Windshear Hold

Urgh, huge internet problems at home meaning I wasn't able to get these out yesterday and am having to cope with near dial-up speeds most of the day, seriously annoying T_T. Regardless, lets try and crack on with the rest of this zone.

After the epic conclusion of the previous area we find ourselves in windshear hold, which is kinda a mirror version of Krom'gar fortress, we get similar quests so I won't go into too much detail of those (other than the fact that its so cool that the large daddy was replaced by big papa on the alliance side, lovely name twisting for mirror quests.

The difference here is that instead of incinerating the northwatch tents, instead we have to release huntress'. Pretty standard key quest with a pretty decent drop rate. I particularly like how you get a big army of sentinels to help you, what is particularly awesome about that though is they help you kill the elite fish, so the alliance have a much easier time of killing cragjaw than the horde. Now, Cragjaw's interaction with the sentinels did seem buggy, since he decided to grab one of them instead of grab me which may or may not be a bug, regardless I really did appreciate that awesome synergy and would hope for some sort of equivalent on the horde side.

Following-on from this the Big Papa quest seems to have mostly been fixed, or at least it works out for the alliance version, and the sucking up goblins and launching them grants you credit, which is nice :D. Now this particular area is much better constructed as alliance, obviously we don't have a mine to go to so you get told to go to some highborne ruins unearthed in the cataclysm and do the horrible spider quests.

Since I've commented on the spider quest (and how horribly terrifying it is) I only want to make a comment on how I love the debuff effect Queen Silith, I don't think I mentioned it in my previous write-up because I was in total shock and horror about the event, but the fact she launches like mini-spiders and they attach to you and try and nibble and kill you, becoming a debuff, is seriously awesome and a great way to implement debuffs like this.

Moving on to the Highborne area though you have these quests where you have to launch a box at them and they either turn good or evil and you get your credit on the good ones. They seemed to work like every other was good, maybe it was just luck that made it occur that way for me but yeh a pretty nice touch. Now what I particularly liked in this area was the abundance of Relics in the lake itself, whilst I was disappointed with the lack of relics on the surface there were plenty in the lake, which is always a good tactic if quests just can't work in synergy. I.E theres an area free of mobs where you can collect relics.

I would say however there definitely needs to be more relics on the surface, I ended up with like 3 once I had the spirit bound quest completed, which is obviously not enough really, I appreciate there is an area with little to no mobs to complete this quest but I would rather have close synergy and then that synergy being perfect wholly dependent on rng.

Now, in this area there are a lot of named highborne and you aren't ever told to come back to this area, I presume they are linked with a horde version of this area quest that hasn't been implemented yet, they have some interesting lore quotes here and it would have been nice to have been given a reason to listen to all of these, either through a "disguise" type quest or just through having to listen to all of their conversations, maybe it's a horde version of the quest but still.. highborne are probably more associated with the alliance than the horde and it would be nice to have a quest to take in the lore surrounding this area.

From here we get given 2 breadcrumb quests, I'm going to take a time to discuss this because I feel like I'm very torn between them, firstly I like the fact that say the breadcrumb to southern barrens involves you doing a certain questing area in Stonetalon, thats nice because it means you can offer the breadcrumb earlier and it still be relevant later when you want to leave the zone, however I feel like because this is an area you want to actually quest in, in the actual zone, you should be directed to this area first then told to move on or at the place after the bomb events you should get the choice to either go south-east to Northwatch or south to Farwatcher's glen and have them as basically mutually exclusive areas for experience allocation of the area.

Regardless the rest of the area is to follow :)