🚀 go-pugleaf

On 18 Dec 2014 09:41:19 GMT, Urbin <urbin@invalid.invalid> wrote:

>Ugh. I keep changing my mind about buying the expac or not. Since last night
>I've gone back and forth about three times. Anyway, no time to play tonight
>and tomorrow night. Might get in a little tomorrow during the day. So I'll
>hold off on the decision until saturday :-)

Hehe, I'd say the levelling content is worth it, the lvl 100 content
less so, but as you'll not be playing much, that's less relevant to
you anyway, depends if you want to spend that much cash on levelling
content alone. It's very fun while you're still questing through the
zones anyway :-)

>>  You'll also be able to upgrade the town hall earlier than 93, if you
>>  reach the right part of the questline
>
>Cool, I didn't realise it was OR, I read it as an AND requirement.

Yeah, it's not clear in the tooltip at all!

>Hm, I've been on two southern islands and only found level 90-91 mobs
>there. I even killed a rare on each. I needed both of those islands for the
>explorer achievment. Is there a third island that is lvl 100?

There is, yes, should be visible on the map as some way out to sea,
south of The Shimmer Moor, not close to an easy bit of the mainland -
I think I know the two islands you found, both are much nearer the
shore :-)

>I'm not quite sure what the story of the whole expac is. I.e. how come we
>have a way to go back into the past Draenor, somehow that seems to have
>slipped by me. Not that I mind, though :-)

They failed badly at getting that bit of storyline across in the game,
anyone who didn't read both the book and the short story on the
website has no idea what actually happened. I'll try and give a short
version:

After Siege of Orgrimmar, Garrosh stood trial in Pandaria, however at
the end of the trial, Kairoz (a bronze dragon who we found powerful
stones for on Timeless Isle) built a device which allowed him to
transport Garrosh away to Draenor of the past. I'm not 100% sure of
the grand plan behind this, Wrathion had some involvement too, but
overall, whose idea it was is a bit unclear!

Garrosh then met up with his father, Grom, used a piece of Kairoz's
device to show him visions of what happened in our world, which
convinced him that it was a bad idea to drink the demon blood which
Gul'dan was trying to make everyone drink (to repeat the history of
what happened in our timeline!). The time after that isn't covered,
but it's clear that between them the Hellscreams built up the Iron
Horde, captured Gul'Dan and his lackeys and used them to power the
Dark Portal, which then hooked up to our timeline and they appeared in
the Blasted Lands, and so we reach the start of WoD.

By the way, according to story, there's a big time gap between us
doing the Tanaan intro and the rest of the levelling experience; in
Spires of Arak you can find the diary of a prominent Alliance
character, which states he's been in that location for over a month,
and given he wasn't in Tanaan with us, he presumably arrived later -
there's a few people around the world who are definitely from our
world, not Draenor, it's never quite explained how they got there.
Just assume the garrison took a month or so to build and a bunch of
people arrived through portals while that happened, I guess!

>Anohter thing that amazes me is that I am playing using the vanilla UI,
>something I could not have imagined during BC, Wrath or the Shattering.
>This is really a testimony to the improved UI!

Hehe it is indeed, I had no trouble using it on beta at all. I've
always run only minor modifications to the UI, but it's a lot better
than it used to be, my addons are mainly information displays and the
like rather than functional (except VuhDo; I really can't heal without
an addon)