The World of Alphabui - A Great Veteran's Return, Monks, Goblins and Pandas again
Well I never thought I’d be writing another of this post
topic, particularly because the last
one I did is from 5 years ago and as you know, I am firmly entrenched with Star Wars the Old Republic (SWTOR). And before
you ask no this isn’t because of the Warcraft
movie, I have seen it and enjoyed it, I actually did this in January and
February this year so it was well before it came out.
Pandaria!
But to be perfectly honest I had always wanted to go back,
back to the familiarity of almost 5 years of playing, you’d think it’d be kind
of comforting you know, but with all of the changes, it wasn’t really. I’ve
mentioned before all of the things that World of Warcraft has over SWTOR, the
massive number of beautiful animal mounts,
the almost perfect dual
talent specialization system and mostly importantly the Australian
based servers which I was excited to try out to see the difference.
Possibly what I really needed was to go back to the good old medieval style,
yes SWTOR is great but all the futuristic techy items and ships and planets get
to me a bit sometimes and all I want is to run through a beautiful forest glade
or even a ruined castle, throwing fireballs or wielding a cruddy sword and
shield, of course I do have Skyrim (and soon the Witcher) for this but it’s a
bit of a different game.
Nuthin like goin back to your roots eh?
I suppose you can say I’ve been looking for an excuse
all this time and that excuse came when I met someone who had a keen interest
in the game and that inspired me to delve back in, in an attempt to play with
them. Firstly I had to update my account as I suspected I only had up to the Cataclysm
expansion as this is where I had previously left off but strangely enough all
accounts had now been freely upgraded with Mists
of Pandaria, So all I had to do was purchase Warlords
of Draenor then I’d be fine, so I did. With my Battle.net account details
updated I then copied my friends game across to my machine so the update would
be faster. I had saved my WTF profile folders but decided to start anew this
time but I did use them to remind myself of all of the “Mods” I used to use, I
then installed the amazingly awesome Curse
Client which makes installing and updating your WoW mods an absolute
breeze, it appears to be compatible with Skyrim and Minecraft now so I must try
it out for those.
The Curse Client, making mods and addons a breeze.
Unfortunately though when I went to create a character my
friend played on a Korean server where I couldn’t join as I had an oceanic
account and could only play on the US and AU servers, we mucked around with
accounts trying different things but unfortunately it wasn’t going to work so I
decided I’d just play the same game with her but not together and I guess this
was ok because we had very different playstyles. She basically liked to
powerlevel with her friends and farm instances for gold and items, she did
raids and instances but mostly lower level ones to breeze through them and
obtain all of the gold and items in stark contrast to myself who does things
slowly and casually taking in the content. I couldn’t watch several times when
I saw her and her friend kill several well-known raid bosses including the Lich King himself as if it
was nothing, just the two of them going at it, then during the interval before
he was finally defeated she remarked that she had to wait so long, like
goddamn, I haven’t even got to see most of those bosses and the events and
cinematics that happen with them and being a lorewhore myself (hah!) I couldn’t
see how she could skip them. So I don’t think I could have kept up with her
anyway. In any case, there were a few things I wanted to do if I ever went back
to WoW, see the Goblin and Pandaren starting areas for one, create a Monk, and basically see and experience all of the changes that
have happened on an Oceanic server of course.
Ahh Westfall so rustic and beautiful
I logged in and had
a look at all my old characters and oh man the nostalgia, I noticed that pretty
much nothing had changed, they were all still there, everything was all fine
after all this time, I guess no-one’s going to hack your account if it’s not
active are they? Unless of course they log in to your Battle.net account and
subscribe for you but that seems unlikely. I was trying to think how I’d go
about choosing an oceanic server then I realised I already had all of my
alliance characters on the Nagrand server already. I don’t remember doing that
but meh, it was good enough because now I could make my Human Monk, yes a human Monk because my warrior always looked the
best of my alliance characters with the armor looking like they fit already
etc. You could argue that I should have made a Night elfPriest as I’d never made either of them but of
course my desire to create a Monk was greater and yes I haven’t made a Gnome
either but I don’t think I’ll ever make one. So I made a Monk and started out
in good old Elwynn Forest,
man it felt so familiar like I’d done it heaps of times before but I really
hadn’t because on my warrior I ran from Elwynn into Stormwind, caught the Deeprun
Tram to Ironforge then ran to the Dwarf starting area in Kharanos, all
this just to be able to ride a giant
goat of course that reputation requirement is now gone I think.
Oh man that latency
Anyway so I
first had to get my mods set up and working and I actually used my warrior to
test them out I had all the old favourites including:
Deadly
Boss Mods: Which is split into different packages now otherwise it’d be way
too huge, but I was impressed of how it worked with just normal world dungeon
bosses.
Altoholic:
Always a favourite, allows you to see what items your alts and wearing and what
things they have in the bank plus a whole lot of other stuff.
Auctioneer:
Very useful for creating Auctions, does all of the undercutting work for you.
Atlas
and AtlasLoot:
Not essential but I looove looking at maps and boss loot.
Move
anything: This was very powerful, it enables you to move, scale, hide and
adjust transparency of just about any screen element in WoW. It was pretty much
like the SWTOR UI adjustment screen except a bit more powerful, it even allowed
you to remove the graphic around the bottom action bar allowing me to see much
more.
Bartender:
User this for extra support with actionbars and includes much more of them.
Monkeyquest:
Used this at first as it was a minimal and pretty cool looking quest tracker
but then I realised that some quests needed you to click the quest tracker to
finish or continue a quest and this one didn’t allow you to do that so I
removed it.
Altoholic, one of my favorite ever mods, being a serious alt maker myself.
So I played and got used to the Monk moves reminded me a bit
of combat Rogue abilities, I suppose the two classes do have a certain
connection with one just using weapons a lot more, I remembered in Diablo that
I didn’t end up finishing it with my Monk because there seemed to be not enough
distinction to which abilities he used his weapons with and which ones he used
his hands or feet. But in WoW it seems to be different as you always seem to
use your hands and feet apart from your main attack where you can use your
weapons. The abilities weren’t too hard to get used to, a bunch of kicks and
punches mixed in with weapons and chi attacks, I had this AOE cone ability
called Fists
of Fury which did a huge amount of damage while stunning the enemy, while
performing it my character stood with his front foot forward rapidly punching
the air in front of him, it looked absolutely ridiculous but was very powerful.
Monks, experts at fishfighting, getit? FISHfighting? XD
I was also glad to see that Monks actually did have Auto-attack
despite being announced that they wouldn’t, you auto-attacked with your weapons
but you could use the Jab ability to hit with
them too. The new talent
system wasn’t too hard to get used to, as simple as it was, it’s most
definitely based on the Diablo system of having the talents organised into
sections. Having getting only to 40 during my Monk’s run in wow I only got the
first two talent tiers, one being increasing mobility, the second being various
abilities involving ranged Chi energy attacks which were great to finally get
as unlike the Warrior and Rogue who have the ability to use Thrown weapons, Monks having no
ranged ability at all in the early game, so you could understand I was grateful
to get this, I first used Chi Burst but then switched to Chi Wave as
you could target enemies in the air and it also bounced around healing allies
or damaging enemies.
Learning some new Monk abilities
So I did Elwynn Forest
then Westfall
and took on the Defias Brotherhood which actually had quite a
good story with an “oh wow” moment this time. As you may know since Cataclysm starting quests in
an area requires answering the “Hero’s Call” or “Warchief’s
Command” board for that particular zone and then get sent to the initial
quest giver, quite the departure from the times where I used to run all over
the zone grabbing all of the quests I could find, it kind of works out better
as the zone has its own story sort of like SWTOR has the planet story arc as
well as your class story. The very first instance I did was the Deadmines, and boy this is
where my appreciation of the current World of Warcraft really slipped. It was
easy to get a group of course as the Dungeon Finder now
include searches through multiple realms so increases the pool of players
exponentially though the way in which the instances are run was disappointing,
firstly this may be me just complaining but when the group forms I’d much
rather we get sent to the meeting stone then have to find our way into the
instance which used to be great fun battling to get to the actual portal but of
course now with inter-realm LFG that wouldn’t work as the meeting stones are
outside the instance.
I do some questing in Westfall with the Monk which include this harvesty machine thing.
Instance quest givers are now thankfully inside the
instance itself allowing you to pick the obligatory “destroy all bosses”
checklist one and any others though it does make it a bit jarring when you’re
trying to read the quest text and get involved with what’s happening in the
instance when everyone else is already halfway down the first hall of enemies.
And speaking of that everything goes so goddamn fast now, it got to a point in
Wrath of the Lich King that no-one bothered with crowd
control (or CC) anymore they just let it rip and even more so now, the
other thing is because everyone else has Heirlooms which in case you
didn’t know are pieces of armor that scale with your level making you pretty
damn powerful, so powerful it seems that a whole group with heirlooms can
plough through an instance with only two dps.
Deadmines gettin wolfy
The reason for this was because I was actually doing
dungeons to gear up, and being new to the class and returning to the game, I
had to look over the various pieces or armor that dropped to check if it was
good for me and also check my quest objectives were being met. This combined
with the fact that the rest of group who were obviously heirloomed up, had done
this instance maybe 200 times already and didn’t need to bother, and were
destroying the instance at a frantic pace, is why I didn’t really get a change
to do much DPS at all, it was laughable and I wonder why I wasn’t kicked from
the group but I guess I remained just competent enough for them to not notice,
or maybe they just didn’t care. Even so I when I looked at the recount DPS
meter and saw that I had done about 5-10% of the DPS was kind of disheartening.
Taking on Lord Vyletongue in Mauradon
Another thing was the massive amount of XP that you had, WoW hasn’t got the
level-syncing to the zone that you are in that SWTOR has so if you do too many
instances you’ll find that you level up and your quests go grey pretty fast,
which kind of sucks if you are enjoying the quest storyline in a certain zone.
I guess if you really like questing in the zones you can only do an instance if
it ties in with the zone you are in currently, such is the case with Westfall
and the Deadmines, though I tend to progress through the zones that are nearest
to me that make the most sense i.e I’m a human so I will do the human lands
first. So on the Eastern Kingdoms Continent I would do in order Elwynn Forest, Westfall, Redridge Mountains,
Duskwood, Northern
Stranglethorn, Cape of Stranglethorn, Western Plaguelands,
Eastern Plaguelands,
Badlands, Searing
Gorge, Burning Steppes and finally The
Blasted Lands, so even if I did all of them negating the fact that I may
have to skip some from doing instances with others etc gives me 8 instances to
choose from, Deadmines,
The
Stockade,Scholomance,
Stratholme,
Uldaman, Blackrock
Depths, Lower Blackrock Spire and Upper Blackrock Spire, 3 of which being in Blackrock Mountain
and are about the same level range.
In Redridge Mountains on my new Grey Ram, it seems the faction and race restrictions have been removed for all mounts.
I spose this isn’t too bad but the other
problem is there’s not enough in the earlier majority of zones it’s only saved
by Blackrock spire having 3 and you can only do them once otherwise your XP
gets out of whack and I can’t help but think about all of the cool gear you’re
missing out on but I guess you can just buy some with all that quest gold.
Really makes me appreciate the SWTOR data crystal reward currency and the
level-sync system.
Zen Pilgrimage to the Peak of Serenity
So in any case being a Monk wasn’t bad, I enjoyed using the Zen Pilgrimage Spell
that takes you to the Peak of Serenity to learn new skills, similar to
how Druids go to
the Moonglade.
But to be perfectly honest I didn’t want to keep playing, by doing too many
dungeons/instances I had gained way too many levels and had to go directly from
Duskwood to Eastern Plaguelands where as soon as I got to level 40 I decided
that was it. I told myself before that one of the things I wanted to do when
going back to WoW was try the Goblin and Pandaren starting areas so I decided
to just do this and be over with it.
Training with Master Taran-Zu
It was during this time that I actually thought I may try
getting my Horde characters over to an oceanic realm for free, yes that right for free. The reason was that back in
October 2014 the Australian-based servers had been announced
and also a two week window was offered to players to transfer their characters
to an oceanic realm, but of course as I wasn’t playing then I missed out on
that. So I thought, what the hey?
There’s no harm in asking if I could transfer all of my Horde characters to an
oceanic realm too, so I put in a ticket and sure enough they accepted the
request and transferred my characters to the Nagrand Realm. Of course there was
one big issue, I had forgotten that there was a limited number of character
slots (10) so basically there wasn’t enough and two of my characters were left
on Silvermoon US as they couldn’t fit.
My Alliance characters on the Nagrand server before the move
Originally I was going to level up a
bank alt and send them across with all of my bank items, but since I had two
characters still available on Silvermoon, I loaded them up with all of my bank
items and replied back to Blizzard. Basically I said that not all of my
characters were moved and wondered how they made that mistake of not knowing
that Nagrand wouldn’t hold them all and some would be left behind, so they said
they could transfer the remaining two but they did to another realm which
didn’t help, eventually the issue was partially resolved but them transferring
my remaining two characters to the Caelestrasz realm as this and Nagrand are
now “connected” in a way that you can send mail and group and be in guilds with
players/characters from that different realm their names are just marked as
Hbui – Caelestrasz for example.
Not the best outcome, but it’s functional, what I really
should have done was tell them to dump all of my Horde characters on a random
Oceanic server and left it at that because unlike SWTOR you can’t send mail to
the other faction in WOW. Another thing that sucks is all of the bags on my
Bank alts were soulbound so I couldn’t send them over and had to vendor them
which sucks majorely as they would be so useful when setting up again and I
spent heaps of time (and money) creating them. But it doesn’t really matter
anyway as I don’t think I’ll be going back unless SWTOR goes down.
Ok so I then started a Goblin, and of
course because I wasn’t really going to be playing this character I didn’t want
to make him a Priest, so I made him a Warlock , why
not? I had actually tried creating my Rogue as a Goblin
but when I found out the Goblin starting area wasn’t the same “You have now
come of age, start your trials” thing I didn’t fancy it. And I still don’t
really, it’s so far removed from the traditional fantasy medieval theme that
WoW has it was almost ridiculous, in fact it was ridiculous, so I’ll explain.
The Goblin starting area is on the island of Kezan where you are
apparently the second in command to Trade Prince Gallywix and are poised to take
his place and you have all these staff and assistants and your get a goddamn
car where you drive around and pick up your friends, compete in a football
match, go to the bank, the have a party that is crashed by pirates. Goblin
abilities are pretty entertaining, they have [Rocket Jump] which is good for launching
yourself down hills and [Rocket Barrage]
works as an extra ranged ability, you can also call in a [Pack Hobgoblin] to get access to your
bank for 1 min. I think I actually got far enough to get the Metamorphosis
ability for Demonology which was pretty cool as I’m so small and I also noticed
when goblins throw fireballs/shadowbolts etc they “bowl” then underarm lol.
Oh yeh, Goblin Racecar, this is just getting ridiculous.
The island of Kezan has seen better days with contaminated
brown soil and patches of brown grasswith metal buildings and machines everywhere like some kind of
industrial revolution dysotpia. So eventually after searching through mines and
sneaking around and other stuff the volcano on the island erupts because of you know who, doing you know what and you have
to get the hell out of there on Gallywix’s private yacht no less. Following a
short scene where you are shot at by the alliance navy you wind up on the Lost Isles
which is another zone you can only get to when starting a goblin, it’s quite a
change from the isle of Kezan, full of lush jungles. It’s here where you first
meet the Horde, specifically Aggra and eventually you end up saving Thrall himself. You also deploy
the ridiculous Town-in-a-Box,
run into the curious new Pygmy
race and also the Naga are
around too, I enjoyed the Vicious Vale section although it being quite
ridiculous, the whole story there was pretty ridiculous.
The Lost isles sure are beautiful, man that's an ugly mug I have.
You eventually defeat
the Pygmy’s who are abducting goblins and turning them into zombies by
defeating their god Volcanoth and join the Horde in the Fight against the
alliance in an aerial battle which was quite spectacular. You then join with
all your friends and set sail for Durotar and are tasked with delivering a
message to the current Warchief Garrosh Hellscream
yes Garrosh as some of you may know he’s not around anymore but funnily enough
he’s standing off to the side with Vol’jin on the throne, but
anyway I guess that’s just because of the lore. So after meeting the Warchief
you supposedly go off to Azshara
as that’s the logical step, I should know I’ve done it on my Troll Rogue and
there are goblins everywhere, they’ve taken over the damn place even sculpting
the entire zone into a giant horde
symbol.
I set off to free Thrall from the Alliance.
So that was the Goblins, there was only one thing left to
do, yes to my brothers chagrin I made a Panda! or Pandaren (pronounced pan-DA-ren) yes I made a lovable but fierce
looking ginger Pandaren with orange fur and big sideburns and a mohawk and
after much deciding I made him a hunter as that’s what my second character was.
Pandaren hunters also start with a crossbow weapon and a turtle as their pet, which is
pretty cool but I don’t really fancy it, I liked starting off with nothing
other than a short blade like the rogue used to have, I mean before cataclysm
one of the purchasable weapons in the orc starting area was a piece of wood
with a goddamn nail through it lol. As a Pandaren you start on the Wandering Isle aka
Shen-zin Su the great turtle, yes it’s a gigantic turtle about the size of a
small zone, and man is it pretty with bamboo and asian-style buildings and yes
it’s basically WoW meets Kung-fu Panda and yes I’ve been over all that already
in a previous
post.
You start off at the Shang Xi Training Grounds where you meet Master Shang Xi
and get on with your training, it’s kind of weird being anything but a Monk
with the Pandaren starting area just as it was very odd being a Druid in the Worgen starting
area specifically because you weren’t Worgen yet and had no contact with the
Night Elves. But in any case it looked great and was fun, I named my Turtle
Sidun after that town in the middle east and went off to train and of course
find out what was troubling the land, Pandaren males are quite portly and I
don’t know how they run with that belly and those legs as they sort of galomp
around haha.
Heh, Panda and Turtle
On the way you meet Aysa Cloudsinger
of the Tushui
and Ji Firepaw
of the Huojin
who have conflicting styles but get stuff done nonetheless. I enjoyed running
along ropes and jumping across posts and getting turned into other animals in
the Singing
Pools, the centre of the island is the Temple of Five Dawns
and you must do various missions to bring all of the cute ancient spirits
(Earth, Fire, Wind, Water, Heart, with your powers combined I am Captain
Planet!) together for some reason I can’t remember and you fight a great big dragon which you fight with
fireworks XD. It is then very sad as you go to the Wood of Staves and say
goodbye to your Master.
Being a Hunter I was a goddamn cheat at the singing pools
You then actually talk to the giant turtle Shen-zin Su
himself and he’s got a “thorn in his side” apparently and that “thorn” is the Skyseeker an Alliance ship
with Horde prisoners that has crashed into the island and you work together to
remove it and heal Shen-zin Su. It is then that you have the choice, do you go
Horde or Alliance, so I thought what the hell and went Horde with Ji Firepaw.
And man, was it scary, and also weird, so you travel to Durator and enter
Orgrimmar and as I said before you meet Garrosh standing off to the side of the
Throne as per the Goblin ending and he takes you on his tour and states that
“your brethren who joined the alliance are now your enemies” and Ji is kind of
set aback seeing how his new leader segregates the city and makes him fight in
the Ring
of Valor, and then leaves and Ji basically just has a tent in the middle of
the Valley of Honor. Gee great welcome, to be honest if I had chosen the horde
I’d think I made the wrong choice.
Racing through the Pei-Wu forest
But anyway that was over with too and that was that for my
brief foray back into WoW. It’s been fun but I really think until something
happens to the Old Republic or something even better comes out (which I doubt)
I will stick to SWTOR. WoW will always have a place in my er, memories and as
I’ve said again and again, it had it’s good points, and it’s bad points, but it
was nice to go back, at least for a while and with Legion on
the Horizon, it will be interesting to see how things change yet again.
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