After dinging level 10 I decided it was time to go to Elwynn Forest. This is objectively the best starter zone in the game, even if my heart belongs to Dun Morogh.
The reason for going to Elwynn before even finishing Dun Morogh is that you always want to do green quests when leveling. They are easy and quick to do, since you’re a bit overleveled for them, and it gives you a nice XP per hour ratio. I killed murlocs, collected gold dust, made a group to do princess, and Hogger. Hogger became somewhat a disappointment. I got invited to this group to kill him, and they killed him without me on my way there. I just had to loot his paw.
After finishing everything in Elwynn I went back to Dun Morogh to clear the rest of it just to find one of the new quests that have been added into Forever. Apparently the Dark Iron Dwarves have set up an operation and you need to figure out what they’re doing there. The clues leads you to Ironforge and to Hall of Thanes.
Hall of Thanes is the first new dungeon in Forvever. It is located in Ironforge, just beneath the throne room. The Dark Iron Dwarves have broken in to rob the vaults and take the sacred heirlooms in possession. Only you, and 100 000 other explorers, can stop them. The dungeon is in level range 13-18 so I went in as level 15. As a healer it was a bit low, but I managed to get us through without a wipe 😅
As the first dungeon of the game, and a taste of what’s to come, it is perfectly fine. You have 3 bosses, and the whole dungeon takes 30-60 minutes. It doesn’t feature any fun events like Gnomeregan. It doesn’t have any deep lore like Dead Mines. It’s just a dungeon. For me as a veteran player it was a disappointing start of the new content of Wow Forever. I really hope they shape up for what’s to come.
As a priest that specializes in holy, dungeons is why I’m playing the game. This is my bread and butter. I go out in the world to do quests, just to get in level range of the next dungeon. My main enjoyment of World of Warcraft is to play with others and help them succeed in dungeons. That is why I play the game. So learning that they’ve nerfed XP from dungeon mobs to prevent you from leveling in dungeons is a hard blow. During my 3 runs of Hall of Thanes I didn’t even gain 1 level. Unless they change this in an upcoming patch, it might become what kills the game for me.
After Hall of Thanes I felt more than prepared to take on Loch Modan. This is another of my favorite areas, but it has always been quite hard. The situation with the troggs in the middle of the lake, and Bingles Tools quest has always been the bane of me. But ooooh sweet revenge!
I am starting to see the upsides and downsides of the fact that everyone is playing on the same world and you’re being sharded into an instance with other players. They have been adjusting these instances all through the week to get the balance right, but when I was doing Loch Modan we were too many players for the troggs. It was a gankfest. We were a group of players in the middle of the lake just killing everything as it spawned.
Now you could suspect that we would be waiting for troggs to respawn, but apparently the number of players and spawn rates are somewhat interlinked, so troggs were spawning as quickly as we were killing them, and Oh Boy! were we killing them. It was a carnage!
I made a mage friend that I was questing with for a while. I hope to see him later.
After being done with half of Loch Modan I went to Westfall, again to seek out the green quests, but also to prepare for Dead Mines. There is a long quest chain that ends with getting Van Cleefs head (ew), and this chain needs to be prepared. I’m not going to bore you with the details of Westfall. I couldn’t find any new quests or changes from vanilla.
By the end I managed to find a group for Dead Mines. We speed ran that thing, with a warrior that was more than capable, and a team of DPSers that seemed to know what they were doing. In true World of Warcraft fashion the warrior and the paladin got into an argument over loot, and ended up cursing at each other. It was pretty hilarious and a true original World of Warcraft moment that I really enjoyed.
I ended up dinging 20 while turning in the quests. Next up is finishing off Loch Modan and preparing for The Stockades, so stay tuned for that.
