The style of writing does vary from time to time and often may be viewed as self-indulgent prattling. There are many times I am horribly, horribly wrong or miss certain painfully obvious things. Some would say this adds to the charm. Likewise, grammatical and typographical errors likely abound. There is no excuse for this aside from sheer laziness.

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

The Blasted Lands

Still too tiny for Outlands (the Burning Crusade expansion must wait until level 58), I found myself scanning available zones and decided to venture forth to the Blasted Lands-- home to the Outlands portal, a dragon to avoid, and various denizens of the wastelands.  I rather like this area due to one "gimmick" in the design-- periodically giant bolts of lightning will ground, kicking off plumes of smoke.  I have no idea if they damage, as I've never been at ground zero when they strike, but it adds atmosphere.

Fortunately, my earlier wanderings had given me a flight path to Nethergard Keep, located in the far north of the region and, curiously, no one really had any quests to give me except a "go visit this guy" quest.  This didn't bode well. 

After a bit of exploring, I found a pair of quest givers on the way to aforementioned guy and they wanted a lot of miscellaneous body parts from the zone's critter population:  boar lungs, vulture gizzards, and the like.  Annoyingly enough, the requests overlapped.  One quest, for example required 3x, 2y, and 1z while another required 10x and 2y.  Given there were about six of these quests, it was going to make keeping quest progress by checking inventory tricky.  That's when I noticed the quests were all four levels beneath me.

Ugh.  It'd be a slow level, but I didn't feel compelled to venture somewhere else.  Quest xp is still a decent reward and I figured by knocking out all of these, I could progress a tidy way to the next milestone on my path to Dalaran.

I tucked the laundry list of assorted viscera into my back pocket and meandered over to the aforementioned "guy", who turned out to be a Tauren, or a spirit of a Tauren, or a leopard.  I wasn't really paying attention.  His minor task was to annihilate a couple dozen Servants of Insert_Gibberish_Name_Here and free their captive souls.  The quest was slightly above my level, so this would be very good xp.  Yada, yada and I'm off.  This is one time it would've paid to have read the quest description fully. 

I explode various animals on my way to the first place Servants roam and find one near a sparkling crystal on the ground.  Trusty Steve and I annihilate it quickly, though it doesn't die-- it just looks stunned and is hovering at one hit point, despite receiving hundreds of extra damage every few seconds from Steve.  Oh crap.  The glowy crystal thing!  I had kited it away from its home and feverishly blinked over to the crystal...and I couldn't use it.  Perplexed, I tried everything to affect it to no avail.  Meanwhile, the dazed expression had worn off and the Servant, still at one health just continued to wail on Steve until my elemental was no more.  The Hell?!

I ran away and let the...thing reset.  I tried again.  Same result.  Hrmph. 
Finally, I read the quest and figured out I had to knock the living snot out of the Servants while they were practically hugging the crystals, then break the crystal, then do the last point of damage to the Servant.  Glah! 

After that mess was done with, Steve and I took to patrolling the savage wastes, annihilating everything in our path in the hopes of gathering enough guts to satisfy all of the quests.  Six mixed collection quests combined with low drop rates does not make for Happy Fun Time.  Still, as I killed I received a few stones which were tradable to a local blood elf for random green (uncommon) magic loot, so it wasn't a total wash.

Finishing up the last of the quests earned my ding and I was ready to leave the zone for good.

Next stop:  Silithus!

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