The Master's Glaive

Right, so as the title portrays this questing write-up basically focuses on the Master's Glaive and the heart of the story here, but firstly we get the explorer's league quests. Firstly I might add all these quests are available and visible whilst doing the stealthing about the master's glaive encampment quest, I feel like they should unlock after handing in this breadcrumb otherwise people will be like ooo shinies! and just take the quests and break up some of the questflow.

However, these quests are superb the breadcrumb quest is a simple hand-in and hand back but obviously you can get other quests here, one is an escort quest one is a kill quest and one is a gather the item quest. All the quests have great synergy really and you end up killing the murlocs at the same time you have done both the artifact collecting and the escort quest.

I really want to comment on the escort quest though, it is amazing I was laughing so hard when it ended the fact that all you do is end up walking all the way round the ruins ending up at the encampment anyway.. superb really that quest is so awesome I mean, god I just love these surprising quests every once and a while, the fact I only realised it right before the end of the quest was really good aswell :D.

You get a couple of cool quests though as follow-up, use some metal detector thing to grab some ancient device hidden in the area, nice quest really a good twist on the common gather quest and the go out to sea and collect some wreckage, pretty bland but the fact that the objective is to build a home for the murlocs is really cool and surprising at the same time. Handing in these quests give a little cut-scene with the device fully activated which is pretty intriguing and also quite scary and forboding since this site is a titan area (master's glaive lore), do we need another algalon :(.

We also get this awesome quest to build a murloc encampment where loads of murlocs rush to along with the kewt baby murlocs, the quest text at the end is also just so good.. What has he done!?!?! Regardless after that little fun excursion, which always, always have a place in a serious story line just for hilarity without breaking the story because the serious story hadn't begun yet, we head back to the Grove for the follow-ups.

Firstly we are told we need to awaken the ancients to battle this old-god awakening, but upon getting to the keeper who holds the horn to awaken them we find it has been stolen by naga and the keeper is dead.. Really I love the revelation here that we find him dead and aren't told he would be on the map or what have you. Regardless we get a follow-up to head back to the grove and figure out what to do, which essentially means go kill the naga and try and get the horn back.

These quests are also really immersive, the naga here are in plentiful supply and the ratio is about right for the cave maybe you could add some myrmidons to the objective, but it's not exactly a major issue. Regardless though the named npc uses the Najentus model, which is pretty cool and you hand in and pick up a new quest at his body, which is pretty cool for immersion a nice substitute for the auto-quest feature, which could have also worked in this scenario. Regardless it seems you are forced to try and stop the horn from being offered to azshara so you can retrieve it.

This quest is pretty awesome though you kill the priestesses, which do have some pathing issues, if you try and kill the back right one from range she will run into all the other priestesses aggroing them because of the pathing here, a little irritating so perhaps increasing her spell range would be nice or something to detract from the pathing issues. Regardless though you kill the priestesses and bam.. Queen Azshara appears, now I presume this model is placeholder.. if it Isn't it needs to be, Queen azshara just needs a different model than other leading naga lieutenants, she is like the most important naga out there and deserves a unique model. The lore is pretty awesome and you get to see malfurion come and save your ass from oblivion, which is always cool.

You get the follow-up though to quickly head to the master's glaive and use the horn to kill the old god avatar here. He has a really lovely model, I would like to think the ancients would spawn quicker to aggro him, I used the horn at max range from him and still had to run to stop from being meleed, I don't know how hard he hit but I didn't want to risk dying since he has like 4k hp. The fight is pretty epic, more and more ancients spawn to help kill him and you really don't necessarily feel like the hero here you just instigated the process of summoning ancients. A pretty epic conclusion to this brilliant zone tbh.

I just want to say a few words about darkshore as a zone, it really is superb it puts alot of zones like Northern barrens to shame in how good and immersive the zone is. It starts off slowly (I think totalbiscuit for example really goes ott on this point in his videos of the start of the area, for a new player you won't be doing the worgen starting area and going from teldrassil to darkshore is a really smooth transition) However the conclusion is lore-infested and overall the zone is amazing.

I think the best way to some up this zone is "how to make a zone immersive without auto-quest", whilst auto-questing could be used instead of the methods employed here, it wouldn't be that more immersive really it would just be slightly more streamlined, I don't know if auto-questing is going to be implemented in this zone at all, but honestly the zone doesn't need it so if the resources aren't available to devote to implementing it in the zone then it really just isn't necessary.

Slideshows for this zone and obviously the whole zone are here, started Ashenvale earlier today I have a few fps/crash issues at the moment, perhaps due to the new build, but hopefully I will finish that today and write-up the zone later today/tomorrow, however enjoy the slideshows :)).

Grove of the Ancients

Ok, so getting back into the feedback after being incredibly tired and sleeping through the day (zzzz :<) We get to the grove of the ancients, now I probably could have just done this area with 2 posts labelled #1,#2 because they all fit in the same area but I wanted some variety in my names of posts just because I don't like having the same boredom. Firstly, a bit of a grievance, GET RID OF THE NIGHT ELF MOHAWK.. I mean, I can see why some ludicrous people might find it somehow appealing, but really it has no place in wow imo. It can be a hairstyle for some people to use, but not on questgivers, it just makes them look way less serious than they should do.

Along with my incessant passion for hating male night elfs, this really was quite pathetic to be quite honest to see a male night elf quest giver with a mohawk, Night elf males are meant to be majestic and wise with some brawn in my mind and Malfurion portrays that perfectly, but the mohawk... It really saddens me.

The actual questing here though is pretty cool you get given a few quests to do around this area and they all have some great synergy between them, firstly you need to find the source of corruption for more bears in this area and kill some of the unfortunately consumed bears, pretty menacing and yeh that's cool. Ideally after this you would be right at the furbolg camp you were sent to, but obviously I had a world server crash or my client crashed or something and I ended up back at the ancients camp, which btw I have to say is so pretty and aesthetically pleasing. I mean the fact that this zone is so dark and damp but it has such lovely havens as this is just such an awe inspiring contrast that I really love and appreciate.

Regardless I'll discuss the follow-ups of that after I've completed this area, which omg could have potentially ruined this zone for me.. these quests are just attrocious. The first quest though is pretty neat, you have to go collect some items that are situated on the outskirts of the furbolg encampment so that you don't have to engage anything, that's pretty cool because why would you want to bust into this camp full of furbolg. You then get a quest to kill a named mob in the woods by the pool, good synergy if you hadn't done that quest on the way and channel the quest item into a statue near the grove enabling you to hand-in the grizzly quest from earlier, again I'll discuss the follow-ups afterwards.

But then.. boy the follow-ups are attrocious, you have to "cleanse" the corrupted furbolg here by using an item on them, now this seems pretty cool and inovative right, you use the item on the furbolg and they spawn a "spirit of corruption".. hopefully the model is placeholder as a slime really makes no sense, and then killing this spirit cleanses the furbolg... what is bad about this quest is the fact that using this item makes the furbolg harder to kill, the spirit has as much health as the furbolg here and do comparable damage, so you are having to kill a mob whilst having twice the damage output upon you. Along with the fact that a lot of these furbolg patrol means you end up with 3-4 mobs on you at some times because you are trying to finish this quest, coupled with the mana problems of the priest at this level made these 2 quests attrocious.

Yes there is also another quest here, which involves you having to end up killing about 15-20 furbolg to complete because of how spread out the braziers are in this zone. This quest took way too long, about 10-15 minutes, which is just absurdly long and frustrating. I really think the furbolgs need to go green when you release their spirit of corruption or get somehow weaker so that using the item is beneficial, otherwise it's just.. why do I want to uncorrupt these furbolg if it makes it harder for me. Also, need more compact areas of brazier spawnings just so the numbers have better synergy.

Then... THEN you get a quest to remove the satyr causing this corruption, the furbolg here don't phase and respawn far too fast so you have to fight through them all again to get to the satyr, I would have loved if the furbolg phased to being friendly and uncorrupted and you could get a free pass through them to the satyr, make it elite and fending off furbolgs or something and kill it. It would just add a level of immersion and make this zone far less frustrating than it should be.

This zone was like the worst part of darkshore by about 20,000,000 miles. It reminded me of vanilla questing in it's structure and it was just urgh imo. Regardless though, heading to the Master's Glaive whilst we are here we get to use the cool quest item which turns you into a prowling cat, pretty damn awesome tbh. You also get to spy on the conversations here learn some cool lore and stuff. I have a few complaints though, the faceless patrolling mobs have a far too big aggro range imo, I was nowhere near one yet apparently it saw me and I ended up dying because I was really near 6 mobs that couldn't see me, highly frustrating, I really like the fact you have to avoid these patrols to get to the top of the tower, but their detection range is really too big.

Now I probably did these quests in the wrong order, I know I did really, heading back to the grove of the ancients you would get a quest to gather some seeds and a breadcrumb to head over to the explorer's league camp.. I'll cover that in my next post but Ideally you would probably head over there and do it now in an ideal questing cycle, I was just doing stuff in a random order and had to get the seeds quest early because of the world server crashing.

The seeds quest though is pretty unique though, you have to ask an npc to give you 1, you have to click a wisp in a tree, which is pretty tough but also I really enjoy the warcraft 3 parallels with wisps harvesting lumber, which I thought was a little lost in vanilla, I barely saw wisps doing anything but randomly running around and basically disregarding how they were presented in warcraft 3, which was nice. You also have to grab a seed from inside a shell where a crab ambushes you after looting, pretty cool stuff. I realise now after doing the quests in the zone that it would have made much more sense to have done the explorer's league hub whilst doing this quest but ye that is what happens when testing an area for the first time.

After grabbing these seeds though you have to go test it on some of the uncorrupted wildlife in the area to save them from the impeding corruption of the area, this is one of the reasons why I say it might be better to take the bear buff in the long run, simply because this is the only area where having one of the 3 mobs neutral/friendly is really good. Regardless though using the item gives a revelation of what is causing the corruption, a faceless one!

Following on from this quest we are told we have to spread this cure/inoculation, whatever you want to call it to the wildlife and we get a pretty nice bombing run type quest where we are saving wildlife, I like how the area is split into 3 distinct animal sections so you know what you should be targetting, the /say for the moonstalker area should be sooner than it is in the run because I easily got all 3 moonstalkers before it told me to try and target them so. The numbers for this quest are fairly easy to obtain, I would have perhaps liked one of those buttons that sends you home when you are done instead of a full wave regardless because I feel that is very punishing on a player who misses 1 mob and has to do an entire run again, but regardless this quest was pretty fun :D.

The last quest in this cycle ends up killing the corruption at the bottom of the watering hole.. which is a MASSIVE faceless one, he spawns once you use the item and just keeps growing and growing, he's pretty big and I think that's a pretty cool touch.. I also like the analogy of bigger=more powerful, and therefore get more satisfaction from killing the beast here.

Regardless though that's it for this post at that quest chain, overall it sets up the zone for a lovely conclusion that will be foretold in the next post. Just please fix that furbolg zone :(.