Starbreeze Village

Moving on towards the next questing area, which I have dubbed Starbreeze Village to simply avoid the Dolonaar #1,#2 which would have preceded it otherwise. Regardless on our way to Dolonaar we run into the Vanilla quest Satyr, who asks you to kill local wildlife. I really don't agree with the quest timing here, the only way it would make sense is if the drop-rates were 100% so you could do it just around him, perhaps you wouldn't be able to get this quest at any other time since you might not follow the road, but regardless I feel like this should be changed to a 100% drop rate if you want to keep it in its current location.

Moving into Dolonaar we are presented with a few quests and handing in the water filling quest means we get to see some more lore :D, definitely a big fan of these little scenes. Going to add that I could learn Chakra whilst I was here, but it constantly unlearnt whenever I handed in a quest or dinged or took a quest, clearly a bug that I can learn it here since it is a Holy talent, but regardless. The other quests in the area involve you heading towards starbreeze village.

We get to appreciate some more lore at the moonwell here, did I mention how frigging awesome this quest line is? :D. We also have to fight our way up to the top of a building to interact with a dying quest giver, I don't know how I feel about there being a lack of "KILL xyz furbolgs quest" upon taking this quest, I feel like you could definitely add like KILL 6 FURBOLGS from this guy to stem the corruption before reporting back to dolonaar, regardless grabbing the Dreamcatcher is relatively pain-free.

However, I definitely feel this NEEDS! to be an autoquest here, because of the hefty travel time between Dolonaar and Starbreeze village the follow-up is just so isolated, however if you could grab the follow-up whilst you are actually here originally then it would Definitely be much better and improve the quest flow dramatically.

I'm just going to comment on the follow-up of this quest before the hand-ins just for the sake of what I feel like the optimum quest-flow should be. Definitely improved from its previous incarnation where you had to pull the named furbolg with 2-3 adds, it was a seriously hard quest in vanilla, since the area is alot more sparse with Furbolgs though, it is much easier to pull the named npc without too much issues. I also like how they removed the requirement to open the necklace and just give you the jewel from the npc. (The quest objectives map is not updated here, and still says you need to get a necklace to drop) However, because of the spreading out of the furbolgs here, there are simply not enough mystics to complete this quest without waiting for respawns, which is pretty irritating. I would just suggest lowering the Mystics requirement down to 4, or turning all the warriors in the area into Mystics and the numbers would again be fine.

Heading back to Dolonaar you get to hand in all the quests, you get a rather abrupt end to the moonwell quest line here, it does continue later on but with no indication of further quests I was a little sad when handing this in and thinking there wasn't going to be a conclusion to the lore. Perhaps a simple /say message to say, return to me later after you have gained more experience.. or something to that effect to inform the player this quest line will continue in the future.

I don't necessarily like this timing to go to the barrow-dens here, perhaps he should tell you to sort out the grell'kin corruption first by speaking to the council before sending you out here, just because I feel like that it's a pretty major story hub and moving you onto it with quests left in the area seems somewhat wrong.

Like I said before, if the Satyr quest was a 100% drop rate you could have done the collecting fel cone quest whilst at starbreeze village, which would again improve quest flow immensely. Regardless though there are plenty of cones around the area, they seem to be more than before but it was overall hard to tell. Handing this in at the Satyr with the amusing frog turning outcome leads us to 2 more quests to finally rid the Grell'kin corruption in the area. Got to say: this new quest is simply awesome, you throw a somewhat bomb like quest item on the ground and it grabs the grell'kin in roots and insta-kills them. VERY NICE quest.

Before heading to do this quest though she informs you via whisper to head upstairs and grab the quest from the guy at the top, again nice little information here. Who inturn asks you to kill the Satyr responsible for the corruption here. I have to say though that this quest is so lovely and pain-free with the quest item. You basically just throw it at every satyr and you're golden. I don't like how it disappears upon completion from the objectives screen, but I've mentioned this stuff before so I won't digress too much. The named npc is a little tough maybe, and I like how he switches into cat-form :D.

Handing in these 2 quests leave you with no more quests, so it's off to the barrow dens we go!

Teldrassil Shadowglen

Right, so onto the nightelf levelling! Since this is my first post with my night elf character, lets go over a few things that might inject bias into my arguments or at least experience. Along with my class and such.

Firstly, this character is going to be a night elf priest, I have levelled a priest before and I will try and keep the priest discussion to a bare minimum in these posts, I consider it one of the worst classes to level as early on (at the very least 1-10) because it seems to have extreme mana problems, even with the buff to everybodys regen sub level 10, as a priest I find you run oom after fighting about 7 mobs in a row, which is just not on par with other classes. I'm stating this here because otherwise I will be stating it throughout these posts ^^.

Secondly, my lore knowledge is not exactly the most amazing, I haven't read any of the warcraft books (why should I?) so some lore in the game doesn't make sense to me sometimes (Yes, please write more lore in-game and FAR FAR FAR less in books). If so, I tend to look up on wowwiki for more definitive answers in lore, maybe I'll get some snipbits wrong but most of the time I am right.

Finally, I have about 20x the experience of levelling alliance characters over horde characters, I have probably done every azeroth vanilla quest across 4 alliance characters, this should mean I can spot vanilla quests far easier in these analyses but hey, I am bound to miss a few.

A few things I have to say about Teldrassil as a whole before moving onto specific detail: This zone felt incredibly polished, there were some quests that I felt like "urgh" about, but mostly this zone feels really lovely, I was surprised at how well Blizzard has taken this zone and kept alot of the backbone quests that originally filled the zone and cleaned up their quest flow considerably. I feel some auto-quest love for this zone would just make this zone perfect, that is about it.

After all the waffle, I guess, lets crack on with the actual zone. After the opening cinematic, which I presume the narration will change since it doesn't mention recent in-game events (although that arguablly could be a good thing) and instead refers to Nordrassil and such. That's fine really but yeh.. it would be nice for the details of the book "Stormrage" to be portrayed in-game and not for people to read up about.. (I had to do some serious lore browsing to actually figure out what had happened and make sense of some of the stuff said in the zone, hopefully some of this is revealed in the pre-cataclysm events).

Regardless, you enter the world and the same quest that has always stood here is still here, Kill boars and Nightsabers, however there are also 2 more quests in Aldrassil, not sure how I feel about these quests being available, since they actually take you in the opposite direction of the quests objectives, but they are pretty functional I guess, maybe I would have preferred the opening quest guy to just guide you towards aldrassil and then give the quest about killing boars/nightsabers.

The other 2 quests here and talk to the dryad and collect some stolen goods, speaking to the dryad you get a follow up: to kill the Grel'kin.

Great synergy between these 3 quests though, the stolen goods are in the camps with the neutral Grel'kin and the boars/nightsabers are all scattered around. I feel like the ratios of Boars: Nightsabers should be switched since there are far more boar around the Grel'kin camps than nightsabers. Maybe it's a minor point but still it would smooth out the quest flow even more.

Handing this in we are given a BAG!?!?!?!? as a reward, opening quests rewarding a bag o.O, don't know if this is intended or not because you end up with 2 6-slots from quests in the zone and an 8-slot bag. So presumably one of these 6-slots is not intended if the zone follow-suits from every other starting zone I have done. I feel like most of the Shadowglen area quests haven't been itemised though since most of the models for quest rewards are from Vanilla.

You gain a follow-up to kill more boars and nightsabers, and that is it from these quests, feels a little isolated as a quest. As a note, you get to level 3 from just the original quests, BEFORE, gaining your class quest. I.E you can learn flash heal before being given the quest to learn it. I don't know if learning it would bug that quest out, but definitely the quest xp needs to be lowered so that the follow-up to get that quest is in time with the level 3 dinging or that the quest from the trainer just opens up at level 3.

Killing the nighsabers and boars is simple, there are plenty of mobs here if a little isolated. Handing the quest in we get a follow-up to visit our class trainer and get the typical: Learn your level 3 spell and practice it. I don't know if it is intended that the priest can just heal the same wounded sentinel 5 times and get credit each time or not, but that's what I did so :).

We also get a couple more quests to go kill spiders and collect reagents for an antidote, both vanilla quests but I really love how they have improved the antidote questline by making it firstly available here rather than at the spider cave.

Doing the antidote quest on the way towards the spider cave was relatively painless, the amount of mushrooms in the area seems to have greatly increased, and the lilys are in an obvious area and again plenty of them about. The quest map is a little bugged when showing the location of webwood ichor, since it only drops off of the spiders, but it seemed to be a 100% drop rate, which was very nice. What is even better is the quest hand in is right outside the cave instead of up that STUPID valley to the left of the entrance, loving the move of the npc here.

He even gives you a follow-up to collect the webwood eggs, to minimise the travelling to this cave. I am not sure if I agree with the hostile spiders here, since in a previous patch you made all the mobs in the starting area neutral, it isn't like you can ever get overwhelmed here, because they are really nicely spread out, but it does also seem a bit overkill if the rest of the starting areas have neutral mobs. Killing the spiders in this cave is trivial since you need to kill around 15 to get to the objective further inside the cave, so pretty good synergy here.

The named spider is still here guarding the eggs, so you have to engage him and since you are forced to engage him, it isn't surprising that looting him drops a starting quest item. I would really like to see auto-quest used more here though, to be like LOOT THE CREATURE whenever you kill something that drops a starting quest item like this, to just make sure the player grabs the quest item. Looting this gives you a quest to deliver the venom sac to Aldrassil, along with looting the eggs you are outta here and heading back to Aldrassil.

I really do love how smooth this quest flow is here, how the vanilla quests have been polished to make the quests really flow and minimise the travelling time here. Upon arriving back at Aldrassil you get 1 follow-up to fill the moonwell, but to my delight! They have changed this quest into a "reveal lore about the night elfs whenever you do it" this is just so cool.. I also agree with listening to the lore as optional here, it's very nice though and really makes me want to do these silly water-filling quests, rather than before where it was just GO FILL THIS VIAL!!

This quest is isolated, but these type of lore-revealing isolated quests are always perfectly fine, since they were worth the trip :D. I also want to say how awesome it is that you only have to climb this tree once! instead of the 3-4 times you had to do it in Vanilla, all the class trainers are in the lower area where most of the quests are, so it really makes for a much smoother and enjoyable experience. After handing in you are given the breadcrumb to Dolanaar, and you are given a slow-fall buff!!! God Blizzard I love you.. :) it would perhaps be nicer if the exit at the top of the tree headed south so you could just jump off.. but I mean, I'll take it! loving the slow-fall instead of me jumping off onto the buildings like I would before.

Upon heading out of the area you also get a quest to deliver supplies to the inn in Dolonaar, typical quest in a starting area, but hey they definitely have their place so I'm not going to complain. Overall though this was a lovely smooth zone. It wasn't perhaps the epicness of the Troll starting zone, but that's an entirely new zone, so it isn't that surprising really. Definitely a huge improvement on the Current Night elf starting area, so mightily impressed.

Next zone incoming :).

Beta Build 12759

Ok, so I delayed this post quite alot, mainly because I don't have the time nor the motivation to data-mine changes made v.i.a patches, and was waiting for either mmo-champion or world of raids to knock off some data-mined content.

Firstly, I'm going to talk about a few things Paladin specific, since I mean that is the class I play and well it's most dear to me, but then I'll go ahead and comment on some other changes that I believe are more major.

Lets take the first change: Holy power UI change, I'm sort of 50/50 on this one, whilst I feel the design is very much befitting a paladin class, I look at it and go BAM I AM PLAYING A PALADIN, which I feel like is well a major plus, since like pretty much every class in cataclysm is seemingly getting some unique UI attention, so I mean I'm going to look at the default screen of a warlock and without looking at spells know that it's a warlock compared to say a mage or w/e.

However, I feel like the design is somewhat clunky, what I mean by this is that it doesn't really serve it's function well, since at the moment I cannot really see a situation where you will be wanting to do anything but 3 Holy power moves in the game, like theres no benefit to really using a 2 holy power ability and the UI is just like, I have to really look at it to tell how much power it is, I have to discern which parts of the bar are lit up instead of seeing an overall number.

I feel like the UI would be greatly improved by adding a number to the bar, maybe it has one on text with the UI and I failed to notice it, but a simple 0,1,2,3 in the centre of the bar would do wonders to making this ui really acceptable. I do think though that half my hostility towards the ui is the fact that I never liked the positioning of the player bar, mainly because it causes players to miss things.

The original ui sort of makes you want to make a pretty large triangle between top-left,top-right and bottom since you need to know about all these 3 things for stuff like timings/buffs and resources/your current hp. However this means that your eyes are constantly darting between the 3 points on the screen and by-pass the middle. I just always feel that one of these has to go in terms of ui and since it would just be easier to like re-design the ui so that the player frame was on the bottom with the abilities and the buff/debuffs at the top of the screen that could really work. I mean, I don't expect this to happen but I mean if players only had 2 places to look between on the default UI I can only imagine player skill increasing because of more time being able to look at your character.

I also don't like the idea of having buffs for holy power and the UI element, probably this build was caught in-between internal builds and the buff will be redundant, I just feel that the buff is pointless with the UI element in place.

If we move on to actual changes to the paladin, there are a few major ones I want to bring up. Firstly for the Holy tree we are moving towards a choice system for Holy Power: GREAT! Definitely getting some choice back into the holy paladin rotation, I still feel that there is not enough choice, considering the amount of up-keep a paladin has in their healing setup at the moment, along with buffs making you do precise things, but it's in a much better shape.

The change to blessed life was always going to be a good change, although I do feel a similar view to some people on the forums about it sharing a little too similar role with Tower of Radiance. I mean, it's not the fact that I wouldn't benefit from having both but because the first 4 tiers of Holy are chock-a-block full of talents I would pretty much regard as mandatory (other than enlightened judgements) it means you can only really take one "utility" talent, which is either Blessed life/Enlightened judgements/Tower of Radiance/Improved Conc Aura (PLEASE GET RID OF THIS!!!!!)/Denounce.

Since Tower of Radiance/Blessed life are going to improve my healing in like most fights they are the choices I would be taking, and my main problem with these talents are the fact that Blessed Life is probably going to be better when you are healing the raid, whereas Tower of Radiance is going to be Superior whilst Tank healing.. it means I know I would end up having to dual spec 2 holy specs, which I don't feel is ever a good goal of a tree, if I was dual speccing to have different Utilities in a raid, I feel that is fine but if I am dual speccing because I am switching between a Main Tank Healer and a Raid Healer, I feel that means a failure in achieving said goals.

I'm also going to comment on the fact that this is the ONLY place where the paladin really has a choice, you pretty much need the extra range of judgements to keep up jotp and you need the extra run speed/word of glory talent/rule of law in Retribution for throughput concerns (I consider run speed mandatory and would rather have every single run-speed talent/enchant scrapped to make it even for all classes, it's like spellback resistance: Every class wants it, but sometimes can't afford to get it, it also provides balancing issues imo because stuff like defile on Lich King is so much harder for certain classes because they don't get a 15% run speed increase compared to others).

The other major changes are the change to Improved Crusader Strike (Sanctity of Battle) I feel like this talent is kinda.. superfluous. At 4.5 Seconds it is not going to be really any more useful haste reduced until you can get it to 3 seconds, this sort of gets to a point where haste will perhaps be a very junk stat until high levels where it becomes godly, but its rather on a tiered level which I don't really like.

I feel like if you want to make haste useful it has to be a way of generating holy power more often, and not through crusader strike usage, since that is going to be global cooldown locked alot of the time, Perhaps have haste give a chance for every other ability to generate holy power.. so like have crusader strike on 4.5 seconds but then give a talent that is like "Allows Haste to give a chance of generating holy power on any ability" perhaps bake it into Divine Purpose to allow for haste scaling of the class maybe something like 30% base and then increased via haste. Idk I'm just throwing ideas out here.

Oh, the last point I wanted to make: Turn Divine Favour into Power Infusion vs. 2. I feel like, although power infusion is not actually that powerful, having 1 healer spec with it is going to affect 10 man raiding balance and perhaps make a disc priest mandatory if you go with a caster setup. Maybe it's a minor thing but I just feel that Power Infusion is just far too powerful, it would also make Divine Favour more of an option than a Mandatory choice. Definitly a step in the right direction though.

For other classes, giving bear a shield wall seems perfectly fine since barkskin wasn't really cutting it as a major cooldown, making tanks a little more homogenized is maybe bad but hey.. I would rather have cooldowns be very similar across the classes some sort of last stand, some sort of major shield wall and some sort of barkskin, they don't have to be identical but the idea of 3 dependable cooldowns that accomplish the same thing always seems like is going to be a win-win scenario.

The "utility" of fire, don't agree with it really, mainly because the only dot's they have are living bomb and ignite, It also seems like it isn't really utility but mandatory, or forcing an "aoe fight spec" and a "single-target fight spec" which I don't think should be intended. It's also very rng utility, 10% on anything which means it takes about the duration of living bomb to proc meaning on average you get 1 proc every 15 seconds. I can't really imagine how useful it is going to be to have an rng spell that on average will only just proc within the time-span of a living bomb application. This definitly could work, but I feel like it needs to be more re-active than pro-active, since fire has alot of proactive abilities at its disposal anyway.

Definitly liking the change to Chakra to make it an active ability, It's great because it definitly isn't one of those abilities you want to use on cooldown but the short cooldown means you are inclined to be pro-active in its use, definitly liking this change rather than a 3-way eclipse bar.

Last few things are like: giving concentration aura to shamans is good, but I feel it needs to go on the fire totem. I know that doesn't make much sense but the shaman is going to end up choosing between free healing (Healing Stream) and less-pushback. Compared to the Paladin who is going to be choosing between damage reduction (armor/resistance) and pushback resistance. Whilst the above points are true they are also covered by other classes (PARTICULARLY A SHAMAN :/) so when you have a shaman and a paladin in your group you are going to be giving up some healing from the shaman to provide concentration aura, which I feel is somewhat wrong and since the fire totem is really not that special for an elemental shaman it would be nice to add concentration aura here.

Last point is the changes to stances, I feel as if we are at the point where Berserker/Battle Stance are really filling the same void.. I mean defensive stance is obvious LESS DAMAGE TAKEN AND MORE THREAT. Berserker stance should provide some flavour to do with rage or enrage mechanics, make it stand out as really BERSERKING. Battle Stance should all be about finess and stuff so perhaps keep it the same as it is. I just feel like berserker stance just is there.. and I can't really say why it is a "berserking stance" because most "berserking" abilities are useable in other forms (for balance purposes) and the stance itself is just MORE DAMAGE. Feel it could do with some love to make it feel fury, even giving them different animations. Wouldn't it be cool to see like say red mist above a player in berserker stance, just to show they are angry. Even if it was just like quivers where only the player could see it I just feel like that would be soooo awesome.

Anyway that was my last word on balance changes, although there were some others these were the only ones that really stood out for me.

Oh and about the purple ashes of a'lar, I still want a pink one for free :(.

Camp Mojache #2

Last area here in Feralas, my thoughts on this zone to follow at the end of this post of course.

Following on we are given the STRAIGHT VANILLA conversions to go kill the silithid in the south, whilst I don't really mind the quest, it just saddens me that this zone is full of straight vanilla conversions, compared to some of the work that has been done in other zones. Regarding the quests though, they are fairly simple and easy, Stinglasher seems to patrol where he is shown on the map, which is rather cool and there are plenty of silithid here, I would perhaps like the number reduced to 15, since that was the amount I killed before having to specifically hunt for them rather than stinglasher, but regardless I think 15 or 20 are fine numbers to kill for this quest.

I'm going to note here that you could get the HILLTOP SUMMIT ogre quest at level 37, but the dryad quest at 38, I would like to see the Dryad quest be opened up at the same time as that ogre quest, for optimum synergy. You are also given the Thousand Needles breadcrumb at level 38, as stated before I don't like this :) and would rather see it at the end of the zone.

Regardless though, killing the Dryads and the Hilltop Ogres are fairly simple, the dryads overall are very buggy though, they continually move around at random whilst fighting you, and their animation for spear throws are very buggy aswell with half of their projectiles missing models/textures and half of them having it.

You are then given 3 quests, to kill ogres and a Sasquatch! and to answer Ysondre's call. I obviously did the ogres first (perhaps a mistake :<) They are fairly easy to kill, they have alot of numbers. The sasquatch had alot of hp and was a little challenging, so that was nice for a named npc you had to kill. Other than that they felt a little... isolated and not much to do with the story.

Then of course you were left with the final Ysondre questline, unfortunately.. the quest was completely bugged for me.. Ysondre was just standing on top of the summit in night-elf form and wasn't interact-able to me. I did run through this quest on another character like.. in an early alpha build and THIS QUEST IS EPIC, with the rp here. However I want to point out how.. completely random this quest is.. sure you did all that stuff at the start of the zone to close the portal to the dream, but this quest is just so random...

This post is obviously short but I wanted to relay how disappointed I was with this zone, overall it has a solid foundation, but it is INUNDATED with vanilla conversions that really just don't have a story to them and are sort of "levelling quests", like with deepholm that I discussed in a previous post I feel like this zone is too much a LEVEL AS FAST AS POSSIBLE zone rather than an IMMERSE YOURSELF IN AWESOME STORY zone. I feel like the story building blocks are there, you have that epic quest with cho'gall in dire maul and a back-drop to help cleanse feralas of the Emerald Dream Nightmare Corruption. However, you never really go in-depth here.

It would be nice for Camp Mojache area to have some a) Interaction and hatrid for the grimtotem for attacking thousand needles, b) Have some Interaction between Ysondre and her quest to attone for her actions, and lastly c) a few generic quests mixed in.

Right now it seems like although camp mojache changed in terms of HEY THERE ARE FREEWIND POST REFUGES HERE, it is still caught in a time-loop where it's biggest threats are from Vanilla and nothing relevent to the cataclysm specifically, which was overall rather disappointing.

I couldn't really tell if the zone was complete or not though.. which is what worries me since this was a zone I really enjoy on live (mainly because the quests are pretty optimised for levelling) and unfortunately no story has really evolved from this zone. I was around half a level short of xp, from the entire zone, but because the last quest of the zone bugged out I am not sure if that was just because I missed that quest..

Hopefully thousand needles will be ready to test in a few builds time so this char won't be idle too long, here's the screenshots of this last part of the zone and the zone itself, I will update this post if I can get the quest to work :<.

Camp Mojache #1

Right, so I could probably just make a singular post on Camp Mojache, and I probably could and make it short, but the online album doesn't really like more than 100 photos per album, IE TOO MUCH EFFORT, so I thought I would just split them, I think the fact I could have done this zone in 3 posts compared to say Desolace's 7 shows you how "bare" this zone really is..

Regardless onto questing, you aren't given a free transport to Camp Mojache unfortunately, although I suppose this isn't needed :). I'm just going to take this time to talk about Class trainers, I will be brief. In Camp Mojache there is in-fact a Druid Class-trainer, because of the awesome quest flow of the zones I have been really not wanting to go and learn any new class-spells. I feel like the class trainer is very much an archaic design, whilst it is nice lore-wise to have one, it is very disruptive to go, EVERY 2 LEVELS according to your system of pop-ups, to go and learn new spells, I really feel like this is "urgh" and you should be able to learn new spells on the fly, perhaps through a special communicator a class trainer gives you or something.

Of course, if you want to reset your talent points or buy a dual specialisation then definitly class trainers need to exist for that, but I find it incredibly disruptive that I should be learning all these new spells but not be given any ample opportunity to go and learn spells without severely disrupting my quest immersion. *rant over*

You are in-undated with a bunch of quests as you enter the area: Killing Gnolls, Collecting an Amulet, Collecting Treant Muisek & Collecting Darter Wings.

Again, like with the previous area, I feel like the Muisek are in the wrong order, it would have MUCH MUCH better synergy if I was collect Faerie Dragon Muisek here, so I could be looting the Darter Wings and collecting the Muisek. The Quest for getting the Dragon Wings is fairly trivial, the wings work out at around a 100% drop rate, with them sometimes dropping 2 and sometimes 0.

Since there is an area of Gnolls up-towards the north where the other quests are I feel like I should be able to complete the quest here.. unfortunately the drop rate of the manes doesn't really help, I feel like they should increase this to 100% and change the quest map to only show this northern area, perhaps I'm alone here but I would rather have the quest map show the OPTIMUM place for me to do a quest rather than EVERY possible location.

A few simple generic quests here, they are necessary I suppose.. now I really have trouble understanding the next follow-up for the grim-totems.. not because there is anything wrong with the quest, but because of the "situation" in 1000 needles, apparently It is under-attack by the Grimtotems, and the fact that their encampment here is like.. right on Camp Mojache's doorstep is sort of ignored and like oh.. just kill some of them, seems a bit disappointing to me, all these quests so far here have all been vanilla conversions and it would have been nice to introduce something to this zone.

The actual quests are fine though, plenty of mobs and yeh.. that's all I have to say. The gnoll follow-ups are again, direct vanilla conversions: find battle-plans and kill alphas. The quest map is very much wrong though with the location of the alphas, I found them later but they are like a small dot on the quest map, whereas that is their only location, so this should be fixed of course.

There are also Mountain-giant's around this area for the Muisek, again I feel like they could add a Groddoc Muisek before the Mountain-Giant one to make the questing circles a bit tighter, overall I feel like the Muisek quests should go HIPPOGRYPH->BEAST->HYENA->FAERIE DRAGON->TREANT->GRODDOC->MOUNTAIN GIANT. Obviously this means adding some more but regardless. I would also like to point out that the treant quest is bugged, and the hand-in is actually to the girl in stonemaul hold, instead of the witchdoctor in Camp Mojache, where the follow-up and actual quest are given from, obviously a bug.

However we actually get onto some non-vanilla fun quests IN THE HILLS of feralas :(. You enter the area to find some highbourne spirits, I was wondering when we would get some highbourne interactivity: guess since most of them joined the night-elves in cataclysm that this will mostly be reserved for alliance :(.

These series of quests are really quite interesting, you appoach an altar and OMFG a night elf female appears and is apparently trapped here as a spirit, clearly you need to free her. A couple of very nice generic quests here, plenty of spirits to kill and soil to gather for both of them. We then have to go and kill the demon that is trapping her here :O.

Now, the actual tree for this quest is VERY unclear, firstly the quest text is wrong since the tree is TO THE NORTH of the ruins, it is marked on the map. I thought it might be the quest with the camp by it, but it is in fact just a generic dead tree in the area, I would suggest highlighting it upon mouse-over or in some way making this discernible from the other trees in the area.

However, upon using the quest item summons the demon, which you then kill pretty easily, but after killing him you get to see some lore of this little area.. and you figure out....... YOU WERE FOOLED, some of the text here is out of order with Verinias saying his opening line right when he despawns, but regardless: LOVELY TWIST of this quest.

Upon handing in the quest the spirit turns into a Succubus and disappears, saying she will re-appear and "repay you" someday, quite frankly I'd rather she repay me now... but regardless I have to play the hero role :<. Looting the altar now yields access to the amulet and you can go hand-in.. which by the way is just amusing because apparently the amulet is a fake and the quest-giver was tricked to send you out there in the first place.. awesome!

Anyway, last post after this :).

Stonemaul Hold

Right, so at this point, or actually before this, the beta went down for a new build: this actually fixed my bugged mangle icon \o/, it didn't really mess with my questing experience I don't think. However, they did add new maps to the zones, which include locations of horde/alliance flightpaths on the map. I do like this change and I can see why the Ashenvale map was bugged before, because of the merger between the old and this newer map.

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 :).

Camp Ataya

New day, new zone. Like said previously the new beta patch sort of caught me halfway through my runthrough of Feralas, delaying my write-up of this zone by a day.

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.