Meanwhile, on "World of Warcraft"
So apparently the rest of Hyjal is a bunch of weird disjointed foolery where you fly off someplace, do three or four quests for a big dead dog, and then fly somewhere else to do three or four quests for like a giant turtle. Then you get a neat cliffhanger about "accidentally" loosing a powerful demon, but… nobody really seems to care about that, and it doesn’t go anywhere.
Here’s the deal. You need to resurrect this ancient dead dog, bird, and turtle because I guess you can’t beat Ragnaros without them. For… some reason. Once you’re done with that, you play a minigame and get a small pet! What is the minigame? Something completely original that I’d never played before in my life. Once you have the small pet, you take a large endless detour into a very brown place and infiltrate the Twilight’s Hammer for what seems like four years. That culminates in another minigame and a cutscene, and then it’s off into the portal to fight Ragnaros!
Fighting Ragnaros seems like it would be awesome, but really you’re mostly watching Cenarius and a cow and Nelfurion Stormrage fight him. Occasionally you’re given the task of getting an add off of Nelfurion so he can keep up the deeps without having to deal with pushback. That’s really about it. I mean, you can go ahead and fight Rag, but here’s an interesting chart:
Recount — report on four targets
Cenarius — 134000 DPS
Nelfurion Stormrage — 86000 DPS
Some cow dude — 86000 DPS
Lysistrate — lol wut
I swear that’s exactly what it said.
Once you beat Ragnaros, you go back out of the portal and then Ysera comes over and is all "Thanks Link! You’re the hero of Hyjal!" and that’s it for that zone.
Because I’m nothing if not a ruthless iconoclast, I liked Deepholm a lot better. Here’s the deal. You go through this portal by completing the quest I may have bitched about last time and it takes you to the Maelstrom where Thrall is standing on a big rock in his bag lady outfit and channeling a spell. Apparently it’s the "make the world not fall apart" spell, because Thrall really needed to be more transparently a Jesus figure. So what would you do if you found yourself suddenly transported to a dude who is single-handedly keeping the world from exploding through the sheer awesomeness of his concentration? Yeah, me too: talk to the fucker. Talking to Thrall triggers a scene where you get on a griffon and fly through the Maelstrom into Deepholm, which is the elemental plane of earth. It’s pretty intense — you get on the bird, and the orc lady who’s taxiing you around because you’re kind of a big deal starts pumping you up for your descent into the giant sparking insane whirlpool by telling you how it’s going to be a really intense trip, and you might not be tough enough to withstand it, but, hey, only one way to find out. Seriously, she warns you for like eleven minutes about how dangerous and exciting this is going to be, and then you dip into the whirlpool, and… oh my god! A loading screen!
When the dangerous, exciting loading screen is over, you’re in Deepholm being congratulated on your stamina. So good job with that. But all is not well in the land of the free and the holm of the deep! Apparently the world pillar was busted into three pieces. What’s the world pillar you ask? Well, it’s the thing that keeps the ceiling from caving in, which I guess would have the odd effect of making the ground fall up. I didn’t really follow this part, because I was too focused on a very interesting fact: all three pieces of the world pillar were recovered by factions with a vested interest in repairing the world pillar. The Earthen Ring has one, the non-ring-related Earthen have one, and Therazane herself has one. And all these three parties, despite the fact that they’re all completely fucked if the ground falls up, have elected to hide their pillar fragments in remote locations and absolutely not, under any circumstances, bring them to the damn temple so the pillar can get rebuilt.
Ground people are fucking stupid.
So then you have to travel around the zone fighting crime to convince these factions to become a teensy bit less suicidal so you can fix the world. The actual quest structure is pretty fun; you solve a spoooooky mystery, then you go swimming in a river of mercury, which, let me tell you, doesn’t seem very intelligent. Then you murder the leaders of the Twilight’s Hammer in this zone, and fight a big scary dragon. Then you save the king of the Earthen from what appears to be a totally uninteresting trogg. Then you go into a cave and get eaten alive by giant hula hoop worms over and over and over and fucking over again. Then you feed petrified bats to a baby rock elemental to prove to the big rock elementals that you’re swell. Then — and it’s gotten pretty stupid by this point — finally there’s a big war and one of the main bad guys gets away, but it’s okay because she’ll be back like two quests later and you get to kill her then. Then some dude dies, and I think it’s supposed to be poignant, but I really wasn’t sure who it was, and this big fat dirt woman was shaking her oddly frightening bodice in my direction and telling me I was welcome to stay as long as I wanted, at which point I got really really scared and left.
I went to Vashj’ir, but I forgot to do anything while I was there. Mainly I spent four years trying to figure out if I was doing something wrong, since I turned in the breadcrumb, and the guy was all "yeah, go get on the boat," but there was no boat to get on. Turns out I wasn’t doing anything wrong; it just takes about forever for the boat to show up. You can pass the time listening to the flavour text the guards blurt out (which has lousy voiceovers, thank god) if you want, but it’s not interesting. You get on the boat, and then Budd jumps off the boat for some reason I really can’t figure out, and then you all get eaten by a squid and die.
Once you’re done being dead, you learn to breathe underwater, and then, if you’re anything like me, you head straight up to the surface and start flying because there are naga down there and you risk slipping into a coma and never coming back out. About halfway to the Earthen Ring quartermaster is a random rock jutting out of the ocean with a flight master on it. That man has what must be the worst job in the world. "Here, stand on this rock in the middle of the ocean and just like wait for people to come by who might need a ride. And clean up after the griffons."
So that’s my experience so far. Tune in next time and I’ll complain about Uldum!
