A few things before we begin with feedback on this zone: 1) This zone is a bit, barebones at the moment, I feel this is to do with this zone being one of the best zones in vanilla, at least from my experience, for levelling in and so a hard urge to remove vanilla quests and not enough bulk on the newly added quests.
2) Thousand Needles is explicitly NOT ready for testing according to the beta forums, I will honor that and keep my druid on Ice until said zone is officially ready for feedback, obviously this means that the Ungoro and Tanaris zone feedback is delayed, however I don't want to be skipping thousand needles and traversing Southern Barrens and Dustwallow to enable myself to move onto Tanaris and Ungoro Testing. This means my night-elf priest will be starting up as of tomorrow, so alliance feedback in kalimdor is on the way.
With those 2 points out of the way, lets crack on with the zone. I won't comment too much on the "lack of direction" when entering the zone, obviously the placeholder from Feralas is currently NYI so assuming this is implemented before live I'm quite sure it will be obvious to go to Camp Ataya.
This place starts out with quests to cull the pesky harpies in the ruins towards the north, and to investigate the illness of the forest. I'd like the Stag's you have to kill for the investigation to be in the same area as the Harpies, mainly for synergy and that quest to not feel so lonely. The harpies is a watered down vanilla quest, overall much better removing the other 2 types of harpies who used to roam this area. The quest item for the summoning of the named npc seemed to be 100%, and I do like these types of killed names which involves summons and not a spawn timer.
Whilst killing the stags to the south of the camp, I picked up the OOX-22/FE distress beacon quest, it required 35 which I suppose makes sense, and I will cover this quest in far more detail when we arrive to it, it's just I happened to have it drop here. Overall there are plenty of harpies for that quest, for the stags though the drop rate was a little disappointing at around 50% for the number of stag in the area, I had to go on long searches to get all the antlers required for the quest. Ideally I would like the stag to be around the ruins where the harpies are, and to have an increased 100% drop rate.
Now, this is sort of my problem with alot of Feralas, the lack of real flesh on any area. This is sort of bore out on the next bunch of quests, they all happen to be one at the time, and there is no synergy here. I would ideally like to not be doing 1 quest at a time. I do have to commend the story as being top-notch, so although I feel there should be more quests here, the story of this hub is nice.
Apparently the Green dragon whelps are also ill, so they require some culling. There are plenty of these mobs in the area so getting the quest done is fairly trivial, like stated it seems badly isolated as a quest and really needs a companion imo.
Upon hand-in the green dragon Ysondre in her Night-elf form contacts the druid, Ideally I would love this to be a MUST-SEE conversation instead of being just there, just for some immersion to the LETS JUST QUEST type of wow player. However, loving the immersion of Ysondre and the green dragonflight's plight with the emerald dream. I am betting that this sort of thing will make much more sense in terms of lore when cataclysm is released. It's already been stated it will be explained why Ysera's eyes are open in Hyjal, and so presumably there will be some event to do with the Nightmare of the Emerald Dream before Cataclysm approaches, perhaps explaining more about Ysondre's words here. Regardless though, the interaction is nice.
The quests involve killing Cliff Giant's corrupted by the land's taint and collecting Tear's. These 2 quests have some nice synergy that the previous quest could have used aswell, Overall the fact that these Corrupted Cliff Giant's are fighting uncorrupted giant's is nice for killing them, there are plenty of them about along with plenty of tear's on the ground, they perhaps blend into the forest a little too much, but I don't think this is that big of a problem.
You then are given the task of sealing the portal to help heal the land of corruption.. again it seems very on it's own this quest, but it also seems very concluding, so hopefully something cool.. but unfortunately nothing cool just an animation of you sealing the portal. Personally I was hoping for perhaps an epic struggle to seal this portal, perhaps a simple named Dragon coming to fend you off and stop you from sealing the portal, however yeh.. nothing exactly cool :<.
You are then given a breadcrumb to Stonemaul Hold, like I said I would prefer this to somehow have a more epic conclusion, I mean the story behind it is great and my problem here is that this hub is concluded and there is no continuation, if say there was a continuation with the quest line throughout the zone the quest would be fine, however with the questing flow as it is I feel it is far more deserving of an epic conclusion, considering the actual lore involved here.
On the way to Stonemaul you meet the Goblin who used to be down by the Feathermoon Port, seems those nightelves have moved their entire stronghold to the mainland because of the cataclysm and forced the goblin to relocate to the signpost, poor him :<. Unfortunately he makes no reference to this, which would have been amusing, and instead offers the same generic quests he offers in Vanilla.
A little disappointing, sure the objectives got cut to 2/3's of their original value (I believe so anyway) and the quest item (finally....) got rid of the 2 hour limitation upon it. The unfortunate thing about these quests, which were actually solid vanilla quests don't get me wrong here, is the fact that the nightelves have just moved in on the coast. It is rather awkward for a horde player to get past the night-elf encampment here without just jumping off the cliff or going round via the second entrance and past stonemaul hold anyway. It just seems rather counter-intuitive here.
Regardless the quests are overall fairly simple here, the drop rate on the elemental cores seems too low though, since I was having to wait for respawns or go extremely far down the coast (in comparison to the 6 giants worth) to get all the cores I needed, I feel at a 100% drop rate the ratio between Giants and Elementals would be spot on and the quest flow improved. The quest is from vanilla so yeh... I can't really think of much more to say here, the giant shrinking quest was always amusing :D, and the fact you only need to get 6 now compared to like 20? before is just a world of improvement.
One last comment I am going to make about the zone before concluding this post: This zone doesn't seem to have had it's quests properly itemised yet, most of the quest rewards from quests seem to be simple Vanilla cross-overs and I was barely taking any upgrades from this zone whatsoever, definitely something that needs looking at although I feel the overall lack of meat to this zone is a little more important :P, and perhaps even is why the quests are badly itemised.
Regardless that's the end of the first questing zone, a promising start with not enough meat on :D.
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