Final Quests in Northern Barrens

This post is basically going to be the last few quests of the zone and my final thoughts on the zone as a whole and all that Jazz.

Basically, I guessed that the next quests would end up being in Crossroads, and that's exactly where they were. There is a breadcrumb to Ashenvale and to 1 last quest hub to the west of crossroads.

Again, they need you to do some more culling of the centaur, firstly to the south near the entrance to Wailing caverns, the horde want you to kill Centaur here. Pretty functional quest really, nothing wrong with it, the named npc is fairly strong because he comes with a couple of adds, but pretty easily beatable compared to the others in the zone. It is a little annoying how the bracers aren't a 100% drop rate though, because there are only just enough centaur to get your bracers unopposed.

After handing this in you get this really cool quest (which happens to be a group quest) to kill the leader of the centaur. Basically, using phasing technology, the area phases and now you are under attack by centaur, you basically have to kill like 20 or so centaur and the boss guy appears who you have to fight. Luckily I was fortunate and there was a Tauren Paladin questing here aswell and we teamed up to kill the elite, however I want to firmly state that this elite is far too tough.. I had to pretty much heal 100% of the time and cannot imagine 3 pure classes soloing this elite.

However, I feel the need to comment on this quest, I HATE group quests, why? because they require somebody else to be on the exact same stage of quest as you, and be willing to help. Like, that doesn't happen unless they want to do the quest themselves. Whilst the concept of group questing is overall sound, it seems silly to me that they exist, I know this is an mmo and interaction is obviously encouraged, but you have the dungeon finder for that. When you are questing I like to feel empowered and basically anything "non-instanced" should be soloable, maybe it has an elite tag but it should still be a pretty weak elite every class can solo.

The only type of group quests I can really get behind are like ARENA style group quests, they make sense and usually players are willing to help out because a) they have no pre-requisites b) are at a centralised questing hub and c) they make much more sense of wanting to be in a group.

I just feel like, especially for this quest, you are with an army of orcs and some trolls here holding off the centaur, why do I need a group to hold this off when I have a horde army supposedly supporting me. More horde troops need to spawn or there needs to be a buff that makes you more powerful so you can take out this guy without help from somebody else in the area imo.

This is also the first quest where I really disagree with the quest rewards.. they are blue but its like 2 shields and a wand.. basically that means alot of classes get no reward from that quest, which tbh if you are going to make it a group quest needs to change or nobody will do it unless 2 players happen to finish the quest at similar times and are just there.

Now this, as far as I can tell, is the end of the zone in terms of quests. Now note I am like level 19 at this point and I started the zone at level 11 and a half. So I mean I guess the zone is incomplete OR the early quests in Ashenvale (mor'shan ramparts) are meant to count as the northern barrens zone. I don't know what happens when you go from Azshara->Ashenvale, so I can't comment on that yet really. I could make an argument for either, you aren't ever sent to the north-west of the northern barrens and after doing the opening quests in Ashenvale you are around level 20 and a bit, you also still end Ashenvale at lvl 25.

My thoughts on the zone overall though: functional, there is no real OVERARCHING PLOT of the zone, or even direction, it's just a series of good functional levelling quests. I personally prefer zones with a story or interesting plot to it. However, this zone is more of those huh? I want to level quickly zones, which I guess have to exist to cater to those players. From what I hear, silverpine and Azshara, the 2 horde alternatives to this zone, are much more story driven but less quest optimised than this zone, so it is nice that this zone is a more functional alternative than the 2 aforementioned zones.

IF the ashenvale starting quests are meant to be the end of the northern barrens in terms of experience, then I agree that the zone has a worthy conclusion, however if that centaur quest is meant to be the conclusion to the zone, then I feel it's rather lacklustre.

With the levelling experience as it is, you are sort of "funneled" into doing Ashenvale->Stonetalon if you want to stay in Kalimdor whilst levelling, so it makes much more sense that the Mor'shan Ramparts quests are the end of the Northern Barrens, although hard in difficulty now, these could easily be tuned to be more in line with the level 19 experience or so.

So yeh, I feel like the zone is just really functional, I would like some more interaction with say WHY U WANT TO DO WAILING CAVERNS as a dungeon type quests, at the moment there is merely a breadcrumb and no real overarching story as to why you want to do the instance, like there is for like Blackfathom deeps or like Deadmines. I feel like zones with an instance should definitly be wanting you to explore the area and want to do that instance, to promote socialising and well instancing at a low level.

I've already done Ashenvale and laid down the areas, I feel like I have to split Splintertree into 2 different posts because well there are just so many quests sparking from that hub. I also want to mention how BUGGED Ashenvale is right now, and how unfinished it is, to me. So my feedback will be quite critical in places of the zone.

However, slideshow of the final quests and my overall questing experience in the Northern Barrens O:

Nozzlepot's Outpost

So, after the awesome little boat ride, I don't think I mentioned that I love these seemless transitions between quest hubs, sure it takes away some of the EXPLORING factor, but I feel like quests should always be somewhat directed in an mmo, since you can explore outside of quests almost all the time.

We arrive at Nozzlepot's Outpost and basically the whole "focus" of this hub is this SAMOPHLANGE, now apparently these are all quests that were in vanilla, don't know if this is their final mock-up but they work reasonably well here apart from some of the really long walking distances :////.

Anyway you are asked to go and like find this venture company place (REALLY FAR AWAY TBH) and obtain the samophlange by working the machinery and killing off the boss of the area type thing. The quests are overall well worked, however like stated the running distance back and forth is really far, there are also a bit too many mobs in the area and they all tend to run away into each other, and multi-pull. It can be rather frustrating.

There is a quest in the sludge-fen but I will cover it later when it seems like it should be covered.

Basically you take this samophlange back to camp and the goblins try to repair it and actually figure out what it does, they decide HUH? we can't figure this out so they teleport you to this female goblin npc (I like how I don't have to run there). Of course being typical Goblins, their machinery is not so reliable and you end up being teleported high in the sky and barely survive, (however you also get the Going Down? achievement, which is nice). Again, nice little quest really, however the follow-up is again another long run-distance back to where you were before basically.. the sludge-fen.

A few things here, there are only like 3 buckets of nuggets for the quest, and whilst they all contain like 2-4 nuggets per bucket, there are just not enough buckets, there need to be WAY MORE around the pool. Now whilst you are here you can pick up the little escort quest, first you have to get the key to this shredder, which is not surprisingly being held at the top of the oil rig, nothing particularly spectacular here. Then you get a nice little escort with great dialogue and immersion.

It would be nice if all the mobs you aggro on the escort wouldn't run away into every mob in the area.. just make them not run away, I really hate that mechanic in anything other than instances (it makes sense there due to having ways to cc and things dying that much faster).

Did I mention how annoying it is that you have to run ALL THE WAY BACK to the goblin girl to hand in this quest... and then just RUN ALL THE WAY BACK to nozzlepot's outpost. I could handle maybe the quest being handed back in nozzlepot outpost, but it's stupid to have to go back and forth between the 2 camps 3 times or so for like 1 quest.

Anyway.. they realise that they can't figure out what this samophlange is/does so they want you to get the manual for it by killing some venture company guys north of the outpost. Now... a few comments here, there are WAY too many mobs in the area, and the cave especially, I was having to be EXTREMELY careful when pulling, and even then I died once because of a patrol coming at an inopportune time. (the graveyard is really.. really far away :/) I mean, you might aswell have asked the player to kill like 30 or so of the mobs on the way to getting the manual cover, as thats how many you end up having to kill. Seems silly that you get all the pages you need before even entering the cave to get the cover.

However after getting all this done and handing in you have some cool dialogue and the samophlange still is somewhat a mystery, and you are left hung out to dry in this quest area.

From what I can tell with some reading these quests seem to be directly taken from vanilla, and perhaps the area is incomplete because of it, it just needs to fix the long run times and over-zealou mob distribution and a breadcrumb back to the crossroads for the zone to be decent though, the storyline is at the very least interesting.

Slideshow :)

Ratchet

Ok, lets crack on with the writing up, so previously we were sent to Ratchet via 2 quests, one to collect some money the horde is owed and has gone missing, and also to correspond between 2 forsaken about THE PLAGUEEEEE etc :D.

You want to head east out of the Crossroads following the path all the way to Ratchet, there are literally a fuck tonne of quests here in Ratchet, however first we will hand in our 2 quests, the collecting the horde payroll just is a simple turn-in and like GO INVESTIGATE type quest, which is cool: I'll come on to why these quests are particularly cool in Cataclysm in just a bit.

On the way to the Forsaken hand-in we pick up a quest to like kill some humans, always a good quest, remember now that ratchet is really a horde quest hub specifically in cataclysm, whilst I am sure it is still neutral for alliance, the whole zone is basically a horde-only zone for quests, so I doubt there will be many, if any, quests for alliance here. Heading into the Inn we hand-in the Horde quest, and basically trigger some awesome dialogue.

Again, highlighting the tensions between the horde at the moment, I think its cool and adds to the ambience of the place. It is also nice it sort of relays events you haven't done yet (wrathgate) and puts them into context in the future, which basically 1-60 is, without ruining exactly what happens in Northrend so it doesn't ruin a new players experience there, which is a nice touch. It also helps apply culture, and like I said, I am a big fan of story through quests and /say dialogue, it helps the quests flow better and makes things far less pedantic and far more dramatic.

The other quests here are like kill a named raptor, kill some pirates, meet up with a couple of pirates, and 1 last quest which is to retrieve some schematics. Again cool quest, you go into the inn where you just were for the forsaken and like "CLUB" the engineer guy unconscious by interacting with him, this in turn starts some massive brawl in the inn, with the forsaken girl being most amused by your actions, it's a nice subtle quest really. Handing this in gives you a quest to go blow up a ship.

Now, like I said before, whenever theres a BIG AREA FULL OF QUESTS, I prefer to do quests in an opposing area first, in case there are extra quests for the big area, since usually if you are given a bunch of quests at the same time, with 80% being in 1 area, they won't lead onto quests in the second area.

Regardless, the investigation quest involves us going up to some wreckage, now this is the AWESOME thing about cataclysm quests like this, the new feature: Auto-questing, which is basically like instead of trecking back to the quest giver and handing in the quest, on certain quests you just hand-in the quests right at the objective and get a new quest given to you, overall it means less travelling time and a far more immersive story line.

This is the first incarnation of the auto-quest we have seen thus far in our first 2 zones, a mechanic which is probably under-used in the early zones imo, however as we will see later there is probably a good reason for it. Anyway.. we receive additional instructions to follow the tracks and find out who stole the goods.

On the way we meet a troll npc who like decides to replace every r with a w like some sort of child, reading his quest text and dialogue and like the quest items are amusing :D. He gives you a quest which is pretty cool interactively, you lay a trap on the ground it makes a raptor call and a raptor comes running, it then zaps them and turns them into a tiny raptor which you then loot from the trap. Pretty nice animations and interactivity in the quest, if I had been smart I might have used it to help kill the named guy for the other quest, which is actually tough.

However, here comes the problems of auto-quest, whilst doing that other quest I get the other quest completed.. the auto-quest hand-in triggers and I hand in... but alas no follow-up, which means trekking ALL THE WAY BACK to ratchet to pick up the follow-up, obviously this quest is bugged and should auto-trigger the follow-on there and then.

Basically the follow-on is just kill raptors and loot back the stolen silver. Now, going on to kill the named for the other quest here.. this is actually really difficult for the level, I mean I'm level 15 here and we are forced to face a level 18 named with 2 level 16 adds, thats pretty damn tough for a level 15 new player to solo, I died once because I basically pulled an extra mob on top of that. If the intention is for this quest to be completed after the like pirate/human missions down south, then I suggest the quests, including the investigation, be only available once said other missions are complete.

Anyway, after barely killing this named and collecting the silver from a chest we head back to Ratchet, there are plenty of raptor spawns for the quest, so completing it is rather trivial. I also dinged after killing the named here, which was nice although would have preferred to have dinged before ^^.

Handing in both of these just ends their quest chains and we are forced to head south towards the Humans and Pirates. Now I have to say I was fairly impressed with the walk from Ratchet southwards down the coastal path, it is laden with stealth commandos who jump at you when you get too close... really awesome feel to that. You also need them for your quest to get medals, which is also good. Nice synergy...

My only problem with this is that you end up with like 5-7 medals before you even get into the camp of humans LITTERED with mobs and you have to kill a good more 3-5 mobs to complete the quests here. I would say the amount of mobs need to be toned down a little, it was really hard to not pull multiple mobs at a time, and not pull the named, meaning pulls of 3 members... which is pretty tough to deal with for a newer player and rather pedantic waiting for patrols to wander off so you don't pull that many.

The 2 named people for the quest are fairly close by and go down rather easily, I like how the male has an ability that makes the player want to run away for it's duration. Nice early practice for running out of fire effects. I love the little pirate of the Caribbean references with the little dog holding the keys to the cage. presumably there is no choice and selecting the NO I DONT TRUST YOU just means you reset the dialogue and are asked the same choice, however I stupidly didn't test it out :<.

Freeing him however leads you to a quest which is like GO GET THIS HEAD OF A PIRATE which the alliance decided to hang outside their camp.. pretty awesome really you get to see the head and everything when you go to get it hanging on a tree :). Now, moving onto the blowing up the ship. There is one obvious ship in the area and diving underwater reveals a MUCH LIGHTER area of the ship which is labelled thinnest part of the hull.

Obviously you place the bomb here and get a countdown, I'm not sure what happens if you don't move, but having a countdown easily makes the player want to move away, so it encourages what it is supposed to... again another auto-quest bug with the hand in auto-appearing and the follow-up not being given to me. Kinda annoying really, since this is the only quest left in the area after taking it much later.. I'll discuss it now since like this is when you should get it. It involves going around and blowing up weapon caches, always awesome, however there really aren't that many of them, there are like ONLY 5 and they are all spread out and littered with human mobs. Since you need 5 for the quest, it seems rather pedantic and annoying, and easily frustrating if there is more than 1 person farming the quest with you.

Finally we move on to the pirates on the little island off the east coast, previously this used to be the warrior class quest island I believe and the human camp the place for the pirates, but obviously the cataclysm has forced the pirates to flee to this island :O. Anyway, we have a series of directed quests from the little quest-hub on this Island to start a mutiny, what else would you do with mistrustful pirates :D.

Firstly you are directed to kill an ogre sitting on some gold, he actually does sit on gold.. highly amusing npc because of this :D. The quest item text is also, kinda amusing referring to the fact that an ogre was sitting on it.. eww :(. Next the mutiny needs guns, and that involves going directly to where the named character is that we need to kill anyway, always good. I feel like this hut has way too many mobs in, you have to pull in 3s realistically unless you are far too cautious and take about 2 at a time, which still is quite alot for a lvl16 character.

Cap'n Garvey, the named npc, comes with 2, possibly 3, level 15 adds and is extremely annoying because of that. I feel like he is a little too tough for a non-healing class, or at least the new player who doesn't exactly have a full grasp on their character yet, I could understand him having at least 1 add though, since that makes sense. The guns are right where he is on the side, which is again an awesome touch and nice synergy between quests.

Handing in those guns we get to start the mutiny, very nice quest this is aswell, you get on the boat and blow your horn and lots of friendly pirates spawn and you take over the ship together.. really immersive and enjoyable quest, especially with good interaction between you and the original quest giver.

Once this is over you have like 7 quests or so to hand-in in Ratchet, I hearthed at this point to learn some new skills, I might attest though that running back is extremely annoying, since you have to go through those commandos (which I do like) again, and it doesn't have quite the same effect running through the wrong way :(.

Only 1 of these quests actually lead to anything, and that is to DIG UP the treasure you found with the map from that dead man's head you got. This is a nice little collect mission though, you have to go a long way round and eventually wind up at a dig site, which is obviously in the most concealed place around! Once you dig it up it spawns Baron Longshore and 2 adds, which are now hostile and don't want you stealing the treasure.

This really caught me offguard and I died from them, they are actually pretty weak and most players shouldn't die if they know they are coming. However their spawn is really nice and realistic and sort of captures the piratey feel of the area. I also like how they can kill you and you don't need to kill them, so it doesn't matter if you die to them :D. (I did check to see if you looted anything off of the baron when killing him, you don't).

Regardless, handing in this money nets you your first blue upgrade. I haven't really talked about quest rewards, because quite frankly I think they are well distributed, but I really do like the fact that armor from specific zones have like a specific look, so taking the quest rewards from a zone makes all your armor match instead of being a rag-tag bunch of gear like you would be from vanilla quest rewards.

The last quest in this hub is to take a MICKEY MOUSE-ESQUE boat up the river to the next area... Really I found this quest highly amusing because of the Mickey Mouse look of the boat, and the fact its piloted by a goblin so is about the size of Mickey Mouse.

Anyway the boat sets you down near the next quest hub.. which will be covered in the next post. OMG SLIDESHOW! :)

Crossroads

Ok, lots of stuff to write up over the coming days, finally finished Ashenvale when the world server was kind to me \o/. I'm uploading all my screenshots, and maybe I'll add in the collage's later, but I mean I figured, hey adding all my screenshots is probably just as Useful as snipbit collages, and it just takes less time so I can write up that much faster.

So all the posts on Cataclysm Levelling feedback should have screenshots of all the specific content covered in the post, and then the final post of the zone will have a slideshow of every single picture of the zone and the last bit of the zone.

Ok, so we sort of just came from Grol'dom Farm on the awesome kodo quest.. shame there aren't more of them, they were enjoyable riding shotgun in the hotseat, quite literally :D.

Anyway, like i commented on previously they don't seem to care that the burning blade attacked their convoy, which seems strange but then again there is no burning blade presence in the zone.. so it's just pretty weird in general.

Anyway we have a quest from the tauren, representing the druids of the horde, that we need to figure out why the oases in the north are currently blooming after the cataclysm, we have 2 LETS KILL SHIT quests to go hunt some wild animals to well PROVE YOUR MIGHT TO THE HORDE, or well this quest giver :). Kinda nice though since like your new in town and well you have only done minor things in lore so far, you can't even have gone into dungeons yet (well you can, but it would be with a pug or a boost, both of which are unlikely for the run of the mill char).

Lastly we have a typical Forsaken Quest: GO COLLECT STUFF SO I CAN MAKE A PLAGUE :DDDDDD, obviously pretty generic. Going out of town to the north-west to do the quests, the zhevra and huntress killing quests are all pretty run-of the mill kill quests, The drop rate is around 75% iirc, and there are plenty of mobs so quest hunting isn't really an issue.

I also dinged whilst killing these mobs, again the text incorrectly stating I gained an extra talent point, :(.

Once getting to the oases, the mushrooms are pretty damn obvious, and also there are 2 more quests :D, basically the horde are a little worried that the centaur are becoming a little too organised, and since they don't want a repeat of warcraft 3 (being forced to move to a new home) they want you to kill them off. Again, pretty simple kill quests but its good synergy since you would have to have killed all these centaur anyway just collecting the mushrooms for the apothecary and discovering the source of the growth in the area.

Diving into the lake you can see a fissure and by swimming over it you can breathe and you get a quest complete, I was a little confused that you had to go over THIS SPECIFIC SPOT, so maybe the quest objectives should make it clear you are looking for something specifically and don't just have to enter the water. The centaur leader is to the southwest of the oasis to the base of this hut thing, which seems to be a new design in cataclysm, he doesn't do anything particularly exciting though and is basically a copy of the other centaur mobs, but with a unique face to make him stand out, would have liked him to have something that spelled him out as a leader to these centaur, he even attempts to run away :<.

Handing in the Forsaken give you a follow up which is like WE NEED TO TEST THIS NEW PLAGUE WE MADE, type quest: which overall is fairly standard for the forsaken. The tauren druid wants you to take his eyes, an eagle companion, to the top of a mountain so he can see the land, obviously he is a little too lazy :D. We are also sent off to kill the leader of the cats, Echeyakee.

I don't really like how you go back up north-west for just this single quest, but ye.. I guess it couldn't be helped, I do however like these style of named kill quests, where like you do something unique, like in this instance use a quest item, which summons the named npc. It's nice because it means you don't get camped npcs and yeh, makes the named npcs feel more special. I do like the cool white model of the cat, although sadly it isn't that threatening, would have been nice to see it be like a little more threatening, especially since the girl like yells about your efforts afterwards.

She does also give a follow-up, to check out some raptors this time towards where all the other quests are, to the south-east. This quest is fairly easy, since there are loads of raptors and only 3 nests the drop rate of around 33%, perhaps less is totally fine. I even ended up with an extra feather, perhaps some direction as to where all the nests are would be nice, the yellow one is kinda hidden on top compared to the other 2, but it's not that bad.

Moving onto the Stagnant Oasis, the logical place to go next, you again go by the pool and are greeted by more quests to do with the area. One is to collect some data on the centaur by picking up "intelligence", and the other one (the much cooler quest) is to just cause havoc and kill shit :D, taking the quest has the npc go a few paces to the west to the top of a hill, and basically its like IM GONNA PLANT THE HORDE FLAG AND WE ARE GOING TO HOLD THIS HILL, king of the hill style obviously :D.

He plants down the flag and waves of centaur come. I feel like this quest is slightly overtuned: I actually died doing this quest because I didn't pay attention to my health. Mainly the centaurs seemed to spawn really fast, so you barely had time to take down the centaurs and rest up before the next wave came, also the npc doesn't do a great help of tanking the mobs, which I feel like should be his function here. There are some awesome yells/says during this from the npc though, which is nice and immersive. The guy at the end is tough because you don't have time to rest up between waves, which is good but I feel may be overtuned for classes without access to self-heals at this level.

You can also plant the fungal plant here (plague), staying near it puts a powerful disease on you, that does do some damage but it's also very immersive and I liked the fact that testing the disease was like dangerous to you in some way. Collecting the Intelligence quest is really shit, there is only like 1 intelligence at each camp, and they are really spread out.. Need to really have 2 per camp or only require 2 bits of intelligence because going round all the camps was really pedantic, since it involved killing a good 20 or so centaur :/.

OBVIOUSLY, after gathering all this intelligence we are going to use it to kill the leader of the centaur here, this means killing his wife and then he appears. Again.. liking the way of spawning the named here: coming to avenge his wife is both realistic and immersive. I also dinged whilst doing all these quests, and hitting the 15 mark means I now have access to Dungeons, and Glyphs.

A small comment on this, I won't be getting glyphs at all during my levelling (mainly cos cataclysm glyphs aren't available yet really). I also will not be running dungeons, 1) because I want to fully test out levelling arcs of zones and 2) because leaving feedback on a dungeon is hard imo, they usually require multiple run-throughs and are sort of dictated by your group, I also feel that most of the dungeons probably aren't finalised yet, but I could be wrong.

I might run through them all later on, on my high-level char to see if anything interesting has changed to do with the lore, but in terms of balance and feedback on anything other than story I don't believe is so necessary.

Back to the Questing.. logically, I'm trying to stress this point, the last quest you end up doing is the tauren's and taking his "eyes" to the top of the mountain, some cool immersion here (although I would personally have preferred you HAVING to listen to the tauren's say's instead of just being able to skip and continue questing, mainly because I like being able to follow a story without reading the quest text of every single quest, and stuff like this really helps). The dialogue helps to explain the druid's view on the cataclysm and such, and you get some follow-ups which are like INVESTIGATE STAGNANT OASIS.

I'm really, really torn on this.. logically this is the last area you go on a quest route, I feel like there needs to be emphasis on the player to go to the top of the mountain first, perhaps the orc lady could come up to the mountain and give you the quest for the raptors up here, I feel like if the raptor quest wasn't available it would make the most sense to go to the mountain first, perhaps that is a bit presumptuous but yeh.

The quests are a little interesting though, not the standard kill turtles quest, but the planting dead seeds near the fissure in the lake. Some cool animations to show the seeds growing into some underwater vegetation is really nice.

Finally you go back to crossroads and turn in all your quests... You get a breadcrumb here to go to Silverpine Forest. I really do not agree with this, you are around half way through the zone here at level 15.. and like, silverpine is also a level 10-20 zone, so it seems really dumb you would be directed away from the zone halfway through it. So yeh, I highly disagree with this questline, and would like to see the sort of questline finished there and then.

The other quests both lead to Ratchet.. so thats where the next post will be on. Note I'll get Northern Barrens finished all tomorrow, and maybe ashenvale.. will depend whether I play through Stonetalon or not :).

Here's the slideshow for the area anyway :).

Far-Watch Post & Grol'dom Farm

Ok, starting off the day by writing up Northern Barrens, the first quest hub. Note a few things, 1) I am not sure if all the quests in this zone are implemented, 2) due to various frustrations (!!!!!!) I haven't finished ashenvale, so will be spending a great deal of time finishing that tonight, so might not finish writing up the 5 or so areas I divided the Northern Barrens into.

Ok, so onto the Northern Barrens, firstly you are sent here via 2 breadcrumbs, 1 is simply a generic GO TO THE NORTHERN BARRENS, so that anybody can go here regardless of what quests have been done. The other one is leading on from the final quest of Durotar, this tells me that Durotar->Northern Barrens is where I should go according to STORY, which is probably the most integral part of the levelling experience imo.

Without story you are just chinese farming and basically just crashing through quests and not paying any attention to them, which means questing is boring and inevitably not satisfying.

However, onto the First quest-hub, the first area you arrive into is the Far-watch post, next to the bridge from Durotar which was almost wrecked by the cataclysm. Cool.. you are told that the cataclysm has caused the quillboar from the south of the barrens to move north and have started attacking the Orcs in the area and cutting off their supplies.

Firstly you are asked to cull the quillboar in the area, and kill the annoying plainstriders in the area.

Before moving onto the quests, I want to talk about the area first:

1) Far-watch post is *REALLY* not accessible, I mean its a big run from Orgrimmar and there isn't any sort of "FREE PASSAGE" quest to far-watch post, it's an annoying run through Durotar to get there, and well I feel this needs to be fixed

2) No flight path, because I decided to do this zone when like LOGGING IN/OUT caused you to lose specialised skills and you had to respec in order to retrieve them, I had to run to and from Orgrimmar, this zone is annoying enough to get to without a flightmaster, I feel like one needs to be added.

After that small rant, onto the quests, killing Plainstriders are all around the camp, the drop rate on this quest is like 50%, and there really aren't many plainstriders, having to kill around 14 REALLY spread out mobs, is a pain in the ass really, either increase the amount of plainstriders or drop rate or both :). I do however delight in the irony that the troll in Durotar wanted to save their lives and instead lead them to you killing them in the Barrens, awesome irony :D.

I also dinged 12 during this mission, PLEASE NOTE: this zone is marked as a level 10-20 zone and I started it a good half level through lvl 11 with some rested experience. Just a note that the LEVELLING TEXT, ie those cool animation things when you ding, are bugged and say you get a talent point every level as of the current build on this date, I presume it's rather low priority fixing, but I will point it out.

Moving south of Far-watch post we arrive at the quillboar, where there is also another quest giver, he wants you to rescue some wolves from inside a pen, which just so happens to be burning, simply walking into this pen and unhooking 3 wolves is simple, but hey this sort of quest is more fun than having to say save 3 wolves in opposite corners of a camp, at least they are nice and clumped.

Nothing much to say about the kill quest, the Quillboar are in about the Right proportion for the killing objectives and are plenty numerous in number to fulfill the quest objective with 0 problems.

Handing in you are told that the Quillboar have stolen horde supplies and you need to retrieve them and kill the Quillboar guarding them. OBVIOUSLY they have hidden these supplies in a cave, going to the cave you obviously have to kill Quillboar and work your way to the top of the cave (it's a generic vanilla cave) to kill the leader of the Quillboar, he has some nice interaction, when you reach the top (before you engage) he yells I CAN SMELL YOU COME AND DIE basically, which is a neat little trigger adding to realism/immersion.

Overall he is simple to kill, a note about the other quests in the area though. There are plenty of supplies to grab on your way up but there are too few thornweavers without going OUT OF YOUR WAY to kill them, ie going down optional paths or into the water, maybe decrease their objective count or replace some of the defenders with Thornweavers. Perhaps I was slightly unlucky with the rng spawns I was presented with, but that was my only functionality defect I had with these quests.

Handing in you now get a cool quest after those rather generic dull quests. They are like DEFEND THE CARAVAN WITH THIS GIANT GUN :DDDDD, cool stuff you get to ride on a kodo and kill stuff with guns. I believe? this is the first vehicle quest that I have done on this character that requires interaction, it's pretty cool: Quillboar go after the kodo behind you and leap up on it, you basically target them and shoot them down with your shotgun :DD. Sometimes the Quillboar were hard to like target, because their nameplate and name disappeared when attached to the kodo, perhaps some fixing of that would be nice.

However, this quest is awesome, and a gentle introduction to interactive vehicle quests (as opposed to the sit back and travel vehicle quests) anyway you get taken to Grol'dom farm, which is under attack by those pesky Quillboar and you are given various quests to kill them, capture them and well kill them.

A weird thing here is that you get the quest to move onto Crossroads immediately... I don't agree with this one bit, a new player might accept this quest and move onto crossroads before doing any of the quests here, This quest should only be unlocked once you have completed the quests in the area, in my opinion.

You also get re-introduced to Mankrik, now I am not a fountain of lore knowledge, especially to do with like horde low level areas, because I only levelled like 2 horde characters, and both of them avoided Barrens like the plague.. however, from what I gather Mankrik's wife was murdered by the quillboar and now he is sort of Bloodlusted into revenge against them. He clearly wants you to kill some in her name as well and asks you to get like 30 tusks, an audacious task but then you realise the quillboar drop 1-2 of these every kill and so you end up only having to kill 20 quillboar, which is pretty much done from the other quests in the area.

The other 2 more specific quests are: KILL QUILLBOARS IN THE AREA, and like capture a quillboar.. btw that quest is so good, you like use the quest item on a quillboar, and then like he turns friendly and you interact with him, and the dialogue option is "POUND THIS CHUMP" and then he sort of gets pounded to the ground, chained up and dragged along the ground as you quest.. seriously cool :D.

When you finish the other kill quest on the same mobs you drag this prisoner back to the questgiver, and some neat phasing occurs and the quillboar appears as a prisoner in the pen to the side of the hut.

I dinged from this quest, but regardless, you get another unique quest as a follow-up, you are asked to question the prisoner.. but unlike every other sort of QUESTION PRISONER style quests you are asked to choose between 6 dialogue options.. I believe that whatever you pick you always get the same result. However the cool thing about this is that the player is given an element of choice, and whatever decision you make you get a 20 minute buff for being NICE or being CRUEL. I ran through this twice and got the 2 opposing buffs, there maybe more buffs but regardless the cruel increases your damage and being nice gives a rather pointless buff.

Personally, I feel like they should have made this a zone-wide buff and perhaps have like other npcs react differently (but give the same quests) depending on what choice you made here. It would be really immersive and give the player a sense that CHOICES MATTER, where in an mmo you usually feel choiceless.

After questioning he reveals there is some leader all the quillboar are afraid of called Tortusk so.. you had better go kill him. Also a kodo has been captured by the Quillboar and you need to go save it.

Simply heading south across the road gets you to the stolen Kodo, you need to gather some food so it won't die. I would have liked a quest timer for this mission, it could be really generous like 20 minutes or something, but it would add to the immersion that you needed to gather the food before the beast dies. Basically you have to gather grain on the ground. I just got them as I saw them whilst heading towards Tortusk.

He is riding a frigging raptor, and when you engage he fights you on the raptor, which is pretty cool for a named guy you are meant to kill. He says some stuff, but nothing is that epic to really comment on. It's nice that there are like 2-3 grain piles behind him so that killing him helps you complete the save the kodo quest faster, which I feel adds to the immersion factor, or at least provides some synergy between quests, which is always nice.

Handing in the kodo quest (AT THE KODO) causes the kodo to basically run off back to the farm, on the beta at the moment it's animations are bugged and it stays sitting down slithering across the ground... hilarious btw... but yeh obviously unintended.

Final quest here is just the quest that was available since you arrived in this area.. again I feel it should only be unlocked after saving the kodo so you are forced down a fairly linear path, since you need to do these quests to ding in this area.

This quest is similar to the far-watch->grol'dom farm vehicle quest, so its obviously awesome. Apart from this time we have raiders attacking us from the burning blade (note.. there is no other presence of the burning blade in this area, in terms of a quest, so it seems weird they would attack us here). But ye they attack you and leap at you, when they do this you can use a new ability which basically uses the butt of your weapon and shove them off (awesome animation for that btw), making your shotgun skills even more epic.

A small comment, the vehicle is called "The Hotseat".. awesome :).

I really hoped they had more of these quests like culminating in some boss battle with your kodo type thing, but alas this is the last vehicle quest with it :(. Concluding this area here, moving on to the Crossroads in another post. Overall a reasonable start to the zone with 2 awesome quests, no real over-arching story at the moment though.. just like QUILLBOAR ARE ATTACKING WE NEED SUPPLIES, so a little bit disappointed here :<.

Northern Durotar

Ok, remember no screens in this write-up for the moment. I will upload screens later and stuff, but write now I want to get my feedback down on paper or what have you.

Right, so I left the durotar action having dinged level 10 and been sent back to Razor hill after doing the awesome lil' patrol quest hub. Like I mentioned in the previous feedback module for this quest hub there was one early quest you got in razor hill that was away from the patrol area of quests, so I skipped it, and in retrospect I regret skipping it, as it was just a one-off quest in that area.

Basically you head up to the east side on top of the canyon to this cave controlled by the burning blade. The orcs of Razor hill want to know what they are up to and such, this quest is awesome though, the burning blade cult put this debuff on you, Fel flame I believe or well it's fel something, and basically every time you kill a mob you get an extra stack of this debuff, until you get enough that you transform into METAMORPHOSIS form, which I mean, is so awesome. Especially as cat cos like the animation makes the form take off and land. I mean small debuffs and stuff like this are really awesome, especially because that illidan form is so iconic from warcraft 3, and only available to those lucky demo warlocks. /envy.

Right, so like I said this quest is like a one-off, kinda annoying imo. I feel like you should only get this quest and come back and get the patrol quests OR the quests up north, like choice wise, so its natural for the player to go to the closer patrol quests. A quest could easily be added to the goblin female gail nozzywigg questline in the burning blade cave before sending you to the patrol hub in order to facilitate the questing experience better.

However, the guys at Razor hill are like OMG BURNING BLADE ACTIVITY TO THE NORTH, go and reinforce the Dranosh'ar barricade (bad spelling no doubt) and inform the superiors there of the burning blade activity.

Now on the way you meet a goblin npc with quests to kill harpies and pick up some random objects. This is purely identical to the quests in vanilla, so I am not sure if these quests are meant to be here, I presume they are because well no other quests involve the harpy area, but it would be nice if these quests got a bit of a makeover, they are just a purely generic kill quest and gather quest whilst you are out there. However, they break the quest flow of the burning blade cult, which would be nice to continue rather than be interrupted by dumb steamwheedle goblins :<.

However, you eventually arive at like the Barricade, and a big dialogue ensues between the far-seer (READ PRO THRALL) and the commander (READ PRO GARROSH), which is basically a thrall vs. garrosh type dialogue with insults thrown about the opposing side etc, however I really love this immersion factor, it really gets you into the tensions within the horde right now. Especially coupled with the troll starting area, to really set the scene for the horde sort of SETTING in cataclysm, which is really important in a starting zone imo.

Ok, so we get to this sort of quest which puts you in a wolf vehicle to sort of tell a parable. This quest is really awesome, but its really weird.. in the build that I did this quest you had pure control of the wolf and had no real direction as to where to go. I feel like this is a bug and you shouldn't be controlling it, considering the amount of yellow emotes triggered whilst moving and total lack of directions. However, the overall sense of this quest is awesome and I really enjoy these types of quest.

I also LOVE the ending of this quest where the commander in chief is like IGNORE THE WARNINGS GO KILL SHIT :D, type message and you are sent out to go kill stuff and retrieve this orb from one of the burning blade camps that got destroyed in the cataclysm. Along with making the waters safe by discharging some thunder kodos. I do like the realism factor here, I mean THUNDER LIZARDS GOT FLOODED, of course we need to make the water somewhat safe to swim in, or at the very least collect the lightning discharges.

Killing the elementals is nice because you see the first sign that the elementals are actually fighting each other and not just the denizens of Azeroth, which is a sort of nice introduction to cataclysm again. Like said you go to the now flooded Thunder ridge and tether some thunder lizards so peons can drag them out of the water. We also go grab this orb, the interaction on this quest is awesome, basically its like THE GOBLINS HAND CLUTCHES ONTO THE ORB IN DEATH, and like you just rip his arm off to get the orb anyway, awesome stuff :D.

Also the quest reward text for the orb is like U GAVE ME A HAND (lol pun) so allow me to return the favour, and he gives you some glove rewards, I love those little puns, even if a little cheesy. They give you reason to read some of the quest text, rather than just the story :).

You get a breadcrumb to go to azshara here, when I first levelled a tauren here I did wonder where that breadcrumb was, but suffice to say I won't be going to azshara with this character because the zone is very GOBLIN orientated, so it makes more sense to go there with the goblins.

Instead you get sent out to find another shaman near some more burning blade :), who asks you to go get some collars. He has a companion who tells you to go to the coast, to do some AWESOME quests, where basically you are killing 3 opponents, all with increasing difficulty. It gives the player a great chance to test their soloing capabilities and a sense of progression and accomplishment. The last fight was actually really tough to solo as a feral druid, and I was like YES I DOWNED IT when i killed it, which I mean for a starting level quest is a really good thing to accomplish.

I also dinged level 11 here, obviously the numbers for this zone are a little off as you should be getting around level 10 after this zone, and I ended up around 11 and a half at the end of the zone. So, obviously a few numbers need to be tweaked, but yeh onto the last quests of the zone.. you go to the cave (WITH THE SAME AWESOME METAMORPHOSIS DEBUFF :DDD) and its a generic kill quest. This is basically the last quest of Durotar, the follow-ups send you to Orgrimmar and then breadcrumbs to Northern Barrens.

Nothing really happens, with these breadcrumbs, which is a little bit of a shame. I presume the like BURNING BLADE QUESTLINE, would get resolved in Ragefire Chasm, but since you can't really go till level 15, it's kinda like a bit annoying you have a break in the chain of events.

My overall thoughts on the zone: AN AWESOME AWESOME STARTING ZONE, the opening zone is great for tutorial style levelling and lore, the quest flow is really nice, the quests themselves are well-designed, other than the few quest flaws i stated previously and those weird goblin quests that are really just "there".

Definitly a good zone though, not much I would change besides numbers for quests, the patrol quest order type thing and those goblin quests in the middle of nowhere really.

Onto the Northern Barrens (probably going to write this up tomorrow and do Ashenvale tonight)

Here's all the screenshots for Durotar on My Druid if you want to Browse through quests and stuff.

Druid Mastery Specialisations

Ok, so right now I am figuring that hey.. why don't you just write up your feedback and put the damm screenshots and all this jazz on the blog later, makes perfect sense right?

So what I am going to do, from now on, is basically write up zones as soon as I have finished them and/or topics of feedback and then every week, maybe a friday or something, go and fish around and put together the composition screenshots so the posts look prettier, the feedback overall is more crisp and actually some things make more sense for other viewers (LIKE THERE ARE ANY).

Ok, so tonight is going to be a very busy write up for me, Yesterday I finished the Northern Barrens (although 1 level short of 20, not sure why or if I missed some quests, but regardless). So I have around 6-7 posts incoming tonight with Northern Barrens and Northern Durotar Feedback.

Firstly though, some feedback on the Druid Specialisations you are presented with at level 10.

When dinging you are greeted with the UNLOCK FEATURE: TALENTS, on that little animation thing, quite cool I think, and like on live the talent button on the bar starts flickering when you ding to indicate you should click it.

When clicked you are prompted to choose your specialisation, you are presented with a summary of the specialisation spells and the signature spell in the middle, you can also view the talent trees by clicking the button saying "VIEW TALENT TREES"

Some comments on this generic feature.. GOOD :), overall, perhaps revolve a class quest around choosing your specialisation. (If a class quest has a place in wow I really think one based on choosing your specialisation would be great).

If we move onto the Druid specifics of the specialisations, we obviously have the 3 trees: Balance, Feral and Resto.

As Balance we get the ability Starsurge, a new ability in cataclysm, that does arcane/fire damage (can't remember the precise term used) and is going to be essential for generating eclipse procs by moving the eclipse bar by 10 each way.

We also get dreamstate to increase mana-regen for the spec and I think the last point is the eclipse bar, but it might be spell pushback for wrath,starfire etc. Whatever it is, its baked in stuff thats good for Balance Druids :).

Overall I think these are decent spells, can't argue with the smaller passive spells at all, definitly completely mandatory talents you would have to take anyway, so it's nice to have them baked into the specialisation.

As for the signature move, I'm a little half/half right now. Obviously I haven't played as a Moonkin on the Beta so I've no idea how crucial starsurge is to the rotation, Presumably it will work like you want to use it on cooldown, and inbetween you will want to proc eclipse with wrath and then move to spamming starfire as much as possible without triggering a solar eclipse early etc.

So I mean, there are arguments for and against it, It will be a signature ability of the balance druid, but I mean, when you think balance you think BOOMKIN, so I would really think moonkin form should be the specialised form, considering blizzard wants to appeal that resto is the spec without the dedicated form. I feel like boomkin should be given at level 10, and starsurge a talent in boomkins place.

However opposing this view is the fact that balance become very accustomed to the eclipse bar and starsurge mechanics from level 10 onwards, but I just feel that boomkin would be just so much more iconic as a specialisation ability.

Onto Feral Druids, we get some passive modifiers, (reducing rage/energy costs, 15% more damage and stuff), the vengeance mechanic for all tanks for bears. Pretty much most trees I think these passive stuff are good things, that you WOULD take and are rather boring talents.

The signature ability of Feral druids is mangle, definitely the right choice here in terms of both levelling progression and the fact that it has good crossover between tanking and dpsing. I mean the only other ability they could have used was like.. berserk, and a cooldown is something I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT WANT as a signature move, I mean a cooldown is almost always attrocious for levelling, because using it on mobs that die in like 5 seconds always feels superfluous. Obviously an ability that has a cooldown is fine, if it does damage and is like less than 30 seconds, but beyond that I always feel that a cooldown is like something you feel like you want to save and things die to quickly for the cooldown to be useful.

Lastly we have Resto, again the minor passives are good for the tree. However, I disagree with Swiftmend being the signature ability. I disagree with it because it has no damage output, I mean it accomplishes nothing to help soloing for levelling. Whilst I do agree that this is probably the best thing that druids could get as a signature ability, I feel like that it could be so much more awesome like if say it could also consume a moonfire on the target to do instant damage. I don't know if this sort of change would have pvp balance issues, however in terms of making resto more level friendly, this change to swiftmend would be awesome imo.

So finally onto my choice: I picked Feral (if it wasn't obvious by the screens :)) because well I think its much easier to level as feral compared to say balance, I don't really like casters so much because they always feel so much more vulnerable if you multipull.

I also chose it for the 30% movement speed increase you get as feral constantly, however I might add that actually feral has felt extremely weak when playing through northern barrens, having to swap out of cat form multiple times to heal and basically dying to any sort of chain pulling, where you just take too much damage. I may switch to balance for the next 10 levels or so to see if it feels stronger and isn't too bad mana wise.

I also want to test out the new eclipse bar, which I obviously haven't tried out yet :).

Anyway, moving on to the Northern Durotar write-up