Explorer!

This weekend, Wapsi, Gallore, Fossegrimme and Panthalassa collaborated to finally acquire the World Explorer achievement. Wapsi and Gallore had already begun most of the zones, Gallore through questing and Wapsi through Archaeology, and Pantha was leveling through Vash'jir which was my last Cata zone to explore. I also "cheated" a bit and had Fossegrimme the human mage port to Exodar to explore the two Alliance starting areas I had left, Bloodmyst and Azuremist Isles. Much easier than trying to avoid angry NPCs on a Horde toon!

Overall, finishing the Explorer achievement was pretty easy and took maybe about 3 hours. Much more painful, however, was finishing the Loremaster of Cataclysm achievement in Vash'jir- Panthalassa had to complete 130 quests, and made it to level 83 before she was finished! I think Vash'jir's beauty rivals that of the Pandaria zones, and I really enjoyed the questline in which Pantha relived the naga fight against the Valkyr. But when that was finished, she still had 20-30 quests to go until she had completed the zone for the achievement! That really felt like work, and I'll be happy to not visit Vash'jir again for a very long time!

This kind of puts a damper on my desire to get the global Loremaster achievement- I still have several long zones in Outland and Northrend to complete, and I suspect they will all be as painful as Vash'jir was.

Explorer was much more fun. I found a lot of nice little places that I have never quested through- this little night elf area in Blade's Edge Mountains, for example. Overall though, I was impressed by how much more rich the graphics are in Pandaria than in most of the old world, especially Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms. Lots of square treetops and low resolution textures in the old zones!

Last night I saw this post on the Blizzard forums and thought that joining a new guild for new RP-ers sounded like fun. So I began a fresh new Alliance toon, Iolae the night elf frost mage, on the Feathermoon server. I chose night elf because I still haven't leveled one completely, mage because I love the night elf casting animations, and frost because it seems to be a good spec right now. Now I need to think of a story for Iolae, which will be likely be percolating in the back of my mind while I'm at work all day!