This past week has been fairly eventful for me in WoW. I’ve been leveling my Death Knight very casually compared to the seemingly standard pace set by those around me. As of writing this post I am about halfway through level 76. I’ve completed all of the quests in Borean Tundra, half the quests in Howling Fjord, all the quests in Dragonblight, and most all the quests in Grizzly Hills.   The Dragonblight quests were, for the most part, enjoyable. I really enjoyed Wyrmrest temple and the storyline about how the various dragon flights have tkane to fighting the blue flight. Seeing Alexstrasza in human form really brought back the memories of reading Day of the Dragon and it has begun to really tie together the story for me. In addition to the lore, the reputation rewards for the Wyrmrest Accord are fantastic. I’ve been doing the daily quests for them the entire week and hope to be Revered with them in no time. (Oh, and if you haven’t watched the in-game trailer after completing all the Dragonblight quests then you really should.)
My Grizzly Hills experience has been rather lackluster. The quests are pretty standard “Kill 10 of this” or “collect 10 of this from these” or “Get 10 of these and talk to this guy to get 10 of those”. This place was truly a crawl towards the end and I ended up forgoing at least 10 quests that undoubtedtly had followups. I just couldn’t stand it anymore. The daily quests here are worth mentioning. I’ve spent an addition chunk of time running these quests to work up reputation and take advantage of the nice exp and money. Unfortunately, I think these led to part of my burnout. These daily quests are trixy, you see, because they lure you in with their flashy rewards but before you realize what’s happened you find yourself despising them. It’s the “I have to do this crap even if I don’t want to” feeling… almost as though I’m being forced to complete them when I don’t want to because I know if I don’t … bah.  Anyway, the best part of Grizzly Hills is the music, heh.
Now that I’m level 76 I’ve decided to go into Zul’drak. I know, I know, the place has a bad rap. Apparently it’s not very much fun? *shrug* I’ll be the judge of that. I’m at least going to give it a shot because of the sheer number of Argent Crusade quests I’ve found. The rep with these guys will give me a good number of upgrades. I’m hoping that getting faction with these guys is as easy as it was for the Walrus people in Dragonblight or the Wyrmrest Accord (so easy because of the 250+ rep per quest).  We’ll see how this place goes. If it ends up being a drag then I can always head over to Sholazar Basin. I have a quest titled “Where in the world of Hemit Nesingwary” … *shiver* … I hate Nesingwary. His name alone instills fear into my soul. At the first opportunity, I think I’ll take an assassination mission from D.E.H.T.A. to take this bugger out…
I can’t leave out my instance runs this week. I did a run of Drak’theron which was boring. The mobs, bosses, loot and look of the place were “bleh”.  I just couldn’t get excited about it at all. I did however enjoy the Dalaran dungeon Violet Hold. This little one room dungeon offers a couple bosses with great loot all in about 20 minutes or less. We burned through it four times in a row one afternoon and each walked out with 2-3 upgrades. How awesome is that? Seriously, this was a lot of fun. The best part? I tanked it! Yep, my DPS spec’d DK was able to tank with a few tank items on and hold aggro with zero trouble.  I actually enjoyed it too and decided that if needs be I wouldn’t mind tanking more in the future. It takes me back to my days of tanking MC, Ony, Azuregos, BWL, and AQ40.
This next week should bring a lot of interesting updates. I’ll probably be close to level 80 with a ton of leftover quests. I’m sitting at around 3300 gold which means I still need another 3,000+ for my Epic mount (Since I have to buy the basic, basic training, winter flying, and epic mount… ugh), so I hope that the exp-to-money at level 80 is pretty good.
Spoilers:Â ‘Read More’ for some of my thoughts on the story elements contained in the Wrath Gate storyline.
Okay, this was awesome. It has to do with the story events that follow the Wrath Gate cinematic.  After you watch the cinematic you are brought back to where the event began. However, Blizzard cleverly employs their phasing technology to make the world around you change based on where you’re at in the story. At this point Alextrasza appears in dragon form with her cohort and has you take the armor of the young Saurfang back to his father. This begins a huge portion of the story where you go to Thrall and begin a siege to take back the Undercity from Putress and Varamathras. It turns out that Sylvanas isn’t a bad guy like Arthas perhaps thought.
During the siege to take back Undercity, players get this buff that basically makes you a god. You fight side by side with Thrall and Sylvanas and work your way through the Undercity until you’ve beaten Varamathras. Right before you fight him, Varamathras summons the burning legion through the portal and when you defeat them an unknown voice says “You failed me Varamathras”… (I wonder who this could be…).  Here’s the best part: After you kill Varamathras, the king of Stormwind returns!! He’s still a bigot and wants to annihilate Orcs and all that good stuff. He essentially reignites the war between the Horde and the Alliance. A PERFECT segue into WARCRAFT 4!!! (Please?)
Blizzard really nailed their ability to tell a story in WotLK. I’m very, very impressed. Their ability to alter the player’s perception of the world without making sweeping changes for everyone is really something that every game is going to need in order to tell their stories as effectively.  I can’t wait for more of this stuff – heck, I hope there’s more of it later in the story.
What did you think of the Wrathgate questline?
Drak’tharon is more fun after you’ve done the drakuru questline out of granite springs. Not only is it a fun questline (bit of running, as a warning) that heavily involves the troll lore, but its final step is a fairly easy quest inside Drak’tharon that leads to a scripted scene after the last boss kill which includes the lich king himself – definitely worth seeing!
@pcmodem: That’ll teach me to skip quest lines. I wonder if I can find that on Youtube or something. Does it include much storyline – the Drak’tharon Lich King thing?
@Mordiceius: I’ll update my blog post with some spoilers here in a few minutes and include my thoughts.
The Drak story line is pretty meaningful to the Troll story line because it’s carried on within Zul’drak, so it’s actually worth doing to get a real grasp of what’s going on.
It’s an interesting story line too and raises the question of moral choice within the game. Some of the things that pop up in conversation got me thinking at least.
You need need need to go ahead and buy basic training and winter flight once you hit 77. The last two zone require a flying mount. To the point that blizz gives out a loner mount that flys at just run speed(ew). Also, the Nesingwary quests are basic Nesingwary(there’s a quest that is literitly kill 60 animals, that’s it, no lore or anything), but you can knock out the Nesingwary quests fast and get on with some much more interesting ones in the zone, including a cool chain that involves the Titans.
Keen – Although not as important to the overall WoTLK story arch as say, the wrathgate line, its definitely has a serious storyline to it, with backstory on the nearby zones and dungeons – much like the Coldarra line. Every 3rd quest or so you’ll get some nice little in-game scripted events involving troll lore.
I’m guessing you probably just didn’t finish the vector/bread crumbs quest that gets you up to Granite springs. You don’t need it, I believe, to pick up the starter quest – which begins by having you take a trap and a drooling companion over to the nearby ruins to “make friends” with a troll.
Once you return to the camp, you and the troll will have a chat, and you’ll be in the main questline – which spans the entire zone, unfortunately.
Hrmm, I’ll probably skip it then. Any more time in Grizzly Hills and I’ll just end up getting more jaded than I want to be. I’ll probably just move into Zul’drak and do some quests and try to pick up the story from a wiki or something.
I actually loved Grizzly Hills, but my characters are Alliance. I also really enjoyed Zul’Drak as Alliance as well.
Ah, so this is where you have been lately.
It should be noted that one of the early and main queslines in Zul’drak is a continuation of the quest line in grizzly hills. You STILL don’t need to do the grizzly hills quest line to do it, but it just all links together. You start in grizzly hills, lead into drak keep , and then reap the consequences in zul’drak. I never did grizzly hills, so the quest was a lot less interesting to me (Just more or less a standard quest line instead of something epic and involving your character)
if you dont like a zone skip it and dont worry about it at all, but go back once you are 80 the quests will be faster and you get a lot more gold for them.
Zul’drak was incredible! At least the first part of the zone was. With the Ebon Hold people helping us out and doing that massive chain. (Riding on a massive thing FTW, won’t go into much detail but very fun!) And a few encounters with arthas along the way.
Ah really… Ebon Hold is in Zul’drak? I must find them. I want their rep!
I wouldn’t stress too much about rep before 80, it’s really easy to get rep with all of the factions then just by throwing on a tabard before you start running instances. Also, if you’re interested in argent crusade and ebon hold rep, I recommend you hit up icecrown as soon as you’re airborne because of the two major quest and dailies hubs for the two factions there.
Kind of sad to hear Grizzly Hills is boring for Horde, I did the quests there on my Alliance characters and had a relatively pleasant time there. Westfall references and Mr. Floppy to name a couple. Well at least my troll hunter will be able to breeze through it. I liked Zul’drak for the most part which is saying a lot for me since I’m not too big a fan of troll lore, ironic I know.
If you like phasing you’ll like Storm Peaks and Icecrown. There’s a little bit of phasing in Zul’drak, but not much. Nesingwary quests won’t last nearly as long as they did in BC and aren’t really the main focus of Basin. P.S. you’ll definitely need a flying mount for Storm, Ice and a little of Basin.
Sholazar Basin, aside Scourge quest chain, is worst zone in the game. The daily quest factions there are more from Hello Kitty Adventure and make me sick.
Grizzly is quite OK but I still remember “bring me 10 meat noob” quest which I feel quite offended with 😉 Killing Arugal was pretty nice tho and so are daily pvp quests (I did them like 2-3 times for free XP while leveling). Still this is probably 2nd worst zone.
Zul’Drak lowest part is awesome, higher ones are not that good but still not bad at all.
If you want to see best zones in wotlk go to Storm Peaks and especially Icecrown.
yeah sholazar is a lot like grizzly so you might want to skip that too, but its really fast and easy xp.
keen what about pvp in wintergrasp ? tell us whats right and what works in that place and what stuff should Mythic ‘steal’ from lake wintergrasp
Make sure not to miss out on the Oracles vs. Frenzyheart quests in Shol. Basin. Standard quests but the NPCs and storyline are fun 🙂
“If you want to see best zones in wotlk go to Storm Peaks and especially Icecrown.”
…assuming you have artisan riding skill and a fast flying mount. If not, it’s doable but REAL slow (as I’ve done some of it already with a regular flying mount). I was going to wait and make money first for my mount but you actually make more money at 80th lvl, so I’ve decide to keep leveling (I’m at 79th now).
Quest chain in Dragonblight was still the best for me so far. Although the one quest in Stormpeaks where you are using a grappling hook to jump onto the back of dragons to fight with their riders and knock them off was pretty cool. Seemed very cinematic.
BTW I enjoyed Scholazar Basin because the quests formed a close hub around the camp. Thus you really didn’t have to go that far to complete them. And yes there is a quest to kill 60 beasts but it has some fun interaction with it, plus you’re killing beasts for other quests at the same time, so they all overlap and thus you’re not really focused on the kill 60 beasts.
@Mathias: I definitely have a lot to say about Wintergrasp. I’ve played it many times now but pre-80 I still feel that I’m not getting the most out of it. I’ll write about it before this weekend for sure.
I installed Wrath last friday, and i’ve hit 74 over the weekend. I think i’ve figured out what Blizzard is doing.
Make everything easy, make everyone feel epicly powerful!
We 4 manned The Nexus at 70, with a Pally tank – Ret specced. The elites in the world are a joke… even more so than in Burning Crusade (most group quests are unnecessary to group for).
I do like the world however, it feels they made a good choice of going away from the space-goat theme of BC.
PS. What’s a “bigit”?
That’s called a spelling error. 😉 You should know that I’m the king of typos!
As you are, Keen then I am too – back in WoW leveling a Death Knight. Just working my way through the instance area around Ebon Hold. Makes sense really, as my highest level character was only 61 pre-return!
[…]Much like Keen noticed, there seems to be a lot more kill/collect quests […]