Bashal'aran

Right, onto the next questing hub. This is what starts to make this zone immersive, you get a /say message from the sentinel here when accepting the quest to go to Bashal'aran saying you can catch a free ride on a nightsaber out of town: awesome a mini-taxi service. Always a lovely thing to have in an area this huge if the questing isn't totally linear. However, I do not agree with the positioning of the nightsaber rider, sure it makes sense to have the 2 riders, 1 north and 1 south, in the same area. However since there is no quick way to access the rider from the west side of town without having to pedantically walk all the way round towards it, it seems a little silly.

If you were ignoring the /say and just headed towards the objective you would totally miss it, especially later on in this zone where there is a quest giver right on the bridges of the western border of the town and has quests around this area where using the taxi-service would be convenient. I just think it should be moved to one of the western bridges out of Lor'danel. Regardless though the actual ride is pretty cool, you can dismount from the ride at any time, which I am not sure I agree or disagree with really, maybe it's a bug Idk but it's not like it really affects gameplay in anyway.

When arriving you are greeting by a quest giver: Excellent, always love getting the quests in the field and not all at the direct questing hub, makes the questing a little more immersive at the very least, regardless this area has changed a little since the cataclysm, instead of grell here we have a lot of Highborne who have moved north from the ruins they inhabited in Vanilla. Putting out the flame is pretty easy, and a little challenging since you get 2 adds spawning from doing this, fortunately they are adds you need to kill for another quest anyway: loving the synergy. Could have even had a few waves of these just for increased synergy. The ratio of mobs you need to kill seems to be spot on, however I VERY MUCH disagree with the shadow resistance on these mobs, I don't like the fact as shadow I was forced into smiting because of these high resistance mobs. They simply do not have a place anywhere unless there is some mechanic like in ahn qiraj for the frost stacking buff, like if say a boss is heavily magic resistant but doing lots of physical/magic damage (could be either) enables a big vulnerability in magic damage.

Again, the named npc from south also moved up north and killing her is pretty easy, she is neutral in this area so she is relatively easy to spot and pull separately from the Highborne here, which is overall a nice feature of the questing area. Before heading back to Lor'danel though we still have a quest to rescue Grimclaw, the little polar bear :D, we however arrive to his location to find he is collapsed :OOOOO, with a keeper and a dryad over his body. Thankfully they have quests to help you revive him, which is cool and a nice twist to the zone for people who actually know who grimclaw was and stuff. There is an error in the quest hand-in text where Grimclaw is spelt Gimclaw, nothing major but obviously it's still there.

These quests are pretty awesome in terms of uniqueness, one is a generic item gathering quest, however instead of the normal gathering quest you actually loot mobs in the zone after certain things happen. This is a pretty nice twist to a gathering quest really so being smart can mean avoiding mobs and being dumb is punished via having to kill more mobs. Definitely a nice little quest this, more please. The other 2 quests have lovely synergy together. Collect items in the same area as the naga and kill naga. The killing naga quest is also a lovely twist on the normal kill quest by razing allies to help you kill them. They also tend to pull naga that end up working out perfectly the right number getting to their leader if you start with the closest one, which is pretty neat.

There was a small issue where you can say collect the moonstalker item and have the moonstalker wake up but could walk away before she aggrod you and chased. A minor bug maybe but I presume the intention is that you should definitely have to fight one if she woke up.

This next quest though is absolutely great, I mean it's a pretty unique quest type for wow, you get to choose between 3 completely different npcs which reward you with a certain mob being neutral/friendly to a specific type of mob depending on the spirit you chose. I was silly and accepted the quest for the stag before screenshoting the text for the others, and since there is an abandon quest bug I couldn't go see the others. Oh well, you have 3 choices here which are: Stag, Moonstalker and Bear. They give you respectively a movement speed upgrade, an attack speed upgrade and a damage reduction upgrade for the entirety of the zone. I love this sense of choice here, there isn't really a right option.

I mean, I went for 10% movement speed upgrade 1) because no spec has access to a movement speed upgrade until midway through the zone, and I mean why would you go to your trainer through an immersive story line 2) I thought it would increase my levelling speed the most, and it probably did in retrospect.

I would probably say that in retrospect the bear upgrade is probably the best, simply because the neutrality of bears is reasonably useful compared to the other 2 reputation gains, and some of the mobs are pretty powerful later and having the 10% DR is pretty useful, but the fact is it doesn't matter and gives a player choice.. this is simply amazing really I love the sense that I get to forge a slightly individual path in a linear questing world, these sort of choices are really good and I wish there were more of them.

After this we head back to Lor'danel, pretty nice that a nightsaber is by the quest-giver at bashal'aran where we originally got dropped off for a nice transport back to the main quest hub. I do like the fact that the conditions of the night elves change and some of them have passed away whilst you were out questing, even Volcar the owner of grimclaw passed away :(, but he got to see the polar bear so its cool right :D, it would perhaps have been nice to see a little cutscene when entering the inn seeing his last moments and seeing grimclaw make him happy before passing, but that's me being an emotional soppy guy when it comes to things like this.

Regardless there is 1 quest left here before I wrap up this quest, this quest is really weird in terms of it's fucking hilarious but completely random and totally unnecessary :DDDD. Firstly it involves swimming out to sea, a longgggggggg way, just for 1 quest. It's just like.. this quest is totally here at random no synergy with anything and totally unecessary in terms of plot development in the zone. However, the epicness of this quest maybe justifies it. You get control of a robot dubbed "Foolhardy adventurer" and basically your job is to run into hordes of murlocs and blow yourself up... oh how I love thee random quest of killing murlocs for no reason what-so-ever :D. Seriously though, this quest is hilarious the text is amusing and the fact there are hundreds of murlocs here is just damn funny. The objective of 50 is actually way too small imo, should definitely be 100 or have some achievement linked to it which is like: KILL X MURLOCS IN 1 DETONATION, just because it's that awesome and totally random that it deserves some external factor to do it. I say it's small just because it is done in 2 trips so the quest is quicker than the actual swimming there (not even including swimming back) which is a little disappointing :(.

Regardless though, you get a little breadcrumb quest to head off towards the Ruins of Mathystra, again using the taxi-service which is in a much more sensible position than the Bashal'aran one, regardless though pretty awesome.

Questing starting to heat up here, onwards in questing!

Lor'danel

OK :), finally got through the zone so lets crack on with the write-up, firstly as always lets set down a few thoughts initially about the zone.

1) This zone seems pretty near completion, the questing was extremely polished other than a few bugs and a couple of annoying quests.

2) This zone is massive in terms of questing, it might end up being the same length/size as desolace but in terms of worth-while screenshots it was way bigger, I might add however that the zone went pretty damn quick, it didn't really feel that long.

3) I absolutely loved this zone!!!

4) These write-ups will be pretty long, I split this zone into 7 zones where I could have split it into at least 10, so yeh.

Right, lets get onto feedback, firstly we start with the breadcrumb from Tyrande (2nd laziest faction leader behind the blood elf leader? :<, seriously it would be nice if she could get out of darnassus at least once), to head to Lor'danel the first major questing hub of the zone, completely new area and really it looks lovely, the textures are all amazing and very night-elf, loving it.

We land here via air and are immedietely charged with going out to rescue survivors at the landing spot, lovely immersion and really ties a breadcrumb into the zone, it's always nice to be able to like get a breadcrumb and be flunged straight into a "crisis" instead of say being given a generic breadcrumb which just leads to more boring quests in the area. So the quests we are given are to kill some water elementals and rescue night elf survivors from auberdine.

I have a bit of an issue with the elite Vile Terror here, I don't really disagree with it being here but the sentinels do barely any threat to it, so perhaps the audacious adventurer wants to help the night elf sentinels fend off the elemental attack but instead they take aggro and die/have to run away. They do net the elemental but urgh I just feel they should do massive threat so it isn't an issue. The actual quests though are very easy, all the guys you have to rescue have MASSIVE arrows pointing down at where they are, pretty cool. Would have liked if say the arrows disappeared after you rescued each person just for a little bit more immersion. Also the last guy is way away from the others and the arrow isn't in vision range of any of the other 3 which are all clumped in the same area, a little strange imo. I don't mind him being further away it just seems pointless to have the arrows if you can't see where the last guy is without looking at your mini-map.

Heading back you get quests to go around and kill some crabs for the buzzbox quests from vanilla, although I don't believe the quests here are anywhere like the same for them :D. Also you need to collect like a few clams. These quests are fairly straightforward and easy to complete. The drop-rate on the meat wasn't great from the crabs, but you had to kill basically the right amount to complete the clams quest so it wasn't really an issue, I just don't like random drop quests really :(.

You hand in the meat at the buzzbox and given a quest to collect a sample and head back to base, it's a small quest of course but it gives the next quest a sense of purpose and better quest flow by placing it here.

Continuing on with the buzzbox quests we are told to collect some bear guts to research the corruption behind the bears, this is a pretty standard kill quest. I had to compete with 2 other people for kills here and didn't run into any trouble completing the quest quickly, so a pretty nice standard kill quest. The follow-up takes us into Cliffspring falls where the corruption is coming from, theres also a quest giver on our way to the falls who tells us that the satyr from Teldrassil (the one you turned into a frog) is here spreading corruption, I don't really like the fact that a great time has seemingly elapsed between the 2 zones so maybe the quests in Teldrassil aren't meant to still be there.. Idk but it doesn't make much sense imo.

Killing any of the demons in the cave drops a starting quest item to free uncorrupted animals from cages, always a nice thing to do. There is also an apothecary table in this cave which gives a quest to basically head back to Lor'danel. All the quests in this area are very easy to complete, I feel like killing 8 vile grell is perhaps a little too small, perhaps 10 would be a better number for perfect synergy, considering you have to clear to the apothecary table aswell. The respawn time on Zenn Foulhoof felt a little longer than it should be, since I was competing for the kill from 2 other people in the area, regardless though these quests were pretty nice and lovely flow to them.

Heading back to Lor'danel you get a bunch of quests in Bashal'aran, the opening quests fill their purpose somewhat and overall flow very well, they are great in terms of a sense of time, basically these quests are designed to show time has passed from you saving the survivors to them recovering whilst you are out at cliffspring falls. I might also add I do like how the quest giver at cliffspring falls phases out when you have left the cave after killing zenn foulhoof, a really nice touch imo.

Anyway, onwards to the next area :)

So cool stuff

Like said, the mob in Darkshore was bugged, but as fortune would have it, I logged on and she was unbugged (only to be rebugged a few hours later according to general), and I finished the zone mere moments before the server was going down for maintenence, some nice ee-han timing there tbh.

Dunno whether I will write up the zone tonight or tomorrow, probably half and half, darkshore is a pretty big zone questing wise but definitely oh so worth it, one of the best zones I have done, probably better than Stonetalon horde to be honest, just because the story flows AND there is alot of bulk that is engaging at the same time. (Plus you get a non-combat pet!!!!!)

Anyway, feedback for that zone will go up within 24 hours of this post at the very least, new build aswell tonight (presumably) so will have to see if it's worth devoting a post to that, oh well least I can get back down to writing feedback :D.

Wth though my screenshots for this zone double the count of any other zone.. over 700 :(.