While I was watching the Race to World First event for World of Warcrafts new raid I needed a brainless activity to grind out while watching the broadcast on my second monitor. I decided to start a grind that I have been wanting to do for a long time. Collecting as much as I can from the old zones of World of Warcraft. It's a huge and time consuming task that can be done without paying much attention. I don't know why, but somehow it manages to be a fun activity.
Nostalgic collection
As much fun as it is to always be playing the newest content, World of Warcraft has one thing going for it. Once you need a break from that new content there's 20 years of old content to be explores in the game. All that content has a ton of things to be completes and even more things to be collected. Ranging from transmogs, pets, mounts, achievements and more.
I decided to try something new and go back to the old world of the Eastern Kingdom and Kalimdor. These are the original classic continents that features in the game when it released back in 2004. All of the zones here were revamped when the Cataclysm expansion released in 2010. The zones are mostly the same with some topographical changes and new questlines. I never explored them back then so I decided to go back and take a look at them, zone by zone.
Westfall memories
For some reason I decided to start with the Westfall zone. This is usually the second zone you get to when playing a human character. It also features the Deadmines dungeon, which is usually the first dungeon for Alliance characters. There's a lot of things to collect here in the form of zone drops from specific enemies with extremely low drop rates, drops from rare enemies and lots of rewards from quests.
I decided to start my grind by running the Deadmines dungeon until I was locked out and then do open world content. That seems like the most efficient way to do it. Since I'm playing as a max level character I'm one shotting everything so this isn't a difficult challenge at all. It's just a time consuming one that requires commitment.
Druid built for speed
I decided to do all of this on my Druid. Druids have the advantage of having several animal forms to turn into that increases movement speed both outside and inside. That's very helpful when it comes to speeding up dungeons. I build my UI around collecting items and having as much visual guidance on my screen as possible. Completely different from how I usually build my UIs as I like to focus on immersion. Different playstyles require different things.
I think it took me roughly 8 hours of playtime to collect around 90% of the things in Westfall. This time is mostly spent killing the same enemy over and over again. The worst item was the Silver Defias Belt which took me over 400 kills on one single enemy to get. This enemy wasn't in a high density area either. Most other items dropped within 200 kills so this was an outlier for sure.
I went through the questline which as a really fun one. It builds on the story from the original classic zone. I farmed all the zone drops, and I cleared the Deadmines dungeon on normal mode and collected all the items there. I'm still missing drops from a few rares and the Deadmines on heroic mode. I'm just gonna have to circle back for these every now and then seeing as the rares have 30-60 minutes spawn timers and the heroic dungeons are on a daily lockout.
It was a fun challenge and I'll probably be doing this for more classic zones. The things you get aren't anything special. They don't look cool or anything but they're a tick on the sheet and they make numbers go up. I like it when numbers go up.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.