Weena wrote:
There's a random island SSW (I think) from Southshore that simply has elite mobs and an eerie mountain.
Purgation Isle.
The island isn't without function. That island is used in the Dungeon Set 2 quest chain, and it also used to be a great place to farm gold. There also used to be the original owner of The Judge's Gavel, a named "judge".
The inhabitants are also amongst the very few undead mobs in the game that can swim and are susceptible to Fear.
That island, though, is a really good example of why Vanilla was awesome: it's a cool, eerie location just slightly off the beaten track, in an odd spot between two zones. It's easy to randomly come across it while exploring; I remember swimming around on my first character and seeing an undead level 55 dwarf paladin mob waddle into sight along the coast and thinking "ooo snap"...
The design is also very dramatic. The fog gets thicker, the mobs more dangerous, and the ruins more sinister towards the summit. It's very organic and much more immersive than the outrageous and stereotyped content in this expansion - nothing in Icecrown, for example. Icecrown also feels very gimmicky - there's too much movement and things going on, everything is very overdone in brilliant colors, with outrageously overdone models - Vanilla had a subdued quality to it which made it much more profound.
That quality is lost on the current dev team that subscribes to the "Disneyland" design philosophy.
...also, it's ironic that I am ultimately the exception that proves the rule: the guy who actually earned legitimate "prestige" in this expansion.
