Rage of the Firelands

Patch 4.2 dropped earlier today, and with it, the new zone: The Firelands. The Firelands carry a multitude of challenges, provided you can get into the zone itself; there's a certain amount of new dailies you need to do just to be granted access to The Firelands. Those dailies will probably take around three days to fully complete, and then you'll be able to wander into The Firelands to conquer. Another notable thing they've given us is an epic questline in which we save Thrall - Former Warchief of the Horde - from the Twilight's Hammer, who've sundered him into four emotional parts. With his mate Aggra, we travel into the four elemental planes to save him from Doubt, Desire, Patience, and Rage. It's very touching, some of it. I'm not going to lie, in the desire stage I was brought to tears. But you'll have to see for yourself why.

It's a very cool quest chain at the end of which you get a nice addition to any gear set you have. But what's awful about it is that since everyone on the server is doing it, there's Alliance and Horde all mixed together. And someone is always flagged. A PvP Flag is a virus when everyone is mixed together. Someone always manages to accidentally hit a Hordie who was flagged, and that someone always manages to be me. Let me show you what it looks like.

That's a cluster of Alliance, Horde, small mobs, big mobs, skeletons, and confusion.

When you get flagged for PvP in a place like this, the other faction has no qualms about killing you. You'll be trundling along trying to kill the mobs when suddenly a dizzying array of priest debuffs will show up and start eating your life away! It's infuriating. Especially since the point of these quests is to kill enough of the mobs to fill up a guage of sorts. If you leave the [small] area for any reason, that guage unfills itself and and restarts. Dying will most certainly cause you to leave. It's appalling to me that the Horde had the audacity to assault me in the middle of the confusion of these quests, one because I'm not doing anything but questing, and two because it wasn't even my choice to become flagged! If a man can't use Bladestorm without getting killed, what's the point of being alive?

I think that personal or faction-specific phasing would be of great help here. A goblin warrior actually chased me from one end of Hyjal to the other, charging and heroic leaping in an attempt to kill me for no other reason than to do so. Luckily, he ran through scores of mobs without regard and was eventually forced to turn around, but had he caught up to me, his full Vicious certainly would have beaten my partial Bloodthirsty. If I could be phased for the duration of the quest, I could Charge and Thunderclap and Bladestorm to my heart's content.

All in all, it was a very fun quest chain. Malfurion has the same voice actor that he did in Warcraft III, and I definately love Thrall. I was just very irritated by the amount of flagging that was happening to me, and the amount of pox-ridden priests that were there to see it happen.