Further Adventures in Ice Crown and the Plaguelands

I mentioned the crazy nostalgic feel of the Shadowlands pre-events up in Northrend last week, how being back up in the Argent Tournament and fighting the scourge brought me back about a decade.

That feeling lasted about… three hours I’d say.  I went at it for two hours the day the pre-patch landed, and maybe an hour after that.  Enough to get the Argent Commendations, the event currency, to buy the battle pet that was part of the event.   Then I was back to playing with alts in other expansions because the level squish thing still has my attention.

But then, yesterday, Blizzard dropped the final pre-expansion patch that opened up the second round of quests, so I dropped in again with Vikund to get going on that.

Back again for the next round

I saw somewhere along the line that Blizz had upped the swan rate on the raid bosses appearing in Icecrown.  I hadn’t seen one the last time I was on, but this time they seemed to be popping up with great regularity.  They get an announcement in chat and show up on the map, at which point people rush over to get ready.

Everybody eyeing the boss

And then after a couple of minutes, the boss goes live and everything becomes a chaos of combat effects as the race to burn them down begins.

And then chaos

In between bosses, the live quest chain was a series of the usual tasks, though it did have a decent disguise and infiltrate segment that I enjoyed, and a bombing run, which is something I have liked since the first once back in The Burning Crusade.  There is a final boss fight, then you get sent back to Stormwind to report back to Greymane.

Back to Greymane

Turning in the quest got me the achievement for the pre-patch quests, so I gather than I did the essential story bits.  Now, if only I remembered them.

Death Rising achievement for the event

But Greymane wasn’t done with me yet.  He still had the quest to go out and slay Nathanos Blightcaller in the Eastern Plaguelands for me.  That was the boss a lot of people were talking about last week.  I headed out to the Plaguelands hoping that the interest in him hadn’t died down.

The beautiful brown Plaguelands

I landed at the nearest flight point and flew out to the point marked on the map.  I need not have worried about finding enough people out there.  The battle had begun before I arrived and it was chaos beyond even the boss battles in Icecrown.

He is in there somewhere

My main problem in the fight was actually being able to target him to get a hit in so the kill would count for me.  I threw out some AOE attacks in the middle of the scrum… consecrate for the win… and hoped for the best.  Then a cinematic came up with his final blow.

Nathanos about to get his

Tyrande got the killing blow in the video.  That is the way the lore will go down, though I couldn’t tell who was even hitting him during the fight.

I managed to get in and loot, which netted me a very nice sword, a serious upgrade to my own.

Nice blade

It is a pity it will be replaced pretty much immediately come the new expansion.  But I can enjoy it for a bit I suppose.

I had to loot quickly because I had the zombie taint on me.  The reason I had trouble targeting was that there were player zombies all over the fight.  Like the old days, with the WotLK per-expansion event, they pass on the zombie plague to others.  So I got my drop and then turned into a zombie myself.

Zombie time

I ran around and played with that for a bit.  Fortunately, if you’re tired of being a zombie one of your skills is “zombie explosion” in which you blow up.  That kills you and you can go back to your corpse and revive as your old self.  I did that and quickly flew away and then back to Stormwind for the final turn in.  The reward was more commendations.  I’ll have to see if there is anything else to spend them on.

Meanwhile, the zombie stuff was going on all over.  I got the taint a few more times in Stormwind as people ran around trying to infect people.  I eventually got up and out of the way of traffic and other players to avoid that.

That is a big blade… needs a transmog

I think I have finished up the minimum tour of the pre-expansion event.  I will probably work on some alts between now and the actual launch.  Just five days left to go.

The Scourge are Back in Town

Guess who just got back today
Them wild-eyed ghouls that had been away
Haven’t changed that much to say
But man, I still think them undead are crazy

They were askin’ where you were bound
How you was, where you could be found
Told ’em you were hangin’ ’round
Drivin’ all the Kul Tirans crazy

-Grim Lizzy, The Scourge are Back in Town

I’m out in Northrend, flying around on my silver covenant hippogriff, fighting scourge and doing dailies at the Argent Tournament in Icecrown, so I have to wonder what year it really is.

Playing it cool in Icecrown

I guess my outfit matches and my glasses are not rose tinted, so it can’t be 2009.  Still, the launch of the Shadowlands pre-launch events did spark a bit of nostalgic familiarity in me.

Blizzard invites you to a scourge party

Of course, it all started with a summons.  I logged in with my main and there was a quest waiting for me.  You know they’re serious when they put the blue wax seal of the Alliance on it.

Mathias Shaw at it again

So I took the portal to Stormwind and headed out to Lion’s Rest, the final resting place of Varian Wrynn, to speak with Genn Greymane.  It seemed I wasn’t the only one to get a summons.

A crowd at Lion’s Rest

Even with the the invisible circle of dismounting around Greymane it was tough to see him.  He had a cut scene for me, which included a glimpse of Bolvar Fordragon, the former Lich King, who had his crown removed by Sylvanas Windrunner in the expansion cinematic.  He seemed pretty concerned about Sylvanas and her plans.  I guess she is the bad guy again.

 

But she seems to be coming for everybody, Horde and Alliance, so we seem to be back to a “patch up the differences and face a common foe” part of the relationship again.  I’ve only seen the Alliance side of things.  I’ll have to go see the Horde side just to see who goes missing there. (Nope, same video on the Horde side.  Maybe they have goblin drone cam over Lion’s Rest.)

Sure, it is Andiun and Greymane there now, but it was only Greymane when I got there

Meanwhile, I was sent off, along with everybody else, to go check in on things and gather scouting reports.  Blizz seemed to feel that only the prime quest givers needed that dismount aura around them, as a few were buried in mounts.

He’s in there somewhere

There were some scourge to slay out in Darkshire, though the main problem was getting to them quickly enough to get on a kill for the quest update.  There was a lot of firepower out there burning them down.  I’m not sure they really had a chance.

That led me back to Stormwind and then on to Northrend, to the Argent Tournament area where the Argent Crusade and Ebon Blade were running the campaign to fight the scourge.

On my way

Also, it was kind of hard to miss the massive hole in the sky as I was headed out there.  It is huge, so big in fact that it is tough to take a screen shot of it with some features to give it scale.

This isn’t climate change doing this, is it?

Oddly, or perhaps not, that hole is only visible when you’re in the Icecrown zone.  Anyway, that is the hole from the early screen shots and cinematic.

Anyway, out at the Argent Tournament there were quests to go slay more scourge, who nicely seemed be be spawning in the tournament practice area primarily.  Again, they barely had a chance to spawn before people were jumping on them.

Waiting for more to spawn

This was one of those times when it was annoying when Horde or Alliance players couldn’t share a kill, save for the big elite in the middle of everything.

The string of quests led on to a group fight to secure a foothold deeper in the zone.

Fighting the big guy at the end of the foothold event

That done, the turn in unlocked daily quests.

Consider the effort advanced

The lead-in quests and the dailies all offer Argent Commendations, which are a Shadowlands currency that can be used to buy items from a vendor who also hands out some quests.  There is an armor set, which is okay.  Somehow even a scrub like me is wearing better, so I am not sure it is worth the effort unless you want the set for transmog.  There is a battle pet though, so I’ll save up for that.

And with that, we’re off to the races with the Shadowlands pre-patch event.  The first week is just under way and the second week will have some new things.  More scourge to slay.

I only had time to get into a bit of what was going on.  WoWHead and Icy Veins both have guides to the event.  I’ll have to go through them to see if there is anything I need to do before the next round.

Related:

• Tales of the Aggronaut – Icecrown Pre-Patch Event

Arrival in a Level Squished Northrend

I suppose, given the nature of the level squish, I should call it a “level expanded” Northrend.  But it’s current status is a by-product of the level squish, so you get what you get.

In checking out the Shadowlands pre-patch, running through the new starter area is fine and dandy, but it is only a 1-10 level experience that won’t take you more than an hour unless you’re set to explore every nook and cranny of the place.  And for us… Ula, Skronk, and I… the idea was always to go check out Wrath of the Lich King in its new 10-50 incarnation.  So it was off to Northrend!

Northrend awaits

Back in the day WotLK was a level 60-70 experience.

As the level cap grew in WoW though, Blizz started experimenting with expanding the level ranges of some of the older content so that players in a game with a 100+ level cap and an xp curve adjusted to suit that wouldn’t constantly out-level zone and expansion content.

Blizz took a shot at solving this first with the Legion 7.3.5 patch, which expanded the level ranges for expansions and made everything scale to your level within those ranges.  At that point you could go to Northrend at 58 rather than 70 and could stick around until 80.

• All starting zones scale up to level 10.
• World of Warcraft Vanilla (Eastern Kingdoms & Kalimdor) scales up to level 60.
• At level 58, players can choose between Outland or Northrend (capped at level 80).
• At level 80, players can choose between Cataclysm or Pandaria (capped at level 90).
• Zones still have a minimum level requirement.
• Dungeons also scale
• Quest rewards scale up to your level.

That was not enough.  Levels were still a problem.  And last week we all dropped down to a level cap of 50 with the promise of being able to choose any of the expansions as a route to that, pending the release of the Shadowlands expansion, at which point the cap would go to 60.

I made this graphic, so I am going to use it again

So off we went on the boat to Valliance Keep in Northrend.  Our little group was:

• Merchi – Level 10 Hunter
• Fergorin – Level 10 Shaman
• Mendula – Level 10 Priest

Waiting for Ula… or Mendula

Unlike the old days, one of the first quests you get sends you to Dalaran, a flight point you get by default.  You can also fly directly to Howling Fjord, as that flight point is available as well.  There would be no need to repeat our 2008 ride across the continent.

Our first ride across Northrend

One of the first things I noticed looking at the map… the real map… was that while the expansion now scales from 10 to 50, the individual zones are not all equally accessible.  There are different ranges for the zones.

• Borean Tundra 10-50
• Howling Fjord 10-50
• Dragonblight 15-50
• Grizzly Hills 15-50
• Sholazar Basin 20-50
• Zul’Drak 20-50
• Crystalsong 25-50
• Ice Crown 25-50
• Storm Peaks 25-50

So they haven’t gone full Legion/BFA “all zones are equal” with the scaling.  They do want you to go through the content in some semblance of the original order.  And that is fine.  We didn’t have any intention otherwise.

Running through the initial content was fun.  It has been nearly a dozen years since we did this, but a lot of it remains fairly fresh in my memory.  And what I had forgotten was renewed and fresh again as we moved along.

I didn’t do a lot of posts about particular zones or bits of content back then.

When we got down to the the mist shrouded beach at Riplash Strand and the haunting music I could vividly recall the first night in the expansion.  We were all out there together and I particularly recall being held up on one quest that required you to slay a named mob, Gamel the Cruel.

Gamel, Gamel, bright as a camel…

Back in the day there was no sharing a kill with people outside of your group and there was a crowd of people showing up to slay him.  This wasn’t the happy times of the launch of WoW Classic either, with everybody lining up politely and waiting their turn. (Except Poncho! Never forget Poncho the line cutter!)  I recall standing on his spawn point and casting consecrate with my pally in hopes of getting the first hit on him.  It took quite a few tries before we got him.

But it is not 2008 any more and much has changed.  You can now get a hit on a mob that somebody on your faction has started with and get credit.  And there certainly were no launch day crowds down at the beach with us, though we saw a few other players around almost everywhere we went.

And when we went to get Gamel another player ran up after we had started… a Horde player too.  But he was able to get credit, because the faction exclusion doesn’t apply to named quest mobs.  Everybody gets credit in this happy new world.

We carried on, running down the quests, swimming through the misty water, and advancing down the quest chains.

Swimming in the mists

I had the pumpkin head transmog on because I had to explain how to hide your helm, which used to be a checkbox in the settings… and still is… but which now requires you do interact with a transmog NPC.  Fortunately somebody had the Tundra Yak out in Valliance Keep, so we could use the NPC on that.

And, then when I got a new helm I had to add in that transmog isn’t applied to your character, but to the individual piece of gear, so my pumpkin head was gone.

I also had to bring up… still bitter… about how the Azure Water Strider, the most OP mount in the game and maybe the best thing to come out of Mists of Pandaria, had been nerfed so it no longer let you walk on water by default.  Our mounts had to schlep through the water like suckers.

No walking on water here

We made our way along, found ourselves out at the D.E.H.T.A. camp to run through their quests, then down to the shore and the first interaction with the Kaluak.  I spent a lot of the time with the Kaluak back in the day.  Vikund, my main, still carries the fishing pole he got from reaching exalted status with them.

We finished that up and made it to the airfield.  Along the way we all made it to level 20.

Another achievement

At level 20 the list of things like battle grounds that open up to you can take a while to flash by.

The leveling is probably a bit faster than the rate you might want if you didn’t want to hit level cap before you finished up the expansion, but that is okay.  I’m not sure we’re in it for the long haul, but for now it is fun and memories and an odd mesh between how the game used to be and how it plays now.

What is that diamond? Is this The Sims?

There are still some oddities.

At one point I was standing around and decided to talk to the trade skill trainers.  I trained cooking, then got the option to train Northrend cooking.

Cooking choices

That made some sense to me because Blizz had divided up trade skills into expansion based grouping.  When I trained Northrend cooking I was then able to train up a bunch of recipes.

Then I went to the fishing trainer and that was less clear.

All the fishing

When you get fishing you get the option to train up all the expansion fishing variations.  That seemed kind of odd.  I guess it knows where you are fishing and can apply the skill up to that  area.  But I feel it might have been better to have skipped this one.

And some bugs from Exile’s Reach followed us.  In the starter area you get some skills early on, but later you choose a spec.  If your spec did not include one of the initial skill it stayed on you your hot bar and was usable… until the game tried to push a new skill onto the bard after you left the starter area.  Then the skill would just disappear, replaced on your action bar by a new one.

But otherwise it has been a light and fun trip through some old memories.

Ula also wrote a bit about this on her blog.  Check it out.