My human paladin encountered an NPC I hadn’t seen before in Stormwind: “Lil Timmy <Boy With Kittens>”. I moused over him and saw the trade cursor, so I clicked on him and a vendor window came up with nothing in it. I assume the window was empty because my character was a paladin? Darn it, I wanted a kitten!
Speaking of NPCs, one little detail I’m enjoying is encountering some of the various NPCs in Stormwind in different places. I’ve seen this a couple times:
There’s a group of three young women (apprentice mages, I assume) I first came across sitting and conversing on the grass near the tower in the Mage Quarter. A couple days later I spotted them walking together in a completely different part of the city. Then there’s what seems to be a pair of retired soldiers - a human and a dwarf - I first encountered in a tavern, reminiscing about some battle they’d been in during the last war. Later on I found them walking together elsewhere in the city.
I think that kind of thing helps bring the world to life. But I haven’t yet seen the same thing in Thunder Bluff, Orgrimmar, or Ironforge.
I’m getting a little frustrated with each of my three main characters (my tauren hunter, human paladin, and night elf druid). Each of them has seemingly reached a point — at different levels, oddly enough — where the quests they’re getting are suddenly too high-level for them. This happened to my hunter around lvl 30 (after moving on from The Barrens to Ashenvale), my druid around lvl 15 (after moving from Teldrassil to Darkshore), and now my paladin around lvl 20 (moving from Westfall to Lakeshire). My suspicion is that this is Blizzard’s way of trying to make me stop soloing and start partying up (either that, or they just expect most players to spend time farming XP, which bores me). So I’ve actually spent most of the last couple days just working on obtaining various Exploration achievements - going back and finding the spots I missed in the areas I’ve already been. My hunter has five of these now, I think: Mulgore, The Barrens, Thousand Needles, Stonetalon Mountains, and Durotar.
Last night I started my human paladin running through Dun Morogh, all the way back to Anvilmar, doing the low-level dwarf/gnome quests to farm reputation with Ironforge/Gnomeregan as well as work on getting the Explore Dun Morogh achievement. While I ran around I had fun casting Blessing of Might on all the lowbie gnomes that were questing through there (strangely, all gnomes. Didn’t see any lowbie dwarves.) She also finished exploring Westfall — she somehow hadn’t made it out to the Westfall Lighthouse yet, and I found three quests for her there. She ended up finding a really nice shield that looks like a ship’s steering wheel. She’s actually not finished with the Westfall quests - she’s stuck on that Defias Traitor escort mission, the one where you have to protect the guy while he leads you to the Defias hideout. I’ll probably go back soon to try again, as my last couple trips to the paladin trainer gained me a couple new abilities that should prove helpful: the spell that makes up to three enemies attack me instead of my “ally”, in particular. On my first try with that mission, the guy ended up getting mobbed and there was nothing I could do to save him.
Regarding my druid in Darkshore: that place has too damned many bears! I literally can’t do anything there without a bear attacking me from behind while I’m engaged with some other enemy. The quest where I had to find 5 Fine Moonstalker Pelts was insane. There’s just something … incongruent … about a druid — “protector of nature” — being forced to wantonly slaughter the local fauna for no reason other than “they’re in my way”. I mean, the place is just thick with bears to the point of straining credulity. I know it’s not supposed to be realistic, but bears are a little more territorial than that. You just don’t find bears swarming like that. If anything in Darkshore should appear in “herds”, it ought to be those strider birds.
I had somehow gotten myself flagged for PVP without realizing it. So I’m in this area fighting a demon 2-3 levels higher than me, when out of the corner of my eye I saw two Alliance players with red names just standing there. A quick mouseover showed me the “??” where their levels should be. I resigned myself to the fact that if they wanted to kill me they were gonna kill me, and I turned my attention back to the demon.