DeusEx

As most people have probably started to level in WotLK on the live servers by now, I thought it might be interesting to share our leveling experiences, so people can get clues on quests that are absolutely worth doing, some dungeon loot or quest rewards that shouldn't be missed, lovely little details and annoying quest bottlenecks that people might want to be aware of.

This thread should be specifically devoted to the leveling part of WotLK and be less concerned with the endgame implications of the expansion.


Personally I started leveling Melisandre, my undead priest, in the Howling Fjord zone. The zone is quite beautiful and right at the beginning of your adventure the first quests in Vengance Landing give you a feeling of being in a Forsaken beachhead on a foreign land, under constant threat of it's native inhabitants the Vyrkul, which are obviously allied with the Scourge, as well as from the competing Alliance expedition. Indeed most of the intial quests in Vengance Landing deal with the war against the Alliance more than with the dangers native to Northrend. When you leave Vengance Landing the focus shifts more to the Vyrkul and other threats, and you only slowly begin to unravel the mysteries behind this new land.

Gameplay wise the quests have been mostly bug free (the occasional evading mob) and traveling distances from quest hub to quest location have been very short. There are some rather annoying "kill named mob" quests right at the very beginning though like Landing the Killing Blow - Quest - World of Warcraft, that must be hell if you level during prime time.

There is a lot of attention given to little details like NPCs dialogues, or quest texts. When you go visit Lurielle in the Frozen Glade, the Nymphs start throwing snowballs at each other after a while. It are small, lovely things like this or the Apothecary Society Dialogues that make the leveling so much more than just the standard kill 10 mobs of x and collect 6 items of y.

I'm not an addict ... maybe that's a lie.

 

cutfang

I never played in the beta so I don't have much to contribute, although I would be interested in quests I can pickup as a drop (or rare drop) off mobs as I tend to miss them out.

So far as bugged quests go, Springing the Trap - Quest - World of Warcraft, seems to be quite fiddly right now and probably wont work first time round.

 

Malleus

People planning to start in Howling Fjord should be warned that several quests there are broken or misleading.

"The Lost Shield of the Aesirites" was broken on original release as the NPC you turn it in with was not put into the game. This has now been fixed on my server, but may not be on all. Captain Ellis stands by the wheel of the Sweet Mercy; if he isn't there, report it and request that he be spawned (he's friendly to both sides).

"Sorlof's Booty" in the same chain was also broken because someone forgot to implement a vital quest object - in this case, the gun. The quest can be completed, however; let the NPCs kill Sorlof and he'll drop the Booty in the same way as with the Ogri'la attunement quests. You don't need to tag him (finding that out cost me an Ankh).

"It's a Flying Machine!" is mostly broken. The Sacks of Relics are frequently not activated as quest objects when you have the Q. I know people who've completed it, but it's not worth your while and if you're going for Loremaster you can get the 130-quest achievement without it.

"Stop the Ascension", which starts from the Vrykul Scroll of Ascension, just doesn't work at all. When you use the Scroll at the Thane's Pyre to challenge the chief, nothing happens.

 

Anthraxx

If we're talking about the bugs, I also found one. Reforging the key that you are supposed to hand in to Surristrasz in Amber Ledge is impossible to complete for me. As soon I try to talk to him he opens fly path map and there is no way to use any dialog options before that.

I think it might be an addon related bug but other FP masters work ok (no instant fly map)...

 

Putts

Adding Injury to Insult - Quest - World of Warcraft caused me a lot of grief in Howling Fjord last night. The quest requires you to both read the insult to the mob, and to kill the mob. Only one person can insult him per spawn, and there seems to be a bugged system to giving kill credit for this quest. There were several times that I was the one to initially tag the mob, yet I didn't get the kill credit when he died. I gave up and returned later, and helped another group that had tagged him, and I got the kill credit when he died.

My advice is to pass on this quest if there are other people standing around waiting for him to spawn.

 

Valerys

The Borean Tundra quest Foolish Endeavors can apparently bug if you or someone else aggroes the elite quest mob before he can stun you and initiate his dialogue. This prevents the friendly NPC from spawning to kill the elite. You can still kill him to get the quest credit in that case (most likely requiring a larger group with a healer).

 

Valerian

I've pretty much cleared the Borean Tundra of quests and I didn't hit a single bugged one. There were a couple of early Borean quests that were not worth doing at all (the one to kill the Raiders had a TERRIBLE respawn rate). The DK quest that ends up in Naxanaar had an annoying respawn too when you had to get the Phylactery of the lich. Other than that most respawns were fairly reasonable I found. The quests themselves have been a lot of fun for the most part and very few felt very tedious. The vehicle quests I've done are suprisingly bug free and also quite innovative. Most of the "group" quests are easily soloable/duoable if you have late BT/Sunwell gear.

 

Charsi

A guildy of mine helped me get this one done. To anyone struggling with it, here's the trick: don't move. From the instant you shoot the flare, don't move, don't turn, nothing. I saw way too many people shoot the flare and run to meet the landing dragon, that seems to bug it out.

Just shoot the flare off and stand absolutely still through the entire script, even after landing, until you get the completed message. Moving screws it up for some reason.

 

Vanadi

The instances look nice, the azjol-nerub ones are good fun but the difficulty seems a bit low. Althought this might be caused by the gear level our group was in (mainly t6). We had no trouble clearing instances with level 75 bosses and mobs while we where level 70-71.

Ahn'kahet is an awesome dungeon design wise and feels alot like BRD with the huge underground kingdom and buildings.

 

Typhon

I do rather suspect its a gear-level thing, and not restricted just to folks with Sunwell Gear - a guild group in ZA/Badge/Kara gear did the Nexus last night and apart from a couple of silly wipes at the beginning we pretty much steamrollered the place (the final boss, the Dragon was particularily easy, albeit rather amusing). I was glad to see an early introduction (from the Treeshaper boss) of a mechanic to keep people to their toes. Makes what is otherwise a boring tank-and-spank fight a bit more interesting. Incidentally, I note the health of the bosses in normal mode is of an order of magnitude similar to those of a heroic level 70 dungeon.

The wipes however were indicative of perhaps a malaise that has crept over too many level 70 WoW players recently - complacency (and the fact that most of us now know the level 70 instances like the backs of our hand). The first wipe, on the first boss was due to our tank pulling the group before her by simply running into them and misjudging her aggro radius, and another wipe was due to accidentally pulling multiple groups. Once we had that sorted, as mentioned above, we didn't have any problems.

On a slightly tangential note, do we know if there is any use of phasing technology in the starter zones? It would be rather disconcerting to come back to the Warsong Farms in 10 levels time to find them *still* under attack?

 

LittleHamster

I've only done utgarde keep and chain pulled the place with 5 dps, no CC and healing mainly by 2 shadow priests VE. I think it's tuned to people in quested green, off spec healer and off spec tank. I don't have any problem with this. Since a T6/sunwell geared group would not find any upgrades from the early instances, and so are obviously out gearing it.

I would like to hear what a group of alts (eg DKs) think of the tuning of the instances.

The design of utgarde keep is very nice. Three bosses, and short like ramparts and mechanar. The location being within a stone throw of the alliance camp is a nice bonus for players trying to avoid fighting over mobs on landing day. So if you find yourself getting frustrated with the crowd, give the instances a try. You don't need a "perfect group" with 2-3 CC.

For the cooks, there's a quest called Northern Meat that requires you to collect chilled meat. Questhelper unhelpfully tells you to collect the meat in the pit from wolves below utgarde keep. (Consequently there was a huge gathering last night in the pit fighting over wolves). Ignore questhelper. The chill meat drops from everthing in Howling Fjord, including inside Utgarde Keep.

As for the zone, I'm disappointed that there are hardly any herbs in Howling Fjord. But as long as the herb supply improves later, it should be ok in the long run.

 

Roywyn

Not even alts will give you a proper idea, since most level 70 alts do actually have a decent gear kit.
You'd need sub-70 alts kitted in purely Northrend quest greens to get a proper feeling for them.


For example, that means that means your plate tank will just barely break 10k HP unbuffed, have pretty much zero defense and no avoidance that would be worth mentioning.

When I did some tanking at 70 in beta with a DK, the first thing I did was finding a smith to make the cobalt tanking set for a bare minimum of protection.
Ended up with 2.5% defense and 11k HP I think, and it still was a pretty spiky ride for my T6 healers.
Ingvar definately knows how to hurt and getting crit by Keristraza adds a lot of fun!

Tanking dungeons will become easier once you get some blue tank gear with defense from dungeon quests. Oh, the irony

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

DPS spec and class comparison in Naxxramas gear: http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...i/SampleOutput

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.
Neither does [The Egg of Mortal Essence] since 3.1.

 

solbergb

The blue rep PVP gear that you'll likely have access to by just leveling from 60-70 in outlands can make you uncrittable pretty easily via resilience.

You won't have any avoidance, beyond what "of the crusader" greens provide but you can do uncrittable easily enough even with greens/blues from outland leveling.

Of course you can't equip any of that until you are actually 70, so tanking as L68-69 could be a little rocky. If memory serves in my matched set of L68 greens "of the champion" I had about 9k health unbuffed, about 2000 armor less than the L70 gear, only 30% passive avlidance and was onlyabout halfway to uncrittable. The L70 equipment makes a big difference.

 

Putts

We managed to discover a hidden 4th boss in the Azjol-Nerub instance: One of my guildmates died 3 times last night trying to jump down the hole between the 2nd and 3rd boss. He was a male Tauren Shaman, I guess he landed someplace on the wall on the way down every time. The 4th time he finally landed in the pool. Anybody else encounter this yet?

 

Bonemage

This happened to my GM last night while I was questing with him. It appears this happens because he was summoned to the Caldera to tank the Nexus, and did a quest over there that is part of this chain, but instead of making it a requirement that you complete the previous steps to get this quest it appears the developers assumed you'd only get to Caldera by completing the quests.

 

evisania

I'm not sure what was up with herbs. The night of the release I rode around for several hours and don't recall seeing any. The next day a few started popping up, and now today there seem to be a decent supply with observable respawns. It may be linked to the number of players in the area or something.

On another note, I've been dual boxing my hunter and mage through the quests and the majority are not bad for this approach. The ones that take longer are the 'gather 10 idols' type, so I'll have to manually swap between the characters to gather them. XP from killing is noticeably less, especially when I started unrested. But honestly the tradeoff isn't bad because I really don't want to individually repeat the quest grind on both characters.

"This is no game. This is real. It’s as real as a beggar squatting by the side of the road, begging, and then you realize, uh-oh, he’s not begging."

 

◊ Melbuframa

We did Keep, Nexus and Azjol-Nerub last night with a Feral tank in lvl 70 outland greens/blues and it was still mostly a joke. T6 party otherwise, we just had to hold back DPS but the tanking aspect was not really an issue unless we weren’t paying attention and pulled more then one group.

We ran them with a KJ geared prot paly as well, which is pretty funny as he can tank nearly ½ an instance at once.

 

Sauce

We 4-manned Nexus in heroic/Kara gear with a Ret Paladin healing. It's remarkably easy. The quest rewards for the instance quests do provide upgrades for that gear level, however. (Unlike the quest green rewards, which will only produce upgrades for people in TBC greens and non-heroic blues.)

Overall, the Borean Tundra is a riot. With the exception of the rather grim Coldarra stuff, many of the quest lines are hilarious.

 

Nemantopia

As my main, I hit Vengeance Landing first and I have to say that Blizzard has done a very good job with the Northrend I've seen. The quests may have some annoying drop-rates at times, but we're not having Northrend's version of the Hillsbrad lions. The quest text and NPC interaction is very good, some of it priceless...especially the Apothecaries. The landscape and atmosphere are very well done as well.

Starting as level 70 Mage in a mix of gear from crafted epics up through T5 trash and badge gear, epic gems, and decent enchants, I'm just shy of 71 having done all the Howling Fjord quests that lead up to the Taunka camp and Dragonblight on rested xp. I plan on sweeping through Northrend one zone at a time, making sure to do dailies of course, and slamming all the quests...and absolutely taking the time to read! The Death Knight chain is also very well done with few things to stall you even during prime [mostly the mount quest], and conveys the mood and drama perfectly.

Initially, the gold costs of becoming Grand Master everything and the recipes is a pain, but selling drops and quest items [along with quest gold] will easily pay for the whole shibang before you level up so this isn't really an issue. I was kind of sad to see that my Dark Iron Smoking pipe got replaced by a quest trinket so soon, but it's the only piece of gear even close to matching my current set up so far. I expect that'll change around level 73, but it's nice to see that the first Northrend greens I come across aren't upgrades. That component alone makes it feel like time spent in BC was worth it, even the time grinding badges for that last badge item and slotting epics.

As a final note, cooking and fishing are fairly easy [although fishing is still kinda grindy] to get up and worthwhile for buff food, although First Aid and Tailoring is proving to be a painful combination since Frostweave seems much rarer than Netherweave was in Outland, even right into the start. At first I was thrilled it only took 5 cloth for 1 bolt instead of 6, but unless the drop rate picks up a bit in a few levels I'll have to ply other wares to get the gold to buy the Frostweave to actually ply my trade -_-

All told, very happy with Northrend quests and leveling, and hoping the instances prove to be as good!

 

Abbichum

Very impressed by the overall feel and progression through Borean Tundra. I even liked the Coldarra stuff The most fun i've had was doing the 2 azjol'nerub dungeons, especially The Old Kingdom. The pace is nice, bosses are very funny and the loot is pretty decent(ilvl 167 in Ahn'kahet)

 

Sauce

I really like the ability to spend 5g as a tailor to get a skill that allows for the collection of additional cloth off mobs. It's a clever approach to balancing the gathering aspect.

 

Xunwael

Well, Ingvar hit my ZA/Badge geared warrior for 11k instantly with his smash attack in the second form, though it can be resisted with shadow he seems a little too strong to me.

"Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice."
- Clark's Law

 

kalbear

You have about 4 seconds to simply walk away from him and not be hit at all. It's not too bad.

 

Malan

Pro-gamer tip courtesy of Falk:
You can save yourself from doing almost a week of Sons of Hodir daily quest rep grind if, before you start the Sons of Hodir quest chain Forging an Alliance - Quest - World of Warcraft, you do this quest - Ancient Relics - Quest - World of Warcraft and use the +Rep booze [Rork Red Ribbon] when you turn in the Hodir quests.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

Xunwael

This goes against everything I know about tanking! Stay in his face till either he's dead, or I am! But, seriously, he's stationary while preforming the attack? Then it's easy to avoid. This isn't vey obvious, though, I've been there with two dozen different people so far and nobody took notice of this. Ah well, thanks!

"Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice."
- Clark's Law