Dusting off My Original Priest

In reply to a comment on my post about WoW's returning player experience back in August, I noted that almost all the characters I've been playing in retail since picking it up again at the end of BfA were created from scratch, because the notion of going back to an existing character that I last played more than ten years ago was all kinds of terrifying.

Having dabbled in retail for nearly four years now however, the idea didn't seem quite so bad anymore. A big part of my original fear was simply that it would make me feel bad to go back to these characters that I used to love and see them in the context of this new game that I didn't like all that much anymore. Thanks to the existence of Classic, I don't feel the same hostility towards retail anymore though, and there are some aspects of it that I actually quite like (as a separate game to Classic instead of as an replacement for Vanilla).

Why is this relevant? Because I noticed in the info about patch 10.1.7 that it was meant to include a new heritage quest chain for night elves. I wrote about how I really enjoyed the one for humans, and night elves are no less dear to me. The very first character I ever created may have been a human, but the first one I ever really inhabitated was the night elf priest I made a few days later to level with a friend. She was the first character on whom I ever hit the level cap, and while my focus shifted over to Horde side during Burning Crusade, I still came back to at least level her up every expansion and check out the new content from Alliance side. So it was clear to me that I really needed to dust this character off for this occasion.

I had last played her during Cataclysm, where I'd left her at the then-cap of level 85, which in the new, post-level squish world, made her a measly level 32. So my first challenge was going to be to just get her levelled up. (The heritage quest chain requires at least level 50.)

I took the returning player gear boost, but declined to clear out her quest log. I manually sorted out her old possessions, and gave her a transmog featuring the old Primal Mooncloth set, which I fondly remember crafting for her during Burning Crusade (for some reason I have very vivid memories of farming wraiths in Netherstorm for motes of mana in particular).

I found that I was still in my tiny old social guild, along with all my alts and... a couple of characters of my ex-boyfriend's who'd last logged in four years ago and one of whom now held the GM title. I couldn't even remember inviting him to this particular guild! I looked into how to depose and boot him, but apparently my priest had been made the lowest rank in the entire guild and you need to be a higher rank to do that, even if the GM hasn't logged in forever... in the end I just figured "whatever" and ignored that whole situation for the time being.

My priest's quest log indicated that I'd done a fair bit of questing during Cata but had stopped with things partially unfinished in Uldum and Twilight Highlands. I decided to visit the latter first, and I gotta say: after playing Dragonflight in particular, doing Cata quests in a zone like Twlight Highlands is quite a mindfuck. Dragons going from scary monsters to more human-like NPCs that we just kinda hang out with is a process that has been going on since at least Wrath of the Lich King, but even so the contrast between how we interact with the dragons in Dragonflight and some of the quests in Cata is pretty extreme. Being given quests to eradicate the last of the black dragons because they were all corrupted anyway, or slaying a "broodmother" after using her whelps to track her down felt very uncomfortable now. Not to mention that picking up Dragon Flanks reminded me that we also used to cook and eat dragons for buffs. Just awkward.

There was also this five-man group quest chain, "Crucible of Carnage" which made me realise to my annoyance that the custom grouping tool is not available to levelling characters for some reason. As I didn't see a single other player around during my journey, I eventually just tried to solo it and learned that with all the class changes and my overpowered boost gear, I could indeed solo the first three encounters, however the Worgen rogue type still made short work of me and I had to give up for the time being.

I also noticed that I still had the dungeon quest from Grim Batol in my log to kill mobs while riding the red dragons at the start of the instance. I thought I'd queue for a run of that dungeon in specific to get that cleared out. I didn't check the clock, but I must have sat in that queue for something like two hours. When I finally got a pop - quite late at night - I greeted the group happily but nobody responded. They also ran right past the dragons I needed for the quest. I just went along with it and figured I'd try to run back and finish the quest after we had killed the last boss. A mechagnome hunter seemed to have the same idea, as they were the last to drop group and ran back with me... however, it turned out that the red dragons were helpfully set up to not do the mob killing circuit anymore once you passed a certain checkpoint and would just immediately drop you off at the spawn of the first boss. Me and the gnome doing a /cry at each other after that happened was the only interaction I had in that dungeon, and I was no closer to finishing my quest, though at least I'd gotten a bit of XP.

As I was otherwise done with Twilight Highlands by that point, I decided to turn my eyes towards Uldum next. I remember avoiding replaying that zone because the Harrison Jones quests were just so. Stupid. Being confronted with a terrible Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull joke in the first spot where I picked things up again did indeed confirm that age didn't make those quests any better.

Funnily enough though, after writing the first draft of this, I went back to check my original first impressions post about Uldum, and it turns out that back in 2010 I actually thought that the zone was quite funny, and I called out the very same joke I just mentioned as terrible as "my favourite bit". This is why I blog, because past me from ten years ago might as well be a completely different person it seems. It's just fascinating to see.

Anyway, levelling in Uldum continued at quite a brisk pace and I didn't even have to complete the whole zone before hitting level 50. It's mad to remember that when Cata first came out, you pretty much needed to do all five of the new zones in full just to gain five levels.

My thoughts on the night elf heritage quest itself will be a separate post.

Questing from 80-85 again, this time as Alliance

I still feel burnt out on Cataclysm questing and have avoided completing zones that my various max-level alts are still missing because I just don't find it fun - even if it would benefit them by unlocking certain reputations and perks. I did manage to finally level my night elf priest to 85 the other day though, driven by the desire to see what this stretch of levelling looked like from the other side.

Mount Hyjal and Deepholm were exactly the same, but that didn't really come as a surprise since it was always obvious to me that these quests were given by neutral organisations. I still think that these two are probably my favourites of the five new zones.

I only dipped my toes into Vashj'ir briefly to unlock the portal, get my sea legs and the sea horse. From what little I saw, it reeked heavily of "superficially different but actually the same" syndrome, as I wrote about it two weeks ago. The only thing that made the experience feel different to me was the fact that I realised for the first time that Vashj'ir was actually located off the coast of Stormwind. As Horde I just got a loading screen while sailing there and assumed that the zone was placed in a separate instance, since the coast was too far away to see it anyway. In contrast, sailing there straight from Stormwind harbour and with no interruptions felt nice and immersive.

Something that has nothing to do with factions but that struck me once again was that the Vashj'ir intro quest makes no sense. First you get a summon from the Farseer/Earthspeaker who then gives you that vision of Thrall... and then they send you off to some random island off the coast to fight the other faction. Talk about a non sequitur! When I first did these quests as Horde and skimmed parts of the quest text in my drive to advance quickly, I actually thought that the boat was supposed to take me to the Maelstrom. It just makes no sense to have Thrall's call for help as an intro to a completely unrelated zone - in my opinion it should have been part of the introduction to Deepholm if anything.

I avoided Uldum and then got started on the Twilight Highlands - finally a zone with noticeable differences between Alliance and Horde! And it was quite a pleasant surprise to me too: on Horde side I didn't really like the introduction to the zone much. First Garrosh has you kicking around scared goblins and lazy orcs, and then you have to endure a twenty-minute "event" that is effectively a long, unskippable cut scene that still requires you to move on and off the blimp at the right moments (so you can't just go AFK or you'll eventually have to start all over again).

The Dragonmaw storyline is... a bit weird as well. Like I mentioned in my review of the Stonetalon story at the time, I find it kind of unpleasant when the game mirrors real life politics too closely, and a story where a large foreign power kills off the local leadership and puts rebel sympathisers in charge instead felt way too close to comfort for me, even if the lines are very clear-cut in this case, as Warchief Mor'ghor is an evil bastard and Zaela is likeable. That aside, the Horde story then sends you on missions that are all over the place and on very different ends of the seriousness spectrum, from dealing with wild dragons and evil spirits to shooting pool ponies out of goblin contraptions, which makes the whole experience feel a bit disjointed.

The Alliance version really is very, very different. Where Garrosh just continues to cement his reputation as a massive ass, Varian has you strolling around town with Anduin in tow - and that boy is freaking adorable. He actually cares about his subjects, and he wants to be a priest when he grows up, just like me! D'aww. Mercifully, the Alliance doesn't have to endure an endless travelling cut scene either; you just hop onto a plane, see it fly away and then it's fade to black and a straight cut to you already being in the Highlands.

Once there, the story flows a lot more organically as well, as you visit the various Wildhammer tribes to get them to work together and basically get to save the day by being a successful diplomat. A certain degree of humour also comes naturally to the dwarves and it doesn't feel as jarring as the contrast between the super serious business of the orcs and the utter silliness of the goblins on Horde side.

There are some parallel quests, but it's not excessive. It's also notable that there are examples of how you can use parallels to make interesting content for both sides. For example the Horde has a story where one of the Dragonmaw warlords rushes off to attack the dwarves and gets killed. You don't actually get to see this, but you see him storm off and then have to retrieve a valuable item from his corpse afterwards. On Alliance side on the other hand, you get to fight off this attack and personally get to land the killing blow on the orc. I think this is a great example of how synchronous storylines on both sides can be used to provide different experiences that add up to a more interesting whole, instead of just giving the orcs a quest to kill ten dwarves and the dwarves a quest to kill ten orcs (though those exist - and have their place - as well).

I dinged 85 not long after the Maw of Madness, and while I still intend to finish the zone, it looks like the rest is going to be a mix of neutral hubs and more "different but the same" quests, except that you get to work with Mathias Shaw instead of Garona and the Gob Squad.

All in all, I enjoyed the dwarf quests enough that I think my endeavour to level an Alliance character to cap was worth it to see those alone, but I still think that it's a bit of a shame that the developers didn't try to differentiate the experiences of the two factions more.

Redoing the 80-85 quests

My focus in WoW is ever-changing as ever, and in the past few weeks or so I've mostly spent my time questing on my max-level alts. I've commented on the linearity of Cataclysm's questing in the past (and so have many others), and as a result have shied away from repeating many of the quests on my alts. I don't like reading the same book or watching the same film over and over. While my main has been a Loremaster of Cataclysm for a while now, my level eighty alts mostly levelled up by engaging in other activities: exploration, gathering, instances. I'd do the first couple of quests in each zone to unlock the portal in Orgrimmar, but afterwards I was happy to never look back.

Well, until recently that is, when I was looking at what ways I had left to progress my alts' gear without raiding and realised that my best options were really things like getting the Therazane shoulder enchants and working towards exalted reputation epics. And how do you get those things? By questing.

So I buckled down and started repeating zones. I've always been someone who at least skimmed all the quest text, even upon repetition, but with the new linearity even I just ignored most of it because I didn't really need a reminder of what I was supposed to do - it was obvious. In many ways it was also boring and tedious, though a couple of zones turned out to be not nearly as bad as I had expected, which was a pleasant surprise. I also couldn't help but be reminded of part of the original purpose of quests - to give players the feeling that they could achieve something even if they only had very limited play time - which is something that I've definitely benefited from when my real life week ended up being busier than I had anticipated.

Mount Hyjal actually turned out to have surprisingly high replay value for me. It's linear, but still less so than other zones. For example there's a point where you can decide to help out at the shrine of Aviana or take another one first. As I said in my initial review of the zone, the gameplay of the quests is varied and fun, and as far as the story goes it really feels like you are achieving something tangible, bringing the ancients back and reclaiming Hyjal bit by bit. I don't mind doing that again.

Vashj'ir on the other hand feels like a massive drag upon replay. I still stand by the good things that I said about it originally, but it really fails to impress a second time. The linearity of progression is very rigid: you spend fifteen minutes at a mini hub and then abandon it, never to return again. The story also doesn't hold up well when experienced a second time. In a nutshell it can be summed up as "you get shipwrecked and discover that the naga are working with the old gods", and it relies heavily on building up suspense about what's going to happen next. Working your way through 150 quests of "golly gosh, whatever are we going to do" when you already know exactly what's going to happen just doesn't cut it.

Deepholm is a lot like Hyjal in my eyes, with a story that emphasises that you're doing something worthwhile at every step of the way and thus feels worthy of repeating. My only problem is that the quests feel a bit too samey to me (it's all about killing earth elementals and twilight cultists really), so I tend to get bored halfway through and then the rest starts to drag a bit.

Uldum is the only zone that I've only managed to repeat once so far, and I think it's pretty much the cut scenes alone that are to blame for this. I don't mind the Ramkahen half of the quests (in fact, I love just hanging out with High Priest Amet and enjoying the view of the underwater world from inside the dam), but the Harrison Jones quest line with its constant clunky cinematics drives me absolutely bonkers. See You on the Other Side! says the quest, "follow me" says Harrison Jones, but then you don't get to do anything at all because clearly moving up the hill yourself is way too strenuous so they just show you a cut scene of your character running and you automatically reappear in the right spot. What the fricking frack. It was annoying the first time, but it only gets worse upon replaying.

Twilight Highlands was another pleasant surprise, but for different reasons than I expected. It has both slightly more lenient and more linear bits, so my enjoyment of those varied. It also had one quest that keeps annoying me in a new way every time I do it, due to having hidden quest requirements that aren't mentioned anywhere, and my characters having suffered repeated deaths due to the helpful NPCs despawning or getting lost whenever I needed them the most. However, one thing that really works in the Highlands' favour are the item rewards. Yes, all the zones shower you in quest rewards, but with how fast you level and how quickly the ilevels go up, many of them don't feel like significant upgrades and don't last very long. Twilight Highlands however offers the best rewards you can get before hitting max level instances, and it's a great way of getting characters up to speed that have fallen behind in terms of gear progression. I ended up taking both my shaman and my death knight through this zone in quick succession without feeling any annoyance at all, simply because getting both their gear sets up to speed for level 85 within an evening felt rewarding enough on its own.

Now, this is one of those topics where I'm really interested in other people's experiences. How many alts have you levelled to 85 yet (if any)? Did you repeat a lot of quests? If so, did you enjoy it? Which zones did you find the most fun to play through repeatedly?