Stonetalon Final Quests

Alright, so you head back to Krom'gar obviously via the flightpath, so the travel-time is fairly short. After our sort of meander in the south of the zone to make sure we wouldn't get flanked. We get to move on with the grand master scheme of the zone WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION!

Firstly, we get our well deserved promotion of course, we are now a Krom'gar Champion in his army. Then we are told to head into the balloon with "THE BOMB" attached to it, and head to the Sludgeworks to refuel it on the way to it's final destination, Cliffwalker Post. This quest is pretty cool, the vehicle mechanic to get in, is kinda unique since you have to get on using the rope ladder, then you get to see an overview of everything, of course it's quite surprising you aren't being shot down since you have A MASSIVE WMD attached via tether to your flimsy goblin hot-air balloon. Regardless though :) you end up at the Sludgeworks.

Whilst the Balloon is being refueled you are asked to do a couple of menial tasks. One is to deal with the wyvern who apparently have bad bowels, and need putting down. It's a pretty nice quest, although again very isolated since there is only 1 quest giver here. Plenty of Wyvern in the area, and you only need to kill 6. I'm just glad it wasn't one of those CLEAN UP TURDS quest, which I suppose makes sense since you are a Champion in the army now!

The other quest here is to route out loads of spies, this is a really nice quest, they have a little glint where they are and you use a choking bomb to aggro them and engage them. My only trouble with this quest, and again it wasn't really trouble with the actual quest, it was the fact that when you weren't on this quest or even on it. If you happened to walk near one of the spies you would hear the "A STEALTHED PERSON IS NEAR AND YOU HAVE VISION OF THEM" sound, which is inherently annoying since you can never see them in proximity without the use of bombs. It's a minor thing really, but I would still class this as a bug.

After handing in this quest, we are able to continue onto cliffwalker post, same quest as the krom'gar to sludgeworks quest really, get on the balloon and fly to Cliffwalker Post.

We then arrive to an awesome lore conversation between General Grebo and the tauren druid representative here, High Chieftain Cliffwalker, of which the post is named of course. Definitly this text is worth reading, awesome lore material here and sort of sets the scene for what is about to happen :D. Before this though you are told to KILL ALLIANCE ::DDDDD, that's what I signed up for in Ashenvale!!!!

Basically you get control of a demolisher which basically can 1 shot everything in site, fun quest to just kill shit with. Obviously the name tag is bugged with the "BUG ID XYZ" on it, but I think that's a pretty obvious bug ^^. There was only one other issue with this quest, which was that the demolisher went REALLY slow uphill, now whilst this was good realism, it was kinda dumb having to dump my demolisher before heading uphill so I could go at more than like 2 mph :D.

Back to the quest hub, and we are told to go meet up with the Chieftain's son at the Tree. Upon arrival at this zone, we see loads of Druids running around in sheer terror, pretty ominous tbh. Climbing the tree we find the son is dead!!! Nice twist imo, I do love those quests which sort of "lie" in their quest text so you expect to see an npc and maybe a quest in the area, but find them dead or just not there. Really awesome little quests, but regardless. HE HAS A KROM'GAR'S GENERAL INSIGNIA ON HIM, hmm i really wonder what is going to happen when I go back to cliffwalker :D.

We break the news to the Chieftain's son is now dead :O drama. Now onto the next quest, with the simple description: DEFEND YOURSELF, pure awesome rp here, check the screenshots below, in the slideshow, everything is there. Basically you end up fighting the General and 2 adds, I presume this RP will be voiced, and if it isn't it definitly SHOULD, it is awesome and definitly worthy of voice acting.

It's a pretty easy fight, the 2 tauren do a good job of tanking 1 of the adds and the general so you can take out the other add and then lay waste to the other add and the general with no real danger of over-aggro. After the quest the tauren are unsure what to do, and ask you to go and plead to Krom'gar for mercy. You set off back to the fortress.

As a side note, the rocket flight path is just awesome, it makes no sense really, there isn't even a goblin here?, but regardless it's just awesome to have a flightmaster, which isn't the generic wind-rider master.

Whilst this travelling may seem slightly unnecessary, I do like the fact that it makes the phasing in cliffwalker post happen when you are away so the changes are seemless and really polished. Krom'gar is obviously angry at this development and tells you to fly back to Cliffwalker post to meet him there and be promoted to take the place of the general.

What follows, is some of the best RP I believe Garrosh is already voiced for this RP but Krom'gar or the High-Chieftain are not. They definitly need to be, the RP is just epic. The quest you get here just epitimises it imo. The Description of the objective is simply: LEARN WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HORDE, which is just so ambiguous, and really the lore and phasing is just so polished. It is all in the screenshots below, and I don't know how many more times I can say awesome before it just isn't as effective, but still this is like.. the best conclusion to any quest zone in wow at the moment, definitly better than wrathgate because YOU are making a difference here.

After this insanely good RP you are told by Garrosh you can basically either go Southern Barrens or Desolace (THIS IS WHERE THE SOUTHERN BARRENS BREADCRUMB SHOULD BE!). Note there is a bug where when you are in the RP phasing, after the bomb blows up on the tree, you get a message THE BATTLE TO FREE HYJAL FROM RAGNAROS HAS BEGUN, definitly a bug here. Garrosh also mumbles his lines, it makes no sense that he asks krom'gar I ASK YOU AGAIN WHAT HAVE YOU DONE, after letting go of him, pretty sure that is a bug.

This zone is just insanely good in terms of FOCUS ON THE STORY ARC, and the actual story arc being insanely good. It also ends in a great conclusion of that sole story arc. Which, was started at the end of Northern Barrens and culminated in this zone. Definitly soooo worth it.

However as I mentioned in my previous posts this zone is VERY skimpy on quests, there really just aren't that many, it probably has less than Durotar, I was also a good level, perhaps 2 levels off in terms of XP that I should have got from this zone. This just tells me that more quests will be added.

You are also never sent to sun-rock retreat, which I did check, is still horde controlled but there are no quests here and only a flight path. Like said in my previous post, I feel like the questing should be The Fold->Krom'gar->Malaka'jin->Sun-rock Retreat->Krom'gar->Cliffwalker.

I mean the fact that the entire charred vale is completely ignored by the horde through quests just seems wrong, along with a couple of quests in the unearthed quarry thing in the south you have to go through for the kobold area, the zone would be fine on quests.

I have to commend blizzard on the quests so far implemented for this zone, they are all pretty polished and the zone is just very enjoyable, if not for the "quest lightness" I would have 0 complaints about the zone. I hope the alliance version is just as epic tbh :D.

I've already done Desolace as a zone so the write-ups for that will be started tomorrow hopefully, the zone is really long though, probably around 2-3 times the length of Stonetalon in terms of time in the zone, that isn't really because of that many bugged quests either, the zone is pretty damn good aswell.

Anyway Slideshows for all the RP and the Stonetalon Zone here:

Malaka'jin

Right, pictures for Desolace are up, haven't decided what zones to split it in, my god there are a tonne of quests in that zone. I'll figure that out after finishing Stonetalon, which of course I left by saying you got a breadcrumb to Malaka'jin.

First off I want to say that riding to this zone is fine, it makes sense that because the Grimtotem are launching a surprise attack on the area that transport to this zone would be at a premium, however I would say that the Northwatch encampment that you burnt and killed their leader and held off their massive attack on your HQ should be phased out, it was rather annoying to tippy-toe around the alliance forces here, which really should be phased out since you pretty much wiped them out in those series of quests. Obviously the fight between the goblins and gnomes should be ongoing still, but the camp just seems superfluous and annoying in terms of travelling.

Anyway on our way to Malaka'jin we pick up a quest to kill *shudder* spiders, now I am PETRIFIED of spiders, doesn't matter if they are on a computer screen or television or whatever, I get absolutely petrified by them, firstly I'm going to comment though how this quest is weird you are on your way to malaka'jin and then have to back-track to do this quest. What would make more sense, which will get discussed in the final post in the zone, is to get a free travel type quest to malaka'jin and then Travel up this area either whilst doing quests or (hopefully) when going towards sun-rock retreat. However, this doesn't make much sense in this context until my final post, so I will discuss it in more detail there.

Back to the quest, it requires you to kill spiders, and one named spider. My god this quest is scary, the named spider is like MASSIVE, almost the size of the spider in Terrokkar forest, can't remember the name. BUT WHAT IS WORST, is it frigging patrols, I was killing mobs for the quest and BAM A GIANT SPIDER BEHIND ME, I was like shitting my pants :/, god I hate spiders D:::. The actual quest is fine if a little isolated like commented upon, but scary spiders D::.

Back on track to Malaka'jin we get a bunch of quests, to get some voodoo reagents,

Anyway back onto the nitty gritty handing it in apparently the horde army is running out of dumb orcs to use as cannon fodder, so we need to go and round up a bunch of kobolds.. this is just seriously epic :). There is also a follow-up to the voodoo quests in the same area.

There is also a breadcrumb to Northern Barrens here, I actually think that is because I dinged 28 from this quest and not because it unlocks after completing. Again, I would much rather have the breadcrumbs from finishing the zone and not halfway through the zone. If you want to promote the "YOU CAN DO ANY ZONE WHENEVER U WANT" type mantra, just make the breadcrumbs from Orgrimmar, since all these breadcrumbs litter the place up imo. Obviously zones that lead on from each other should have breadcrumbs, but only when the entire zone is complete.

Basically there is a Kobold cave, where it is on Vanilla iirc, and you have to whip kobolds over and over until they submit, until you have YOUR MASSIVE ARMY OF KOBOLDS, I really wish you could get like 200 or something and not like only 6.

There is one thing I would like to comment on here, I don't really like how the quest items disappear off the objectives panel when quests are completed, there are MANY quests, including this one, where having the quest item still on the bar after completion is just plain useful, I would have liked to have not fought any Kobolds when running out of the cave and just plain whipped more into my army :D

The other quest, to collect resonite crystals, is fairly trivial although there are a little fewer crystals then I feel there should be, but it's only a minor point.

Heading back to Malaka'jin you are given 2 quests: TO INFUSE DA VOODOO into the horde soldiers fighting the grimtotem, and the other quest: TO UNLEASH THE MASSIVE KOBOLD ARMY ONTO THE ALLIANCE SCUM, both pretty awesome quests.

The Infusing the voodoo quest is sort of buggy though in a couple of ways, the grimtotem do a couple of aoe attacks (demo shout and fan of knives) and being hit by either interrupts your channelling, it's somewhat infuriating considering the long cast time, I was sort of resorting to standing at max range. Also the voodoo infusion goes onto your current target, and not the orginal target of the spell. So like there are 2 horde soldiers standing next to each other, I use the item on the left one, and target the right one after. At the end of the cast the right one gets the buff even though the animation was on the left one. A minor bug really, but ye.

There is the named leader of the grimtotem here, and I was somewhat disappointed there was no quest to eliminate him in anyway, it would have made sense since malaka'jin periodically sends that force of horde warriors to kill him. I have no chance of killing him without a buff or lots of help though, so couldn't see if he dropped a quest item. Regardless it would be nice to kill him with some help.

The other quest, to unleash the kobold army, is somewhat confusing, originally I went up the back door of the alliance quest, the elite who should be stopping anybody from attempting to go up this way is far too off to the side, and I just thought he was a random patrol and not meant to be a "DO NOT GO UP THIS RAMP" elite. Regardless, going all the way round, which is rather tedious for one quest, means you go through a quarry, which is a new part of the zone in cataclysm and had absolutely 0 quests, I did have a look, but nothing was in this area, seems extremely strange considering the area. I presume that perhaps there will be quests here in a later build, but that is based alot on the fact that the zone is very sparse of quests generally.

The actual quest to unleash the Kobold army is actually pretty cool though, theres a good amount of kobolds and they like MARCH TO THEIR DEATHS, but put up an amusing fight. The backdoor ramp I was talking about makes for a good getaway aswell, which is a nice touch.

After these quests, you are then told Malaka'jin is safe and that you should go back to Krom'gar, and earn yourself a promotion of course. Now like I said this just seems incomplete in terms of quests of the area, they seem pretty sparse and don't really have a conclusion, obviously wiping out the grimtotem leader would be a good conclusion, but there was no quest for that so...

Onto my final post on Stonetalon though, and yes the lore/rp is so epic :D.

Krom'gar Fortress

So we have just got promoted to Sergeant, and now seemingly have a right to speak to Krom'gar, awesome stuff and realistic of the new horde regime. Nice immersion, you get given a bunch of quests, including a daily to just kill soldiers in the area, not sure how I feel about having a daily here in this area, I mean sure I can understand the purpose of the daily.. but its a level 25-30 zone and I don't the idea, especially on a pvp server, of level 35-40's coming back here to do this daily for money or like free xp, and be able to gank lowbies.

I have never minded dailies near to say max level, where it is more expected that high level players should be at, especially dailies with like a pvp backdrop, say the dailies in Grizzly Hills for instance, but this daily seems out of place imo.

The other dailies involve incinerating some tents, killing a named npc and gathering some materials. I love the quest giver clarissa here, if only because it was the name of my boyfriend's alias :(, but its a kewt blood elf child who loves ice cream. I mean the quest doesn't really have anything to do with the major story arc.. yet it contributes to it, this is what I like to see with these sort of off-shoot quests, stuff that doesn't have to do with it but contributes. I'll discuss this a little later when we get the follow-up.

Firstly, I went to collect the parts for clarissa, since they were spread out and it made the most sense to do so.. Easy enough to find the parts and made you go through the whole area, I can only think that their should be a quest up via the venture company place, since you have to kill alot of them to reach the quest part and it seems silly to direct you up there only for a part for the clarissa quest.

Whilst out here you get a "recommended 2 player" elite quest, my thoughts on this though: In my experience blizzard quests that say recommended 2 player are code words for you can solo this if you are good at your class, however I really don't know if I could solo this as a class with a lack of self healing. The fight is against like an enormous fish, you fight for like 70% or so, and he hits pretty damm hard tbh, after that he grabs you in his mouth and deals 5% of your hp every 5 seconds or so, my problem is that for a class like a rogue or warrior he hits like a truck before grabbing you, and then pathetically little as you are crushed by him, since its 5% of your hp.

Whilst I do LOOVVVEEE the uniqueness of this type of solo quest, I feel he is really a little too strong, especially since the idea is surely that you want to be able to pump out around 2k damage before say a minute when he should kill you, so tune it that he only does around 30% or so of your hp in damage before biting you, so that this challenge is there, I would also reccommend disabling healing when he grabs you, to make it less easy as any healing class. This quest has alot of merit to it though, so overall very positive.

After collecting 3/4 of the parts, which most look like goblin totems.. don't know if that is intended but I suppose they look cool and sort of fit in with the grand scheme of the quest of these things being "MECHANISED". The last part is in the area for burning the tents. Now, really, the incineration graphic at the moment looks like you are spewing out plague, when clearly you are meant to be burning these tents, a nice addition would be to make these flamethrowers in animations.

I also don't like how if you aren't close enough to trigger a completion you are allowed to channel the incineration, I always hate it when quests tell you to channel or use a quest item that has an incessantly long cast time and then fails at the end of it. I would advise just being able to only use this quest item if you are in range of the tents. The mechanised air is also in the nearby hut, so that's cool aswell in terms of synergy.

The named npc is right at the end of this area, he is a paladin dressed in 60 pvp gear, gotta love that item set, or at least I think its the alliance 60 pvp set, might be wrong though. He is pretty easy to kill but the look is nice. He drops an item that starts a quest, which is sort of Integral to the storyline of the zone. I mean, you are inclined to loot this since, well you should loot pretty much all the time anyway. However I do like when you go to hand in this quest the quest-giver makes specific note in the "hand-in quest" to check the body for plans and such.

If you are adamant about keeping in STARTING QUEST ITEMS, which personally I am not a major fan of unless you are told to loot corpses anyway and happen to find this extra thing, I digress though. If you want to keep this feature of questing on then yeh the quest is fine, otherwise I would just strongly suggest making the quest to kill him include looting the plans, it makes sense and well I just don't like the STARTING QUEST ITEMS, personal opinion or w/e but regardless.

Anyway, handing all these quests in you learn that the alliance is mounting an attack and low-and-behold the cannons are broken and people sent to get parts haven't reported back, incompetence! You also get to hand in the parts to Clarissa who revives large daddy and you get this awesome quest for killing a bunch of gnomes, what is ever!!! wrong with that :).

The controls are intuitive for this vehicle, but the frost beam seems somewhat superfluous, since the fire beam does more damage and the frost beam doesnt freeze anything. Also the magnets that attract gnomes and flings them again (BTW THIS IS SO FRIGGING AWESOME, OMFG I LOVE IT) is broken, in terms of, it works but it doesn't register the kills you get for using it. So you only get kills from using the beam, which is quick but its not like as cool as the awesome flinging :D.

I also like how kills here count towards the daily and obviously this thing always contributes to like the HORDE VS ALLIANCE theme of the entire area, even if the quest is sort of nothing to do with the overall story. The quest hand-in to Krom'gar text is just amusing "I DONT EVEN KNOW WHERE SHE CAME FROM", which is just hilarious since she turned into some bloodthirsty little kid, don't think I mentioned how whenever you kill anything she whispers you encouraging you :D.

Anyway, after this we like go into the mines to see the incompetence, which is just hilarious, they are all like WELL IF WE GO UP THERE AND REPORT THE SITUATION WE DIE AND IF WE GO IN THERE WE DIE, so they just stay put and send you in to clean up all the shit. The quests here have great synergy, kill elementals all around, save peons (which have some hilarious /say opinions) and collect some items for the actual quest to fix the damn cannons. All these quests are pretty easy, and low-stress value, so that's nice.

Heading back up to the surface after the various comments on the fact you should be promoted, hint hint :P, you fix the cannons and bam the Alliance are attacking, I would really like the phasing to appear when you accept/are on the quest and not just when you are in the cannons, just so the quest looks much more smooth instead of just a massive attack then leaving cannons = no more attack. The actual attack part of this quest is also pretty epic, loads of damn aeroplanes and gnomes parachuting in, it's just a really great feel and I love these sort of quests that put you in the centre of a moment.

After this quest you get promoted to a Krom'gar Legionairre, and like get told to head to Malaka'jin, going to comment on the travelling to this area in the next area, but regardless, this is the end of this zone, things are heating up! you held off an alliance attack and now need to prevent the army from being flanked by the allied grimtotems to the alliance.

The Fold

New day, New zone. Ok, before getting started I'm going to add a few provisos to my coverage of this zone.

1) This zone is INCOMPLETE, I mean there is nothing definitive that tells me the zone is incomplete, however the lack of quests in certain areas and the fact that I was around 1 level short of xp from this zone tells me right off the bat that there needs to be more quests in this zone.

2) This is without doubt my favorite of all the zones so far, despite the fact it is incomplete the actual zone is just awesome, I'll get onto it in a bit but it suffice's to say that this zone is just exactly what I love about questing

3) Oh, I cba with a 3 lets get on with the awesomeness!

Alright so basically we have entered the zone and got promoted to Krom'gar Grunt. This is basically a rank in the Krom'gar army that you carry around with you wherever you are in the zone. When you have one of these buffs activated, ie in the entire zone, you get a special Horde-emblazoned tabard. I didn't actually notice this at first, because as you will note I decided to go back to feral because lack of starsurge made me hate life :<<.

However, this touch is lovely, the tabard itself is of pretty awesome design with the Horde insignia emblazoned upon your chest, you really feel like part of the Horde fighting force. I also like how the rank gives you a sense of how far you are through a zone, and a great sense of progression: Hey, I just did something pretty awesome= promotion. Which, tbh, is an awesome touch. I mean going by how much you have left on your bar or left to explore in the zone is one way to show progression, but this way of arbitrary ranking of yourself throughout an entire zone is just awesome.

Onto the actual questing, as a grunt in the army you are given the menial tasks to do, such as arming bombs, dubbed "elf-killers" in the entryway to stonetalon from Ashenvale. I was kinda disappointed these elf-killers didn't 1-shot the stealthed night-elves in the area, but I do like the synergy between arming bombs and then luring the night-elves over them to kill them, even if it isn't necessary. They are pretty powerful these night-elves though, so the synergy is nice touch to help balance out that power. There are dozens of bombs in the area so arming 8 isn't a problem, they might take a little too long to arm, there was always a sense of OMG A NIGHT ELF IS BOUND TO HIT ME WHEN IM ABOUT TO FINISH AND WASTE 5 SECONDS OF MY LIFE, which isn't necessarily a good feeling on such a relatively long cast time that is cancelled upon damage and not simply pushbacked.

Regardless, you hand in the quest and are told to do more tasks, to find a goblin blastgineer. Kilag Gorefang is also here, who was in the Lost Isles if you did the Goblin area and like he gives you a similar quest to one on the Lost Isles, using infra red spectacles to spot stealthed night-elf and add them onto your minimap, lovely little touch this. There are plenty of night-elves to slaughter here and making your way to the goblin is pretty easy, I had a little trouble getting my camera positioned so I could interact with the quest giver, but that's a pretty minor point imo.

Anyway further to the east here is the objective for the follow-up: kill the named npc, she is actually a high elf: quite rare tbh, especially with this being Kalimdor, but regardless. She is nothing special, she comes with an add, her pet cat, which was actually more of a nuisance than she was to take down, but regardless a pretty simple quest and you get some attack plans.

Handing this in ends our first entering zone really with a trip to Krom'gar fortress, like I said this zone is pretty short, I'm going to comment a little about how I feel about this breadcrumb. I know in previous posts, and probably future ones too, how I like the idea of "travelling quests" i.e. quests that are breadcrumbs AND grant you free passage to the next quest hub, however these pure breadcrumbs here in this zone work.. I never mind having to travel to a place once, especially if you have to go through a battle and get to see the lay of the land.

Sometimes it just doesn't make sense to make every quest give you an automatic transport to the next hub, you are a grunt in this army at the moment and hey it makes no sense that any special treatment would be given to you, precisely because of that.

Anyway, you get told to go to Krom'gar and do this via land. It's pretty easy to just follow the road towards the fortress. Just going to mention that handing this in gives a promotion to Krom'gar Sergeant. I would also like to add how like, again it would be nice if Krom'gar's inspirational speech, which is like periodically repeated, was just triggered by this hand-in. Like with the blood-guard's speech in the previous area, it seems a waste to only catch half of it 90% of the time and not be able to trigger it with this simple hand-in and get to just see the speech.

Anyway, moving onto the Fortress.

Prelude to & Silverwind Refuge

Leaving off from my previous post you are now presented with 3 breadcrumb quests to the last 3 questing areas of the zone. I decided to include them all in 1 post because they are all relatively short and well I already have like 6 different posts on this zone, and certainly didn't need another if I could help it.

The first breadcrumb leads you to like the massive volcano that has sprung up in the zone, of course this is an elemental invasion zone and the earthen ring are on-hand to clear up the area of the rogue elementals. You are given 2 quests, 1 gives you access to a personal pet to help kill elites in the area, awesome idea for making the player feel more powerful, and one is for closing up lava fissures to stop the volcano from doing more damage to the land.

Awesome couple of quests here in terms of both synergy and actual enjoyment. You get access to basically a guardian water elemental for these couple of quests to help you combat the elite fire elementals of the zone. It would be nicer if like the elemental didn't just instantly run out of mana and was able to tank the fire elements so you didn't have to worry about it, they are pretty powerful and the fact that the water elemental is constantly oom and not tanking them means you get hit alot if you are a melee class especially. Since you can't take advantage of the freeze the water elemental does periodically.

Other than that though both these quests are nice and fairly easy to complete, plenty of fissures and fire elementals in the area so, completing them isn't an Issue at all. I also love the fact that the leader constantly yells stuff here, it gives a real sense of danger and imminence of this elemental attack. Great for the immersion in this little quest chain.

After handing these in, there's only one thing left to do, DESTROY THE BIG FIRE ELEMENTAL OF COURSE, I mean seriously its a frigging massive fire elemental... that's so cool. You get a vehicle for this quest which is basically an air-elemental which you don't control movement wise, just ability wise. You have a dot, a direct damage spell and a dispel yourself button at your disposal.

There are a few problems I have with this guy though.. 1) the fact that the fight is justWHOLLY unforgiving, the dot that he does does serious damage on the first tick meaning if you let it tick even once you are probably going to fail the quest.

2) The actual spell he casts, Infernal Conflageration IS NOT the spell you are meant to dispel, that is just highly confusing, you are given a spell to dispel fire from yourself and he does 1 spell that he actually casts and you do nothing to it? that's just highly stupid imo

3) The actual spell you need to dispel is highly unclear when it's cast, if you don't have game-sound on it would be incredibly hard to notice you were afflicted with it. This definitly needs some BIG EMOTE if the immolate spell is going to remain instant cast from the elemental boss.

However, the actual theory of the quest is awesome, I don't mind quests that are a little un-forgiving, but they should be because they are hard and not because of slightly dodgy mechanics which are confusing. I also feel this quest is certainly worthy of a blue reward, it was certainly worth it from the difficulty of this quest imo.

The next breadcrumb, which is the one I would have logically skipped if I didn't know silverwind was the absolute last area, was the quest to go to Raynewood Retreat, you simply have to kill a named keeper dryad here, which is a nice and simple quest, and is basically a complete 1-off, nothing really to complain about the quest here, although perhaps he is a little strong coming with 2 adds, but he wasn't that hard to handle. You could easily just put the breadcrumb to silverwind refuge here, even if it makes sense from a story to be coming from Hellscream's watch.

I don't know, but it needs to somehow be worked around otherwise this quest should just be cut.

Finally we get to Silverwind Refuge though, bam theres a massive amount of night elf corpses in the area since this is an Alliance town in Vanilla. There are several quests in the area, and this basically is another one of these PRELUDE TO STONETALON type quest areas.

I'm going to comment on the fact that you get 2 breadcrumb quests here towards the end of this post.

Firstly you hand in your bomb package to these goblins and they are like WAHHAHEHHAHHAHHEHAEHAHEHEAHEHAEHE we can make an awesome bomb out of this, so you are sent out to help the goblins at their production factory. However they need more parts and are being plagued by Night-elf assassins (They really have loads of these don't they). I do like how the assassins only aggro if you are wearing the Goggles, which are pretty suave btw :D. Anyway there are plenty of assassins round where the pieces are and plenty of pieces.

Like I mentioned in a previous post I was attacked by Ursangous here, who is apart of the old ASHENVALE HUNT vanilla questline, whilst the quest text is right for the hand-in here, compared to the other 2 which actually say take them to Splintertree Post, even though they hand-in at silverwind. Like said in a previous post, unless there is an overarching quest to kill them or inform the player you want to look out and kill these animals, they need to be cut as quests. I mean, whilst the quest text now makes sense for Cataclysm, it makes no sense why the player should automatically be killing mobs they don't need to.

Anyway, you also got quests to kill water elementals in the lake right next to silverwind.. along with killing the named. The named npc drops an extra quest, which involves going to see the npc who is now inside blackfathom deeps and not in Zoram'gar. I'm going to say this quest is unintended, it really breaks from the story-line flow (having to go back to splintertree and then to zoram'gar) and well it's not like the zone needs this extra quest. Overall there are plenty of these elementals, but their knock-back is seriously annoying at times :<.

Handing these in leads to the YOUR THE BOMB quest, which is currently bugged in the beta, obviously you are meant to be riding in the shredder basically and killing night-elves as you take the bomb into stonetalon, but I'm going to comment on this later.

Lastly in this zone we are told to kill the local furbolg who are causing trouble and then kill their leader. These are carbon copies of vanilla quests, and again whilst they make sense in terms of MAKING THE PLAYER VISIT THESE AREAS, they are also sort of detracting from the story of the zone. In terms of the actual quests though, they work well if you just kill furbolg working from west to east you clear a direct path to the next quest area, and they don't respawn in time for you to get the next quest complete. Which is to just DEFEND THE HILL till the boss shows up and you kill him. Overall nice quest, but like I said a little detracting from the story.

Now here is my only real beef with both this zone and well the preludes here. Firstly, you are given access to breadcrumbs before finishing the quests in the zone, 1 is to stranglethorn vale and 1 is to Stonetalon. Now whilst Blizzard wants to promote the fact that you can do ANY ZONE regardless of which other zones you have done, I feel like those breadcrumbs should be in Orgrimmar and not in the middle of my questing experience. If I want to go somewhere like Stranglethorn I am going to go through orgrimmar. The newer player will appreciate the linearitty of only being offered breadcrumbs to go to Stonetalon than being told OH U CAN GO TO THE OTHER CONTINENT AND DO SOME QUESTS HERE, which just doesn't make much sense imo.

I'm also really confused as to how transitioning into Stonetalon is going to work. You HAVE to take the wagon to go to Stonetalon, for both the first promotion and so that people who haven't quested in the zone can transition seemlessly to Stonetalon, btw that quest is awesome, I unfortunately encountered some phasing bugs whilst doing this, shown on the screenshots, resulting on some of the text not being shown and not full interactivety on the wagon. Also I had to exit and re-enter the fold zone in stonetalon. However I digress a little from my rant.

My main point is that doing the "YOU'RE THE BOMB" quest is going to mean you end up in stonetalon when you finish this quest, however you aren't going to be able to start the area because you need the promotion quest, both quests are also important in terms of story. This bomb quest is like THE ONLY REASON the story exists in stonetalon, yet it is optional. Also the fact you are a recruit in the stonetalon army at the beginning and work your way up the ranks throughout the zone is also integral. I really don't know how this is going to work.

My only suggestion is that you use phasing, and heres how I would do it: Like if you quested in Ashenvale, IE you did all the quests at Hellscream's Watch, you can't get the breadcrumb into Stonetalon from the commander.. you have to do the goblin quests and make the bomb. Once the escorting bomb quest isn't bugged and is actually do-able, then what would happen is you would deliver the bomb and the wagon that you would have taken arrives and you get enlisted into the army that way.

Likewise if you enter the zone from an orgrimmar breadcrumb you simply take the quest from the Blood Guard and you get enlisted as a volenteer, whilst you see SOMEBODY ELSE deliver the bomb before you arrive, this way the fact the bomb exists isn't so bad. This breadcrumb quest wouldn't lock out the player from doing those ashenvale quests either, and wouldn't count towards loremaster. It would just be a way of allowing people who didn't quest in Ashenvale to be able to just do Stonetalon.

I'd like to also say that the Blood-guard's speech in Silverwind Refuge should only be triggered by you accepting that breadcrumb, and not on like continuous repeat, I never liked those continual speeches which you always end up only catching halfway through, rather than ones triggered by accepting or handing in quests so you can experience the story better.

Anyway thats the end of the zone, A few comments, despite the fact that alot of the quests in this zone are buggy and some mobs are out of place etc, the story and overall feel of the zone is awesome. I would like warsong to be a little more fleshed out, but other than that the quest distribution is great. There are good mixes of awesome and generic quests, and also quite a few unique quests here.

I would prefer if the armor associated with the zone was say more green and foresty, so that it would sort of go with the zone. Like, it made sense the Northern Barrens' armor set was yellow cos well it's the barren's but it seems silly that the Ashenvale Armor set is just a duller yellow, as it really doesn't blend in well with the overall feel of the zone.

Definitly a good zone, and it serves it's function as really just a prelude to Stonetalon, which btw is just an Insanely awesome zone, without doubt the best so far in terms of story, but I'll come onto that in future posts. A perfectly good zone and with the bugs sorted out it will be fine imo.

Hellscream's Watch

Ok, firstly the name of this quest hub is awesome, lore to do with like HELLSCREAM being the leader of the horde and finally back into the action of fighting those alliance-scum out of their precious city of Ashenvale. You get various quests here, 2 are to do with the area behind Hellscream's watch and the Furbolgs, whilst the other focus on the Horde-Alliance conflict.

Whilst I agree that the quests with the Furbolgs sort of warrant being here, I mean close proximity and such, I feel like it detracts from the story arc, perhaps raiding their camp would give us a benefit against the alliance or unsettle the nightelves or something, but I would like it to have good prevalance to Horde-alliance conflict as it sort of detracts from it.

As such, I decided I would to the Alliance-Horde Conflict quests first, because well thats far more awesome than killing furbolgs :). On the Shores of Ashenvale, right below Hellscream's watch is where the quest objectives are, this is really nice although perhaps a little confusing as to how to get down without just simply jumping, which I just did the first time because I'm lazy and can heal :D. There are plenty of spawns of both the clay and the alliance scum, I mean male night-elves :). I would perhaps like the clay to have a few more sparkles so it's a little bit more obvious. However the quest is functional. I feel like they respawn a little too quickly the night-elves though because I had to fight my way back up to the way back up to Hell-screams watch, but that's a pretty minor point.

The next quest is like BAM THE GOBLINS HAVE MADE AN AWESOME BOMB LETS USE IT. Basically the clay you collected, always awesome to see you contributing, has lead to the creation of a powerful bomb. Of course you test it on some beaten down wagon and bam it blows up, pretty decently tbh. You hand it in and you are given an awesome quest of course: BLOW UP THE ALLIANCE IN ASTRANAAR

Basically you bomb Astranaar, which is just simply put awesome. You get to see the glaive throwers from warcraft 3 of alliance and they the archers take shots of you on your vehicle. The quest is overall simple vehicle technology, simply pressing 1 for bomb and selecting the area you want to bomb, simply awesome quest. I also like the introduction of this "FLY BACK" button so basically you aren't limited by like 1 run and having long fly-in's and fly-outs and basically can just cycle until you are complete, especially helpful if there was more than 1 person on that quest at the same time.

I'm going to add here as a sort of bug, although I don't know if you would call it that. My internet decided to die during this quest the first time I did this, a regular dc and not a world server is down message. When I logged in I spawned without a vehicle and fell-down into a fully packed astrannar with loads of nightelves basically trying to kill me. Luckily I was close to the edge so I could Ress without aggroing any night-elves, but like said I don't know if thats a bug or a limitation with the Vehicle Implementation.

Some of the animations for the fly-in and fly-back are just wrong, you sort of continually "jump" in elevations and paths, and it doesn't look very natural, obviously the quest is functional, but of course it would be nice to see this polished.

Anyway, after completing this you are given breadcrumbs to like 3 different areas of Ashenvale, going to come back to this as I discuss the Furbolg quests first though.

Heading North out of Hellscream's Watch we reach the furbolg village and proceed to massacre everything in site. We also need to head into a cave and collect some troll charms. The mobs in the cave do not count towards the other quest, which is really annoying synergy-wise however there are just soo many of those troll-charm boxes that the quest is fine regardless. There are also like a billion furbolg outside in the village, so that isn't a problem either, it's just some synergy between the 2 quests would have been much appreciated.

There is also a friendly furbolg in the area outside of the cave, not sure if he is meant to give you a quest or something, but it seems really strange that he would be there. If he was an alliance quest-giver I would suggest phasing him or making him neutral and non-attackable rather than friendly and attackable.

Now, like I said you get given breadcrumbs to the 3-final quest areas of Ashenvale here, in my opinion this is at least 1 too many. I don't like how there is a breadcrumb to silverwind refuge here, because this is naturally the last area of the zone and well I feel like you should definitly should be led to do the other 2 areas first before heading to silverwind refuge, whereas logically you would skip at least one of them in terms of quest-efficiency routes.

Regardless though, last post of Ashenvale coming up!

Zoram'gar Outpost

Ok, so we get a nice way of travelling between the horde quest hubs here, just simply talking to the flightmaster to get a flight out there. This is just so great in terms of not interrupting the questing experience and well a unique way of bypassing the alliance quest hubs in-between the 2 Questing Areas.

Here, we are given a look at the new look Zoram'gar: and isn't it just awesome, loving the new Horde architecture of war-driven looks and well more crisp instead of say the huts of like a rag-tag disorganised horde, which wasn't so threatening or just awe-inspiring.

Here, we are sort of given a break off the front-lines of the horde-alliance conflict and are instead focusing on securing supply-lines and troops and well investigating blackfathom deeps, onto this later.

Arriving into the zone we get a bunch of quests, 1 to light a lighthouse, unique type of quest afaik :O, 1 to collect some stuff, 1 to kill a load of Naga and 1 to do a sort of Escort.

I'll start with the escort first, because well accepting it makes it automatically trigger. This escort is well... it's exactly the same as it was in Vanilla, down to the handing it into the Warsong runner (apart from you don't gain his report this time for it). Seems a bit weird you would be handing in this quest to him. Onto the actual quest, he takes a painfully long time to get to the actual area we are fighting. He is quite a powerful escortee though, so the waves of Naga are fairly easy to handle, although somewhat annoying that if you don't do enough damage to his target you won't be able to loot the heads of the naga for the other quest. (I would really have loved this quest escort to involve killing exactly 20 naga, it would have been awesome for synergy purposes).

The final guy at the end of the escort isn't too tough, I mean it makes no sense his quest description I mean it made sense when zoram'gar was a small outpost and was highly vulnerable to attack because it was just basically a camp outpost, but now its a ful-fledged fortress pretty much and it sort of makes no sense that this hydra would be able to seemingly decimate, as implied, zoram-gar on multiple occasions. Regardless he's a uniquely colored hydra and falls rather easil.

Now, the next quests involve killing Hydra and collecting parts, both of which happen to be at the bottom of the ocean here. They really need to give a water-breathing buff and/or a swim-speed buff (yes I forgot about water form I suck :<<<<). Really though, the ocean here is really deep and you have to come to the surface around 3-5 times whilst doing this quest, which makes the quest exceedingly annoying. I do like these sort of COLLECT ITEMS TO MORPH THEM INTO THIS NEW ITEM, however some way of tracking them would be nice other than looking into your inventory.

The area is also *REALLY* close to the edge of the zone in terms of fatigue, Reef sharks patrol the edge here, which are like elite creatures designed to deter players from heading into fatigued zones. I could see people accidentally aggroing them, which is always a concern to me. Anyway after killing all the hydra, which there are plenty of spawns of, along with the parts at the bottom of the ocean, it's just they are too spread out if you aren't given access to water breathing and/or a swim-speed buff.

You find yourself returning to Zoram'gar to hand in the quests and like cook your hydra blubber to make oil. A few things, when I had 10/10 blubber it showed me where the lighthouse was on the map for me to go and hand that in, rather than like the forge where I cooked it. Then when I made the oil the quest objectives map was showing I needed to go collect more blubber. I don't know if this is a limitation with the quest objectives, but it would be nice to be shown where to do the quest with the oil aswell as where to collect the hydra depending on what part of the quest you might be on.

After climbing the lighthouse and lighting it, which tbh didn't make enough of a difference to the flame, maybe somebody else had just been here and lit it but I don't think so. It definitly needs to be MUCH brighter when you light the flame to just add to the realism of the quest and of course the immersion aswell.

Now, you get one last quest here to like... get some venison for the soldiers at Zoram'gar a nice quest that makes sense in the story of the lore, it's just its timing is a litte ><, I mean the problem here is you get given all the quests to do with like the Blackfathom Deeps area before the venison quest, and so logically you would be doing these and heading to Blackfathom deeps before going back to do the venison quest. So it just seems rather isolated, having all the blackfathom deeps area quests unlock when you unlock this venison quest would make much more sense in terms of quest cycling.

Onto the actual quest though, there really are nowhere near enough stags. I'm sure there might be loads like heading into alliance territority, but they need to be more concentrated on the edges of the beach in my opinion, I don't want to be heading into alliance territory to get some venison if I can just get it here. Also the drop rate isn't 100%, it's like 50-75% or so. Increase it to 100% please, I hate killing stags in the first place and the fact there aren't really enough and the drop rate isn't 100% is just irritating.

However, yes this is part of the area I love, the fact they kept the Blackfathom deeps outside quests in the game. It's just overall nice to be sort of led into the area of Blackfathom deeps by quests outside the area, allowing any person questing in Ashenvale to unlock the dungeon in the dungeon finder, and well do some quests. I question actually entering the instance to hand in like 2 quests but yeh. The actual quests themselves, plenty of spawns of those Sapphires on the walls, plenty of tide priestesses and the drop-rate on the QUEST STARTING piece of paper was perfectly reasonable. Overall these quests were very nice and easy to complete, whilst giving the player an actual reason as to why you would want to go and do Blackfathom Deeps as an instance, it's lore and story etc.

But yeh, that's it for this zone, you get a breadcrumb to go to Hellscream's Watch after handing these quests in.. so ONWARD!!!