When I first played the last expansion, Dragonflight, I was immediately taken by the graphics and beauty of the new area we found ourselves in.
The Dragon Isles were beautiful and I took soooooo many screenshots of various areas as I admired everything.
The War Within has been less striking.
There is one new region that I think quite pretty, and that's Hallowfall: an underground inner-Earth of greenery, rivers, waterfalls, and a radiant crystal in the 'sky'.
It's definitely my favourite of the new regions for this expansion. Plus, there's plenty of ore, things to skin, and areas to fish! So this'll probably be my main in-game home for a while. xD
Plus, every few hours the crystal turns a vibrant purple and a rare creature pops up who has the possibility of dropping a mount. More reason to stay in the zone!
The Ringing Deeps, I suppose, is rather pretty too in a cave-like way. Definitely screenshot-worthy in a few areas!
Anyway.
Enough about the prettiness of the world. xD Time to babble about the game itself!
One of my favourite new additions for this expansion has been these slip-stream type of things.
With the interactive flying system, you get charges for your mount to fly higher or faster and sometimes you can run out... especially if you're trying to get somewhere very high.
Between zones, they've implemented this slip-stream system for you to fly into that carries you nicely along. It's great, and something I wanted back in Dragonflight. 😅
When you finish the campaign and get access to world quests and the weekly quest that rewards you with a purple cache, you get an option for your weekly cache!
In Dragonflight, it was a random quest every week. Do pvp, do this event, get 2000 reputation with a faction, do 5 mythic dungeons. Sometimes you'd get a week where it was something you didn't want to do, so you missed out on your purple cache for that week or did some gameplay you disliked.
So having the choice to do a whole heap of world quests, do a certain dungeon, or whatever, is really good! I like it.
For this first week, I decided to do Awakening the Machine. Which is a nifty little 20-wave activity where you protect some dude from all the enemies.
At first it was pretty slow, but then it got better with things I had to interrupt, a thing I had to destroy ASAP because it was unleashing a beam of destruction upon my dwarven friend, exploding things I had to destroy far away from my friend, and also, very helpful, little medical-bots that would heal the enemies but when I killed them I got healing stuff for my dwarf buddy.
It was a fun little activity.
Much like in Dragonflight where you got to choose between Wrathion and his brother Sebastian, now in The War Within there's a thing where you choose to aid one of three Nerubians.
I chose the Weaver this week, but will undoubtedly choose them all in time and get all their goodies. Because I'm a completionist like that.
One change I don't like is that raid groups are no longer viable for farming. Only 5 people can tag something now before it goes grey, which means you need to farm in a normal party of 5 instead of a more effective farming-party.
There is a cute little bee mount that I would like, which requires 900 pollen from the bees. I've gotten 300 so far, AND, a 'crackling shard.'
That crackling shard is 1 of 10 needed to unlock a beautiful gryphon mount called Alinura. It's gorgeous and I want it. I'm also doing a chitin farm for a Nerubian mount... and I'm doing it in this area too so I can hopefully get more of these shards.
^ Best screenshot I could get of it. xD
Sadly, at the moment, I only have the one shard. I NEED NINE MORE. Come on Blizzard. xD Give me my drops!
Mythic dungeons don't start for another 2 weeks, so I have 2 weeks of farming fun! Fingers crossed I get these shards and get my gryphon. I never did finish a similar farm back in Mists of Pandaria. But then, I wasn't really actively trying... I got three shards for that particular mount farm just by doing whatever in the area. So, this time, actively farming, I should hopefully get it!
So, that's basically my goal for the next two weeks. 😅 Get a bee mount, a Nerubian mount, and a cool shiny gryphon mount. All by the glory of killing things for hours on end and hoping for RNGeezus to bestow its bounties upon me.
Until next time! 😊🎮