AV Club

I returned to retail so I could experience "Classic Alterac Valley", which I remember as being a total slog. Spoiler: it still is. Everything is scaled to level 60, so all of the mobs are actually threatening when encountered in groups. There's no reinforcements, so it goes on back and forth until one side trounces the other... but wait, there's more.

The 15th Anniversary prize you get is another mount, an Alterac Ram of some sort, isn't for actually winning an AV match. You get it for earning 200 timewalking badges by doing quests in the battleground. As a consequence, you have two factions on your own team: the people trying to win the battle and the people who are just trying to earn tokens to get their mount. It's hell.

Contrary to what people say, AV is very Alliance-winnable. All total I played through 5 games to earn my 200 badges and we won three of them.


It CAN be done!

I also took the time to play through "the thrilling end to the War Campaign", which was delivered in patch 8.2.5. I wish I hadn't bothered. Start to finish it's about 30 minutes with a handful of busywork quests and cutscenes that show what is derisively being called Siege of Orgrimmar 2.0.

It's seriously bad.

15 Years!

Sorry for the lack of updates lately, faithful readers. It's been a crazy few weeks. Between a busier-than-usual work schedule, a brief dalliance with a few other games, starting in earnest to learn Japanese, and writing a decidedly non-Warcraft-related novel, time in Azeroth has been somewhat short.

Magrom continues to enjoy a semi-retired life in Ironforge as Marrowsweet slowly enjoys the Horde-side of things. After adventuring a bit in Silverpine, I took her over to the Barrens to enjoy Happy Stabbing Time in the Land of Infinite Leather. She's managed to reach her sweet sixteen and I note with some amusement that a decade and a half later, the place still features an abhorrent chat rife with Chuck Norris references. It amuses me somewhat that Chuck's only been in one movie, the Expendables 2, since 2005 and he still maintains a presence in a game that continues to echo the same banal jokes.

My personal favorite: "Chuck Norris invented White Castle burgers when he roundhouse kicked a cow through a chain link fence."

In celebration of the 15th Anniversary, I briefly stepped into retail to claim my gift box (free pet!) and run through the 9 raid bosses for the free Deathwing (excuse me, "Obsidian Worldbreaker") mount. Flying into the Caverns of Time was a delight. There's a party-like atmosphere throughout the place-- revelers, balloons, a discotheque, and even a stall where Leeroy Jenkins sells chicken. Near crystals which allow you to re-watch a number of in-game cinematics and expansion launch trailers is the star of the show, Chromie.

Chromie allows you to queue up for 3 special LFR raids: one for Burning Crusade, one for Wrath of the Lich King, and one for Cataclysm. Each of these contains three "iconic" raid bosses. As you journey to each, you join the raid encounter in progress and wail on the boss until a certain amount of damage is done and then you are teleported back out by Chromie. While you only get to experience a "slice" of each boss, you're scaled appropriately and have to face the full gamut of boss mechanics for the phase. So, we hope you remembered, for example, how to do the safety dance in Naxxramas and all of the Lich King's special fight moves. Failing any one of the three bosses means you get to start all three over again and they are in a present order.

It's amazing how fast it comes back to you and even with the LFR mentality, you will eventually get enough determination to be victorious. The fights that gave my teams the most trouble were Cho'gall (switch to adds!), Heigan the Unclean ('you can dance if you want to…'), and Achimonde (this dick just sets everybody on fire and frequently throws raid-wide 5 second fears, scattering the group). In the end it took a little less than two hours to complete them all.

The only thing left to do now is experience "the classic Alterac Valley", which I resolved to try this weekend, simply because it can take ages.

Beware, I Unlive!

Started off the evening by creating my undead rogue on Bloodsail. She was no looker and all of the "good names" were taken. (Stabigail, Stabitha, etc.) My wife provided the suggestion "Stabbyabby" and, miracle of miracles, it wasn't taken. I roamed around the nearly empty starting area of Someplace Forgettable leveling up to level 4 or so before realizing what I was doing was dumb.

You see, not all populations are created equal. Bloodsail is among the the worst when in comes to faction balance. Not overly surprising given that it's not only a PvE server, but an RP one at that. For whatever reason, people who RP are more likely to play Alliance and people who PvP are more likely to roll Horde.

Don't take my word for it, here's the server breakdown from WoWHead:



So for my purposes, small population means stunted economy, fewer people to team with, and generally less of a good time should I ever want to take a rogue into battlegrounds when Phase 3 hits. Well, fewer queues, true, but a quick succession of /who commands showed only 39 level 60s only. WTF? 8 people level 2-6. Ok, this simply won't do.

I looked at the chart and said "screw it". I'll play the PvP server with the most unfair Horde to Alliance balance possible. Is it cheap? Beyond the shadow of a doubt. Do I particularly care? Oh, hell no. I'll be killed a thousand times by Alliance on the road to 60, but I'm certain I'll be avenged ten thousand times over. I recreated my little rogue on Stalagg and this time gave her a name I shamelessly stole from another player on Bloodsail, because I thought it was absolutely delightful: Marrowsweet.

Time to get things started-- again!


Like this, but different.

Breezed through the starting area, because that's how it's designed and made my way to the first of many depressing stops along my anti-hero's journey, the town of Brill. I made it my home base and picked up skinning and leatherworking. I'm going to Do It Right this time! (So, let's see how I screw it up, eh?)

Journey's End?

Magrom spent the last quarter of his final level blasting holes in the wildlife in Winterspring for reputation quests. The Timbermaw Gnolls and Wintersaber Trainers still think about as much of him as I do of them.

Still, as an otherwise inconsequential bear fell to a well-placed shot, Magrom was enveloped by an aura of levelupness for the final time. Level 60. Feels good. He has beaten the World of Warcraft. (I know, I know.)

So, now what?

There's the end game treadmill for gear. I already have some pre-raid best in slots (or close approximations) and there's the possibility of raiding.

It's much more likely that he'll lounge around Ironforge for a time, keeping Fluffers warm by the forge.

I still haven't done the Horde quests and that's a lot.

I'm thinking Undead Rogue on the same server.

ÜBRS Alles

Fresh from my Nathanos kill, I giddily decided it was time to properly skill up my new weapon skill a bit before I actually needed it for more than being a stat stick. For once I knew just the place to go.

In the ass-end of the Eastern Kingdoms there's the Blasted Lands, home to the Dark Portal. It sits menacingly inside a crater with various demony things standing silent vigils or generally skulking about the place, lowering property values. Around the rim of the crater, mixed in among felguards taking their felhounds for felwalkies, are Servants of Razelikh. What makes them special is that these level 57 thingies can only be killed when you have some quest gadget I have yet to see. For my purposes, they are immortal target dummies that hit back.

The execution was ridiculously simple: pull a Servant and let Fluffers tank while I swung every 3 seconds and change. Periodically heal Fluffers. When mana is nearly completely gone: dismiss pet the pet, get another couple of hits in, and feign death to reset. All total over 35 minutes were spent fighting the same mob and I only had to reset twice. Somewhere in the middle of all of this, a warrior wandered up and tipped me a gold to shoot it for a while himself to raise his bow skill. Periodically he'd stun the mob and throw a bandage on my pet, so that helped keep things going.

The only sour moment was when I realized in my haste to make with the slashin' I had forgotten to buff my intellect, which would have helped out a bit. Still, I was pleased that I had gone from 1 to 240 and change with very minimal effort. About ten minutes after my warrior buddy skedaddled, I left to join an Upper Blackrock Spire (UBRS) raid a guildie was organizing. Oh boy, a chance to progress my Onyxia attunement!

I made my way to Blackrock mount, climbed a giant chain suspended over molten lava, scurried along a narrow ledge, then hopped onto a balcony mere meters from the portal. As a paladin and I awaited the arrival of the rest of the team, I joined our Discord and mused at our party composition. Out of ten people we had no mages or warlocks and I was the only hunter. It was Plate Mail Central with a couple of priests healing. Blinkers, our raid leader, said that we'd be making use of my trapping skills, since we had no other form of crowd control. This set me into a panic.

You see, I've never actually "trapped". Although I bought the skills, I can count on one hand the number of times I've ever actually used the ice trap to any effect. Worse still, I could only place the trap at my feet-- I couldn't throw them like I could in retail. I hastily alt-tabbed to see if Trap Launch was a thing I'd forgotten to pick up, if it was a talent in the Survival tree or what. I could find nothing. Well, maybe they wouldn't REALLY need crowd control? We'll see.

It started off very rocky for me. The first section of the dungeon is fighting in very close quarters, which was fine for everybody else-- they were all melee. My damage was horrifically low as I tried to edge myself into a firing range without "butt-pulling" other packs of hurt. The next sets of mobs were worse as they constantly charged and knocked back ranged players. I steadfastly resolved myself to be a good hunter regardless. Growl off. Passive pet. Dismiss the pet before trying to sneak around mobs or drop from ledges.

We avoided a couple of bosses. Our prize was at the end of the dungeon and we were focused on getting there in more or less one piece. By the time we had made it to and downed the next-to-last boss (which thankfully was cake for ranged DPS), we had had only a few deaths and I was breathing a sigh of relief.

"Ok, Magrom", the raid leader said. "I'm going to need you to trap square." Oh, God.

"You are aware I can't throw traps right?" There was a brief pause and then laughter. "Yes!"

"The thing is... I've never trapped before." There was a pause and then a lot less laughter. "Well, not in Classic at any rate."

The raid leader responded matter-of-factly, "Ok-- time to learn, I guess."

Turns out, it's cake. Place an ice trap out of the area and when the tank pulls, use Distracting Shot to peel the marked target off and run it over the trap. Flawless execution the first time and every time afterwards. W00t! I'm now more useful!

Impressed (and likely surprised) by my quick uptake, Blinkers then asked if I was ok to kite the boss. "Never done it before, but I'm willing to try!" A person who used to main hunter years ago explained and it was close to what I imagined it to be. Set your Mark to speed boost, distracting shot to aggro the boss, run like the freakin' wind, and shoot it a couple time along the was to hold aggro. When the adds are death, feign death.

I buffed. I shot. I ran. I shot more. I ran like a freakin' schoolgirl on fire. Then I got caught on the dungeon terrain for a moment and then I was really on fire. The boss had caught up to me, stunned and then engulfed me with flames. As I ran around uncontrollably seconds from a fiery end, the raid leader called out. "Ok! Adds are down. You can feign death now."

"Ok. I'm not feigning."

"Oh? Oh. OH!"

The rest of the team finished up the fight and I was the only casualty. As I lay on the cold stone floor, I mused that this is how Fluffers must feel as the usual Noble Sacrifice. My UBRS trial by quite literal fire was complete.

After a quick resurrection, I scooped up some blood from the boss. We called it a success, hearthed out and disbanded. I returned to Winterfell to do the final series of corpse runs through the Cave of Draconic Hell and turned in the blood to the quest-giver.

She smiled and handed me a necklace in return.

Magrom triumphant! I'm now attuned to Onyxia's Lair.

Whither Moonglade?

Ran a dungeon (Stratholm-- live side) with a mostly guild group. It was kind of nice getting a feel for the classic dungeon vibes again. Looking back on it, this was my third dungeon run and it went fairly smoothly with a couple of wipes near the end when we got a bit cocky and patrols overwhelmed the tank and healer. Still, the run gave Magrom significant upgrades for his head and boots.

Afterwards, cleaning out completed quests left me fairly close to level. There were a few "travel to the ends of Azeroth" that were just hogging space in a quest log that stays near to bursting with dungeon, elite, and raid quests, so I opted to do what I could.

One long flight to Darnassus later, Druid Staghelm started me on a long go here, do that series of quest chains. After be-bopping through Daggerear Central, I was given a task to go to... MOONGLADE?

I had actually forgotten about the zone. As far as I was aware, outside the Lunar Festival in retail it held no purpose whatsoever. It always struck me as a waste of a zone and a city and I've long suspected there were plans for it, but they were cut short due to budget or time. A search through Questie's database raised an eyebrow. There were all of 6 quests attributable to the zone. Well, it looks like I'm doing them!

The second surprise was when the Moonglade quest sent me to... SILITHUS? I thought there were no quests whatsoever there yet, but to my surprise there was at least one "feeder" chain that led into it. This short chain had me riding back and forth to kill spectral druids for some reason I probably should have read. The important thing (to me) was that every time you killed something, a level 57-58 wasp would spawn in. Lovely. Fortunately, it was enough to nudge Magrom over to the hump into level 59. Home stretch, baby!

Fast forward through a Silithid-infested tower invasion and I'm winging my way back to Moonglade. With a 13 minute and 13 second flight time, I'm starting to miss the teleportation Strev had. The quest line ended somewhat abruptly with mention of a book that was under some bug goo that was in an ancient version of the Night Elven tongue. My expectation is that after a little while a translation would show up in my mailbox, as it has for several other quests, but alas-- no such love here. It is literally the end of it all. I find that to be a bit... unsatisfying.

I flew over to Winterspring to see if I could ninja 10 frostmaul shards to complete an elite quest there. Testing the waters, I found Fluffers simply couldn't keep up with the damage the Frostmaul Giants were dishing out. Consequently, Fluffers made The Supreme Sacrifice a few times as I gathered rocks a few inches from very one-sided beatdowns, flopping as necessary. In time, I gathered all ten (of course) with minimal fuss.

Of note, in the area I found a satyr named Lorax who only spoke in gibberish. I would love to know what he was yammering on about.


Obviously, he speaks for the trees.

Leaving all of that behind me, I joined a guild group for Strat, live side, which netted me my BiS boots and a near-BiS polearm. Unfortunately, I didn't know how to wield polearms, but a dwarf in Timberline Arms in Ironforge told me I could seek such training in Stormwind. I needed to go there anyway to pick up a quest chain that would eventually pit me against the undead asshole Nathanos, so I was ok with the diversion.

Master Woo Ping *cough* in Stormwind taught Magrom all he needed to know as far as "how to hold a long stick with a bit of metal on the end", but actual proficiency would be left to the battlefield. So, with no skill in my chosen weapon, I went forth to slay "the" Nathaniel Blightcaller.

Major props to Stickman for both the Nathaniel raid invitation and the patience for a few minutes while I got caught up on the quest series to actually do it. The quest rewards a seriously nice wand, bow, or shield-- all of which were quite worthless to me. But Nathaniel? I hate that guy so much. Filling him with bullets was a wonderful end to the day.

Little did I suspect there would be so much more ahead...

(continued tomorrow)

Miner Diversions

Hit level 58 while finishing a few final quests in the Eastern Plaguelands. I returned to Ironforge and decided "what the hell"- I'll train up all of the stupid skills I've been sitting on that should be bumped up. That was about 50 gold and change. Then I said to myself "Hey, let's hit the AH just to see if there's a better axe or something or maybe some armor got a little cheaper." That's when the floor fell out of my personal universe.

The BiS Hunter gun, Dwarven Cannon, normally sells for three to four hundred gold. Someone had just listed one with a 220g buyout. I hit that 'buy' button so hard, so keyboard buckled. Add about tree fiddy for a scope and I'm sitting below fifteen gold. YIKES!

At this point panic mode sets in. I don't NEED gold-- in fact there's about 25 sitting idly on my bank alt, Hiddenpocket, but something primal kicked in and I decided I NEEDED MONEY NOW, presumably to keep from starving to death or something. For the billionth time I cursed myself for dropping Skinning, and decided to play to my strengths.

I lacked the capital to effectively corner a market or flip rare mats and I haven't been paying enough attention to ancillary markets to know what particular mats are needed for what potions or enchantments. By god, I'd do this old school and farm some freakin' metal. There's a reason I've kept mining all this time. Well, the promise of profit and my sheer mule-headedness.

I'd pick picking nodes here and there where I could find them in EPL, but they were sparse. It's a well-populated zone. Winterspring was simply nightmarish to navigate AND it was covered with people. So I needed a high-level zone no one cared about.

Holy crap. I knew one. SILITHUS! Prime time on Saturday and just four players were there-- cloth types that were farming elementals. I grinned and took to the skies. Let's see what fortunes may await...

From the FP I fell north into a hidden elite mob. Hilarity ensued. Within 5 minutes I had found my first arcane crystal, worth 40g or so on the marketplace. Things were looking up. As I circled around the zone, I felt as though I had stumbled into a secret area granted only to a privileged few. The mobs were in the upper 50s so when I bothered to fight, the xp was rewarding. I tucked into tunnels when I felt as though my pet would be able to buy me at least 2 hits on a rich vein of thorium. As I explored, I learned what dives were ok to recover from and which would involve earning a 10 minute timeout. This was somewhat compounded when I discovered there was no place to repair gear in Silithus. The blacksmith isn't added until the quests are added in later. Terrific.

I paused to try my luck with some air elementals, since Essences were always consistent sellers. I've had streaks of bad luck before, but 20 in a row dropped absolutely nothing. A check on the forums shows that I wasn't the only one that's happened to, so that was a bust.

After a lap, I've decided that my first five minutes were the best five minutes and retreated to Ironforge to lick my wounds and sell what I'd gathered

Forging Ahead

Magrom stood above the forge, silent and tired. He mopped rivulets of sweat away with a soiled rag. Even discounting the trip to Gadgetzan to pick up the last of the needed schemata, it had taken hours and so much gold to finish. So much gold. That was what pained him even in his moment of triumph. He held aloft a thorium bullet. "I'll t' sell lots o' these t' recoup it all.", he muttered.

Dropping the shell into a sack with thousands or others, he grinned wryly, finally allowing himself some sense of self-satisfaction. He knew his skill at Engineering was now unparalleled. He'd spend the evening in the tavern, celebrating the proper way.

Midway through his fifth ale, his party-of-one was interrupted by a boisterous group of adventurers clamoring at the bar, screaming at Innkeeper Firebrew for "Trick or Treats". Oh, bugger i' all, Magrom thought glumly. Tha' explains all th' fookin' pumpkins." He decided to deal with that after just another few tankards...
--
Indeed, the Hallow's End celebration has begun in Azeroth and even though Classic has a very stripped down version compared to retail, it has one major prize everyone wants: 16-slot BoP bags that randomly drop off any undead level 50+. Visions of filling my lots with delightful pumpkin bags delighted me. I'd take the extra bags and use them for my bank. Heck I'd go ahead and buy the rest of the bank slots when that happens. My older non-soulbound bags would be sent to an alt who couldn't farm bags for themselves. It'd be a GRAND ol' time in the Plaguelands.

Except it wasn't. Somewhere in my zeal, I'd neglected to account for the fact the drop rate would be somewhere around the odds of Magrom soloing Onyxia in his skivvies. By the end of the night, I'd not even heard a rumor of anyone getting one of these fabled bags and for my own part I had nearly ground out an entire level in the Plaguelands (both sides) questing and killing so many undead. Well, if nothing else, at least I was earning Argent Dawn reputation.

Questseeking

I make no secret that I use a number of add-ons to improve my general quality of virtual life. One of these is Questie, a neat little thing which shows where available quests around your level can be found and (generally) where targets of those quests can be found. Over the last month and change I've become a little dependent upon it. Imagine my horror when after an update it stopped working. Frantically looking and clicking through all of the options to no avail, it wasn't until I fully exited out of WoW and restarted before my word was again populated with happy little exclamation marks on the global map.

During my blind panic, I had discovered a previously-unknown nifty feature Questie had. It had an interface where you could pick a zone and it would tell you which quests you had or had not done for it, total counts of each, who starts them, and its level. Whoa. Hello there, Mr. Gamechanger.

The thing about it is there's tons of quests which are part of a chain and since chains can start anywhere around the world, there's a solid chance you've missed The Important Breadcrumb. I've likely missed out on plenty because, despite everything, I still have a "retail mentality". Despite literally dozens of times this has been false, I STILL tend to think "If NPC Joe wants me to send me to another zone, that's so I know where there's monsters to kill in my level or it'll send me to a new quest hub."

So the one bad thing about Questie's here's-what-you've-missed UI, as I call it, is that it makes no distinction what quests are part of a chain and, if so, whao or what kicks it off. So when I saw I had done far less than half of the quests for Winterspring, it was a matter of finding a quest on the list that sounded interesting, and then alt-tabbing over to Wowhead to find out what chain it belongs to and where to go to start it.

Thus I went from 56 to 57 (mostly) painlessly by playing "catchup" by hunting down seemingly irrelevant people, killing things until a specific gewgaw drops and running around like an idiot. Come to think of it, that's what I do most days, but this time with purpose!

I'm actually a little excited now. I thought I was nearing the end of it all, but it seems there's a lot more loose threads on the tapestry that can be pulled. Let's see what the weekend brings!

A Small Aside

Found the recipe for Thorium shells for 40 gold and snagged it immediately.

Then I see that it's going to take 285 engineering to craft them. DOH!

At least I know what I'll be doing this weekend!

Wing Clip

The last couple of days saw abbreviated playtime as I slowly quested my way to 56 in Winterspring and the Eastern Plaguelands.

As per usual, I continue to hamstring myself by repeating stupid mistakes. Kill 40 yeti trying to get the last of 10 hides to drop? You better believe it was because I had one in the bank. (Third time banking quest items bit me, for those of you keeping count.) Questing and grinding in the plaguelands? Sure, we'll farm undead for over an hour before realizing I forgot to equip the trinket that causes rep turn-in items to drop.

I've nearly exhausted the non-elite, non-dungeon quests that are obvious in the areas I'm hunting. While I'm not looking forward to potentially grinding out the last 3 levels, I'll need to suck it up and spend time with the dead so I can purchase level 55 food.

That seems to be what's hurting-- after a certain point, the scaling doesn't seem to progress well. Besides the whole food thing, I'm using the same store-bought ammo I did at 40 due to cost and the inability to find the recipe that lets me make thorium shells. The top (x) projectile weapons are all bows, which would be great... if I were a troll. I love the aesthetic of "dwarf with gun". Between the launch cinematic with its damn-it-all gun-wielding, bear-commanding dwarven hunter and the fact we get +5 to boomsticks, it makes wanting to switch to bows distasteful at best.

Meanwhile, Tuesday saw the early release of the much-anticipated Dire Maul dungeon, with its three wings of adventure and mostly healing gear. I'll probably give it a go over the weekend when I can take a couple of hours to devote to it.

Sub-optimal

Bit of a weekend wrap-up this time. I put in my application for, and was accepted by, the guild Willingly Suboptimal. Instead of being the only one of two online half the time, a very healthy population with a number of members running things together daily. It'll be a bit before I'm Ready to Raid, but glad to help out where I can.

Spent a few hours in Un'goro and realized I probably shouldn't have waited so long. Many of the quests are targeted for the 49-51 range and I was able to steamroll through them earning valuable experience in half the-- waitaminute. I guess it wasn't so bad after all! Ran a bunch of quests for the locals and, after finding a crashed rowboat and a nearby pack, started me on a ridiculous Legend of Zelda tribute questline, but I get ahead of myself.

It was about this time one of our mid-50s warriors, Cheerry, asked for some assistance getting attuned for Onyxia. Well, in the words of Our Lord and Savior, Eek the Cat, "It never hurts to help!", so I said "sure". Hilariously, it turns out I had already done the first 9 or so steps of the attunement quest series without realizing it. It starts with the Burning Steppes quests to kill a crapton of elite drakes. This was amusingly enough where I had met up with Jaxthrax some days previous. After turning it in, there was a bit of running about until I had to do a dungeon run, so it had sat gathering dust in my quest log.

Later in the evening we met up to put some hurtin' on the flappy bastids. We had picked up another member and as we killed drake after drake, we picked up a couple of random people for everyone's mutual benefit. By what was probably not a happy coincidence, we had a tank, a healer, and three DPS. Everyone was gung-ho to keep the party rolling, so after everyone caught up to where I was, we headed down to Blackrock Depths to interrogate
and free a prisoner of the Dark Iron dwarves.

Personally, I'm a huge fan of this dungeon. It's a relic of a forgotten era, back in the long ago when developers cared more for the craft than coming up with speed runs. It's a freakin' underground city! After some slight hilarity (I fell in the lava), we trooped in and set about our task to get things done and slaughter everything in our path. For the most part, we did pretty good. We found our prisoner and killed a bunch of evil, evil Dark Iron dwarves. All in all, there were two tricky bits.

The first was the last boss we needed to kill. He comes with two huge golem adds and when the fight starts, if anything aggros the boss itself, he does ridiculous amounts of damage. Here's where it starts getting dodgy. It took us a lot to get through. To compound matters, our healer was a druid. That means they couldn't resurrect-- only battle rez once every planetary conjunction. There was a LOT of corpse running. Like to the point where we're wondering if we should take the rez sickness to repair. Things started to get a little dicey-- we had been in the dungeon so long, the mobs were starting to repopulate. Lovely. Then everything aligned just right and we downed the sucker.

The second part was escorting the prisoner out of the dungeon. That was nightmarish as even after clearing out what we thought was going to be his path (a largish room and a ring of tunnel) it was effectively several very long chain pulls with little chance to recuperate. It was possibly the tensest escort I'd ever seen, but we survived! We bid each other a good night and collapsed after the run.

Flash forward to me advancing my attunement quest by "corpse running" through a cave in Winterspring invested with draconic menaces. At the back was a teleporter that took me to the top of a mountain to speak with a member of the blue dragonflight. She told me I'd need to run a raid in Upper Blackrock Spire to finish empowering the key. Great. While trying to find a way off the mountain, I stumbled back onto the teleporter and got instantly gibbed by a ton of dragons. Opting to take the "10 minute breather", I decided that'd do for now.

I headed back to Un'goro and spent the next 3 hours travelling back and forth on a fun, madcap series of adventures for a gnome who's similar, but legally distinct from, the protagonist of Zelda fame. It's got everything: death, romance, potions, and culminated with a group quest, of course entitled "It's Dangerous to Go Alone". I spent five minutes trying to research if it was possible to solo it, when I flipped back to the game to find someone looking for more to do the very thing! In short order, we had climbed a rocky mountain, dispatched an elemental, and recovered the trifor--glowing thing. For my rewards, Linken gave me a sword and a boomerang. Good times!

Afterwards, I popped my head into neighboring Silithus, but had forgotten that at this point in the original Vanilla, there are no quests there. It's just a bug-infested hellscape until AQ opens during Phase I-Can't-Be-Assed-To-Check.

Heading back to Un'Goro, I received a whisper from a person who needed help with a quest. "It never hurts to help!" Join up, no questions asked and it turned out to be the Dangerous to Go Alone quest again. I love paying things forward.

Ended the weekend in Everlook. Level 55 and ready to womp some yetis.

Somber and Sober

Legendary Drunk's guild chat was been quiet for several days, with the GM offline for three. Checking into Discord, I found that she along with the former GM had cancelled their accounts in a show of solidarity with Hong Kong's current situation and as an act of protest against Activision/Blizzard's recent pandering to the Chinese government.

I don't intend to use this platform as political soapbox now or ever, but I find it more than a little sad and depressing that fellow players are feeling betrayed by a company that has brought them such joy. I suppose this decade "everything is political" and I should just suck it up and deal.

A call was made for another to step up and take the Guild's reins. Yeah-- thanks, but no thanks. I've led guilds and served in countless officer roles over the years. Absolutely done with it, but I respect those who are selfless enough to take on the mostly thankless tasks of endless mediation, recruitment, and event coordination.

Instead I said my goodbyes and gquit. I may make an effort over the weekend to find a new home, but for now there's things to do.

With less than an hour's play time, about half of it was spent in flight. Very short and simple goals:

- kill the last few evil furbolgs in Felwood to close out a quest
- follow up by crossing over into Winterspring for the first time and pick up the final Eastern Kingdoms flight path.
- grab whatever quests are offered there... two of which were breadcrumbs to Western and Eastern Plaguelands.

Heh. I decided to go ahead and just run those then return to Ironforge and call it a very short night.

The EPL quest was "Deliver this thing to a dude" and it didn't even register that it was a BOOK until I glanced at the quest text to complete. I stopped short of clicking complete and hastily pulled up my inventory. Sure enough, it was a book-book you could read!

"Studies in Spirit Speaking". Cool! Let's see what it says...




I laughed. It's a blatant reference to Ultima Online, one of Warcraft's then-competitors. Dead players could only say "OOOoooOOooo..." and such. The Argent Crusader I was passing it off to mentioned he'd get to work at translating it and I looked again.

Sonofabitch. It's binary. Those cheeky bastards!

Knowing I couldn't possibly have been the first to notice that, I saved myself time and just looked up the translation. It reads "Ultima Online Napa Valley Knights of Chaos". A shout out to his old guild hidden in plain sight. Very clever, unknown quest author.

Into the Plaguelands

At this point in my travels I have a surprisingly large number of options for adventuring in the open world. There's a few upper end quests in Feralas I should probably consider doing. I still haven't set foot in Un'goro beyond getting the travel point. There's also the Blasted Lands, Azshara, and Felwood with enticing promises of excitement, loot, and danger. So naturally, I avoided all of that and went where I haven't been at all yet: The Plaguelands. Magrom was 52 after finishing off a few quests in Felwood and I felt I was "good enough" to at least die slowly.

Nestled in the northeast corner of the Eastern Kingdoms, it's chunked into two parts: Western and Eastern. In theory, Western Plaguelands is the easier of the two with some mobs being as low as 49 or so, but when you first get there, two of the first quests you get at "Chillwind Camp" have you trooping into the Eastern plaguelands for level 55+ stuff. I added them to my somewhat stuffed adventuring log and set about exploring.

The basic premise behind the Plaguelands is that these are the lands that have succumbed fully to Classic's Ultimate Big Bad: the lichlord, Kel'Thuzad. His plague has suffused the land, blighted everything except the people it hasn't, and hordes of undead scour the land. Standing up to the villainy is the Argent Crusade and, should you be willing to sacrifice a trinket slot for the duration of your stay, you can earn gewgaws that can be turned in for reputation. Ideally you should turn those in once killing undead stops granting experience on its own. Argent Crusade reputation is pretty important as the faction quartermaster sells both mana biscuits that restore health and mana better than mages' conjured food as well as shoulder enchantments. Not recipes...enchantments! (As an aside, this is long before inscription became a thing-- enchantments are normally only cast directly by enchanters. No scrolls.)

Anyways, for me, the Plaguelands is a special place. Not in a "hey, that's the spot where I lost my virginity to an entire cheer-leading squad" kind of way, but special nevertheless. You see, I never made it to level 60 in Vanilla. Throw all the tomatoes you like, it's true. My original long-forgotten Paladin (now renamed and living on a different server) never made it past 53 or so on the PvP server she was on. I distinctly remember playing through a small portion of the quests in both Western and Eastern Plaguelands on her, but I never really finished the zones until years later with Strev on his Eastern Kingdoms Loremaster bonanza. It was the last place I had adventured with my first character and I was about to undertake it again a decade and a half later.

So I ran through and instead of grinding safe(ish) mobs, I made a concerted effort to just do the quests. It was absolutely brutal, but I attempted many of the tasks I did in Vanilla and braved the eastern half of the landscape when required.

Some of the things I tried ended in absolute failure, as the mobs were just far too tough and when another one or two wandered into the mix, it was either touch and go or a corpse run. Regardless, I kept trying at it, despite it all. Through sheer dogged determination, I died over and over trying to get to certain places in the ruins of Andorhal that were covered with dense packs of marauding undead.

Some were total wins: I cleansed the first of four plague cauldrons. I completed a series of tasks for a ghost that led me to Stormwind and back and earned a shadow resistance necklace in the process. I found and assembled a little doll for a ghost girl, which triggered a quest chain as I sought information about her family, which led to the biggest win of all. I finally met Chromie again for the first time.



Chromie, my gnomie homie of the Bronze Dragonflight, Temporal Mistress, She Who Is Unbeholden to Time's Arrow, looked up at me and quite pointedly asked if I was from the future.



"I sure am, baby. I sure am."

Steppe Brother

Next, my wanderings led me from Searing Gorge south through Blackrock Mountain and down to the Burning Steppes. As I rode through the wasteland, which was far more barren than The Barrens and most desolate than Desolace, I was startled by how... empty it was. There were no teeming throngs of murderous hellbeasts waiting to dine on me-- mostly scorpions and wargs hanging a... oh, here they all are.

So it seems there's a few densely clustered packs of hurt scattered around the area. There's a mountain covered in ogres with a tunnel network within and most of the southeastern map has a fairly sizable population of whelps and elite drakes and other draconian entities. Lovely. I found the flight master and a few quest givers nestled up in the mountains. Of course one of the quests would amount to "eradicate all the ogres", but at least I knew where to find those, so off I went.

Ever so slowly I worked my way around the outer ring of the squat mountain, taking on mages and brutes as I went. Fluffers howled nervously. There were a lot of ogres, but several other people were also decimating the populace with aplomb. I began to wonder if I needed to adjust my positioning in case of respawns. As it was I was leapfrogging another person-- when I received a random party invite. I generally don't refuse them, so I found myself teamed with Jaxthrax.

Jathrax was a level 56 Druid who was killing time and ogres before tanking a Strat run for his guild, Willingly Suboptimal. We had a fairly decent level spread between us, but between Fluffers and myself we kept pace with his DPS. I relied mostly on auto-shot to cut back on the time spent recovering mana with a few timely bursts as the situation called for it.

Fluffers likes to think he was the star of the show. Ever since I put my 31st point in Magrom's Beast Master tree, he's been enjoying getting superbuff for a bit every couple of minutes.


Size matters.

After we cleared out the ogres, we dove straight in to clearing out the elite draconian menace. We synergized well as a small team and when he finally had to go, I had made both serious progress on my next level and a friend.

It was a good night in the Burning Steppes.

Searing Gorgeous

Rather then let myself get stomped on in Jurassic Park, I opted to stay in the Eastern Kingdoms a bit longer and made my over to the Searing Gorge. Quite a while ago I had picked up the flight path at Thorium Point and I was finally of a level that I could actually handle the zone-- quite well, it seemed. I picked up a bunch of "go forth and kill some things and retrieve other things and don't confuse the two" sort of quests and generally ignored them as I explored the area, killing as I went.

The zone itself is really two-in-one. The surface is a rather desolate rocky terrain and a giant quarry/gorge encompasses much of the middle of the zone. There's a ton of elementals, dark iron dwarves, and lava spiders for all your grinding needs. Some elevators allow access to lower ramps and ledges, but by far the most interesting part is the underground. Pits and caves allow you into a fairly substantial underground network of tunnels and caves that give home to hundreds of mining dark iron dwarves, their slaves, and even some flaming dinos. "Incendosaurs", I believe they are called.


"Whateverosaur is more like it"

While bopping around, I joined forces with a random Paladin who was also just exploring and we laid waste to so many dwarves they'll probably never want to join the Alliance. *cough* Anyway, as we progressed we inadvertently finished a number of the kill quests and helped a few other people with killing elites and such. A good time was had by all.

Later, I came back and made an effort to finish the quests that weren't too obnoxious-- the drop rates on some things were just ridiculous and I doubt I'll finish a couple of quest chains, but it got Magrom to level 50, which seemed to be as high as the mobs were in the zone.

Seeking a new place to quest, I then crossed the world to hunt in Felwood, which is a drab intersection of demonic invasion and forests with a green filter for good measure. It's what I consider to be the "original" Fel-tainted area, with its green pools and rampant satyr population. I was at first excited by the prospect of hunting them to extermination and then they taught me the error of my ways.

Turns out, there's a LOT more of them than there are me. Higher level...and stealthed. Like ninja-level stealth, it seems. I started using "flare" so I could see them and they STILL managed to appear out of nowhere with regularity. I am not a satyr-masochist, so I backed off from them to see what else the zone had to offer.

Answer: Timbermaw furbolgs! They start off as hostile, but as you quest to gain their favor, eventually you can get nuetral to them and can pass through their tunnels unmolested to...Winterspring, if I remember correctly. I'm not the only one who wants to be loved in those tunnels and the two main camps of their adversaries were heavily camped by people higher level than I. Rather than fight tooth and nail for a few furbolgs, I fought against tooth and nail, as the zone is packed with wolves, bears, and owls.

It may not be glamorous work, but the bears have decent loot and the wolves have plenty of meat on their bones. As a bonus, the borders of the zone have a number of mithril and thorium nodes. After some time, I achieved level 51 and returned to Ironforge to finish leveling cooking to 300 (Magrom's first capped skill!) and put a few points in Engineering.

Net result? I was able to craft a great trinket...



Party on, McNugget!

Zul'Farrak

For once I stayed "on task" and Magrom slimed his way to level 48, then stuck around a little longer until his bags filled up. As an unexpected delight, one boneless horror dropped a 14-slot Troll-hide bag. My puny inventory space GROWS! It's now 38 plus the backpack which is much smaller than I'd like, again due to having to surrender a precious slot for ammo (Warlocks are the only others who will sympathize).

After a quick unload at the AH, it was off to Tanaris to wrap up a couple of quests and maybe finally do Zul'Farrak. Along the way in Theramore, Doctor Gustaf VanHowzen trained Magrom in the fine art of making Runecloth bandages. Mind you, I've yet to even see a piece of runecloth, but I find it reassuring I can rip some to shreds the first chance I get.

Arriving in Tanaris, I dashed down to the middle of a map to turn in a breadcrumb quest. The goblin there gave me pair of quests (find 30 things) and a fetch quest...to Ratchet. "Sure thing, buddy. Oh, wait! There's a chicken to rescue here!" I booked it over to the inert robo-fowl... only to find I had left the damn quest item in the bank. Again.

For those of you keeping score, this is now twice in one week.

Meh. Screw it, I ran back to Gadgetzan, grabbed the Homing Beacon from my vault and flew to Rachet and back to get this goblin's MacGuffin. After a quick search, it was back to Tanaris to collect 30 "relics" of some sort. While scouring the desert, I stumbled upon the Eastmoon Ruins in the middle of the map, southside. It was home to a farmable number of 45-48 ogres and was apparently relic-central. I stuck around long after my relic count had been reached to restock Magrom's dwindling mageweave bandage supply.

While orbiting the Ruins for the umpteenth time, a cry echoed out over the land "LFM ZF-- need all!" Well then, that's my cue. In short order I found myself in a party with a pair of warriors and a pair of priests. The priest was only level 44, but the tank was level 50, so I assumed this would be a smooth(ish) run...

...and it was! Over the course of a couple of hours we cautiously cleared the bulk of the dungeon with minimal deaths by the lower level warrior. I didn't get any loot from the run itself. The only thing I "need"ed on got won by the same warrior... no harm, no foul, as I'm sure it was an upgrade for him as well. The run provided nearly a half-level's worth of experience and checked off 4 quests and those rewards included my first trinket (+3% mount speed) and a nearly pre-raid BiS ring. Hard to feel bad about that!

Turned in everything I could, escorted the third chicken, and finished the level by making a few more laps around Eastmoon Ruins.

From there it was west to kill a few shambling plant things and collect a "pristine dew gland" for a thirsty goblin that apparently thought that would be preferable to just buying water at the tavern a hundred feet away.

That seems to have wrapped up quests in Tanaris with a pretty bow. Anything lingering requires me to go halfway around the world to advance or... just a little bit west into Un'Goro Crater, The Land Before Time.

Slime Time

The ogres carried me into level 47 without much fanfare. I recalled to Ironforge to resupply and regroup my wits. Not wanting to return to Kalimdor to continue to level, I look over my options, then grabbed a gryphon to the Blasted Lands.

There's a few quests there that involve gathering body parts from the local fauna and I completed a few of them before looking elsewhere. The problem is the area is heavily camped by others and killing things +2/+3 can be slower than just steamrolling things at level.

I seriously didn't want to return to Kalimdor due to the flight times from Ironforge (Menethil, boat, and then wherever), so I looked for another hunting ground and to my utter delight, I remembered the Hinterlands.

Where I last left them some time ago, the east side of the zone was...let's say "intimidating" and leave it at that. NOW it was the perfect level to farm my heart out. I picked up some quest to kill a couple dozen slimes and made my way to Skull Rock. What I found there exceeded every expectation.

Not only was there a small hill covered in level 46-48 slimes, but there was a small mini-dungeon as well stocked with the same. As a bonus, loot was decent and the dungeon itself contains several mithril nodes, which have no pushed me up to the point I can mine thorium. And that's how I came to love legless monsters.

While the Slime Harvest of '19 was reaching a fevered pitch, one dropped a Homing Beacon-- the trigger for a nearby chicken escort quest, similar to the one that I had completed in Feralas (and one I have yet to attempt in Tanaris). I took a break from slime ranching to help the little robo-clucker out. This time I had a plan to cheese it.

As expected, while the chicken ran along its merry path, it would occasionally stop to alert to danger and a small group of things would appear. In this case, owlbears and trolls. When the chicken stopped, I charged ahead on my trusty steed to get all of the aggro before the chicken could. I then ran in circles while my would-be ambushers impotently chased in vain. Once Mr. Chicken got past where they had spawned I ran a short distance and dropped aggro. They ran back and the chicken never got scratched. At least, that was how it looked on paper. The execution, as always, had snags.

The first ambush point spawned the three owlbears, which I picked up, but the chicken aggro'd a fourth one who had just been wandering near the road. I had to send Fluffers over to dispatch the interloper before he killed the chicken; meanwhile I busied myself with the ambush. To send Fluffers, I had to dismount. Since I was off the horse, I fired round after round into the errant owlbear while the ambush wailed on me. Fluffers died and I was able to finish off the one while the chicken was at a sliver of health. For my own part, I was at about 20% health when I flopped like a floppy flopper.

I watched in mute horror as the owlbears immediately dashed towards the chicken... and then past it to return to their spawn point! The chicken had made it past the ambush spot! I hastily revived Fluffers, fed him to get the happiness back and ate and drank for a few seconds before the onward-rushing chicken cut my break short. I remounted.

The second ambush with a few trolls went slightly smoother. Dashing in circles, I was able to lead them away and they dispersed... just as a random prowling wolf "uncloaked" beside the chicken. During the fight, two more patrolling wolves joined the fray. It was touch and go for a minute, but we all survived with our respective feathers intact.

From there it was a short, pleasant jaunt to the coast where I had once taken a snapshot of a turtle.

Somehow "A chicken has made it to the water." doesn't have quite the same ring. I'll need to turn in the quest next time I'm in Booty Bay, but I'm totally ok with that.

Returned to Skull Rock and slaughtered slimes until my inventory was full and my bullets were low. I'll be coming back tomorrow to finish out the level.

Legging it Hither and Yon

Over the past few days, playtime has been limited (oh, cursed real life!), but Magrom has still managed to eke out another level. The universe really wants to send him into the trollish dungeon of Zul Farrak, but I'm putting that off until the weekend when I have more time that I can spend in a single block.

Instead it's been a bit of meandering to find things I want to grind while completing a few quests along the way. As fortune would have it, while collecting missing flight paths, I stumbled into Azshara, a zone I had completely forgotten about. According to Lore, it was named for Queen Azshara (yes, that former queen of the Kaldorei Empire) by the night elves that survived the Sundering, who I presume were ok with the whole "naga" thing.

The land itself was plagued with satyrs, naga, and such. I marked it as a footnote and I'll return if something makes me, but I left without looking back. The zone felt a little cramped and the main road runs through a naga encampment. Plus, I just really irrationally hate naga. I don't know if it's the animations, the reptilian forms, or what exactly. I can't put my finger on it, but I just plain hate fighting them. Maybe I just prefer my enemies have legs. I'll let my therapist unpack all of that later.

Feralas proved to be a bit more amenable for my hunting. Up and down the coastline I prowled killing water elementals and shrunken giants for a couple of quests. When given an opportunity for a followup doing more of the same, I declined. Not a huge fan of the water elementals either. Nothing good seems to drop from them, they are immune to a number of my attacks and, worst of all, THEY GOTS NO LEGS!

So I moved a bit inland from the coast and found large quantity of bears, wolves and... what's this? OGRES?!

Perfect. Ogres have nice loots, drop cloth, and GOT LEGS. I need to seriously stop obsessing about legs now. Thick, muscular, OGRE legs.

Seriously. Done with that.

But the really nice thing with the ogres is that they are spaced out enough they aren't about to pile on Fluffers and since many of them are casters, they fold like cheap lawn chairs playing high stakes poker.

I think I'll stick with them for a bit and see if I can't reach 47 tonight.

Into Tanaris

Putting a blissful week of vacation in tropical lands and the jungle behind me, it was time to return to virtual tropical lands and the jungle. In my absence, my competitive guildmate had yet to hit 40, so that seems to be that for now.

Back in Stranglethorn, I teamed up with a couple of ragtag groups to finish off a couple of lingering quests, namely killing a few pirate captains and annihilating that damn gorilla from the previous update. These went much smoother than expected, with only a few harrowing seconds. With much of it behind me, it was time to venture to new stomping grounds and that meant Tanaris, but in my usual indirect way.

First it was a flight to Nethergarde Keep in the the Blasted Lands to turn in a quest... only to find too late I was missing item I needed to hand in. Sure enough, I had stuffed it in the bank for safe keeping (and to free up the precious inventory slot). Ah, when will I learn? (Spoiler: Never.)

I returned to STV and took the boat to Ratchet. Rather than go straight to Tanaris, I stopped by Theramore to take care of a little side business.

In Theramore's Keep, there's a quest to unlock First Aid 226-300. For all the flak I give the "retail WoW" experience, it's important to remember that in Vanilla/Classic, nearly ALL of the quests are of the "kill 10 rats", "collect 10 bear asses from 30 bears", "click static things", "escorts", and FedEx deliveries. Anything outside of those 5 are rare. With this quest, you're given a roll of 20 bandages and must heal patients around the ward, giving care to treat the worst off first. The quest fails if too many people die from being neglected too long. It isn't a hard quest by any stretch of the imagination, but it is novel enough to provide entertainment.

I'll need to return to the Keep as my First Aid improves as the good doctor there is the only one who teaches you how to make the most advanced bandages and I love bandages. Not for me, though. I slap them on Fluffers like they're going out of style. It's a lot more mana-efficient than Mend Pet and I can always imagine he looks like a cross between the cereal mascots "Fruit Brute" and "Yummy Mummy"


But never this cute.

So into Tanaris I fly. I'd adventured here briefly before, picking up the low-hanging fruit. Figuratively, not literally, since it is a desert, after all. So many pirates. The east coast is crawling with pirates and they had to be culled by the score. In the far west, the mobs start getting serious, with silithids hitting level 47-50. My coastal cleansing had taken me to the lofty level of 45 and I was itching to try my luck. It was slow going, but I eventually felled enough to complete another quest.

I continued my explorations further to the southwest, looking for mithril, when I came across a turtle with a quest. Ok, Mr. Turtle, what do you need? An escort mission? OH, JOY! I accepted it, because I wanted to see how badly it would suck and when I failed, I could always drop and pick it back up again. (cough)

Yeah. What I wasn't expecting was a timer to appear. "29:59"... oh, dear. Turns out it wasn't as bad as I expected. Instead of following a set patch, he follows behind you (slowly) and you have to guide him from the far SW of the zone to the far NE to meet up with his wife by the coastline, aggroing every damn thing along the way if you're not careful.

I am very careful when it comes to matters of the heart and I can proudly say:

"A turtle has made it to the water."

Stranglethorn Fever

This will likely be the last regular update for a short while-- going on a vacation without internet for a week and change. This delights a fellow guildie who's been nipping at my heels in an informal race to 60 and my current 7 level advantage will become a deficit by the time I return, particularly since he's also taking a few days off from work. Such is life.

With gun and wolf both locked and loaded, Magrom strode out of Booty Bay with a full quest log and a determination to murder things wot needed murdering. For the most part, this went exceptionally smoothly. When approached one (or two) at a time, the local wildlife proved to be non-threatening. Kill 30 gorillas to get a handful of "giblets" to scare a local, check. Kill 30 naga to get a dozen weeds, done. Kill a few dozen pirates to get 15 piles of snuff, sure thing. Classic is nothing, if not predictable… until it isn't. I had forgotten about "Stranglethorn Fever".

In order to get a fever cure for a local resident, I was asked to contract the services of a local witch doctor (It was either that or go "out of network" and no one wants to do that.) to summon a gorilla and extract its heart. This, of course, comes with a catch-- you have to kill gorillas to get 10 fangs or some such nonsense to perform the ritual and, wouldn't you know it: apparently most of the gorillas are apparently trying to gum me to death.

After finally performing enough freelance dentistry to make Hermey proud, I went to a cave and waited for the respawn.


Silver and gold...AND TEETH


Eventually, I saw the witch doctor, he told me what to do. He said, "Ooh! Ee! Ooh! Ah! Ah! Ting! Tang! Walla-wa--GET THESE &#$@ING MONKEYS OFF ME!"

Oh Classic and your deceptive quest logs. Group quests aren't labeled as such and just because a quest is "yellow" does NOT mean it is scaled properly for you. What followed was a slaughter as wave after wave of apes stormed into the tiny cave hellbent on killing, me, the wolf, and the shaman. Fluffers and I barely survived the first wave as the larger wave two with a named mob (that was NOT the quest target) poured in and over us. I alone survived by fleeing the cave and flopping. I'd need ten more fangs to reattempt Custer's Last Stand. Screw that.

Instead I busied myself with other tasks… collecting trollish-zombie elixirs, debt collecting for a local low-life, and a few other miscellaneous tasks that wound up with me grouping due to either it being an elite boss or to keep from competing with other players for kills over a small stretch of land. As a general rule of thumb, Hunters are the only class whose efficiency actually drops when teamed, because of having to share the xp with others. This works well for anti-social people like myself.

Throughout ALL of this, I kept getting page drop for The Green Hills of Stranglethorn, the killer of inventory slots. It has 15 separate pages and by the time I'd wrapped up what I was going to get done for Booty Bay, I had collected 12 of them. 23 silver at the neutral auction house later, I was riding up to visit Nesingwary's camp fully loaded…. 15 sheets to the wind, you could say. Even green and at level 44, the quest provided a metric ton of experience and pushed me firmly into the first bubble for level 44.

Hyjal Kids, Hyjal Wife

My pace is definitely slowing down and that's perfectly fine. I still eked out enough xp to hit level 43 questing in the Hinterlands, but a significant amount of playtime was devoted to traveling to the four corners of the world: literally Darnassus, Gadgetzan, Booty Bay and… well, the Hinterlands are close enough, being a bit north of Arathi and just south of the Plaguelands. This now marks a couple of days in a row I've spent inordinate amounts of time airborne to tidy up the quest logs a bit. "Keep yer feet on th' ground", indeed.

At first, the Hinterlands pitted me against some local troll tribes to collect necklaces and check cages for a captured hippogryph. At least I think it was a hippogryph. I was a little fuzzy of the details and between fighting owlbears (more eggs!) and searching the forest floor for feathers may have warped my memory. I vacillate on whether or not quest items should glow out of convenience, but I think the mild frustration made the payoff more rewarding.

Next it was over to the coast to take a "snapshot" of an elite turtle. (The goblins had cameras long before the S.E.L.F.I.E. was a thing.) This required dodging level 48 wolves (that could prowl), before falling off a cliff onto a beach swarming with (non-hostile) turtles that were even higher. Brave Fluffers found and distracted the one truly horrific giant turtle while I got close enough to take the shot and scoot.

Finally, it was time to investigate the top of a troll-infested ziggurat to look for whatever wasn't in those cages earlier. It was a death trap that I knew how to handle. "FLUFFERS! SIC 'EM!" The poor wolf ran back and forth tagging everything around, which afforded me enough time to ascend and fall down the other side. One heroic feign death, a revive pet and a LOT of apology meat later, I'm done with the Hinterlands for now.

As an aside, thanks to South Park, there's a running gag about going from level 1 to 60 by only killing boars in Elwynn Forest. This is very much possible in retail, thanks to level scaling. Last year a player named "Ianxplosion" did precisely that by slaughtering 19801 boars. In Classic you'd have to range farther afield, but I believe there are boars at pretty much every level range. That's pretty much how I feel about wolves. No matter where I go lately, it's miles and miles of wolves. I'm still hating myself for dropping skinning, but I'm sure as hell not changing out engineering now. So. Many. Damn. Wolves. Fluffers, you're the only good one.


So. Many. Damn. Wolves.

From there it was to Darnassus to turn in quests, then back to Feralas to continue a chain. The next one is recommended for level 50, so that's not happening in the foreseeable future. While there I joined a quick escort mission with a couple others to rescue a robot chicken.


Not this one.

I've learned the hard way that escort missions are simply not meant to be solo'd and this proved to be no exception. The chicken was beset upon by packs of 3-4 higher-level enemies several times along the journey. We also discovered that failing to let the stupid motherclucker gain aggro meant it would make a beeline for the horizon while we fought packs of yetis, apes, and (of course) wolves… and fail the quest as we were no longer by its side. Yeesh. Second time was the charm and it was off to sunnier climes in Booty Bay.

Stranglethorn now has a promising bounty of quests out of the southern tip, so I'll likely stick around for a little bit before heading out for adventures unknown.

For those interested, today's title comes from the first guild name to make me laugh out loud in a long time.

Don't Panic!

Hit level 42 while questing in Feralas. It started to rain. It was a hard and constant downpour that lasted for well over an hour. After a while and a number of deaths trying to solo something that was decidedly group content, I was ready to quest somewhere else.

As luck would have it, the follow-up quest was in Darnassus, a place that I already had a mission to visit. Well, yay. It was only…6 zones and two ferry rides away.

For once, providence dropped a mage in my lap as literally a minute later in BFE (Bum-fuck Elvish), I hear for the FIRST time in game. "Anybody want to buy a port to Darnassus? Ironforge? Stormwind? 25s, but tips are great!" Ah yes-- portals are one of those spells that require reagents to cast. 20s, if I remember. I met up with him and gave him 50s (fer me an' th' wolf!) and a minute later I was surrounded by pointy-eared treehuggers.

As an aside, the questing is all over the place in Classic. More times than not, I'd be happily grinding mobs somewhere and someone would come running up wanting to know if I was also on Quest Something-I'd-Never-Heard-Of. Well, of course not, because that's step three of some five part quest that starts on the other side of the world. In this case, one quest turn in was "Ok. Cool, I guess. We already knew this. Feralas is screwed." and the other wanted me to go to Gadgetzan to pick up a thing to trade for a book I needed for…reasons.

Ok…fine. I've already dinged and I've got time to kill. There's the flight path…and OF COURSE it isn't connected to any other path I know. Classic, man. You can't fly past points you haven't connected. Great. I take the ferry to Auberdine in Darkshore, which was a bit more pleasant than I made it sound, then took a hippogryph from Auberdine at the top of the map to Gadgetzan on the far southeast.



Twelve minutes, thirty five seconds.

I should've gotten peanuts for the trip. In Gadgetzan, my contact refused to give me boo unless I did a favor for him… of course… in the Hinterlands on the far east side of the other continent. Hmm… soon. While I was in the neighborhood I killed a few rocs for fun and eggs. The eggs sell easily for 40s and up on the auction house and it's like a 39% drop rate, so it doesn't hurt to brake for feathers.

As a bonus, one of my quests earlier rewarded me with a Very Nice Dagger I barely knew how to use. Well, no time like the present...

and so on and so on....

Stopped off at IF on the way to the Hinterlands to restock my supplies and call it a night.

Mount Up!

As anticipated, Magrom hit level 40 over the weekend while grinding out mobs in the Badlands. In nearly record time, he returned to Dun Morogh to purchase riding lessons and a nice white ram. Pedestrian no longer! One thing I had forgotten is that with classic mounts (and pets) they stay in your inventory using precious bag space. Woe to pet and mount collectors in Classic.



As unanticipated, from my scrimping and a LOT of auction sales, I had about 50 gold left over and it was time to blow it all! I stopped by my class trainer and picked up all of the pet skills and most of the hunter skills I'd avoided. In many cases this led to immediately getting to buy rank 2-3 of some spells. These are typically situational skills such as "Track elemental" or a "sting" that drains mana from my target. The latter would be great for pvp, but very rarely do I find myself facing down caster mobs that heal.

I leveled Engineering in earnest, purchasing "Artisan" in the process. I picked "gnome" engineering, which will give access to some uniquely fun dealies like the "battle chicken", over "goblin" engineering, which is just about blowing stuff up. Goblin is better for hardcore pvp players, which I am most assuredly not. I then took it to 210, which is high enough to craft the next level of bullets… and got gut punched again.

So it turns out it costs about 11 silver (opportunity costs) to make a stack of these new mithril bullets. They can be used at level 37 and are a significant improvement over the previous tier. HOWEVER… they cannot be made in the field, as they require a forge. They are also slightly worse than the level 40 ammo that can be purchased from vendors all over the world… for just 10 silver a stack. ARGH!

Well, there's always cooking. It was time to break out of my rut, as I'd been stuck at 225 for ages. This required doing a short trip to Stormwind to buy cheese from a local merchant and all the things I'd need for the Artisan cooking quest from the AH. All total, maybe 6-7 gold worth of supplies. I stuck around in Tanaris long enough to realize I wasn't enjoying the quests there, then headed out for new frontiers.

This segued into an extensive Kalimdor exploration trip as I rode through zones I haven't seen for many years. In retail, there was never any reason to go back to areas like Stonetalon Pass or Desolace and I was shocked by how much of the pre-Cataclysm landscape I remembered. I picked up more flight paths on the western side and finally connected Ashenvale to Ratchet in the process. By the time I made it to Desolace, I half-recalled there was a "secret" vendor that sold rare cooking recipes.

Well, it turns out it's a goblin caravan that deploys trading bot when it makes stops, one at the north end of its route and a different one on the south end. By happy luck I stumbled into it when it was set up shop on the north side. I bought all of the available recipes and explored a bit before camping on the southside. The caravan takes an hour to do a full loop and it was nearly 40 minutes before it came to me. Classic times are classic. I pounced as soon as it set up shop and cleaned out its inventory just as a Tauren came loping up to it, presumably to do the same. Sorry, friend-- the secret of Dragonbreath Chili, Hot Wolf Ribs, and Lean Wolf Steak shall be mine and mine alone.

I then ran south into Feralas and took a ferry to a small island with a night elf outpost called "Feathermoon". This would serve as my next base of operations as I reached level 41 (and a half!) questing between killing wolves and naga. With my new recipes and an ample supply of ready-to-harvest wolves, I raised cooking to 285, amazingly close to the game's 300 cap. Aside from ready-made Fluffers snacks, cooking the meat effectively doubles the vendor value even after factoring in spices. The meat doesn't sell well on the AH, so it's pointless to stockpile. For those who are curious, the margin isn't high enough to warrant buying dozens of cheap wolf meat on the AH. Time is money, friend!

As an amusing side note, at one point as I was riding through Ironforge like an idiot because I was level 40 and on a real mount (not a ghetto freebie like those warlocks and paladins *shakes fist*) when a random person asks me for gold for their mount. There's a stock answer for this, so I glibly replied, "Certainly, friend! I have hidden my fortune in small amounts in creatures all around Azeroth. Crack them open and you make keep it all!"

He laughed and replied, "No, seriously." Rather than blow him off, we start talking.

He's level 30 with 20g to his name. He's both a Skinner and a Miner, but neither of these skills are close to being what they should be for his level. He's been farming cloth. Oh, dear. I take him under my wing and I go into full "teach a man to fish mode" to help get him on the path he needs to be on to reach his goals. (For the record, this is NOT by actual fishing. That is a terrible way to make money.) By the end, he has confidence and a plan and I? I have a new battle.net friend. I'll be checking in on him from time to time to see how it's going, but with skinning and mining, he's going to do just fine.

A Matter of Reputation

With steely resolve, I decided it was time for Magrom to schmooze with the kinfolk and work on his less-than-stellar reputation. I combed down Fluffers and his beard for fleas, then returned to Ironforge.

Ironforge is not the ghost town it is in retail. Being the cornerstone of industry and engineering, as well as convenience to a number of northern zones, there's no real reason to take up residence in Stormwind over it. I filed that away in the Big Pile of Things I Could Have Done Better Sooner and set my hearth to a lovely dwarven lass by the city's entrance.

Now bristling with dwarvish pride, I set forth to make a name for myself by steamrolling through Loch Modan. I picked up every single quest I could find and obliterated everything in my path. In short order I returned to town ready to empty my packs of assorted animal entrails and ogre heads while I regaled the locals with tales of my derring-do.

I turned in the first quest. "5 reputation". Huh? I turned in another. "2 reputation". Oh. No. The most I got from a single turn-in was 15 and I needed thousands to reach Honored. So, it turns out that if quests are grey to you, not only do you get a pittance of xp, the reputation rewards are ALSO reduced by 90%. Oh, gods. I have erred most severely.

There was one single quest I had gotten from the area that was yellow-- and it wanted me to gather reagents (read: miscellaneous animal bits) from the Badlands to the south. Ok-- fine!

I ventured forth, passing by Uldaman, and walked into a scene from countless Road Runner cartoons-- just with significantly more coyotes. Towering cliffs ringed the area and wide open grassless plains between. Small rock outcroppings broke up the otherwise featureless landscape and there were so many delicious animals. Fluffers was positively salivating as he leapt towards the nearest plainstalker. I kind of wish I had bumbled into the area a level ago, as it is significantly more fun that the Swamp of Sorrows, but the creatures here go up to at least the low 40's along the south western edge, with promises of many whelps (handle them!) to the east.

The bulk of the landscape is covered with level 37-40 critters, making it Yet Another Skinning Paradise but, more importantly to me, there's quite a lot of iron ore and some mithril. MITHRIL! I actually grinned as Magrom's pick bit down into the first sweet, sweet chunk of the stuff. I wasn't earning significant reputation, as the quest givers were few and far between (and most wanted me to go to Uldaman) but by god I was going to be wealthy enough that the reputation didn't matter so much.

The only pain point is that there's no proper flight point in the zone, but it isn't a far run from Loch Modan's southern town of Thelsamar. In fact, I'm pretty sure the run is shorter than the Stormwind to Arathi flight.

I hit level 38 whilst pulling apart stone elementals for a series of "collect rocks" quests, which seemed thematic for Magrom and kept at it as my bags filled with ore (Mining 215 baby!) and decently valuable vendor trash.

After returning home and clearing out the inventory, I assessed my situation. I have maybe 30 gold's worth of skill ups I was stoically ignoring and the people of Ironforge were pretty impartial to my heroic mining efforts. In fact, on top of everything else, I'd need another four and a half gold to become a licensed Artisan miner, so that's also on hold for now.

BUT…I now have saved up over a hundred gold so I am SET when I hit level 40, which is comforting. I'll be heading back to the Badlands over the weekend with the goal of obtaining a nice white ram by Sunday night. Afterwards, I intend to drink myself silly and buy all the skills I can!

My Hearth's in the Highlands

My hearth's in the Highlands, my hearth is not here
Seven minutes of flight time, and chasing o-gier.
A-chasing the raptors, iron ore I fol-low
My hearth's in the Highlands, cause gryphons are slow.

Continued my conquest of the Arathi Highlands, farming the ogres and iron found along the southern border with some juicy raptors and spiders nearly for both variety and animal bits to feed the never-ending meat pit that is Fluffers' gullet. Thus my ascent to level 37 was relatively uneventful.

One thing I neglected to mention in a previous update was that I took the time to (finally) do something I should've done a couple of weeks ago-- locate and install a version of the Auctioneer app that is classic-friendly. I have a fairly inefficient method to my farming which, contrary to the opening bit, involves porting back to Stormwind twice a level to resupply, load up the AH, and generally do dick-all for a bit before getting on the 7m10s flight back to my hunting grounds. Yes, I COULD be doing a lot of that better. I could move to Ironforge, which is significantly closer. I could just fly over to Southshore and mail everything to Hiddenpocket and let her deal with all of the AH shuffling. Honestly, the long flights give me a chance to stretch my legs and/or play Peggle.

As an amusing aside, the Peggle for WoW has a dozen different WoW-themed levels with its own talent trees. Earn talent points by beating or fully clearing levels and… well, it's more fun than it sounds and you can set it to auto-close when your flight lands.

Looking to mix things up a bit, I took a detour down to the Bog of Eternal Stench-- err, I mean the Swamp of Sorrows. The Swamp of Sorrows was originally one half of the area formally known as "The Black Morass" before some orc terraformed half of it into the Blasted Lands by opening a portal to Outland. The Swamp contains the village of Stonard, one of the few Horde outposts in the Eastern Kingdoms, and has no Alliance flight paths at all. I nipped down to Nethergarde Keep to pick up the FP there, before heading back into the swamp proper.

I don't have very much positive to say about the place. The zone has an unappealing green filter over it and it's a swamp. You can't really put much of a spin on a couple of square miles of downright fugly terrain densely populated with crocs, spiders, and jaguars. There were only a handful of quests I could find and none were particularly "fun". Kill a few dozen rats, fetch a bag, and escort an idiot through an entire village of things that will swarm and kill you. In a way it was a bit like a crappy version of Dustwallow Marsh, but without the charm.

After nearly a half-level, I decided I was done with the place (for now) and returned back to Stormwind and-- great googly moogly! Wealth had poured in from many auction sales and I was now sitting above 80g. Level 40 mount! Here! I! Oh, crap.

Magrom's a dwarf. Specifically a dwarf who's been adventuring almost exclusively in human territory. While the humans honor Magrom's achievements, the dwarves are barely "friendly". What this translates to directly is I'm not getting a large-enough break on the dwarf mount and you can't buy cross-race mounts unless you are exalted with that faction.

So now I get to choose: go back and waste a day or two cleaning up level 6-20 quests trying to raise the rep a bit or suck it up and pay significantly more for my mount at 40? Either way I'll NEED to fix the reputation by 60. That's literally hundreds of gold difference.

Arathi Khan

After exploring a bit of Hillsbrad around the coastal city of Southshore, everything finally clicked. Hillsbrad itself is a fairly low-level area, but the quest hub serves the entire tri-state area, as they were guiding me north into Alterac Mountains and east into the Arathi Highlands. Right then!

First I headed north to confront members of the Syndicate and a bunch of bloodthirsty yeti and ogres. Exploring the side of a mountain, I saw several nodes of beautiful ore. As I raced to each, a tauren riding a kodo raced me to each, beating me handily. For a half-second, I wished it was a PvP server so I could teach this jerk a lesson by--oh yeah, by dying horribly to him, since he's obviously at least 5 levels higher. I'd just have to mine elsewhere.

As I circled the area, I found myself up against a small wall placed into the side of the mountain. Odd, but there was a small gap I could hop through, so I did. I slid down a short hill into a ruined city (Alterac, proper) packed with elite ogres about 3-4 levels higher than I was. Oh, this would end well.


Rude.

Barely escaping, I realized I'd have to go back in to secure a book for a quest. Terrific. Fortunately, I had a plan. I'd run in sans Fluffers and flop in the doorway. Summon fluffers to distract the Big Bad level 40 elite guarding the bookcase, grab the book, and be out lickity-split. Most of this plan worked flawlessly. Most.

What I wasn't counting on was halfway through the operation a well-meaning idiot running in and trying to save Fluffers. Oh god. It was a paladin...and pulled aggro off the wolf. "Run past! Get the book!", I yelled. Fluffers continued a tug of war for the attention of the ogre. "Seriously! Just grab it and go!"

The paladin replied, "Oh. I don't need it. I was helping YOU!" Oh, for the love of-- ok. We'll do it the hard way. Gun blazing, we took down the ogre, with my valiant savior surviving with a wisp of health. I thanked him for his assistance and we parted ways...mostly because I then got killed by another ogre.

My next quest took me east into Arathi to investigate rumor of a new plague. This is a fun little series of quests I half-remembered that involves jumping a pack of baddies to kill a courier, then culminates in an escort mission through an orc village. For these I teamed up with a rogue who was also looking to complete them and they went smoothly for the most part. It was a little harrowing when add after add jumped us, but fortunately the escortee was a pretty capable druid in her own right and the novelty of not having to trotside along an infirm idiot was a nice change of pace. (At least that's what Fluffers told me.)

Best of all, the side trip showed me where I could find a giant unspoiled field of raptors and spiders ripe for conquest. Spacious enough that solo fights are a breeze and not so spread out that I'd have to run vast distances between battles. Finished the evening at 36.

New skills are now 1g26s each and I'm being even more selective about my purchases. With that whole "level 40" closing in fast, I'm starting to seriously doubt I'll have mount funds before 42.

Wallowing in the Dust

Finished my trek to 34 in the Shimmering Flats, then headed by to Stormwind for another round of "Oh, my God-- where did the money go!?" Training skills, training pet skills, and a nice new weapon and scope watched nearly 10g evaporate into the ether. Fortunately, people seem to really like buying turtle meat, paying between 60s and 1g for a stack of 10, and I have no small supply of it after the Turtlegeddon that got me to this point.

I cooked some of the mystery meat I'd been collecting from scorpions and basilisks and that was enough to cap my cooking at 225. To go any higher, I'd need to pick up a quest in Gadgetzan, which required hunting level 40-something critters for eggs as well as other things. I'd need around a dozen or so plus other things and the eggs were selling for around a gold each in the AH, so that was just gonna have to wait.

My bank stays in a constant state of stuffed… and this is with me having 2 extra bag slots. I had created a bank alt, HiddenPocket, to store some of the things I might want to stockpile, but honestly I've been getting more use out of her just mailing her things and then rejecting the mail. This effectively gives me dozens of extra bank slots that last for a month for a couple of silver per transaction. Still, no excuses. Time to do some housekeeping, which meant it was time to throw even MORE money away and level up engineering.

I shoveled everything I could into Magrom's sacks and pouches. Anything leftover not remotely related to crafting got thrown up on the AH or into Fluffers' ravenous maw. Unfortunately, I'm to the point where new recipes are only available in Ironforge, so I had to commute to get any real work done. This led into a series of "Och! I cannae believe I forgots t' pick up MORE heavy stones." and another few gold disappearing into recipe costs and raw supplies. Net result? Magrom's now the proud owner of 190-something Engineering skill and a flock… a FLOCK…of exploding sheep.

These ba-a-a-a-a-ad boys will sit around for up to three minutes and charge off to the nearest threat leaving behind a crater of gunpowder and wool. They are decidedly a LOT more entertaining than the usual dynamite, grenades, and bombs, but are best deployed on battlegrounds that haven't been released yet. Guarding a flag? Plop down a sheep. You might get sapped or polymorphed, but that flag will be defended. Plus, exploding sheep sound.

To my disappointment, I still don't have a use for the iron I've been stockpiling. Mining continues to be my albatross. Although I can now mine gold I can't locate, I'm still a few crucial points shy of smelting steel, which is used for the more exciting engineering recipes I'll be getting to…probably next week.

But, with lightened heart, load, and pockets, I searched for adventure and found myself back in Theramore. The swampy, marshy lands of Thera--OH MY GOD THAT SPIDER JUST APPEARED OUT OF NOWHERE. Seriously, the place made me really regret scrimping on "Track Hidden", but it wouldn't have mattered because of all the beasts. The marshy terrain is surprisingly hilly with just enough cypress and tupelo trees to ensure you aren't going to see the spiders, raptors, and crockolisks that will start dogpiling on you out of nowhere. The coastline is densely covered with murlocs after a point and the turtles up to that point are fiercely fought over to complete a quest.

Consequently, I stuck to "the plan" of questing. One of the absolute joys of the zone is a couple of locations (notably a burned out inn), which have several interactable objects that give quests, but don't glow or have any indicator that they are special until you mouse over them. Literally, you're just told of an inn that was burned down at the Barrens border and actual exploration leads to quest discovery. That's the sort of thing that's so delightfully immersive about Classic. A Redditor summed it up nicely, "Classic is a videogame that tries to simulate a fantasy world. Retail is a videogame that doesn't want to be anything more than a videogame." (Which is fine. Different things for different people.)

Some quests were trickier than others. There was a painfully slow escort quest that took nearly every trick in my book to survive as the Escortee was hellbent on chain-pulling crocs. "TONIGHT YOU DINE ON MUTTON!", I screamed and supplemented my rifle with Woolen Hellfire. Even Fluffers survived with a scrap of health. We weren't so fortunate on a "collect 40 'unpopped' spider eyes from the mines near here" quest. I never even saw the inside of the mines, as the outside was thickly infested. "Poisoned, you say? For three minutes? 67 damage every 3 seconds? AND it stacks? Sucks to be you, Fluffers." *feign death* *spider is not fooled* *real death* Again and again.

Somehow through dogged (and wolffed) determination, we were able to complete it and a number of others, leaving the muck at level 35. Seeking drier climes, I returned to Hillsbrad… by way of Alterac, because idiot me forgot to pick up the Southshore flight point the last time I was there.

MUCH better than last time… I spent my last few minutes picking up over a half dozen new quests, ranging from killing tigers and yetis to hunting assassins and those coastal murlocs and…oh. my. god. "Collect ten turtle meat and soothing spices." So that's what they wanted it for.