Cataclysm Beta: Part 1 — Gilneas

Upon receiving my beta key, I excitedly went to install Cataclysm. Unfortunately I’m not at home right now, so this wasn’t on the most powerful computer in the world; nevertheless, I can’t not play now! After installing, the patcher had a lot of work to do, which resulted in us both being way too tired at 6:30AM to wait any longer. The next day I found that I couldn’t get online until the evening anyway, where everything was finally fixed. Party time!

I logged on the newly-copied Strobe and wondered what I was doing. Addons are currently disabled in Cataclysm, which pretty much leaves me doing nothing. I hadn’t copied any binds, either, so Strobe was about as useful as a Raw Bristle Whisker Catfish. Too much work and I’m too eager to have fun, so let’s make a worgen!

I decided on a mage. I’d been toying with the idea of playing a worgen mage come Cataclysm, so I figured this would be a good choice. I’d also had a lot of experience with mages in the past, so I wouldn’t be wasting my time learning an all-new class, and might appreciate some of the class differences in Cataclysm. I named him Trickle — partly because I thought it was a decent name, and partly because I just wanted to get on with it.

Lag! Latency is a fixed 300-600ms, but that’s to be expected of the beta. Surprisingly the servers are quite stable — I haven’t noticed any spikes — although I do get a “World server down” message every now and again. 300-600ms makes mages a little dull — hell, I stopped playing my old mage partly because of latency issues — but again, it’s beta, and the content is delicious!

Anyway, so I’m a worgen… or not. Actually, worgen start out as humans and are then tainted by a curse that turns them into worgen. You have no control over how your human form looks, though I assume it corresponds to how the worgen looks somehow. Nothing new to me here, as I’d already watched a video taking me through the worgen starting zone until the character transforms into a worgen. Still, the quests are pretty fun and the story is nice to follow. I decide to read all of the new quests in the expansion, so that I don’t have to waste my time doing so on release; strongly recommended if you enjoy the WoW lore!

Finally I’m done with the first area and am transported out with a nifty placeholder message instead of the would-be cut-scene. Unfortunate, but funny. So I’m a worgen now! And I’m locked up. Well that’s never good. I miraculously (drugs) retain my human mind and am accepted by those around me as a werewolf. This is undoubtedly much easier than it is to come out as a furry in real life. Anyway, it turns out that Sylvanas is attacking Gilneas for a reason that I’ve forgotten. Gilneans consider this a Bad Thing, and I can’t blame them.

After a couple of quests, The Cataclysm happens while I’m in some basement. It’s a strange experience: The Cataclysm splinters the entire world, yet our dog’s farts have more impact than the pathetic little vibration seen in-game. Leaving the basement reveals that much of Sylvanas’ army, along with the Gilnean people, have been swallowed up by the ocean. Onto an awkward lifeguard quest!

Somewhere around level 9, after seeing a pimped-in-heirlooms worgen, I decided I should have transferred a whole bunch of Heirlooms with Strobe. I set out to do just this with my rogue, Stapler, who I had no real intentions of playing, but who would serve as a decent pack mule to move some goodies over. Infuriatingly, worgen appear not to have a stable postal service for every area around level 9 and above, and I was left waiting to equip them until I was done with the whole area. Sure, I could have gone back to a previous area, but it was a fair assumption that a mail box wouldn’t be too far away, especially given the fairly recent retail patch which put them just about everywhere. How silly of me.

Attaining the big level 10 was something I’d been looking forward to a while. Woohoo, new talent system! I decide to choose fire, recalling how much I enjoyed it over frost in TBC. I would apparently receive pyroblast simply for choosing the spec, along with molten armour soon after. *Click*. Oh look, I have molten armour straight away! *Cast*. “Target is too low level”. Huh? It appears this is a bug; even now, I cannot use molten armour. Oh well, not exactly show-stopping — a druid later enlightened me that mangle doesn’t work, so I stopped whining.

The new talent system is great, in my opinion. The summary clearly states the general benefit of each spec without requiring further research, and the trees are beautifully concise. In WotLK — and even TBC to some extent — the trees were so long-winded that I often forgot which talents I’d taken. That’s just no fun. Blizzard has done great work to make Cataclysm more newbie-friendly, consequently adding a truckload of polish. The UI remains unfortunately basic, but many of the panes have been enhanced or overhauled. Stats no longer require 5000 hours in MATLAB to unravel, which means less time wasted looking at numbers when all you want to do is enjoy the game or roll on some loot.

On the whole, I thoroughly enjoyed the entire Gilneas area, with the exception of a few awkward quests which were most probably just not suited to the plethora of beta players constrained to so few servers. Problems usually involve too few spawns, especially in one case where there is a single spawn point and about five-thousand players crowded around it, or too many enemy spawns, where you can’t actually loot the damned item without the same spider you killed a few milliseconds ago spawning in your rectal passages. While there are many generic kill/find quests, they fit well into the flow and often complement other, more interesting quests. Stylistically, the place is spot-on with its intentionally drab and creepy structures and impossibly cosy interiors.

The last couple of quests (last quest?) found me battling to destroy a horde airship. I believe this is the same airship that horde use in ICC, as well as the one floating around Icecrown. A fairly standard but fun gauntlet affair, where the player must follow Lorna Crowley — a politically powerful Gilnean whom I know next to nothing about — and plant explosives, all the while holding off orcs. This had me perplexed at one point where Crowley orders me to “use the ropes” to get down to the deck, except there are none and I end up free-falling instead. Likely a beta thing.

Eventually it was time to go. A Captain Placeholder wannabe, positioned on a boat, notifies me that Gilneas, as an area, has yet to be completed by Blizzard, but we can go to Darnassus and continue questing in Darkshore (though there is no follow-on quest messiness, which I am quite grateful for). As this concludes Gilneas, it also concludes this post. Join me next time as I explore the new Darkshore!

Time for the screenshots! Most of these have been painstakingly captioned for your viewing pleasure, so do have a flick through!