The air is festive and steam-filled inside the cave of the northeastern coast of the Broken Isles, as the bodies of Horde and Alliance players alike form a pile around an orb that must be clicked to complete the Legion expansion’s recently-discovered secret world quest.
I’ve been working my way through the Kosumoth the Hungering quest, discovered by secret-hunting players earlier this week. It involves finding a series of ten orbs hidden throughout the Broken Isles and clicking them in the correct order. Once they are clicked, the player can kill Kosumoth the Hungering, a demon unleashed by players in the Eye of Azshara zone upon first discovering the secret process. If all goes well, they will get a world quest for killing him, which will reward a special mount.
It’s all pretty simple and straightforward, except that the orbs currently have a cooldown rate of something like 30 minutes to an hour, so once any player clicks on it, it’s non-clickable for everybody else for a rather long time.
Following the directions on WowHead, I managed to click through the first five orbs over the course of an evening. This morning I headed to the underwater cave off the coast of Stormheim for orb number six, and discovered two things. First, that area is a cross-server zone, so everyone is in that cave, attempting to click an orb that is only clickable maybe once or twice an hour. Second, a cave filled with players trying to click on an unclickable thing while deadly steam geysers randomly fill the area is endlessly entertaining.
People are chatting, dancing, taking bets on which of the players crowding the orb in the center of the cave will be shot up into the air by steam and killed next. People are spawning clickable items where the orb should be — it’s hard to tell with all the bodies — causing the folks cautiously waiting along the edges of the death trap to charge forward into the superheated water.
This is horrible, horrible design on Blizzard’s part. The chances of being at the orb in the center of the room, out-clicking everyone else and surviving long enough to attune to it are astronomical, and yet they hold out hope. It’s kind of beautiful.
The players’ actions, that is. The quest design is horrible. Blizzard said earlier this week that a hotfix is in the works, which will make it easier to click the orb, but will also kill the endlessly entertaining Steam Death Cave. It will be missed.
Comments
6 responses to “Witness World Of Warcraft: Legion’s Amazing Steam Death Cave Before It’s Gone”
I wish blizzard would stop designing crap like this that you have to camp for hours to have a chance of clicking something.
I remember coming across something similar in Shadowmoon back in WoD, there was a cave with a clickable doodad that just had a huge crowd of people around it because it would only spawn once every 10 minutes or so and everyone who was levelling needed to click it to progress their quest.
Blizzard designs things for all kinds of play styles, and they’ve said this repeatedly when asked. Some people enjoy camping out ultra rare spawns like Aeonaxx and the Time-Lost Proto-Drake, so they continue to put content like that into the game. It’s completely optional, you can participate if you want to or you can ignore it. Not every feature is intended for every player and it’s silly to think that just because one personally doesn’t like a particular activity that it’s bad design and should be removed.
Well said. I used to raid at pretty high levels in EQ, and saw stuff that 99% of the players would probably never see. Some of the raids there were brutal just to get keyed for, let alone beat.
Not everyone will experience a lot of content, and people need to be aware of the efforts needed to experience some things. Think of original Naxx; not everyone got to see the original zone before they changed it.
no
It’s like Blizz putting quest rewards behind mythic dungeons, not required but since the reward is so good, everyone wants to do it.
Remember the Whale Shark achievement? Haha the flavour text was something like “You killed the Whale Shark in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that it drops no loot.”