Setting Foot into Classic Pandaria

It's funny that for all the preparation I did for my "Project Vale of Eternal Blossoms", I then ended up completely forgetting about the actual launch of MoP Classic. A former guildie who had noticed me being active again during Cata actually messaged me last week to ask whether I was still playing and I said I was taking a bit of a break until the actual MoP Classic release, to which his response was "it released yesterday I think" and I was like "oops".

It was no problem of course, as I'd wanted to avoid the launch day crowds anyway, but I still thought it was funny. When I did eventually log in, my first order of business was not to go to Pandaria but to level my archaeology. I'd had a bit of fun with it at the end of Cata already, but archaeology is one area where MoP made huge improvements, both by making surveying give skill-ups and XP for longer and by literally doubling the yield of each dig site. I breezed through the different tiers in what felt like no time at all, with Outland and Northrend barely being more than pit stops, and gained about half a level from the whole endeavour.

At one point I also ended up making a detour to Tol Barad, for no other reason than that I happened to walk past the portal and suddenly remembered that I quite liked the place back in the day. However, I did a round of dailies and it didn't really tickle my nostalgia. I also queued up for a Tol Barad battle when the time for it came around, and I don't know whether that's a bug or what, but the map wasn't actually showing who owned what, which was very confusing for a game mode where you're supposed to fight and hold specific nodes. Whenever I got into a skirmish I got my squishy level 85 ass kicked hard by people three or four levels higher than me so I eventually just semi-AFKed in one of the bases. We still won, based on the final scoreboard probably because the Alliance had twice as many players as the Horde.

Eventually I decided that it was probably time to at least get started on Pandaria and began the intro scenario. Just as I resigned myself to having to machine-gun down orcs from a helicopter again, I clicked on the chopper and... the quest just auto-completed without me having to do anything. I laughed out loud because it just seemed too bizarre that literally the very first quest in Pandaria would be bugged. Looking at the Wowhead comments, it sounds like this weird skip may actually be intentional, though I have no clue why.

I made my way to Paw'don Village and was surprised to find that things were somewhat different than I remembered them from Remix. In Remix, they'd designated the main storyline quests with shield markers like they've done in retail since Shadowlands, and everything else seemed to be pretty openly available to do in whatever order you liked, which did seem to align with my memories of Pandaria feeling much less restrictive in terms of quest progression than Cataclysm had been.

However, it seems that my memory in that area is clearly faulty, because once in Paw'don I had exactly three quests available to go to the orchard to the north-west (which I remembered being an optional side hub in Remix) and nothing else. I decided to ride around a bit to see whether I could pick up a different quest line anywhere else, but found very little (not nothing, but something like three other exclamation marks in all of Jade Forest). So there was clearly still a lot more pressure to do things in the exact order prescribed by Blizzard than I remember.

Still, I didn't feel like continuing to quest just then, so I just explored a bit and did a bit of pandaren archaeology on the way. I ran into a rare mob and decided to try fighting it. Considering that my gear was pretty bad I didn't expect to get very far, but it did nominally show as being the same level as me so I thought it was worth a shot. I laughed out loud when its first attack literally one-shot me.

I ventured forth into the Valley of the Four Winds and saw that Chen Stormstout had a grey exclamation mark over his head, so there was no skipping ahead either, or at least not until I levelled up. At least the cooking quests in Halfhill were available, so I made a start on those.

I'm still not entirely sure what my plan is going to be - my goal is of course to explore the Vale of Eternal Blossoms in its original pristine glory, and while I could probably get there already, it's a max-level zone and I'd probably not have a very good time, so it seems sensible to do a bit of questing and levelling in the other zones first, even if I don't particularly care about that part. 

Levelling Through Southern Pandaria

Sorry, I couldn't think of a nice alliterative title including "Valley of the Four Winds" and/or "Krasarang Wilds", so I gave up on that particular little game.

While I had received some recommendations about which zones to prioritise in terms of story, my pet tank and I had decided long ago that we were going to do ALL THE QUESTS anyway, so we might as well just follow the natural zone progression as it happened.

This meant that our next stop after the Jade Forest was the Valley of the Four Winds. It's quite a beautiful and serene zone, though the wildlife messed with my head a little. Previously the game conditioned me to expect certain mobs to be hostile and others to be neutral, but in Pandaria those expectations all seem to get turned on their heads, as I keep running into things like peaceful crocolisks while getting mauled by swarms of aggressive moths and hostile birds.

Anyway, the quests were reasonably entertaining but honestly a bit dull at the start. Help this farmer. Now help that farmer. Now help another farmer. Didn't I already do some variation of all of this in Elwynn Forest back in 2006? Chen Stormstout and his niece Li Li made for amusing company though, and things picked up as we progressed through the zone.

Then we got to Halfhill and learned about Pandaren cooking. Yikes! I like cooking, but this whole system with the different ways seems unnecessarily complicated to me. Then again, maybe I'm just jaded, knowing full well that this is another convoluted system whose only purpose seems to be to provide busywork for one expansion and which will be swept under the rug and circumvented completely once Warlords of Draenor comes out.

Also, we got a farm! I thought that I had read somewhere that you couldn't unlock your personal farm until level ninety, but either Blizzard has changed that since then or I misread and what I was reading was only referring to some features being unavailable until max level. We just kind of stumbled across the whole thing by accident as we were doing the regular quests around Halfhill, and it turned out to be pretty fun. The farm is one of those features that I'd heard nothing but good things about, and I can already tell that it really is a fun little mini-game.

Once we hit level eighty-eight, we also decided to try and duo the first two Pandaria dungeons, Temple of the Jade Serpent and Stormstout Brewery. The former didn't give us any major trouble, but where duoing instances had started to feel kind of slow in Cata, doing so in Pandaria was like wading through molasses. Just killing the Sha of Doubt must have taken us something like fifteen minutes. Stormstout Brewery was even worse, and some of the trash leading up to the last boss in that one gave us serious trouble as well. We eventually managed to down it with a mixture of kiting and quick corpse-running, but when the last boss wiped us within a minute with some bubble ability, we were too dejected to keep trying. We just did it again through the dungeon finder, and with some proper dps it was a piece of cake - though funnily enough, the boss didn't blow any bubbles at all that time around.

After the Valley of the Four Winds we continued to Karasang Karasarang Krasarang Wilds, which ended up being kind of the opposite of the previous zone for me in so far as I thought that the first hub was really fun, but after that it quickly devolved into a series of boring kill-and-gather quests. The saving grace came in the form of a quest that sent us back to the Valley at the end and which I thought was just a breadcrumb to direct you there in case you had gone to Krasarang first, but actually it turned out to be a full-blown little chain that tied up the stories of both zones in one epic finale. That was some seriously good stuff.

After the Stormstout Brewery we gave up on trying to duo any more dungeons while levelling and just queued for some randoms, which got us into both Shadow-Pan Monastery and Gate of the Setting Sun so far. Fortunately they were easy enough to understand even without having done the lead-up quests to them. We also found them reasonably challenging in our gear and actually wiped once in each.

We hit ninety after having completed three zones worth of quests as well as five Pandaria dungeons, just as we were entering Kun-Lai Summit. In a way 85-90 took us longer than I had expected, but looking at our pre-Panaria levelling for comparison, our levelling speed didn't actually slow down that much. I guess I just expected the last five levels to have been nerfed even more than they have, knowing how Blizzard does these things...