RaF has come to an end for my wife and I. Fortunately we managed to level our toons to 60, get them through the Dark Portal and into Outlands. I am really looking forward to questing through Outlands this time, especially since I’ll have my wife by my side. It also helps that I’m getting a kick out of playing my pally as a tank. It never gets old to mount up, round up a large group and AoE them down with my wife’s vitally important DPS. At some point I know “epic mode” will become the keyword for letting my wife know that it is time for large-scale burnage of mobs. It reminds me of my unholy DK before that tree’s AoE got nerfed to the ground.
Questing during our journey wasn’t as smooth as I would have liked, but I shouldn’t have expected anything else considering how long it has been since I leveled a toon in that level range in a long time. Constantly the thought of “I know there’s a quest for this … but I don’t remember how to get it” ran through my head as we would ride through zones. For example we flew out to Tanaris in our early 40′s for a change-of-pace from the jungles of Stranglethorn, but after only one night in the desert we found ourselves back in STV to complete most of the quests out there leaving us around level 52.
When I came to the realization that we had passed level 50, I remembered an old guild tradition rooted back in vanilla where we would help fresh lv50 toons complete the cauldron quests in Western Plaguelands. It’s been a long time since I last did anything in the plaguelands, so the thought of smiting undead sounded attractive. I knew that with our RaF experience bonus we would fly through the levels as we completed the quests. Also considering that we had logged out the night prior in Undercity, it was a no-brainer to finish up our old world exploits in the plaguelands.
Once I finally dusted off my memory on how to start up the cauldron quests, things went smoothly from there on out. That is if you exclude the fear bombs from Skeleton Terrors that caused add after add and frustrated my wife to no end. Fortunately no deaths occurred in spite of the problematic fear bombs and we breezed through the remaining cauldron quests. After demolishing the western half of the plaguelands, we then turned our attention eastward.
If there’s one thing that I definitely won’t miss post-cataclysm it will be the quests in Eastern Plaguelands. Kill 30 of this, then 20 of that and while you’re over there kill 10 more of another thing. Ugh! Then there is the issue of disjointed quests sending you back n’ forth across the zone or zones to keep the quest-train chugging along. Gathering termites in EPL for a quest that you get at the Bulwark for an area in WPL has to be one of the best examples of the bad quest flow design in vanilla.
I can’t wait until Blizzard blows up the old world quests and updates everything to being on par with WotLK questing, or at the very least TBC. I only hope that with this revision of old world content we get treated to more in-game cinematics ala Wrathgate to move important story-arcs along. Blizzard has stated that they were very happy with the Wrathgate questline so we can be assured more of these questlines. I’m just unsure if they’ll be for the 80-85 content, or if we’ll see a smattering of it through the new leveling experience.
I’m glad that my wife and I have gotten our toons past the vanilla hump and can start in earnest on the TBC content. I’m interested to see what my wife thinks of her first bombing run in Hellfire, but I’m sure that she’ll be anxious to burn through Hellfire to move onto Zangarmarsh which we have renamed “The Mushroom Kingdom.” Questing through Outlands will be far more rewarding for us if only because the quests will be quite fresh in my head considering I now have two other alts, a boomkin and a troll DK on jubei’thos, that are just starting Hellfire. I’m sure it won’t be long before I’ll be picking up a copy of WotLK for my wife so that we can keep questing together.
