Sunday, July 30, 2017

Archdruid "Mount" and Reflections on the Broken Shore

All right! That's all of them.

Druids don't get a mount, exactly, but instead get an altered Flight Form, which is a sort of horned owl. If you like the old form better (and I might, to be honest) you can talk to an NPC near the Shrine of Aviana in the Dreamgrove to swap back. It appears that the color scheme of this is based on race, not class, as my Night Elf shifted from Balance to Feral and had the same color. I also imagine that it won't apply to low-level alts as it's not really a mount in your collection like the other ones are.

The quest chain involves attempting to defend her Shrine on Mount Hyjal and then going to Azsuna with Thisalee Crow in order to recover the idol a Dreadlord steals.

Like the 7.0 class campaigns, the mount quests are a bit of a mixed bag. Some, like the Death Knight one, feel totally in-tune with the class identity and are really a lot of fun, while others feel a bit generic (the Priest quests for example could have been for any class.) They also vary widely in difficulty. The Shaman one is extremely quick and easy whereas the Rogue one is genuinely difficult in a way that will never get easier, as it'll always require you to (eventually) have to sneak into the enemy faction's most popular auction house.

Some classes have mounts that change based on your spec, while other classes get a baseline mount and then alternate color schemes that can be purchased with order resources only once you unlock Concordance of the Legionfall on the spec's artifact (so far I've unlocked the Protection and Retribution Paladin mounts and the Subtlety Rogue one.) And some classes simply get one mount that always looks the same and that's it.

Of course, getting all these mounts means I also had to do the Legionfall campaign twelve times. I have to say that compared with the Suramar quests or what I've seen of what we're getting in 7.3, the Legionfall "campaign" really feels a lot more like the kind of guided-tour quests that we got on the Timeless Isle - not really any plot, but rather a series of quests to introduce you to the features of a zone with several different weird little systems going on.

I'm hesitant to say that the Broken Shore lacked plot - after all, the expansion's introduction took place there, and that was maybe the most exciting way they've ever launched an expansion. Alliance players also get a nice character moment through quests surrounding Anduin and his grief over his father (made more poignant to me due to my going through a similar situation.)

Still, the Broken Shore felt light on revelations, and the campaign felt a little more chore-like than a grand adventure to quest through. Also, they really should have had us kill the rare elites before having us do the Sentinax quest, as those guys consistently drop beacons.

I haven't even attempted any of the artifact challenges yet (I'm sort of waiting to overgear them) but I hope that after people head to Argus that the building rotation doesn't slow too much.

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