Deathknell

[MongoJerry]

ADVENTURES OF NERIAD: Prologue

For perhaps the thousandth time, Neriad was knocked over the head.

"Not again!" Neriad thought. "Where am I going to be sent this time? Ah, a land of trees. I must be back in my elvish homeland!"



"Strange," thought Neriad. "This place doesn't look familiar. And what is that human mausoleum doing over there?"



"What in the...?" said Neriad.

Looking down, she exclaimed, "My robes!"

Feeling her head, she cried, "My ears!"

Pulling strands of her hair in front of her eyes, she yelled "MY HAIR!!"



THE ALL NEW ADVENTURES OF NERIAD: Deathknell

Neriad walked out of the mausoleum and found a robed undead undertaker named Mordo.

"About time you woke up," said Mordo. "We were ready to toss you into the fire with the others, but it looks like you made it."

"There's been a terrible mistake," said Neriad. "I'm a night elf. Night elves don't become undead!"

Mordo replied, "Speak with Shadow Priest Sarvis in the chapel at the base of the hill. He will tell you more of what you must know."

Bewildered, Neriad walked down the hill and entered the chapel Mordo had indicated.



Inside, she found a chaotic scene as undead of all kinds were being processed by the person identified as Shadow Priest Sarvis. It was clear that Neriad was only one of many who had recently discovered themselves to be undead. When it was Neriad's turn, Shadow Priest Sarvis began what was clearly a well rehearsed litany.

"Another of the walking dead, hm?" said Sarvis. "Must have been quite a shock, waking up in the crypt with only the cold and Mordo to greet you... I see the confusion on your face. Let me try to explain our... situation... to you.

"We have been freed from the control of the Lich King by our new leader, Lady Sylvanas. The Dark Lady guides us in our war against the hated Scourge and the holdouts of humanity who dog our every step."

"There must be some mistake," said Neriad. "I'm a Night Elf. We become light fuzzy wisps when we die. We don't wake up undead!"

But the chapel was too noisy and Sarvis was too busy to listen. Ignoring her statements, he quickly told Neriad that their present location, the village of Deathknell, was under siege by the forces of the Scourge and assigned her the task of killing 8 Mindless Zombies and 8 Wretched Zombies.

"Mindless and wretched zombies?!" cried Neriad. "Why, just last week, I was with a group of heroes who fought Onyxia herself! Ten times in fact. And we almost got her, too. Well, we got her to sixty-five percent, but that was pretty good..."

Sarvis pointed to the doorway.

"Right, mindless and wretched zombies," said Neriad, walking pitifully out the door.



The long wait is over. The release of World of Warcraft is here!

I played an undead priestess and an orc shaman way back in beta 2, but ever since the PvP server was introduced, I've played nothing but alliance characters. Now that the release is here, forcing me to start from scratch, I felt it was time to switch back to the Horde side. I can't wait to see the redesigned Barrens (it was awful before), along with all the other areas that have been redesigned or fleshed out in Kalimdor. Plus, it'll be fun to see areas like Ferales, Western and Eastern Plaguelands, the Swamp of Sorrows, and Dustwallow Marsh from the point of view of the Horde.

I and some friends decided to play on one of the servers on which we knew some of the bigger PvP guilds were going to play. This meant, of course, that the server was one of the busiest servers, and I had to spend fifteen minutes in the queue just to log on. Oh, well, that was to be expected. (I'm not going to mention the server name, although it probably wouldn't take long to guess it. I don't want even more people clogging up my server. :lol:).

I worried about how camped the initial undead area would be on the first evening of the release. When I played my undead priestess on the first night of beta 2, the area was horribly camped and people madly fought over spawns. I hoped that some of my and other's /suggest's had paid off.

The first quest one gets as an undead player is to kill some Mindless Zombies and Wretched Zombies in the part of Deathknell under the control of the Scourge. Despite about a dozen others working on the same quest, I found I had no trouble finding and killing the zombies I needed, because the spawn area was large enough and the respawn rate was fast enough. Score one for Blizzard.



After killing the requisite number of zombies, Neriad returned to the chapel, intent on getting answers from Shadow Priest Sarvis.

Before Neriad could speak, however, Sarvis began, "You've shown your potential to the Forsaken under normal circumstances, Neriad - now let's see you under pressure."

Neriad stammered, "But...".

Sarvis continued unimpeded, "The Rattlecage skeletons, more mindless minions of the Lich King, are a tougher foe than the zombies you have faced thus far. Again, thin their numbers and prove yourself to the Forsaken. Do not tarry - when you are done, speak to me again."

Then, almost as an afterthought, Sarvis tossed Neriad a scroll written by Dark Cleric Duesten.



Back in beta 2, this scroll was the welcome message new players started with in their inventories. Undertaker Mordo didn't exist. Many players commented that, although in principle it this was a decent way to welcome players and get them into the spirit of being an undead character, it unfortunately required one to already know how to open one's inventory, to already know how to read messages, and for that matter to know to open one's inventory and read the message in the first place. Blizzard switched things around a bit and added Undertaker Mordo to help new players have an easier start to their character's life. It's a good change.

But it feels a little awkward getting the same scroll from Sarvis when Duesten is standing only a few feet away.



Neriad turned and found Dark Cleric Duesten standing off to the side in the crowded chapel. After reading the scroll, Neriad hoped that Duesten would be able to better answer her questions about how she got to be there and most importantly, how to get back. But Neriad was to be bitterly disappointed.

"Allow me a moment to explain a thing or two," said Duesten. "The Holy Light no longer concerns you, the spirits of your forefathers are fairy tales, and creatures from the Nether don't want you. Do you understand me so far?"

Neriad bit her bottom lip and stared at Duesten in anger.

"There is only one thing you must know," continued Duesten. "We have survived through will alone. It is faith in ourselves that separates us from others, and with our powers, we will cause great change in all of Azeroth. The weak will come to lean on you. The lepers will call you Lady. And the ignorant will look to you for guidance. It is my duty to make sure you have the necessary tools so when the time comes, you are prepared. I will teach you greater powers if you are ready."

Neriad stared at Dark Cleric Duesten. It was clear that she wasn't going to get any useful information out of him, and it was equally true that whatever caused her to show up as an undead elf in Tirisfal Glades wouldn't be reversed overnight. She would need all the strength and help she could get to survive in this maddening new world -- even if that help had to come from this strange band of undead creatures. She let Duesten teach her how to cast Power Word: Fortitude.



One other person in the chapel wanted to talk to her -- Novice Elreth, whose job it was to mend wounded warriors and to tailor armor and clothes for the local garrison. Unfortunately, she was low on supplies, so she quietly asked Neriad if she would be willing to kill wolves and bats to collect the six Scavenger Paws and six Duskbat Wings she needed. Neriad agreed and then asked Elreth the question she had been dying to ask ever since she had spied Elreth in the chapel.

"How do you get your hair so green?" asked Neriad.

[MongoJerry]

At this point, I noticed a mage named Earthon from one of the guilds I know to be a good friendly guild. I didn't know him personally, but I had posted these adventures of Neriad tales on that guild's website, so I took a chance that he'd recognize my name and suggested to him that we party up. I was glad when he accepted, since I figured it'd be a lot less tedious to do these early quests in a team.

We passed back and forth along the perimeter of Deathknell, picking off wolves, bats, and skeletons. It was at this point where we found our first bottleneck. Wolves and bats were plentiful, but skeletons were scarce. About a dozen players were spread out along the area where the skeletons spawned, and many times there were nasty races to see who could tag a newly spawned skeleton first. I was glad that I had teamed up with Earthon, so that we each got quest credit for the skeleton kills of the other. While I realize that this was the first day of the release and therefore it was probably as bad as it will ever get, I still hope that the developers can add more skeleton spawn points. There's plenty of room in the forest and grass areas surrounding the town for skeletons to spawn.



While killing bats, wolves, and skeletons, it was funny to see the many Mini Diablos trundling after other characters. (People who bought the Collector's Edition get their choice of a special pet -- a Mini Diablo, a Zergling, or a Panda bear).

We turned in our Scavenger Paws and Duskbat wings, and we reported back after finishing off our twelve skeletons. We then got two more quests.



The first one was to clear out spiders from a gold mine nearby. We ran into another mini-bottleneck here, but it wasn't nearly as bad of a bottleneck as it had been in beta 2, since the spider respawn rates had been increased greatly. Still, I wish the developers had taken my suggestion and doubled the size of the mine. The four or so groups who were working the mine kept running into each other and sometimes fought over spawns.



The second quest involved collecting boxes of equipment in the buildings in the Scourge section of town. While completing this quest, I realized what the Blizzard developers were trying to do with this area. They're running new players through examples of the standard quest types. First, you have your "Kill X number of mobs" quest. Then, you have your "Kill X number of mobs to collect Y number of items off them" quest. Now, you have your "Collect Y number of items and you don't have to kill anything if you don't want to" quest.



Then Novice Elreth expands the horizons of the new player a bit by giving a minor "different" kind of quest. OK, it's still a collection quest, but at least the ending is different. The player is supposed to kill an undead mob named Samuel Fipps (Aha! Our first named mob!) and bury his remains in the town's graveyard next to those of his wife, Maria.

Earthon and I headed toward the camp where Samuel Fipps roams only to find about half a dozen other players gathered, waiting for him to spawn. Ouch! Another bottleneck.

While sizing up the grouping possibilities, Fipps spawned and was immediately tagged by one of the waiting players. Other players joined in and helped that player kill Fipps, and I hoped that meant that several people in the camp were in the same group and would all get quest credit at once. If so, I figured Earthon and I could invite the remaining people into our group and we could all kill Fipps on the next respawn.

And right as Fipps was about to die, my game crashed with the automatically generated error report saying something about a problem with the file, Sound.mpq. Oh, well, I thought. It's a beta.

Wait a second...



I took the game crash in stride, but when I logged back on, I found something that infuriated me. I had to wait for the server queue again because of an error on Blizzard's part? That was ridiculous! On top of that, I had a partymate standing there not knowing what was going on. Can you imagine if this were an instance party situation where someone has a game crash and holds up the whole instance party for 10-15 minutes, all because of the realm queue? There has got to be some mechanism put in place so that people who disconnect or crash can get back on in a reasonable amount of time. All I can say is thank God I'm not using my modem connection with it's periodic disconnects anymore.

Luckily, the queue moved faster this time than it had in the beginning, so I only had to wait seven minutes to get back. This meant, of course, that people were leaving the server more frequently, and I should have made the connection that something wasn't quite right.



I came back on to find the camp less, well, camped. There were maybe two or three others in the area, all of whom were kneeling down looting chests and bodies. Fipps spawned while Earthon was on his way back from doing some other random quest, and since the other players in the camp didn't attack Fipps, I figured I would take my chance. The fact that the other players in the area were all kneeling and not attacking should have again triggered something in my brain.

Earthon and I killed Fipps, and while I was looted the body and took screenshots, the server decided to start a major lag hiccup. People could use general, guild, and party chat, but no one could fight or loot anything. It kept going for a few minutes, let up for a few seconds (long enough to kill another mob), and then froze again. The only thing more painful than waiting for the lag to go away (or for the server to decide to reboot) was listening to the whining on the general chat channel. I in turn vented my usual sarcastic charm on the channel and got a whisper from Silvergade who had read my Adventures of Neriad beta tales.

Silvergade: you arent the neriad that writes the forums? (sic)
Neriad: Yep, that's me!
Silvergade: sure
Neriad: Unless I owe you money.
(pause)
Neriad: lol. Was that "sure" sarcastic?
Silvergade: sarcasm yup
Neriad: Ah. Well, if you wouldn't believe what someone tells you, then why ask?
Silvergade: just to see if they would try to deceive =P
Neriad: lol
Silvergade: the real neriad was a night elf female character
(pause)
Neriad: Ah, yes. Very true. Of course, the real neriad who was a night elf character was also in the beta which no longer exists, right?

I got a kick out of the exchange at least. Oh, and Silvergade? /wave

The server finally crashed completely, and I checked on it every few minutes. Most of the time, the server didn't show up on the realm list. When it did show up, the game usually hung while trying to retrieve the list of characters. One time, it actually got the list of characters, but it hung while trying to join the game world.

After about 45 minutes of this, whatever was wrong with our server apparently spread to all of the pacific and mountain regional servers. Or, at least, the pacific and mountain regional servers stopped showing up on the selection screen. After a while, a message came up that those servers were in the middle of a restart that would take about half and hour to complete. I'll give Blizzard credit for one thing. That's just about how long it took.



I was one of the first people back online when the server came up. I saw I hadn't picked up Samuel Fipps's remains during the lagfest, so I killed him again and grabbed the remains. I then killed the other named mobs near him and ended up getting some good pants and gloves. I guess it pays to farm named bosses even if they're only levels 2 and 3.



Maria's gravesite lay in the main town graveyard, and I buried her husband's remains there as instructed. Again, I have to give credit to Blizzard for creating a nice starting tutorial area. Here, a new player is being taught how to recognize a significant quest-related feature (i.e. mouse over it) using a quest with a simple but nice storyline.

[MongoJerry]

The final quest series in Deathknell involves the Scarlet Crusade, a group of zealots who hunt undead -- Scourge, Forsaken, or otherwise. The first part is to go to the nearby Scarlet Crusade camp and slay enough of the Scarlet Converts and Scarlet Initiates to collect 12 Scarlet Armbands. So, it's your standard "Kill X mobs to collect Y things" quest.



For the next part of the quest series, Executor Arren, one of the officers in Deathknell, tells you that he's had reports that a messenger, named Meven Korgal, has arrived at the Scarlet Crusade camp. He orders you to kill Korgal and bring any documents found back to him. In Beta 2, this was the worst bottleneck of the entire area. One of the nice things about the server crashing, however, was that people were still just trickling back in at this point, so the Scarlet Crusade camp wasn't as camped as it usually is. I took Korgal down and returned the Scarlet Crusade Documents to Arren. (I noticed that Korgal also respawned much faster this time than he did in beta 2).



I'm one of those weird people who actually reads the letters they deliver to NPC's. In this case, the documents detail the distribution of Scarlet Crusade troops and which officers lead the different detachments. When you return the documents to Executor Arren, he tells you to immediately take them to his superior, Executor Zygand, in Brill. Translation: Get out of here. You're too big for this place!



Before heading off for Brill, I took one last look around Deathknell to make sure I hadn't missed anything, and it's a good thing I did. Dark Cleric Duesten had one more quest to give -- to seek out Dark Cleric Beryl in Brill. I did a double take and double checked my quest log. Sure enough, this was officially the first priest-only quest I had ever seen! Woohoo! Six months after they were promised, here was a priest-only quest at last!



With orders to deliver the Scarlet Crusade documents to Executor Zygand and to seek out Dark Cleric Beryl, Neriad bade farewell to Deathknell and left for the town of Brill. It was clear that no one in Deathknell was prepared to explain what had happened to her or to tell her how to undo it. Perhaps she could find someone in Brill who might give her some clues.

It felt strange to have helped this motley band of undead, but the Scourge and the Scarlet Crusade were the enemies of all. Neriad hadn't been asked to do anything she wouldn't have done anyway, so she could at least take comfort in that.

"As long as they don't ask me to do anything truly vile," she thought, "I can play along and see what I can discover."



As she passed through the bulwark leading to Tirisfal Glades proper, Neriad was stopped by a fellow named Calvin Montague who asked her to deliver a letter to the innkeeper in Brill. He said that he'd pay Neriad well once the letter was delivered.

"Sure," thought Neriad as she accepted the letter for delivery. "I could use the cash. What could be the harm in that?"

UP NEXT: Brill

[Ruvanal]

Earthon and I headed toward the camp where Samuel Fipps roams only to find about half a dozen other players gathered, waiting for him to spawn.  Ouch!  Another bottleneck.

While sizing up the grouping possibilities, Fipps spawned and was immediately tagged by one of the waiting players.  Other players joined in and helped that player kill Fipps, and I hoped that meant that several people in the camp were in the same group and would all get quest credit at once.  If so, I figured Earthon and I could invite the remaining people into our group and we could all kill Fipps on the next respawn.

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Some notes and observations on the respawning currently in the game. Some of these points were being mentioned by the developers in the WoW forums about 2 or 3 patches before the end of the beta and there may have been a minor note in the patch.txt concerning it also. The developers were changing the respawns to a dynamic system instead of a fixed rate for areas outside of the instances. This would mean that the respawns would be faster in an area that has very high player count and a slow (or even very slow) respawn rate in areas that hve low (or almost none) player counts.

From what I was observing of some players reactions durning the last month of the beta, most have been unaware of this change in the game dynamics. By that point the distribution of players was usually fairly well spread out and differences in the respawn rates would not usually be apparent from what they were before. It was only when I would get onto the beta server after the stress test started and at a slow period and area that the effect could really be seen. In going through an area that I had observered the activity in many times prior in earlier patchs I could see the severe difference in the respawn rate for when the area had a very low player count (about 6-8 players for the whole zone of Tanaris). I was finding that I was almost to the point of being able to do solo full clear of one set of ruins that had been over run by ogres. In prior patches, I had never seen less than 6 ogres in those ruins even when there were 2 parties of players working to clear them for getting to the quest objective in the area. Now here I was having cleared about 12 ogres out solo and not yet seeing the first of them respawning even though I was not rushing to get everything in the area (the first that I cleared did not respawn for almost 15 minutes after I started watching for the time).

In similar vien I can report a situation similar to yours from the human starting area. There is a quest to get the head of one of the defias in the area (Garrick Padfoot). When I came up to the area to do the quest there were about 8 players all standing packed close together with a pile of corpses at their feet. I arrived just in time to see Garrick spawn and everyone try to get him. My thought was "hmmm... lets see how many pick up the head and leave. Bet its only one." I was right unfortunatly. I then just started doing unsolicted invites to players there to see who was wise enough to take the hint on how to get the quest over with quick. That got the quest done somewhat faster for the five of us in that group (except the item lag spike that choked us some). But while waiting for the respawn, I was able to take a closer look at the corpses on the ground (the lag spike while looting helped in this reguard). All the corpses on the ground there were of Garrick and there were at least 5 of them there. For those more familiar with the respawn rates in the early to mid beta, any corpse of a killed mob would end up decaying prior to the mobs respawn. But in this case, Garrick was respawning a greatly excellerated rate due to the very high player count in that area from all the players trying to get started on the first day (looked like on the order of 20 to 30 seconds at the time I was there). That explained to me why I was having so much trouble moving through some of area around him with all the bandits that kept spawning next to me. One area near the bridge has so many respawn points close together that 2 players could stand there and just fight continuosly due the steady rate of respawns on top of the players.

I am less sure of this point, but it also looks like the respawn rate of the mineral and herb nodes is also being dynamically modified by the player counts in the areas. This was from the observation of the mining nodes in a couple of the areas during the last couple of weeks of the beta (with very low player counts in those regions) compared to prior to the stress test.

Feel free to split this out if you feel it deserves its own thread.

[Tal]

I had a different experience. On the Alliance side of things in the Newb zones the respawn was very quick, almost too quick in some cases. For example while doing the grape collection quest I would frequently get attacked by a re-spawning defias as I attempted to start collecting the grapes. I would kill hte attacker and start again to collect the grapes. I would get to the end and just before it would open the loot pane I would get attacked by another respawning Defias.

Deathknell by contrast was a *cough* ghost town of mobs when I signed on with TheTal. The Mindless and Wretched respawned quickly enough but the bats and skeletons were very much in short supply and did not seem to respawn quickly at all.

[Treesh]

I had a different experience. On the Alliance side of things in the Newb zones the respawn was very quick, almost too quick in some cases. For example while doing the grape collection quest I would frequently get attacked by a re-spawning defias as I attempted to start collecting the grapes. I would kill hte attacker and start again to collect the grapes. I would get to the end and just before it would open the loot pane I would get attacked by another respawning Defias.
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And that's why you should avoid that overcrowded area known as the human newbie area and play a real race. ;) :D There is more to the alliance than squishy humans. ;) :P

[LavCat]

If Neriad has not already heard, she will meet lots of sister undead night elves in Silithus.

[LavCat]

In similar vien I can report a situation similar to yours from the human starting area.  There is a quest to get the head of one of the defias in the area (Garrick Padfoot).  When I came up to the area to do the quest there were about 8 players all standing packed close together with a pile of corpses at their feet.  I arrived just in time to see Garrick spawn and everyone try to get him.  My thought was "hmmm... lets see how many pick up the head and leave.  Bet its only one."  I was right unfortunatly.  I then just started doing unsolicted invites to players there to see who was wise enough to take the hint on how to get the quest over with quick.  That got the quest done somewhat faster for the five of us in that group (except the item lag spike that choked us some).  But while waiting for the respawn, I was able to take a closer look at the corpses on the ground (the lag spike while looting helped in this reguard).  All the corpses on the ground there were of Garrick and there were at least 5 of them there.  For those more familiar with the respawn rates in the early to mid beta, any corpse of a killed mob would end up decaying prior to the mobs respawn.  But in this case, Garrick was respawning a greatly excellerated rate due to the very high player count in that area from all the players trying to get started on the first day (looked like on the order of 20 to 30 seconds at the time I was there).  That explained to me why I was having so much trouble moving through some of area around him with all the bandits that kept spawning next to me.  One area near the bridge has so many respawn points close together that 2 players could stand there and just fight continuosly due the steady rate of respawns on top of the players.

I am less sure of this point, but it also looks like the respawn rate of the mineral and herb nodes is also being dynamically modified by the player counts in the areas.  This was from the observation of the mining nodes in a couple of the areas during the last couple of weeks of the beta (with very low player counts in those regions) compared to prior to the stress test.

Feel free to split this out if you feel it deserves its own thread.
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When Tribade made it to Garrick's shack, Garrick's corpse was on the ground amidst a pile of skeletons. Several heroes were standing around expectantly. Tribade called out: "Anyone want to party for doing Garrick?" After a few seconds of silence Garrick spawned on top of her. She slew Garrick and returned to the abbey with his head, leaving the heroes still standing there.

Not only are mineral nodes respawning more frequently than in the beta, the amount in any given node is larger. Tribade took seven piles of ore from just one copper node.

[MongoJerry]

If Neriad has not already heard, she will meet lots of sister undead night elves in Silithus.

Oh?! I thought I was just pulling a story out of my behind to explain why I'm suddenly playing an undead priestess. You're serious about this? I looked briefly around northern Silithus in the open beta and only saw lots of bugs, worms, and scorpions.

It would be great if it were true. Then, I could make sure to keep the mystery of how Neriad became undead going.

[Artega]

And that's why you should avoid that overcrowded area known as the human newbie area and play a real race. ;) :D  There is more to the alliance than squishy humans. ;) :P
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Yeah. Floppy Night Elves, fragile Dwarves, and tiny Gnomes.

[LavCat]

Oh?!  I thought I was just pulling a story out of my behind to explain why I'm suddenly playing an undead priestess.  You're serious about this?  I looked briefly around northern Silithus in the open beta and only saw lots of bugs, worms, and scorpions.

It would be great if it were true.  Then, I could make sure to keep the mystery of how Neriad became undead going.
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Yes, seriously, there were. Although I killed a couple. As I recall they were along the eastern edge of the zone. What I was looking for was the Twilight Hammer, but I'm pretty sure these undead night elves were not Twilight Hammer.