Spiderheart hit level 80 this afternoon while doing quests for the Brunhildvar in Storm Peaks, an area and set of quests I continue to love.
Later in the day, I did my first heroic-level tanking, for acquaintance sin the Nexus. At first I stank. Then I stank some more. Gradually I didn't stink quite so much. We finished up downright okay.
I have a lot to master yet.
I've got posts in progress, including some notes on my first experience with death knight tanking. (Short form: wow, went great; death knight tanking is more fun for me than warrior tanking.) Unfortunately I've also got the Martian death flu again. So for the moment, here's a grab bag of screenshots.
The war of chickens! Akaa has the pet chicken you can earn with some amusing effort in Westfall; Spider's got the mechanical chicken that's a token of thanks from the gnome whose wandering robots one rescues in Tanaris, Feralas, and the Hinterlands. Unfortunately, no showdown of nature versus art seems impending:
I got some pictures of Tivara and the Kalu'aks' mighty turtle ferries a while back, but happened on this angle just the other day, as Spider was returning from a quest on the sea floor in the Dragonblight:
Sean, I have not forgotten the World in WoW series, I've just been sick, busy, or sick and busy so much. But it is coming, because I'd like to write a bit about the overall situation as far as gods and titans goes so as to have a proper context for writing about Dragonblight questing. It involves the dragonflights a lot, and the more one knows of the lore, the more fun they are. In the meantime, here's a fun moment. Quests in Darkshore and the Wetlands have Alliance characters helping out at dwarf-run excavations and gathering up pieces of fossils and relics. Then one puts them together, and a manifestation of the titans shows up to tell everyone to knock it off and get the hell off the titans' lawn:
The above moment came about because I thought it would be fun to build up Spider's reputation with lots of people. So does the one below. WoW players have pretty well all seen this, but for those of you who use me as your surrogate...
Uldaman is another dwarvish dig site, in the Badlands region in the center of the Eastern Kingdoms. As with several other such sites, the Ironforge dwarves exploring it ran into troggs from below and hostile Dark Iron dwarves from above, and the quests for Alliance characters involve a lot of "please help finish this bit of exploration" requests. There's a spot where the adventurers put together a broken staff and use it to open up a magically sealed chamber, and it is a good swipe:
As noted previously, the death knights are undead, just now free-souled rather than bound to the Lich King. So they have a lot of cool abilities. A friend pointed out to me recently that I'm seldom so happy in WoW play than when I can transgress a normal limit on characters' interactions with the world. Take the Path of Frost, which lets characters and their party mates walk, run, and even ride across water. Here's Spider escorting a guildmate of level 20 or so from Menethil Harbor to Southshore, bypassing the higher level critters of the Arathi Highlands:
This is the best shot I've yet gotten of the Acherus Deathcharger, death knights' standard mount. The skin peeling back to reveal glowing bones first appeared on warlocks' dreadsteeds, and I've not yet gotten tired of it:
Dating services! Who knew that one would have to provide dating services? So here's the story. The kalu'ak (the walrus people seen in some previous posts) have an ongoing concern for the health of the ecosystem they live in. Sensible folks. There's a community of sea lions on islands off the Howling Fjord's west coast, with bulls on the south side of a strait and cows to the north, and the community's bull leader dead at the hands of rampaging buccaneers. Now the bulls are muddled and don't know how to get to the cows. There's a daily quest to gather up enough of their favorite fish to lure a bull across the strait. And when it works? Twue wuv!
Kalu'ak elsewhere, in the Dragonblight, are engaged in a pitched struggle with the wolverine-like wolvar. It's an interesting situation. The kalu'ak leader frankly blames the Horde and Alliance for the mess, their expanding settlements pressing the wolvar into crowded conditions that make them more irritable and violence. And the kalu'ak elders think the wolvar are as fundamentally entitled to good lives on the land as themselves. So there's a daily quest to round up wolvar pups so that they won't get slaughtered in the battles—the elders of the kalu'ak realize the risks of going too far in battle and wish to have the wolvar's future in hand before any grand struggle.
Wolvar pups are really, really cute. You can see Spider's shoulder at right for a sense of scale:
And finally, some more heroism. There's an Alliance settlement at Wintergarde, on the eastern side of the Dragonblight. Recently the Scourge started hitting it with a very great deal of force, directed from the floating necropolis of Naxxramas. I'll have more to say and show about that pleasingly epic set of adventures later. This is just a great moment from one of them, using a griffon supplied by the soldiers of Wintergarde Keep to pull out trapped villagers from among the incoming hordes of undead:
Hoping to do more substantial posting this week, as I de-stress on various fronts. Enjoy, in the meantime!
Spiderheart got her first ever look at Northrend this morning. She's seen city-sized demons in combat, peered over the edges of a shattered world, died, been a plaything of the Lich King, regained her freedom, rejoined the society of the living as a perpetual outsider, become an exalted ally of half the members of the Alliance, and gone forth in search of her former master. As Treat Williams put it so well in Deep Rising...
"Now what?"
The Dragonblight is home to the great gathering of dagons, the Wyrmrest Temple. And north of the temple is a road that runs into the heart of Northrend. It's patrolled day and night, by this guy. This is what it's like to have mythology at arm's reach.
Neither Tivara or I yet know what curse he's bearing, but I'm sure we'll find out in due season.
Connectivity failures keep me from playing tonight; I might as well work through some of the picture archive. You'll notice from Tivara's look and gear that this was some weeks back. This stuff really has been piling up.
DEHTA
Back in original WoW, characters at about level 30 could venture into the jungles of Stranglethorn Vale. They would encounter warring tribes of trolls (some with undead minions), pirates, and various other challenges, and also dwarvish big game hunter Hemet Nesingwary. He and his hunting party have the character kill 10 of this and 10 of that, working their way up to the named elite individuals who dominate various animal packs—the tiger Sin'dall, the raptor Tethis, and so on. Most folks I know did them most of the time because it was good experience, and handy rewards for some classes.
Come the Burning Crusade he turned up in Nagrand, leaving his son in charge of the camp back in Azeroth. Same setup, but this time 30 of this and 30 of that, and accompanying jokes among players about how this was going to rival Draenor's shattering for population catastrophe.
Yes, he's in Northrend now. But before travelers like Tivara have a chance to cross his path in the Sholazar Basin, they spend some time in the Borean Tundra, and they run into these folks:
Lathorius is here leading Druids for the Ethical and Humane Treatment of Animals. They have a statue of Nesingwary in the habitat nature intended for him, burning in the Twisted Nether.
Quests for DEHTA are fun and varied. You put down deranged assistant hunters, destroy their traps, and also rescue trapped baby mammoths:
When freed, each one rears up and trumpets some appreciation, which feels remarkably good:
Finally you get to hunt down and dispose of Nesingwary's crazy agents in the Borean Tundra, complete with mammoth riding to trample some of them. There's humor in this, of course, but not a lot of mockery—the victims of the hunt are shown as genuinely suffering, the druids trying to help them seriously focused on doing what good they can and keeping others from doing more harm.
When I first read about these quests, I dread yet another oh-so-clever fannish bashing of anyone so stupid as to actually care about the well-being of animals. I got something a lot better than that, and am happy.
She's got a red drake from the appreciative Wyrmrest Accord, with whom she's now exalted:
I make absolutely no bones about the extent to which this is an occasion for pure glee for me. Flying around on a dragon is such an iconic sort of thing. I never stuck at one character long enough to do the long grind required for the cool mounts in Burning Crusade, and felt bugged by my failure that regard. This is yet another milestone in my march to do this time the things I did not last time.
And it's so cool.
Sure enough, I forgot something.
• Quest Instructions. One of my favorite new addons this year was Lightheaded, because it gathered up Wowhead entries' comments and made them available next to the quest log. Coordinates, special advice, it's all there in Lightheaded. One of my greatest pleasures in addon management this week was going ahead and turning it off because I didn't need it. The clarity and completeness of quest texts has really improved in Lich King. I've needed to go look up something on Wowhead...twice? Maybe three times now. With hundreds of quest done, that's an awfully good success rate, I figure. NPCs describe the position of things, assets you'll need to have along, and tricky complications to be aware of in pretty full, useful language.
Summary: Delighted.
Slightly longer summary: Really delighted.
Let me break out some specific topics.
• Presentation. There's more graphical detail, and it's outstanding. For a great demonstration of this, check out Andromache's post on the subject and be sure to click the picture of his dwarf to get the larger version. There's also no problem I've yet seen with clashing colors and patterns that led some people to describe early Outland gear as all being "of the assclown" in addition to any other properties it had. Early Northrend gear is subdued but brighter colors come in as one goes along, making for a pleasing progression. The music is also a pleasure, very rich and enjoyable—I've got the game music on a lot more than I never did before.
When Tivara first landed in Borean Tundra, I really did gasp a time or two while looking at the scenery. Then came the Howling Fjord, and I thought, "Wow, this is just amazing." Then I saw Utgarde Keep and thought, "This is just really amazing, one of the best-looking instances ever." Then I saw the Nexus and thought, "They've outdone themselves, this is maybe the best-looking instance ever." Wyrmrest Temple and environs: "Astounding." Azjol'Nerub: "This is brilliant. I have never seen so utterly breathtaking, amazing an instance. How can they top this?" Dunno yet, but I'm looking forward to finding out. :)
• Participation. Be it noted that I have a sometimes-pathological loathing for a lot of jargon, and am prepared to go some distance to avoid many popular buzzwords. "Interactive" has gotten my goat recently, since I think it folds together concepts that deserve separate consideration. WoW hasn't gotten any more interactive in the sense that you do things other than pick up quests, perform their tasks, turn them in, and so on. What has changed is the kinds of situations that Blizzard presents for players and their characters, the range of available responses, and the reactions that our choices provoke from bystanders of all sorts.
The nature of the story has changed. Any player character who's made it to Northrend is presumed to have what it takes...by most NPCs, but not by all. Some are always going to be scornful, while others can be won over. But most authorities are prepared to grant some respect to someone who's come through everything PCs have to get that far, and a lot of folks are outright grateful for help. Furthermore, characters aren't just left to their own devices. There's a lot of tool use, from specialized implements of torture to tanks to drive and dragons to fly upon. Characters often join in battles already underway, and contribute to their success (or failure), and summon aid, and rescue trapped comrades, and so on.
• Activity. WoW has always had some fun stuff going on that doesn't depend on the characters, and indeed much that can be seen only when characters can avoid triggering hostilities. There are herds of gazelles in the Barrens, and skeletal guards who throw some of their own bones for their demonic hounds to chase, and on and on. But the expansion pack drives the level of independent action way up. Many more NPCs move around, rather than just standing or sitting in one place. This evening, Tivara fought some trolls on the eastern coast of Northrend, and the ones at water level were fishing rather than patrolling. More predatory animals hunt prey; more prey dodges and fights back. It's an even more vivid world to just sit and watch sometimes.
• Plots and Phasing. Plotting is hard in an MMO environment—world-changing payoffs would break or at least drastically change the game for everyone who comes along later. One of the things that make Blizzard such a success is that it learns from others. Other MMOs introduced various ways to make significant parts of the world behave like the dungeons and other features inside instanced areas. Blizzard's version is called phasing, and what it does is this: it changes the environment and NPCs shown to you in a particular area depending on your character's status. In the death knight starting quest sequences, for instances, first you see the town of New Avalon with blue skies and green fields and the assault just beginning; after winning some milestone victories, you see the northern reaches burned and sacked but the southern ones still intact; finally you see it all in flames and ruins.
(Yes, of course I have screen shots, but this is a text post. Stop sniggering like that, I can too write with nothing more visual than the occasional emoticon.)
They use the same technique in Northrend to dazzling effect at least once. Quests all over the Dragonblight in the mid-70s level range lead to a cut-scene movie of a particularly epic battle and then use phasing to let those who've seen the fight see its aftermath, on the spot and elsewhere. (I'm being vague because it's really, really, really worth getting to see the events unspoiled.) Your character spends an hour or more in customized versions of familiar places as well as the battlefield, with strategic consequences. And even though the phasing ends and you resume seeing the regular versions, the things that happen matter to future quests.
• Continuity and Visibility. The storylines in Outland weren't as disconnected from developments back home on Azeroth as they often seemed, but the connections were often buried deep, and there's a lot that I personally never saw because they were made manifest in play only deep inside the endgame raid instances. Blizzard's people paid attention to the complaints about this. Now the action is up front and accessible, and there are a lot of connections both big and small to what's come before. There are a lot of faces that'll be familiar to players, if they paid attention early on—I was profoundly pleased to find Gryan Stoutmantle running an Alliance outpost in the Grizzly Hills, years after my level 10-20 Alliance characters helped his force clear out bandits in Westfall, and like that. And these people have stories, too, with their own advancing careers and agendas, families and friends to be concerned about, and all the rest. So the whole enterprise really feels like ongoing developments in places and with people we have a prior history with.
All I need now is to find Mankrik and my joy will be complete. :)
• Upgrades. The curve of niftiness was really too steep in Burning Crusade—it's fun to get new things, but it's hard when gear you put in serious play time and effort to acquire for your character becomes useless in, literally, minutes into the first zone of the newly accessible territory. The upgrading in Lich King, on the other hand, has been very satisfying. As Tivara closes in on the last few bars to 76, she's ditched about half the gear she came to Northrend with. This feels right, partly because it's pretty much all been rewards for completing whole chains of quests or major single-quest achievements.
• High-End Craft Learning. There's a really nifty new mechanism for acquiring high-end recipes for cooking, patterns for leatherworking, and so on. (I assume this applies to the other professions too, but these are the only ones I have direct experience.) Past skill level 400 (out of a currently possible 450), you don't just go out and buy new recipes. For leatherworking, you trade in sets of heavy borean leather or arctic fur; for cooking, you perform daily cooking quests—fixing up dishes with a couple recipes or a recipe and some gathered extras and delivering them to commissioning clients spread across Dalaran. This gives you a cooking commendation award token and a bag of rewards including spices you'll use in future cooking, and sets of tokens let you buy recipes. So progression in the craft hinges on actually using it more. This is a relatively small thing overall, but it really caught my fancy and felt significant.
And, no doubt, more will come to mind as soon as I press the Publish button.
The Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains are some of my favorite scenery in the whole world. All I really have to say about these scenes is, "Isn't this beautiful?"
This is all just stuff that made an impression on me, before I get on to covering developments in the next zone or two.
How you get out of a Scourge-fighting tank, when it's used up:
A baby mammoth we just freed from a cruel trap, trumpeting its thanks before running off:
The grandest mammoth of the Borean Tundra, happy for our good deeds (and Druids for the Ethical and Humane Treatment of Animals will be the subject of some small post in the future):
High on the list of people you don't really expect to show up to help deal with a challenge, providing an unexpectedly cool capstone to a quest chain:
One of my favorite quests so far:
The insult deployed, not long before Bjorn charged after Tivara, right into Lydell's camp and got killed:
A very thorough product warning:
Ember Clutch, where proto-dragon eggs hatch most happily, and a proto-dragon whelp taking umbrage at Tivara's presence:
A vrykul ghost, forever summoning:
Getting custom delivery to a band of pirates:
Pirates let you use the greatest stuff sometime, when you're willing to go to haunted islands they aren't:
One of the orca of the Howling Fjord, with Sagarmatha for scale:
A storm giant fighting the guards at New Agamand; the guards themselves are out of sight, below the rim of that bluff Tivara's on:
One of the major dwarvish excavations at the rim of the Howling Fjord:
Another great quest text:
And that clears the miscellany backlog. Next post, likely, will be sights of the Dragonblight, the next zone along the way.
Tivara hit 72 last night, thanks to helping out the swell undead guys at New Agamand. (Some of my characters would be horrified by it all. It's fortunate for my desire to explore that Tivara's personality includes plenty of room for finding the plague project fascinating.) Along the way I've been playing around with a variety of pets.
• Gorilla: Sagarmatha. No question about it, gorillas remain my pets of choice. The tanky pet is most comfortable and enjoyable for me in more circumstances than any other option.
• Wolf: Scourgebane. Almost as dear to my heart as Sagarmatha, Scourgebane is my instance pet of choice (everyone who does damage likes Furious Howl, pretty much), and I bring her out for questing when I feel like doing some single-target attacking and less volleying.
• Devilsaur: Gorynych. I'm genuinely uncertain about ol' Stompy. He's fun, and though he's taller than a rhino (see below), he doesn't have the bulk or thick fur, so he's easier to see around. But I don't feel any real urge to use him outside instancing. I suspect I should probably keep him leveled up and see how he does in higher-level instances and raids. I can afford the stable slot, at least for now.
• Worm: Kurgan. Not bad so far, but I haven't given it a really hard workout yet. Hoping to get the chance to do that soon.
• Rhino: Byran, retired. I gave it a shot, but it just wasn't the thing for me. They're big and massive enough to make the same kind of visibility and access problems for me that large-winged flying pets do, and while the knockback effect is hilarious to watch, it's much harder to control and maneuver with than gorillas' thunderstomp. I retired her, with thanks.
• Bird of Prey: Shravana, auditioning. I wasn't really planning to try out a new bird of prey, but then I saw someone with the fjord hawk matriarch in Coldarra, and Nyo's player asked me if I'd thought about getting one, and off we went! Not bad at all, so far. I'm not sure she actually does anything Scourgebane doesn't, but I'm willing to keep on experimenting. She has relatively short, thick wings, which means she interferes less than I'd have expected with my visibility.
Come level 74 for Tivara and I'll think about what to do dump to get a Blighthound to play with.
The early fights in the Nexus are against dragonkin (like the one pictured outside the Nexus in part 1)...
...and groups of mixed-race mages, arcane engineers, and others interested in whatever the blue dragonflight is up to. Some of those mages have demonic hound companions, like this:
We also encounter a chamber full of several groups' worth of frozen adventurers or explores, who frankly aren't as grateful for unthawing as I'd like. In fact we have to fight them as soon as they can move:
In the picture above, you see that the path curves around a raised area on the right. When Tivara turned 90 degrees in that direction, she saw this (and was very glad they didn't have to fight it, too):
And ahead of us...more mystery:
But before we can get there, a smaller passage...
...into another large hall, with that mysterious space from before off to our right:
Some of those glowing runes hang in the air in front of a wall. Others emerge from the wall, floating out and then rising or hanging until they dissipate...
...and the chamber we'd seen past the frozen intruders is filled with them:
I didn't get any good pictures of the ensuing fight with Grand Magus Telestra on the far side of this chamber. It's a fun fight, and I'll hope for better when Tivara and I go back. In any event, past her is a more natural cavern filled with floating platforms connected by stone-like bridges:
Overseeing mana elementals, their tenders, semi- and un-controlled eruptions of mana through portals, and other complication is Anomalus, a sentient gathering of mana and void energy:
I mentioned earlier, by the way, that healers have some things to do when they're not healing. This is druid fun. Amedina (off to the left at the time this picture was taken) has summoned up a Hurricane spell. Clouds form over the area she's targeted and lighting bolts blast every enemy beneath. There's a reason her player keeps asking "Can I AOE these?"
On the other side of the circle of chambers and halls that comprises the Nexus, a tree turned to pure magical crystal:
Indeed, an entire wing of crystal, some of it very much active and interested in repelling us:
Eventually we found and brought down Ormorok the Tree-Shaper, the elemental responsible for the unnatural ecology:
A two-fer from that gauntlet: Tivara inspecting a trapped frost nymph, and Amedina in the midst of casting another Hurricane:
And so we came to the last of the Nexus' chambers, to be confronted with fresh evidence that whatever else he may be, Malygos is a first-rate bastard. He'd captured Keristrasza, a member of the red dragonflight, and was breaking her will with the aim of making her his newest consort. We got stuck with the job of killing her before he could finish the job:
The deed done, we made our way back out to report to the Kirin Tor. They are understandably both curious and alarmed, and there'll be more to do there in days to come.
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