More Levelling in SoD

I mentioned last month that I was getting back into Season of Discovery with the goal of eventually seeing the Demon Fall Canyon dungeon. Over the past couple of weeks, I got a bit distracted by some things in SWTOR, but I haven't forgotten about this project, so I wanted to jot down some notes about my most recent adventures.

In general, I've continued to be surprised by how not dead the SoD servers have remained after the launch of "Classic Classic". According to my census addon, there are pretty consistently about 1000 players online on Wild Growth Horde side, which is actually pretty close to my personal sweet spot in terms of server size: enough people to keep the auction house replenished, make it easy to get into a group for most dungeons and see plenty of activity out in the world, but not so many that you can no longer gather or quest without perceiving other players as a constant competitive nuisance.

The economy is a bit less good and feels quite inflated to me. People trying to charge one gold for a single Green Hills of Stranglethorn page feels quite ridiculous to me for example. I sometimes see complaints that prices on the era servers are inflated due to the servers' age, but at least on the PvE cluster, most things are pretty fairly priced even after more than five years. Occasionally someone will try to drive the price of certain goods up, but the thing with era players is: they've got time. If you charge too much, they can always wait and/or go farm for themselves. On seasonal servers there's more urgency to get stuff now and it's noticeable.

I also remember hearing that certain activities in earlier SoD phases really cranked up inflation (incursions awarding lots of gold or something?) and that's probably part of it as well. Either way the end result is that as someone returning after several months of absence, I find a lot of things on the AH quite unaffordable. If I find one of those lost supplies boxes, if I can't fill them with my own gathering and crafting skills, it's basically a no-go. I have managed to make a bit of gold by occasionally flogging some goods for (to me) rather silly prices as well, but opportunities for that are somewhat limited and partially luck-dependent so not really a reliable solution.

I think there's also bots? It's probably not as bad as on the anniversary servers, and I've stated in the past that people are way too quick to cry wolf about people supposedly botting, but sometimes you can definitely tell. (I remember one time in Elwynn when I saw a whole stream of low-level humans leave the village zig-zagging along the exact same path; that was eerie.) I haven't come across a lot of such cases on SoD myself, but definitely at least a suspicious number of hunters with unnamed or scrambled pet names.

As for myself, I continue to rotate through all my alts to use up some restedness and try to have them quest in different places for variety. My priest also healed a Razorfen Kraul and my mage did a Wailing Caverns and a Shadowfang Keep. The latter was a bit funny to me because I actually used the group finder tool for the first time and saw a group that was just missing a tank - with the three dps being a warrior, a shaman and a warlock, all three of which can tank in SoD. I sighed and just listed my mage by her lonesome... but within less than five minutes the other group had invited me anyway and we were off to the races.

It's also been fun to do more "discovering" of content and mechanics that are unique to SoD. The other day, I was in Stranglethorn Vale during the Blood Moon for the first time, and while I had the immunity buff on me, it was still a slightly odd experience. I didn't actually see any fighting for example, but lots of max-level allies running around killing my quest mobs. Does that give them rewards? I couldn't be bothered to do any deeper research on it. I did also run into this boss-type mob that was yelling and taking a swim in Lake Nazferiti for some reason.

In terms of questing, my hunter has offered the most interesting experience. I only noticed the other day that it's possible to place traps in combat now for example, something I'm pretty sure wasn't possible in the earlier phases. She also kind of struggles with the massive XP bonus, since it doesn't apply to pets, meaning her little tiger is currently three levels below her. I've tried to get him caught up by focusing a bit on mob grinding while unrested, but then I hand in one quest and bam, suddenly I'm another level ahead again. It's a bit annoying to be honest.

Another questionable adventure she had occurred around the AQ gate opening event. I mentioned previously that it worked a bit differently in SoD compared to normal, with the war effort completing automatically on a timer, but apparently the ten hour war - or at least the events tied to it - were extended significantly as well. I kept running into giant floating Qiraj crystals in levelling zones for days, which I think made farming Brood of Nozdormu rep a lot easier for people, but I'm not sure Blizzard fully took into consideration what this would mean for levellers. For example one of these crystals spawns right in the middle of Camp Mojache, so when I tried to pick up the flight path there, I swiftly got stomped into the ground. I couldn't even res and quickly click on the flight master, as I would instantly get put into combat and killed again. I think in the end I had to accept a spirit rez and use my hearthstone.

The other day I saw a video by WillE about what's new in SoD, and he mentioned that there are now vendors that sell all the runes for one copper each. I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I was a bit concerned about how much of a grind it would be to find all the runes at this point, and this is definitely a nice solution for people who want to level more alts to raid. But I'm not looking to raid, and finding more runes was kind of part of the journey I was looking forward to? I mean, I can still gather them myself over time, that hasn't been disabled as far as I'm aware, but it does make me a bit worried whether people will be shirty in dungeons if you haven't just bought all your runes. Then again, so far everyone I've grouped with since my return has been very chill, so one can hope.

WoW Memories #11: December 3rd, 2006

I'm celebrating WoW's 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time.

The following was originally posted on December 3rd, 2006 under the title "Another WoW Tale":

This entry is a bit anachronistic since this actually happened on Tuesday, not Sunday, but I think it works for a Sunday entry. :-P

So, Khytez and I were in Booty Bay for one reason or another, and our friend Excelior¹ complained about not being able to find the second Stranglethorn troll legend², even though I had told him where it was. Since I was already in the area, I said I'd just show him myself. Upon my arrival at the underwater ruins, he's just about to be beaten into a bloody sea lion pulp and I can save him just in time, aggroing all the elite Murlocs in the area in the process. As I blast and whack them like mad, Excel swims up to me and... just stares. My health bar goes down pretty low, prompting a worried "Tira???" from Khytez (cause nothing says "What the hell are you doing?" like three question marks) but I survive. At least the Murlocs are out of the way now and Excel can get his legend. "That was well-hidden!" he claims. I roll my eyes. ;-)

As we bound along the beach afterwards he complains that me and Khytez being fifteen levels ahead of him now makes him depressed.³ But you know, maybe I want to help him anyway? With finding the remaining legends? Sure, why not. Immediately the level 34 kitty rushes off right into the middle of a level 35-37 troll camp, and of course I have to follow in hot pursuit to save him from being killed. As I step over a dozen troll corpses I tell him not to do that again... "But it's fun!" he yells and runs off again. His health goes down faster than I can run, so I try to cast my shield on him... and get the message that his level is too low. D'oh. He dies, all the remaining trolls attack me, and I barely survive with the help of a health potion, while Khytez is yelling something about wanting to jump off his gryphon to save me.⁴ How heroic. ;-)

"Okay. Let's try this again." I resurrect Excel, he runs off, just to get killed again by another dozen trolls. I fight them off, resurrect him again, he runs off... can you see where this is going? I actually felt kind of bad about him dying over and over again, but he thought it was absolutely hilarious and eventually I was in stitches too. It was just too silly. Just as we find the last troll legend, Khytez finally makes an appearance too. Obviously we should have waited for him, then Excel wouldn't have died as much - or so he claims. "Oh yes, he would. He's very talented." As if to prove my point, Excel runs off right into the middle of a patrol and before I can blink he's dead again. Comment from Khytez: "... amazingly talented." I was laughing so hard by that time... and Excel claimed that all those deaths had been the most fun part of his whole evening.⁵

Also, being in Stormwind just before server shutdown was an interesting experience. General chat got spammed with goodbyes and goodnights in a dozen different languages, not to mention comments like: "In 2:45 you'll have to get a life. Nooo!" People were running around like mad, trying to get things done at the very last minute, and the usually empty beds in the inn were all occupied.⁶ Yay for patch day!

¹ Excel was a male night elf druid and was introduced to us by Khytez. To this day I'm actually not sure whether theirs was just another random friendship struck up in game or whether like Nemi and I they actually knew each other from outside the game.

² To be fair, that quest was brutal and another one that I think really stood out in people's memories as taking a lot of time and effort back in the day.

³ I mention in the next sentence that he was level 34, which means our own characters were around level 49 by this point. I do seem to recall Excel losing interest in the game soon after since he wasn't motivated enough to level by himself and we were just too far ahead to do anything useful together anymore.

⁴ The implication being that he was travelling towards us on a flight path and was alarmed by my rapidly dropping health bar.

⁵ I do think there's something very sweet and innocent about this story and it's a good representation of how none of us were really worried about things like efficiency at the time. We just had a good time goofing around with like-minded people in a virtual space.

⁶ Ye olde server shutdown experience is admittedly something I do look back on with fondness nowadays. It really made the server as a whole come together in a strange way, as we were all sad that we were forced to stop playing. That said, I'm not sad that maintenance windows tend to be much smaller now than they were back then.

Winning the Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza in Retail

I don't know much about it since I've barely scratched the surface of that particular part of the game, but I get the impression that fishing has a lot more going on in The War Within than it did in Dragonflight. Specifically, I noticed that there's this new item called an Algari Weaverline, which you're supposed to spin into your fishing pole.

I got some of that and it made me realise that my evoker didn't actually own a fishing pole, since they stopped being a requirement to fish many years ago and I just hadn't come across one organically. So naturally, I opened up Wowhead to have a look at what good fishing poles are out there nowadays and how to acquire them. I was stunned to find that after almost twenty years, the Arcanite Fishing Pole that you get for winning the Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza from Vanilla is still the best permanent fishing pole in the game. There are other options that are very close, but this one still beats them all. It even got a new model at some point. Amazing!

What was even funnier however was that it also looked like the most straightforward option to acquire on short notice, as all the other good poles were either RNG-dependent in some form or required a reputation I hadn't ground out on this particular character (and which isn't account-wide yet). I mean, yes, winning the fishing tournament is not trivial, but I'd done so several times in Classic, so it didn't seem that outlandish to think that I might be able to do the same in retail as well.

Somewhat amusingly, I actually struggled to find up-to-date information on how the tournament works in retail. The reason this was funny to me is that the first time I took part in the event in Classic, I confused myself due to having looked up a retail guide with information that didn't apply to the Classic version. Now it was the other way round.

Ultimately, I came up with the following list of differences compared to the Classic version:

• In retail, the tournament is a world quest. This means you get a little pop-up and tracker on your UI when it starts, but other than that, I didn't see this change making much of a difference to the experience. It still doesn't auto-complete or anything; and you still need to hand in in Booty Bay to pick your prize.
• As I'd observed previously, Tastyfish can be fished up all throughout Stranglethorn in retail, not just along the coast.
• There are no longer dedicated pools of Tastyfish, but the regular pools just start giving primarily Tastyfish once the tournament starts (though you can still get those pesky Oily Blackmouths ruining your day sometimes).
• It's no longer a server-wide competition, so you don't automatically win by playing on a low-pop server, but the first fifty people in the region (?) to hand in their forty Tastyfish all get a prize, regardless of what server they are on.
  

I was very curious how the latter in specific was going to pan out. Azjol-Nerub is considered a medium population server, but I decided to follow the advice to do my fishing in war mode to minimise competition anyway. (Also, I had to google how to turn on war mode because who thought the talent panel was the logical choice for that?!)

So I figured I shouldn't be facing too much competition for pools... but I also wasn't optimised in any way. My Classic fishing skill on my evoker was less than 100, even! And I'd read about all kinds of weird min-maxing to win the competition, such as that if you were after the account-bound heirloom ring reward, it would be best to use a Highmountain tauren druid since they can move between pools more quickly with instant flight form, and Highmountain tauren have a racial that lets them catch extra fish sometimes.

Either way, I was happy to wait and see. Min-maxers might be a threat, but the new expansion is also still pretty fresh, so I figured that might work out in my favour in the sense that there might be fewer people spending time chasing rewards from old content. I changed my hearthstone to Booty Bay, parked myself in my usual spot in northern Stranglethorn and set my phone alarm to remind me just before the competition was supposed to start.

When the time came, I was kind of surprised by how not nervous I was, considering the way the Classic version of the tournament had got my heart racing at times. The war mode gamble was definitely paying off as I didn't encounter a single soul while fishing and had all the pools to myself.

Just as I was starting to wonder when the first winner would be announced, considering that in Classic the contest tended to end after 15-20 minutes and that the cast bar for fishing is shorter in retail, the yell to announce the first winner went out, only ten minutes in. I kept calm and carried on, reminding myself that there were 49 more prizes to be won.

After another three minutes or so came a yell that Riggle Bassbait had given out about half of his prizes and to hurry up, but fortunately I was close to done myself by that point. Once I grabbed my 40th fish, I quickly hearthstoned to Booty Bay and handed in - and clearly not a second too soon, as two Horde druids did the same right after me, which then triggered a spam of "that's it, we're done" style yells from the quest giver.

I could hardly believe that it had been that easy! Of course, now I needed about another 200 fishing skill points to actually be able to use my new pole. I figured I'd fly around and fish up a few more Tastyfish for consolation prize money, but oddly all my casts came up empty now. A bit of googling revealed that this is a bug that has seemingly been around forever - that you can't actually get any more Tastyfish like you're supposed to after the competition is over. However, the same forum threads also noted that you'd still get skill-ups for your "empty" catches and that you still had a chance to catch one of the rare fish, so I kept it at for a little while until I ended up picking up a Dezian Queenfish which I was able to hand in for another buff to my fishing.

Now to work on those remaining 100 or so skill points...

SoD Phase 2: First Impressions & Ennui

Season of Discovery's phase two launched Thursday late in the evening in my time zone. I had a quick look at the time to see whether there was enough hype to create login queues again... there was not, though it was insanely busy in Thunder Bluff when I logged in. I needn't have worried about people immediately losing interest in the BFD raid once it was no longer at the level cap, as the "Denizens of Kalimdor!" yells were going out non-stop. They had always been frequent but now they were even more so as people were running it for XP.

I didn't really try to play properly until the next morning myself. I figured maybe I could avoid the worst of the crowds if I focused on my professions before trying to level, so I went out to buy the expert cooking, first aid and fishing books. However, I then realised that the primary professions still required level 26 to progress beyond 150 skill, even in phase two, so I decided that levelling up at least once should be my main goal for the time being.

I took my priest to Stonetalon since I had a few quests from there in my log and it's usually a comparatively quiet place - but it wasn't that day. Or rather, it might have been if things were even busier in other zones, but my point is that things were pretty crazy in Stonetalon as well, with everyone fighting to tag mobs as they spawned. I even saw people looking for group for "The Den" - a group quest which I think I've never completed at level because it's part of a chain that takes you all the way to Ashenvale and nobody wants to go back to Stonetalon to find a group to finish it, but on that day, people were doing even that.

While things were pretty brutal on Stonetalon Peak, the Charred Vale was the most striking to me, because I always remember my more experienced friend warning me about the place back when I first started playing WoW - that it was densely populated with mobs and could be quite dangerous. That Friday morning, it was barren, and harpies were dying pretty much as soon as they dared to make an appearance. Still, I successfully made it to level 26 and returned to town to work on my professions a bit.

I came on again later in the early evening, and actually found two guildies online who invited me to do some dungeons with them. We did SFK twice, followed by a partial run of Razorfen Kraul, in which I at least got my Blueleaf Tubers and the goblin escort done. Apparently the place was a popular destination to level as I saw people advertise for "RFK boar farm runs", which sounded very South Park-esque. Apparently dungeon farming to level is "the meta" even in Season of Discovery, simply because the open world is too full to quest efficiently. There's something kind of sad about that.

However, already the next day, the biggest wave of power-levellers seemed to have washed over me. I took my hunter (who hit 25 literally the night before phase two released and never did get to go to BFD) on a similar quest circuit around Stonetalon and it was much, much quieter... but in an oddly annoying way because without the hyperspawns triggered by the massive crowds I actually had to run bigger circles around the area to find more of the only slowly respawning quest mobs, while my priest had just had new ones pop up in front of her over and over.

I just needed a little more XP to get her to 26 so I thought I'd do the breadcrumb delivery quest to Thousand Needles. At the Great Lift, a human paladin aggroed my quest NPC while running to the lift, just before I could talk to him , so I did a /shoo emote on her, meaning to indicate that she should just get on the lift so he would run back to his spot and reset. She then decided to turn back and kill both Horde NPCs before I could talk to them, which meant I spent the next ten minutes waiting for them to respawn. In that moment I was kind of glad there's no cross-faction communication in Classic as I definitely would have called her names.

Meanwhile, my priest was close to 27 after the dungeons from the day before, so I thought I'd pop over to Ashenvale to ding her as well. I was successful, but Ashenvale was another sad sight as I saw the PvP event come on and nobody took part on either faction. I wonder whether anyone will come back to farm more Warsong Gulch rep once the current levelling frenzy is over.

I haven't checked out the new PvP action in Stranglethorn yet but I'm also kind of scared to. When I was doing the dungeons with guildies, one of them accidentally took the wrong zeppelin and landed in Grom'gol while the Blood Moon event was on. Turns out it's so free-for-all that even the guards hate you, meaning he instantly got ganked by them and was unable to revive and get back onto the zepp. He actually had to switch to a different character entirely to be able to go to the dungeon with us as the one stuck in STV was effectively unusable for the time being.

Reddit is afire talking about the new event, though I'm not sure I entirely understand what's been happening - something about people getting insane rewards for spam-killing the same characters over and over again at the graveyard since the event was lacking anything to discourage that? I don't know, it doesn't currently sound very fun either way.

I was wondering whether the release of phase 2 would bring more of my era guildies back to SoD to check out the new stuff, but after three days, only half a dozen people or so have even logged in. The ones who are still active are talking about moving to a new guild in SoD and I can't blame them. I need to think about what I want out of Season of Discovery myself. Right now I'm just getting major deja vu, finding myself feeling lonely on a crowded mega-server like I did a couple of months after Classic's launch, though back then I was still carried along for a few more months by the sheer excitement I felt about Vanilla making an official comeback. While SoD does have some interesting new mechanics, it's not enough to make the experience completely different from what I've been doing for the last five years (gosh, has it really been that long - it has), and being on my own all the time just feels unsatisfying.

I'm even wondering whether I should go and re-roll Alliance on the RP-PvE server - it's only medium pop so that should alleviate some of my stress caused by the crowds, and relocating to Hydraxian Waterlords is what ended up turning Classic around for me back in 2020. Who says that couldn't happen again? However, even if it could, would I even want to go in that deep again? (I went pretty hard for a while once I started raiding in Classic.) I just don't know. I keep looking at SoD and thinking that everything looks so fun on paper, but I just end up feeling slightly jealous of all the people who are so obviously enjoying themselves because something about it just isn't working for me right now.

Gone Fishing

I've enjoyed fishing in WoW for a long time, and that is the case in Classic too. Knowing that, you may or may not be surprised to hear that I never took part in the Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza before. It just wasn't really on my radar as something I had reason to care about.

That changed a bit over a month ago, when I was trying to fish in the Bay of Storms and found that while it was technically possible, every single fish I hooked at the time instantly got away. Now to be fair, I had somewhat foolishly only brought mid-level lures with me, but even so I was annoyed and started thinking about how else I could raise my fishing skill.

While Horde gets a pretty good fishing pole from a simple quest in the Hinterlands, it turns out that the Alliance has no equivalent to this, so that the best way to upgrade my measly +3 fishing pole was to win the fishing tournament.

I'll give you a spoiler right here: I haven't won it so far. But it's been interesting to try.

I started off by not researching the whole thing very well. I ended up watching a video about the tournament by a YouTuber I follow, but it was about the retail version, and while the basic idea is still to be the first person to catch forty Tastyfish and deliver them to Booty Bay, some things have changed. For example the retail video showed the guy fishing in Lake Nazferiti and saying that this was in fact a great spot for pools.

In my first tournament in Classic I therefore started by the riverside, just to discover that in Classic, schools of Tastyfish don't spawn in-land, only on the coast. This meant that I lost the first five minutes or so of that first contest to just running along the river and lakeside, looking for pools that weren't there. Despite of this, that first attempt was actually the closest I've come to winning ever since, as I was on 36 Tastyfish myself when the yell about someone else having won went out.

The next week I decided to start near Booty Bay, but this was a bad idea, as it was insanely crowded in that area. Specifically there was a group of Hordies who I believe were working together, trying to boost one person's score by having the others act as spotters and such. One of them got very annoyed with my presence and kept spamming me with duelling requests, which I found easy enough to ignore, but ultimately the number of people in the area meant that I had only caught less than twenty fish by the time the contest ended.

The week after that, I decided to go for the opposite approach and started at the very northern end of the zone. That went a bit better in terms of competition, but there was still some, and the pools seemed to be more spread out, meaning that I was once again only on a measly 25 fish by the time the competition ended. On the plus side, I caught one of the special fish for the first time and was able to trade it in for a Lucky Fishing Hat.

After that I missed a week because I forgot to log on at the right time, but last week I once again started up north. This time it went even better, because I was completely on my own in the area for quite a while, but unfortunately I got super unlucky with my pools. One thing people rarely seem to mention is that beside the randomness of the pool spawns and of how many people are in the same area as you, what you get from the pools themselves also has a degree of randomness to it, as it's possible for them to give you things other than Tastyfish. That week I just had the worst luck and all those schools that I had to myself kept spitting out things like Oily Blackmouths.

I was on thirty Tastyfish and competing with a gnome mage for a pool when both of our bobbers bounced at the same time, and we both reeled in at the same time as well. Then I saw her hit her hearthstone, and a few seconds later the yell went out announcing that this very same gnome had won the tournament. Hopefully that's one more person who won't feel the need to come back next week.

I'll just keep at it, because even when it goes badly, it's only twenty minutes out of my Sunday and the little goblin lady in Booty Bay pays good silver for the Tastyfish either way. I just remain kind of surprised by how competitive it is, considering that this is Classic, a medium-pop server, and that fishing's never had a reputation for being a sport for the masses.

Level 40 the 3rd

Well, who saw that coming? I certainly wouldn't have guessed, looking at my roster at the beginning of the year, that my third character to level 40 would be a brand new nelf hunter, but here we are. I'm just enjoying the solo experience as a hunter way too much, and playing as Alliance feels refreshingly different after focusing on Horde side for months.

I even remembered to take a ding shot:

This one doesn't have the money to buy a mount yet, but I decided not to fret about it this time. So instead of proudly showing off my new ride, have some random screenshots I took while levelling on Alliance side:

 

The very first screenshot I took of my hunter in the starting zone. It was raining so hard that night! Also, I really love the female night elf bow-drawing animation.

The night I made the run to Ironforge. I never realised how you can see the city's lights up on the mountainside at night.

 

Remember when the Titans were this big mystery from Azeroth's past instead of overused and annoying?

 

Ashenvale contains a fair number of ruins, but it didn't really hit me just how pompously those elves must have lived back in the day until I considered the sheer size of that half-buried statue.

There's this quest in the Wetlands that has you fighting cursed undead, and one of their abilities temporarily passes their curse on to you, turning you into an undead as well. To my great amusement this applies to pets as well, meaning that I ran around with a pet undead for a while. (And I guess it confirms that Spotty is a girl? Unless everyone gets turned into a female undead.)

Hunting at night on the Shimmering Flats. I've said it before but I'm astounded by how beautiful I find Thousand Needles in Classic, because I don't remember being particularly fond of it in Vanilla.

Always gotta keep your eyes open on the road through Duskwood, you never know when you'll run into Stitches!

Whenever I spotted him wreaking havoc in Darkshire, I sometimes decided to help out.

I noticed there's an impressive amount of yells associated with Stitches spawning as well. It's interesting and somewhat old-fashioned design if you think about it: There is no quest to kill him, he's just a really hard mob (for the level of the zone) that spawns when someone completes a certain quest and is basically like a cat set among the pigeons, making the road unsafe and killing lonely questers left and right if they aren't careful. Makes for a very memorable experience.

Stranglethorn can be quite beautiful when you take a break from killing wildlife and trolls every now and then.

Logging in one evening I was baffled to find such a crowd in Stormwind, considering the server's usual population levels. Turns out it was just before someone dropped Onyxia's head to give everyone a buff. There is a whole system to this where guilds take turns I think, everyone assembles just before the event to get buffed, then mages put up portals to take the big guilds away to raid and the city empties out again. Quite fascinating to watch.

The Hall of Explorers in Ironforge is such an RP place, with all those oddities on display, including plaques that you can actually read.

Looking out over the beauty of Loch Modan. Destroying that was one of those things I could never quite forgive Cataclysm.

Finally, a sunset over Theramore.

A Cow Goes To Westfall

After two days of binging on World of Warcraft Classic, I've already got so many stories to tell that I hardly know where to begin... but since what I'm thinking of today is a particularly easy post to make, I'll jump right ahead and tell you how my little shaman and friends went to run the Deadmines as Horde.

Basically, Nemi and I were undecided last night: we wanted to run another dungeon but couldn't decide which one. We'd just done Wailing Caverns in the early afternoon (and it had taken quite long), so we didn't want to do that again right away, and we weren't really of a high enough level yet to go for the next obvious targets, Shadowfang Keep and Blackfathom Deeps.

Then she had an idea: How about... doing Deadmines as Horde? It's quite a hike and there are no quests, but it would certainly be an adventure! A quick shout-out in the guild we've joined immediately yielded some volunteers.

After a brief discussion about what would be the quickest way to get to Westfall as Horde, we took the zeppelin to Grom'gol and made our way from there, trying a number of different routes. Personally I went for "trying to swim up the coast", but being too close to the beach I got killed by crocolisks and murlocs multiple times. I should have followed the example of our priest, who had ventured much further out into the water and didn't die once from what I could tell.

 

I found it quite interesting to see this giant gate at the very Northern edge of Stranglethorn - presumably that's where the Defias ship actually goes out into the sea (if you ever wondered how and why there is a ship inside a cave).

We hung out at the meeting stone for a few minutes while some members who had travelled differently had to wait for their res sickness debuff to wear off. A number of Alliance came over and gawked at us, understandably. I'd been similarly surprised when I crossed a group of Alliance players upon exiting the Wailing Caverns earlier in the day.

Our group was quite a nice one, and the rogue amused everyone by insisting that the mage should conjure water for him too because he was thirsty, and then sat down to drink with the casters every time. (We're not on an RP server by the way.)

Also, at one point another guildie noticed our location and basically broke out in giggles in guild chat about what a mad bunch of nerds we were.

Most of the run was pretty smooth (not least because we were on the high end of the level range for Deadmines) but we did suffer two near wipes: one on an accidental pull of Captain Greenskin with loads of trash and one on Van Cleef himself. Someone with a res always managed to escape by jumping off the ship though, which caused the mobs to evade and then the rest of the party could be revived without having to do a corpse run.

As mentioned there are no quests for Hordies in the Deadmines, but I briefly got excited when I could loot the quest item that drops from Van Cleef. It turned out to just be a racist letter though.

Overall, it was a fun little adventure to occupy our evening. It's not something I'd ever done back in Vanilla or on private servers. However, one thing that's quickly becoming apparent about Classic is that it invites people to be playful and that old content is no reason not to have new adventures.

The Kronos PvP Tournament Event

Last Saturday I logged on in Booty Bay and asked in /world if anyone was up for Stranglethorn Fever. The response was (what I interpreted as) a gentle chiding in regards to why I was merely questing in Stranglethorn when there was a big PvP tournament going on at the Gurubashi arena.

Never one to ignore a community event right in front of me, I immediately made my way over there and was amazed to see about a hundred players of both factions spread out across the edges of the arena. There was a clear east/west split between Horde and Alliance, however overall people seemed to be respecting the truce of the event for the time being, and at the edges of the two groups, the factions were even mingling peacefully.

There was already a match in progress when I arrived, an undead holy priest vs. a human ret paladin in healing gear. Unsurprisingly for Vanilla, they couldn't actually kill each other! The priest was always running from the paladin (who was trying to whack him with The Unstoppable Force), and would occasionally even manage to sit down and drink. This continued for about twenty minutes, with people in the stands offering increasingly hilarious commentary ("and they say you can't make a perpetual motion machine") or simply booing at the contestants for drinking so much. Eventually the paladin got lucky with a combination of a fear resist and a well-timed stun proc and was able to claim victory. The crowd erupted in cheers and the chat was scrolling past so quickly that I couldn't even read any of it.

None of the matches that followed took nearly that long, but they were still interesting to watch and some of them were quite impressive displays of skill. My favourite was the druid who managed to kite a warrior for a really long time and then still lost, with the warrior only having a fraction of his health left at the end. That generally seemed to be the thing with warriors, they all hit extremely hard, often taking half their opponent's health off in a single hit, and could only be countered by classes that could exert control and managed to keep them at a distance.

After a while, things slowed down and it seemed to take longer and longer to get the match-ups started. People started to become bored and unruly and began picking fights. A GM reminded everyone to please keep their weapons sheathed until the event was over, and GM intervention was also apparent by interlopers getting punted out of the arena and getting debuffed with a stun that had the duration "forever". It was dispellable though and I eventually took pity on a couple of such individuals and freed them from their imprisonment.

Things got particularly bad when tournament participants were suddenly teleported to the Dire Maul arena with the justification that one entrant, a mage, had such a bad computer that it couldn't handle the crowds in Stranglethorn. What the hell? This is Vanilla WoW, a game from the early 2000s. That thing runs on a toaster! What sort of PC does this guy have? Either way this was quite disappointing for the people actually sitting on the edges of the Gurubashi arena, and the organiser pointing everyone towards his Twitch stream was a cold comfort.

Things got interesting when Teremus the Devourer, an elite dragon from the Blasted Lands, suddenly appeared in the stands. I thought that a GM had spawned him to distract the unruly crowds, but other people in chat claimed that someone had actually kited him all the way to the arena from the Blasted Lands. Either way a dragon rampaging through the crowds certainly served to liven things up for a while.

As a bonus, the Gurubashi arena chest suddenly spawned while people were still killing Teremus, causing another bunch of people to jump down into the arena and start brawling for it. Fun for the whole family!

Eventually it was announced that both the match for third place and the final would take place in the Dire Maul arena and the GM officially gave permission for people to start killing each other in STV. It's noteworthy that while several Alliance players had been talking big the whole time about how they were going to do nasty things to the Horde the moment the tournament was over, it was the Horde that actually came rushing over as a group. It goes without saying that I as a lowly level 46 simply got steamrolled by all those level 60s. I decided to take res sickness and hearthed back to Ironforge before tabbing out to watch the last two matches on the organiser's Twitch stream.

The fight for third place was a rogue vs. warrior, a match that somewhat surprisingly went to the rogue. The final was between another warrior and the aforementioned mage playing on a toaster, and that fight was actually kind of sad and a bit boring to watch as the warrior simply didn't stand a chance. The mage timed all his frost novas and cooldowns just perfectly and the warrior basically couldn't touch him.

Despite those issues I would say that this event was definitely a success. In the future I would simply disqualify any players whose machines can't handle the crowds, as it kind of goes against the spirit of such an event to remove the contestants from the arena and tell all the people who showed up in person that they need to tab out and go watch on Twitch instead. The increasingly long breaks between match-ups also gave people way too much time to get bored, however in the end, the community was quite successful at making its own fun whenever the actual event failed to provide it. Well done, Kronos!

A Guild and Grind

I joined a guild again. It wasn't planned, but as I was sitting in Darkshire looking for people to polish off my last couple of group quests in Duskwood, a person called Pawsy whispered me to ask if I was unguilded for a reason, which I thought was an interesting way of starting a recruitment conversation. We talked for a bit, I told them about how I wasn't playing very much and had ended up somewhat disappointed by the last guild that I'd joined randomly, and in the end I agreed to join their brand-new levelling guild called "Mending". It really was brand-new, as according to the guild info it had been founded only about two weeks prior.

I was pretty impressed by the leadership's recruitment efforts, as they were apparently whispering people like crazy, to the point that they were joking about how they were getting "no, I don't want to join Mending right now" replies as soon as they even said "hi". I was impressed because while they didn't seem to be very discriminating with their invities, they did genuinely try to engage people in conversation in the process.

I asked about the group quests in guild chat and half an hour later they were done. Boom! That's why you joined a guild in Vanilla.

Of course, it also took only a few hours until I had my first impulse to ragequit, when I saw some guy repeatedly use the word "jew" as an insult in guild chat and realised that another guy called Donaldtrumps (the name says it all really) who had come across as kind of trollish in general chat was in the guild as well. However, I decided that I didn't want to be hasty, as the guild is still very new and one has to wait a bit to see how these things shake out. A few bad apples don't need to necessarily ruin it for everyone, depending on how they are received by the rest of the guild, and I've already seen a fair bit of pushback against people saying overly stupid/rude things in guild chat as well. In short: we'll see.

In terms of gameplay, after having gained a few levels in Stranglethorn Vale, I was starting to hit a bit of a wall there, in the sense that I ran out of quests that I could easily solo. Plus, the Horde players I was encountering were starting to get on my nerves a bit... like that troll shaman 7 levels above me that tried to gank me on the road twice, though both times I managed to keep myself alive for long enough for other Allies to come by and kill him instead. Then there was another troll shammy, only 2 levels higher or so, who tried to kill me near Nesingwary's camp, but I kept healing myself. By the time I was nearly dead due to running out of mana and he was out of mana as well, I handed in two quests so that I dinged and was instantly back to full health and mana, hah! Unfortunately that was when another troll shammy (is there anything else in STV?) who was 9 levels higher than me and had been fishing nearby decided to join in to kill me. Anyway, the point is - all those troll shamans were getting in my way a bit and I decided that it was time to visit Kalimdor again.

I took the boat to Theramore and crossed Dustwallow Marsh, the Barrens and Thousand Needles on foot. Seeing the old Thousand Needles again made me so happy, even if its design and textures seem kind of bland by today's standards. I missed those windy canyons. I unlocked the flight path in Gadgetzan and picked up the artisan cooking quest there, since my cooking is a bit ahead of my level, though I'll need to level up a couple more times before I can effectively farm the materials for the quest.

Then I decided to go do a couple of quests in the Shimmering Flats. I vaguely recall not doing those on my priest back in the day, because I was already too high level for them by the time I arrived in the area, so I was only ever peripherally aware of them. It's safe to say that I didn't miss out! They are all super grindy and anything that doesn't require you to simply kill things or pick items off the ground has a terrible drop rate. Salt Flat Venom or Hardened Shells, anyone? I was OK with it though, because honestly, I needed something to grind and these quests just gave me an excuse to pick on turtles and scorpids.

Also, an orc rogue who was something like 7 levels lower than me tried to kill me and failed; I killed her instead. Definitely preferable to Stranglethorn Vale.

The Green Hills of Stranglethorn

While I had found unexpected enjoyment in questing in Duskwood, I was also keen on moving on to Stranglethorn Vale. STV, as it is sometimes shortened to, is a place with a very mixed reputation. Personally I have mostly fond memories of it, but I also know people who absolutely loathed that zone. One of the friends that levelled with me when I first started playing WoW used to call it "Ganklethorn Vale". Since we played on a PvE server I didn't really get this whole world PvP thing at the time and it didn't really mean anything to me. Seeing Horde players for the first time was simply exciting.

Now that I'm actually getting to re-live the experience (sort of), I'm being reminded of both the good and the bad about this zone:

The Good:

- After the gloomy atmosphere of Duskwood, the sunny tropical beaches of Stranglethorn really lighten your mood.

- There are loads of quests by Vanilla standards. I mentioned before that while WoW gained fame for having more quests than any other MMO at the time, by today's standards they were actually pretty sparse, and you were constantly running from zone to zone to find new ones (or submit to the grind for a couple of levels).

The Bad:

- Especially as Alliance, there is so much walking. I'd forgotten that the Rebel Camp didn't gain a flight path until Burning Crusade, so the closest Alliance hub is Darkshire. Then it's all the way down the winding road to Booty Bay and it takes freaking forever because you're still on foot for another ten levels or so. No mercy or consideration for the fact that you didn't actually get a mount until level 40.

- As this is one of the first zones where Horde and Alliance are forced into some proximity, it's a popular spot for gankers on PvP servers. So far I've only been affected by it once though, and I guess I was kind of asking for it by fishing near Nesingwary's camp...

The Neutral:

- Mob density is high and many of them also make pretty worthwhile grind targets (animals for leather, humanoids for cloth and cash). On the other hand: mob density is pretty high and you can't take two steps off the road without being attacked. In a couple of spots you are likely to be attacked on the road as well, plus it's often hard not to get adds while fighting in many places.

- The zone covers a huge level range, from about 30 to 50. In some ways this is good - see the aforementioned positive about lots of quests. On the other hand you'll find yourself coming back to the place again, and again, and again (because this being Vanilla, of course there aren't enough quests to level in STV alone) and you'll probably get pretty tired of it after a while.

- The mobs start to get more interesting in terms of abilities, and since combat is so much slower than in modern day WoW, they actually get to use them. In some ways this is interesting, because it trains you to - for example - save stuns until the caster mob tries to heal, as they will otherwise heal to full. (Kurzen Medicine Men, anyone?) On the other hand, it makes certain mobs plain annoying to fight depending on your class. For example combat as a pally is already slow enough as it is, I don't need a stupid basilisk stunning me for three seconds twice per fight on top of it.

- The Green Hills of Stranglethorn clog up your bags. On the other hand, if you have the money, you can actually buy a chunk of XP, which is pretty neat in my opinion.

- Samantha Swifthoof patrols the road. That lady scared the crap out of me when I was an Alliance newbie and before I realised that she didn't aggro. It was weird to find out later that she never actually had a purpose in the live game... (She was originally meant to teach Tauren Plainsrunning.)

The homogenisation of WoW's two factions

I've been hopping back and forth between a bunch of my lowbie alts lately, looking at the last corners of revamped Azeroth that I hadn't seen yet, and while I've been enjoying the experience overall, it also reminded me of something that has been bugging me about the Cataclysm quest revamp. No, I'm not talking about the speed and ease of levelling this time - I'm thinking of the homogenisation of the two factions.

Let me grab my veteran cane for a moment and say that "back in my day"... I levelled up as Alliance first and found that, in the most general terms, Alliance quests mostly seemed to be about one or more of the following things: politics (mostly human-based), searching for ancient artifacts and lost treasure (dwarves), slightly mad inventors trying to reclaim their lost home (gnomes), protecting nature (night elves) and gathering goods for trade. Basically the Alliance side seemed to represent a "classic" fantasy society that was reasonably well off apart from the occasional intrigue, kobolds in the woods, and bigger but also more vague threats looming beyond the borders.

When I rerolled Horde several months later, it was actually a bit of a culture shock, and not just because Orgrimmar was very different from Stormwind and I kept getting lost in the Undercity. Playing the other faction just felt very different in terms of atmosphere and story. The Horde felt a lot more down to earth, or more savage if you prefer, and the quests seemed to imply that everyone was constantly fighting for survival. They were about hunting for food (tauren), gathering building materials (orcs), trying to carve out some space in the world, ancestor worship, dealing with dark magic (trolls) and struggling with and rebelling against an unpleasant past (undead).

Even though there wasn't a whole lot going on in terms of Horde vs. Alliance in the overarching story, I was always kind of wary of the enemy, because I knew first-hand that they lived in a very different world and had very different priorities.

There've always been zones with neutral quest givers, but those never bothered me. I didn't find it hard to believe that there were outsiders who simply didn't give a damn which side you belonged to and simply wanted to hire you regardless, especially if it concerned a greater cause. I didn't feel that this affected the way I viewed either side.

In Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, the borders between the factions started to get a little fuzzy however, as they still had separate bases in most zones but often pursued the same goals regardless, which made many faction-specific quests feel a bit same-y. Still, there were a fair chunk of storylines left on each side that were exclusive to that faction and remained in your memory as uniquely Horde or Alliance.

To take Hellfire Peninsula as an example, there are a lot of parallels between the quests from Thrallmar and Honor Hold. Where the Alliance clears up the Path of Anguish, the Horde kills the exact same mobs in Felspark Ravine. While you burn Horde blade throwers for Honor Hold, the Horde has you setting fire to the Alliance cannons on the other side of the map. Both sides send you on the same tough group quest, even if it comes under two different names.

However, the zone also still had plenty of interesting moments that were unique to their faction. On Alliance side, who could forget The Exorcism of Colonel Jules? Who didn't feel bad about the events set in motion In Search of Sedai? Who didn't get tired of players asking in general chat where to find Nethergarde Bitter, over and over again?

In the meantime the Horde got to be amazed to rediscover the clan of its Warchief, the Forsaken got to make friends with some local undead, and vindictive players got to help a duped blood elf woman get revenge on her cheating husband's mistress. While Horde and Alliance may have shared the same goals in regards to the Burning Legion, they were still two distinctly different cultures with different priorities.

In Cataclysm however, it feels to me like the borders haven't just become fuzzy, they've almost been completely erased beyond the immediate starter zones. The two factions seem more and more alike to me, or rather the Horde appears to have become more and more like the Alliance. Orgrimmar may still look very different in style, but it's every bit as pompous as Stormwind these days. Garrosh and Varian are both unpopular warmongers, and the orcs in general feel a lot like more aggressive humans to me, with their fight for survival and shamanistic roots largely swept under the rug. (There is a quest in Durotar where a shaman tries to convince an enforcer to be less hasty and aggressive, gets completely ignored... and nothing bad comes of it.) The Bilgewater goblins have been set up to be "gnomes for the Horde" and even share the gnomish backstory of having lost their home. Even sub-factions have been copied across, and where the dwarven Explorer's League formerly had a monopoly on archaeology as a hobby, the Horde has now received its own version in the Reliquary.

If you look at it at the level of individual quests, the parallels become even more glaring. In neutral zones where both factions have their own bases, it's often shocking to see just how close to identical their quests are. During the end of the Lashtail Hatchling chain in Stranglethorn you talk to a draenei priest who can't speak proper common as Alliance... and as Horde you get a troll priest who speaks orcish exactly the same way. (One of the user comments on the page for the draenei does in fact bring up in-game evidence to show that the character was simply copy and pasted.)

Or take the Badlands, which I replayed only yesterday: as Alliance you get sent out to hunt with a group of dwarf NPCs, as Horde you get a group of orcs with exactly the same abilities. God help us if either faction did anything slightly differently.

This just strikes me as lazy. Clearly the developers thought that if they made a nice quest chain for one faction, they could just copy it over to the other side and get two quests for the price of one! Maybe they even thought that they were doing their players a favour this way, by not "limiting" precious lore to one faction only. I really dislike this practice however. If you're just going to give both sides the same quest, simply make the quest hub neutral and be done with it. Making two faction-specific towns that offer exactly the same quests, only from different NPCs, just waters down faction identity and sets players up for disappointment. The former because a draenei shouldn't be acting like a troll and orcs shouldn't be acting like dwarves, and the latter because by setting up separate bases for the two factions, you create an expectation that they'll actually contain different content that makes it worth levelling an alt of the other faction to see - if you then just end up with a carbon copy of the same content you've already done, that's nothing but a massive letdown.

That aside, I also think that it leads to Blizzard making their own lore less convincing in a way. These days the writers are all about beating the war drums between the two factions, but when the game actually represents both sides as more similar than ever, the hostility only becomes less believable. Don't waste all that wonderful background lore by having all races of both factions pursue the exact same interests in the contested zones!

Adventures in Stranglethorn Vale

One of the last revamped low-level zones (not counting all the starter areas for the different races) that I had yet to investigate in any way, shape or form was Stranglethorn Vale. Not long ago I finally had a thorough look at it on my draenei warrior (I seem to have a lot of lowbie warriors it seems, they just never manage to get anywhere), and it was interesting.

Firstly, to put things into perspective, I was quite fond of the old Stranglethorn Vale (or "Strange-thorn vale" as I thought it was called initially) , though I wouldn't have listed it as one of my favourite zones. It's quite funny, considering that a friend who had been playing longer than me immediately told me upon entering the zone for the first time that it was an awful place and that on the PvP server he used to play on it was called "Ganklethorn Vale". Unsurprisingly, the purely PvE experience was very different. I remember having my first encounters with the opposite faction and actually helping them, because you know, trolls and tigers and stuff everywhere, man! I know how it is!

I generally remember Stranglethorn as a very social place. Seeing how it covered a huge level range back in the day (30-50, roughly), there were always a lot of people there, looking for help with one of the many group quests, or sitting in Booty Bay and asking whether anyone wanted to trade Green Hills of Stranglethorn pages (back when there were about a dozen of them instead of just one and the quest was a bit like a mini collectible card game).

However, I also understand why people hated Stranglethorn. For some of them, spending so much time in the same zone quickly made them grow tired of jungles and trolls. Quests constantly making you run up and down the entire zone over and over again (on foot, back when you didn't get a mount until forty) got tedious, and repeatedly being forced to run past mobs ten levels higher than you was generally a disaster waiting to happen. I do think that those things also added something to the game at the time, but I certainly understand why they annoyed people.

So how does the new Stranglethorn compare? I knew that it wasn't going to be a social experience for me and that I wouldn't spend nearly as much time in the same places as before, especially since the zone has now been split in two, but what else is there to know?

Northern Stranglethorn hasn't changed that much, on the whole. Most of the old quests are still there, even if they have all been streamlined in some form. Sometimes the quest text and story have changed, but you're essentially still doing the same things as before, like with the Kurzen quests: Kurzen himself is dead but you just kill his lackeys instead, basically. On the whole I was quite happy with this. Somehow, I always felt that Stranglethorn was one of those places where the "kill ten mobs" model just worked, and it still does.

The Nesingwary quests have some remote turn-ins now to save you from having to run back and forth between the different killing grounds and the quest NPCs. To be honest I didn't really think it was needed, considering that you don't have to stray that far from the hunter camp anymore anyway, but whatever. The lore justification for the remote hand-in was interesting however - instead of the quest givers constantly giving you new tasks to kill different kinds of tigers/panthers/raptors, they just tell you to prove yourself as a hunter and your character then "feels" that after killing ten young ones they should move on to the adults and so on. I just didn't think it made sense that my warrior magically "felt" that she should now go kill a named tiger that she realistically never even would have heard about.

The most interesting addition to Northern Stranglethorn is a new quest chain surrounding a little raptor hatchling that you find while in Kurzen's camp. It integrates quite seamlessly with the rest of the quests as the hatchling just kind of pops up and gives you a prompt related to what you're already doing. I was quite intrigued by where this story was going, and loved it when - SPOILERS INCOMING - I accidentally ended up resurrecting Bloodlord Mandokir. Damn low-levels and their resurrecting raid bosses. You'd think that I would have learned from the many times I accidentally helped with bringing back Hakkar back in old Tanaris.

What makes it even better though is that they make it personal by having Mandokir take your little raptor hatchling away. Nooo, not my pet! You then engage on an exciting and fascinating mission to get her back, only to fail right at the finish line, and you're left with nothing but a vague promise that you might be able to get her back if you manage to become strong enough to challenge Mandokir in Zul'Gurub directly. Indeed, if you go back there at 85 after having done this quest line, you get to rescue your baby, fifty-five levels later. Amazing.

Now, I can't really see my little warrior getting to that point any time soon, but this quest alone certainly made me want to level her a lot more. And I think that's great. If you read the user comments on the Wowhead page I linked above, you'll see that I wasn't the only one who had a very strong emotional reaction to this quest. And why not, it's got all the hallmarks of an epic quest line in WoW: it spans several levels, you have to overcome some serious obstacles on the way, you fail and suffer a setback, but when you eventually get to pick up your little Lashtail Hatchling it just feels all the sweeter.

I just couldn't help being somewhat surprised that Blizzard went through all this effort "just" for a mini pet. No offense to pet collectors, but non-combat pets don't exactly strike me as the type of content that yearns to have an epic quest chain attached to it. That's the kind of thing I used to expect from raiding and attunements. I guess this just proves that there is a real benefit to being a hipster in WoW and engaging in relatively niche activities like pet collecting. Whatever the developers want to make "mainstream" will inevitably end up getting declawed and nerfed because they are worried about anyone being put off by obstacles. However, as long as they don't create content with the expectation that everyone will do it, they can make it cool.

Maybe the loss of my pet raptor left me feeling a bit dispirited at the time, but Southern The Cape of Stranglethorn initially seemed considerably less interesting to me. That part of the zone never had as many iconic quests to begin with, and those that used to be memorable back in the day have long been stripped of what made them exciting.

Take Stranglethorn Fever, for example. Back in the day you needed to collect ten (low drop-rate) Gorilla Fangs to summon Mokk, and then he would come in with about a dozen apes accompanying him and wipe you out. Then you'd have to gather another ten fangs and try again, probably while asking for help in chat at the same time. Frustrating? Probably, but it was definitely memorable. Now it's just another quick kill quest.

Same with the quests to kill various giants given by Captain Smotts. I remember when you needed to have Barbecued Buzzard Wings to summon Negolash... you bet I was popular for having actually bothered to level cooking and having got the recipe in the Badlands! Funnily enough the pile of food that you now use to lure the giant still looks like Buzzard Wings when placed on the ground (I think they were even labelled as such if you hovered over them), even though it's supposedly something else.

None of these quests were bad. It's just that if, like me, you remembered having more fun with them back when they were more difficult, they seem a bit bland now.

So, I continued through the Cape of Stranglethorn, not finding anything particularly noteworthy, until there was a sudden and very noticeable shift in my questing as I was given a quest to infiltrate the Bloodsail Buccaneers for Baron Revilgaz. Suddenly everything was shiny and new and quests were varied and fun, making use of all the new tools that Blizzard has developed for a more interesting quest experience over the years. Most of it made me laugh, but at least one quest also made me feel quite distressed. It was good!

Finally it all ended with a big showdown between the Bloodsails and the Blackwater Raiders. I really enjoyed this as well, and this is one case where I felt that the devs really made an existing story a lot better by simply overhauling it big time. I didn't mind the old pirate-killing quests, but they always left me with the feeling that the Bloodsails weren't much more than a nuisance. In the new quest chain you actually get a real sense of them being a threat, and phasing is used to show Booty Bay under serious attack, which is when I took the screenshot at the top of this article.

Now, I've rambled a lot in this post. What's my final verdict? I think, all in all, both halves of Stranglethorn remain what they were to me before: not my absolute favourite zone, but solid entertainment. In revamping this area, Blizzard has managed to strike a good balance between preserving the old and introducing something new.

I'm still not entirely done with looking at the revamped old world, as I still have some starter zones left plus the view of some zones from Horde side, but I have at least a vague idea about most places now. One of these days I might have to write a more comprehensive summary of my impressions of the shattered world.