WoW: Shadowlands First Impressions Part 2

We’ve got quite a lot more World of Warcraft: Shadowlands content to discuss, my friends. Before we dive into the second installment of my first impressions on this expansion, though, I want to share what I consider to be some excellent news. I concluded the first part of this series by expressing my hope that Shadowlands’ introductory questline in The Maw would eventually be made skippable because I find that it becomes more monotonous each time I take one of my numerous alts through it.

Well, news has since broken that this particular wish of mine will be granted as soon as the upcoming content update, Patch 9.1.5, reaches live servers. Granted, there’s currently no word as to when Patch 9.1.5 will officially be implemented within the live game client. However, this update has already been rolled out on WoW’s Public Test Realm (PTR). What’s more, those data miners we all know and love are already hard at work discovering everything that Patch 9.1.5 will ultimately feature once it’s live.

Patch 9.1.5 will reportedly contain quite a few other cool aspects, too. For example, there will be new character customization options for certain playable races that are lacking in that department, like Lightforged Draenei. Additionally, players will find that they can switch between the four so-called Covenants essentially at will with no restrictions or other drawbacks once this patch is live. I’ll cover what this change means and why it’s significant later in this series.

That’s just scratching the surface of what this update is said to bring to World of Warcraft. I’m sure Wowhead will have covered most of what’s coming in the new patch by now, so I would recommend checking there if you’d like more details. I’m most excited about no longer having to escape the Maw on my two full accounts’ worth of characters when Patch 9.1.5 arrives. It would seem that dreams do come true!

Anyway, let us now return to the topic at hand. When I last left off, I had just arrived in Oribos, the so-called “Eternal City” after escaping the Maw. Upon your arrival in Oribos, you’ll find that the city’s guards don’t exactly welcome you with open arms. They greet you with apprehensive curiosity given the circumstances, but that’s still far better than open hostility. The resulting quest tasks you with asking one of the guards where you are and whether or not you’ve successfully escaped from the Maw.

You’re the first living mortal to set foot in Oribos in eons, so the guards aren’t quite sure what to do with you. They escort you inside the city to an area known as the Enclave, where you’ll find such NPCs as the Overseers, Kah-Sher and Kah-Delen, as well as the so-called “Honored Voice,” Tal-Inara. Here, the guards essentially pass the buck and make you the responsibility of the Overseers, who aren’t exactly overjoyed to suddenly find themselves dealing with a mortal who somehow just escaped the supposedly inescapable Maw and could very well be an agent of the Jailer.

You explain yourself to Tal-Inara and the Overseers, and Tal-Inara begins to suspect that you were sent to Oribos by fate rather than chance. The Honored Voice, the Overseers, and many of the NPCs similar to them who can be found in Oribos devoutly believe in and strictly adhere to something they call “the Purpose,” which seems to guide them in their judgments and actions. Tal-Inara believes your presence in Oribos is a sign that the Purpose is guiding its believers in the right direction rather than toward evil.

A bit later, Tal-Inara grants you what would ordinarily be an audience with the Arbiter. The Arbiter is charged with judging the nobility of each and every soul who comes before her by experiencing everything that shaped that soul in life. Upon doing so for any given soul, she then sends said soul to their proper afterlife. At least until a terrible fate befell the Arbiter and rendered her unconscious for what seems to have been an almost immeasurably long time.

That’s why the Arbiter can’t actually grant you an audience, so Tal-Inara instead takes the opportunity to explain to you exactly how dire the current situation is. As an aside, I should note at this point that it is Tal-Inara’s sole discretion as to who may or may not come before the Arbiter for an audience. Tal-Inara is also tasked with essentially speaking on behalf of the Arbiter to those who also serve the Purpose, hence why she’s known as “the Honored Voice.”

The Arbiter is still out of commission when you arrive in Oribos, though Tal-Inara joyously reports that she stirred a bit right when you showed up. The Overseers and the Honored Voice interpret this seemingly minor development as a sign that the Purpose is working as intended despite the fact that things have taken a huge turn for the worse. They collectively begin to theorize that perhaps you could help to rouse the Arbiter and restore order to the entirety of the Shadowlands.

Before you’re sent off on the first steps of your grand adventure, however, Tal-Inara and the Overseers allow you to attempt to commune with an artifact from Azeroth if you have one. The only such artifact you have in your possession that can alert your allies to your location is the remaining shard of Highlord Bolvar Fordragon’s Helm of Domination, so you decide that will have to do.

The magic surrounding the Shard of Domination combined with that of Oribos allows your allies who remain on Azeroth to step through the boundary and enter the city alongside you. Though the Overseers are initially distrustful of Bolvar and the Knights of the Ebon Blade who accompanied him, Tal-Inara recognizes them as integral to your mission and allows them to stay.

One of the Overseers then requests that you explore Oribos a bit so that you come to know where its most important and useful facilities are. More specifically, this quest tasks you with visiting the inn, the bank, the Hall of Shapes which houses the city’s profession trainers, and the Hall of Curiosities where such things as the transmogrification vendor and barber (also known as the “Appearance Agitator”) can be found.

This quest will likely constitute your first few encounters with beings known as “the Brokers,” who remind me of a cross between ethereals and goblins in that they look like ethereal beings and seem to exist solely to conduct profitable business transactions. The Brokers even belong to various oddly-named cartels, which I think serves to reinforce the comparison between them and goblins.

For what it’s worth, I personally think implementing a quest that requires players to learn where these aspects of the city are located was a great idea on Blizzard’s part. Even so, I readily admit I still frequently get lost in Oribos, depending on what I happen to be looking for. Still, at least I’ve found Oribos to be much easier and less tedious to navigate than Dazar’Alor in Battle for Azeroth.

After your brief tour of Oribos, you return to Bolvar and the Overseers in the Enclave. Once there, the Honored Voice asks Bolvar to explain how Jaina, Baine, Thrall, and Anduin wound up in the Maw. Bolvar informs her that dark, winged beings similar to Sylvanas’ val’kyr apprehended the quartet of them with chains and “dragged them through the shattered sky.” Tal-Inara ponders this for a moment before explaining that “the winged Kyrian of Bastion ferry souls from the mortal realm into the Shadowlands, but not with chains.”

The lot of you then realize that those winged beings you saw taking your allies away constitute virtually the only clue you have to follow. You’ve told the Overseers and Tal-Inara all you know about the situation, and they have subsequently agreed to aid you as best they can. By now, you’ve almost reached the point at which your journey in Shadowlands truly begins.

Tal-Inara instructs one of the Overseers to bring you to the “Ring of Transference” within Oribos and use the city’s reserves of a resource known as Anima to open a pathway for you to reach Bastion, the expansion’s first questing zone. The Overseer protests, but much to my amusement Tal-Inara simply replies, “See it done, Kah-Sher. With her voice have I spoken.” I’ve basically interpreted this as her way of saying, “You had better listen to me, and that’s the bottom line because the Honored Voice said so.”

You then follow Kah-Sher to a teleportation pad that leads to the Ring of Transference. It is here that you’ll find the city’s Flight Master, Pathscribe Roh-Avonavi. You’ll have need of Roh-Avonavi’s services fairly frequently as you quest within Shadowlands content since the only way you can safely fly between the expansion’s questing zones is on the back of a Flight Master’s mount.

That remains the case even once you’ve unlocked the ability to ride flying mounts in this expansion. If you attempt to fly between zones by yourself despite this, you’ll encounter the dreaded Fatigue mechanic. Something tells me you probably don’t want to have to contend with that, so you’re best off just sticking to enlisting the aid of Flight Masters.

I should also mention that even if you purchase a flight from one questing zone to another, you won’t fly directly to your destination. You’ll have to briefly pass through Oribos along the way because the Eternal City is the only place in Shadowlands that contains gateways to every available questing zone. While this does tend to make flights between zones feel like they take longer, each required detour through Oribos is a useful opportunity to request to stop there if you suddenly realize you need to use one of the city’s facilities or need to quickly log off in a rested area.

It is at this point that (after a brief cutscene) the path is opened for you to fly directly to Bastion and begin your grand adventure. That leads me to something else I wish to discuss at relative length. If you’re going through Shadowlands for the first time, you’ll quickly find that this expansion does away with the mechanics present in Battle for Azeroth and Legion that allowed you to quest through any of their zones intended for leveling up your characters in any order you wished.

That is to say, you’re required to quest through Bastion first, followed by Maldraxxus, Ardenweald, and finally Revendreth. The exception to this rule is if you’ve unlocked and subsequently opted into the Threads of Fate leveling system. This system allows you to travel between the four questing zones at your leisure and gain character experience by doing things like side quests unrelated to the primary campaign and bonus objectives as opposed to repeating the main story multiple times on different characters.

Patch 9.1.5 will reportedly expand on the methods that you can level up via Threads of Fate, which is a wonderful proposition as far as I’m concerned. However, I’m getting a fair bit ahead of myself. I’ll discuss that in more detail later in this series once that update is actually live. For now, I think it’s high time I began my closing statements.

I hate to end this entry on something of a cliffhanger, but I think this article is running a bit long as it is. Moreover, I want to be able to devote as much time to discussing my experiences questing through Bastion as I can. I think I’ve rambled too much to be able to do that within this piece, so we’ll save that for Part 3. In the meantime, if you’re going through Shadowlands for the first time as I recently did, please feel free to share your thoughts on it so far in this article’s comments if you’re so inclined!