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WoW Archivist: Vanilla WoW's most hidden quest line
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? The southern coast of Arathi Highlands is mountainous and all but impassable. Most players leveling through the zone in vanilla never bothered to explore beyond the steep ridges. Yet if you were curious, you might have discovered a tucked-away area known as Faldir's Cove. To find it, you either had to swim along the coast or discover a small cave tucked away in the hills southeast of Stromgarde. The area wasn't labeled on the map, and no NPC sent you there. Explorers were rewarded with perhaps the least-known quest chain in vanilla. Other secret quests such as Message in a Bottle were "hidden" in plain sight in high-traffic areas. You were bound to notice The Matron Protectorate if you ran Blackrock Spire enough -- or someone would helpfully point it out to you while you were grouped. The only one that might be more obscure was Sully Balloo's Letter, but that wasn't really a line of quests, and you didn't do anything but talk to some NPCs. Therefore, I give the title of most hidden quest line to Faldir's Cove.
WoW Archivist: A fluffy history of companion pets
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? In Mists of Pandaria, our companion pets will be more than just vanity items. We'll be able to tame them, train them, and pit them against each other in Azeroth's most adorable blood sport since School of Hard Knocks. Pet battles are brand new, but the history of companion pets stretches all the way back to the game's earliest days. These faithful sidekicks have been tagging along with us from our first characters in 2004 to the final confrontation with Deathwing. They're more than just a fluffy diversion, however. Believe it or not, some pets have actually made the real world a better place, and some have irrevocably changed WoW as we know it.
WoW Archivist: Patch 2.0.3 -- The first pre-expansion event
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? Released on Jan. 7, 2007, patch 2.0.3 set the stage for WoW's very first expansion. One week later, The Burning Crusade officially went live. During that week, Blizzard unveiled the game's first pre-expansion event, known as The Dark Portal Opens (or Highlord Kruul Unleashed in Europe). While perhaps not as ambitious as later in-game events, the Dark Portal offered some memorable moments -- and some valuable lessons for the game's developers. Let's take a look back!
WoW Archivist: Strat 45 -- the original challenge mode
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? Mists of Pandaria will introduce a new feature to WoW called challenge modes. Challenge modes are timed heroic dungeon runs offering rewards based on how fast you complete them. What newer players may not know is that vanilla WoW also had a timed dungeon run. It was known as the 45-minute Baron, Strat 45, or sometimes simply Baron run. This "challenge mode" was actually just a quest (called Dead Man's Plea) to engage Baron Rivendare within 45 minutes and then kill him, or he would execute his prisoner and you'd fail. Why 45 minutes? That's just how Rivendare rolls. The timed run was perhaps the most infamous step in the quest line to upgrade vanilla's rare-quality Dungeon 1 set into a mix of upgraded rares and epics known as Dungeon 2 or "tier 0.5." The quest line was added in patch 1.10, but it was removed entirely with Cataclysm's Shattering. Because it was a part of that quest line (occurring roughly a third of the way into it), everyone wanted to complete a successful Strat 45 run. Trade chat in cities was full of "LFM 45Baron must know pulls!" However, very few PUGs in that era ever finished the run on time. It really was that difficult.
WoW Archivist: The most painful attunement of all
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? Attunement has been a hot topic across the WoW blogosphere of late, and WoW Insider has been no exception. Some believe that attunement is an archaic concept that only serves as a pointless, artificial gate to content. They appreciate the fact that Blizzard has almost entirely done away with attunements. Others see attunements as opportunities for extra content and a way of filtering lazy players out of raid groups where they don't belong. They want attunements to return. Attunements used to be a big deal in WoW. As the first steps toward endgame raiding, completed attunements were a hallmark of a serious player. Lest we forget what we're debating, I thought it might be the perfect time to revisit the single most grueling and aggravating attunement process in WoW's history: Horde-side Onyxia.
WoW Archivist: An expensive history of gold sinks
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? If you had asked me six months ago what I imagined would be the most expensive mount in WoW's history, I would have imagined some kind of giant rock elemental where you rode around on its shoulder, possibly a 10-headed hydra that breathed green fire, or maybe a goblin shredder that transformed into a jet. As it turns out, the most expensive mount in WoW is now ... a cat. Granted, it's a very shiny cat. It also happens to be five cats. It can fly. But why does it cost so darn much? And what other ludicrously priced items has Blizzard offered us over the years? Read on to find out!
WoW Archivist: Blackrock Depths, WoW's ultimate dungeon
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? You don't trust this bar. First of all, you had to fight your way through a legion of Dark Iron dwarves and their constructs just to get here. Secondly, it's run by a shady leper gnome who has one grumpy-looking golem for a bouncer. Third, there's an awful lot of laughter, yet no one here looks amused. You are right to be nervous. This is the Grim Guzzler. This is not a nice place. Welcome to Blackrock Depths For someone who began playing WoW post-vanilla, it's hard to explain just how amazing Blackrock Depths was back in early 2005. It's true that people often got lost there, but it was also a fantastic place to simply lose yourself. No area of the game has ever been as convincingly comprehensive or offered more to discover. There always seemed to be another boss, event, or area to explore, another secret to unlock. It's no secret, however, that BRD remains a favorite dungeon of many WoW Insider bloggers. BRD wasn't just a dungeon. It was a civilization, and you were there to bring it to its knees.
WoW Archivist: 5 years of daily quests
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? Just like Officers' Quarters, another WoW staple has recently celebrated its fifth anniversary. Daily quests were added to the game a little over five years ago, on May 22, 2007, in patch 2.1. One of Blizzard's big selling points for Mists seems to be its huge amount of daily quest content. Dailies are undoubtedly going to be a big deal at level 90. Blizzard has even lifted the daily quest cap that has stood at 25 for several years, so players will be free to do whatever dailies they like across the entire history of the game. Dailies seem like such an obvious and critical element of WoW, but they weren't part of the vanilla game. In this week's Archivist, we'll explore how daily quests began, how they have changed over the years, and how Blizzard is trying to recreate the glory days of daily quests in Mists. WTH is this blue exclamation point? Has a single piece of designed punctuation ever been as famous as WoW's chubby yellow exclamation point? It even has its own merchandise. Believe it or not, the exclamation point was one of Blizzard's biggest innovations when they created the game. No longer did you have to chat with every single NPC in town to figure out which one of them needed a favor -- a staple of RPG games for decades. Now you could tell at a glance which NPCs were willing to pay for a bit of random mercenary work. I remember how odd that first blue exclamation point looked. They had been yellow, after all, for two and a half years. Changing its color seemed like sacrilege. After accepting the quest, it had the word "(Daily)" next to it in my log -- it felt like both a promise and a warning. Daily quests were an exciting new element, but they were not without their critics.
WoW Archivist: Massacre at the Crossroads
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? Last week, Tom Chilton revealed that Mists would have no dedicated world PvP zone like Wintergrasp or Tol Barad. Instead, Blizzard wants to encourage a more natural style of world PvP. It wants players to duke it out in actual questing zones. On PvP realms, it wants players to be free to attack towns and cities without overwhelming NPC intervention. Since we're reviving WoW Archivist here at WoW Insider after a seven-month hiatus, now seemed like a good time to revisit the earliest days of world PvP. It's no secret that world PvP has had a rough journey throughout WoW's history. Blizzard did all it could to discourage the wild Southshore vs. Tarren Mill clashes that made Hillsbrad Foothills a laggy, unplayable mess, often crashing the Eastern Kingdoms servers entirely. In patch 1.12, the developers gave us new objectives to fight over in Silithus and Eastern Plaguelands, far away from where new players were leveling. Ultimately, those objectives failed to capture much interest. Players mocked the Silithyst PvP objective as "sandlol." Further experiments in The Burning Crusade were only moderately more successful. In Wrath, Blizzard added the Wintergrasp PvP zone, and that has been the company's primary world PvP model through the last two expansions. Before all of that, however, when the game was still so young that the vast majority of the playerbase hadn't yet reached level 60, there were raids on the Crossroads, in the heart of the infamous Barrens. And they were glorious.
WoW Archivist: How each WoW expansion set the tone, part 2
The WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold. Previously on WoW Archivist, I discussed how the tone of Warcraft and its associated world changed drastically as time went on and the first expansion pack, The Burning Crusade, was released. Each time World of Warcraft changes its setting, the tone of the game (from the way the environments make the player feel to the actual mechanical development of the product) changes significantly. The tonal change makes WoW a unique specimen in the MMO sphere, allowing it to grow, adapt, and target a vast array of audiences opposed to growing stagnant over time. Incorporating each new tone and focus with each new expansion lets World of Warcraft move forward despite its age. For a long time, we jokingly referred to Wrath of the Lich King as "The Frozen Crusade" because Blizzard took the best parts of The Burning Crusade and began to build the next expansion. It was hard to understand the tone of the newest expansion before you actually played it. In the beginning all we saw was two new ores, 75 more profession skill points, and greens that were going to replace our purples again. For me, the tone looked like it was going to be "here we go again" -- that is, until I first stepped into Northrend.
WoW Archivist: How each WoW expansion set the tone, part one
The WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? Before we learned about Mists of Pandaria and where we stalwart adventurers would be exploring in the coming months, I wrote a post discussing how an expansion about Pandaria, specifically its title, would change the tone of World of Warcraft. Mists of Pandaria would be the first expansion that does not directly reference or reveal the main villain of the expansion's storyline. Blizzard and the WoW development team has been incredible stewards of tone, from the early days of Warcraft to Cataclysm's world-breaking motif. Tone is one of the most important aspects of the MMO because your game world needs to be compelling enough to call back players at any point. Good MMOs set good tone. Tone has evolved in WoW after each expansion pack, changing considerably each time we swap settings and install the latest content. Alex asked me to write an article that spanned the history of World of Warcraft, and I could think of nothing more dynamic than the tone of the story and how masterfully Blizzard has handled it.
WoW Archivist: Recapping classic World of Warcraft
The WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? The Archivist has come a long way. We've just about wrapped up the chronological history of classic World of Warcraft. Sure, there are still bits and bobs that have gone unexplored for now ("The Ashbringer ...") but we've covered every single major patch from the World of Warcraft from prerelease all the way up through the final raid tier of level 60 content. The next time we tackle a set of patch notes, we'll be firmly in The Burning Crusade territory. Exciting, isn't it? Before we leap into that sweet, sweet Burning Crusade, let's recap what we've covered already, starting way back in July 2009.
WoW Archivist: The changing raid design of Naxxramas, page 2
Similar to the issues with the Anub'Rekan fight, Instructor Razuvious suffered from the "bring player abilities" to the fight rather than having all of the tools necessary already available in the encounter itself. In the original 40-man raid, Instructor Razuvious was accompanied by four death knight Understudy adds who could be Mind Controlled by a priest in order to turn the tables on the Instructor and tank his untankable damage with innate abilities. Student becomes the master, etc., etc. You had to off-tank two of the adds and have your priests Mind Control two for the purposes of taunt and tank rotations on Razuvious, and then keep the Understudy adds off of their respective Mind Controllers because they would gain a debuff that would prevent reapplying Mind Control for 45 seconds.
WoW Archivist: The Emerald Dream, Outland, and other Z-axis secrets
The WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? This week's edition of the Archivist will be a little different than what you may be used to seeing. Rather than exploring a specific event in World of Warcraft's history, we're going to look at a bit of antiquated game design. Specifically, we will be looking at one of Blizzard's old development practices: trying to hide content development in progress on live realms. Before I begin, I want to note that to my knowledge, none of the hidden locations outlined in this article are accessible anymore. If there are still ways of accessing them on live realms, I want to request that none of you discuss the methods of entering these places on our site. Blizzard hid these places for a reason, even if it didn't do it very well. Follow along for a look at the Emerald Dream, an early Outland testing ground, and other Z-axis shortcuts and secrets.
WoW Archivist: Patch 1.8, Dragons of Nightmare
The WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? Who says every content patch needs a new raid tier? Patch 1.8, released Oct. 10, 2005 (just slightly under one month after patch 1.7), laughs at your raid tiers. It was actually quite a small patch as far as content goes, and there wasn't anything particularly world-shattering in it, but it still did something interesting: It built up future content. Patch 1.8 implemented the following: The Dragons of Nightmare world bosses A revamp of Silithus The groundwork for holidays such as Hallow's End and Winter Veil None of these things, on their own, were very large events. They were cool pieces of content, but they weren't supported by a raid or dungeon. Quite the opposite -- they laid the groundwork that would herald a raid coming in a later patch. Let's dig in, shall we? First the patch notes in full, then the analysis.
WoW Archivist: World of Warcraft patch 1.4
The WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? Onwards we go through the tomes of World of Warcraft history. Today we come to patch 1.4, released May 2005, a short two months after patch 1.3. Patch 1.4 was the sort of patch we would be shocked to see nowadays: it contained no raid zones and no instances. It wasn't bare of content, though. Some highlights from this patch are: The implementation of the earliest iteration of the honor system Sweeping itemization changes in high end 5-man dungeons and raid zones The outdoor area of Andorhal was revamped from, quite literally, the ground up And the most controversial classic WoW change of them all: the succubus model was updated Let's dig in. Just like our patch 1.3 discussion, our first page will be the patch notes (which are always massive) and the second page will be our in-depth look at the highlights.
WoW Archivist: Indalamar the Warrior
The WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? What secrets does the game still hold? If you enjoyed Patches of Yesteryear, you're going to love this. I have a confession to make. I lied about Archivist being done with events from WoW's beta. Last week, we discussed the Talisman of Binding Shard, an item that dropped six months into World of Warcraft's lifespan on live realms. What we are going to discuss today goes back again in the final stages of the beta. Remember last week how I told all of you to make a note of the guild name Nurfed because it was going to come up again? Today, you will meet Indalamar the Warrior with a capital "W."
WoW Archivist: World of Warcraft patch 1.2
The WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? What secrets does the game still hold? If you enjoyed Patches of Yesteryear, you're going to love this. Patch 1.2 was World of Warcraft's very first post-release content patch, way back in December of 2004. It was officially released on Dec. 18, less than a month after the release of the game. Patch 1.2's crown jewel was Maraudon, the first instance ever added to the game after its launch. You may all hate Maraudon now, but back in 2004, that twisty hellhole was the cat's pajamas. Patch 1.2 also included: Winter Veil The ability to turn off your helm and cloak A nerf to Daze The Great Kodo Nerf of '04 Let's dust off the patch 1.2 tome together, shall we?
WoW Archivist: World of Warcraft patch 1.1
The WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? What secrets does the game still hold? If you enjoyed Patches of Yesteryear, you're going to love this. This week's Archivist will be tackling World of Warcraft patch 1.1. Up until this point, we'd been mired in alpha and beta patches, examining the game before the masses got its grubby mitts on it. Patch 1.1 is the first 1.x version of the game, making it the first version of the client made available for open release to the public. However, this patch was released prior to the official launch of the game -- those of you that participated in the open beta of World of Warcraft back in late 2004, it's this version of the game that you likely saw first. This patch included goodies such as: The implementation of kodo as the replacement for Plainsrunning Molten Core and Onyxia's Lair were opened up Removal of many in-combat resurrection spells Let's crack open the archives!
