Grizzly Hills and Drak'Tharon Keep completed.
Grizzly Hills and Drak'Tharon Keep are now complete. Being Level 80 with some decent blue crafted gear on all my toons, Drak Keep was by far the easiest instance I have attempted so far. So easy its quite un-memorable for the most part.
Highlights of the zone. The werewolf story line was pretty cool. I really wish Blizz would utilize vanilla wow better. They should have sent us back to Silverpine Forest at some point with the whole Sons of Aragul bit.
Now that I am 80, collection quests have really lost their allure. At least while farming meats and stuff for some NPC, I got to watch the progress bar slowly move. now, its nothing more than a speedbump/treadmill to open up the next set of quests. The twin bear gods story was pretty cool. I was reading the War of the Anchaints at the time and they made an appearance so that quest line was more interesting with that knowledge in it. Kinda surprised any mortal group would still be worshiping things that died 10000 years ago.
The Ulduar hint quests were ok, along the same lines as the ones in Howling Fjord. But I really liked the Harrison Jones area and the Datalore guy. That was a nice nod to pop culture. I did like the reverse escort quest with that npc. He escorts you to safety lol.
The crowning event in that zone has to be the Troll quest line that ends at the top of Drak'Keep with the lich king showing up and making the troll guy you have been helping into a death knight. From the start I figured he was going to be a rat at the end, but not like that. Also the exchange and the fact that he tries to recruit you instead of attacking makes me wonder a little bit on how they are going to implement the final encounter in Ice Crown. Im sure there isnt going to be anything as devious as giving players the chance to betray the horde or alliance, but damn that would be cool. I suspect that this troll guy is going to be some sort of double agent in the end. Or maybe not. Seeing how is entire quest line is about saving Zul'Drak but he has you slaughter over and over his own people...
Drak'Keep was pretty easy. The first run through I one shotted all the bosses except for the T-rex guy. His aoe fear wiped me the first try, but on the second, I just parked my druids at max range and they did not get feared. The last boss, I don't think even did damage to my group. I just spammed dps when I was human, and I spammed the 1 and 4 buttons when I wasn't. When he died and I turned back human, everyone had full hp and mp. That looks to be an easy zone maybe for heroics unless they let the bosses do something totally different other than just more hp and atk power. The whole zone was just a big tank and spank.
Now I am off to Zul Drak! Ill continue to gear up with my own crafted skills. I will prolly buy frozen orbs to make a handful of epics for all my toons, but It will be a while as I only have one toon that can make titansteel bars and im not going to buy those horribly expensive things when It costs nothing to make. I have several stacks of all the mats needed to make them already, Just the 20h timer in the way. I might have some guildies help out with that or spam /trade for cool downs. I did buy epic flight form for my mining druid. This has sped up farming ore by leaps and bounds.
Overall, I would give Grizzley Hills a 6.5/10 score.
