Shadowlands Pre-Expansion Patch

Hey, since I'm currently still dipping my toes into retail I can write about the same stuff as all the cool kids are talking about: the pre-expansion event for Shadowlands.

So far it consists of three parts (though my understanding is that more will be added this week):

Part one has you talking to Genn Greymane in Stormwind and he tells you in the form of a cut scene that King Anduin was abducted by some weird flying creatures. As a sort of afterthought it transpires that other faction leaders were captured as well. It's all a big plot by Sylvanas! I'll admit that I've only been following the storyline of the current expansion from afar, but this all feels kind of ham-fisted and disconnected. I did like how you had the option to trigger additional conversations between the NPCs though if you're interested in that kind of thing (which I am).

Then you get sent off to investigate and deliver some reports about a Scourge invasion in the area, which involves slaying a couple of zombies but doesn't really feel very exciting.

Part two gives you a quest to kill Nathanos Blightcaller at the Marris Stead, where he just happens to hang out, waiting to be attacked. Doing this results in a cool cut scene, though it was a bit weird/buggy for us in a group. The husband and I got separated so he actually got his kill before me, but we were still grouped so I suddenly got thrown into a cinematic while flying over Arathi Highlands. I quickly escaped out of it so that I could watch it again later in the proper context, which fortunately worked. The husband on the other hand never saw the cut scene at all and had to go to YouTube to watch it. I thought that one was pretty neat, even if it involved an NPC kill-stealing from the players once again.

Nathanos also dropped an ilevel 115 weapon, which was more than double the strength of what I had. I'd read somewhere that you could kill him repeatedly if you wanted more than one (e.g. if you were dual-wielding, which my monk is), so returned later for another go but had no luck, as the two additional kills resulted in no loot whatsoever. However, at least this gave me an opportunity to try out the pre-made group finder feature, which was functional but weeeird.

Part three of the event has you flying to Icecrown and doing a couple of dailies there as well as the option to visit a world boss every twenty minutes. (There are twenty different ones on a rotation.) Doing so rewards you with a currency that you can trade in for some catch-up gear, which once again more than doubled my ilevel in those slots.

The most common opinion of the event from what I've seen is that people tend to find it okay but underwhelming. I actually kind of like it though, but then I'm probably not a good judge - once I started thinking about it, I only really remember the Cataclysm pre-expansion event and no others, as I have no memory of taking part in either the BC or Wrath ones.

Anyway, I do wonder whether this isn't intentionally designed to appeal to players coming over from Classic or more generally returning old-school players, because it certainly ticked several boxes for me:

• Killing Nathanos at the Marris Stead is something Alliance players do in Classic as well, so it's a nice tie-in.
  
• It's hard not to get the feels when returning to Icecrown. I always say that Wrath wasn't my favourite expansion and was when things first started to go downhill (in my opinion), but that doesn't mean that I don't have plenty of good memories of that expansion too. The bosses are all revived versions of Wrath dungeon bosses as well, uttering familiar quotes, so there's a lot of "a-ha, I remember you" going on. There's nothing quite like watching Falric fear several dozen players around an Icecrown rampart.
  
• I've seen people complain that the twenty minutes between boss spawns are too long/slow, but personally I appreciate the somewhat slower pace. I'm not a completionist who's there to camp all the things, and I agree with Rohan that the timing encourages you to use the bosses to bookend other activities. In general I feel that retail is too much of a rush-rush game these days, but that's a whole different post to be honest.
• The bosses also actually encourage some friendly community interaction as people will always helpfully share spawn times and locations in general chat (the new map ping system is really cool by the way). People being friendly and helpful to strangers in retail? Perish the thought.
  

An Eastern Plaguelands Adventure

As I was getting close to hitting level 60, I decided that it was time to find some grindy quests to fill out those last couple of bars. There was plenty of content left to do but I already had my eyes set on the start of Tirion Fordring's quest chain, which requires you to depopulate half the Eastern Plaguelands. I hadn't actually thought about Tirion's background as a sad hermit living off maggot stew in a long time. Hemet Nesingwary has nothing on this guy's bloodlust in Vanilla.

My first attempt to get going actually got aborted before I'd even made it to the Plaguelands, as I got a whisper while on the gryphon whether I wanted to tank Sunken Temple. I had realised last time that I'd forgotten to pick up my class quest (because to be honest I'd forgotten that everyone got one of these for Sunken Temple to begin with, so I hadn't been on the lookout), so I needed another run anyway and was happy to oblige. All I can say is that it was another successful and entertaining run.

As a result of this, my second attempt at tackling Tirion's quests saw me armed with a shiny new axe. I started my play session by spending several minutes whacking away at a carrion grub, trying to get my one-handed axe skill at least into the double digits.

As I moved out of Tirion's little corner of the Plaguelands, I saw that someone else had already cleared out the area and eventually ran into a rogue who was obviously on the same mission as me. She instantly threw me a group invite.

In that second before I accepted, a lot of thoughts raced through my head, not as fully formed words, but as concepts. Modern MMOs have generally made me not want to group up for kill quests, because usually they only require you to kill something like six mobs anyway and if I'm already on the fourth one there is little point in accepting a group invite when I'll be up and away again thirty seconds later. Also, I had kind of come out here specifically to grind on my own. But that quest counter required me to kill seventy mobs or so, without being specced for dps. I accepted.

We had barely grouped up when four Horde came riding by. I tried to run but didn't stand a chance. My new companion vanished and immediately apologised for leaving me hanging, but I agreed that there wouldn't have been any point in her attacking, what with there being four of them. Once I'd recovered my body, we began scouring the area for mobs more seriously. The rogue turned out to be a skinner and a herbalist, diligently hoovering up the leftovers of all dead hounds and bats, and frequently dashing off into the nearby hills to pick flowers. She got really excited about some of them and I couldn't blame her - she even found a black lotus. She apologised for seemingly having such a short attention span but I could completely relate, seeing how my own main in retail used to be a herbalist and my main in SWTOR is also a bioanalyst (the fancy sci-fi version of a flower picker, and I still get shouted at for not keeping up with the group in that game - some things never change).

I apologised for my lack of damage contribution and explained that I was levelling my weapon skill (never mind the whole prot/holy thing) but she didn't seem to mind and was just delighted by my buffs and constant cleansing of the various nasty debuffs that plaguelands critters have a habit of leaving on you - seriously, some of those can be nearly crippling depending on your class and have durations of up to half an hour.

I soon commented that questing as a duo was oddly relaxing and she said that this was because it was so safe, and it's absolutely true. Vanilla WoW managed to strike that golden balance of making it possible and feasible to quest on your own at all times, but since pulling adds could be highly painful, grouping up was a great way of reducing stress, not to even mention the added strength in numbers on a PvP server.

Later, when the follow-up mission to the mega-grind sent us to the Undercroft to retrieve Taelan's toy hammer, clicking the mound of earth there spawned four mobs at once, plus a couple of nearby zombies decided to join in as well. The rogue was initially alarmed, but I laid down a consecration and controlled the lot of them while she burned them one by one, eventually resorting to a Lay on Hands when I got low on both health and mana. She laughed and commented that this was a classic pally move. It reminded me of how much I previously enjoyed teaming up with damage dealers - as a paladin with a prot/holy spec I'm pretty good at staying alive through all kinds of shenanigans, but killing things can be painfully slow. Having someone to help with that while keeping any situation under control by tanking and healing is just the perfect combination.

When we had finished up the EPL part of the quest chain and I needed to log off because it was late, I was quite pleased with the evening's progress. It just continues to fascinate me how easily and naturally grouping up occurs in the Vanilla WoW environment even now, and that despite of the questing being perfectly solo-friendly.

From EPL to the Badlands

You have to hand it to Blizzard - they are pretty decent at telling an interesting story. Whether "being told a story" is what I'm looking for in an MMO in the long term remains open for debate, but in the short term I'm quite willing to take the bait and pursue a quest line simply to find out what happens next. In fact this is working so well that I've been zooming through both levels and zones at a remarkable speed for my standards.

The Eastern Plaguelands are still a lot more plagued than the Western ones, but progress is being made to heal them as well. Light's Hope Chapel is quite a quaint little place these days, all the watch towers have been turned into mini hubs, and I was most surprised to find that both the Infectis and the Pestilent Scar had been transformed into lakes. Even if there is still a lot more boring brown than I'd like, the overall mood of the zone has moved from depressing towards optimistic, just like in WPL, and I appreciated it. The Battle of Darrowshire chain still tugs at your heart strings (even if it has been condensed for convenience), but the main storyline guiding you through the zone is a more light-hearted matter that has you making friends with a lot of NPCs. Mostly I found them quite likeable, though the two paladins were very prone to repeating the same couple of phrases over and over in quick succession whenever they accompanied you out into the field, which got tedious somewhat quickly.

The zone also felt quite long. This wasn't a coincidence as I checked afterwards and the zone achievement contains a lot more quests than most of the other revamped old world areas. I don't want to say that it dragged on, because it never really felt that way, but at the same time slaughtering all those plague bats, undead and Scarlets certainly did bring back a bit of that vanilla WoW feel for me.

I was also pleasantly surprised when I got a Mr Grubbs. The pet collectors among you may laugh at me now, because you of course knew about this pet and made sure to get it the moment the Shattering hit. But I don't keep up with these things... in fact, I almost vendored the poor fellow at first because the icon reminded me of bear organs and similar vendor trash; good thing I noticed the green text. Once I had him out however and got to witness his wonderfully silly bouncing animation while idling in Ironforge, there was no end to my delight. I was most disappointed that I couldn't add the next three Mr Grubbses that I found to my collection as well, or at least pass them on to other characters. You take good care of these little guys, Mr Vendor guy, you hear me?

The only thing that I didn't like about the new Eastern Plaguelands - and I admit that this is a fairly minor complaint - was the fact that the last quest of the major storyline, no spoilers here, requires you to fight an evil mob alongside some NPC allies, but the moment you get ready to fight, the view switches to cut scene mode and you simply see the NPCs doing the job for you. You never even get to join in. I just didn't understand that. I may not be that fond of cut scenes to begin with, but I can see where they can serve a purpose to show something happening that isn't usually part of normal gameplay. But fighting a mob? That's the most basic unit of the game, why prevent me from joining in? Turning the act of playing my character into a passive affair of watching mobs die without any input from me is not a good thing.

Funnily enough, in the next zone I went to, the Badlands, Blizzard then immediately showed that at least some of their designers do understand that concept. The quest The Day Deathwing Came (and its follow-ups) has been praised by many and while I don't think it's that amazing (funny, yes) it's a case of clever use of game mechanics to make the player feel more involved instead of less. Usually when an NPC tells you a story, that either involves reading a lot of scrolling dialogue or clicking through several pages of quest text, but this quest has you acting out what's being told. There's another quest like this in Durotar, and it definitely makes the whole process a lot more fun and memorable.

On a more serious note, the Badlands were the first revamped zone I visited that didn't seem to be designed to progress you through roughly five levels. I guess after the Plaguelands the devs realised that they'd have to cram more and more quests into each zone in order to keep players busy for that long and just gave up on this model. The Badlands story only takes as long as it takes, which was two to three levels for me without heirlooms. It's a good story though, a little heart-wrenching in parts but with some very interesting lore implications. If it isn't continued in another zone, I hope that Blizzard picks it up again in some other form before the end of the expansion.

Oh, and one quest ended up being unintentionally hilarious: it has you fighting Nyxondra, a black dragon with a lot of whelps, alongside a couple of pet NPCs. I thought I'd be clever and pull her with my archer guy's ranged attack, but then it turned out that she also cast a fear every so often, scattering my little party all over the place and aggroing half a dozen whelps. Good thing that I was playing an invincible paladin, otherwise I might have been in trouble. Still, the whole thing felt a lot like a badly botched Onyxia attempt, which I thought was very funny.