Monday Random Thoughts

I hope the Grumpy Elf won't mind me stealing one of his frequently reused post titles... but it is Monday, and I have a couple of things to talk about that don't really warrant posts of their own.

First off, I was vastly amused when I saw this in chat on the Silvermoon server (where my little Draenei alt lives):

For all the complaining people do about the evilness of random lockboxes, they are apparently popular enough that people feel the need to make their own if a game doesn't provide them. I wonder if someone at Blizzard is watching and taking note of this demand... No, don't answer that; I'm aware that this type of gambling is more likely to break some kind of in-game rule than be adapted as an example to follow.

Speaking of my Draenei alt, I was questing in the Plaguelands with her and thinking about how despite its age and many issues, WoW is still amazingly beautiful and atmospheric in many places. Of course, then I approached the dead town of Caer Darrow and...

HI LOL LOVE IS IN THE AIR! This is just one reason I hate all those seasonal festivals in WoW. There is room for silliness in the game of course, but the way it has become ubiquitous and unescapable, even in places where it really hurts the setting - that annoys me. It makes the world feel ridiculous when it really doesn't have to be.

Speaking of ridiculous things, the amount of self-healing tanks and dps do in this game nowadays has become a joke. I've been thinking about that for a while, but it really struck me the other day when I managed to get stuck and found myself unable to die.

Continuing my little side project of showing my pet tank all the old raids he never saw, we decided to venture into Ulduar. I was a bit rusty on tactics and didn't explain some things very well, so I ended up trapped by a constrictor tentacle on Yogg-Saron and Pet Tank died. Oh well, we'll just wipe up and try again - or so I thought. Only one problem: I couldn't die. My sanity didn't go down any further, Ysera's Gift kept healing me, and I was stunned and unable to do anything. My pet tank eventually left the group to get his corpse kicked out of the instance and I Alt+F4ed out of the game. When I started it back up a few minutes later, guess what? I was still alive and trapped by that bloody tentacle. There were tentacles everywhere and yet they couldn't kill me.

Once I surpassed about a dozen debuffs, my health finally started to dip... just for Hodir to save my life with his flash freeze, and the moment it wore off I was immediately back in a constrictor. I've never missed SWTOR's /stuck command so badly (which allows you to "commit suicide" while in combat). Eventually I managed to achieve death by immediately clicking the flash freeze away the next time it saved me and instantly jumping towards a crusher tentacle so it could whack me dead. Death never felt like such a relief before.

Finally, on a more positive note, I've had some more fun on the Timeless Isle. I found a treasure-hunting quest in a mound of dirt, and when it became obvious that it was directing me towards the one part of the island I hadn't been to yet (across the broken bridge), I finally got off my butt to find out how to get there.

That bridge is a funny thing to the ignorant new player. You watch others run up to it and just fly across, as if by magic! If you're anything like me, you might think: aha, so it's like an Indiana Jones leap of faith thing; I just have to run straight off and... oh, guess not.

I don't expect to get a legendary cloak any time soon, and while there was an option to get across with a vendor-bought glider, I'm too attached to my timeless coins for other purposes, so I was delighted when I found out that there is actually a way to get up there for free: attack a passing albatross until it grabs you, then just hang in for the ride! It's such a silly thing, but in this case I really enjoyed it. It's nice to have an option to get around for players that aren't as advanced, even if it's slower and more of a hassle.

Another thing I found on the Timeless Isle was a quest for a "secret" noodle recipe. It's really old school, requiring you to run back and forth a lot and to complete two dungeons. It amuses me how Blizzard has repeatedly sworn off that kind of design, yet every now and then they still put stuff like that in. Anyway, it was quite fun, until it cumulated in another solo scenario, which required me to... serve noodle dishes to pandas. It's actually pretty fun as a mini-game; it just seemed kind of bizarre to me since I don't recall ever seeing anything this blatantly "gamey" in WoW before, for all the gamification it has suffered over the years. In fact, it reminded me a lot of an old C64 game I used to play, called Tapper, that required you to rush back and forth behind a bar to serve drinks to impatiently approaching customers. Just... weird. The only thing that drives me crazy about it is that the background music is the same little ditty that plays in all the Pandarian inns... and which is my least favourite bit of Warcraft music ever.

Updates to the Hinterlands and WPL (for Alliance)

My dwarf's tour of the Hinterlands felt fairly uneventful. While I've always loved the Hinterlands, I have to admit that it's been ages since I last quested there as Alliance, so my memories of the old Alliance quests were somewhat vague. I know that they involved lots of wolf and troll killing, and a chain to find the missing Featherbeard...

The new and improved Hinterlands simply felt as if Blizzard decided to cut out most of the unnecessary running around and any overly repetitive kill quests, and put more focus on the more interesting storylines instead. Jintha'Alor still feels like a dangerous place and retains a slightly higher mob density than the rest of the zone. You can also hitch a ride on Sharpbeak to get to the top quickly - yay, Sharpbeak! The quest to summon and kill Shadra that only used to be available to Horde is now available on Alliance side as well and doesn't involve running halfway across the world anymore just to ask different people about who Shadra is. There's an interesting quest at the Quel'Danil lodge that actually makes good use of phasing (in my opinion). And silvermane stalkers are actually silver again. Basically this is one of the zones that hasn't undergone any drastic changes, and considering that I was already very fond of it before, I'm okay with that.

Now, the Western Plaguelands were a very different matter. I had heard a lot of good things about the changes to that zone but then that had also been true for other areas which I didn't end up liking as much. This time I couldn't help but agree though. I really loved every single thing the developers did here.

To be fair, I hated the plaguelands in their old form. I know many players loved them due to their lore and what not, but back when I was a WoW noob I had never played another Warcraft game before (and still haven't, actually) and thus had no connection whatsoever to Arthas and the Scourge. For me the plaguelands were just an extremely drab and depressing place, where everything was either undead or diseased, and absolutely everything, from the ground to the trees to the mobs, was a dull shade of brown. Yuck.

The new WPL still carry remnants of the undead taint, but the overall atmosphere of the zone is an optimistic one. The quests reflect this with a nice mix of melancholy (the name "Taelan's Tower", or this quest) and silliness (the brilliantly funny Zen'kiki quests, or the fact that a remote quest turn-in to a priest is explained by her having used mind vision on you - I'm so used to NPCs being completely different from player classes these days that one actually acting like a player just struck me as funny). I was enjoying myself so much...

*record scratch*

...until this quest. The premise is that the humans and the Forsaken are fighting over Andorhal and you're supposed to help kill the deathguards. Except that as I strolled around town looking for them, I saw nothing but bored Andorhal defenders twiddling their thumbs, and sometimes even fighting each other (?!). Turns out, the quest mobs were in a different phase from me. D'oh. Usually I wouldn't consider a single bugged quest that big a deal, but when your entire zone consists of a straight line of quests, that single bug will cause the player's entire quest progression to come a grinding halt since there's no option to skip and move on (other than going to a different zone altogether). Major quality control fail there.

Fortunately the crafty people in the Wowhead comments had figured out a way to complete the quest anyway. Apparently there were two deathguard spawn points even in the wrong phase, and if you ran to the edge of town you'd be able to see the mobs appear inside. With a lot of persistence and some luck I managed to catch a couple of the respawns before the friendly NPCs mullered them to death within seconds, and managed to quickly pull a few mobs out onto the correctly phased edge of town. I don't know how much time this took in the end and I'm not sure I want to know, considering how long the respawn times were and how often the mobs I tried to pull cross-phase reset on me. But in the end I did it and got to see the end of the battle, which was worth it to me. I think that alone says enough about how much I loved the rest of the zone. This quest was a good reminder of the dangers of overly linear quest design though.