Desolace Final Quests

This is a short area, simply concluding the zone, but I feel like it needs it's own post since it's in a very much distinct questing area, regardless your uniting of the centaur is important and is resulting in a final clash between the Demons and the Centaur, the great thing about this quest are you are apart of the Centaur army.

You are given a regiment of Centaur to command, when I first tried this they got stuck in the barricades surrounding the Khan, obviously a bug that needs to be fixed.. not exactly sure how. The Centaur is also slightly bugged, using the 2 ability doesn't work, they won't attack the target unless you are in range, kinda like they are on defensive and are pets.. but ye the number 2 ability doesn't work.

However, this quest is really immersive, the healing and controlling of units is fun.. just great, nothing wrong with this quest other than those bugs, which didn't prevent me from enjoying this quest :D.

I feel like I should be able to hand-in this quest on my centaur, since I need it for the follow-up instead of dismounting and then mounting the vehicle again. I also feel like this area needs to be phased with the centaur say taking over this first area so that you don't have to like clear your way through demons you had essentially just killed in the last quest.

However, this quest is awesome aswell,you get to fight the PIT LORD, when engaging the Pit Lord, the 3 Centaur Khan's charge up behind you and proceed to engage him, it's a pretty iconic Pitlord, it has all the warcraft 3 spells, although I would have loved to have seen some summon Infernal action, whilst you seem to be quite a spectator in the battle, you still feel apart of it so it's pretty epic! :D.

Handing in the quest ends the zone..

Before concluding this post with the slideshows just going to comment on my thoughts on the zone: LONG is the major word I would use here, the zone could definitly use some streamlining, not really in terms of cutting out quests though imo, they are all pretty good and necessary (other than a few vanilla quests and well that awful kodo quest). However, I do like the philosophy of this zone, which seems to be alot of mini story epic quest hubs, which I am certainly a big fan of here, with a little bit of polish this zone will be pretty damn awesome so yeh.

Apart from it's length and some lack-of polish though, the zone overall had a great flavour, there were alot of "awesome" quests and a few "epic" quests aswell, the zone utilises the auto-quest feature well and it only failed for me once, which was nice for a change :D.

Obviously the Feralas Breadcrumb isn't in place, and I don't know exactly how the Centaur Khan can give this breadcrumb, I feel like they should direct you back to the cenarion circle who say you need to help them in feralas and aid them there (and get a free travel there). Since the beginning of the zone is quests from the Cenarion Circle, or at least a Tauren Druid. I don't know though so.. :).

Here's a Slideshow of these final quests and of the entire zone (biggest zone yet in terms of screenshots).

Shadowprey Village

Ok, so onto Shadowprey Village, the next logical place to go here :D, Whilst heading here again there is a signpost which is like NEW EXPLORERS LEAGUE HUB! or words to that effect, which obviously needs to be fixed at some point :D.

When coming here there are no quests until handing in the breadcrumb, then 3!!!?!?!!??!! quests appear, but the 3rd quest is like miles away from the other 2, so unless you know it's there you wouldn't pick it up here, whether that's a good or bad thing I haven't decided yet. However the 2 quests I picked up first, which are next to each other, involve looting shellfish traps (a vanilla quest), and killing a named orca in the area eating up all the fish :D.

The Vanilla quest has been improved immeasurably with the drop rate on looting the traps increased to 200%!, meaning you get the quest done in 3 loots, which is just SO NICE for a quest that doesn't provide breathing or a swim speed buff. Now it took me a while to find the named orca, It either patrols WAYYYYY too far, or somebody just killed it before I arrived, not sure which is the truth but ye.. it was annoying searching for this guy with the map only showing one position for him, and he wasn't there :<.

I'm also going to comment on the reward from the shellfish collecting quest, In vanilla this reward was like a quest objective of another quest, I can't remember exactly which, but I'm quite sure that quest DOES NOT exist anymore, so updating to a reasonable quest reward seems appropriate.

Now the third quest I was talking about asks you to kill the Lobstrok in the area, I'm sure they aren't called that elsewhere and are called Makrura, maybe it's slang or something Idk... Anyway, the reason why I am torn between this being shown or not to the player is because although there are Lobstrok underwater and this provides synergy between the 2 quests, if you restricted yourself to the water it would take SOOOOO MUCH LONGER to kill all the lobstrok, since on the land there are just a greater abundance of them, so although they have synergy together, I am pretty torn between whether or not they should be together.

Regardless, completing this unlocks the FERALAS BREADCRUMB, obviously not yet implemented here so ye! :), loving the !!!!!!1 action in this quest. There is also a breadcrumb to Northern STV, I've stated countless times but I DO NOT LIKE BREADCRUMBS TO OTHER ZONES NOT IN THE QUEST FLOW IN ZONES MILES AWAY FROM THEM. I also think the feralas breadcrumb should be at the end of the zone, and not here, since the entrance to feralas is soo near D:.

Anyway, moving on involves us going to our remaining active quest! rescue the daughter of the Gelkis Khan, so heading up towards the zone where we are asked to kill 10 Maraudine Maulers, looting any of these gives you a quest-starting item showing where the Khan's daughter is.

Heading inside Maraudon, I don't really like how "The Nameless Prophet" Elite is here still, he is kinda tough to take down and annoyingly aggro's alot of nearby mobs. The Daughter is inside a cage and is pretty obvious to see, the quest right next to her is highly confusing though, both in name and description. I mean the quest is like "WHILE YOU ARE HERE" and there is no indication in the description where these artifacts are, since you are inside maraudon the zone map is disabled so you can't see where the artifacts are.

They are outside, but I mean it needs to be in the quest description or the Zone map needs to be enabled here so you can see that the artifacts aren't inside. I would like to add though that it would be nice to have a couple of quests here taking you to all 3 entrances of Maraudon so they unlock in the dungeon-finder for people wanting to go there, and perhaps give some background to the 3 dungeons.

Anyway, heading back outside to kill off the rest of the maulers and collect artifacts there are plenty of both so the quests are pretty simple.. There is also an escort quest, but I HIGHLY BELIEVE this is a left-over vanilla quest, because a) nothing directs you quest-wise to where the escort is, b) The escortee walks sooooooooooooooo slowly and c) the follow-up when handing in (also a left-over quest) is marked as a red quest in my quest-book.

Both the quests from the Khan, and the quest inside Maraudon are completed via auto-quest, speeding up quest-flow, which is a nice touch.

I don't really think feedback on that quest is really necessary, but yeh... remove it or make it better and give some direction to the player towards her :).

Anyway, handing in all of these quests lead you to the final area of the zone.. I'm going to add how like, the quest is really unclear I mean the map objective is perfectly clear, but it makes no sense how you meet him at the final quests zone rather than say at the Wildlands and then head towards that area, but yeh.. I feel like this needs to be cleaned up a little.

Ghostwalker Post

Right so of course now we logically head to Ghostwalker Post, and pick up the 3 or so quests here, we get the, awesomely sounding, typical quest from the Forsaken here... I NEED SOMETHING FOR MY PLAGUEEEEEE. Oh, it cracks my up how almost all forsaken quest givers are the same ^^. Theres also a quest to cull the demons in the south, and to head on over to a goblin quest giver: who in turn wants you to "Kombobulate" the kodo's.

This quest is a vanilla quest, although reduced in numbers from 5 to 3, the quest is pretty awesome though, showing off the awesome goblin ingenuity of somehow being able to turn these old/aging/dying Kodo's and turn them into fresh young Kodo's, I particularly find the amusing references when handing them in, which I like since it's unique even though a vanilla quest, about how you want to use the kombobulator on yourself. Theres some typos in the hand-ins that are to do with the vanilla to Cataclysm conversion. The quest still refers to you gathering 5 kodo's when obviously you have only gathered 3. I also don't like how slow the Kodo's are, they can't keep up with a 60% speed mount, which they really should be able to do since they are a Tauren mount of choice..

HOWEVER, we then move on to THE QUEST FROM HELLL!!!?!?!?!?!?!!?!? The quest from the Forsaken, what is bad about this quest, well it requires a SPECIFIC TYPE OF KODO, there are 3 types in the graveyard, and they are all randomly spawned from locations, we have Ancient, Aged and Dying Kodos. The quest item only drops off the dying Kodo's, and since there are only around like..10-15 Kodo's in the area, this means ON AVERAGE there will be a maximum of 5 dying Kodo's in the area, however since there is absolutely no reason to kill the other 2, the Dying Kodo's slowly dwindle in the area meaning a number of around 2-3 is far more accurate.

THEN, if that wasn't bad enough, the quest item is like a 25% drop rate or something... just ridiculous, I mean this quest needs to be changed to either all the Kodo's dropping the item, or a 100% drop rate on the dying Kodo's. I spent around.. 20 minutes or so farming 3.... horns. Was just URGH. I also did not appreciate the irony of the quest giver hand-in text "BACK SO SOON", although I doubt it was meant to be irony, it was rather distasteful after wasting so much time :<.

Anyway... after this somewhat attrocious quest, you get a pretty cool follow-up to hand in this plague to the Cenarion Circle so they can use it :O, lovely twist to the Cenarion Circle imo. It's a typical bombing run type quest, the plague bombs 1 shot everything, so it's pretty nice and easy. Pressing the FLY BACK BUTTON, is a little.. urgh though. The animations are really not fluid, it was alot of stop-starting whilst seemingly trying to get in lanes to the right path to go back, obviously the pathing needs to be fixed, but the quest itself is fine.

Then the next quest to logically go to was the demon quests, The infernals you have to kill drop periodically from the sky, pretty nice effect. I was kinda disappointed I could never gain enough stacks of the Burning Blade debuff here to transform, because the infernals don't give you a stack but all the other demons do. Would like the Infernals to grant this debuff just because the debuff is awesome :D.

Killing any infernal and looting it gives a quest starting item, and this quest is REALLY NICE, you have to take control of the elite, the quest text is also just really nice, making you out to be some sort of power-hungry warlock :D. After taking control of the elite you use it to defeat the elite warlock here, the fight is pretty close and you feel like skill plays a good part here, even if it doesn't necessarily. I would perhaps like this to be in the vehicle ui and not just replacing your unit bars.

After completing this quest it just auto-completes, which is really nice: it's like your character has self-will, which as commented on in previous posts, is just a great thing to advocate with the auto-quest feature.

The quest has great synergy with the other 2 quests aswell since there are a bunch of infernals and portals in the area, closing the portals requires you killing the demons after clicking on the portals. I don't how like doing this shifts you out of form as a druid, I also feel like the portal number should be reduced to around 4 to match the amount in the area around the elite quest, for just perfect synergy and making the quest go quicker.

Btw, just because level 34 means that mob hp is around 1300-1500 by evolution of health, doesn't mean that every single mob has to have 1337 hp :<.

Whilst I'm down south I thought it best to continue with the other areas, so over to the Gelkis Encampment to complete that quest, there are ALOT of centaur here, a bit too tightly packed for my taste, making multi-pulls quite easy and accidentally so, especially because they ALL run-away T_T. The 3 sons are in pretty obvious places and fairly easy to kill,

Cenarion Wildlands

Had hoped to be writing this post much later, but hey Beta maintenence interrupted my feralas run-through, hopefully it won't fuck up my feedback that much.. I don't think it should since all my quests were complete and only had breadcrumb quests really. Regardless, that means the Desolace feedback will be all done tonight, perhaps also the first hub of Feralas aswell, since I can't go back and do that, depending on if there is a new build tonight, I might put a post up discussing that, so busy busy :D.

Anyway, lets get onto the Cenarion Wildlands, the major new area of Desolace. The druids of the Cenarion Circle have come to Desolace and seemingly REBORN the land, it's a lovely temperate climate in the middle of this desolate zone :). Obviously I am coming from the breadcrumb via the naga quests at Ethel Rethor. Firstly you are given many menial tasks around the zone, culling air elementals, weeds... I mean Lashers, collect some Aloe Thistles and take samples of blood of the Thunder Lizards.

These quests are all nicely in the same area (other than one :/), to the west of the wildlands, the air elementals and lashers have plenty of abundance and are easy to take down making those quests pretty straightforward and generic kill quests. The Sampling of Blood quest I am sort of torn on, since I'm usually a "DO FIRST ASK QUESTIONS LATER" type of person, I continually ended up killing the Thunder Lizards before using the Quest Item on them to spawn the leeches, this was particularly annoying because it has a minimum range, so you can't use it if the Lizards are in melee range. However, I do like the twist on a generic kill quest, to loot leeches and use quest items and such, so although it was a little frustrating I don't really mind. The thunder lizards also had a very annoying habit of using Thunder nova when they were about to die, and apparently since they were casting means they can't die until the cast finishes, don't know if this is a bug or the idea was that they do this nova before dying that you can't stop ^^.

However, this last quest to collect the Aloe Thistle is just ridiculous, you need 10 and there are like 2... spawns in the area where all the other quest objectives are, even spread around the wildlands there are like only 5 thistles really, most of these are in the graveyard, and you shouldn't really be going there tbh. I really think the thistles need to spawn FAR MORE to the west of the Wildlands, along with all the other objectives. It's not like you can save it and do it whilst questing in the area, it is actually a pre-requisite to the next couple of quests.

Which, involve planting seeds in fertile ground, and calming down enraged kodo's, although I was kinda semi-torn on the whole "TENDERING THE ZOO" type quests we have here, they do fit well with the theme, it's just they lead to alot of boring generic quests for a while, which is unfortunate imo, however the zone has been lacking these really ^^.

Both quests are quite easily completed in the area south-east of the wildlands, there is a small bug with the bowl for the "De-raging" Kodo's quest, if you accidentally go too close to ghostwalker post, which is where some of the kodos are, you aren't able to place the quest item to de-rage them. Since they are elites, I almost died because of this bug... I wouldn't think it would be that hard to fix, so I'm putting it down as a bug since it was a little annoying. I did really like how both of these quests were really fast paced, you just had to use your quest items like 10 times total and not even wait and the quests were done. Whilst sometimes immersion means watching and taking longer, I did appreciate the fast paced flavour of these quests.

Now, onto the actual "major" quest of the zone, at least imo since it encompasses the next 3 or so questing hubs. In Vanilla there are the 3 centaur clans: The Kolkar,Magram and the Gelkis. Now, in vanilla you were told to ally with 1 of 2 clans, with the third being always hostile iirc. However, the Cataclysm has caused a massive power shift in the zone. The Magram clan were driven out of their home by an invasion of the burning blade, they took over the Kolkar clan and the Gelkis now are the power-house of the centaur factions.

Now, the Kolkar Clan Khan, the leader of centaur clans, has come to the Cenarion Circle, and more specifically you, to help unite the factions against the common enemy of the burning blade.. I'm going to point out here that this storyline is just really good, FORMER ENEMIES UNITING, that's like warcraft in a nutshell and it's nice to see some parallels here in this zone with the player perhaps taking on the function of Medivh from warcraft 3. Kinda cool imo. Anyway, you are first sent out to free Kolkar from being imprisoned by the Magram. You are also to recover stolen Cenarion Circle supplies.

You can also pick up the breadcrumb to ghostwalker post, (You could have gotten the quests from this area already) I would definitly suggest making all these quests only available once you're finished in the first centaur area, just to make the quest cycles cleaner.

Both quests don't have a real lot of synergy, but at least they are paired and aren't alone per-say. Heading on over to the encampment there is a signpost with the direction to cenarion wildlands directed as "AWESOME NEW CENARION CIRCLE QUEST HUB!?!?!?!" or words to that effect, obviously not anything major, but something that will probably be changed, even if it's amusing ^^.

The Magram warden is a little tough, he comes with 2 adds (I believe they are all linked, when i pulled the warden the other 2 came at the very least). However, overall he goes down pretty easy so I'm fine with the 2 extra adds, all chars should have that 3rd tier talent here, which should make these adds manageable.

The Cenarion Supplies are basically in all the huts, they are perfectly fine to get to, it could just do with some synergy with the warden quest, perhaps having supplies in with the prisoners would provide that synergy and make the quests go somewhat quicker.

Heading back to the Wildlands we are given the task to rally the survivors of the Kolkar centaur and attack the Magram in a show of strength! You get to ride into battle on top of a centaur, pretty cool animations here. You are given a vehicle interface and told exactly when to use the 1 key to trigger the attack, a pretty neat way of twisting the sort of normal KING OF THE HILL type quests. Upon triggering it lots of Kolkar centaur spawn and lots of weak defenders try and swarm the hill, overall a lovely quest, I would have perhaps wanted more defenders attacking just to make it a little more of a THIS IS SPARTA!!?!!!?!?!!??!!?!? feel, since well who doesn't love that sort of heroic struggle

Eventually the Magram Khan shows up and he gives you a quest to win the favour of the Magram Clan, GET THEM SOME FOOD! Now, I would really like the Magram centaurs to go unfriendly here, since you kinda signed a ceasefire when accepting this quest, it seems strange you can still slaughter Magram centaur whilst getting food for them so they can survive.. Just feels odd and makes the quest hand-in a little more lengthy than it should be.

The Basilisk Flank's are pretty much 100% drop rate, and there are just plenty of them so the quest is fairly trivial. Handing it in gains the loyalty of the Magram clan, and now they turn neutral. The quest map is slightly bugged here showing the wrong position of the Khan when trying to hand-in the quest, it updates when you get near the wrong position, but obviously this is somewhat buggy.

After handing this in we are told to head towards the Gelkis Clan and slaughter the khan's sons... seems a little harsh for centaur looking to rebuild the land and unite... You also gain a Shadowprey Village Breadcrumb, which is fine aswell.

However, Before continuing with this quest line it makes more sense to do the Ghostwalker quests, so that's what I'm going to do :)

Thunder-Axe Fortress

Ok, so this is the second optional questing area, it's a bit shorter than the Ethel Rethor area, but This area is so big that splitting off these little hubs makes sense to keep the post length down, aswell as consolidating feedback for specific hubs.

So we get 1 quest here, which is to go kill a named npc in front of Thunder-axe, he's pretty easy to pull alone and well easy enough to kill, however the great thing is the interactivity with this quest hub, firstly you get an auto-quest upon killing him BASED on his yell, that's pretty damn awesome immersion, your char is like HUH HE MENTIONED SOMETHING BETTER CHECK IT OUT, instead of being a dumb ass who can only do what quest givers tell them, which is just sweet immersion factor.

You also get an additional quest for just looting any of the burning blade in the area when you kill them, to basically just COLLECT EARS, not exactly sure why they want ears particularly, usually its heads.. but oh well collecting ears it is! 25 is sort of a daunting number, perhaps reducing this to 20 would be about right, since I had to kill 20 to kill the quests in the area, but had to go searching for the last 5.

Since this is a burning blade area, you also get the AWESOME AWESOME debuff like in durotar when you kill any mob and around 3-5 stacks you transform into the demonology warlock metamorphosis form, I really love how this is an astigma attached to like Burning Blade zones in cataclysm, It's just so cool :D, especially the animations for feral charge in Metamorphosis OMFG! Druids need metamorphosis form ok, replacement for boomkin or something!

Onto the actual quests, going into the room you kill a whole bunch of mobs, the middle mob is sort of weird, he will aggro you but not engage in combat, I suppose it makes sense otherwise he would aggro the entire room, but I would just suggest lowering his aggro range dramatically instead of having him keep you in combat throughout the room. The box which the summoning ritual is a little small for my liking but hey, it's obvious and easy to loot.

Now.. I got an auto-quest failure, or at the very least I presume it is an auto-quest failure as going back and forth made no sense, you get the auto-quest hand-in but no follow-up was triggered, obviously I went back and got it, but the idea is you head straight to the main chamber and trigger this summon early, with the auto-quest inplace this is some awesome immersion, a race against time so to speak to summon this demon TO AWAKEN HIM TOO SOON etc :D. There are plenty of skulls around the place, I feel like they should on average drop 20 instead of 10-15, since that way there would definitly be more than enough patches, instead of just like ONLY ENOUGH PATCHES, which is a big difference.

You face off against this demon after performing the ritual, it's a little weaker than I thought it would be, although I did have metamorphosis form thing, so that made it easier :D, after this it's a simple hand-in for the quest completion.

It's a bit of a mini-quest hub but I mean it's fast paced and great action/story. For a short quest it utilises the auto-quest feature magnificently (OO A NEW ADJECTIVE!!?!?!?!) to really grip the player and immerse them in the action.

I included the travelling to Cenarion Wildlands in the screenshots.. the effects on that Tornado are just awesome! You get flung about whenever you walk into it and take falling damage, good fun stuff.. I love it :D.

Anyway onto Cenarion Wildlands and sort of the start of the MAJOR questline, if you could call it that, in the zone.

Ethel Rethor

Yeh, weird title for a zone ^^, I would call this something different, but I feel that's a little spoilerish, and probably less descriptive. Obviously these whole posts are spoilerish but ye.. I feel like they give good feedback hopefully.

Anyway, this is 1 of the 2 options from Furien's Post, I decided to go here first because it seemed FURTHER OUT OF THE WAY, so was more likely to be it's own quest hub, even though both turn out to be, so it doesn't matter which way you go.

Regardless, the Cenarion Circle are here and they are mildly concerned with the naga invasion, the researcher here sends you off on a tour of the zone, where you get to see the lay of the land, and a priestess of Azshara, and the fact that Water elementals have risen to fight the naga here, clearly something is going on here and is more than meets the eye O:.

You get a follow-up to sort of SLAUGHTER NAGA, now this quest is actually ridiculous imo. The drop rates on the FINS especially from the Warrior's is exceptionally poor, it is around 25-50% and there are just nowhere near enough of them. Whilst I understand this quest needs the reagents for actual quest flow reasons, the drop-rates are exceptionally poor, just bump them up to 100% at least, maybe reduce the Bones to around 6 or something aswell and I think the numbers are right.

There were also alot of Sorceress' that evaded on the coastline, obviously inherently annoying because they would end up keeping you in combat and aggroing nearby naga to you, I ended up dying because i got 3 naga on me D:::, very annoying considering the closeness of the patrols on both the land and the water patrols so you get naga sort of appearing from nowhere (ie the water) and killing you, very annoying. This was an unfortunate distraction to an otherwise simple quest.

However, after this irritating quest you get a far more awesome quest! You get disguised as a naga and share their awesome animations, pretty damn awesome if you ask me, you slither on land pretty slowly, although normal walking speed, and get a 150% speed increase in the water, pretty nice buff for the quest involved, you have to go talk to the priestess of Azshara, Valishj. Now she is sort of STUCK IN THE RUINS on the beta, which is amusing however I presume totally unintended :P.

She is obviously like WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE USELESS NAGA and sends you off with a trident! To go kill the servants of neptulon, they are neutral elementals, there are plenty in the area and are pretty tough to take down, you don't really need much skill to take them down, however the heal you are provided is pretty pathetic, if you don't kite much when he charges after your first netting wears off you lose around 500 hp or so, and the heal is just pathetic, it really needs to take you to full health because tbh you are only able to use it out of combat, so it seems kinda silly that like it only does a small percentile of your hp.

However killing them is pretty trivial, there are a couple of annoying crab creatures, I can't remember their exact name in warcraft, makk... something idk. However, they remove your disguise, which can be somewhat irritating, this is an intended mechanic but I think its silly that there are alot of them around the naga island where you have to hand in rather than say out in the open sea where you can avoid them easier.

The follow-up is somewhat irritating, although I am not sure if it was because I was looking in the wrong area, you are told to unearth rubble to find some relics, the rubble itself is really kinda hard to see against the sea floor, along with their being relatively few spawns of it. The map objective screen wasn't working so I don't know if I was in the most optimum zone for it, but regardless I feel like the amount of rubble needs to be increased. I am also sort of TORN between when you unveil the rubble and it reveals like 3-4 artefacts or w/e. Only one of them sparkles, the one that actually contains the quest item, as a quester I'm sort of like YES THIS SPEEDS UP QUESTING, but I also feel like it defeats the point of spawning multiple artefacts if you see the one which is EXACTLY containing a quest item.

After collecting all 4 artefacts and arranging them into Ancient Engravings of Neptulon you get an auto-quest to head back to the Cenarion Circle, obviously liking this since obviously you wouldn't want to give it to the Naga. What I am annoyed about is that after this quest you lose your naga disguise, when handing in to the circle, when you could still very much utilise being able to run past the naga without aggroing them, and the actual swim-speed increase granted by the Naga disguise.

Regardless, you are sent to go and contact the leader of the water elementals here: Lord Hydronis. I like how approaching the island phases you so you into that zone, but it's far from seemless since you have vision of naga on that island and around the border of the zone and when entering the zone they all disappear, if you were being chased by naga (like me) then they disappear when you zone into the island area aswell, so some work on the phase transitioning here would be nice.

Speaking to Lord Hydronis he is like WE GOTTA KILL THE PRIESTESS, so we get to mount him and control him, pretty easy vehicle quest your ice block cd lines up with you going oom quite well, so it's pretty hard to die. The Typhoon style interrupt is really hard to control, I couldn't tell if it was hitting or missing the priestess, I guess if it was hitting it wasn't working since she never got stunned/interrupted like the text implies. However ye.. if that worked the quest is perfect. The mobs have [Q1] by them, but I guess that's a testing mechanic that hasn't been patched out of yet.

Again, going back to like the Cenarion Circle, again wtb swim speed buff from naga here :<, you get a breadcrumb to the Cenarion Wildlands.

This quest sort of gives you some background to the Vash'jir zone and what the Naga are intending to do in the cataclysm, which is nice lore to include to the zone, since this is the only zone in Kalimdor that could really accomplish this other than like Azshara, and that has more important goblin and Blue Dragonflight lore to cover, so this is the only place for it, which is just a nice simple addition tbh.

Anyway, if you didn't do the Thunder-axe fortress you can head to that now or go straight to Cenarion Wildlands, I like how these sort of zones are very much based on choice, you aren't forced into either one immediately, but are forced into doing the more lore intensive quest if you want to gain the breadcrumb and maintain quest flow, but it is certainly not required for the Cenarion Wildlands quests.

Desolace Furien

Right, now again like most zones I write-up going to set a few provisos before continuing about the zone.

1) This zone is frigging long, seriously you can construe this as a good or bad thing I suppose, the quests within it are pretty good, but in essence you feel like you should be level 40 rather than 35 when you leave the zone.

2) The aesthetics of this zone are really lovely, very polished and the overall feeling on this zone is well done

3) There are a few carbon copy vanilla quests still lingering, I presume 2 of them are certainly unintended, the others may or may not be.

4) The Quest Objectives have not been fully implemented on the map for a large majority of quests, I probably won't mention them in these write-ups because there just are alot, but there are screenshots provided of all the times I noticed/needed the quest objectives on the map and they were not there.

With that out of the way, lets crack on to our first quests, when last I left it on my Troll druid write-ups, we were being given a choice by Garrosh Hellscream to go to either Southern Barrens or Desolace, In terms of a questing flow this means a choice between Desolace->Feralas and Southern Barrens->Dustwallow Marsh. As of this build Dustwallow marsh is pretty much identical to its state on live, not that that is a bad thing, since the quest flow is pretty nice, but It's not really worthy of a write-up yet because of that.

So I chose Desolace, obvious by the title I guess D:, and with the breadcrumb you are told to go to find Furien. Now, to get to Desolace one runs through the Charred Vale, which is not so charred on the east side and more volcano on the west side, I expect quests here in the future, or at the very least on the alliance side. However lets crack on with the Desolace Experience.

We arrive to Furien to find him well... dying and then dead :<. Nice little dramatic twist to a placeholder, we then get a nice travel to the first little quest hub, you are sent out immedietely to find out what Furien was up to with his Research, which, in turn, after a nice travel on his mount, which is pretty sweet btw :D, directs you towards Sargeron.

I like this type of quest, it's pretty similar to the patrol type quests, you visit 3 places on the map here, the 3 ruins which aren't on the quest map yet, and you get quests at 2 of them, and at the final one you get an auto quest to complete at the third one.

The quests at the other areas are all to do with killing Satyr in the area, which is great: They don't detract from the story, in fact they actually contribute to the immersion of the History of these ruins to do with elune and such. Whilst the quests are allowed to be completed whilst you carry on with the main quest line. Getting both completed is fairly trivial and doesn't require you to do any specific killing, because you are on the over-arching quest to visit all 3 places originally, the player is very much inclined to go to all 3 places and get all 3 quests before continuing.

The auto-quest follow-up involves collecting melons for a ritual, much like the other 2 quests, the melons are pretty easy to spot and there seem to be plenty of them, they seem to appear mostly under trees in the area, which is a nice aesthetic touch imo. After this you gain a buff, which allows you to see Night elf spirits in the area. They are hostile but don't aggro you, so I would consider making them neutral.. you have to kill them later, but I never agreed with Hostile non-aggroable mobs.

The next quest involves you following more research follow-ups and finding the Ruin's of Elune's Palace, pretty nice to see this included in the lore of the place. However, it's more of a simple hand-in. Now, because I had done this zone previously and was a total noob :<, I proceeded to the next quest in the chain forgetting I had to do the first part. I'll discuss that before moving onto the hand-ins for the other quests you got in the area.

This quest involves you killing night-elf spirits with a vortex pet out, it sort of SUCKS THE SPIRIT OUT OF THEM when you kill them, the animation is pretty awesome anyway, and then proceeds to grow bigger. There is a slight delay between the change of size and change of name of the vortex, which is a little bit annoying, but I don't know if that's changeable in anyway.

This again is another auto-quest hand-in, which I am glad is working here since I would not have liked to have walked all the way back to the original quest hub, which is on the other side of the zone :). Now, the other 2 hand-ins are again rituals, the weapons ritual I have absolutely no problems with, the animation for doing it is actually pretty awesome, you toss a load of swords in :D.

However, my problem is with the Satyr Flesh ritual. 1) The buff you get from this quest is really poor, 15% more base health is like maybe 60 hp or something in that region. Pretty disappointing and 2) It only lasts an hour, for a zone that you are going to be spending roughly 4-5 hours in, thats not really long enough. I would really like to see the buff increased somewhat, maybe 15% increase in health would be nice :D, and for it to be a zone-wide buff like the ones in darkshore for alliance characters. It would be an awesome addition. The final point, 3) is the fact that this quest is repeatable and DOES NOT have a blue question mark above it, people may believe it is a quest to do again without realising it doesn't give xp, I never ever ever liked quests that were repeatable and sort of disguised as actual quests, like the one in Zangarmarsh with the naga killing, they are highly confusing and ye.. just urgh.

Regardless though, we move onto one of the most AWESOME quests I have done with a vehicle, firstly though the actual place where you summon this vortex is WHOLLY UNCLEAR, with the current quest map objectives location. This implies you need to go into nijel's point, full of 35-40 alliance guards, and use the quest item here. Whereas in fact you need to use it at the arch in front of Nijel's point. I would HIGHLY SUGGEST making this area sparkly at the very least, it's pretty tough to see and I wasted like 5-10 minutes when I was originally doing the quest thinking it was bugged because I was trying to follow the map objectives screen.

The actual quest though, boy is it awesome.. you summon your RAGING VORTEX you created in the previous quest and just hop into it :D, you get somewhat control over it, it goes in a set cycle and well SUCKS UP EVERY ALLIANCE NPC IN YOUR PATH, and flings them to kingdom come. You also have an ability, if the sucking up wasn't enough, to 1 shot any alliance character in the zone. Now obviously this zone is phased so you can't kill pvp-flagged alliance, but still it's frigging awesome.

I would have liked to have seen more Merchants, by doing like 2-3 circuits I was done with Defender's and instead was just hunting merchants, they seem to appear mostly off of the route your vortex takes, so using your ability on them was what you seemed to have to do, maybe I was just being slack on using that, but there seems to be way more defenders to merchants than the quest ratio implies, either increase the amount of merchants or like bump up the amount of defender's to kill to around 60-70, I don't think anybody would mind in the slightest.

The second most awesome thing about this quest, is the fact that when you use the 4 button to return home persay you get catapulted across the zone inside the vortex, it's so awesome. It means you don't have to travel back to the quest givers and well it just really fits in with the like awesomeness of the quest.

This is the actual end of this questline, and it really epitomises the theme of Desolace, which is like 4-5 awesome quest-chains with no overarching story, which is just as effective as the Stonetalon way of doing things. There are plenty more quest chains to write-up but there was really not much wrong with these initial quests, fun stuff.

I might add also the armor set in Desolace is just AWESOME, in comparison to the ones before it, although I haven't got it now the shoulder piece for this set is like a 1-shoulder thing, you will see it in subsequent screenshots, I think it's pretty awesome and the color-scheme works really well with the aesthetics of the zone.

Also, I would like to see a repair vendor at this mini-questhub here at Furien's Post, otherwise you are going for like 2 hours or so in this zone without a repair vendor, which is a bit long if you forgot to repair (LIKE I DID :<) in Stonetalon. You are given 2 choices here, to go to Ethel Rethor or Thunder-axe Fortress, like all things I'd always prefer to go towards the coast than in-land, so I went Ethel-Rethor first. It doesn't matter what order you do them in though, so feel free to look at either :).