Daily Thoughts: Hyjal

I must say: Hyjal was a blast. Counting all the horrible groups of people killing and collecting everything for the quests, completing the zone took me between 4-5 hours and got me to level 82. I really enjoy how the zone played out, with few exceptions I’ll get back to later. For the most part, the quests lead you in a circular direction around the zone with very few quests sending you very far. The zone makes heavy use of little mini-instances. You take portals to underground areas and complete small quest chains inside, then return to the main zone to continue. Everything looks great, though (unsurprisingly) they reused a lot of old models for the mobs. I only have one major complaint with the flow and feel of the zone as a whole. Occasionally, there was no quests to do. Sometimes it seemed to not give you any directional quests to the next place and you sort of have to fly around for a little while to find a quest giver.

There aren’t really any difficult quests to complete. This could be due to it being the “entry-level” cataclysm zone or because my Paladin was sporting pretty nice ICC25 quality gear. After doing what I believe was all the quests in the zone, I had only two upgrades to my current gear, though some pieces were close. As a result my person damage dropped a little. As you level the ratings required to gain a % of haste/crit/hit/expertise all become much more substantial. With only 2 upgrades, my haste and crit are both 50% or so lower after 2 levels gained and both hit and expertise, which used to be capped, are now well under cap. Fortunately, I feel that Deepholm holds more upgrades. Shortly after leaving Hyjal I did the Stonecore instance and got Sword of the Bottomless Pit, a substantial upgrade over even my Shadow’s Edge. The damage per second of the weapon is 33% higher. I digress, back to Hyjal.

Another thing I noticed, though honestly not until I was writing this, there wasn’t any group quests in Hyjal. On several occasions I ended up grouped with people so we could share the kill of a quest mob, but it was out of convenience of not waiting for 4 other people to kill it first, not from difficulty of the mob. I am hoping for more difficult future zones and quests. Alas, I must wrap this up, my 35 minute wait to log on is about over and I want to get back to questing.

More from the Cataclysm soon, Deepholm next!

Hyjal leveling guide – I admittedly didn’t use this, but I wanted to provide a resource for those looking for one.

Daily Thoughts: Blind Faith

Have you ever wondered why exactly you need to collect 8 random flowers or kill 10 gnolls/troggs/wolves/etc? Do you know why you killed Malygos? Or the guardians of ulduar? Or all those orcs in Hellfire Ramparts over and over again? Sometimes I wonder about these things. For Lich King content, since that is when I really started raiding and doing instances, I’m pretty aware why I’m killing most of the bosses I’ve been sent to dispatch. On the other hand, while leveling or questing, I pretty much take the quest and read just enough to glean what I’m supposed to be doing and start doing it. I have almost no idea why I’m in most of the pre-70 instances. Most players probably don’t care the reason they are questing, the ones who might care that they are out doing “good” assume that the quest givers, being friendly NPCs, are good and want the best for the world. This isn’t the case everytime. Sometimes, the results of the meddling of we adventurers can cause pretty disastrous things.

I really enjoy the faction pairs that let us choose which side we’re killing and which side we’re helping. In Sholazar Basin, we get to choose between the Frenzyheart Tribe and the Oracles. At first you do quests back and forth between the two and are eventually faced with choosing. Although some may like to get exalted with both (and I hear there is some way of doing that, not sure how), I like that we at least get a choice. Elsewhere in Northrend we get pitted by the Kalu-ak against local wolvar. As far as I know, there isn’t an option. You either help slay wolvar and generally mess up their business (including stealing their pups) or skip the quest area. Who says those Kalu’ak are the ones deserving our  considerable services? You might have sided with a tribe of wolvar in sholazar and would like to be able to do the same here? No such luck my friends.

As I mentioned before, some of our deeds done through our relentless questing for knowledge, glory, and topping the meters can have dire consequences. There’s a series of low-level quests involving morrowgrain. *Minor spoils incoming*.  I can’t recall if it is revealed in-game what these quests do, but through reading about the Stormrage novel, I learned these herbs we were gathering we being used to poison Malfurion (the leader of the Night Elf Druids, general bad-ass, and savior of the world). Yet we blindly chose to gather and turn in. What else might our actions have cost us? One theory is that it may have cost us…the entire world (of warcraft). *Sort of spoilers incoming*. The titans that shaped Azeroth into a world of life an order battled the Old Gods and although beat them, knew they were too integrated into the world to be removed without harming or destroying it. Cosmic beings of immense power knew better than to kill an Old God, but what did we do? We killed Yogg Saron in Ulduar. Yes it was a Monster that has spread is influence and corrupted people, creatures, and even the ground itself possibly all over Azeroth, but maybe it was also part of the fabric of that world. Maybe killing Yogg Saron destabilized Azeroth. Are all these events going on in-game now with elementals invading caused by Deathwing just preparing to come out. Or is Deathwing taking the opportunity caused by the after effects of our meddling?

So be it kidnapping Wolvar pups, gathering deadly herbs, or killing beings integral to Azeroths survival, us players, adventures, continue to press on with blind faith that we’re fighting the good fight. Or maybe it doesn’t matter cause, hey, at least we got the lootz.