Shadowmoon Valley, caves, tunnels, dungeons and living in the dark

[siofral]

I want to say up front I've got three strikes against me. I'm a newby who has never done a role playing game before, I'm color blind (yeah, unusual for a woman but it's there and it's the pits) and I don't see super well (astigmatism and genetics SUCK). Add all that together and throw in dark (cave, tunnel, dungeon, depressingly dark region, take your pick) and I struggle. I struggle to see the players, the terrain, the things I'm supposed to click . . . in the beginning the level of frustration was stratospheric. I've got good quality equipment, fast video card with lots of memory, good LCD monitor, good quiet/dark environment to play in . . . I'm doing what I can to improve my basic capabilities.

So I've been playing for a while . . . since March when I broke my wrist and had to put doing things aside for holding still and healing (life sucks like that sometimes) and I dove in and tried a bunch of things. I started a mage and was so bad at playing her the standing joke was she was totally pathetic and couldn't leave town because she would die if people breathed on her. Fortunately things have improved. I don't see any better but I am playing a bit better and dying a lot less often. I seem to favor hunters (I've got five but am pruning back) and I can keep them alive pretty reliably, an encouraging sign.

Now I have 10 alts in addition to the 70 hunter I have in Shadowmoon Valley. I have a 51 druid, a 47 mage, a 36 rogue and a 23 warlock. I deleted my much higher level warlock because she was a gnome and playing something that small with a big demon sidekick was really frustrating. I was forever fighting to see around the demon and in the heat of battle, there were no positives. In Wow the pets for hunters, mages and warlocks can't seem to keep their distance and have to act really co-dependent and stand right on top of the alt which I find extremely frustrating. I have glyph of proportion set for all my hunters so I can see around the darned pets.

Have I listed enough personal issues yet for you to be rolling your eyes? I know I am . . . and I'm talking about me.

So what I would like, the one thing that would tremendously (I should put that in all caps because I'm really serious about this) improve my playing experience is some sort of 3-D map of caves, dungeons and multi-layered playing areas.

I've got Frahny in Shadowmoon Valley which is dark. I've never played this region before which is the second negative (once I've played through it's like a golf course . . . you know what to expect). The third strike is the dungeon (okay, it's not a dungeon but it might as well be) of levels and dead end areas where we're supposed to find this guy AND his backpack and it's loaded full of things happy to kill my butt.

And here's my point.

I can stand on the surface and be where the NPC and his back pack are supposed to be located. We all know the NPC isn't there, but the POINTER says I'm there. The NPC isn't.

I've been all over in the dungeon looking for this clown and his backpack and have died in the attempt to find him. NO JOY.

It would be wonderful if there was a vertical indicator of some sort to say "you must go lower" or "you are too low" so the player knows to go up or down. A 3-D map would put many of us in alt, I am sure. And for newby players like me . . . it's almost a must. If I can't have that, can I at least have some sort of verbal guide to get me to where the target is? Please? While I still have SOME hair left?

[Cartman]

I can't really remember Shadowmoon as it's been years since I quested there (because the zone is a pain...).
But normally if you need to enter a cave the guide should have a step leading to the entrance before that.
Most caves have a common layout so often I only see some basic directions like "to the left and all the way down" for that standard Ogre cave layout.
3D navigation ist not possible as WoW does not support 3D coordinates.
If there's some cave that does not have a standard layout there should be more waypoints set inside the cave.
I can only suggest that Cabby makes a note to the team to investigate this. Can you name a step number and quest name associated with this?

[siofral]

In this particular quest, the one with the guy with the backpack I'm supposed to find, it would have been a lot of help if the coordinates actually matched the position of the corpse AND that the instructions going in were fleshed out just a little (follow the right wall around to the room, guy with backpack is dead on the floor and you get the backpack by clicking the body and "accepting" the backpack. Being the literal animal I am, given the quest text and the instruction provided by Zygor, I expected there to be a live person to talk to and a backpack sitting somewhere to pick up. Once a character is dead their labeling text doesn't stand out enough for me to clearly read and I totally missed it the first time through in the sea of dead bodies lying around. The coordinates put the backpack on the other side of the wall and I spent some time trying to figure out how to get there. It took an internet search to figure out I was after a clickable dead body with a backpack. If I have to do an internet search because the instructions are incomplete or unclear it's a Zygor fail.

It's the same situation in . . . can't remember, it's an earlier post I made about a quest in the Drainei starting area with layered chambers. The Zygor step says "talk to *" with no instruction where to find the NPC. The instructions assume you know where to find him which is so not the point. The instructions are supposed to point you where to go. Mostly Zygor is right on but in cases like this one, someone didn't do their due diligence to provide the necessary guidance.

In the Draenei starting area in that particular quest, where the path splits into a drop down ramp to the left and two bridges, the NPC is in the chamber beyond the right hand bridge. That's critical information for running that quest set quickly. I'd already run it twice but it was long enough back that I had forgotten that crucial bit of information so wasted time pissing around below that point trying to find him when it should have been a straight shot upon exiting the tunnel. If the player's never been in there or has forgotten the positioning and is focusing on killing instead of getting killed, that's information that needs to be on-board before entering the area.

I like Zygor but as with everything, some things aren't as perfect as they could be. The leveling doesn't take into account running a gathering profession while leveling and I wish it would. Some of my alts have two gathering professions (feeding other alts) and level really fast blowing out of an area before being close to finishing the open quests. And, as someone else suggested, it would be nice to be able to elegantly finish out the open quests after loading the next appropriate guide. I have to decline the guide suggestion so I can finish out the area or I lose my place and have to reload the the previous guide.

[Cartman]

I think I know which cave desing in the Draenei area you are talking about. There are a few caves that are pure horror.
And even with a lot of waypoints inside such a cave you can get lost because waypoints have a certain vicinity so you do not need to stand directly in the location for a "goto xy" step to complete.
In general the Zygor team currently put in some more hints on NPC locations. I've seen some rather new ones when leveling my last character.

About leveling with gathering professions, the guide asks if you want to go on to the next zone if you outlevel a zone if you have set this option (I think it's on by default).
But I always recommend to stick to the zone you are in and complete it. Green quests give you the full XP and are easier and quicker to do. Also switching zones sometimes takes a lot of time.
So especially for not so experienced players it can be faster to complete a zone and skip entire zones if you outlevel the guide by a few levels. With my last character I even went from Hellfire Peninsula directly to Nagrand because I completed the whole loremaster guide for each zone before moving on. And still I'm currently 5 hours faster to level 77 than my previous record.

[siofral]

I definitely hear you. I started a pandarin hunter this last week (I need an alchemist) and didn't get herbalism on the wandering isle (first time through and didn't research where to get it) so independent herbalism runs were necessary to fix that. My next zone was Westfall which requires at least herbalism 60, 80 if you want to collect seakelp, so I did the first quest set (through to the Murloc clue to get the Captain Sander's Treasure Map quest) then did a couple runs through Elwynn Forest to collect herbs. I did the Hogger quest because it's fun and has the lead-in to Westfall and if you're doing the Hogger quest you should do the gnoll armband quest so I grabbed that one as well. You're killing the little suckers in and out so you might as well get credit.

My herbalism still wasn't high enough so I made a run through Dun Murogh killing crag boar to bump my cooking while gathering herbs on the way to Loch Modan which is a fave area with lots of good herbs in interesting terrain. Because the Wandering Isle is populated by blue foxes I thought I'd snag Ashtail (he resides in the hill grizzly area) as one of my pets (nowhere to be found this time through) so I snagged Ol' Sooty instead.

On the way from Dun Murogh to Loch Modan I did the missing pilot quest, then grabbed a couple starter quests in Loch Modan . . . kill Aldo and get the Gorick's Stash quest start and the blood sausage recipe (yeah, I know I can buy it from the guy in SW but it's more fun to quest it) and the spider one because I can use the spider bits for leveling my cooking. By the time I'd done a run through Loch Modan picking herbs, killing bear, spiders and any elite I could find and collecting all the explorer's League docs I had jumped a couple levels. Then I ran the Checking on the Boys quest because it's so much fun and with bigger alts I have to use the stairs not the windows to exit which changes how the quest is played . . . by the time I'd gotten back to Westfall and finished Sander's Treasure Map I was collecting seakelp and was leveled out of the zone, had gotten my apprentice riding and was off to Redridge Mountains.

All this is super low level stuff but it was a lot of fun, very care-free, fast and productive on three or four fronts. My cooking is where it should be, I'm a little higher than I need to be in alchemy now and my herbalism is where it needs to be for exiting Redridge without additional grinding to get my herbalism up. I still need to pick up archeology and get another bandage recipe for first aid and I'm all set for another great day of play.

My upper level hunter is in Outland (Shadowmoon Valley). I started through Nagrand before I realized I had a lot of quest stuff to turn in (the finishing the quests thing we talked about earlier) and just for fun I did a couple more little quests in Hellfire and the Forest while cleaning up the turn ins. After the last turn in I was high enough to skip Nagrand. I'll do it the next time through . . . maybe. I'm enjoying Shadowmoon Valley though I am stopped at the "ride the fel reaver" quest. I hate having to use machines to do things. I suck at it, I don't enjoy it . . . . hmm. I wonder if I can skip it . . .