The Adventures of Neriad

[Ruvanal]

Yes this the starting area is very nice, but also very isolated from every other area of the game. If you pay close attention to some of the sub-story line plots you can see why and why there may not be very many pulls to bring the various characters into this area at least until much higher levels. Hint: Teldrassil is 'supposed' to be a replacement for the World Tree that was destroyed in the WC3 game; see the story line for why it is not.

... 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.

From what I have seen listed on the WoW boards those boarders do have meanings. The dragon encircling the mob icon picture is supposed to indicate a named boss that is part of a quest. As Pete would probably put it, this is just more of the leading the players by the hand to know what to bother with in the game rather than having to bother to figure out which monsters you really need to mess with. Some of the other types of border artwork have other meanings, but I do not recall what they were listed as.

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.

Those level 90 guardians were there last push and from some of the descriptions I have heard they were probably there in the first beta push also. Someone that played a night elf in the first push could robably confirm this.

For the Horde players to somehow get into Teldrassil will require some way of their first crossing the ocean from the mainland. With the changes in how the game handles the characters swimming in the deep water (fast loss of fatigue), I am not even sure if there is a practical way for them to even reach the base of the tree. Then they would need to get to the top which would probably be very easy by comparison (die and spawn at the grave site in the centrally located town. This would actually then place them in a potentionaly better position to be disruptive than if they were situated near the capital.

...From one of those places, you can probably find your way to Ironforge and Stormwind in one or two jumps (I'll have to explore a bit to find out). ...

Menethil has a griffon transportation link to Ironforge. I not sure what the minimum required level is to access that "quest" for the flight path though. On the first push my dwarf paladin made it to Menethil at a fairly low level (~9) and could not access the tender to add the flight path, so he had to run all the way to back to Loch Modan and the Dwarven areas. My other characters that made there were somewhat higher in level and could readily access the 'flight path quest'. You may want to try checking on this to see what the character level requirement is if you can remember to keep checking back.

OT Rant:
As for my trying to check some of this out... more of the headaches like last push. I am currently getting crashes that lock up the computer and force me to manually shut down to reboot. This will happen anywhere from a couple of seconds of play up to 5 minutes of play. Talking to an NPC that has a "!" will result in about an 80% chance of immediate crash, being in the water will result in a an immediate crash and trying to click on a specific trade skill formula will result in an crash. There are undoubtably more causes but with spending more time running reboots and looking at the scan disk screens that actually being in the game there is no desire to push this much. P.S> I have made sure all the driver updates are in place and tried all the old stupid tricks that I had to do last push to get the game to run. It will like be several weeks before I can do anything else to remedy the situation (or wait for another path from Blizzard....HA!) before any of you will see me in the game for more that a couple of minutes.