Go to login and the first thing that greets me is a warning that most of the servers will be offline all day and night Tuesday for maintenance and patching. Lovely. That would leave me just Wednesday for the summer festival, so tucked that into the back of my mind as I recalled to Booty Bay. At level 38 I was now tall enough to take on a lot of the quests I had previously postponed, so I dove into the jungle north of Booty Bay and began culling raptors with a ferocious err...ferocity. Along the way I found several pirate encampments, and gleefully obliterated them as I collected a few trinkets for the townsfolk (read: other pirates) they had wronged.
After a few dozen close encounters of the raptory kind, I headed north west to the shore line to investigate an island inhabited by water elementals and a spectral and thoroughly untouchable goblin wizard. The elementals were completely immune to cold magic, so I had to rely on my ghetto fire spells to down them. The drawbacks of being a specialty wizard.
From that point, I dove underwater to explore a sunken colony of murlocks that were guarding a stone tablet inscribed with trollish legends. As a side note: swimming is a utilized mechanic in this game with some content deep in the water for those who explore. You have a limited amount of air (barring spells I don't have) and failure to surface before its expiration will result in your own. After retrieving the tablet, it was on to storm a garrison of trolls to recover several other similar tablets. Finally returning to Booty Bay, I hit level 39. That's when I decided to have a little extra fun.
I opted at that point to take a break from grinding to take advantage of the Festival before it ended and thus began a long and circuitous flight path to hit a number of waypoints that had bonfires to honor. I visited the western continent to the city of Gadgetzan and came across a horde bonfire before I found my own. I stamped it out and got double the experience of one of my own fires. Hmm. I checked the map. I was heading north anyway to honor a couple of flames and turn in a couple of quests in the neighborhood, so I decided to go the extra mile (or three) and head into the starting zone for the Tauren, the Horde minotaur race. After stamping out their fire there, I decided I'd try for the big prize: the flame in the middle of their capital city of Thunder Bluff, situated on a massive mesa another couple of minutes north of my then-present position. I knew it'd be killed, but maybe...just maybe I could pull it off.
I ran north along a path to the rise and hopped on an elevator that carried me skywards. No sooner had I reached the top and taken three steps, but one of their NPC guards hit me once and sent me straight to the graveyard. Not easily dissuaded, I ran back and resurrected 20 or so yards from my corpse behind a building. This afforded me a few seconds of reprieve, so I got close to a suspension bridge that emerged from the second story of a building I'd need to enter...and promptly got one-shotted again. And back again I ran...
This time I was able to bypass the building altogether and resurrect on the bridge itself. I crossed it without any interference and saw my prize! I dove for the flame just as my screen flashed "Entering combat!" and the half-second I was able to touch the fire was enough! I died, but not before stealing their flame. As a side note, my death provided an unintentional diversion for a level 80 night elf who was attempting the same. I snickered when I saw it was a member of SCARAB, Brian's guild. Not bothering to recover my corpse, I took the 10 minute resurrection sickness and 25% armor degradation option, then teleported to the alliance capital of Stormwind to trade in my prize for a bounty of goodies.
It was about then that I looked at my in-game calendar and realized I was wrong-- very wrong. The festival won't end for another week! It was just missing because the month changed to July at that point. D'oh! Still, it would give me a little more time to collect bonfires and credits for more festival toys. It wasn't a waster tour, however. I was now well over halfway to level 40. Once more into the breach!
I ground out the rest of the level on pirates and ended the night upgrading my spells and my mechanized ostrich. My new ride doubles my overland speed and I'm very happy now!
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