My wife and I finally hit level 80 on the Wrath content and have been VERY much looking forward to exploring the new Cataclysm content. We decided that we would start our adventure in the new Mount Hyjal, and let me tell you, it was the PERFECT choice. Aside from a few issues of having too many people questing in the same areas and not being able to complete quests as quickly as we’d have liked, it’s been an amazing experience so far.

First you start out in a place very reminiscent of the old Ashenvale and Moonglade. From there the quest chain takes you on a perfect path across the territory and has so far brought us from 80-82 relatively quickly. I believe that our /played reported back with 3-5 hours per level, which in my experience, is really fast.

It’s been a great experience thus far and can’t wait to finally cap level at 85.

I don’t wanna be too narcissistic and only talk about my experience so I wanted to give you folks some screen shots of Mount Hyjal and provide you with some information that may be useful on your journey.

BEGINNING YOUR JOURNEY

Ysera is the first NPC that you’ll be getting quests from.

First thing you’ll do is communicate with dragon fly thing’s that track down hidden Twilight henchmen. This as well as every Cataclysm quest is relatively easy, and doesn’t take a lot of time to complete.

One of the things that excited me the most when I saw it was the new models and textures that they created for some of the boss characters. Thrall, Garrosh, Ysera and Malfurion all have brand new artwork, and they look great. Honestly, I don’t know what’s keeping them from giving us those same textures. We will probably be seeing more use of them in the future, but for now it’s really cool seeing the graphics of WoW improve.

Hyjal is relatively simple throughout the entirity of the map. You’ll basically just follow the same road you got on at the beginning, only straying from it about 5 times, and even then it’s not much off the path at all. Everything is very close to where you get the quests, so there won’t be a lot of flying/walking.

The only real issue we experienced was when we first got to the Cataclysm content. Our characters had just hit 80 so we were using quest equipment and a few pieces of armor/weapons from the Wrath instances, so they weren’t as strong as some of the other player characters we came across. This made it very hard for us to kill mobs as every mob in Cataclysm has at least 30k health, and deal at least 1k damage per second. This is a huge difference from the Wrath content we’d just left. But since we’d teamed up throughout the area, it made it really easy to just team up against each mob. Still, a bit of a warning, just be careful if you’re fresh from WotLK, it’s not going to be the same thing you’ve experienced and expect from WoW.

Malfurion is one of the next folks you’ll be getting quests from. You should remember him from Warcraft 3 if you played it. These quests are pretty easy, one’s a pick-up “sparklies” and the others are “kill X amount of Y”. I’m not really going to go through EVERY individual quest, I just want to give you guys a good idea of what to expect when you play.

Anyways after hanging with this guy for awhile you’ll continue on the same path to destroy some caravans, kill some Worgen and retake an area, kill some ogres and more!

Before I get carried away here are a few images of these areas I took to show you all the beautiful visuals of Cataclysm.

FURTHER INTO YOUR JOURNEY

Anyways, before I leave you guys I wanted to share with you a few more bits of useful information. One is these “flamegates” I guess they’re called. You’re going to be using them quite a bit in Hyjal. They’re pretty cool actually, you walk through and it takes you to a place seemingly underground. Much like a cave behaves, but this allows them not to use of the actual map space and create little instanced areas. Now when I say instanced, I don’t mean only you and your party will be there, because you will definitely see a lot of other random players. What I mean is that these places don’t seem to actually exist on the map and the portals take you to a remote zone.

Inside these gates you’ll fight elementals, Twilight Henchmen and even JOUST! Yes! That’s right! There’s a portion of this area where you get to jump on a gryphon with a lance and merely run over these buzzards in the area. It’s actually a LOT like the old arcade, ‘cept a little more “WoW-ish”. The only difficulty is that in order to fly, you actually have to flap your wings by pressing a vehicle button and point in the direction you’re hoping to fly in. There’s a little bit of momentum involved, so it may seem a little difficult at first, but it’s easy once you get the hang of it. You even get rewarded a little buzzard vanity pet! Haha.

NEARING THE END

At the end you’ll go undercover with the Twilight and investigate their inner workings in hopes to discover some useful information. I really like this part because everythings RIGHT next to where you receive your quests and they’re ALL way too easy. This portion is a good 4 bars of experience basically for free. Afterward you’ll take on Ragnorak with the ancients you spent all of your time in Hyjal rescuing.

SUMMING IT UP

Mount Hyjal was a great experience for us. We greatly enjoyed all of the new content we came across there as well as learned a few new things about the story. I really suggest to everyone that you take the extra time to read the quests throughout Cataclysm. The stories are surprisingly interesting and fun.

Well guys, that’s it for me on this one. Like always, I look forward to hearing what you have to say about my article, or if you think I missed anything.

Until next time!