The Adventures of Neriad

[MongoJerry]

THE ADVENTURES OF NERIAD, THE NIGHT ELF PRIESTESS

For most of yesterday, Leme and I adventured together through the Night Elf starting area of Teldrassil. The previous day, the first day of the patch, we had each independently created Night Elf characters, because neither of us had ever played one and we were curious what the elven areas were like. When we hooked up, Neriad, my priestess, was level 5, and Lem, Leme's rogue, was level 4. We then spent the entire day completing nearly every quest in Teldrassil.

Along the way, Leme and I commented to each other on things that were new -- either new in this patch or new because we had never been in Night Elf country before. At the end of the evening, I thought, "Shoot! I should've been writing those things down!" So, I figured I'd start writing up the adventures of Neriad, my Night Elf Priestess in a way similar to the way I wrote up the adventures of several of my Diablo II characters. I don't know how much role playing I'm going to do with this or how fancy I'm going to get, but I'll try to make things as interesting as possible as I go along. Also, I know that there are some people who read this forum who are not participating in the beta, so I'll try to include tidbits for such folks as well.

So, where is Neriad now? She's level 12 and has just left Teldrassil, the starting area and home of the Night Elves. Teldrassil looks like a large island just off the coast of Kalimdor, but as many people in the general chat channel were quick to point out when I mistakenly used the word "island," Teldrassil is actually a gargantuan tree growing out of the ocean. This has an important affect on players in one aspect: there are no mining nodes in all of Teldrassil!

But herbs. Talk about herbs! Holy cow! Blizzard said that they had increased the number of herb and mining nodes in the game, but neither Leme nor I could believe our eyes about how many herbal nodes there were and how fast they respawned. Peacebloom, silverleaf, and snakeroot were everywhere! I don't know how much of this has to do with the new patch and how much this has to do with Teldrassil itself (maybe Teldrassil gets more herbal nodes to compensate for the lack of mining nodes?). I'll have to visit some of the other races' starting areas to judge the changes for myself. Either way, you can forget the idea of farming low level herbs and selling them at auction. The market's going to be flooded!



So what did I think of Teldrassil? Simply put: It's beautiful. The artwork for the area took my breath away. Different regions of Teldrassil had their own character to them, the mobs had a lot of variety to them, and yet the storyline and themes for the area bound everything together into a united whole. I may sound nuts by lavishing praise on a starting area, but I enjoyed playing in Teldrassil more than any other starting area I've played in.



So was it just the pretty artwork I liked? Nope. A lot of my enjoyment stemmed from quests that were (to borrow a phrase) "somewhat interesting." Years ago, when I played D&D, my friends and I had a code phrase called "Plan A" when we got to a dungeon door which meant, "Open the door, kill the monsters, get the treasure, look for secret doors." That was a signal that things were getting monotonous and it was high time the GM did something to spice things up. Often WoW has it's own version of Plan A: Talk to the NPC, get the quest, kill the X number of mobs to get Y items, return to the NPC, get the quest to kill the mob boss, kill the mob boss, return to the NPC again.

But Teldrassil had enough quests that didn't quite follow this formula that it kept things "somewhat interesting." Sure, there were some that followed the formula, but the number of items needed to be collected was small enough and the drop rates high enough that the quests didn't seem tedious. But a large number of quests were of the "Easter egg hunt" variety. That is, one wasn't required to kill X number of mobs. Instead, one merely had to find things and bring them back -- fel cones, water from various moonwells, and seedlings, for examples. That may sound like a small change to the usual collection quests, but it was much more enjoyable for me in that instead of my goal being to kill X number of mobs, my goal is to somehow get *past* the mobs to my goal. This adds a small but noticeable addition of tactics to the game (how can I kill the fewest number of mobs and still get to my goal?) and it involves a bit of exploration to discover where your goal actually is.

The best example of this is the Relics quest where one needs to find four relics in a twisting labyrinth with bridges, cubbyholes, small passages off to the sides, etc. I know that this architecture gets used in other elven areas (I had seen it briefly while doing the Test of Lore quest with my undead priestess), but since this was the first time I'd spent any length of time in such a structure, the maze was enjoyably mystifying. Leme and I frequently found ourselves circling back to the same places we'd been when we thought we were going in new directions. It was fun wandering through this three dimensional maze looking for the four chests that contained the relics. What's more, there are a couple of mini-quests you get inside the structure from a trapped elven druid. And all the time, there are mobs trying to stop you from getting around, so if you take too many wrong turns, you get "punished" by having to kill a lot more mobs to complete your task than you ordinarily would.



I also like it when there are quests that aren't given by the usual NPC's with yellow exclamation marks over their heads. Leme and I found three such mini-quests in Teldrassil. Two of them came from shining purple trees shown above. The third came off a named boss that we had not been given a quest to kill. In fact, we almost passed by him while completing another quest and decided to kill him on a lark. He ended up dropping a moss-covered heart that started a small quest. I like this kind of stuff where you get rewarded for exploring and trying things out. I hope Blizzard puts more such quests in the game. Also, Leme and I noticed that the pictures of boss mobs now have some fancy new artwork bordering them (shown above). I don't know, yet, if the artwork is just for show or if there is some meaning to the type of bordering a boss gets.



After finishing most of our quests in Teldrassil, Leme and I entered Darnassus, the main Dark Elf city. The first thing you see are a few new features Blizzard added to compensate for some of the new FvF capabilities -- namely massive level 90 guardians that protect the city in addition to the usual faction guards. The one shown above is called an "Ancient of War." There are several varieties of such guardians, and a level 90 "Ancient Protector" guardian patrols the smaller elven town in the center of Teldrassil (the elf equivalent of Goldshire, Brill, or Razor Hill). Inside the city, you see level 70 elven guards and some elite level 50+ snow tigers that could give invaders quite a surprise. Still, Darnassus is such a large spread out city, I have a suspicion that some weak points of entry could be discovered by some unscrupulous Horde invaders.