Kaelinda went to Zaralek Cavern last night.
For one thing, the Valdrakken weekly “get rep and do a Dragon Isles world activity” quest wanted me to go to the new zone of Zaralek Caverns and do the new activity of Sniffenseeking. I was rather expecting this, given that that quest wanted me to go to the new zone of Forbidden Reach and do the new activity of Zskera Vaults the first week that that area was available.
For another, when I went to pick up Professions weeklies, the Drakonid dude didn’t have a quest to steal clothing from Gnolls, and the Gnome dude didn’t have a quest to get scythid legs or tarantula legs. There was a new Niffen fellow there, but he didn’t have a Tailoring quest for me, either. But when I logged in with my Druid, who is a Scribe, the Drakonid dude did have a quest for her. So I figured that the Tailoring weekly must be from the Niffen fellow, which meant I’d probably have to go unlock the Niffen Renown track to be able to get it.
And I did want to get the new Dragonriding Glyphs. This was made quite easy to do by using the map of glyph locations on Wowhead to plan a route around the cavern and the close-up images and specific location directions/instructions on Blizzard Watch to find each individual glyph. I didn’t find any of the glyphs difficult to get to as I moved around the cavern counter-clockwise starting from Loamm.
I played through enough of the main questline to get the quest completion for the Valdrakken rep weekly. I’ll come back for the rest of it later — I want to get through the rest of the launch questlines before I activate Fyrakk assaults so that they don’t interfere with doing the launch questlines. I am going to have to do those Fyrakk assaults eventually, though, since they reward the Cloth gear set coloration that mimics Alexstrasza’s new look. I’ll also have to push Loamm Renown through to 16, eventually, for the Black Dragonflight-themed shoulders-cloak-tabard set.
The environment of Zaralek Cavern feels like a hybrid of Deepholm, Blackrock Mountain, and, oddly enough, Nazjatar. The colors and shapes of the plant life and crystal formations in the entrance passageway are what give me the Nazjatar vibes.
The Niffen confuse me. They talk about how they arrived in the cavern and had to establish friendly relations with the local Drogbar, but where did they come from? How old are they, and how long have they been there? The princess talks about her mom having established the settlement, and the princess’s (former?) BFF talks about digging adventures during early explorations of the cavern, so it doesn’t seem like they’ve been there very long. To me, the Niffen are giving off similar vibes to other small races such as Cataclysm‘s Lost Isles Pygmies or Mists‘s Grummles, created to fill a specific, narrow cultural function niche but without really solid worldbuilding of how they actually fit into the ecology of Azeroth’s spontaneously generated sapient species, and likely to be left behind & forgotten after the expansion that introduced them.
Overall, my initial reaction to Zaralek Cavern is …meh. In the past, I have often put alts that I didn’t intend to actually do the zone questing with through the entry sequence to a new zone just so they’d be able to go there for Mog photoshoots in the future. I didn’t do that with Mechagon or Korthia because those environments did not inspire me at all; Zaralek Cavern is falling into that bin as well.
Kamalia et alia 