I spent most of my days off playing video games and getting chores done. Two days off were spent in beta. I honestly didn’t spend as much time as I thought I was going to – which is good. One: Because I have other games and things to play and do. And two: This is beta, which means everything I do here is temporary, the characters are going away, and I’m going to have to do it all over again when this goes live.
So I’m trying to not get too invested in this.
Har har.
There be spoilers beyond this point.
The pandarin starting zone is actually fairly smooth and I didn’t have any trouble finishing it up. The servers were a little bumpy, but that’s to be expected.
I didn’t start there on day three though.
I started on the character copy of Kalil – the paladin main. My main spec is holy, but so far I haven’t been able to play around with it much. I don’t want to pug the higher dungeons quite yet, and I haven’t been on at the same time as most of my guildies. I figure that’ll get done eventually and there’s no rush.
Most of the bugs I encountered were the big ones that everyone and their brother’s cousin already knew about. For example:
Garrosh's New Look for Orgimmar is a little bit garish.
But apparently it's pretty popular in the Jade Forest as well.
The “fix” for this is to actually turn down your graphic settings. My computer can run the game pretty comfortably at ultra settings these days but setting it back a little didn’t hurt much. I didn’t figure this out right away though (because that would have required me to look at the thread in my guild’s forums where a guildie pointed it out and why would I do that when OMG BETA).
To get to the Jade Forest there’s a panda standing outside of Garrosh’s Hold in Orgrimmar. You talk to him and he’ll send you one of three places: Hellscream’s Hope, a zepplin crash site, or just “Pandaria,” which sends you to Dawn’s Blossom if I’m remembering that correctly.
Me, being the over enthusiastic person that I am, picked Pandaria going “Yay! Pandas!”
I got over to the town and looked around. There were a lot of dead bodies (PvP Happened) but no quests. Not to be deterred, I hopped on my shiny mount and started exploring.
Just in case. If you are Horde, the settlements in the south: Wayward Landing, and Glassfin Village, are not your friends. I didn’t check out Moonwater Retreat, but I’m going to guess the situation is similar. I may or may not have been one shot and flagged by a level 90 Zora.
I hadn’t figured out the fix for the giant pink boxes yet, so I went around mostly blind. I ended up stumbling off a cliff and my paladin reflexes being what they are, immediately hit bubble and found, to my delight, that the bubble graphic had been given the Twilight treatment:
So there was that.
While wandering around, Kalil got to know some of the local wildlife. Including the hostile, suicidal, bear that came over to say hi. That bear gave me my first taste of what they’d changed with regards to retribution paladins. After playing with it more over the past couple days, it’s fairly safe to say I will probably stop collecting prot pieces because ret is now awesome.
There were also these things, were were neutral and just adorable! They were, in fact, too cute to kill. ...I killed it anyway.
For the record, I found the starter quests for the Horde over at the crash site. If the Horde’s intro video to the zone has been implemented yet, I haven’t found it. Apparently though, your zepplin crash lands in the forest and the first quests you do involve running around, checking on survivors, putting out fires, and salvaging supplies.
I liked it even without the cinematic because it made me feel like Kalil actually was a part of the initial expedition. The NPCs treat you like one of them, that they’ve known you from previous wars (expansions) and I always like that. It grounds you in the “reality” of the world. You’re a famous war veteran and they know that. That’s why they go to you to solve their problems now.
Speaking of NPCs I like. General Nazgrim survived Vashjir – yay! Of course…
Uh.
Er.
Well. You see.
It’s just that.
Erm.
He’s a cube.
But I'm sure he'll get better soon.
So you round everything and everyone up, because you really are a capable, steadfast, unflappable member of the Horde (no, I couldn’t keep a straight face while typing that – this is Kalil we’re talking about) and go set up camp at Hellscream’s Hope.
And you are immediately attacked by monkies. They’re Hozen. Hozen are…
Well, we’ll get to them later.
After a few quests I ran into Acid Rain. Judging from the amount of posts on the forums already, I figured Blizzard was pretty aware that it was broken for some people. I happened to be one of those people. Some QQ in guild chat and a few drops/logs/no-really-Kalil-you-can’t-do-this-quest-right-now-stop-trying attempts, I gave up. I figured this zone was a lot like the cata zones in that I was totally bottlenecked and couldn’t continue questing/leveling until it was fixed.
I was wrong, but at the time didn’t realize it. I left Kalil at the camp and went to finish up the panda starter zone. Fun fact: Your panda cannot join a guild/you cannot communicate with your non-Real ID friends until you have finished the zone and chosen a faction. This makes sense because your panda really doesn’t HAVE a faction and could go either way so it makes no sense to have a neutral panda in a Horde guild from the start. Still, it would have been nice not to be stuck in the silent zone, even for a short time (my in-game RealID list does not translate to beta and I have not added anyone to the beta one yet).
No, I’m not sure how to rectify that. It’s a minor quibble because the starting zone isn’t that long. It takes all of an hour, maybe two from start to finish if you manage to avoid getting hung up on bugged quests. So really, this would be a case of suck it up, buttercup.
I have more thoughts on the panda zone – and the changes to Ji’s dialogue from a writer’s standpoint (it was a wise decision on Blizzard’s part, but not for the reason a lot of the whiner’s think it was) – but as this post is getting pretty long already, we’ll end it here.
PS: If you are Horde (or Alliance – these should be faction neutral) and you get stuck on a quest like Acid Rain, you can find other quests in the following locations:
- Ruins of Gan Shi (starter quest is on a fallen sprite – I tripped and fell on this one)
- Chun Tian Monastery (do these anyway, they’re awesome – they start here) and…
- I was able to pick up and complete The Perfect Color and Quill of Stingers even though none of the other quests in the area were opened for me (it may have been a bug, or it may have been that I hadn’t gotten far enough in the story line to open them up yet – not sure).
PSS:
You Can't Do That While Stunned 