Welcome to today's edition of Ask WoW Insider, in which we publish your questions for dissection by the peanut gallery -- now with extra snark and commentary by one of our writers. This week Houldlum writes in:
I'm wondering if it's possible to hit level 70 before ever heading out to Outland. I've been working through every zone trying to hit every quest, even if it's grey (they do give a bit of XP). So far I've only skipped the dungeon quests and any group quest I can't solo. My goal is to hit 70 before Outland so I can maximize the gold return from those quests... and to see if I can do it.
I have managed to get to 63 on my Alliance Rogue before I hit Outland, but I skipped several Zones.
What are your thoughts?
Thanks, Houldlum (Falsehould, Fatherhould)
It was a light week on questions, so I'm going to dig down and use this one. Short answer: I'm pretty sure you can't. Long answser: Why the heck would you want to? Even if you got xp from anything in the Azeroth, even Cartman would think that grind was nuts.
So, anything out there -- at all -- that will give him or her xp until 70.
Got questions? Don't wait! Send them to us at ask AT wowinsider DOT com and your query could be up in lights here next week.
This is just beautiful, from the title ("Brave Noob World") to the idea -- a geographical survey of Azeroth. James Wallis, the director of Hogshead Publishing, gave this presentation at an "unconference" called Interesting '08, in which he tried to do a survey of Azeroth, in the same way that Tobold did -- by walking from one end to the other. And he discovers that Azeroth is pretty small and pretty dense -- it's about 12km across, according to him (I really like his comparison image of the Death Star), and using a Female Tauren, he even comes up with the force of gravity, which is about equal to Earth -- about 1g. Which makes sense; Blizzard would want the virtual world to feel the same as our world, no matter how big it is.
There's a problem with that, though -- if you have a small planet with the same gravity as a much larger planet, the only answer is that the mass of the planet is much more dense. And when you get a really small, densely packed mass, you start to mess around with the flow of time. So Wallis actually ends up explaining one of the more annoying features of Azeroth with actual science. Very nice.
It's definitely a fun example of looking for more in this MMO than Blizzard probably put there, but Wallis covers it with enough zest and logic that it works, strangely. Now if he could only explain the weather...
John Bohannon has been writing for Science magazine as "The Gonzo Scientist," and his most recent writeup, on a real scientific conference held in the World of Warcraft, is a great read. We reported that the event was happening back in May, and now Bohannon's put together a really honest report (from how the conference was funded to the reasons why it was chosen to be Horde-only) on what its like for these scientists researching virtual worlds to put their money where their mouth is, so to speak, and actually hold a conference ingame.
They had to deal with everything from conversation direction (they appointed one person to get whispers on any questions for speakers, though, as anyone who's ever been to a mass ingame event will tell you, you can't really keep people from yelling and screaming) to mobs in the Barrens. And it sounds like they did get something done -- besides the panels, which were only slightly frustrated by griefers, they took expeditions throughout the world, and did do a little thinking about how different meeting in RL and meeting in a virtual existence is.
Very good read. The end of the article has a link to a PDF book about the conference, but it's hidden behind Science's membership wall. Still, Bohannon writes clearly and fairly about the game, and it's fun to think of a bunch of scientists actually trying to navigate a virtual world while doing their own research.
Welcome to Know Your Lore, where each week Elizabeth Wachowski and Alex Ziebart bring you a tasty little morsel of lore to wrap your mind around. Sweet, sweet lore. Mmmm. Oh yeah, and it's late this week. Blame it on the severe dehydration. Or Alex, you can blame him too, if you want.
Continuing the Wrath preparation train, this week's Know Your Lore will take a look at one of the three Bronzebeard brothers. Not the King one or the dead one, but the eccentric, probably-should-be-dead one. The one and only Brann Bronzebeard, explorer extraordinaire.
Brann Bronzebeard is the very definition of a Jack of all Trades. He's an explorer, a linguist, a warrior, an archaeologist, et cetera, et cetera. He is the premier member of the Explorer's League, and while the guild was founded under an edict by Magni, Brann was one of its founding members.
This is pretty ludicrous, but it's too funny to ignore: this YouTube posters swears he hears "World of Warcraft" and "give us your money" hidden in the whispers swirling around the Spirit Healer while dead (there is one NSFW word in the video, if that rubs you the wrong way). Personally, while I do hear it, it's a little too off to be taken seriously. And of course we all know that subliminal messages don't work anyway. But still, if you're the type to go for a good conspiracy theory, it is in there -- maybe the reason Blizzard has the top MMO ever made isn't because it's a great game, but because they're transmitting messages to your brain!
The question does remain: what's really being said in those death whispers? Whatever it is, odds are that it's not in English. My guess is maybe Titan, the language of the Titans -- but that assumes that whatever's speaking to you is from the world, and there are probably more deceased spirits floating around Azeroth by now than actual living creatures on it. For all we know, it could be the Others.
If you listen to me (or anyone else around here, it seems), the major consensus seems to be to head to Outlands right at 58, period. The leveling is faster, the quests are more interesting, and the money is plentiful, as are the drops. But cyanrose over on WoW LJ makes an amazing case for exactly the opposite: staying in old Azeroth from levels 58-60.
She's been rolling around Hearthglen picking up items and XP, and from the way she tells it, things are almost as good there as they are in Outland. A dropped Orb of Deception (which was sold for a whopping 700g) didn't hurt, and there's lots of Rich Thorium around as well. Since old Azeroth is so empty, she hasn't had any problems with PvP, and apparently there's some good AoE grinding to do around there as well.
Great example of going against convention and finding your own way to play through the game. Outlands is there if you want it at 58 -- you can replace your gear in just a few quests, and get started on the new reputation grinds early. But don't let the popular opinion stop you from exploring the old world if you want -- there's lots of loot and fun to be had there, too.
Today's the first day of May, and that means that Children's Week has begun. All kinds of little snot-nosed orphans are out there begging for you to run them around Azeroth and show them the sights, and in return they'll give you one of the richest treasures in all of WoW -- a cute little noncombat pet. There's a nice Children's Week guide up over at WarcraftPets, and we've done our share of orphan touristing around here at WoW Insider. This year will be no exception -- stay tuned all week for posts about what may have changed in Azeroth for the holiday, and don't forget that this Sunday, our in-game guild on Zangarmarsh will be running around the orphans all together.
Of course, it may not be the best thing for Azerothian orphans to be running around with all you wacky player characters, but they've got to get out of the orphanage at some point, right? Go do it for the kids this week!
Players are reacting to (quite a few things, actually, in) the Tom Chilton interview we linked to earlier, but one of them is rubbing a lot of older players the wrong way -- when Gamespy asks Chilton about world PvP, like the kind that took place between Tarren Mill and Southshore, he called any fondness for that "nostalgia" -- he says that people didn't really like it at the time, they only want to go back to that because they're nostalgic for it.
Fortunately, we here at WoW Insider keep all of our old archives online, and as you can see, most people did actually enjoy the old Xroads and SS/TM world PvP -- I have fond memories of fighting in Ashenvale as well. But Chilton isn't wrong that there was complaining (isn't there always?): it was usually just complaining that those were the only places any real PvP happened. Nowadays, we've got BGs and Arenas, and actual rewards for world PvP, but it's still a little hard to come across one of those all-out battles that used to rage in Xroads or south of Tarren Mill. Most of the time, the only reason those battles were going on was because, well, what else did you do besides raiding at 70? Now that there's more choices, no level 70 would waste their time fighting lowbies in SS -- there are much more epic rewards doing dailies or fighting in the Arenas.
There's no question that nostalgia definitely makes things better, but Chilton is wrong to dismiss any wishes for SS/TM-esque world PvP as simple nostalgia. Blizzard has a tough line to walk here -- they're being asked to encourage, by careful planning, something that always happened spontaneously in the past (and mostly because PvPers didn't have much else to do). It's not nostalgic to think that it was fun (it was fun), but nowadays we've got choices that are fun and give epic rewards, so old world PvP just doesn't compare for most players.
It's that time again. Those of you who were around right beforethe Burning Crusade release might remember this time -- there are no new content patches before the next expansion, and we've got pretty much nothing to look forward to and nowhere to go before Wrath shows up and changes the world for good. Yes, there is a little more yet to discover at the Sunwell, but once we've seen that instance cleared out (Blizzard originally predicted about a month, and it seems like some players might be moving even faster than that), there'll be nothing left but the waiting.
Things went pretty badly last time around -- guilds stopped raiding (what was the point, when the next expansion would replace all of our gear with greens?), players abandoned the game for a while, and there was a general depression in Azeroth. While people were excited for the expansion, the live realms seemed like yesterday's news.
Hopefully things will be better this time around -- back then, we didn't have dailies to do, there weren't any arena matches or tournaments, and the 40 man high-end raid instances were pretty much the only game in town (nowadays we have 10mans, 25mans, or Heroics, and lots of rewards from each). And depending on when Blizzard gets the expansion out, the wait might not be as bad (although if they wait until January again, the time frame should be about the same as last time). But get ready -- the calm before the storm is coming, and we won't see a new game again until we step foot on the icy shores of Northrend.
We all have pieces of gear that we don't want to do away with. For me, it's mainly my Quel'Serrar sword – thousands of gold spent on it pre-bc makes it (adjusted for inflation) the most expensive item I've ever purchased. I'm never going to be getting rid of it.
I know that others have the same sentiments. For instance pictured above is the hat of one of my good friends in game. She's had those moose antlers for about 2 ½ years from Onyxia. I know that she'll never get rid of them, and if she did... well, our guild would probably have to gdisband.
There's something nostalgic about keeping around old gear. It provides a memory of "the good old days" when hitting 60 actually meant something. Those old pieces of gear meant that you had accomplished something epic when epics weren't free. Our old epic pieces of gear are a testament to a time when the game was still new and the wilds of Azeroth were really wild.
That's right, for all of you lore enthusiasts who like to speculate as to whether Azeroth is in the same universe as Aiur, here's your proof. The Terran confederacy, on the lookout for new recruits for the meat grinder, has stumbled upon a planet known to its inhabitants as Azeroth, and has taken a special interest in a group of anthropomorphic bovines with bizarrely well developed horticultural skills. They've managed to recruit a group of the younger, wilder bulls, creating a new corps of soldiers that have taken on the nickname of "Mad Cows."
We're incredibly excited to see what repercussions this could have not only for Starcraft, but for the World of Warcraft itself! It is likely that we'll see an in-game event or patch soon in which the Terrans land on Azeroth in order to recruit the Tauren. How will the Tauren accept a group of space-faring aliens who look suspiciously like the Humans who are usually regarded as their enemies? How will the Terrans react to the Humans themselves? Will there be any technology sharing? I'm sure many Engineers will be dying to get their hands on the schematics for their very own Vulture land mount, and the Cenarion Circle may want to compare notes with the Terrans on fighting giant bug-like creatures. Of course, those of you with the Zergling pet may want to consider hiding them for a while, lest a Firebat mistake you for an Infected Terran.
Jethro and Lump are an unlikely duo. Jethro isn't the brightest redneck in Azeroth, and Lump forgot his ADD medication. However, together they find themselves searching for the epic tankadin blade. In Fresh Oyster Episode 1, they are sent a mysterious ticking package that begins their adventure.
Worthog appears to be a machinimator with not many videos under his belt, but it looks like that will change with this series. If he makes the music flow more smoothly and eliminates the awkward pauses in dialogue, he'll improve the quality greatly. Although he'll definitely need to work on his voice actors. Overall, I liked it for a new effort.
The ring features +22 to the primary five stats, making it (wait... let me make sure my math is right here...) 22 times better than The 1 Ring.
I'm not sure of it's use initially. It's a well rounded stats ring, so perhaps a druid or other hybrid class might be interested in it if they find themselves changing roles often enough. However for a single role / gear set, there are a plethora of better choices easily obtainable.
Of course, with that said, it makes a helluva nice ring to start off at 70 with.
We've hit on the topic of "classic" servers before, and there are even players already carrying the idea out in game. Not everybody thinks Burning Crusade is the greatest thing since Molten Core, and so there are still quite a few players who wish they could play on servers that didn't go past level 60, where Naxx and AQ were still the main endgame, Bloodfang was the hotness, and Atiesh was more than just a few splinters taped together.
But while people have asked for classic servers before, Drysc repeats what some of them might not already know: that though Blizzard has "seriously" considered the idea before, they eventually determined that it would be too much to run two majorly different versions of the game at a time.
It's worth stating that you can definitely still run vanilla WoW without installing Burning Crusade at all, but even if you do that, you'll still see Blood Elves and Jewelcrafters running around, and people in the battlegrounds at level 60 will probably trounce you with all of their shiny Outland gear. It might be nice to experience the old endgame the way its meant to be experienced, but at least until WoW's population slows down and Blizzard determines they have the resources to do so, you can't go back to Old Azeroth again.
Dramatized has a simple but intriguing question on the forums: "Is Azeroth flat or round?" It's got to be round, right? You can prove that the world is round a number of different ways, but do they actually work? I don't ever remember seeing ships disappearing beyond the horizon (in fact, Tydeus confirms that ships don't drop below the horizon, so either Azeroth is flat or just really, really big), and in most places on Azeroth, the horizon is actually a mountain range. And I've never seen an eclipse on Azeroth, so we have no idea what shape the world really is. The ingame map between Azeroth and Outland hints that it may be a globe, but really it's just the map overlaid into a circle -- no hints there.
Neth hints in the thread that maybe even the Explorers' League doesn't really know if the world is round or not. But whether it's round or flat, it's a pretty good guess that there's a lot to this world we haven't yet seen -- if it is flat, neither the Horde or Alliance have reached the edge yet, and if it's round, you'd wonder why someone hasn't sailed from Darnassus across to Azshara (and if Northrend is what's north of the two main continents, what's south?). Remember this the next time someone asks just what else Blizzard can visit in future expansions -- there's a whole world out there we haven't been able to see yet.
John Bohannon has been writing for Science magazine as "The Gonzo Scientist," and his most recent writeup, on 
If you listen to me (or 
Today's the first day of May, and that means that 
Players are reacting to (quite a few things, actually, in) 
It's that time again. Those of you who were around 
Two Ring to rule them all, 
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