The Trip to 85

DAY 1

So my wife and I hit up the midnight launch because, well, we could. Might have been other reasons, but the “because we can!” camp seemed to be the most persuasive.

We arrived at Gamestop about five to 10pm. Eight people were in line already. We waited in the car for a few minutes (because standing outside in Minnesota in winter is not conducive to a harmonious relationship). Doors opened, we walked in.

I give Gamestop credit. They came up with a fun activity to keep us amused while we waited for the midnight launch. They had some basic WoW trivia questions. First person to answer correctly got a point and popped a balloon. Inside the balloon was a number that corresponded to a quest or a skull. The quests were reminiscent of community chest cards from Monopoly: some were bonuses, some were activities. For example:

• Choose 5 people, 2 from your faction and 3 from the opposite faction. Each group must do an in-game cheer, such as “For the Horde!” The best cheer—loudest, most enthusiastic, funniest, whatever—as determined by the rest of the crowd wins and gets 5 points for everyone.
• Your warlock logged out in Shattrath, but needs to go to Stormwind to train. Mount up (on a small stuffed pony) and run through Hellfire Peninsula to the Dark Portal (around the room). The better the ride (make us laugh!), the more points.
• Dance off! Pick someone from the crowd and perform an in-game dance. Best dance, as determined by the crowd, wins 5 points. Loser gets 1 point.
• Some of the quests were lootboxes, which contained leftover promo items Gamestop had from other things. I got a lootbox: a Donkey Country felt pencil case (yellow and banana-shaped), an UFC hat (I don’t like MMA, so I gave it to a guy standing next to me who thought the hat was awesome), and a Tapout shirt (which got the same treatment as the hat.)
• An example of a skull: It’s Monday night. You answer an ad in trade chat for “LF1M, dps, ICC-25”. On Marrowgar, all the healers stand in coldflame and die. Ten people leave. Looks like this isn’t happening tonight. Lose 1 point.

Person with the most points at the end got something but I don’t know what. Although a bit awkward among strangers, a game like this would be fan-fucking-tastic at a guild meet-up especially if alcohol was involved. For those uninterested in the activities, they had the Cata behind-the-scenes DVD playing on one of the TVs. Overall, I thank Gamestop for making the midnight release something more than a bunch of WoW players standing around waiting for midnight.

Someone got realm-first cooking before most of us could log in. A couple guildies were gunning for realm-first cooking. They had the mats, the chef’s hat, logged out next to a campfire. But as they logged in, they saw the announcement come up. Oh well.

Good job, Blizzard. Two different xp fails between launch and now.

For the first 30 minutes of Cata, nobody on our server could earn xp. Neither quests nor mobs generated xp. Very disconcerting. And then, after 30 minutes, xp was switched on. No server restart, no announcement, just “Hm. I just xp from that daily turn in….Whatever.”

I could have waited to turn in my 25 dailies, but…

• No idea what was going on. Was it intended? Was there an ETA? We had no information whatsoever. Maybe the server would restart and put us back to where we were 15 minutes earlier (which has happened). Maybe the xp would kick in later. Maybe lvl 80 dailies weren’t going to give xp.
• Still got stuff for the quest turn-ins. Even though I didn’t get xp, I got guild rep. Not what I wanted, but nice. Plus, the quests contributed to our guild’s xp. Within 30 minutes, we had reached guild rank 2. That extra 5% xp will expedite leveling. Oh, and I got the gold and other goodies like normal.
• Wife aggro. There was some convincing and cajoling to get my spouse to do and save 25 dailies for the release. Thus, when the xp bug hit, the desk across from me began steaming. She didn’t strangle me then and there only because she was exhausted. In the interest of marital bliss and sleep, I cut my losses and turned everything in.

I’m still kicking myself for not waiting. A little, though: the xp would be nice to have, but not having to sleep on the couch for the next month is worth far more.

I feel very cheated by the announcement regarding no guild xp for guild achievements. Our guild was gunning for realm-first guild rank 25. We selected profession masters, donated to the gbank for repairs and mats, figured out which race+class combos we would need leveled after our mains were 85. Now all that planning is for naught, all because Blizzard underestimated our xp gains. Now we can only hope to get guild rank 25 on the same day as every other dedicated guild.

Progress: uh, like 50k = my first step into a larger world (of warcraft).
Time played: 1 hour

DAY 1 (continued)

After a normal work day, we rushed home and went to, er, work.

Vashj’ir or Hyjal? Both of us leveled in Hyjal in beta, so we knew what Hyjal offered. Vashjir sounded far less enticing: underwater movement, possible pet issues, not terribly exciting lore. Plus, who wants to level in a fish tank? But since we figured most people would avoid Vashjir, we took the boat from Stormwind to the briny depths.

First thoughts: Much better than expected. Underwater movement not an issue; in fact, the 3D aspect being underwater provides is fun. Makes the brain think a bit. It’s basically flying. The big issue is the aquarium-ness of the zone: there’s a lot of stuff in the water—plants, fish schools, critters—which makes for a very busy environment. Finding specific things, from quest items to inns, is troublesome. When returning from a quest is the longest part of the quest, that’s called zone design fail.

Lore improved with quests. The intro sequence, which starts at the end of the pier, gives a great lead-in to the zone. The starter quests are meh, but get more interesting. Budd’s quests were my favorite from the first section. That, and the mind-controlled sharks v. naga. Nomnomnom!

Druids, you want to do Vashj’ir. Seal form is OP.

TIP! For “Nespirah”, make sure the brain room is on the right as you exit the tube and do not mount when you exit the water. We thought the quest was bugged, but we were doing it wrong. Went up another tube, NPCs spawned as they should, done.

Kellwin dinged Snarley. I was waiting for a mob to spawn when I saw the gold swirl around Snarlsalot and the “Snarlsalot has reached level 81!” message. “Did Snarley just level with his mind…?” Nope. Just my wife pushing Snarley over as she killed a mob off my screen.

Deathbringer’s Will is awful for leveling. I replaced it as soon as I got a halfway decent trinket. “Cannot mount will shapeshifted” = FUCK YOU!

Cutscenes are sweet. Gives a more single-person feel to WoW. Oh, and they’re awesome.

I was pleasantly surprised by the apparent lack of players clogging the zones. After just an hour, Kell and I had waded from the masses and had maybe 10 other players on the same quests. After two hours, we saw about 5 others killing the same mobs. There were plenty of players in the starting zones, a lot of players hanging about the questgivers, but hardly anyone killing the same mobs. My guess is phasing. I think Blizzard is using phasing to prevent the questing areas from being overcrowded, but not phasing non-questing areas. For example, we got a group together to try the whale shark (more on that below). One person was farther ahead in Vashj’ir quest progression than us, another had been questing in Hyjal. We could see everyone when we were on the outskirts of the questing area as we followed the whale shark, but the phased bubble appeared at other times. I’m not 100% sure of this, but it would help explain how we’re not feeling any population stress.

So, ya, the whale shark will have to wait. Commenters on wowhead say it takes a full raid and it must be kited. Snarlsalot knows this first-hand: I sent him in as a lolpull and OMGWHATHAPPENEDTOYOURFACEOHGODOHGODFEIGNDEATHDON’TFAILMENOW! Recount said “Whale Shark wtfpwnd your bear for over 800k.” So unless you’ve got a bunch of people, don’t waste your time.

I don’t know who got realm-first 85. A guildie got realm-first mage. Kind of surprising since his Wrath main was a shaman. Congrats, Sib

Progress: 81, halfway to 82.
Time played: 4.5 hours.

DAY 2

More questing in Vashj’ir. We finished the vision quests. Here’s me on the third quest: “Killing vyrkul as a lady naga. Vyrkul and naga, it’s a bad romance. (Ya, I went there)…Another wave of proto-humans into my bass-o-matic…Yet another wave. They die. Oh look, the vyrkul boss. He’s not dying. But hark! Our friends cometh—wait a sec…I know those ‘allies’…Those are not the reinforcements I expec—WTF IS THAT?!” Ya, watch the cutscenes.

TIP! Hold the line. Let the vyrkul come to you. Stay by the lady. My wife bugged the quest because she kept moving too far forward. *Sigh* Overenthusiastic boomkins…

We stayed in Vashj’ir mainly to get our Earthen Ring rep to friendly. Fucking stupid that more than halfway through the zone, ER rep is 2470/3000 neutral. Yet we got friendly with the Guardians of Hyjal after escorting Fandal out of barrow dens. Less than 10 quests into Hyjal and we’re friendly with GoH; more than 30 quests into Vashjir and we’re still neutral with ER. Lame.

FIXED! Blizzard hot-fixed this on Thursday. Grumble.

While not as long or engaging as the Vashj’ir intro sequence, Hyjal’s intro is worth watching. 828M health, that’s all I’m gonna say.

Ran Throne of the Tides. Gorgeous instance. Not too bad: no wipes or deaths, medium hard bosses, helped that the tank knew what he was doing. Yay for guild runs! Disappointed with the xp: maybe 3 bars at 82 for the whole instance.

Went to Deepholm. Wow. Just…wow. Stunningly beautiful. I hope we have a lot dailies here cause I wouldn’t mind spending a lot of time in Deepholm. Mobs are starting to hit hard: Snarley pulled three and didn’t outlive them, Kellwin pulled too many and nearly died herself.

Progress: 82, 40% to 83.
Time played: 4 hours.

DAY 3

A short play session as the wifey was tired. The past couple weeks caught up with her last night. Three solid hours of questing in Deepholm.

I’m still in awe. I look around and my brain goes, “Deepholm’s Beauty stuns you for 10 seconds.” Just…wow. I hope Twilight Highlands and Uldum are gorgeous, too. One disappointment with Wrath was the scenery. Icecrown was fairly epic though the dichromatic bluish white and black washed away much of the detail. Storm Peaks was blah: a snowy mountainous zone. Woo. That’s where we spent the vast majority of our time in Wrath. The visually-numbing zones. Grizzly Hills and Howling Fjord, my favorite to look at in Wrath, were worthless for level 80’s. Shoalazar Basin, also visually-stimulating, had the Puppymen and Big Tongue dailies to entertain max-level players. I hope we don’t repeat the experience in Cata.

TIP! To complete “Quicksilver Submersion”…

1. Grab a box from the troggs.
2. Walk/fly/whatever to the island in front of the ogres. Do NOT go too close as the ogres will kill you. They have a fairly large aggro radius.
3. Hop in the water and click your box. Don’t move and you get the “Submerged” buff.
4. When the ogre yells “Here she comes, boss!”, swim slowly to the middle of the little channel between the island and the ogre camp. Not too close as the ogres will see you. If successful, a cutscene will pop.

Another “WTF ARE YOU DOING HERE?!?!?!?!” moment. I love those moments!

After Kellwin crashed, I stayed up for a bit and leveled jewelcrafting. Not to 525, just to 475 so I could do the JC daily. 3k gold later, and I had access to the JC daily. Fuck, JC is expensive to level. Always has been. Gems must be prospected from ore, which means you need a miner or a thick wallet. Currently, my miner is waiting until I hit 85 before I start clunking rocks from the ground. So my main waits. I’m okay with that. No rush.

Had my first two deaths of Cataclysm. For those who have done Deepholm, you probably died in the same place I did. So as not to spoil the fun for first-time Deepholm visitors, I’ll just say it’s underground and near the dailies. First death was a complete rookie mistake. Second was half rookie mistake, half me being impatient.

Progress: 83, 20% to 84.
Time played: 3.5 hours.

DAY 4

Finished Deepholm. Good progress on Uldum. Not much to discuss. Just a lot of questing on Friday night.

Two more deaths. One was me being stupid. “Harrison Jones didn’t die. Neither will I. Into the big pit!” The other was Kellwin and I underestimating an elite mob, the jailer with the crocs.

Progress: 84, 10% to 85
Time played: 4 hours

DAY 5

The weather outside was frightful, but the leveling…well, “delightful” isn’t the word I would use. We started the day in Uldum, but decided to switch to Twilight Highlands. As fun as Uldum is, twas frustrating to bog down on the leveling.

We were getting testy. To quote the wife: “I suppose it’s a good thing that we had our first fight halfway to 85.” Truth. (For those wondering, it was a simple miscommunication based on quest markers moving on the map because I was closer to one spawn point and she was closer to another. All good.) Drop rates were starting to slide back into Classic rates. Aside from the Wildhammer wedding, which was “lumpy in all the right places”, the quest chains were less than thrilling. Mobs were beating us up. Quest rewards were decent, but nothing exciting. Quests were getting repetitious: follow breadcrumb to new hub, pick up “kill x” and “gather x” quests, complete, turn in, get follow up “kill named mob”, complete, turn in, get breadcrumb to next zone, repeat. Guildies dinging 85 weren’t helping. I was happy for them, but got more frustrated with myself. “So close! Move yer ass, Lyr!”

And then, as we were making friends with the red dragonflight again (“Call Alexstrazsa! She knows me! Please don’t make me do these stupid, time-wasting…Ok, fine! Be that way!”), I noticed that—THANK GOD!—I was almost done. I was a bit ahead of Kellwin due to the JC daily, so picked a few herbs to catch up. We checked our numbers, did one final quest (www.wowhead.com/quest=28758/battle-of-life-and-death), and dinged 85 together. Whew!

The couple that dings together stays together.

More deaths:
Too many mobs in TwiHi x2.
Crucible of carnage. Sacrificial Draenei.
Knocked off mount via propeller. I blame my wife for this one: “Ignore the deck and fly around to the back.” I tried to land on the ledge on the back of the airship, but, well…propeller 1, twilight drake 0.

Flintlocke is win. Pure, epic winsauce.

Like its predecessors, the Crucible of Carnage gives a metric shit-ton of xp and a weapon equal to non-epic heroic weapons. So ya, when you can access it, do it. The bosses are fairly straight-forward: first guy (ogre) fears, second (Dragonmaw orc) is cake, third (abomination) drops gas pools, fourth (worgen) has adds and hits very, very hard, and the final guy (??) turns the ground floor into swirls of fire. Easier than past death match arenas. What made the crucible insane was the new mechanic that allowed for multiple bosses to be up and active simultaneously. Although some combinations were manageable, we had a lot of “fun” when we summoned the last boss and another group summoned the first boss a minute later. Fear + swirls of fire = crying healers.

Why is the Alliance trying in TwiHi? Sure, the Wildhammers live here, but the Horde have two gigantic bases plus the goblin city just off the coast. This might be a good time to fall back and solidify positions elsewhere.

Speaking of which, how is it that the Alliance is losing ground in Eastern Kingdoms? We have four capitals here (three if you don’t count Gnomergan) while the Horde have two. And yet it is the Horde that is taking over. Thanks, worgen, for defending your own keep. Oh wait, my bad. The forsaken are walking all over Silverpine. Andorhal is doing okay, not great. TwiHi is still being contested, but whereas the Horde has strong fortifications, the Alliance is dispersed. Seriously, could we man the fuck up and at least not concede entire zones?

Talk about being lucky. Kellwin and I were questing on Saturday when a BoE epic dropped. Shock and awe. Neither of us could use it, so we put it on the auction house. Then, a few hours later, I was finishing up some TwiHi quests when another BoE epic dropped. This one was for me: an agility neck. Oh. Fuck. Yes. Sure, I could have sold it, but this neck will see me into the second tier of raiding. Tis a great feeling to have one item slot solid for the next 4-6 months.

Ding!
Time played: 9 hours.
Time to 85: 22 hours (give or take an hour)
Deaths: 8

I’m pleasantly surprised by how fast we leveled. Leveling in beta was fast, but that was partially due to increased leveling: more xp, less xp needed per level. Whereas 70-80 required at least 50 hours of /played, we hit 85 in less than half that time with the majority of the time spent on the last level and a half. We could have leveled faster, but we wanted to enjoy the experience. We read the quests, took our time getting from place to place, made sure we both were having fun. We could have speed-leveled in much less time, but that was not our goal.

If I was going to try for a leveling speed record, I’d pick druid. Gathering in travel and flight form plus self-heals plus solid damage equals insanely fast leveling potential.

EPILOGUE

Questing has never been better. Some have commented that leveling is not as fun as it used to be. Yes, the trite “you kids don’t know how good you have it!” statements have been thrown out by some Classic players. Someone bemoaned the near-100% drop rate on boar livers in Westfall. And even I found the quest patterns to be repetitive after a while. But the changes improve the leveling experience for new players, which is always a good thing. Players can devote more time to reading the quests and enjoying the plots instead of getting frustrated with not finding items/mobs or bad drop rates. The phasing, while frustrating at times (“Why is there no one around who can help me…?”), is a huge improvement over phasing in Wrath. In Wrath, questing was still fairly open: get a bunch of quests, do them however you want. But the linear-ness of Cata questing lends itself perfectly to more phasing. Players will find other players at the same place in the quest progression, but they won’t find players above or below them. No more clogged quest hubs, reduced kill stealing and ganking, the bad aspects of MMOs. Questing, which has always been a predominantly single-player endeavor, will now feel even more single-player. Group when you want to, but questing can be done solely. Oh, and removing the dreaded 5-player quest is awesome. You can do the quest with a group or alone. No more soul-crushing waits getting 5 people together who are all on the same quest and in the same phase; I’m looking at you, Icecrown Citadel. Blizzard did not change questing for the sake of change. They changed it because they wanted to improve it, and they definitely improved it.

My major concern with Cataclysm was my lack of interest in the storyline. Twilight’s Hammer, to me, was a bunch of wackos out in Silithus who stripped naked so I could summon random elites. Deathwing intrigued me, but after punking another dragon aspect, I thought he’d be kind of a pushover. I didn’t do Molten Core at lvl 60, so I did not have an emotional attachment to Ragnaros or any elemental. Heck, the whole elemental storyline feels awkward and weird when we consider there are other planets; how do Draenei shaman communicate with Azerothian elements? But Blizzard did a great job convincing me that the Twilight’s Hammer is dangerous, Deathwing isn’t Malygos, and that the elements and their issues matter to me. I don’t think I’ll have a burning hatred—a love-to-hate relationship—for Cata baddies as I had for the Lich King, but as I’ve said before, the Lich King was special. Blizzard has engendered enough anger in me to push me into action against the named mobs of doom of Cataclysm.