One week into Cataclysm and I
already feel like Blizzard have put WOTLK behind them and produced
what I would personally say an expansion that is oozing with content
and quality. The lethargy that I felt from the last few months of the
predecessor of the impending Cataclysm has instantly dissipated as
just about every part of this expansion from the moment I logged in
has impressed me, and we haven't even properly began the PVP side of
it yet. My initial experiences are pretty much as follows with a
brief rundown of leveling.
My server currently has queues
approaching the 6-8h mark, when I logged in to begin handing in my
quests for some free exp before starting to level I was greeted with
this -
After handing in the quests I
moved to Hyjal as the rest of my group for BRC was still struggling
with the login server. Kudos to anyone who actually managed to handin
a quest -
After that it was a 6 hour slog
through BRC to 83 which consisted of spamming Howling Blast about
500000 times in Blood Presence to be our "tank" in DPS
gear, we were able to clear the instance in 10~12 mins per run like
this. After this it was off to Uldum where the entire zone is one big
linear quest chain, and this is an incredibly good thing for the
story telling side of the game and making the quests feel more epic
in general, this is why.
Linearity
No longer do zones consist of
multiple camps with bread crumb quests leading you from camp to camp,
every zone is now one long quest chain that tells a story of some
kind. What this has allowed blizzard to do is not only create quests
that actually feel in place in the world but also tell a far more
interesting story while making the player feel far more involved.
Quests have evolved far beyond the 'go here and kill 5 rats' sort of
thinking and when you look back at the original vanilla questing
areas they look like a different game in comparison. The zones flow a
lot better with this design and you never feel lost or unable to
progress while their ingame references never fail to raise a smile.
My only criticsm is there are still some phasing bugs where some
quests will cause vital NPCs to progress to disappear completely
until you abandon that quest. To put this into context; I wasted a
good 3 hours or so of 84-85 trying to work out why the Twilight
Highlands pre-quest guy was invisible, it turned out the Vashj'ir
pre-quest in my log was bugging the entire quest chain out leaving me
unable to progress, other than these bugs though the linear design
has made leveling fast, fairly painless and fun and is a vast
improvement over anything prior to this.
After hitting 85 we went
straight into heroics with half green gear and a tank with 110k
health, this is probably the most fun and challenge I've had from PVE
in a long while which brings me onto my next point of call.
Difficulty
The heroics in the current gear
available are difficult, those who enjoyed the original TBC heroics
will love the new design. This is partly due to the gear reset as you
no longer have Sunwell gear to zerg through them in as you did in
WOTLK, greens are far superior to anything from ICC, including
Shadowmourne. Hitting heroics with very ghetto gear was not only a
world of pain, but also a world of fun. As most people have realised
by now, healer mana is at a premium and taking unnecessary damage is
no longer optional, it's pretty much required. We started with heroic
Deadmines with none of us having beta experience of the place, to sum
it up, we died alot but managed to clear it after 3 hours. At the
start of WOTLK we zerged pretty much every instance in HCs with a mix
of BT/Sunwell gear without any issues whatsoever. The only downside I
see with the new HCs is while they are a lot of fun they can get
tedious very fast due to the length and are also not something I
would like to PUG, there's also nowhere to dump Justice Points as I
already have all the gear that's useful from them for DPS. The amount
of tears on the R&D from this huge increase in difficulty are
also delightful to read and I really do hope they remain at the
current difficulty. I do have one criticsm though, some of the trash
packs (Stonecore HC in particular) are absolutely brutal on melee and
pretty do promote bringing as many ranged dps as possible, it's
managable with a 3 melee dps group it just takes a lot longer in most
cases.
The New Raids
No longer do we have recycled
content, every boss feels like they have sat down and thought about
the design. The best part being it all feels very well tuned for HC
gear (340~ avrg ilvl), my guild is currently at x/12 with none of us
having any beta raiding experience (we're also recruiting!). Rather
than starting the expansion with an instance from Vanilla, one boss
that can be killed with half the intended raid size in Sunwell gear
and another where you spend half of it on vehicles it feels like
every encounter is an execution fight that relies a lot more on
personal play. This makes most of the fights a pleasure to progress
on and gives a far better sense of achievement from killing them.
Most of the fights are also fairly balanced for what classes you
would want from a sense of DPS although shamans/paladins do seem to
be far superior to druids on certain fights because druids feel
incredibly poor at spot healing people when it's required. If you do
have the choice of what melee DPS to bring though a DK does seem to
produce superior numbers and have by far the best survivability.
There's also some pretty nifty uses for Necrotic Strike in some of
the encounters but I'll leave you to work them out. There is one
thing that I've found to be bad though, most of the trash is
incredibly painful to clear to the point where Blackwing Descent is
like AQ the 2nd with the amount of trash there, there's also an
elevator that is the cause of more deaths already than the SSC one;
why is this relevent? Trash can now use elevators apparently.
From what I've seen so far this
expansion is a far superior product to WOTLK and a lot more effort
has been put into the zones, the raids and the instances. If anyone
is doubting coming back but enjoyed the TBC launch then I would
advise you to give it a try, at worst you'll experience what I think
is an awesome leveling experience (yes I did BRC spam and skipped 3
zones but I have alts and have to do Deepholm anyway for the shoulder
enchant) and a bunch of new content for a fairly small price. I'll
leave you with a small hint for the Throne of the Four Winds raid,
don't use rocket boots incase they back fire and don't jump off the
edge with Levitate, this is the result.
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