The Golden Age of Ballooning – Gadgetzan Episode January 17, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Blizzard, entertainment, World of Warcraft.Tags: Cataclysm, Gadgetzan, Tanaris
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It is becoming quite clear that I am going to have to start another new character (or two) to run through the 1-60 content in Azeroth, since the instance group is bypassing a lot of the solo content.
I have been out with Tistann, my hunter, now level 83, running some low level quests in order to get him exalted status with five of the six alliance race factions so that he can spend those Argent Tournament marks he has sitting in his currency tab.
And every time I go our in the old world with him I find some huge change in the world I want to explore or some amusing quest that I’d like to run at level.
For example, last night, I made my way to Gadgetzan with the idea of getting Tistann a little closer to exalted with Gnomeregan. And there I found the balloon quest.
Even the balloons look crazy
You are supposed to fly around in the balloon (it follows its own path) and drop rescue rocket packs to goblins stranded by the floods caused by pirates sinking supply boats. The goblins grab the packs and zoom off into the sky.
Oh, and you also get to bomb the pirates as well.
Targeting Pirates!
I know it is really just another one of those fly and bomb quests. We’ve had those since Burning Crusade came out. But so many of them have their own little twist with Cataclysm.
And, as seems to be the norm now with this sort of quest, you can keep flying around as long as you want. When you are done, you click the button for your own rocket pack and get sent back to Gadgetzan.
Flying back to Gadgetzan
You also get a feel for how the world has changed. Gadgetzan is now a port town, the tide having come in quite a bit. And over the hill in Thousand Needles? Let’s just say the Southsea Pirates have a new place to sail.
I’m going to have to roll up a new character to see this. The instance group seems to be bypassing a lot of content, so Maloney might not get to see as much of the world as I would like.
[...] for now, I’m still enjoying Cataclysm, but I’m waxing nostalgic for Azeroth-lost. Like Wilhelm, I’ve come to the conclusion that to get the most out of new Azeroth, I’ll have to [...]
Don’t worry, you’ll miss stuff even without instances. I recently finished Dustwallow Marsh with my paladin, got to Thousand Needles.. where the third quest I got told me to go to Tanaris because I’ve almost outleveled Thousand Needles already. I’ve skipped Azshara, parts of Northern Barrens, Ashenvale, Desolace and Feralas because the quests went gray before I could get around to doing them.
I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing, though. Multiple, mutually exclusive paths means that there’s plenty of replay value preserved for other alts. I recently started a new undead warlock to see how Eastern Kingdoms fares in this regard.
I think I’ve figured out the logic of the new levelling.
First, you do your race zones up to level 20.
After doing whatever dungeon/battleground and gathering/exploring/archeology XP you want to do, you go the the “hero’s board” and choose a zone to do for the next 5 levels.
Clearly Blizzard has decided to break the flow connecting the zones, and package all the 20-60 content into discrete story bundles.
PS. Did Thousand Needles as alliance and was great fun.
Similar experiences. Started a worgen druid, and after leaving Gilneas you find yourself in Darkshore at level 12. I decided to do all the quests in Darkshore, and by the end I was about level 22 or 23 (with some random dungeon runs mixed in) and WAY over level for the quests.
So I got to Ashenvale next and had time to do about 5 quests on the border of Stonetalon before I had outleveled Ashenvale; went to Stonetalon and did another 10 quests or so before I had outleveled it. Rinse, wash, repeat. I’m currently 40 and just about to head to Thousand Needles after doing about 8-10 quests in Feralas.
It’s kind of a shame because the new quests are generally very nice, but there’s no way you can do them all, especially with doing dungeons as well. I’m not sure you could do all the quests even if you weren’t doing dungeons. The exp you get from gathering skills doesn’t help either. I can’t even keep my gathering skills leveled up enough to keep up with the zone progression.
The one cool thing is the city rep. Get the city tabards and you should easily be exalted with everyone in time. I kept my Gilneas one on til I was exalted – about level 35 I believe (just in time to get the level 35 cloak from the same vendor, shame it was worse than some random I had gotten from a random dungeon goody bag). Then I switched to Darnassus and was exalted by 40 (I wanted a kitty mount). Now I’ve picked up Stormwind. The rep gains in dungeons is insane, especially a place like Uldaman where there are a bazillion trash mobs. You get 15 rep each even for non-elites, like those huge groups of 20+ scorpions and crap. I went from Darnassus Revered and about 5000 rep into it to Exalted (so from 5000 to 21000) in those 10 Feralas quests and 2 Uldaman and 1 Mauradon run. Or something very close to that.
If it takes several alt characters to do it, I plan to cover all the areas that are in the game, just to see the story. The zone by zone way of questing has really become mostly a single player game, with big arrows pointing you to your next objective and elites that are only elite if you don’t follow the instructions. With gathering causing most of my characters to outlevel their zones before they run out of quests, I am forcing them to complete each zone, waiting for the achievement banner to display across the screen, even finishing up any quests left after that, before I allow them to go on to the next area.
I just don’t want to miss anything!