AQ Gate Opening Event on Hydraxian Waterlords - EU

Same event, very different experience.

For one thing, actually being a member of a guild as opposed to just timidly peeking in from the sidelines made a big difference, as I found myself invited to a raid group pretty much the moment I logged in, which was nice.

However, the timing of the event was also very different. I found it very convenient that the gong was rung at 20:35 on Sunday evening on Pyrewood Village, but on Hydraxian Waterlords the hand-ins had been timed in such a manner that it happened at 10:55 on a Monday morning instead. The guild mistress relayed that there had been some drama surrounding this, as apparently certain people had been supposed to do the last hand-ins earlier but failed to do so, leading to others kind of "going rogue" and doing it themselves.

From the sounds of it, it wouldn't have made much of a difference to the inconvenient start time though, as the idea seemed to be to start the ten-hour war between the banging of the gong and the actual opening of the instance early in the day, so that the raids would become accessible in the evening at the raiders' convenience, never mind people actually wanting to take part in the event.

Fortunately I'm working from home indefinitely now, and since I didn't have any meetings that morning, I had the luxury of moving my lunch break to a convenient time to attend the banging of the gong. One advantage of the timing being rather unfriendly towards working adults - combined with Hydraxian Waterlords' slightly lower population compared to Pyrewood Village - was that the zone wasn't overflowing quite as badly during the event. Sub-60 characters were still getting kicked out, but from what I heard no level 60s were ever teleported out the way it happened to so many (including me) on PV.

As things were actually somewhat playable and I was in a raid group this time, we got involved in the killing of the Silithid colossi. This was something I had only vaguely heard about before: three humongous, tick-like Silithid spawning in each of the three hives and needing to be taken down. Our group of course didn't get the tag on any of them, but they were so massive and had so much health that it really made you want to help out regardless.

To my great amusement, they also had a huge knockback attack that would send dozens of people flying halfway across the zone, resulting in everyone dying from fall damage who didn't have some sort of ability to counter this (such as a mage's Slow Fall). Fortunately I'm the sort of person who finds falling to their death in a video game hilarious, so I had a grand old time.

Once all three colossi were dead, NPCs in Cenarion Hold handed out temporary quests to deliver colossus samples to people in the Eastern Plaguelands, Searing Gorge and Booty Bay. These were available to all, regardless of whether you helped with killing the colossi or not, but only for two hours. The biggest initial challenge was that everyone wanted to pick up the quests simultaneously, burying the quest givers in a sea of mounts, which of course inspired some players in that pile to flag for PvP and well... you can imagine how that went.

Eventually we were able to pick up our quests though and they were quite rewarding, as each one paid out about six gold and a goody bag full of food, potions and gear. Certainly made up for my own repair bills from repeatedly going splat at least. 

We then returned to Silithus to farm some elites around the obelisks. As it was still quite busy we made a detour through Un'goro and Tanaris, but for some reason we couldn't find a single obelisk in Un'goro, and in Tanaris we killed some mobs near Gadgetzan but everyone was kind of dissatisfied with getting only five rep per kill when some of the mobs in Silithus had given fifty or more a pop. Thus we moved back to Silithus anyway, even if it meant facing some competition for spawns.

Camping at the obelisks was both pretty chill as mobs only respawned every fifteen minutes or so and endlessly entertaining due to the obelisks' mind control ability constantly turning random raid members against their friends. I'll hand it to the mages for being fairly disciplined and sheeping (or pigging, or turtling) affected people fairly quickly to neutralise them, but since it was an ongoing affair it was simply impossible to get everyone. Personally I whacked my poor pet to death a couple of times while controlled, and got killed by a gnome mage once who was standing behind me when she suddenly got MCed and blew me up with a fireball. I laughed a lot. 

I eventually had to get back to work for a while, but I did log back on in the evening once my shift was over. To my great incredulity, several of the guildies I had been grouped with earlier had kept going all afternoon and were still at it, happily letting me rejoin their little group - except that it wasn't so little anymore and eventually grew to a full 40-man in fact, as the bear druid who was raid-leading kept picking up strays.

With bigger numbers it was less of a struggle to kill the bigger/stronger groups of enemies (though the mind controls remained as entertaining as ever), and we also started elbowing out the Horde players that had also been trying to camp the obelisk. You see, the mind control also had the side effect of making you hostile to everyone without counting as PvP, so whenever we saw a Hordie getting MCed, they soon became the target of a swift and opportunistic gank.

On another amusing side note, after people had spent hours farming Silithid Carapace Fragments for our Scarab Lord, two to three drops at a time, it was funny to discover that the bugs spawned for the event dropped them literally by the hundreds. Once we noticed, I made sure to fetch my Agent of Nozdormu badge from the bank so I could collect them too, and then passed them on to the rogue who I knew was also working on the quest chain (even if he wasn't going to be a Scarab Lord).

As the last hour of the war began, a zone-wide announcement asked for all forces to gather for the final assault. This being an RP server, we were of course game for this, and people started to pile onto the NPC army south of Cenarion Hold. It took a while for them to get going, but once they did we all rode along with them.

Then we reached the gate, more Colossal Anubisaths began to spawn... and that's when it turned into a lag fest at last as the server buckled under the numbers. I didn't really do much during that last hour except aim my bow at Anubisaths while hoping that my auto-shots would go off eventually, but people were meme-ing about the whole thing in chat as if it was 2005 and it was still highly amusing. We also saw one guy finish the Scarab Lord quest chain and ring the gong about ten minutes before the end of the event, which was a pretty impressive feat.

Finally there was a bit of NPC RP at the gate and then the instances were open and even if I had no interest in going there myself right then, I felt a certain sense of satisfaction watching the first groups of players snake their way inside. That whole day was definitely one of my most memorable WoW experiences ever.

Addendum for a little bit of extra serendipity: I ended up fighting next to an orc shaman called Gnawgrim at some point, which caught my attention because I used to raid with an orc shaman of the same name back in Wrath of the Lich King. (The main thing I remember whenever I think of him was that he had his Astral Recall macroed to say "Screw you guys, I'm going home", which amused me to no end.) I did a bit of asking around and it turns out it was actually the same guy. Small world!

AQ Gate Opening Event on Pyrewood Village - EU

I noted in my last post about the war effort that Pyrewood Village was close to being done, and sure thing, the next time I checked, the coffers were full and the NPCs were just counting down the days to the actual opening event. Consulting the server Discord allowed me to narrow it down further: apparently the gong was going to be rung at 20:35 server time on Sunday. Not a bad time to join in for a fun world event!

I made sure to take my tauren hunter down to Silithus in advance to beat the inevitable crowds. This seemed to have paid off when I logged in with about half an hour to go and watched a pile of horribly lagging wind riders pile up on the wind rider master, seemingly unable to land.

As I hadn't been removed from my old guild's Discord and I could see that lots of them were online and in voice chat, I hopped on to listen to what they were talking about. Apparently the raid leader had his own sceptre ready to bang the gong and there was much excitement, though they were also talking about people forcibly getting teleported out of Silithus due to overpopulation. As it turned out my own hubris about having been clever enough to log out in Cenarion Hold before was also about to be punished with an appropriate fall, as I suddenly found myself among a pile of other people teleported to the graveyard in Thousand Needles.

We rode to the nearest flightmaster in a giant train and flew back. The wind rider pile in Silithus was still laggy but it did land people eventually. Acutely aware that I was likely to get teleported out again (apparently only sceptre bearers were immune - or something like that) I mounted up and ran south to have a look at the gate itself. The crowds were real. The game clearly couldn't cope and would basically show me a blank landscape in any direction unless I stared at it intently for a few seconds, which would then result in more and more people loading in as time went on.

The next time the dreaded loading screen appeared, I found myself with a pile of similarly afflicted people in Ratchet for a change. Again we were off to the flight master and flew right back. Again I rode south to mingle with the crowds, hoping that maybe I'd be able to hang in there until the big event, but I got ported out for a third time at half past, once again to Thousand Needles. Others on Discord reported landing in Un'goro Crater and Tanaris.

I flew back a third time and my wind rider was just approaching Cenarion Hold again when the broadcast text went out that the first person to ring the gong had been an Alliance warrior called Moatty. Once again I rode back down south, hoping to see some of the Qiraj invaders, and I did! There were a whole bunch of giant Anubisaths about, but everything was so laggy that they didn't even seem to move. I did see people fight them, but again as far as my game was concerned, players were mostly running on the spot. I observed this for a while, until I once again got teleported out to Thousand Needles.

People on my old guild's Discord were now talking about trying to find some invaders in other zones. The crystals apparently spawn in zones all over southern Kalimdor, so there were people hunting elite silithid even in the Barrens (though the mobs were levelled down appropriately for each zone and also dropped lower level loot accordingly). Listening to my guildies on voice and reading chat channels however, things weren't quite so simple in other zones either. I made my way over to Feralas and asked if there were any groups hunting Anubisaths, just to be told flatly that they had all been wiped out within seconds.

I rode back into Thousand Needles, remembering that I had seen an Anubisath from the back of my wind rider earlier, and found a seemingly untouched crystal with lots of mobs around it - I soloed them down for the heck of it. Then I rode on and found some more crystals - it was only at this point that I realised that the mobs did respawn, just on a timer. One crystal I encountered looked abandoned and then all its silithid spawns repopped at once just as I was about to ride past. I killed a few more there but quickly got bored. Health potions and greens may be useful drops, but not so much when scaled down to the thirties (plus my bags on that character were already full too), and I didn't really care that much about getting Brood of Nozdormu reputation in increments of five.

On my way down to Gadgetzan I saw huge groups of players camp more crystals in the Shimmering Flats, I'm guessing because the mobs spawned there were at least in the fourties and therefore dropped slightly better loot.

And thus, the gates on Pyrewood Village are open. I still plan to see the event on Hydraxian Waterlords as well if I get the chance - at least now I'll have a bit of an idea of what to expect. Blizzard seems to have found a workaround to prevent the servers from crashing I guess, but I can't say that getting teleported out of the zone every fifteen minutes because it's considered too busy makes for the most fun experience as a player either. I'll concede though that I don't really know what else they could have done if the servers just can't take that many people in the same spot, even in 2020.

Did somebody say... Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker?

I've previously talked about how I ended up being a social member of a raiding guild on my Horde characters in WoW Classic. I'll also be honest and admit that I have wondered occasionally whether I wouldn't be better off in a more casual levelling guild, especially after the friends that had originally rolled characters with me all quit and I was nothing but a lonely leveller in a guild of raiders. But inertia is a powerful force, and ever since I hit 60 I have occasionally benefitted from things like being invited to super smooth guild dungeon runs.

This Tuesday though was one of those evenings where being in a raiding guild definitely paid off.

You see, a couple of weeks ago the guild's main tank had acquired his second Binding of the Windseeker, meaning that he was now in possession of both of the rare drops from Molten Core needed to craft Thunderfury, Classic's legendary (in more than one way) sword.

It wasn't quite that straightforward though, as there are also a lot of expensive crafting materials involved, and those couldn't just be conjured on the spot. The tank didn't explicitly ask anyone to give him stuff, but he did comment that there were still a lot of Arcanite Bars to go and that he'd appreciate any help, so I instantly mailed him my three recently acquired Arcanite Crystals free of charge, even as a part of my brain was quietly screaming: "What are you doing? Those are worth like 150 gold and you still don't even have an epic mount!"

But things are just different in Classic. It takes a village to raise a child and it takes a guild to get someone a Thunderfury. You just know this and take pride in being able to contribute, even as a social member.

After that I definitely wanted to be there for the final forging though, so I made sure to keep a close eye on the guild's Discord from then on, in order not to miss the point when material gathering was complete and the tank would want to assemble a raid to challenge Prince Thunderaan for his weapon (who is also a raid boss, if not a "proper" one, so you do need extra warm bodies to finish the quest).

And Tuesday night was the night! The note said that it was going to happen once the Molten Core pug organised by the guild was finished - fortunately the guild leader was streaming the run, so I opened the stream in a secondary tab to keep an eye on their progress while doing something else, and once they'd downed Raggy I logged back on my hunter and made a beeline for the Crystal Vale in Silithus.

I was so excited that I recorded the whole thing:



Even including time for summons and so on, the whole shebang was over in less than ten minutes, but that didn't make it any less memorable to me. It's just not an event that most players will take part in more than once, if ever, so I was happy to be there, kill a boss the size of a small tower and feel epic. It was definitely worth it too, and seeing everyone else's excitement and happiness for the tank just gave me warm fuzzies. What's not to love?

The Opening of the Gates

In a strange juxtaposition of retro gaming and modern social media, I found out that the Ahn'Qiraj war effort on Kronos had been completed because a message from Kronos' official Facebook page about it showed up on my Facebook feed. It stated that there was going to be a delay of five days before the grand opening of the gates, to allow the armies to get into position. I have no idea whether that's true to the original Vanilla experience, but it was certainly convenient to have the whole event moved to a weekend, when I'd actually have a chance to poke my head in to see what was happening.

On Saturday evening I then saw another post stating that the event had started, though the gates to the raid weren't supposed to open until Sunday. I logged right in, having already parked my paladin at Cenarion Hold the day before.

Silithus was the busiest I've ever seen it in any iteration of the game, and I excitedly started to ride south, passing an awe-inspiringly huge NPC army in the process. Then I saw my first Anubisath! I stopped to take a screenshot... and a few seconds later I was dead, killed by Horde. Oh right, PvP server.

I released my spirit and watched the continuous stream of Alliance ghosts running back to their bodies for a few seconds, then logged out. My plan to "witness" the event, maybe even record it on video or something, was clearly futile under the circumstances, and I had so many more fun things to do that evening than let myself get ganked over and over again.

But you know... well done, guys.

(Tekai once again has a more informative post about what's been happening.)

Tales from Southern Kalimdor

My little human rogue finally completed her journey from the northern tip of Kalimdor down to the very south of the continent and hit level sixty. We last met her in Thousand Needles, so these are my impressions of what I saw of Tanaris, Un'goro and Silithus.

Tanaris

Tanaris is still a good zone, but I struggled to be truly enthusiastic about it because I loved the old Tanaris that much more. I always felt that it was a very evocative zone, making you truly feel like you were on the edge of a desert on the ass end of nowhere. The dunes south of Gadgetzan seemed to go on forever, and the goblins didn't give a rat's ass whether you were Horde or Alliance, as long as you didn't pick any fights while within their walls and helped them steal water from the waste wanderers and booze from the local pirates.

The new Tanaris feels smaller somehow, and it is, seeing how almost a quarter of the zone has been flooded by the Cataclysm. When I flew over the shallows where I used to farm waste wanderers, I felt sad at the sight of the area's emptiness. In general, the zone feels way too busy for a desert now though, with hordes of NPC archaeologists fighting over the various ruins and the Southsea pirates being taken on by an entire army. The Horde vs. Alliance conflict rears its ugly head in Gadgetzan as well, with a girl gnome and a goblin whining endlessly at Marin Noggenfogger that he should join their respective side already. You can't help but feel sorry for the man.

One thing I liked was that there is a sort of intro quest line to Zul'Farrak now, which explains why one of the quest givers you meet on the inside is the ghost of a dead troll. It just strikes me as slightly weird design to make quests like that now, when ninety percent of dungeon runners might never even set foot into the zone associated with the instance anymore.

Another thing I found notable in this zone was that after completing all the quests I could find, there were still several sub-zones that I hadn't even touched. This gives me hope that the Horde quests might not all be mirrors of the Alliance ones this time and might actually utilise different environments to tell different stories. I'm looking forward to seeing this one from the other side.

This quest text made me burst into uncontrollable giggles.

Un'goro Crater

Un'goro is a wonderful zone. I was always quite fond of it to begin with - if Tanaris was the desert at the ass end of the continent, then Un'goro was the metaphorical pimple on that ass, not to mention a wild and untamed jungle. Plus it used to have lots of quests that led you all over the zone and gave pretty nice XP.

The new Un'goro somehow managed to capture the charm of the old zone (the developers added a small extra quest hub but on the whole the area still feels like proper "adventuring territory"), while also updating it to Cataclysm standards and adding some new bits and pieces. Old quests feel familiar and slightly streamlined, but not to the point where it feels like you're just being led around by the nose. I actually ran into more than one little surprise that made me go "Oho, what's that?" while exploring.

For example I spotted a little mound of earth with a blue question mark above it in the now abandoned Marshal's Refuge. Of course I had to investigate it, and found it to be the burial site of Dadanga the kodo. Nooo, not Dadanga! I still remember gathering dozens of Bloodpetal sprouts for you and being sorely disappointed by the way you rewarded me with a pumpkin and some moonberry juice. I decided to accept the challenge issued by the new repeatable quest and honour her memory by depositing some Bloodpetal sprouts on her grave. This turned out to be harder than I expected since the damned things don't show up on the herb tracker anymore and you need some pretty keen eyes to spot green sprouts on green ground, but in the end I did it. After depositing my gift, I was rewarded with a little speed buff that lasted a whopping twenty minutes. Still the same old disappointing Dadanga, even in death... /sniff.

One old quest that I was surprised hadn't been removed is the one to rescue Ringo the goblin from Fireplume Ridge. I kind of assumed that the way you had to lead him back to camp yourself and keep sprinkling water on him every so often would have triggered the developers' "not fun enough" sense these days. I guess in a way it did, because while you still need to use the water, you can apparently also keep him going by slapping him every so often before he falls over. I never quite figured out how that was supposed to work though, as the response to my /slap emote seemed very delayed and hardly ever seemed to do any good. It felt like a pretty cruel way to "rescue" someone anyway.

My favourite new addition to the zone were the Maximillian of Northshire quests. I don't think there was a single one of them that didn't make me go: "What the...?" They are incredibly silly and funny, but still manage to not feel out of place. The fact that I was doing them on a rogue added an extra layer of hilarity, as knight Maximillian was not at all impressed by my roguish fighting methods, and would idly stand by as I stunlocked mobs to death. Then he would charge off towards the nearest elite before I could restealth and make me facepalm. I would say the zone is worth doing for his quests alone.

Silithus

Unfortunately, Silithus still sucks. They cleaned it up a bit and removed all those old raid quests and weird currency grinds, plus a couple of quests where I have no idea why they took them out. (The Spirits of Southwind was a rather haunting story in my opinion, and The Calling gave the most interesting bits of lore in the entire zone.) Then they smoothed out a couple of bumps in what was left over, such as adding a remote hand-in here and reducing the number of items needed there (the dwarves down south tell you that "conveniently" another adventurer already brought them the parts they needed from the other two silithid hives, so you only have to go down into the one right next to them)... but that's it. Grinding for encrypted texts is still boring. Killing fifteen dredge strikers just to get a follow-up to kill twenty dredge crushers still feels uninspired.

I found this particularly disappointing since I remembered seeing this video of the 4.1 PTR and fully expected there to be some new and exciting quests with phasing in them. But nope, looks like none of that actually made it into the live game. I guess Silithus was Kalimdor's Arathi Highlands, aka that last zone that the developers didn't find the time for in the end. It's a shame because the story behind the zone has so much potential... but at least with Silithus we're already used to it being a boring place.

Silithus sure sucked

Putting the title of this post in the past tense is not entirely correct since Silithus still sucks at the time of writing this, but since Cataclysm is supposed to come out in less than two months or so it seemed kind of appropriate.

There's been a fair bit of talk about nostalgia and the like in the WoW blogosphere lately, and I'm guilty of frequently feeling quite nostalgic for the Burning Crusade myself (I thought WOTLK has been a decent expansion, just not as good). As a bit of a counterpoint I want to write a post about a piece of vanilla WoW today that I consider to be utter rubbish, and I think no matter what Blizzard does with it in Cataclysm, it can only get better: Silithus.

I generally prefer the lush and healthy-looking zones in the game, but Silithus isn't just barren, it's seriously dull and ugly. Sand, rocks and... giant twitching insect legs sticking out of the ground WTF? The zone's soundtrack is boring and grating as well, and not just because of the incessant buzzing in the background. I suppose you've got to give the Blizzard designers credit for creating a zone that feels truly unpleasant and unwelcoming, but when it makes your players feel so alienated that they'd rather go play somewhere else, you've kind of overshot your goal a little.

I remember going to Silithus to quest when I hit level sixty for the first time. I had a friend with me so it was reasonably fun (even if we wiped to Deathclasp way too many times), but I still found the zone so unappealing that I never returned on any of the characters that I levelled afterwards. I always just go there once to grab the flight point at Cenarion Hold, but then I'm off and never look back.

However, when my recent Loremaster adventures took me down to Silithus I was strangely looking forward to it. Maybe my memories were tainted and I'd simply forgot about all the good times. I thought that I might even have a moment of revelation like I had in Gnomeregan!

Alas, it was not to be. I got excited when I saw all the exclamation marks on my minimap the moment I entered Cenarion Hold, but that excitement quickly turned into frustration when I realised that many of these quests were what I'd consider "fake" quests to turn in some raid currency from Ahn'Qiraj for epic gear. I mean, I admit that you can call these things quests from a purely technical point of view but... imagine if all those emblem armour vendors in Dalaran and at the Argent Tournament presented their activities as quests instead of just being vendors. "Bring me so-and-so many emblems of frost and I shall reward you with a new headpiece!" And that for every armour slot and every class - it would be a confusing and convoluted mess! Which basically summed up my feelings as I was trying to find anything at Cenarion Hold that I could actually just go out and do, instead of being asked to run a couple of old raids by every other NPC.

I did finally find a couple of good old "kill these mobs and bring me their body parts" quests, but they didn't last for long. I even did that silithyst collection quest - did anyone seriously do these even when they were current content? The whole concept just seems incredibly lame.

One NPC "gifted" me with a couple of combat task briefings... to kill 120 silithid in one of the hives. Are you kidding me? I mean, I'm really quite fond of simple grind quests in general, but 120? Keep in mind that these used to be elite too... even at level eighty and being able to one-shot all the mobs I must have spent a good hour scouring Hive'Zora for the right mobs, especially as one type seemed to be incredibly rare. The amazing reward then consisted of one Cenarion Combat Badge per assignment, which turned out to be one of the many currencies that one of the vendors wanted, but I didn't have any of the other things he asked for. If you think the current emblem system is complicated, you've clearly never tried to get anything done in Silithus.

One more thing that was left to do was to farm Twilight cultists. I had two quests for their encrypted texts, and had a bit of an a-ha moment when I quickly found my inventory filling up with weird green outfits as well. I actually managed to reconstruct their purpose from memory: some kind of weird fashion pyramid scheme, where you wear three items to summon what was formerly an elite elemental, kill it, and after you've done it a couple of times one of the vendors disguised as quest givers will give you another piece for your outfit which you can then use to summon an even more powerful guy... or whatever. I think you needed a raid for the biggest ones but can't remember for sure now. It seemed like a rather lacking endgame occupation though. I think I summoned a couple out of curiosity, but when my bags overflowed with dozens of cowls and mantles for the umpteenth time (the abyssals wouldn't talk to me if I didn't have the right chest piece as well, boohoo) I grew bored and gave up.

The one thing that I thought was vaguely cool was the quest The Calling, which resulted in a friendly dwarf NPC giving me a massive info dump about the history of the zone, which is admittedly quite interesting. The problem is that I never got that far back at level sixty, because back then this quest required a full-fledged raid to complete and was thus simply impossible to do for a lot of people. Good job at hiding the most interesting thing about the whole zone, Silithus.

Seriously, just bring on the Cataclysm. I only hope that Brann Bronzebeard remembers to pick up his pet monkey.