So I swallowed my Stygian pride and am now a world-wandering mercenary. I was hoping to get all the way through Khopshef Province without having to go elsewhere to level, but I'm an explorer at heart, so it was always going to be an inevitable thing I guess. Its an opportunity in disguise I think, and an opportunity to spread The Good News to ignorant foreign savages!
Its quite interesting to learn how much the two alternative zones, The Wild Lands of Zelata and Conall's Valley, differ from the Stygian adventure zone, and its more than just the scenery. Wild Lands seems to have quite a few more instances on offer, for example, while Conall's seems to have more than average in the way of group-based questing. They all look good, mind you, and I'm just enjoying the scenery of it all; suitably epic landscapes in all the zones I've seen so far. And of course, grabbing all the yellow !'s I see, and if you do it like that, a bit of of a worldwide smorgasbord of missioning, there seems very little need to hunker down and grind on mobs, certainly at this lower end anyway.
I'm learning that it isn't meant to be the usual kind of thing; a balanced set of alternative equivalents, so that each 'side' gets their own version of it all, there seem not to be any 'sides' in that sense, and instead, we're all meant to go to all of the zones. Fair enough, a wanderer I shall be!
Impressive sights so far include The Maze, a brooding spider and demon infested set of canyons that we were slightly overpowered for, and anyway, you know what spiders and cobwebs are like around Fire. Good News suitably driven home, we then went off to the big ruins in the middle of the map, which had another huge staircase! I love the Heroic Rampage Up The Big Staircase, so it was great to see the theme is repeated out in the post-Tortage real world. Once up the top, its on to the ever-present Undead Hordes, and beyond that, the enigmatic, and often LFGed Sanctum of Burning Souls. We peeked inside, then ran away screaming from the first 'trashmob' in the place, a rather enraged huge spider monster. Probably have to hold on the missionary work in there for the time being, I think.
Quite enjoyed the Border Range side instance place, which we happened to be just about the right level for, which is always nice. Its a winding canyon pass on the border between the warring nations of Aquilonia and Nemedia, and it seems the big military push has ground to a halt somewhat. Enter two hapless mercenaries, stage left! An interesting chain of quests in there, although we did have some troubles getting the requisite ticks in the journals. The Ranger went afk briefly, and me, full of enthusiastic zeal, managed to completely depopulate the place of the Dark Beast werewolf things, before they'd managed to get back. Unfortunately, the group shared ticks require your little team to be quite close together, or all land some damage or something, which meant the Ranger didn't get any of the ticks along the quest for my somewhat frenzied spree, so we had to both leave the place, degroup, regroup and then go back in to reset the place, to let the Ranger have a werewolf or two. Oops, my bad!
The plot thickens as we find a lost and routed Aqulionian patrol, and are sent all the way through the pass to the big Nemedian Fort at the far end and free a gaggle of prisoners. The whole 'not being close enough' thing reared it's ugly head again; I got all a bit Red Mist again, and was somewhere on the other side of the enemy camp, enlightening the natives on the Word of Xotli, (I love my job), while the Ranger was actually getting on with the whole Freeing the Prisoners bit, and by the time I calmed down, they'd already scarpered. No tick for me! Still, this must have been one problem they'd anticipated, as by the time I'd finished unsuccessfully beating myself against the closed fort door (which it turns out, you're not supposed to break down at all), the cage magically closed and filled up with prisoners again, allowing me to be a Hero too. Phew! So all in all, a bit quirky, but still a fun self-contained romp.
Later explorations have seen me poking about the Cimmerian lands too, which are all very Alpine, and a quick peek into the Fields of the Dead, which I'm not quite ready for yet, but which seems to be the only L40 Adventure zone on the map, so I expect plenty of Good News to be spread in there in the weeks ahead. Not wanting to neglect my Resource Gathering duties (Or more precisely, wanting to free up six quest slots), I then finished the tour by heading into Lacheish Plains, the Cimmerian Resource zone. I expect its quite nice too, but I ended up far beneath the world on entry, so will have to come back another time to see that properly. The Perils of Foreign Parts...you wouldn't get that kind of thing happening in Stygia, I can tell you!