So, I’m a bad ass Blood Elf Fury Official now. You can tell because I’m wielding a bloody cleaver and killing WoW Lions and Goblins and Dark Elves and shit with it. If wielding a meat cleaver over a sword doesn’t scream BLOOD FURY WARRIOR I don’t know what does.
I have managed to surpass the Level 20 mark, which is the threshold for Free to Play. In fact, there is a magic gate thing that prevents you from going farther in the world. I saw the same gate on my Orc Hunter in Orgimmar. A bit of lead up to that point…
I’ve had to leave a few quests behind. There was one “Epic Quest” involving hunting down a couple of large Ogres (maybe it was just one Ogre, don’t they have two heads in Warcraft?). Anyway, I saw him several times stalking around and even confronted him once despite that his is enormous and was several levels above me. No luck, I barely did any damage before he totally crushed me. I’ll go back and try again later. I also had to skip what seemed to essentially be the Boss of the newbie area. I managed to complete every other quest but this boss is pretty tough and it’s not helped that he is in a room with 4 other normal monsters. If I could lure the other monsters out I MIGHT be able to get him, but I had some difficulty and decided I’d return to the area around level 30 and crush both of these guys.
The idea is of course that by now I’d have recruited some people and have a small war party or Guild I could use to assist in taking out these enemies. Unfortunately my experience has been that the land of Azeroth is pretty sparsely populated. I kind of get the impression that there simply aren’t many low level new players. I’ve seen a few wandering around, but they tend to either be way above or below my level and point in the game.
Anyway, after completing all of the other quests, i was left only with one optional quest on my list. It was several regions away. This was a bit disturbing. Previously, when i was nearing the end of the quest options in a particular region, at least one of the new quests would direct me to the next area to continue my journey. It’s cheesy and convenient but it works for encouraging the player to proceed. This left me with no real direction other than a lone quest that I had only picked up by happening on a special item dropped by a monster. I figured I’d just proceed to follow the road forward.
I found the enemies in the forward area were pretty high level. At least, the ones that didn’t have ???? listed for their level, they were in the 40s range, they were also giant slug looking guys. Maybe I was just being paranoid but, they looked like trouble, so I hopped on my mount and hurried along the road trying to avoid encounters looking for the next guest filled village.
Nothing, nada, zilch. I found a castle, but it was full of unfriendly folks who, while not attacking me, were not really into asking me to fetch crap for them in exchange for money and experience. The village did have a flight stop, which led to several areas that i had not been to yet at all. After consulting some maps online, I took a flight to Undercity, then wandered around until I found the Zeppelin to Ogrimmar. My plan was, at least I could maybe find the quests that I had done previously as an Orc Hunter on my other Avatar.
No luck. These quests are apparently considered too low level for me. This is when I noticed that each region has a level range located next to the name. Makes sense I guess, and after heading to a region of an appropriate range, I found… quests! Something to do. I was starting to worry that I’d reached a complete dead end of activity and somehow the point of the game simply broke down into nothing after Level 20, but no, there was more to do.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with the details of my exploits helping a bunch of Goblins.
Instead I’ll make a comment on the recent patch, which seems like a huge mess, quite literally. I went to play yesterday on my Laptop only to find the game had to patch, then do some sort of crazy reconfigure. This is mostly in preparation for the upcoming Mists of Pandaria Expansion. The process of getting to the Reconfigure stage took like a half hour or more, and then, it starts downloading a 10GB (13 on my desktop install) Patch. GIGABYTES. At the speed it said it was running I was looking at a 12 hour download. There isn’t a better way to handle this? Really?
I am a pretty big advocate of digital distribution but one of my hugest pet peeves is being all stoked to play a game, and then, HUGE PATCH. Team Fortress 2 is pretty bad about this, though Steam is decent about updating itself.
