Kalimdor...revisited! (or...Hot for Seeker)

Spent most of the Thanksgiving weekend carving through Kalimdor like a knife through water. The Seeker quest total was, in fact, bugged and I didn’t lose any credit towards the 3k quest completions…although it certainly looked like it for a while. Quite happy to say the balance of what was needed was knocked out before I had finished the second zone.

Determined to acquire Loremaster of Kalimdor, I set forth once again from Theramore, hitting Dustwallow Marsh and getting really disappointed that 80% of the quests there were the same as ones I had done before, just at a slightly different level. From there, I started exploring the Southern Barrens, got sidetracked and wound up in Thousand Needles.

1k Needles is now almost entirely underwater and I was dreading it—swimming is horribly slow, but I wanted to see the new speedbarge floating over the wreckage of the raceway. Wow. Aside from the horrible time I had getting lost in the speedbarge itself, the zone itself was…amazing. There’s quite a lot of travel and underwater activities in the area, but you’ve got plotline tools that make it painless: a river boat of your own (summonable only in 1k Needles), as well as an underwater-breathing apparatus that also greatly increases swim speed to ‘very fast mount’ levels.

I won’t go into details on too many of the quests in the various zones—that’s for another time with another character. As it is, running a level 80+ through this content is really only based on how fast you can get from point a to point b and running lowbie quests in ‘god mode’ doesn’t make for good story. I will, however, note:

The changes to Vanilla are spectacular and the people attempting LM now will be able to have a much easier time of it than in the days of old—I’m not simply talking about “vanilla flight”, which is still over a week away: the whole enchilada is just designed better. I’ve now finished all of the quests in all of the zones in Kali except Stonetalon and none of them send you to other zones halfway around the world and most of the ones that have you leave the zone you’re in is just a breadcrumb quest to get you started in a new hub or adventuring area.

The redesign of the zones is a godsend: there are dozens of additional flight points and the maps have been changed to allow people to EASILY travel to nearby zones without having to find some obscure hidden tunnel on an ill-defined map. (Speaking of, the new maps are brilliant too.)

The quests are well-thought out with a feeling of impact—each zone has an internal cohesive story arc and most have a sense of closure when you have “finished” a zone. Humor is still there, in abundance, and there’s just enough “epic” to keep you wanting more without diluting the experience.

I envy players just starting out—this is what Warcraft should’ve been from the start.

The end of the world as we know it...

Deathwing, which would make a great name for a spicy chicken wing, broke Azeroth yesterday. With the Shattering, our world was sundered and all has changed, for good or ill.

Strev started off in Dalaran, where a massive exodus was taking place—with no transportation portals, people had no reason to stay. Within a week the place will look like Detroit. Wanting to immediately explore the carnage, I teleported to Stormwind—and crashed. Three failures to login later, a new Blizzard merssage appears telling me to run the Launcher directly to force more patches. Yay.

After one last false start, Strev stood in Stormwind’s mage tower, where everything miraculously looked like it did previously. That ended the first step outside. The world was sharper, better defined, laggier, and the city had been redesigned. The auction house was just steps from the bank in a straight path! The park was annihilated and a hundred little things vied for my attention. I hopped on a gryphon and flew to Booty Bay, just so I could see as much devastation from above as I could. I marveled at the new maps—they were more useful by orders of magnitude, then it hit me: I should check my achieves.

My worst fears were confirmed. They had stripped nearly every quest from Vanilla and replaced them—I went from 632 or so completed quests in Kalimdor down to about 95, most of which were in the Exodar-centered starting islands. I retained my EK Loremaster achieve, which was fortunate as all but 50 or so quests were wiped there. The truly surprising setback was losing 1k quests credited toward “the Seeker”, taking me from 2940 or so down to 1916. Ouch. I can understand Loremaster, but cutting my Seeker progress was just… rude and uncalled for.

Ah well, most people are rolling alts for the next couple of weeks, but I decided to go ahead and start working on the new quests. I took a tip from a guildie and headed to the “Dragon’s Mouth” (or something) section of the Badlands. As an aside, we gained dozens of flight paths. Dozens. I met up with some dwarf who wanted me to find another dwarf, which I did—then it turned awesome in seconds. (If you care not for spoilers, stop reading now!)

The dwarf and his two buddies are drinking by the fire, telling tall tales each in turn of how Deathwing devastated the land and how they alone fended off the dragon. For each story, there’s a cutscene and you get to “live out” their tales of derring-do. They included being an angry dwarf that could kill anything and everything with a PUNCH TO THE FACE, a gnome with a world-shrinking gun that lets you explore the zone as only a 600 foot tall gnome can, and a race through a canyon as an orc on a motorcycle with a hot chick you rescue. It was epic and a good sign the vanilla experience was going to be fun. I almost don’t feel bad about re-earning all those quests now.

Almost.

Questing for Lore

Spent most of the time since the last update working on the Loremaster of the Eastern Kingdoms achieve and annoying my friends every few hours with status updates. (“654/700!” “657/700!” and so forth.) I’m very proud to say that as of 11:30 or so last night, I completed the achievement. It has been an incredibly interesting diversion and there was a vast amount of lore I never knew existed, ranging from imprisoned demons to odd portents of the current impending elemental invasion. In my adventures I discovered a flight path I never knew existed in the Burning Steppes, explored nearly every single island on the coastline, and have probably hiked over ever square meter of the mainland…twice. In a way I feel kind of bad for the people that will never see a fraction of the content that’s going to get pulled in a matter of weeks. Not all of it is good, but it adds a depth of immersion to the game that just queuing up for one random dungeon after the next will never provide.

By the time I got to the last dozen or so quests, I had gone past scraping the bottom of the barrel for realistic quests and found myself lost once again in Black Rock Depths to knock out three more tasks for random people. The last six quests, oddly enough, were almost all booze-related.

#6: “Get some holy water from STV to give to the Thunderbrew dwarf in Westfall”. This quest isn’t that bad if you know where the shrine to get the holy water is. It’s the followup quests that are a pain in the tuckus. “Get 3 bags of grain from all over the world.” Yeah. I contented myself with the holy water, which I presume will make a “wholly” delicious booze.

#5: “Collect four different boozes for an innkeeper in Redridge.” Compared to my available quests, this one finally looked really, really pleasant. I had some Thunderbrew Lager that had been aging in the bank for a few months, so it was time to run around Duskwood, Goldshire, and Stormwind to get the other three.

#4: “Kill yet another dude in the Stockades” For reasons unknown to me, it seems just about everybody feels as though locking up criminals isn’t good enough, so for about the seventh time I ventured into the Stockades for a three minute beheading.

#3: “Gather ingredients for some pois—I mean ‘booze’.” This was a quest that Ian had told me about a while back and I had assumed it was Warlock-only, but I was quite wrong. This required a little flight time to not-too-remote regions to hit a couple of sparkly plants and then return back to home base.

#2: “Delive the boo—I mean POISON to a noble in the castle that’s been horkin’ me off.” Right then. I decided to add my own little flair to it. Upon delivering the noxious brew, as my victim guzzled I proclaimed “The Twilight Hammer sends its greetings!” There’s maybe five people in the world that would appreciate that and I’m sure four of them work at Blizzard.

#1: The last quest was found in the same room in which I murdered the nobleman. “Go talk to a woman by that flight point you discovered in Burning Steppes.” Holy crap! A breadcrumb quest?! I missed a BREADCRUMB QUEST? Apparently so. Tickled pink that there was no way I could screw that up, I promptly screwed it up.

I mounted my trusty mechanical emu and rode to the Flightmaster. I hopped on a gryphon for a straight flight path to victory. Along the way, I started clearing out my inventory of useless crap for quests I’m never going to complete and then opened my journal to clear out all the no-longer-needed quests. “Dungeon… dungeon… dungeon… raid… dungeon... dungeon… some painful quest involving trecking to the ends of the earth… another one of those… dungeon…” I then blinked with mute, stunned horror; I had somehow dropped the final freakin’ quest!

I growled at myself until the gryphon landed, ported BACK to Stormwind (I couldn’t imagine doing this achieve as a non-mage), and accepted the quest again. Aha! Although it was a breadcrumb, it was a “raid” quest. After vowing to leave the journal alone, I flapped back to the Burning Steppes, said “O hai!” and knocked out the achievement. I gave the woman a high-five, who seemed perplexed that I didn’t want to accept her quest, rubbed the belly of the dwarf standing next to her (Hey—I earned it! [Other Loremasters will get the joke]), and called it a night.

Next stop: Exodar!

Separate Lives

Over the past week or so, I’ve been mostly working on Anyth and Strev, each with their own decidedly separate goals.

Anyth has been trying to get Northrend-ready. Now at level 67, I’ve finally gotten a handle on the 4.0.x changes to the skill trees. Her ‘main’ spec is survival with a nice Ferocious pet, Buttons the wolf. This is my preferred spec for grouping as it allows for fairly high, consistent damage, even if it requires a LOT of button-mashing and situational reacting. I’ve been having fun with traps to a point that should probably be considered illegal. I can honestly say I don’t miss volley at all. Multi-shot, thrown explosive, multi-again… and suddenly I’ve stolen all of the aggro from the tank. Counting down the levels until I get misdirection.

Anyth’s offspec is much more solo friendly, but it comes with a terrible, terrible price: about half the DPS of the survival build while soloing. With her tenacious warp stalker “Goes” (Yes…”Anyth and Goes”—I’ll go the extra mile for a cheap pun.), she can mow through most things without having to stop and eat/bandage/repair which is a great perk over the “rest after every fight” she was getting with survival. Another nice thing is through glyphing, mend pet now gives a little happiness. As a result, I don’t think I’ve fed my pets more than once in the past week, particularly since you can overfeed them without penalty and the skill costs no focus and has an insanely fast cooldown.

I’m starting to warm up to the hunter changes, but she still has a long way to go before she sees her full potential. Strev, however, is on the top of his game.

Strev is (finally) at an illustrious 6k gearscore (average item level 264), which will be considered utter crap in a few weeks, but for now allows insane damage output. I’ve been fretting over haste/crit/mastery calculations trying to squeeze out every last point of DPS for the spec, but according to calculations over at elitist jerks, I guessed right. After hit cap, get haste to 20%. After haste, plow everything into mastery and ignore crit, which hath been deemed “really horrible” for arcane specs . Strev’s mastery pulls in another 20% damage at peak mana, so I think he’s where he needs to be until Cata comes out.

There’s been two main things that Strev has been up to lately: working towards the Loremaster achievement and throwing himself into the maw of Anub in the heroic 10-man ToGC.

I’d been lackadaisically pursuing Loremaster up until the end of the Halloween event, earning the Outlands achieve, then a bunch of quests in the Eastern Kingdoms, then I started working on reputations. I kind of liked the title “Strev of Gnomeregan”, so I started working towards it. Halfway through revered, I said to myself “Self—if you do other factions, you can get more gnome rep from bleedover!” and ported my butt to Darnassus. (Basically, if you’re exalted capped on an Alliance race and earn more of that reputation it coverts into a quarter of the reward for each of the other Alliance races.)

I hate the night elf lands. I hate them with a passion that goes to the very core of my soul. It’s all ugly, dismal, dark forest caught in perpetual twilight without sparkly vampires. In a fit of outright masochism, I completed all of the night elf starting quests, then moved into Darkshore, cleared out all of those and kept the rolling ball of questing going as long as I could. I knew if I stopped, I’d realize how godawful it all was and just give up and sit around Dalaran waiting for the world to end like so many others.

By the time I was halfway through…umm “Ashenvale”? (I really can’t remember those freakin’ zone names), I had reached Exalted with Darnassus and realized with horror that there might be drastic changes to Loremaster coming with Cataclysm. A few searches on the internet later, my fears were confirmed: people who had the achieve already was not going to lose it, but people who were halfway through would get screwed pretty hard. Quests that were being removed wold no longer count towards credit and I could expect to see my numbers completed plummet. Terrific. Between Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, I had about half of the needed 1400 quests done. On the bright side, the Cata changes will be along the lines of Outlands and Northrend in a “Complete 60 quests in Duskwood” sort of way. That’ll greatly improve tracking, but now I have to push to complete at least one continent before Cata comes.

Strev’s Kalimdor quest completes was about 150 behind Eastern Kingdoms, so I did the logical thing and wept. Strev put his Gnomer title quest on hold, dropped all of the Night Elf quests and teleported to Stormwind to start clearing out old quests. With only 280 or so to go and no good tracking method, this leaves a LOT of running around looking for exclamation marks. I’d previously “cleared” Elwynn Forest, Westwood, and Redridge. Starting up in Duskwood, I finished all I could find there and in Stranglethorn, finally closing out the last of the Booty Bay quests that didn’t involve trips to the western continent. Moved my base of operations to Nethergard keep, but it looked like I’d already done all of those as well, leaving me in the somewhat depressing Swamp of Sorrows, which was like a normal swamp, but greenlit.

Unfortunately, I was only been able to find a handful of quests here and there and none have led to large chains. I’m certain my destiny lies to the north, so next time, we’ll be revisiting Arathi and Hillsbrad!