Level 15 in Season of Discovery

Season of Discovery has been out for less than a week but apparently the no-lifers have already run the BFD raid to death and are bored. I haven't heard any complaints in my guild, but I've certainly seen my share of min-maxers there as well and I've got to admit it makes me a bit anxious. I'd forgotten how quickly the threat of "being left behind" looms when you're playing with people like that, and I'm glad they at least have nowhere else to go past level 25 for now. I hope Blizzard stick to their guns and give this phase time to breathe, without being tempted into raising the level cap too soon just to appease certain loud voices.

My little undead priest is level 15 so far and probably won't get to 25 for a while as SWTOR is deploying a major patch today. In my last post I talked about how I found my second rune, but I didn't mention what it was: it's called "Homunculi" and conjures three little mini-yous to fight by your side. The spell's cooldown and duration are the same, so you can have them up all the time unless they die. They don't hit particularly hard, but they do apply some very useful debuffs to your enemy and can serve as life-saving distractions in tough situations. Though they also do the opposite sometimes, by running off to attack a random mob by themselves that you didn't actually want to fight. I'm not sure about the logic behind that... either way, it's a fun little spell.

Around level 12 I left Tirisfal to pick up all the quests for Ragefire Chasm. One of them has a pre-quest in Skull Rock in Durotar. I wrote a bit about just how deadly that place is in the context of the orc voidwalker quest, but it's well-known as the deadliest place on Horde side in hardcore mode as well. Still, all the knowledge in the world couldn't have prepared me for what I encountered there in SoD: it was absolute carnage.

The moment I stepped inside I found the whole floor littered both with dead NPCs and player skeletons. There were both people and hyperspawns everywhere, which led to the bizarre situation of it being both hard to tag things and easy to get overwhelmed by respawns at the same time. An orc shaman threw me a group invite which I immediately accepted; later we were joined by two hunters. I was quite happy to let them do most of the killing and just do some healing. They seemed quite pleased with that and responded with friendly emotes more than once. However, both of the hunters left quietly the moment they'd completed their quests, so then it was just me and the shaman again. At one point I died - no shade on the shaman there, as I said it was weirdly easy to get overwhelmed out of nowhere - but then he just looted his quest item and also dropped group quietly, leaving me to run back to my body by myself. I've got to admit that felt kind of crappy.

I later joined another group and eventually got my own quest item, plus one of the mobs dropped a third rune for me. All in all, I must have spent about three quarters of an hour in that cave though, which is definitely too long.

On the plus side, getting into a group for RFC was fast and easy after that. When everyone arrived at the instance entrance I asked who was tanking since it wasn't obvious, and it turned out to be a shaman. Funnily enough, my first thought was "ah yes, I guess at low levels shamans can tank too" and only my second thought was "oh wait, in SoD shamans are meant to be legitimate tanks". It was only then that I noticed that they had a buff on them that indicated increased health and threat. Their tanking seemed to involve totems somehow - I'm not sure how it worked, but they did a good enough job with it. We only had one scary moment when we accidentally overpulled and the tank died... however, I managed to survive with something like five hitpoints, so we were able to res up and continue.

While in Org, I also saw Monty again, the priest who first gave me the Loa buff in Tirisfal Glades, asking for someone to /pray and give him the two buffs again. It felt like proper karma to be able to return his favour so quickly.

I've now moved on to Silverpine but will probably start working on the Barrens soon, if nothing else to get ready for Wailing Caverns. I haven't found another rune since the one in Skull Rock... but my plan is to just go with the flow until 25, and maybe then look up what I missed.

I've also been levelling all my professions on the side because that's the kind of thing I always enjoy. I've been surprised by how easy it's been to find herbs; I would've expected every zone to be absolutely picked clean with how busy it's been, but maybe Blizzard just made the respawns really fast in this iteration of the game or herbalism is a less popular profession than it used to be.

Kneel Before Me, Fellow Priest

My first day of playing Season of Mastery has been absolutely delightful. The combination of the familiar with strange new things that nobody knows what to do with is definitely a winner. To give an example of what exactly I mean, let me tell you about my experience with priest rune acquisition. This will contain what you could call early gameplay spoilers for undead priests I guess, if that's something you care about, but it all happened before level ten, so...

As I mentioned in my last post, you get your first rune at level two. As an undead priest, you're told to go to the Deathknell graveyard and kneel there to meditate. This involves doing a /kneel emote there, at which point you gain a four-hour buff called "Meditation on Undeath" with the description: "Your mind is expanded by your meditation, granting you the clarity to learn new spells from Memories found throughout the world." This allows you to use a green item in your bag whose name I don't remember right now but which is what actually grants you the rune.

I didn't give much thought to when, where or how I was going to find more runes but simply continued to quest as I would normally. However, while killing Scarlets near the Solliden Farmstead, one of them dropped a green item like the one that had taught me the first rune. Aha, I thought, I know this! Another rune for me! However, trying to use the item didn't work, so I double-checked the item description and it said that it required two meditation buffs to use. A conundrum! How was I going to get a second buff? I decided not to worry too much about it just then and once again simply continued as I was, figuring something would end up presenting itself sooner or later.

While doing a bit of reading up on reddit and forums to see more of other people's first impressions of Season of Mastery, I came upon a post that talked in vague terms about unlocking runes as a druid and how the poster thought that it was very appropriate for their class fantasy. This was the first time that it really hit me that the process for unlocking runes might actually be very different for different classes. I wondered what the devs had decided the priest class fantasy was supposed to be. Was it meditating at a graveyard? Did I have to meditate at other graveyards?

I tried /kneel-ing at the Brill cemetery the next time I was there and it did nothing. However, I also noticed one or two people in general chat asking for a troll priest, which was an... oddly specific request. Did I need to meditate on other races? That seemed a bit odd and like it would be very punishing later on when the starting zones were no longer heaving with people, plus how would you even mediate on a random troll anyway? I'd buffed a troll shaman earlier and it had done nothing for me.

As I left town, I walked past another undead priest... and noticed that he did in fact have a second meditation buff on him, called "Meditation on the Loa". Okay, that definitely had something to do with trolls, but how had he got it? I decided to go the direct route and simply whispered him to ask.

"I got it from a nice chap here," he replied, which made me raise an eyebrow a bit. I was thinking about how exactly to word a potential follow-up question when he threw me a group invite (which I of course accepted) and ran over to me. Was he gonna show me?

"Kneel" he whispered. I barely hesitated, having only the briefest flashback to 2006 and a male character pretending that my kneeling knight elf was fellating him... but who can you trust if not your fellow priests? I did as instructed, and he did another emote in return that stated that he was saying a prayer for me. And just like that, I'd gained the loa buff and my undead meditation buff had been refreshed to its full four-hour duration as well.

I immediately learned the new rune that had been waiting in my bag and thanked my fellow priest profusely and excitedly. I imagined him smiling as he simply said "help others" before dropping group. Thanks Monty of Wild Growth-EU! What a lovely little mechanic, and I really loved how it became clear to me slowly and gradually over the course of the play session. Plus it really made me curious how other classes get their runes now... but no, don't tell me. I want to find that out organically too.

Also, in hindsight the priest trainer totally gave a hint about all this that completely went over my head at the time, as the last paragraph of the quest hand-in for the level two rune says: "As you grow stronger I recommend spending some time with the trolls of the Horde. Though their culture is primitive, the 'loa' they revere have some connection to undeath. They may provide insight into our nature." Guess it's important to read quest text again!

Season of Discovery Is Here!

Season of Discovery was scheduled to launch at 9pm in my time zone last night. I'd been planning to be there right as the servers opened, but ended up making it home a bit later than expected. I logged on as soon as I had a chance (which was about fifteen minutes after the official launch time) and was immediately presented with a several-thousand player queue and an estimated wait time of forty minutes. Oh well.

I kept myself busy doing some other things, so it's not as if I was staring at the queue screen the entire time, but even just taking a look at the estimated wait time every so often showed some pretty wacky numbers. It started at about forty minutes, got down to about twenty, and after about forty minutes of actual waiting it was back up to predicting forty again. At some point, with more than 1.5k players left ahead me, it decided that from now on, it was going to say six minutes forever.

I think in the end it took me about one and a half hours to get in. I was excited to create an undead priest with my name on the European PvE server and jumped right in. During the flyover intro cinematic, I recognised the flash of another priest casting Penance and immediately got excited by the idea of how overpowered that must be at such a low level.

However, I wasn't really going to find out that night, because the launch night crowds were just as bad if not worse than they'd been for hardcore, and layers or no layers, it was almost impossible to tag any mobs. I ran around for five to ten minutes, getting credit for about three kills in that time, and then just logged off, deciding to not waste any more time on that but to instead come back the next morning, like I'd done with hardcore.

This morning, things were indeed better, though still very crowded. There was one quest in particular to kill Rattlecage Skeletons that was still pretty impossible to complete. I saw people trying to form groups for it in general chat, but in my entire time questing in Deathknell I only saw a single (un)living skeleton and even that died too quickly for me to get a tag in with my instant Penance. So I just did everything else and abandoned that particular quest. I gained a bit of bonus exploration XP from a quick detour to Orgrimmar to sign the charter for our guild, so I was still level six by the time I reached Brill, which is about where I'd expect to be.

Everyone gets their first SoD-specific rune (basically an extra ability or talent) for free at level two, with a simple quest instructing you on how the whole system works. As mentioned, priests get Penance which definitely added a punch to my early questing.

I also suffered my first death very early, at level three, as I unexpectedly found myself mobbed by four spiders in Night Web's Hollow even though there'd been scores of people around a moment before. I just considered myself lucky that this wasn't hardcore. In spite of this I wasn't off to a bad start in general as I'd found two six-slot bags by level four.

General chat was abuzz with people talking about runes and where to find them. There was one spoilsport who complained about people asking questions and that they should just use Google, but they were rightfully laughed out of general by everyone else. Do you even know what server you rolled on?

Just from listening to the chatter I gathered that a mysterious new chest that I'd noticed in the cave but couldn't interact with was meant for warlocks, that mages had to do something with melons, that warlocks were also after a "frozen murloc" and that some people were bamboozled by what to do with a bunch of severed heads. I also saw others link mysterious new items, such as scrolls with funny names that supposedly needed decrypting. I wonder what these are for and I'm happy that most of us have no idea right now. Season of Discovery working as intended so far!

Not so Forsaken anymore: how Sylvanas & co. surprised me in Silverpine

MMO Melting Pot has a link to a post by Cynwise up today in which he discusses the Forsaken, why he considers them evil, and why he doesn't really like playing them. It's both interesting as well as conveniently timed for me, because I played through Silverpine Forest on my own undead hunter last night and was left with an urge to post about the experience and how it changed my view of the Forsaken in general. (Unlike previous "I quested in this zone" posts, this one has some very explicit spoilers. You have been warned.)

To start at the beginning, I used to feel ambivalent about the Forsaken. I didn't like them enough to play one of my own until I rolled my death knight, but I enjoyed their company and liked to spend time in their zones. They always struck me as the Azerothian equivalent of that misanthropic guy in your circle of friends whom you suspect you'd really dislike if you got to know him more closely, but as long as you keep him at a safe distance he makes for great company, because he's also clever, sarcastic and funny.

Looking at it a bit more closely and seriously, the Forsaken have always been giving quests that were considerably more evil than those that you got anywhere else. Yes, all factions ask you to kill people, but the Undercity was the only place where they made you think that you were actually helping the one you were going to get killed and considered this perfectly normal behaviour.

And yet, despite of this, I could never get myself to truly dislike them, probably because I was also feeling a bit sorry for them. They are not like other races, they aren't even really a "race" at all. They are sentient abominations, forced to exist in a sort of limbo between life and death where they are unable to truly enjoy anything and have no real purpose in life undeath. For every evil apothecary poisoning people for the hell of it, there was usually a quest about a sad Forsaken trying to recapture some of their lost humanity and failing. More than anything, they are simply some seriously messed up people.

Wrath of the Lich King was a big expansion for the Forsaken, because it went back to their roots and gave them purpose, reminding everyone of how it was the Lich King who was responsible for their current plight and that it made perfect sense for them to want revenge. But then the Wrathgate happened... and it was painful. I'll never forget the shivers that ran down my spine as I watched the cinematic for the first time and saw Putress appear, threatening Arthas with the wrath of the Forsaken (yay, here come our crazy but ass-kicking allies) - until he added "and death to the living" to the end of his speech (oh shit).

After that I felt that things kind of went downhill for the Forsaken. Before that I had always considered the apothecaries a sort of extremist group that wasn't necessarily representative of the undead as a whole, but the Wrathgate made it very clear that they were indeed the ones in charge. Sylvanas denied all responsibility afterwards, but I challenge you to find anyone who actually believed her story.

Now the Forsaken weren't just poor disgruntled monsters anymore, they were traitors. While it had been easy to feel at least some sympathy for them in the past whenever they seemed uncaring or unnecessarily cruel, this was personal, outright treachery and simply inexcusable. I was sad about this because it felt to me like this development really eliminated a lot of shades of grey from their character as a race and just left them as this purely evil people that couldn't be trusted even by their own allies.

As such I wasn't actually looking forward to seeing how their story would develop in Cataclysm, especially after I had heard reports about Sylvanas going mad with power and effectively becoming the new Lich King.

Let's just say, the new undead starting area was surprising.

Tirisfal Glades not so much, as it's retained a lot of the old starter quests; the experience has just been smoothed out considerably. Yes, there are some new quests and they are fun, but nothing that struck me as really out of the ordinary. The only thing I found notable was how different the reception of my new undead character felt compared to the old starter zone. Pre-Cataclysm, it basically said to a newly risen Forsaken: "Oh, you woke up too? Sucks to be us, let's try to make the best of it." Nowadays it says: "Welcome! We brought you back to life so you can serve the wonderful Lady Sylvanas!" The atmosphere is almost... friendly, like you're being inducted into a special club.

When you enter Silverpine, that's where things get really interesting. You immediately get to witness Sylvanas explaining her newest scheme of having Val'kyr intentionally raise new Forsaken to Garrosh, and her choice of words is fascinating. "I have solved the plight of the Forsaken," she says, and "as a race, we Forsaken are unable to procreate". I've seen people brush this off as her simply wanting to "produce" more soldiers for the Horde war effort, but to me those are not the words of a warlord talking about her cannon fodder. You want your people to procreate, Sylvanas? That sounds awfully... maternal.

A bit later you get to ride side by side with her as she explains the history of the Forsaken to you. Usually when your character gets to interact with an important NPC, this strikes me as a way of trying to make you feel more important: you're such a great hero that even the Warchief himself (or whoever) comes to have a chat with you. In this case I got the opposite impression though, namely that this conversation showed that Sylvanas is a leader who genuinely cares about her people, even a lowly schmuck like my level twelve hunter.

In a later quest, you get sent on a rescue mission to save the survivors of an ambush. Rescue mission? What? Are these the same Forsaken that asked me to mercilessly kill any of their number that were unlucky enough to get captured by the enemy in Dragonblight?

During another quest, you accompany a group of soldiers into a cave where they end up getting ambushed. Before I had time to properly process what was happening, the leader of the group shoved my character out of the blast radius, with his last words being that I should tell the Banshee Queen. The way I sat in front of my monitor in stunned confusion must have been a pretty good reflection of the way my character must have felt about this strange act of heroism. "But... I'm just the rookie, and yet he bothered to save me. I don't understand."

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the Forsaken have suddenly turned into a bunch of fluffy bunnies. They are still ruthless and cruel, but something has changed for sure. They don't just loathe everything and everyone anymore, including themselves. They stick together. They care about the survival of their people. Up until Wrath, it was all about them killing and bombing their way towards the Lich King, no matter the cost, but with Arthas dead, what was left for them to do? Lie down and die?

It seems that Sylvanas has decided to make the Forsaken a "proper" people. They are still undead and messed up, but they also want to have their own land, procreate and get some joy out of their existence, even if it's just from worshipping their Dark Lady. This is a huge change in my opinion, and one that makes them a thousand times easier to relate to. Sure, you can still hate their methods and that's fair enough, but at the end of the day their goals are now not so different from those of the other races. They just want their people to flourish, in their own undead way.

As if to drive the point home, the zone ends with you having to work with the new bosses from Shadowfang Keep for a while, and those guys are bastards. They combine all the worst traits of the old Forsaken philosophy, loathing not just their enemies, but also their allies and even themselves. During the aforementioned rescue mission, Lord Godfrey sometimes randomly pulls out a rifle and shoots the soldiers you just saved because he thinks that they are worthless. This is perfectly in line with old Forsaken quests (refer to the one in Dragonblight I linked above!) but as a player of a "new" Forsaken you can't help but hate him. You're being taught to care for your fellow undead, even if you don't care for anybody else, and you just don't treat them like that!

Later in Hillsbrad, there is a similar situation where you encounter a crazed apothecary for a while who has clearly gone off the deep end and is raising mindless zombies everywhere. I immediately felt uneasy when I saw his whole operation and started to wonder whether I had overestimated the "goodness" of the new Forsaken... until I found Master Apothecary Lydon locked away in a cage and together he and I went back to kick some butt and clean up the mess, because again, this was actually not acceptable by the Forsaken's new standards.

I certainly didn't expect the Forsaken to come out of the Cataclysm more likeable than ever, but there you go. This is my interpretation of their quests at least. I get the impression that a lot of people seem to think that Sylvanas is still scheming quietly about how to destroy all life on Azeroth and how to become the Ultimate Queen of Uber Evil, but I have to admit that I have trouble seeing that side of her, going by the way she behaves in game. Yeah, she hates Garrosh, but who doesn't? She is genuinely saddened by the loss of her Val'kyr companions, and when she deals with Crowley at the end of the Silverpine story, she honours their agreement to let his daughter go unharmed. I think that she just wants to see her people prosper, and while she definitely still has a bone or two to pick with certain people, I doubt that she's hell-bent on world (or even Horde) domination.