Windshear Mine

So this zone starts off by having a few quests preceed it from the Ashenvale zone, I made the cut-off point here because all the quests from this point onwards are in stonetalon mountains so it makes perfect sense to include them in said write-up.

I just want to say how great this zone is, even though it doesn't have the epicness of the horde version it is still very well done.

So we get some nice flavour quest text from the gnome, I was amused at the very least I mean it would be amazing if at some point quest text could become audio, I know that is nowhere near in cataclysm's plans but I mean it would do so much for the immersion factor, theres such a difference between reading and hearing in my eyes, reading is a chore and hearing is a pleasure.

Regardless we are told to shoot down some horde windriders, pretty standard quest really perfectly good control on the vehicle and a fun quest though, I particularly enjoyed how you could shoot 2 cannonballs at the same time and shoot down the wyvern and the windrider at the same time.

Handing this in gives follow-ups to press forward the advantage and head into stonetalon, now obviously I was blind and didn't pick up the quest from the gnome, which obviously you should at this point, this gnome quest is particularly interesting as it gives the zone access to auto-questing throughout its entirety, I particularly enjoy it because it "makes sense" theres no Oh lets throw in an auto-quest somewhere to make the quests flow better, theres already a precurser for having auto-quests throughout the zone.

I also appreciate how riding through into stonetalon presents obstacles like do the "night elf killers" from the horde quest actually activate if you go near them riding through, would be particularly great immersion if they did but I'm not sure since no horde were questing here at the time. The actual quests here though are very interesting though, they involve killing elite incinerators by killing a non-elite oil canister on their back and blowing them up. This is really lovely, great way of spicing up kill quests by making your killing more ingenious than simply targetting the mob you want and killing. The incineration of the horde supplies is pretty simple realistically and has good synergy with the other quest because there is just about 1 incinerator per crate.

Handing these in we get up to windshear mine, where "the bomb" has been spotted, I mean this zone is really good at giving you a sense of story and progression and throwing you right in at the deep end. Regardless though we have to do a simple kill and gather quest, but again with a nice twist on the gathering quest. We have to kill orcs and they drop their pay-load, not exactly a unique quest in cataclysm but certainly appreciative of the change up. Now one of the orcs dropped a starting-quest item, I presume the overseers for synergy purposes, personally I would have preferred this quest to be told to go straight to Minx inside the mine instead of going outside then fighting all the way through to minx who is really deep inside the mine.

Heading back outside, there is suddenly panic apparently the bomb is going to blow up an alliance stronghold and we need to stop it, this quest is just so epic really you feel a great sense of urgency, running over to the balloon you can enter it via the enter vehicle setting and you have to blow up the power coupling *before* reaching windshear hold, I just love how you have a sense of time-limit for this quest, sure its a very very conservative time limit but that is also good, you feel like you need to kill this thing asap but you aren't in any real danger of failing the quest.

I am not sure if you are meant to be attacked by the overseers, I feel like you probably are but I aggrod one before entering the vehicle and they continued to attack me so not sure if thats a bug, also it took a *long* time for the balloon to crash after I destroyed the power coupling, again that might be intended I just felt I was standing around waiting for the balloon to crash and me to parachute outta there.

The hand-in is in Windshear hold where the next write-up will continue from.

Discipline Priest

Right, so before I crack on with the stonetalon write-up for alliance I wanted to take a post to talk about discipline priest levelling in cataclysm. I could probably sum it up pretty easily by just saying its about 20,000,000 times better than shadow, but I want to go ahead and explain that, by level 23 you have 4-5 spells you are using on every mob, the rotation is dynamic, engaging and actually really fun. It is pretty skill capped, if you forget to archangel properly you run oom - that's an amazing feature. Let's just analyse a few bits at a time.

Firstly, the biggest perk of the discipline tree is that all the "levelling" talents, or at least the talents that enable the player to dps effectively are all in the first few tiers of spec. This is important, the main problems that shadow has is that you don't get a "feel" for the actual rotation until a much higher level, but as discipline by around level 20 you basically have all the tools you need to be able to dps effectively and level. I mean, that's just great I mean sure you need to have "progression" through a tree so you feel like you are becoming more powerful, but you can do that by spicing rotations up through talents like Pain and Suffering, the fact that your "core" is available so early on is just great.

The fact that discipline is such a good tree and actually you could see alot of merit in it's rotation could spring some arise of a "need" for a discipline dps spec, similar to feral tank/dps. I don't know whether it would necessarily be popular but a dual healing/dps spec similar to feral could have a great place in wow. The necessary tools are there and if you wanted to, I feel like you could easily make the discipline dps tree actually viable in raids. Now I realise this is highly unlikely, and tbh I prefer the playstyle of shadow, but I can see the attraction of discipline and see other people perhaps wanting the spec to become competitive.

Now, the only downside to the tree, although actually I wouldn't call it a downside to the tree persay but more so the others, are the talents arcangel and evangelism. Like or not they are designed for shadow priest mana viability and dps, it obviously has a discipline equivalent so that its a great talent to pick up for discipline in cases of downtime of healing and for overall levelling. Right now though, it is like.. well I need this for all 3 specs whilst levelling, I cannot imagine levelling as shadow or holy with this talent available in discipline and the other trees having no active source of mana regen until level 66 or so when they get access to shadowfiend.

Whilst this talent obviously fits the design for discipline quite well I feel like, it needs to be made baseline if you do not want to implement some of my suggestions for shadow in my other post. 15% mana regen every 15 seconds or so is very big for all 3 specs and at low level it just feels mandatory.

I've stated my feelings about discipline tier 2 already and there is just way too much going on, so making evangelism/dark angel baseline would free up the tree immensely.

That's probably all I have to say on discipline other than the fact that OMG I LOVE HOW PRIESTS HAVE WINGS NOW, this is awesome :D. Gonna finish all the stonetalon write-ups today and the supplements and hopefully start my Dwarf Shaman later.