Cataclysmania

Yesterday I finally completed the high-level zones in Cataclysm. The last zone, Twilight Highlands, has an almost dried-up river bed that reminded me a little of Thundering Steppes in EverQuest II. Still, I thought the atmosphere in Deepholm was clearly the best of them all. Mount Hyjal was a little bland, Vashj’ir refreshingly different with its undersea paradise (but in the end a bit too samey quest hubs) and Uldum had too many pop culture references for my taste. The Indiana Jones quests were imaginative but also an almost direct copy of numerous scenes out of the famous movies.

It took a bit longer to get through it this time because I felt a little burnt out (as mentioned in my previous blog post about the expansion) but when I finally completed the last zone, I was actually more inclined to do the dailies from then on. Maybe it’s because the dailies represent standard quests I quickly get used to, and because of that I can really relax. Without vehicles.

The normal quests in the high-level zones were often awkward as soon as a vehicle was involved. In theory, the vehicle task is a grand idea and keeps the quests varied and entertaining, but too often I felt I had to learn a new set of skills all over again (typically with no time to read the skill tooltips), and just as I’d learned how to do the quest properly, it was all over. I was always worried every time a new vehicle quest popped up in my quest log. Some vehicle quests were easy, fun and exciting and others were difficult, cumbersome and tiring. To be honest, I’m not really sure I really want to play an MMORPG to experience these theme park rides. I’d rather just play my own character with his trusted abilities that I know inside out. Maybe that’s even why I wasn’t entirely captivated by Cataclysm.

Now that I was down to doing dailies, I took the opportunity to bump my enchanting all the way up to 525 (I deliberately postponed that while leveling so that I could disenchant all the greens and blues I didn’t need). It cost me a few thousand gold to get up there with materials from the auction house, but I didn’t mind since I wasn’t really using my gold for much else. I even bought a ton of shards to buy the formulas from a vendor in Twilight Highlands. Only the last three weapon formulas had to wait. I need 15 crystals to buy all of those, and on my server one crystal sell for ~2500g!