Flying into Astranaar-- capitol of one of my least-favorite zones: Ashenvale.
Not really knowing where to start, I just picked The Hinterlands at random. There wasn't much there aside from a questline to save Sharpbeak. This, of course involved traveling across the entire continent several times. This is apparently a core quest design mechanic: soul-crushing travel. Riding across a 2000+ yard zone is fine. 10 minute flights back and forth and inter-continental ship travel is awful.
I'm so used to being able to pop into epic flight, point to the distance and hit NUM LOCK.
From there I worked on quests in Stormwind and all over the world, really. They send you off every which way. Each place has several NPCs offering more quests, and things just branch out until you forgot what the hell you were trying to do in the first place.
The first time I ever played World of Warcraft was in public stress-test beta in the Fall of 2004. I rolled a Night Elf Warrior. I have no idea what I named him. I picked Night Elf because I always played NE in WC3.
As I did some questing, I eventually found myself in Darkshore and in the forest there, I saw another player transform into a bear. "WOAH! THAT WAS SO COOL!" I thought. I moused over... he was a Druid. Druid eh?
I stopped playing the beta because the game was really sweet, and I didn't want to get too far just to have it erased when retail came out. However, I knew what i wanted to be.
Flash-forward to November 23, 2004. WoW has just launched, and I picked up a copy. When I got home that evening, I flipped though a few websites looking for an elvish name generator. I decided I wanted to roll a female character. I had always played male characters in Star Wars Galaxies, but I didn't really like the way Male Nelfs looked like 'roided out vampires. I went female. I have her long blue hair, no face markings, pale blue skin, and named her Eulynn. Her full name is Eulynn Ironmoon-- but alas, there are no surnames in WoW.
I was playing with some friends I had made in SWG. They were human and Gnome, and off leveling up in the Eastern Kingdoms while I was toughing it out in Kalimdor. I did the quests in Teldrassil, and moved on to Darkshore. I have always said that Auberdine, Darkshore is my home town. I love that little village. The house next to the Inn is mine, because I say it is. :D
I did most of the quests in Darkshore, and started to move into Ashenvale. I was probably getting near level 20. I really did not like Ashenvale. Darkshore was bad enough with all of the running back and forth from town to the southern end of the zone. Back in those days you didn't get any kind of mount until you were level 40. Druids were lucky enough to get Travel Form at level 30. Besides, at that time it seemed like 100g was an incredible amount of money.
I made the big trek over to the Eastern Kingdoms. You could sail from Auberdine to Menethil Harbor, Wetlands. Then you had to run across the entire zone, full of level ?? crocs that would eat you in 1 or 2 hits if you strayed anywhere close. After the long and punishing run across Wetlands, you went down into Loch Modan, and then eventually you could reach Dun Morogh and find the massive Dwarven city of Ironforge. From there, you had to take the Deeprun Tram to Stormwind City, and then move on foot through Elwynn Forest and into Westfall where I resumed questing.
After Westfall, I moved into Duskwood, then Stranglethorn Vale. There never used to be a flight point at the rebel camp in STV, so questing in the zone was not fun-- as is is very large.
After STV, I wasn't quite sure where to go. I did some questing and grinding in bits and pieces in various places. Desolace, Stonetalon Mountains, Thousand Needles, Tanaris, Feralas, Un'Goro, Azshara, and Winterspring. As I got higher in level I quested less, focusing mainly on grinding mobs and running instances to get the last bits of XP.
In my low 50's I started running instances like Scholomance and Stratholme. Back in those days there were no caps on how many people you could have inside instances. We would run them with full 40-man raids. It was crazy. Even in a raid it still took hours and hours to clear Scholomance. There were SO many trash mobs in there. There's a lot now, and it's been thinned out considerably from it's heyday.
Once I hit 60 I started doing raids in Molten Core and Onyxia's Lair, so I all but quit any kind of questing until The Burning Crusade Expansion, in which quest hub designs were VASTLY improved, making questing a very efficient and much more fun way of gaining experience than just grinding mobs.
So now I am left with a bunch of areas that I never really quested though completely. I did a few here or there.. skipped some dungeon and group quests when I was solo, and overall am left with having really no idea where to even begin.
I suppose I am fortunate enough to have started from the very beginning of WoW and have done a bunch of quests that are no longer available in-game. The Onyxia key questline, is one I can think of.
So, stay tuned. I will have more updates, including how my first day went. What went right, and what went horribly wrong.
I'm normally not one for blogging-- but I have decided to share my experiences while striving for one of the biggest (in scope, definitely) achievements in the World of Warcraft: The Loremaster.
For those who may not know, there is an MMORPG called World of Warcraft that has been running for almost 5 years now. Henceforth referred to as WoW, the game has attracted over ten million subscribers and is, by far, the largest massively multiplayer online RPG in the western world.
A couple years ago, Blizzard added an achievement system to the game, which should be very familiar to anyone who is familiar with Xbox360 games. You unlock these achievements by completing certain tasks in the game. Many are fairly pedestrian and require no real effort to obtain, some require you to perform difficult tasks in boss encounters, and many are for going above and beyond the level of dedication of the typical player.
Some achievements reward you with titles that appear next to your name in-game, some give you nice-looking tabards to wear over your armor, and some reward mounts. Typically these are flying mounts, many of them various kinds of drakes or proto-drakes.
Glory of the Raider for example, was one of the hardest achievements to obtain before Patch 3.1.
The quest I am embarking on, to achieve Loremaster status, isn't particularly difficult. It just involves questing... LOTS of questing.
World of Warcraft's world of Azeroth is currently represented by three continents, Kalimdor, The Eastern Kingdoms, and Northrend. The world of Outland is a diffrerent planet entirely.
These zones break down into two main categories: Old-World, and New-World. Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms are what I call "old-world" continents. These are the original two continents that were in the game when it launched in 2004. There are no flying mounts, flight paths are more scarce, the zones are larger in size, the terrain isn't nearly as pretty, and the quest structure is--- not good. There will be plenty on that as we continue.
The Loremaster is a meta achivement, meaning it's requirements are other achievements. These are:
Loremaster of Kalimdor
Loremaster of Eastern Kingdoms
Loremaster of Outland
Loremaster of Northrend
Both Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms Loremaster achivements require that the player complete 700 quests in each continent.
When I started I was about halfway there-- with over 300 quests completed in each continent.
What follows is my experiences knocking out the remainder... what a long, strange trip it will be.
