World Of Warcraft

Alt!Guldan is a poor mobbing victim with an inferiority complex.

Guldan Prime was a mighty shaman before becoming a warlock and confident.

The backstory actually applies to both Gul'dans - if I recall correctly, Chronicles 2 outright confirms that.

I don't think they actually retconned the Ner'zhul part, though - which means MU!Gul'dan first burned down his village and then joined up with the Shadowmoon. That'd mean him backstabbing Ner'zhul has probably been a long time coming, as Gul'dan would have already been in contact with the Legion before that.

I thought Garithos was just lazily written.even for his small role. He could have been sympathetic, or more intelligent (seriously, why would someone so xenophobic trust what he must regard as abominations?), or with dastardly charm, or entertainingly deranged... instead he just seemed like a plot device to make Kael'thas ally with Vashj and then add some diversity to the Scourge campaign. My preferrence would be to show that he feels compelled to come down hard on the elves due to his superiors demanding results, and that he expects everyone to uphold a code of honor.

I find that every time they try to push the Alliance vs Horde thing, it comes off as terribly forced, or makes one side seem irrationally hating, or more often both. I wish they would either focus on the difference in mindsets that the Pandaren factions hint at, or restrict it to small splinter groups fighting each other (Stormheim would have been this if only Sylvanas were not the Warchief).

And just what has Christie Golden done so wrong?

I think there were some issues with how the Horde/Alliance conflict was portrayed in Tides of War. Specifically that the Alliance avoided launching a counterattack against Garrosh because they didn't want to "provoke a war" even as his army was brutally tearing through Alliance holdings in the Southern Barrens.

A more minor issue would be her tendency to interpret the game world extremely literally, down to the placement of ships in a harbor. While it's cool that her minor characters tend to be either questgivers in game or have a connection to them, this can get a little silly on occasion (like the Northsea Pirates were apparently still besieging Westguard Keep 2 full expansions later, with the denizens of the keep still using the exact same captured Zeppelin to launch counterattacks). This would be much less of an issue if she's going to be writing stuff for the actual game.

Although something to keep in mind is that Christie Golden just said she works for Blizzard now, not her position or even what game she'll primarily be working on. It wouldn't shock me if she's being brought in for Overwatch, especially since saving the announcement of whatever she's doing for the One Year anniversary could explain the current secrecy.

Honestly if your going to write about a game use the game's elements, you are writing for people who play the game, The South Barrens arc was a pretty big plot point too.

Better than a lot of writers who seem like they never played the game they are writing about.

edited 18th May '17 5:06:00 PM by Memers

So I get my shaman to 110, quickly get her artifact knowledge to 25 (one artifact gains half a dozen traits off one item) then within a few hours, I get the hidden skins for both Doomhammer and Ra-den. Weird. I haven't even finished the shaman campaign.

Talking of which, the leg in Deepholm felt lazy. Resurrecting Thunderaan felt like a follow-up to Cataclysm, but having the Twilight's Hammer again trying to end the world was more like a rehash.

That reminds me of my experience while levelling at the Searing Gorge. After doing many quests involving Dark Iron dwarves cooperating with Ragnaros' fire elementals, I genuinely thought those quests were vanilla quests that Blizzard forgot to update. It was all very similar to the storyline that culminated with the Molten Core raid.

Cataclysm brought many zones forward, but with the entire world to remake as well as the new zones there were some that ended up as the same story redone. I can forgive that more for the old levelling quests than for the new max-level ones. Instead of talking of the Twilight's Hammer as a force able to beat back Therazane, it would have worked better if she complained of restless elementals from the wounds of the Cataclysm, roaming a deserted cultist outpost, and when you're there you find they are manipulated by a handful of Twilight Dragons.

You'd know if it was quests from Classic if you had to go round the entire zone four times to get three quests done.

There is a questgiving ogre in Searing Gorge who hates killing and shows you how to loot mobs without killing them, but when I did the quest it was bugged (gave pickpocket loot instead) so after he had disabled all those mobs I had to do it again and kill them anyway. Gave it an unintended comedy feel in the vein of Douglas Adams.

I don't even think that Silithus has been updated at all. I don't know what it was like during Vanilla but the end of the major quest chain had the dramatic reveal that... C'Thun is responsible for the events, complete with questgiver not knowing what that is. Nothing else there seems to be affected at all by the Cataclysm either.

I can confirm as as a player whom played from Vanilla till Cataclysm that Silithus was never changed.

Kind of sad really, it's a creepy and foreboding zone which was perfect for an endgame zone back in Vanilla. The only zone I found much more creepy then it back then was Eastern Plaguelands.

They wanted to keep the zone intact seeing how it was so connected to the dungeons and would break those reps.

Also there really wasnt anything new to tell story wise unlike EPL.

Dustwallow Marsh, the area with Theramore, is pretty much unchanged quest wise, too. It just had a nice road added to it.

edited 21st May '17 9:08:51 PM by sgamer82

Dustwallow received a quest revamp just before cata so there really wasn't a point to do it again.... also received a 'revamp' after cata.

It did? I've never known its quests to ever change more than cosmetically, unless this was before/during Wrath (when I started playing) and wouldn't have noticed.

In 2.3 aka the Zul'Aman patch in TBC they added

• the goblin town, Mudsprocket, and roads
• brought the southern half of the zone's mob level to be better in line with the north,
• added the enemy Tauren,
• added around 30 quests in mudsprocket and the horde/alliance towns
• moved Quest NP Cs from the towns to Mudsprocket to avoid long turn ins for quests.
• They also added the questline about King Wrynn's disappearance, this line was the only thing that really changed with cata.

Edit: oh and they added graveyards in the south, the walk back for Ony's lair was infamous.

Before this patch there were only a few horde quests in the zone, mostly in the south. And a huge gap in levels between the upper and lower half of the zone, like the upper half was a level 30 area and the dragons at the bottom were 45.

Horde had a lot of difficulty leveling in the early 30s before the revamp, you only had Stranglethorn and that caused that zone to be a clusterfuck on pvp servers.

The revamp was very likely the testbed for Cata's big one.

edited 22nd May '17 5:15:00 AM by Memers

No wonder I didn't notice. I'm a Wrath-baby. I came in on the very end of BC (my first in game event was that zombie apocalypse thing they did).

I'm happy that they kept Silithus as an example of level 60 endgame. With its out-of-the-way location it would not have done well as a levelling area. Besides, the one-time quests are not too bad, it's the density of mobs and the grinding that made it painful. I am equally glad that they got rid of the pyramid of "grind mobs to summon a better mob" with its four steps, and mounds of mostly soulbound items.

Now it seems the mobs scale to 110, though it's of little relevance outside Day of the Scarab.

Pre-Cata my favourite zones were Tanaris (which actually looks like a desert), Darkshore, Ashenvale, Wetlands, Hillsbrad and Alterac (so scenic and peaceful...), Stranglethorn and in particular Azshara, which had hardly any quests but looked and felt so vast and wild. Most of the high-level areas like the Plaguelands, Felwood, Burning Steppes and Searing Gorge never felt right. They were meant to be creepy or menacing, but the abuse of a single colour just made them feel dreary and monotonous.

One thing I still don't understand is why they must all be separated by ridges. Mulgore is meant to evoke the Great Plains, but the fact that you can see steep mountains on all sides makes it feel more like the bottom of a valley. Un'Goro Crater is the only one to acknowledge this. I'm glad they stopped this unnatural fencing-off in Wrath.

I don't know. I guess I have more fondness for the old high-level vanilla zones more simply because they were the zones you just didn't wanna go into unless you knew what you were doing, high enough, and possibly had a group of friends with you. And even then they were still pretty dangerous.

There was also many times were I accidentally wandered into them out of curiosity (Redridge to Searing Gorge for example) and was immediately killed. That was more memorable for the sudden shock.

I do like a lot of the other old zones better though. Tons of memories. Darkshore especially as my first character, a Night Elf hunter named Alfurn, spent a lot of time exploring there.

I like the Princess Mononoke-style background music that plays in Mulgore. :)

Before the cata changes, I always felt going through the 50-60 zones to be a slog. I feel similarly about burning crusade zones.

Ugh, one thing I remember hating before I quit the game was leveling up a Death Knight through the BC zones. A lot of the BC zones were honestly really goddamn boring by that point.

The worst thing about BC was how every zone just had one dominant color like red for HFP or blue for ZM.

I still love the old Nagrand. Netherstorm and Zangarmarsh are unique, but too limited in their palette. Still Outland outside of the Peninsula is better than the old world.

But Northrend had this problem that most endgame stuff was in this dreary grey spread of a zone that is Icecrown. The glacier itself is a flyover zone milling with mobs that should have been dangerous but were really just an eyesore. Storm Peaks was better, but having endgame divided between grey and white left Wrath feeling devoid of colour. It's likely why no zone since then has been entirely snow-wrapped.

Yeah, late Wrath was very boring color-wise. Icecrown itself was pretty tiny and very repetitive after the story quests were done, to say nothing of the literal repetitiveness of DUN DUN DUN DUN repeating over and over while you stare at a dark grey sky flying to somewhere more interesting.

It certainly fit the theme. I'm not saying it was a good decision necessarily, but I'm curious what color scheme would have been "entertaining" enough yet maintained immersion.