Teldrassil Conclusion

Right, so we end up on our last legs in Teldrassil, we hand in the quest of the moonwells to the quest giver, who has phased to appear right outside darnassus, definitely an awesome and welcome touch. We are told there is one final moonwell to the south and an old friend needs your help to rid Teldrassil of corruption.

Heading south you get to the moonwell, it took me a couple of times entering and leaving the moonwell to trigger the rp of this one, whereas the others had worked seemlessly, so Idk if this one is a little different from the others but regardless. THIS ONE reveals the lore of the stormrage books, which I had to do some extensive research to understand it properly about Malfurion's return and such. Through my research however I have discovered that some of the RP text is wrong. The rp text specifically says "Alexstrasza and Ysondre blessed Teldrassil" when in fact Ysondre was freed from the corruption of the Emerald Nightmare and Ysera was the one who blessed Teldrassil, being the green dragon Aspect. I am pretty sure this is an error in text, but like I said this is based off of wowwiki and not of any in-game lore... unfortunately.

Regardless nearby you hand this quest into Tarindrella, the Dryad from shadowglen. Idk but I really was thinking and hoping that tyrande would be here to help you free this land from corruption, since cataclysm has alot of interaction between major lore figures I think that having Tyrande here would really immerse my character far more.

Regardless you get given this insanely awesome quest, you get 3 abilities in a really unique vehicle action bar, I haven't seen any other quest with a bar exactly like this one really. One removes corruption and heals, one pulls in lots of enemies and the other one kills any enemies :D. You end up moving towards the final goal, the corrupted heart and nature allys pop up from the ground and tank all the mobs for you, whilst you put down the cool solar beam affects and use starfall.

Pretty damn nice animations for this quest and it feels really intense as you make your way towards the heart. I feel like when I reach there, there definitely needs to be some emote saying "USE 1 ABILITY ON THE HEART" because I was pretty unclear what you had to do here since starfall didn't damage it, I just simply took a guess and it worked so yeh ^^. I also feel like after killing the heart the area really should phase out, just for immersion purposes really.

Handing in the quest leaves you with a few hand-in travels to eventually get to Tyrande and the new (OMG FAP FAP FAP) Malfurion model... seriously this is THE ONLY male night-elf model ingame that is just hot and appeasing to the eye, maybe illidan is pretty cool aswell, but that's arguable. I really love the new malfurion model it's so pretty. I feel like tyrande could use a new model aswell, as she is kinda outshone by the raw sex-appeal of malfurion :D.

Regardless I would have liked some epic rp conclusion in this zone between Tyrande and Malfurion, perhaps a recount of their wedding or something would have been lovely. You do get a nice breadcrumb (at an appropriate time) to go to Darkshore and take on the next zone.

I was genuinally really surprised by how good Teldrassil was, I mean it has alot of vanilla quests still here but on the whole the quest flow is about 100x better than it was, the travelling is just so much less and the quests are just that much more fun. The addition of a few cool quests and the lore aspects of the moonwells and that awesome finale quest really just made the zone feel really really good. I feel like this zone is about 10x better than durotar because of the awesome rp and final concluding quest (even including the troll starting area which is better than the 1-5 zone of Teldrassil). Ye.. I was just simply blown away how you can like take vanilla quests and make them into lovely quest flows and make the zone just seem totally polished.

Hopefully (Ye.. I did Darkshore on a worgen character already :P) Darkshore is just as good (IT IS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) as the starting zone here :P. Here are the slideshows of the final quest and the entire zone :).

Lake Al'Ameth & The Oracle Glade

Right, so this is the last major questing hub other than the final quests of the zone here, you are first sent south to Lake Al'Ameth to do the vanilla quests here, I don't really like how when you hand in the breadcrumb to him he becomes non-interact-able for the next 30-40 seconds or so as he does some rp, I feel like a new player might just run off back to dolonaar and not realise he offers follow-ups because of it.

There are plenty of sprouts and although the drop rate of the seedlings isn't 100% the drop-rate lines up nicely with the ratio of sprouts in the area compared to Timberlings. I really do like how they have moved the quest giving plant much closer to the quest-giver here, I felt pretty inclined to head south of the river to get to the area where this quest is, so that was pretty cool synergy between all 3 of these quests.

Handing them in leads to again some interactivity with the soil and like in vanilla means you get boglings spawning that you can kill for some buff food, again nice interactivity even if it's a vanilla quest the flow of these quests have been superb.

After this you are given a simple breadcrumb to head towards the oracle glade, heading past Dolonaar you see a quest appear.. More Moonwell quests! In the same area at least so we head towards the area. I would have perhaps liked a free travel card after accepting this quest, perhaps the guy at Lake Al'ameth could catch you up (since he phases up in the next quest area anyway) and give you a free ride, just because the travel distance is pretty hefty.

After arriving at the area we are given the task to get tumours, I like how there are much less spawns at the front of this river and many more along it, which invites you to synergise with the quests in the area. The droprate is pretty high making gathering the tumours a very easy process. However, this quest is crying out for auto-quest completion, the follow-up is sooooo isolated unless you get the quest after you have collected the tumours, it definitely needs to become an auto-quest somehow to improve the quest flow even more so.

Commenting on the follow-up as before he is tucked away in the corner, not too far from the river and easy to kill. You end up pretty near the oracle glade moonwell and heading there reveals more lore and a couple of quest givers, loving the quest givers near this quest objective type thing. You are given the vanilla quests of killing harpies for belts and the named spider. I really do like how the quest for killing the spider was moved from darnassus to here, it really does make the quest flow that much nicer and less pedantic.

However, I really wish the spider was more towards the west, right next to the northern harpy encampment, I say this because there is another quest-giving plant here and I only went here because I knew the plant was here since vanilla but unless there is some compulsive reason for heading to this northern harpy encampment by the quests most players will unfortunately miss this quest.

The spider npc is fairly easy to take down, perhaps more epicness is required here but Idk. The drop-rates on the belts seems way too low, perhaps increase the amount of belts required to 10 but increase the drop-rate to 75% to make the quest seem much faster than it actually is.

Heading back down towards the encampment we see that Denalan has phased here, very nice touch I might say, so we are able to hand-in all our quests, like said you do get that Oakenskowl follow-up quest here, but really that needs to be an auto quest. Handing in the Shimmering Frond quest from the Harpy encampment means some Fronds sprout in the soil and you get a small quest that grants you some more buff food :D.

This just leaves the moonwell quests left in the area, which I will conclude in my final post on the area :).

Ban'ethil Barrow Dens

SO, we are left with the somewhat dreaded quest in vanilla "The Relics of Wakening" this was one quest I was sure might not make the cut for cataclysm, but it did so :D. We do have some much better interaction and immersion here though, firstly you get informed that you can take a free ride to the quest area, pretty awesome ride and skipping a lot of furbolgs you would have had to fight through. You are dropped off at the entrance and make your way inside

Where you are joined by a sentinel, my god I did not expect this, this is just an epic addition to making this area that much easier, you basically get a companion who basically is a pretty decent tank and holds aggro and generally means you can kill stuff much faster. She is also interact-able and by talking to her you can find out where any of the relics are, she summons some green mist and it goes directly to the relics/the exit and the quest giver inside this cave, it certainly makes the questing experience here soooooooooooooo much better.

The quest giver has also moved to the first chamber here, meaning you can't really miss him like you could before. He gives you the same vanilla quest as before but the drop rate "seems" to be much much better since I got it on my 2nd kill, hopefully it is around 50% though. Handing this in gives you the same vanilla quest before, but again it's much improved. I didn't realise this at the time (because I didn't bother looking at the quest text) but rageclaw is right next to the quest giver in the locked off door section, pretty damn awesome to isolate him so he isn't such a nuisance in that central area as he was before. It also means you can't kill him before being given the quest to, which adds to the immersion of the area.

He comes with an add but is fairly simple to take down, completing the quest means you can hand in. The rest of the barrow-dens is just simple now, you get a lovely directing npc to tell you where all the relics are and the mobs are spread out enough so you don't feel like you are wasting time. This is without doubt one of the most improved areas in cataclysm I have seen in terms of keeping the vanilla quests that already existed for the area. It is just amazing how much nicer this area is. I would have maybe liked the night-elf sentinel to give you a ride back to Dolonaar instead of simply despawning, just to improve travel time, but my god this area is sooo much better.

Handing it in gives us a follow-up to kill the leader of the Furbolgs who is enslaving Druids of the Talon! :(. Firstly though we are given the typical LEARN TO USE A FLIGHTPATH quest, so ye they have their place but I feel like it's maybe a level too early, just because it interrupts the flow of these furbolg quests just a bit. Regardless heading up the road by the entrance to the quest path there is a quest giver here to give you the vanilla quest to kill ambushers, but this time they are on the path towards the furbolg leader, so definitely some good synergy here. I do however question the numbers for this quest, whilst remaining the same as the Vanilla quest, I feel like the numbers could be bumped up to around 15 and have no trouble at all. You end up killing about 15 on your way to the leader of the Furbolgs and 8 just seems too little for the area, like I missed a shortcut or something.

Regardless the leader of the furbolg is a little less impressive than I had hoped, it would have been nice to have the druids of the talon helping you and for him to be somewhat of a hard challenge, perhaps some interactivity with the enslaved druids of the talon to stop him from turning them hostile during the encounter would be pretty awesome. Regardless though after killing him the druids fly away after being freed, nice immersion at the very least.

Heading back to Dolonaar we are given a sample of rare earth to go south towards Lake al'meth, since this area was so short and paired nicely with the next questing area I thought I would just cut off this post rather short and combine the next 2, this zone is pretty fast paced and streamlined though, so definitely pretty awesome.

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 :).