Goblins–Best Race, Worst Starting Area?

Cool Goblin’s don’t look at explosions.

I’ve had a chance to play through the goblin starting area three times now and my opinion of it has changed quite a bit. At first I thought that the zone was interesting but nothing special. By the third playthrough I realized it might be one of the worst starting zones in World of Warcraft, which is pretty sad seeing as how it’s one of the newest.

Bet let’s talk about the Goblin race in general first. Before Cataclysm dropped I was pretty sad that the Horde was getting shafted with Goblins, while the Alliance got a werewolf race. What? How does that seem fair? Especially after the Horde got shafted with Blood Elves and the Alliance got good natured demons in Burning Crusade!

Fortunately, after playing through the starting areas with both the Worgen and the Goblins, I’ve realized that the Horde actually made out better race wise than the Alliance. First of all they didn’t take the opportunity to change the human model for the Worgen. I understand not changing the normal human models because some people would get upset, but why reuse the same terrible models for the Worgen human form? Still, I guess you can just stay in Worgen form all the time and look feral and awesome. Unless you’re playing a female Worgen. As my wife pointed out, the male Worgen get glowing eyes, wolf like manes, and just look really feral. The female Worgen look more like a good natured Anubis, with big eyes and more curves than fur. It’s like they were trying to make them attractive instead of feral, so I guess score one for the furry lovers out there.

The Goblins on the other hand aren’t the terrible Goblin model we’ve seen since the launch of Vanilla. I was really worried before Cataclysm launched that it would be the same model. Thankfully it’s a beautiful redo that brings a short race to the Horde without getting cute. The only downside for the race that I’ve found, other than the starting zone which we will get to, is that after looking at the beautiful textures of the Goblin skins, when I look at any of my other characters I cringe. They look God awful comparatively, and it’s about time Blizzard added some new, high res skins for every race and gives us one free redo, while leaving the old skins for those who actually like them, or have really poor machines. I don’t want an EQII styles “replace or not” scheme, just add some new good skins.

The Starting Zone

Let’s get into the worst aspect of the Goblin race, their terrible starting area and lore. Is it unique? Absolutely. Is it beautiful? Very, especially the island you go to after you leave the starting city. So what’s the problem? Well the first problem is that I have absolutely no investment in the Goblins yet. When I play through the new Troll starting area, or the Forsaken areas, I can see the amazing changes they’ve made to the lore, and feel like a badass when Sylvanas calls me her personal murder machine. With the Goblins you get none of that, even when *SPOILER HERE! IF YOU HAVEN’T BEAT THE GOBLIN STARTING AREA YOU SHOULD GO TO THE NEXT PARAGRAPH* your capital city is destroyed by Deathwing I felt nothing for the millions of Goblins murdered or anything else that happened, if Undercity had been wiped out I would have been jumping up and down screaming.

Another problem is that, while you are supposed to be this important Goblin in your society, enough to rival the big cheese and about to become a friggin Trade Prince you’re entire time spent in the city is either doing meaningless events like picking up your friends or serving drinks at a party, instead of making you feel like a hero like the other starting areas. Sure they try and rectify this in the second island, but with all of these people who used to be your servants moments ago rising to a position of authority it just feels like your failing miserably the entire time. I never felt like I was a rising star, more like I’d just gone supernova and it was time to end it all.

This is getting a bit long, and I have many other complaints, but the biggest one is the simplest one. Your faction leader is a tool. The entire Goblin starting area pushing you to hate him and feel like he’s a tool, a chump, a piece of stinkin offal that you need to scrape from the boot of your society. Then *SPOILER AGAIN* Thrall just comes up and appoints him, not you who rivaled him and helped Thrall not be tortured to death, to leader of the Bildgewater Cartel Goblins. I have sometimes not cared much about my faction leader, such as the Night Elf chick who is meaningless past her involvment with the Stormrage brothers, and sometimes I have loves my faction leaders and thought of them as total badasses, such as Thrall or Sylvanas. Never have I thought of my faction leader as a pussy who by all rights should be dead under my boot if not for the intervention of Thrall. What happens later when they use him in lore like they did with Sylvanas and the Halls of Reflection, or Thrall and Wrynn destroying stuff in the Undercity? I’ll just remember what an asshat he was and that I should be in charge.

I’ll talk more about Cataclysm’s Faction Leader Fail later. Have a merry Christmas if you do that thing, or a happy whatever if you don’t.

Lowbie vs. Main–The Cataclysm Experience

That’s my hunter in the front there, looking cooler than any level 40 has a right to.

To be fair I haven’t made it out of Vashj’ir or whatever the level 80-82 underwater area is called, so keep that in mind as we move forward. So far I’ve enjoyed Vashj’ir except for a few serious problems. The main one is that the respawn timer for several mob types seems broken. Mobs will respawn as you kill them, and while that’s not exactly a problem, when you combine it with the fact that you’ll probably pull more mobs than usual due to mobs not only being on your plane, but above and below you as well. To limit this I try to ‘walk’ on the sea floor as much as possible, and it helps to a limited extent.

Another problem with Vashj’ir isn’t so much with the zone, but with the number of people playing in it. The mobs respawn crazy fast so that’s not a problem, but when you swim up to an area that is supposed to be swarming with the mobs you need, and all you see is thirty players AOEing like mad in hopes of tagging one of the mobs when it spawns, it gets annoying fast. Compared to the lower level quests Vashj’ir also seems a little lacking in story. There are hundreds of quests it seems, but only a few that continue the main story. Sure most of the random side quests tie into the main story somehow, but until I got to the Battlemaiden quests I wasn’t really enjoying the story at all.

That leads me into what I think of the lowbie zones I’ve done. The first thing I want to comment on is the amazing storyline that runs you through zones at the perfect pace, revealing story bits along the way. One thing I wish the developers had included would be some of the path quests. Quests that didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but had little self contained stories that you would only find if you went off the main quest path and just went exploring.

Some people have expressed concern that the lowbie levels are too linear, and that it doesn’t feel as social as an MMO should. The first thing I have to say is that, unless you are playing specifically with friends, most people level solo in WoW, and have for most of it’s existence. If I’m going to be leveling mostly solo anyway, why not give me a really great single player type story? Should I just go play a single player game then? No, because I can enjoy this single player story in a duo with my wife, or if I want to do a dungeon I can gather some friends, or use the LFD tool. Besides, if you are not enjoying the single player story style of Cataclysm, you might as well cancel your pre-order for The Old Republic, because that game looks to be even more story oriented.

One of the great things about the new lowbie experience is that you don’t really have to look like a total idiot until you get to Northrend anymore. It used to be that you had mismatched gear from level 5 to level 68, when you get Northrend and got the muted brown gear that matched. Now though, if you rely completely on quest gear, you can look pretty cool as you level up. Every ten or twenty levels your quest gear will change it’s look, and you’ll be slightly mismatched for a few levels until you get the rest of your gear. Overall it’s nice to look cool early on, something I really missed from Warhammer Online.

The major drawback to the new low level experience is the old high level experience. Sure, Northrend isn’t bad really, and it’s got a few REALLY cool questlines, but in between awesome old world content and good Northrend content is the dreaded eight to ten levels of shitty Outland content. When it first came out the quests weren’t terrible, though most didn’t like Hellfire from the start, but they weren’t great either. Now, after WotLK and Cataclysm, I am seriously dreading going to Outland. It sits there, taunting me, letting me know that I may be having fun now, but the Dark Portal awaits. I don’t even care that the storyline isn’t going to flow naturally, just that there really isn’t much of a story at all in Outland. There are one or two quests per zone that might be considered part of an overall story, but until you get into raid quests it really doesn’t come together.

All in all I’m excited to tank my first Cataclysm instance still, but that’s on the back burner while I level up my Undead Hunter and my Goblin Warrior. I’m really excited for the Warrior too, as I’d love to compare his tanking ability at 85 to my Druid and Paladin when I finally get them those five levels.

The next post won’t be Cataclysm or WoW related, but until then enjoy whatever you are playing!