Cata Continued

I finally hit level 85 in Cataclysm Classic! About time too, as the Mists of Pandaria pre-patch is only a few days away. 80-85 took me a little longer than expected mainly because I took a bit of a break about halfway through, otherwise it probably wouldn't have taken much longer than 70-80 did.

I ended up loitering in Northrend for longer than expected, since there were a few milestones I wanted to hit before moving on and the XP I got along the way wasn't as bad as I had anticipated. I have this memory of many years ago, that XP gains in Outland became absolutely abysmal the moment you hit level 70 and the game wanted you to move on to Northrend, and it's stuck with me ever since that Blizzard hates you lingering in old expansion content. However, I'm starting to wonder whether I didn't exaggerate that effect in my mind over time, because as I said, continuing to quest in Northrend past level 80 wasn't all that bad. Sure, XP was reduced, but it wasn't abysmal. I actually ended up making it to 82 and about a third into level 83 before moving on to Cataclysm properly.

The main things I did in Northrend were the cooking and fishing dailies, as well as finishing up my exploration of the continent by uncovering all of Storm Peaks and Icecrown. In the former zone I also did the Loken quest chain, because unlike many players back in the day, I absolutely loved the Sons of Hodir. I briefly contemplated doing the Argent Tournament in Icecrown as well but ultimately decided against it as I didn't want to get bogged down with doing jousting dailies.

The last goal I finished up was getting my leatherworking skill caught up to the appropriate level, which required me to do a bit of farming for leather and other mats. I actually found it strangely zen to farm yetis in Storm Peaks and revenants in Wintergrasp, and it made me realise that this is an activity that I kind of miss in retail. Skinning as a skill still exists of course, but since skins - like all gathering nodes - are shared, the best way to farm leather is not to farm by yourself in a quiet corner of the map, but the opposite: to find an area where lots of people are killing skinnable mobs and then clean up behind them (and since the skins are shared you won't be "stealing" from any other skinners). It really drove home for me that while these shared gathering resources are a good thing in many ways, they have also taken something away from the game.

Anyway, once I was finally ready to get started on Cataclysm content properly, I did what I had planned and hauled my butt over to Vashj'ir, as I felt that it had been ages since I last visited that zone and I figured that it might actually be nice and nostalgic to replay after all this time. This turned out to be... partially true.

My initial review of Vashj'ir back in 2010 was pretty positive, but already a few months later I noted that replaying the zone on alts felt like "a massive drag". This time around, the first few quests felt pleasantly familiar and nostalgic. Back in original Cataclysm, mounts were not account-wide yet, so I had to do at least the first hub and a bit on every alt in order to earn my underwater breathing buff and seahorse mount to be able to navigate the zone.

As I continued deeper into the zone, my memories became fuzzier and I realised that there were some bits I barely remembered at all, such as the whole Nespirah chain. However, by the halfway point or so things definitely started to drag again this time too. I got the "2000 quests completed" achievement at some point and it struck me that almost 10% of those quests took place in this one zone alone, which is insane.

There's nothing wrong with any of the quests by themselves (and the Battlemaiden chain provides nice insights into the world of the naga), but it's just the fact that you have to go through almost 200 of them in a strictly linear chain just to cover a plot that can be summed up in two sentences. The same story could have been told in less than half the number of quests; there's just way too much "kill 15 naga" filler.

It's funny because at the time, I didn't think Cataclysm questing was that bad, but having revisited several older expansions in recent years it seems undeniable to me that Cata was an absolute low point in terms of questing. Mists of Pandaria was a noticeable step up again, but even BC and Wrath have aged better than Cata - in my opinion at least.

Gear progression was another interesting thing to observe. I'd started my journey in mostly tier five from BC and only replaced a few pieces of that while levelling through Northrend, and for very marginal upgrades at that. And then I started doing quests in Vashj'ir and the stats on the green quest rewards just went through the roof. By the end of level 83, after questing in Vashj'ir for a while, my health had nearly doubled compared to what it had been at level 82.

Finishing all of Vashj'ir got me most of the way to level 85. For the rest, I did the introductory quests to the other four Cataclysm endgame zones to unlock all the portals in Stormwind, as well as a bunch of cooking and fishing dailies. (I'd forgotten how much I used to love those in Cata.) At some point the Midsummer Festival also started, adding more supplementary XP from bonfire visits and torch tossing dailies.

I also got the "Stood in the Fire" achievement while doing the Uldum intro thanks to Deathwing paying the zone a visit. 

I was surprised to see the Darkmoon Faire return after only two weeks, but then I recalled reading somewhere that Blizzard increased the frequency of its visits in Classic due to the sped up expansion schedule compared to the game's original run.

I even paused to do a bit of archaeology when I found myself flying past dig sites. I was surprised how good they were for XP and pleased to see that Blizz had already increased their yield a bit to five fragments or more per unearthed relic - I vividly recall that when archaeology was first added, you only got about three to four pieces per successful survey.

Now my plan is to perhaps continue doing the cooking and fishing dailies as well as possibly level my leartherworking some more. I'm not planning to dive into Pandaria the moment it launches as I expect things to be very crowded and I'd rather avoid all the mayhem tied to that. With my modest goal of wanting to see the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, I should have plenty of time to get there at my own pace, as long as I do so before the release of the later patches.

I've got to admit I found myself wondering why I still care so much about this night elf hunter. Sure, part of it are the fond memories I made with her during Vanilla Classic, and another part is that I simply enjoy things like levelling professions, regardless of how useful it might turn out to be. However, I think at this point it's also that I'm kind of hoping that eventually she'll be united with my warband in retail. I don't think she'd bring anything particularly rare to the table, but she may well have collected some transmogs that I don't own in retail yet.

I know Blizzard hasn't even hinted at Classic merging with retail, and in fact said at the start of Classic that the two would always be separate. However, with Classic about to move into Mists of Pandaria, that seems like forever ago now, and I find it hard to imagine any other endpoint than an eventual merge with retail, regardless of how many more expansions will actually end up getting the classic treatment. I can be patient.

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?

My thoughts on Vashj'ir

Others have discussed this topic at length already, but I wanted to throw my hat into the ring as well.

Let me start off by saying that I rather enjoyed the zone as a whole, but I do have to add the caveat that this was my first playthrough and that I did the entire zone solo. I think the latter bit is particularly important because from questing with my boyfriend I've got the impression that "the new WoW" is actually not particularly group friendly. As Zelmaru pointed out in a comment elsewhere, the frequent phasing means that you can only level with someone else if you are in "lock-step", since you can neither skip ahead nor go back to help your friend kill things that have already been phased out for you.

Contrary to what some people hopefully proclaimed after the Shattering, collection quests don't all have a hundred-percent drop rate either. My boyfriend and I got started on Uldum today and I lost count of how many times we had to circle the same spot of desert, killing pygmies for their stupid rare drops, just to complete a simple quest for both of us.

Some quests are also more likely to just not work properly or bug out if you try to do them in a group. For example there was this quest in Mount Hyjal where you were supposed to trap and interrogate a harpy, and I was very confused that I didn't get any dialogue options when I tried to talk to her... and then she suddenly dropped dead and I got a quest completion message. Turns out that only my boyfriend had been allowed to question to her. Lame. Or in early Uldum we completed a quest at the same time and while my boyfriend got to watch a cut scene afterwards, the quest giver just phased out quietly on my screen. I could go on and on...

Anyway, Vashj'ir. The sad truth is, questing alone actually made it easier for me to enjoy the story since things went much more smoothly that way. I only had to worry about gathering crab meat or whatever for myself, nothing got borked up for me just because my boyfriend clicked on it two seconds earlier, and I found it easier to suspend my disbelief and believe the NPCs' constant praise of my unique talents and heroic deeds.

While the zone is still extremely linear, I do admit that it felt a bit less constraining than the worgen starter area, because at least I was never completely locked into a four by four market square or anything of the like. I could still swim around and explore the entire zone if I wanted to, even if many areas seemed oddly empty if you were visiting them in the "wrong" phase. I only ran into an obstacle on the rails once, when I finished everything at a hub but couldn't pick up any follow-up quests. I then went back to the area where I had completed the last couple of quests and found a completely unrelated quest giver in a corner somewhere, whose quest then unlocked the rest of the zone for me. In the end it turned out that he wasn't completely unrelated as he became a recurring character, but it still felt clumsy to me that he was placed somewhere where he could easily be overlooked if he was that important to the plot.

Many of the quest achievements also felt kind of pointless to me. For example, you can't get 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea without completing Visions of Vashj'ir Past and Sinking into Vashj'ir as well, so why have separate achievements for those anyway? Fancy names aside, they are basically all equivalents of "complete x quests in Vashj'ir". Felt to me as if Blizzard was worried that if players weren't getting an achievement pop-up at least every so often during their way through the zone, they might get bored...

There were a couple of quests independent of the main storyline by the way, but they were thoroughly unimportant. For example you'd kill a wandering Alliance NPC, get a quest pop-up saying something along the lines of "Alliance, here? You better kill them!" and then that was it. Didn't really make me feel like I had discovered a great little Easter Egg or anything.

Also, the seclusion of the storyline made suspension of disbelief harder for me than usual. You're supposedly helping out these ship-wrecked survivors with no contact to the outside world... but for convenience's sake, you can stop at any time and then hop through a portal in Orgrimmar that will take you right back to where you left off. MMOs have always requried a lot of suspension of disbelief, but if all NPCs are stuck in the same place and time forever, at least that's consistent. However, having my questing move the story onward, until the point where I decide to hearth and it all magically freezes in time, is once again a whole new kind of awkward. I like the idea that the world goes on without me, that's part of the appeal of an MMO.

Many of the quests themselves also weren't actually that inspiring. I'm tempted to keep a record of my next playthrough and count just how many quests are basically a variation of "kill some naga", because I got the impression that it's a very large percentage. Good thing that I like naga. They are probably my favourite NPC race and if they ever became playable I'd happily roll a dozen.

I particularly liked the battlemaiden quests for that reason, but also because my character "playing" yet another character felt like diving into an additional layer of roleplaying to me, and even as someone who hasn't actually roleplayed much in WoW in a long time, I really got into the spirit of being the battlemaiden, appreciating her fierce loyalty to her cause and the way one of the male naga quipped with her about who got to do more killing. Why wasn't she around in the end? With her abilities she would have made for a fierce raid boss...

Since I'm talking about likes now, I should probably also mention that I really liked the look of the zone. For some people that might be a minor thing, but for me it's very important. If I don't enjoy the way a zone looks, I won't ever enjoy questing there either, regardless of the actual quest content. Deepholm for example was a big turn-off for me simply due to being nothing but black rocks overlaid with more black rocks. The underwater movement in Vashj'ir didn't pose too much of a problem either, though it probably helped that I was going through the zone on my druid, whose instant-cast aquatic form was often more efficient than even the seahorse.

The ending to the major quest line struck me as very weak, unfortunately, because it was basically one endless cut scene - except that for the first ten minutes or so it's not even apparent that it's a cut scene. I can pretty much agree with Adam's spoileriffic account of it here because my own experience was eerily similar, except that as Horde I was dealing with goblins instead of gnomes... and I got stuck behind one of the submarine's pipes while bouncing around in boredom and was about to hearth out in disgust when a cut scene mercifully ejected me. Who designed these bloody ships anyway? I managed to get stuck on the Alliance airship in Deepholm the other day as well.

Anyway, tl;dr version:

Things that I liked about Vashj'ir:
- Smooth single-player story progression
- Pretty to look at in a Little Mermaid kind of way
- Naga everywhere, and you even get to play one for a little bit, yay!

Things that I didn't like so much:
- Too much linearity and all its associated problems (awkward time flow, redundant achievements, getting stuck)
- The final quest basically being one huge, boring cut scene.