I hit 100 sometime over the weekend.  A week to clear “all” the content for leveling and I’ve upgraded my garrison to level 3.  When I completed Nagrand (which had a pretty neat cinematic) the final quest just dropped progress forward.  It was an odd feeling, sort of like hitting the finish line and then a lack of fireworks.  I was expecting some breadcrumbs to lead you to the other features.

The zones themselves are pretty well done.  Spires of Arak is my favorite zone as the lore is interesting.  Skettis has always piqued my interest and this zone does a super job explaining what happened to make them as they are.  Plus, there are next to no orcs in this zone.

The one I liked the least was Talador.  It was like a rehash of TBC and was more of an homage than actual progress.  Using a Shredder to attack hundreds of orcs wasn’t a whole lot of fun.  The garrison artillery skill was pretty cool though.  I went through Tuurem and didn’t notice til the end.  I spent the majority of my time in TBC within Terrokar, as it was the final point of leveling, was the central hub and had level 70 content as well.  I came out feeing “meh”.

Nagrand is an odd one.  There is a lot more vertical movement in this zone than I expected, in particular in the middle of the zone.  The elemental plateau was neat, as well as Oshu’gun.  That I took down the earth element lead in 10 seconds seemed pretty stupid to be honest but the story was solid.  The final quest taking on Garrosh was neat.  Also, the solo arena section was pretty cool, somewhat similar to the Brawling Guild.  The garrison buff that I took was a mount that I could use in combat, which is essentially a zone-wide speed boost.  Maybe there’s more content at 100, with what I hear about hunts.  Overall well done.

If I was to rank, favorite to least, it’d be something like this:

1. Spires of Arak
2. Shadowmoon Valley
3. Nagrand
4. Gorgrond
5. Talador

What to do at 100

Well the first thing is to keep the garrison going and the missions.  I am running short on resources to update the buildings I have and still have an empty slot.  But that makes sense if there’s a long game.  I have an odd issue with the gathering garrison nodes.  The way the game works with these items is that you no longer need mining or herbalism.  Skinning can only be done in-field, so that still has some use.  Fishing is the odd one out, since it’s used for cooking and alchemy.  I have so many herbs and ore, I don’t know what to do with them.

The daily quests in the garrison are broken outside of the dungeon runs.  I say this in that the progress is for each takes a while and heavily contested.  If there was open grouping it wouldn’t be so bad but the way it’s implemented now is very poor.

Treasure hunting is neat but only 1 time.  There’s some interesting acrobatics involved to find some of them.  Rare hunting is fun too, with some interesting rewards.  It’d be better if the rewards reset on a weekly basis though, would keep people in the zones a bit more.  I mean that the rewards themselves are neat but of such low ilevel, that once you hit 100 there’s not much point to go back.  Timeless Isle worked because of the meta game, you gained faction/currency for something else.  The zones need this – and not just Nagrand.

I’ve yet to run a dungeon.  The first few weeks of an expansion are all about tweaking the content.  I think I’ll wait another while before giving it a shot.

Overall Impressions

The leveling experience of WoW 2.0 is pretty good.  My Timeless Isle gear was replaced pretty quickly and my monk had a good power curve for the entire process.  I took my time, did all the quests I could and really enjoyed the scenery.  I appreciate the lack of flight, it makes the world seem busier.  The open world content works well, with rares everywhere, treasures to find and things to do.  If they can make that content repeatable, then it’s gold.  The plot/story is confusing at times but decently executed.  There’s a heavy saturation of Orcs but that’s expected.

I took the time to read all the quest text, which certainly stretched out my adventure.  I think the first time through it took about an hour for the intro quest up until I had a level 1 garrison.  I did it the other night with an alt in about 20 minutes, just to have the resources generate.  I can see how people got to 100 so quickly, and really, I sort of feel bad for them.  There’s a ton of good work and the data motivates your character.  I’m thinking the writers had a lot of Game of Thrones viewing because main characters just dropped dead in every zone.  Understanding why they did is kind of core to the game, no?

Garrisons are a neat feature that has a fair amount of potential for the “long game”. That said, this is the first expansion in a long time that is so alt-unfriendly because of the garrisons.  I realize this must be something that’s hard to balance in terms of power output.  The old MoP gardens were just resource farms, simple an just made gold.  WoD’s garrisons actually give you tangible power rewards and sharing that across a slew of alts (I have 5 that are 90+) would “break” certain parts of the game I guess.  The social aspect of garrisons is also lacking.

But I guess the final question/answer boils down to, is it fun?  And the answer there is yes, 90 to 100 is fun. Lots of fun.