Last week finally kicked off the lead-up quests for Battle for Azeroth, giving us content-starved players something to do. It’s too bad that it was, all in all, not that interesting in the least, nor beneficial for advancement or rewards. If you’re going to have story for story’s sake, it’s pretty important to make that tale count.
I can tell already that the story — at least the initial “phantom menace” tale of Alliance vs. Horde — is not going to be anywhere near as interesting as Legion’s conflict. I feel like I speak for a lot of World of Warcraft players when I say that the factional friction doesn’t matter and hasn’t mattered for a long time now. Blizzard is twisting itself up in knots to try to reignite this feud, and nobody’s really buying it.
SPOILER: This whole expansion is going to be about the Old Gods. I know it, you know it, everyone knows it. So why go through this facade? Why remind us how fickle all of the leaders of this world are? They’re allies, they’re enemies, they’re frenemies, whatever.
At least there was one bright spot to this, which is that the first series of quests involved elf deaths. A LOT of elf deaths. I can get behind that. Sure, this whole Horde invasion into Night Elf territory really comes out of nowhere, but if it thins the population of these purple nincompoops, then I can lend it my support.
It also reminded me how little I know of the game’s core lore and key figures. I have a vague shape here and there, but I’m already having a hard time remembering all four of my kids’ names, so I don’t feel bad that Feather Arms up there doesn’t have dedicated space in my brain for a six-page biography.
The quest chain went on pretty long with a lot of very standard quests. I guess I did get the sense of an army campaign moving forward, but it all seemed very small and inconsequential. Plus, having done both sides, I can say that the Horde version is far more interesting than the Alliance.
Plus, you get to actively kill Elves on the Horde. That’s great. Just great. I could do this all day.
I’ll praise the repurposing of older zones for this storytelling, however. It is nice to go back and revisit these previous areas (which still look weird to me post-Cataclysm) while having newer tales happen. It was also a good excuse to grow more familiar with the changes to my different classes. I’m still not firing on all cylinders for the Warlock, but it’s coming along.
Who would have guessed it? Maybe you would have? Because you’re a sort-of Elf? Have you not been to the conventions lately? There are forty-six panels on just trees alone, lady. That should tell you something!
Anyway, here’s hoping that this week’s entry will ramp up action and excitement, because it takes the wind out of my sails to have to do dull content numerous times to bring all of my characters up to speed.
Bio Break 
The best part of these pre-expansion quests so far is that once you complete the quest line, when you take an alt to start it again you get an chat option when you talk to your faction leader to skip the whole quest line and just open up the world quests in Darkshore. It’s faction-specific, but at worst that means you have to do the quest line twice (and the Alliance version is over so quickly I blinked at one point and missed the fact that it was done). Now I just need to wait for world quest reward randomness to pop up a second weapon reward, since I need TWO weapons to replace my ONE artifact weapon…
It felt like newbie level of questing to me, from defeating legion to murdering elves…a bit of a come down from heroics.
Although horde had more interesting quests i did feel they were more scattered and directionless as if the warchief didnt really know what she was doing…