Stormsong Valley First Impressions

With a new build finally allowing Mac users restored access to the Alpha/Beta/Gamma/whatever, I was able to take the Death Knight I'd played through Drustvar up north to Stormsong Valley.

While Drustvar is composed of dark forests and snowy mountains, and Tiragarde Sound is a sea-soaked area of pirates and docks, Stormsong Valley is, at first glance, an idyllic grassland. Imagine the Valley of the Four Winds, but far larger, such that as you ride out into the fields, it seems as if they go on for miles.

More than Tiragarde and even Drustvar, the quests really flow you in a clear direction, at least for part of the zone. The quests that lead up to the Shrine of the Storm have you investigating the odd culture of the Tidesages - a group of priests who bless Kul Tiran ships so that they can withstand any storm on the ocean.

The quests for the zone actually begin in Boralus, where you visit an abbey for the Tidesages within the city. It becomes clear immediately that there's something off about these priests.

Once you go into the zone proper, you find that it's actually more complicated than it first seems - there are some Tidesages who are genuinely benevolent (as far as I can tell, at least,) but it becomes very clear not too far into the quests that many of them, including Lord Stormsong, are actually practicing very Lovecraftian void magic. Not only are they allied with faceless N'raqi, but many of them transform into Kith'tir - humanoids with a serious case of tentacle-face (if you are familiar with Mind Flayers, aka Ilithids, in D&D, that's more or less what these are.)

While it currently lacks voice acting and there are some regions where the terrain geometry is flawed, this is likely to be a very cinematic questchain.

In fact, the Shrine of the Storm is built on an island that is quite massive - while the main plot sends you into a 5-player dungeon, I could certainly imagine a raid finding a place in this island. It seems clear to me that there's got to be at least one raid on Kul Tiras, and this is the best candidate I've seen so far.

But there's still plenty of the zone for me to see - I could see a quest chain like this, perhaps with a bit more branching elaboration - as being the main quest for a Legion-style zone. I'll be very curious to see how well the rest of the zone ties together. Drustvar, by comparison, is very unified in its story, while Tiragarde seems to send you all over the place.