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.
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