Shrine of Aessina

I have already stated how I feel this quest should be in a different place to its current situe in the quest story arc. However, these quests are all really good though, it's just a shame it suffers from the bad quest flow of the zone, if anything I feel like they should be expanded upon.

Firstly you are sent via breadcrumb to see the edunes near the Shrine, he has some amusing dialogue with the human here about his adventures in azeroth.. I'm personally not sure who they are referencing, they were apparently added in TBC, but nothing has come of them on live.. not sure tbh I guess they are a reference to something but hey I can't really tell :<. Regardless though unfortunately that's all you get to see out of them, I did check later there were no quests to do with them :(. Regardless though you get sent down to find 3 night elves in the forest.

This quest is just utterly brilliant, a sheer stroke of genious. It's a Trap! You hand in the quest to chained night elfs you have been shackled by a demoness and bam she ambushes you, she has a lot of health and is like... huge. She is pretty challenging to take down but not overly so, I just personally love the epicness that is "ITS A TRAP" quests ^^. Always fun, regardless you loot her heart and they have to eat it "eww" and then they become free. They give you a follow-up which is to basically kill demons and then "warn" the ancient at the Shrine of Aessina. Killing these demons is pretty easy (other than the fact the fel puppies mana-burn an already struggling shadow priest :<).

However handing in this quest we realise the ancient is under attack by hordes of demons and you have to kill 30 of them, personally I find this number wayyy too excessive, especially since a shadow priest goes oom after killing like 6 of them :<. I feel like the quest needs to give you some form of aoe or "ancient power" to 1 shot these mobs so they go fast, I do really love this last stand feeling though the quest gives, you and the ancient alone against hordes of demonic invaders.. simply awesome :D.

This though ends this mini-questhub, he phases after the hand-in so all the demons are vanquished and you are a hero of the forest. However, again you are given no breadcrumb back to Astranaar, which is a little disappointing in my opinion.

Raynewood Tower

Right, so this is where the questing gets ugly.. firstly though we are told to go collect the tear of elune for the saving the girl quests, pretty standard gathering quest, I really love how they updated this quest for cataclysm, by adding soot to the tear and therefore rendering it useless, pretty cool in my books. This obviously is pretty near the Earthern Ring quests so I did these at the same time, I won't go over the quest really, they are identical to when I previously ran through the area other than I think the end quest was slightly more forgiving than before, or maybe I was just better at it. I'm not really sure ^^.

However, this is when the questing is bad, firstly you are left with no breadcrumb from the Earthern Ring place, that's fine right because you have the quest left to hand in for the saving the girl quest.. but this is where it gets ridiculous.. after handing in the saving the girl quest, after running to and from the earthern ring area, you have to run back to basically the exact same spot again. On top of that I missed the quest for the Dartol's rod questline because you don't have any quest that explicitly sends you to the inn and I simply thought this was the only follow-up, some quest that sends you to get that quest from Raene would be really appreciated, since not getting it makes this zone 20x more painful. This quest needs some sort of automated travel time, or make it so you cleanse the Tear of Elune in Astranaar and then get free transport to Raynewood Tower from the sentinel station after collecting the quest from Raene.. yes that would work pretty awesomely.

Instead though you have to run alll the way back to the area and cleanse this tear, fortunately you get a pretty cool auto-quest, which basically gives you a pretty unique quest to help a satyr seek atonement for his corruption, pretty awesome quest but we'll get onto that later. Now arriving at Raynewood Tower we would get 3 quests, 1) to kill Satyr's, 2) to collect Laughing Sister's corpses and 3) Get part of Dartol's Rod.

Now I have to point out that I did not have the last quest because of the bad quest directions in Astranaar/my blindness, which really made the quest flow bad, but ye back to that later ^^. Firstly collecting the Laughing Sister's corpses is very nice and simple, I also like the fact you need to avoid the patrolling elite guy to get to the retreat to hand in to the dryad.. pretty nice quest. However, the follow-up is pretty damn epic in my opinion. You basically become a spectral tiger and go on a massive killing spree. What makes it epic however is how skill capped this quest is, you die reasonably quickly if you don't realise how you are meant to use the 3 abilities you are given, but once you learn what to do you barely take any damage, have got to love and adore quests that have some sort of skill cap towards them.

Now if I had the Dartol's Rod quest, these 2 quests would have at least some synergy in terms of the area you have to go, I personally don't like how far north you have to go to do the Dartol's Rod quest, I don't like it on live and I don't like it now, it really needs to be much further south tbh. The Dartol's Rod quest is fine though in terms of drop rate and availability of the chest, I just feel it needs to be bought further south somehow or you need to be granted a buff that increases your movement speed for this quest so you can get their faster.

Now... this Satyr quest, boy is this quest annoying, firstly.. the drop rate is horrendous like said before with 5 I would expect a 50% drop rate at worst, but this drop rate is like 25% or something similar, really really too low imo. However, that isn't what makes this quest annoying. What makes this quest annoying is the debuff these Satyrs give you: -100 spirit. For a caster of my level that makes me go into the negative spirit.. I had around 50-70 spirit, so basically I was just going through my 1.4k mana pool in 1 and a half mobs, that's pretty bad, I mean I know my situation is exaggerated because of the fact that I was a shadowpriest and their regen is attrocious at the moment, but yeh this definitely concerned me.

The other thing that was really infuriating was that because I had specced into twisted faith (The Shadow Spirit->Hit conversion talent) the -100 spirit meant I had around a 50% chance to miss with my spells with the debuff up. I have no idea if this functionality is intended, that negative buffs of spirit affect hit rating in this way. But if it is I HIGHLY suggest removing it, it's ludicrous that I should be punished for spending points in a practical talent on 1 stupid quest that decides to debuff me with -100 spirit. However, the quest at least redeems itself with the hand-in, which is quite seemingly brilliant. The Satyr phases into a night elf upon "sacrificing" itself to save this girl. Truly lovely ending to this quest here, the phasing is near seemless. I mean I want to add that I personally would prefer to be a satyr over an ugly male night elf.. at least try and redeam yourself as a female night elf^^. Regardless though, the phasing is pretty sweet here.

The last quest here (again, if I had done this right) is another pretty unique quest.. you basically have a "feign death" item which basically means you lose aggro from the bears in the questing area, you use this feign death to grab the item and avoid fighting the elite located here, pretty awesome unique quest here. Not seen a quest like it really and I think it's just a lovely quest tbh.

Now a few things need to happen hear, Raynewood Tower needs something.. it either needs a sentinel station so you can travel on nightsabers back and forth between Astranaar and here or it needs a flightpath. I think for immersion purposes it should probably have both, but if I was to choose one it would be a sentinel station, just because you could have far more immersion by having one of these here rather than a flightpath. It definitely needs some form of travel between here and Astranaar though.

Heading back to Astranaar though gives you a follow up for Dartol's Rod and an end to the Saving the girl questline, where she is unsurprisingly saved.

Now, if all my points were followed this would work out perfectly and you would only have stardust tower to go to along with the quest with Dartol's Rod, which would really flow lovely in the zone, however because they aren't I have to do the Shrine of Aessina and Forest Song before then so ye ^^.

Astranaar

Ok, lets not beat about the bush, from this point on the questing experience takes a somewhat downward slide. I want to note this is not because the quests are in any way bad, it's just the fact that they don't flow together.. I'll say that it's much better to have bad quests that flow well together than good quests flowing badly together, since you end up forgetting they are good because of all the travelling you have to do to them.

So firstly arrive in Astranaar and are given a load of quests.. firstly I don't like this at all, considering some of the quests are about protecting astranaar it seems utterly ludicrous to be given quests to do other errands when they need your help to protect astranaar from the horde. I suggest phasing out all the breadcrumbs and make the "saving astranaar" quests the only quests you can do before proceeding onwards. I also feel that offering the breadcrumb to forest song *this* early is a bit urgh. Basically you offer it at a time when it's not prudent to head there, because you have quests in the immediate vicinity. So it gets relegated to "go there when you are done with the quests here, which is definitely not its place in the ashenvale questing experience. I'll come back to this point later.

Onto the actual cool quests though.. well astranaar is under horde siege and you need to... put out the fires!! Oh how the mighty have fallen seemingly ^^. Regardless the quest is pretty cool interactivity wise, there probably aren't enough "clear-cut" fires in the town, I was basically aiming at what I thought looked like fires and presuming they were. Also the aiming for this quest is a little off, sometimes you hit the fire and it goes out, other times it just stays there.. I also don't really like how your work goes un-noticed.. there's no phasing showing the buildings not being on fire anymore it's just.. hey you did all that for nothing, which is pretty disappointing.

However the follow-up is pretty damn cool you get to ride a Glaive-thrower and shoot down Horde wind-riders, nothing fancy with this vehicle quest just a shooting gallery really but it's pretty awesome imo just because the glaive-thrower controls are really nice and you only get one shot per rider because of the energy regen.. it sort of works out really well. Now this is when we should get the furbolg quests and the Elune's tear quest (although more on that quest later) once we have cleared the horde out. The area does phase now slightly so you don't see the fires (would have liked that one quest earlier) I don't think the wind-riders are still above Astranaar but I might be mistaken here.

I'm going to comment that the "Shrine of Aessina" Quest hub, (which I'll cover in a later post) *should* be here, It obviously isn't available now and only becomes available at a really weird point in the zone.. it would make so much sense to add that questline here so that the zone has better quest-flow. Regardless though you go and kill some furbolg and loot a quest starting item about troll charms.. pretty standard really. Handing them back in leads you to the quest you got on the horde side for troll charms. However, heading to this cave leads you to that green furbolg I commented on in my horde post, he does give a quest for the alliance. By the tone of his quest I can see why he doesn't give this quest to horde, but it is very strange that he is friendly towards them :S.

The quest is a simple "kill a named" quest where you have to kill the chieftain, he was actually pretty tough to be honest, however he was both tough, manageable and rewarding for doing so, which is definitely a good thing for any quest, the quest map shows him in the wrong position in addition to the points above. Now whilst in this chamber I came across a caged tauren druid seemingly, in bear form. I presume this is a horde escort, but if it is there definitely needs to be a quest pointing towards it, the place where the cage is, is miles away from the area where the troll charms are in the cave and if you don't have the map fully zoomed out (for which the default is fully zoomed in) there is absolutely no way you would see this escort. On a future run-through I'll add an addendum to the horde post regarding this quest.

Now.. handing these quests in leaves us with a breadcrumb to the "Earthen Ring Volcano" quests, which I have covered in my horde write-up, they are entirely identical to the horde quests however with the lovely touch that the goblin npc is phased out and a human "female" (presumably worgen) is in their place. I presume that the worgen npc in the Astranaar inn will be updated to cataclysm worgen model/textures and is simply an oversight using the old models.

Mostly the bad quest flow is in the next write-up :(, However I want to point out that the "Forest Song breadcrumb" should be available after both the Shrine of Aessina questlines and the furbolg corruption questlines are available. I also would like the Tears of Elune quest and the Earthern Ring breadcrumb quests to only be available after the forest song quests are completed. This would just lead to a far more streamlined and quest-friendly zone.

Maestra's Post

Cracking on with this area we are left with a quest to go to Maestra's post. This is a problem I have with most of the zone actually you get like left with a semi-conclusion to a quest and no breadcrumbs whatsoever to a new area, just quests in your inventory still. This is the "vanilla school of thought". It basically is like, hey lets give you lots of choices to go to different areas and quest but not link any of them together. I don't really like that.. I always feel there needs to be quests leading into other quests, even if its a simple breadcrumb leading back to the original quest-hub, it's just nice to have quests lead into each other.

However you arrive at Maestra's post and are given alot of quests.. pretty exciting :O, since Maestra's post is under attack from 2 fronts. I choose to do the against the horde series of quests first, since 1) It's right in front of you as you enter and 2) the horde are more menacing, you get a pretty nifty new cataclysm-esque quest where you are given a squad of sentinels to help. This seems to be one of those quests you associate with a new expansion, there are a lot of these quests that send you out with a squad of troops or quest givers in some cases and just have them help and kill shit :D. You just have to kill a bunch of hordes, but hey thats pretty fun and having a group of sentinels is awesome. I don't really like though how if you engage a pack of 3 all the sentinels attack the target you pulled and let the other 2 bash on you. It would be nice if they acted more like offtanks and just attacked the mobs you weren't attacking so you don't fall on your face and die :D.

The follow-up is just as cool you have to sneak through the horde and recover some items off fallen paladins who used to be here in the post, I didn't really feel that nostalgic because those guys gave awful quests, but regardless ^^ the quest mechanics are pretty cool. Feero Ironhand was incredibly hard to spot though, he definitely needs some sparkles to attract where he is, he basically just blends into the shrubbery and I was on low graphics settings so I can only imagine this gets worse as you increase in them. It's cool that you have to fight a warlock at the top to get the item. I would maybe appreciate a slow fall on the cloak, because any accidental drop down from the base of the tower at that small cliff gives you fall damage and basically results in your death since you cannot use the cloak in combat.

The follow-ups are also pretty synergetic. They involve you taking the battle to the other front against the furbolg, basically its a kill quest and an activate items quest. They are pretty synergetic and the animations on deactivating the moonstones are pretty nice with them visibly turning off. Good quests really nothing much further to add. The last quests involve you going west and killing tentacles.. oh how I love killing tentacle quests.. always fun :D. Basically the quests involve killing tentacles and the faceless one here. You get the quest in the field aswell from the keeper located here, which is always cool for immersion and a great way to hide the fact somebody is dead in the objective screen. I also really like the quest which involves you using an item in a beam of light, I feel like this is a pretty unique twist to using an item.. by having a massive bright beam to use it in especially in the dark surroundings of the area.

Now heading back you get 2 breadcrumbs to Astranaar, now in a future slideshow I actually come back to Maestra's post and realise there was a third breadcrumb, if you look in the pictures you can see there is a question mark located here and I was obviously blind and missed it. This third breadcrumb gives you free passage to Astranaar. Maybe Maestra's post should also have a flight path but I think that is either way considering you can use the sentinel station to travel to and from Astranaar, I was just too dumb to notice :(.

This area is pretty short but the quests are pretty exciting and engaging and the area went very quickly, which is always a good sign for a quest hub imo. I perhaps feel this zone needs a more climactic end with a fight against a horde leader at Maestra's post, but this isn't entirely necessary and the quest flow works here. This is the last point at which the questing flow is really good though :P.

Next up is Astranaar O:.

Orendil's Retreat

Ok, a somewhat unproductive week on the writing front it seems, basically whenever I tried to do beta I would get tired and annoyed (at how bad both shadow and the quest flow in Ashenvale is ^^) and would log out. However, I yesterday perservered and have done up to Feralas on my night elf priest (I specced to disc :P) so I've got 2 full zones to write up and a couple of supplements, so hard work ensues :D. Regardless though, lets crack on with Ashenvale.

Firstly I want to state a few things, 1) This zone looks fairly incomplete, I mean the quests seem to be all implemented and inplace but the quest flows are way off, alot of quests lead to dead ends or are just "hey lets randomly travel for 20 years to get to a quest objective". The zone definitely needs a lot of work.

2) Like darkshore this zone needs more flightpaths, but unlike darkshore this zone NEEDS them, in Darkshore the questing was very linear and in 1 direction whereas in Ashenvale the questing is all over the shot so needs the flightpaths for stability.

3) I probably did the quests in the wrong order that they would be intended, I may also have missed some quests because of some horde boomkin killing quest givers in Astranaar. (Sometimes I question why these people bother to play a beta test, it's pretty sickening to just down right deny beta testing for some people). I'll try and list some sort of optimum quest flow in my last post on the area.

4) I probably am slightly too predjudice on my zone, the fact that shadow was so bad and I had to drink after 3 mobs and ended up using 55 drinks in the zone (and I only bought them when I first got to astranaar) is pretty bad, I apologise if my feedback is somewhat skewed by the dreadfulness that is Shadow levelling right now.

Ok, with those points out of the way lets crack on. Firstly I want to comment on how.. unintuitive it is to go ahead and purchase a ground mount. You obviously should be dinging 20 when entering or just before entering the zone and since Ashenvale is a good 20 bazillion miles from Darnassus it's really really annoying to go and purchase a ground mount, and it really is necessary for this zone. I would suggest that there be a riding trainer plus mount vendor at Maestra's post, I'll get onto this questing hub later, but there is a "sentinel station" there and it would be really streamlined if you could purchase a mount there. Even if it was just a temporary one for the zone (because of how big it is) it would be a great bonus.

Actually entering the zone we end up at Orendil's Retreat. You are given 2 quests in Bathran's Haunt and an extra quest once you get there. The quests to kill horde and collect Bathran's hair are well synergised, I feel like there are slightly too many horde in the area though and perhaps toning down on their number would be ideal, it was especially annoying by the Bottle of Wildfire objective. I also appreciate the change in model to the Bathran's hair, since before it was really small and white on live and the thick bushy brown item is much easier to see and collect. The quest is pretty intuitive though, grab a bottle of wildfire and burn Bathran's corpse and then return, it synergises well with the other quests, if there were slightly less horde as previously said.

Regardless handing in these quests gives you a choice between heading to Maestra's post "as quick as possible" or going to Zoram Strand, I don't really know how I feel behind the text on the item that is the breadcrumb to Maestra's post.. it implies that is the most optimum place to go whereas in reality it is always going to be more optimal questing wise to head towards the Zoram strand. Perhaps adding in an extra quest for the "saving the girl" type quests to collect some items in the zoram strand and then delivering them as soon as possible to Maestra's post would be the most ideal way of linking these areas together.

Heading to the Zoram Strand we see there is a new alliance encampment here, and a flightpath.. it's nice to have a flightpath right outside the instance entrance to Blackfathom deeps ^^. The quests here are to collect 10 items and kill 15 naga. There was a distinct lack of statues nearby the quest camp and only really near the Horde base to the south could I really find an abundance of statues. I feel like this is because some worgen had just finished questing here and had taken all the statues that spawn nearby so I was forced to head further south to the Horde encampment, regardless though the quests have reasonably good synergy. The Wrathtail Wave riders had an annoying "bladestorm ability" that meant I could not mind flay them. I don't know if you can mind flay when a warrior is bladestorming on live but I feel like, just because I cannot slow them I should be able to do damage with my "signature" abiltiy.

I know this is a little offtopic but I'm going to discuss my feelings about quest numbers in this next paragraph, maybe I should discuss it in another post but really I'm still going to discuss it in the Ashenvale posts so I'm going to discuss it now. Firstly, I feel like kill quests should only ever have a maximum of 15 kills, beyond 15 it is quite demoralising to kill 20 random npcs. If the quest objective calls for more than 15 it should be because the enemies are really weak or you are using a vehicle/have some external buff etc. Note though this only applies to individual objectives in a quest. For example in the naga quest above you could say ask to kill 10 Wrathtail Wave Riders and 10 Wrathtail Sorceress' to bump the amount needed to kill up to 20 and that is better than asking to kill 20 outright. Obviously there is a point where this breaks down, but I prefer small and numerous objectives rather than one massive chunk you have to swallow.

My second point here is drop rates.. This is a big issue, especially with this zone, with questing in wow. I feel like there are some "golden numbers" that you need to follow when assigning drop rates.

1-3: Minimum 25-50%

4-7: Minimum 50%

8+: 100%

I feel like once I get told to collect 8 items or more they need to be a 100% drop rate, since anything 50% ish is pushing you above that 15 mark I talked about, which is just demoralising. I would rather see a quest that told me to collect 20 items and them being 100% drop rate than do a quest that asked me to collect 8 items and them being on a 50% drop rate. Even if it means I take longer with the 20 items quest I at least know exactly how long it's going to take me rather than setting me up to be disappointed by the drop rate and the quest feeling longer than I expected it to. This isn't exactly related to this area specifically but I feel like random chance drop rates only have a place sub 7, and even then only 50%+. I feel like on some quests it makes perfect sense that they have a random drop rate but just make them require less than 7 rather than asking for something like 10 and putting a drop rate of 50% on them.

Anyway, back on topic of the zone these quests are basically carbon copies of Vanilla quests, down to the interaction upon hand-in requiring more help. I presume this quest should still be here in cataclysm, since it flows well and obviously the alliance have an encampment here so there needs to be some quests flowing out of the hub. Regardless you are told you need to kill a named naga npc.. Lets be frank here she is ridiculously tough for this level, she has about 100% more health than any mob in the area and has a ridiculously frequent knockback that knocks you back pretty far. You can't even use the pillars to stop you from being knocked back because she knocks you onto a ledge and she evades. I can understand knockbacks, they are a pretty fun feature really, but they need to be far less frequent. There are some mobs, like this one, that knockback like every 8 seconds.. a knockback should be a 30 second cooldown.. even on mobs, otherwise its just really unfair on casters trying to kill them.

Anyway that's it for this starting area, I want to note that my comments for quest flow only really start to kick in when we get to Astranaar this area flows really well, other than the silly choice to choose between the Zoram Strand and Maestra's post this zone has a nice flow about it.

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 :(.