Remininscing about the last few years Part: One

Recently it was announced that the friends and family alpha has finally begun which means that soon enough the beta will start and we will be inundated with tons of information about the new expansion and all of its smexy goodness. I was thinking of that and drooling over soon to be released beta info (which probably wont start for a month or so...I think) when I realized that suddenly everything is going to change!

I know, I know...welcome to months ago when they first announced the expansion which was going to change Azeroth. It's one thing to say that a year and some change from now something is going to happen but when you say in a few weeks something is really going to happen that people like me start taking notice. I've been playing WoW for 5 years so I've spent a lot of time in Azeroth either leveling, pvping, farming, or just running around the continents. For anyone who doesn't know (and if you're reading this I am going to assume that you either play WoW or have some knowledge about the game) the new expansion that is being released this year, Cataclysm, is going to revolve around a huge world event that will cause the landscape of the game to change. Volcanoes will erupt, lands will flood, plague filled lands will be cleansed, new zones will be opened, lore characters will change, factions will grow more factious.

So why the blog topic you may ask. Well...when you've played as long as I have, Azeroth is like a kid brother or sister and the cataclysm is like watching said sibling go to their first dance or start driving. It's watching a caterpillar that you've been following turn into a butterfly before your eyes. It's like a generic metaphor for something changing. So I've decided to post about some of my experiences in the old world as Azeroth is known as now. With so many changes to Azeroth, I'll go ahead and split this into two posts so people don't have to sit through a wall of text.


All my characters have usually followed the same track for leveling areas in the old world. One to ten is usually done in their race's respective zone but after that its usually Elwynn to Westfall/Redridge to Darkshire Southshore/Arathi Highlands/Alterac Mountains/Dustwallow Marsh/Desolace to Tanaris/Hinterlands/Badlands/Searing Gorge to Western Plaguelands/Burning Steppes/Felwood/Eastern Plaguelands. The expansion is going to affect how my new dwarf shaman and worgen rogue are leveled. Entire zones are being changed and rebalanced for different levels. Hell, Southshore is going to be washed away! (Personally I think that's a better fate for it then having it under horde control)

Southshore
I remember being new to the game and having some serious fights in Southshore against horde that would last for hours. Even now, there is still pvp being waged in the zone. One time I was seriously pwnt by a horde spawned NPC in town because he was a higher level mob then I was.  I will miss this town and all of its quests to kill a few of the never ending supply of Murlocs.

Plaguelands
Both EPL and WPL are supposedly being cleansed of the plague so I am interested in seeing how this is going to affect the zones where I spent so much time in my 50s. I remember looking for a group to kill Araj for his quest items or looking for a group to kill Alexi Barov for one of the coolest trinkets ever! I still have the peasant caller on all my characters because it's so cool to summon three minions. Cleansing the 4 different fields was a blast and made me feel like I was actively doing something to stop the spread of evil in the old world! Plus they were great experience quests. Running around EPL for an exiled Tirion Fordring was awesome at the time because he was a lore character who stood up for his beliefs and at the time I thought he was pretty cool because of this alone. Now he is a bad ass who pwns raid bosses but back then he was a shabbily dressed npc with a penchant for carrion worm meat.

I can't mention EPL without mentioning Duskwing because of the countless times I got too close to him and agro'd him. 60 elite > 50-60 mage sadly. I think everyone single one of my characters has been killed at least once by that damn bat. After the first few times I remember that I was looking forward to getting the quest to kill him but sadly only horde get that pleasure. Borelgore is also another elite who I had a fun encounter with. I was running UD Strat with a pally guildee and we were running to the instance from Light's Hope when we ran across the big worm. I saw that he was an elite so I thought "Hey maybe he drops something good!" so I tell my friend that we should kill it. He was doubtful but I went ahead and started attacking the thing and he joined in. I died, ran back, he died, he ran back, and then we killed it and went to loot it...and got nothing but some silver coins for all our troubles. We both started laughing our heads off because of all the trouble we went through just to kill it. At the time I didn't know that he was a mob that you have to kill as horde just like Duskwing. Oh well, it was a fun time anyway.

Oh good times they do keep on coming. Think that's enough yapping for the moment so I'll end this post with a simple to be continued...