#wow bc

It was really cool spotting all of the retroactively familiar names out in the wild! Getting to know them as they were when they were introduced. Ranger Lilatha is a Ranger Captain now, and she's the very same lady who calls out instructions during Void Assaults in Eversong. The Tranquilien folk were much more stoic back in the day, though I suppose they had to be, what with the Scourge still haunting their lands. I have this urge to tell them that, one day, many of their own will side with the Twilight's Blade, and not to heed the tempting whispers of the cult... but given how Zidormi's timewalking powers must work, it wouldn't do anything.

I wonder if some NPCs are simply renamed or adjusted for a more modern take on themselves. There is an elf named Solania, or Solaria... and I have to wonder if they later become one of the two proprietors of the Solaarian Sunbaths.

My favorite bit of trivia I got to learn was about the "nature spirits" and how the sin'dorei interact with them. In Midnight, I did the side quests with the ranger boy who still believes in the spirits of old, the chain that ends in a ghostly unicorn acknowledging the player and ranger before running off across the water. In BC, something loosely similar also occurred. There is a quest you can take from a male ghost near the Farstriders Enclave. He says that his village used elemental pendants in a ritual to control the elements of nature - particularly water. They bound a powerful water elemental to the lake, though it later lured the nearby tribe of murlocs to rampage in the village, killing most of the inhabitants and ending their control over the elemental. In the ghost's quest, you gather any remaining pendants from the lake soil and destroy them before an altar (a *naga* altar 👀) to summon the elemental and kill it, which he hopes will put his fellow ghosts to rest.

DRAENEI SHAMANS.

So, holy crap, The World of Warcraft Shadowlands pre-patch seems like a huge change to the game in a lot of ways, some big some small, but all of them pretty damn incredible!  There’s plenty of places you can go to get all the information on this thing in a way that’s far more explanatory and concise than my rantings, so i’ll for the most part just run down the things that excite me the most about it!  Without further ado:

- The Level Squish :

So we all knew the level squish resetting the level cap back to the games original 60 was coming, but did we know it was a part of the pre-patch?  Because I sure as hell didn’t!  I’m absolutely ecstatic, as someone who really loves the leveling process, that leveling a new character will finally be a manageable and semi breezy task.  No more will I have to dread certain outdated expansions being done in a hard line sequential order.  I’ll no longer need to worry that it’ll take me up to 60 hours, even with Heirlooms, just to get my new character up to the games newest content!  The level squish is so long over due that I almost can’t believe it’s actually happening.

- Chromie Time:

Chromie Time, on the other hand, is something I’ve desperately wished for for years now, and the fact it’s actually happening is astounding!  Essentially, instead of a linear path through all the old expansions, often outpacing all of them in very annoying ways, you can just pick to do whichever one you want!  Have a fondess for Cataclysm Era Old World?  Level your whole character there!  Want to relive Legions world ending stakes and excellently paced leveling zones?  You’re free to do so!  No more are expansions just pit stops on the way to cap, now they can finally be experienced and appreciated as the things they are, not just shells of the content they once were!  Hell, this will be the first time I’ve ever actually been able to properly play the Mists of Pandaria content, so that alone is huge for me!

- Plague of Undeath 2.0:

I honestly thought it was insane for Blizzard to do this event again with the whole....you know...actual real life plague going on, but damn if my excitement is proving to me why they probably stuck around with it.  I want to see it happen all again.  I want to see the zombies start out slow, not really a threat.  I want to see Stormwind devolve into a horde of the undead, I want to see it get worse and worse every day!  This was all so badass when it happened in BC that the idea of an updated version, one in which you also actually strike back at the zombies by going to Northrend to cut them out at the roots, just sounds about as cool as possible to me now.

- The Removal of Dreanor (and Legion!) Flight Requirements:

Okay this one is small, especially since I am a crazy person who already got Legion and Battle for Azeroth flying.  You know what I didn’t get though?  Warlords of Dreanor flying....and you know what I've desperately wanted for years now?  You guessed it!  Going back and earning flight in Warlords of Dreanor seemed genuinely crazy in 2020, like so much time wasted for a power that doesn’t really do anything for me now, but hot damn am I excited to hear that i’ll just be getting it for free in the Pre-Patch!  I can finally explore some of the weirder areas in Warlords of Dreanor without needing to be constrained by ground mount movement!  This could even be huge for this blog, I love the design of Dreanor so much but I never really wrote about it because it was such an odd outlier or an expansion for me to ever consider getting Screenshots of!

- Transmog Changes:

I mentioned in yesterdays post that Zangamarsh being alive and vibrant with life was just about the last thing people expected to find in Outland, and Terokkar Forest shares some of that wonder, but in a way that just.....feels wrong.  To clarify, I don’t mean that in a way that indicates bad design, or like something went wrong in the creation of the zone as a whole, but that there’s something about Terokkar Forest looking as vibrant and alive as it does (and large parts of it are still not vibrant and alive) that never quite sits right with you as you explore and quest in this zone. Don’t quote me on this, but from what I understand about the lore of Terokkar, this zone went through a phase of looking just as nasty and messed up as most of it’s neighbors, but semi-recent intervention from the Cenarion Circle has turned it around.  In a way, to me, Terokkar feels almost artificial, like it’s full of plastic plants that only superficially resemble the living things that once dominated this place.  The fauna, though seemingly a lot more normal than most places in Outland, are constantly referred to as acting strange, and that also lends a big chunk of unease and strange tension to your time in Terokkar.  To the player the animals look like the same kind of things you always fight, but it adds a lot to the tone of the place when the quest dialogue is so adamant that something about them seems wrong.

Says a lot about my “things seem wrong theory” when you go back in time during Warlords of Dreanor and find that Terokkar’s trees used to be blood red.....never would think green trees could look so unnatural.

There are two extremely notable things about Terokkar, other than the stuff I just talked about, and they are as follows: Shattrah City, and Auchindoun.  Both are old Dreanei holy sites, and both are in the opposite shape as each other.  I’ll get to Shattrath tomorrow as I have a whole post planned out for it, so lets focus here on Auchindoun.  An old burial site for the Dreanei people, Auchindoun looks as if it blew up and took half of Terokkar forest with it.  The land surrounding the massive structure is dead, burnt to a crisp, and the only things living on it are explorers and vultures.  I remember wondering what, exactly, Auchindoun was supposed to be back in the BC days, was it a tomb?  A City?  Some kind of holy site?  None of these questions were really answered until far later in Warlords of Dreanor, but looking back on it now with the information I have, it makes it easily one of the most interesting locations on the whole of Outland.  Not to mention it’s the home to some pretty killer instances!

Last thing of note, for this zone, is Skettis.  I’m not really sure where Blizzard was going with Skettis, and the Arakoa in general, but they often seem like a bit part in an expansion that was packed full of a lot of disparate ideas.  Once again, it seems like we never really got much of an answer for what their deal was until Warlords of Dreanor gave us Spires of Arak (an area of Dreanor that’s been completely wiped out in the change to Outland), but they were at least an interesting part of the world building!

Best Refuge In A Broken Land Award: Stonebreaker Hold

I love some of the orc towns in Burning Crusade.  Many of them use the classic Warcraft: Orcs and Humans style that was lost to WoW’s art style since so many of the assets in the game were based directly on Warcraft 3′s structures.  It’s such a specific nostalgia blast that I can’t help but love Stonebreaker Hold!

Random Screenshot of The Day:

Seriously though, what happened to Auchindoun?  It looks like it could have leveled half of Outland with whatever blast happened here!

Stray Notes:

Have I ever mentioned that I tend not to like the color red?  No?  Well I guess it doesn’t really matter.....Hellfire Peninsula is so red....anyway!  Hellfire Peninsula is a really interesting zone in the context of World of Warcraft, because as far as we knew of a place called “Outland”, all of it was Hellfire Peninsula!  In Warcraft 3 we visit this place and we’re more or less told all out the remains of Dreanor look like this, which isn’t strictly true, but then again isn’t that far off either. Heck, HP was originally planned to be in the base game of World of Warcraft as an endgame zone called “Outland”.  Regardless of what this place was supposed to be before, or when it was supposed to actually make it’s way into the game, where it is now is a strong introduction to Outland as a whole, and a big flashing sign telling all players that walked through The Dark Portal that this world is going to be nothing like the places you saw on Azeroth.

Hellfire Peninsula is in...rough shape.  There’s only one zone that’s held together worse than this chaotic place, and even that one at least has someone attempting to make it better.  Fire spews from the ground all the time, Fel-Orcs have taken control of what few fortifications are left, The Horde and Alliance have picked an inopportune time to start fighting again and demons have a solid foothold in all areas of this, introductory recall, zone.  It’s a hell of a sight you get to see when you walk through the dark portal and see a vanguard of soldiers barely holding off a demon assault!  That moment was by far the most cinematic WoW had gotten to up to that point.  You’d never really been placed in the middle of something that felt that grand before then, and WoW would increasingly find refuge in that kind of spectacle going forward.

Good thing we don’t have to spend too much time in this zone amirite guys?...2 levels you say?  Possibly four you say?  To shreds you say?

Lore wise, Hellfire Peninsula is one of the most intriguing in the entire expansion.  I mentioned at the top that this was presented to us in earlier games in the canon as “Outland” so, in some neat moves, you can see remnants of the earlier games that took place here scattered around the environments.  The alliance has multiple forts built here, obviously constructed when Dreanor was still, well, Dreanor, as one of them has sustained heavy damage and the other is quite literally tilting off the edge of the world and into space. The Horde has setup Thrallmar as a base of operations, but the old Horde, now comprised of the aforementioned Fel-Orcs, rules the land from Hellfire Citadel, an imposing as hell fortress resting at the very beginning of the path of glory.  It’s the small details that really bring this stuff together well, banners of Lorderean scattered in the old Human keeps, the uh....interesting makeup of The Path of Glory, and that giant killer robot that roams the lands looking to pound your level 58 body into dust.  Oh yeah did I forget to mention the Fel-Reaver?  That thing was absurdly terrifying at the time and it’s still a little creepy today, even being 80 levels above it!

Best Refuge In A Broken Land Award: Falcon Watch:

Lest WoW let us forget the two brand new races they introduced in Burning Crusade, both of the towns visited in the second half are Blood Elf and Draenei themed for Horde and Alliance respectively.   I always thought seeing the opulent Blood Elf Architecture contrasting with the literal hellscape all around you was really interesting! 

Random Screenshot Of The Day:

This is probably the most well worn piece of trivia in World of Warcraft, but, you ever look closely at what’s paving the path of glory?  It’s....not a pretty sight.

Stray Notes:

- Hellfire, while looking great to this day, is absolute trash from a questing perspective.  Everything here is painfully outdated Vanilla WoW style quests stuck in a game that’s now in it’s 16th year of evolution.  I really wish they’d somehow go back and re-do Outland, but I know that’ll never happen.

Escape From Durnhold Keep, a part of the now underused Caverns of Time, is my very favorite instance in World of Warcraft.  It’s my favorite because I get to live out such a pivotal lore moment (Thralls escape from slavery), and there’s such an absurd amount of fun little details around the sides that it creates it’s own unique little pocket world at the same time!  Hillsbrad Foothills got a big boost as one of my all time favorite zones in WoW from the very first time the Warcraft 2 narrator over pronounced it’s name, and it’s stuck with me for a long time since then!

The version presented during the Caverns of Time is vastly different from the version we now see post Cataclysm World of Warcraft.  It was less of a shock back in the Vanilla WoW days, when Southshore was still the northernmost functioning town for the Alliance and not, you know, a bubbling toxic wreck.  Here we have a totally normal Soutshore, filled with easter eggs and silly character cameos (One of my favorites being the future Champion Herod being the local childhood bully to the other future members of the Scarlet Crusade).  Tarren Mill, far from the wreck it is and always will be under the control of the Forsaken, is a sleepy little farm hamlet where nobody would even consider looking for something as absurd an escaped orc gladiator.  Just about the only place that doesn’t gain an increase in charm by being still intact is the main feature of the instance, where most of the story takes place: Durnholde Keep.

Just feels unnatural seeing this place as anything other than an eternally smoldering ruin.

From the old days of questing through Hillsbrad, the only memory most people have of Durnholde is a castle razed almost entirely to the ground.  Seeing it built up in it’s full glory is a reminder of just why it was destroyed in the first place.  The Orc internment camp is as abusive and violent as the books always described it, and Thrall is treated like trash by Adeles Blackmoore so often that he’s now planned this break out attempt.  It’s immensely satisfying to be able to take part in this huge lore moment, though I do wish they could have made another instance where you came back with the force of orcs and razed it to the ground! Fun fact about Old Hillsbrad from someone who used to mess around with far-sight macros a lot, there’s a lot more in this zone then the game wants you to believe.  If you stray too far from the established play area (or Southshore, which is just a bonus Easter Egg to find) the screen is quickly filled up with blue fog and you can’t go any further due to invisible walls.  That doesn’t mean all the stuff you’d expect to find isn’t there though!  Hillsbrad fields is there in all it’s old timey human settlement glory, you can get so far as where Dalaran is supposed to be, but you’ll just find a bit patch of flat land!  The beginnings of the Alterac Mountains zone is also present, but much like that zone itself at the time, doesn’t really have anything to find.

Tarren Mill, meanwhile, is apparently celebrating the midsummer fire festival even this far back into the past!  Shame there’s no fire keeper here, just as one last little hidden entry on that achievement list!

Old Hillsbrad had a lot more work put into it than it really required to work.  This would end up being something of a common theme for most of the Caverns of Time instances, and is likely why they don’t make them anymore!  All Blizzard really needed to make was Durnholde Keep itself to make this instance work, but they went above and beyond in not only near fully recreating a zone inside the instance itself, but a snapshot of a zone as it existed long before Warcraft was ever “World of Warcraft” just to give lore nerds a lot of fun stuff to discover!

Random Screenshot Of The Day:

Eh, he’ll never amount to anything.

Stray Notes:

Easter Eggs I didn’t cover but do deserve some mention: 

- Hercule is talking with Kel’Thuzad about finding “true power” away from the Kirin Tor, which, uh oh.  

- A meeting of paladins is using the inn to discuss troubling news out of Northrend as the few human settlements present there are reporting invasions of more and more undead, which the kingdom is woefully un-prepared to deal with at the moment.

- I don’t know who Don Carlos is, but if you find and defeat him, you can get his famous hat!  Which makes a ghost wolf follow you around!