However onto the questing, your first tasks here are to Clear out a load of ogres and collect an orb from the warlocks that is suspicious, gather some beast muisek, and gather some Yeti Pelts.
Don't know how I feel about the Yeti pelt gathering, I feel like urgh it's on it's own and back-tracks you in the zone. I feel like it would have a much better place if you picked this up from Ataya and handed it in at Stonemaul Hold, this would make for less of a massive travelling time between the 2 hubs, whilst not having this random quest out on a limb.
The quest in itself is perfectly fine, however again very isolated. I am glad (at least hopefully) that the PERFECT HIDE starting quest item that used to drop from these yeti's was removed, hopefully it was removed and I didn't have bad luck. I also appreciate the explanation for swapping the order of the 2 quests around, obviously it would have made little sense to do them in the opposing order with the zone going from left to right in terms of progression instead of the vanilla right to left progression path.
The muisek quest was also another vanilla converted quest, apart from this time the first few steps start out from the Witchdoctor's apprentice, however I feel this whole quest is all in the wrong order, specifically in this first part it makes very little sense for the Beast Muisek to come before the Hippogryph Muisek in terms of quest flow, whilst it makes sense in terms of story although that could be changed.
Since the only concentration of Hippogrpyhs in the area is in the EXACT same area as the Gordunni Ogres you have been sent to kill, it seems silly that this part of the muisek quest becomes isolated if you chose to cycle with doing the beast muisek quest and the ogre quest at the same time.
However, I don't want to criticise this quest-line, it was always a good favorite of mine from vanilla and a nice variation on the standard kill-quests that you so often see. The beast muisek quest was very simple and plenty of mobs in the area, although as stated I feel like the order of the Beast Muisek and the Hippogryphs should be switched.
Firstly I went to do the follow-up for the yeti pelts quest, since the Feral Scar Yetis are pretty near :). Overall a solid quest and is backed up by having a nice quest route here that is naturally a circle either beginning or concluding with this quest (IF THE HIPPOGRYPH MUISEK QUEST IS FIRST). Again in this area is the Oox quest, the escorting the mechanical chicken...
My thoughts on this quest are a few fold, 1) IF the drop-rate for the homing beacon is really high, like 25% at worst on most mobs so you get it very quickly as you come into the zone, then this quest can stay. If not it needs to be increased, I never liked how these quests were totally rng whether you would be able to reap their large xp gains.
2) I haven't quested in Hinterlands or in Tanaris in this expansion yet, however I cannot see these zones being linked anymore, if the oox-quest is to continue I feel like they need to be all on the same continent, perhaps Feralas->1k Needles->Tanaris could work.
3) These quests HAVE to be completed via auto-quest. The fact that you have to go to booty bay to hand in these quests, whilst this makes sense story wise, is so impractical for the levelling player. Since areas now flow that much better it seems silly to tell the player to go to booty bay when this will lead them out of the quest flow.
I would like these quests to stay in, simply because the quests themselves were always nice but the few tweaks above definitly need to happen for this quest to be somewhat relevent to the cataclysm levelling model. The quest itself is much nicer than it's vanilla original, although I believe it is like this already on live, and only requires you to go to the Road and face 1 pack of mobs. Overall a small-mini escort is never a bad thing. The animations for the Mechanical Chicken are broken though and it just slides across the ground never getting up, which although is amusing is obviously unintended :D.
The Hippogryph Muisek quest is very easy to complete because of the abundance of Hippogryph in the area south. I also took the opportunity to check if I could go loot a Hippogryph egg for the old Gadgetzen quest to hand-in the eggs into that machine thing. They still spawned in the nests and I was able to loot one, not sure if this is intended or not, but it definitely should not reward xp for this quest, and perhaps merely a vanity pet or something to reward ingenuity. I haven't been to Gadgetzen to be able to see if this is the case or not though, so ye :<.
Moving onto the Ogres at last, involves killing alot of ogres :D. They are all fairly weak and die pretty quickly, so the 16 kill count goes by fairly easy and quickly. I'm going to add that I got the orb off a SHAMAN and not off a warlock, either the drop of this is wrong or the quest text is wrong here. Regardless, the orb seemed to be a 100% drop rate, I got it on my first kill at least, so this is a good thing, you could probably reduce it to a 50% drop rate and it be fine if you really wanted to though.
Lots of generic quests here but they form a nice questing circle and have some good synergy about them, so not much to complain about here. I don't really like how you get the Camp Mojache Breadcrumb here, obviously if the beast and Hippogryph Muisek quests were swapped you would get it after the next ogre quests, but it would still be one quest too early, I feel like there needs to be one more Muisek in this area and the actual next one (the treants) could be viable to place up-here. I believe there are treants around the area of Dire-maul and if not you could easily add some or perhaps ask you to gather muisek of the Hyenas that patrol Dire Maul.
Regardless though, you are given some more quests to kill ogres and from Swar'jan, a smart ogre :O, you are told to capture an ogre-mage. Loving this quest of trapping the ogre-mage, I would perhaps like a big YELLOW TEXT IN MIDDLE OF SCREEN saying when he is weak instead of the small emote in my chat window, but regardless the animations and immersion of this quest are great. I would have perhaps liked this to be done on a named ogre of some kind, just for slightly better synergy than capturing a mage you want to kill for another quest.The ratio of mobs you have to kill also seems fine since there are plenty of them around the outskirts of dire-maul all around a 1:1 ratio of enforcers: mages.
The follow-up to these quests though are truly epic though, firstly the mage you captured is released from the orb and is tortured and told to jump off the tower and he does :D, omg I love it! You are then told to proceed into Dire Maul and disrupt the sermon from Cho'gall, MORE INTERACTION WITH LORE PEOPLE :D. This quest is a little isolated, but I don't really care because the quest is just so epic!
Unfortunately it was a little buggy and took a while for me to trigger the event, with alot of waiting around and entering/re-entering the zone to get "in phase" with the event and then to trigger it actually starting, boy was it worth it though. Cho'gall has some awesome rp speech about the elements and the cataclysm, (I am guessing here that the stuff in brackets is perhaps stuff Deathwing is meant to say, or something.. since it makes no sense for Cho'gall to have bracketted his own yell, and it sounds like he is talking to himself somewhat), before which he sends 2 ogres, one at a time, to come kill you. HE THEN jumps down and freezes you on the spot, omfg DRAMA, and starts channelling some DEATH SPELL, scary stuff :D (GOTTA SAY I LOVE!!! the Cho'gall model, so sexy! :D) BUT THEN the leader of the Stonemaul Hold comes to your rescue and just leaps into the arena with a bunch of stonemaul ogres and we get to fight Cho'gall.
Epic battle later... and Cho'gall pretends to be Jaina and freezes everybody before teleporting away :D. Seems strange that there is no say like MEET US BACK AT STONEMAUL HOLD or something, and a little disappointing there isn't open warfare phased at dire maul, or perhaps corpses littering the place feeling the wake of the stonemaul crashing the sermon. Regardless though, this quest was seriously awesome. I went and explored the entrances to dire-maul dungeons and personally I would like a quest that just made you go and do this just to unlock the instances for people who came here and quested here, there are some bugged textured areas around aswell, some screenies attached of those.
Definitly though, the quest reward is NOWHERE NEAR worth the epicness of that quest, seriously needs a blue for that quest: it was fun and dramatic and had lore-interactivity. Anyway, that's the end of this area, the rp of Cho'gall's speech is included below :).
No comments:
Post a Comment