I've been making a pretty concerted effort over the past month or so to
knock out all those things that I hadn't quite gotten around to
finishing for one reason or another in
Cataclysm. Last week saw
the end of the grueling grind to get enough tokens to purchase the
mount shown above, which is easily the most hideous mount I now possess.
I'm not sure who thought aqua went with olive green and pink, but
whoever they were, I wholeheartedly hope they aren't doing the color
scheme on any further mounts.
While I was pleased to get the mount despite its questionable color
scheme, there was something I was far, far happier about. I got all the
tokens I needed, I got the mount, and at last, at long, long last, I
never had to look at Tol Barad ever again.
The only things I enjoyed from Tol Barad were getting a pet and two
mounts, and the backstory that never really developed further than "Here
is a mysterious island with some really strange stuff and ghosts on
it." The story disappointed me, the mounts and pet were happily added to
the collection,
Sell wow gold and as for the rest of it ... Well, let's just say I'm
not holding any candlelight vigils for the zone.
In
Mists of Pandaria, we don't have a Tol Barad. We don't have a Wintergrasp. And I am perfectly happy with both of those things.
Wintergrasp wonderland
This isn't to say that I hated Wintergrasp, mind you -- in fact, I
really liked the zone. I liked the PvP it offered. I liked the
objectives. I liked the dailies. I liked the idea of using vehicles and
knocking down fortress walls, of storming the keep and claiming it for
my faction. I even liked the bosses in the zone. They had a unique
flavor, and each subsequent boss built upon the first in a way that
really worked and tied in very well with the
Wrath expansion.
And I really liked the way the zone itself worked. I remember fondly the
minutes before a Wintergrasp battle began, when everyone crammed into
that tiny war room in Dalaran and queued up with the mage to get in on
the action. I liked the way the main bunch of players would split off
into various groups, attacking different fortresses, building vehicles
and marching them to the front gate -- or, on those days we were
defending, mounting up and hunting down the opposite faction to make
sure they didn't have the opportunity to storm the keep.
There was something so very server community about the whole zone, and there was something about how it worked with the
Wrath expansion itself. It was an entire zone that was nestled between a ton
of different leveling zones, and flying across Northrend invariably took
you over Wintergrasp. You couldn't help but notice it was there, and
you couldn't help being curious about what was going on down there,
whether a battle was in progress or not. It was absolutely grounded in
and part of Northrend.
The raid was pretty fun, too -- and the fact that it dropped random tier
and PvP gear was awfully nice. It would have been nicer had it dropped
tier tokens, so that there was more opportunities for various classes to
pick up PvE loot, but it wasn't a huge detriment. My guild ran
Wintergrasp pretty faithfully at the beginning of each raid tier, taking
advantage of those bonus chances for tier loot. Once we'd gotten far
enough into the raid tier, Wintergrasp became optional, but there were
still plenty of us who chose to run it.
Tol Barad blahs
Tol Barad sounded like a really interesting concept when it was first
introduced. It was a PvP zone like Wintergrasp, only the dailies were
separate from the actual PvP portion of the zone. It meant that the main
island dailies could be done by both factions simultaneously, instead
of the lockout that occurred if your faction didn't possess Wintergrasp.
And the PvP portion of Tol Barad had dailies available as well, dailies
that were only available to the side that happened to have Tol Barad.
So it was the best of both worlds, right?
I'm not sure where it went wrong, but it did. Maybe it had something to
do with Tol Barad being so remote -- it never really felt like part of
the
Cataclysm experience. There was absolutely no reason to go
to Tol Barad except to do the dailies and gather tokens. The raid in Tol
Barad didn't really feel like it had any story or depth behind it -- it
was just random bosses in a jail cell, with no real explanation for
their existence.
And maybe that was the crux of it. While Tol Barad was an interesting
zone, the flavor it had was lost due to a complete lack of story. I
wrote a piece about the interesting flavor of the zone
and the small bits of lore behind it, but none of the questions raised
in that article were ever answered. There just wasn't really anything to
care about as far as Tol Barad was concerned.
We just don't need a Tol Barad anymore
But
Mists of Pandaria isn't including any kind of Tol Barad or
Wintergrasp zone. We'll no longer have a particular bit of land to fight
over, and we'll no longer have a server-based PvP area. To be perfectly
honest, I'm not unhappy about this at all. While Wintergrasp worked on a
unique level, the improvements that were made for Tol Barad really did
nothing to enhance the experience at all. And for a low-population
server like mine, whether Wintergrasp or Tol Barad, one faction almost
always had it the majority of the time.
In a way, what Tol Barad morphed into was a Battleground that wasn't a
proper Battleground at all. It didn't have an instance portal, but it
may as well have, for all the effect it had on the surrounding world.
The only advantage to having Tol Barad was the dailies it offered for
extra chances at tokens and the raid itself, which contained bosses with
largely PvP gear and a very low chance at an occasional piece of PvE
gear.
We don't really need a non-instanced Battleground. That should be what
the open world is for. Vale of the Eternal Blossoms actually works
pretty well as a world PvP location if players really want it to be; the
Horde and Alliance cities are fairly close together, making the
possibility of skirmishes a pretty fun one that doesn't require a long
trek. We don't really need a raid boss that drops PvP gear.
wow
gold for sale PvP players
are generally focusing on PvP and getting that gear via PvP, not
raiding. We don't need a raid boss to drop potential pieces of tier
gear, because we have the Raid Finder for that middle step between
heroics and tier gear.
There's just no reason for an outdoor PvP zone anymore. I don't know if
there ever really was. Wintergrasp and Tol Barad were fun experiments,
but with a game that is allowing players from different servers to group
together more and more, it seems almost silly to designate one
particular area as a server-only PvP zone. I'm not really going to miss
Tol Barad, nor am I terribly broken up about the fact that there isn't
going to be a new one available.
But I'll still fly around on my really ugly mount every now and again, just because ugly has a certain charm.
