Bound and determined to put Sholozan behind me, I focused on clearing out the Nesingwary hunter quests, as I’d have to complete them at some point for a certain achievement and honestly… Blizzard put serious work into the characters so I wanted to see the ending. I was not disappointed. The arc culminated with a hunt with Nesingwary himself, both of us on his mammoth. I’m steering and he’s riding shotgun…literally. I’m running the mammoth in circles while being attacked by a giant fire-breathing dragon. He’s screaming at the it (and me) while dropping traps and firing his shotgun at the fell beast. Good times! Victory brought a wonderfully scripted dialogue back at the camp as Nesingwary recounted the adventure to his party.
Finished up a handful of other quests and accidentally aligned myself with a faction of gnolls by playing along with them while trying to find a different group to ally with. In doing so, I made my potential allies my enemies and to ‘fix it’, I’m going to have to hunt down an elite lich. Terrific. Blowing off the rest of that misadventure, I flapped around and explored the rest of the zone from the relative safety of my gryphon.
From that point, it was “Eastward, Ho!” as I gradually crossed the continent, taking and finishing minor quests in the Borean Tundra, Dragonblight, and Grizzly Woods made stupidly simple with air travel. My goal was to ‘fill in’ the areas of the map I had not yet explored in those zones and I did so with ease.
Took a brief break when a random dungeon team was available and I found myself in some unpronounceable hellhole populated with golems. The prevailing party opinion was to skip as much of the dungeon as possible and get to the end boss quickly. From what I saw, I was glad we did. We picked up an NPC dwarf along the way and we had to defend him as he worked to disable “automated defense systems” that must have shared an AI with GlaDOS. The place was nightmarish and I had no idea what was going on half the time. Tonight I’m going to read up on that place because I just know I’m going to see it again and I want to be better prepared. Regrettably, the anguish brought no new gear, so the experience only rewarded experience…and gold…delicious gold. With under 400 gold until epic flight, I’m scrabbling for copper coins in the gutter.
Returning to Northrend, I turned my sights northward to the Crystalsong Forest, home to Dalaran, but finding no quest hubs through casual exploration, I continued north into a frozen mountainous region known as the Storm Peaks and was delighted to quickly locate a goblin outpost known as “K3”. Making it my new home, I undertook the various tasks required and notably wound up with several explosively fun doosies.
The first was retrieve some tools from the middle of a field. A minefield, that is. A large number of anti-air cannons precluded subverted the quest by just flying to the tools, so I had to pick my way through the field densely populated with proximity mines. More than once I found myself flying through the air from a mine that was a little too close, but in the end I made it out alive with my prize. I would soon get some of my own back.
Soon armed with improved mines, I got to deploy a minefield of my own and set traps for magnataurs (think buff ugly centaurs) that were more intent on storming a goblin outpost than hassling me. It was pleasantly fulfilling.
Finally, I got the most awesome quest ever and I was deeply saddened to know it wasn’t repeatable. It was so nice I considered never turning it in, just so I could KEEP doing it. The task? Get a bomb with a short fuse from a dispenser. From the time you pick it up, you’ve got less than a minute to get rid of it. The goal? Find a mammoth and strap the bomb to its side. When the mammoth blows, pick up chunks of meat that rain down on the nearby scenery. PETA would not approve.
I can’t wait to see what the rest of the zone holds.
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