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.

Shimmering Flats

As usual, my plans got disrupted by my own realization that what I was doing was scathingly inefficient, but I digress. Having finally finished up every swinging thing to do in Duskwood, I proudly moved south into Stranglethorn Vale and promptly got my ass handed to me three ways from Sunday.

This is how my mind trap works: with great care and selectivity, I can take down one of the rats needed for the usual orange kill ten rats quests. It'll take a little time to recover from the fight, but I'm one step closer to Quest Reward #1456, which is generally a pittance of xp and/or gear I can't use. OR... I can ignore the quest altogether and stomp easier rat after rat after rat, earning much more xp in the same amount of time, earn a couple of levels, and then go back and rat stomp the actual quest. I can never seemingly convince myself that the challenging route is The Better Route, so I wind up finding places I can stomp a billion rats and if they happen to have quests, that's a bonus.

I ran a couple of Nesingwary's initial quests, but otherwise Stranglethorn would just have to wait.

My wanderings took me up to Southshore because I heard "It's a great place for level 30s." Eff. That. Noise. What I found there was dense packs of shore murlocs and a level 44 Horde elite named "Helcular" camping the Alliance graveyard. After some further research, screwing over the Alliance is a quest reward for the Horde running Tarren Mill quests. Good for them.

Fortunately, there are alternate leveling paths in Classic, so went to Kalimdor instead. Leaving from Ratchet, I flipped a coin and ran south to Thousand Needles.

Best decision ever.

Thousand Needles is technically a Horde leveling zone; the Alliance don't even have a flight point in the zone itself, but there are ones juuuuuust past the northwestern border into Feralas and one just past the southeastern border in Tanaris at the neutral city of Gadgetzan. TN was another zone completely ruined by Cataclysm-- beautiful towering mesas in a twisty canyon to the west and a large open salt flat to the east were transformed into one ugly-ass lake and a speedbarge. Yay, progress.

The lands themselves are heavily populated with 26-35 critters, with the higher levels on the salt flats. Being open there, it is very easy to pull one at a time and, once again, I find myself wishing I hadn't dropped skinning. There's a goblin vs. gnome racetrack in the Flats and, being the good mercenary, you're working both sides of the con.

Long story short, this has been an excellent and profitable place to grind and I ended the weekend at level 33 and just over 34g. I may actually be able to afford that first mount at 40!


natural enemies

Tradeskill Interlude

After touring Ashenvale long enough to realize I didn't really want to quest there, I spent some time getting myself "Stranglethorn Ready" or at least that's what I told myself. In actuality, I knackered about with my tradeskills most of the evening.

Mining is now 120, which is in that uncomfortable spot where you can't quite mine iron (125) and to advance you pretty much have to find tin and silver in the wild. I haven't been terribly fortunate in that regards and I may have to find a more mountainous region to farm.

Engineering is faring slightly better, being in the upper 140s. It's still quite a bit lower than I would like it to be, but raising it is costing a lot in opportunity costs. I'm defraying that to some minor degree by selling rifle scopes and bronze tubes (used in a Duskwood quest), but there is still a little too much supply and not quite enough demand for it to be truly viable.

Fishing is around 155 or so-- with a lure, I'm sure I could fish up some Stranglethorn pools, which will be a steady source of food my pet won't eat. The weekly Stranglethorn Fishing contest doesn't exist yet; it will be implemented in a later phase of Classic, so that isn't a consideration.

Cooking is (finally) at 175, but I haven't yet obtained the recipes I need to make level 25 food. I imagine they may be sold in Booty Bay; it's just a matter of getting back down there at this point.

I finally started creating bandages out of my extra cloth-- it's going to be a while yet before these are actually useful and, again, levelling it is costing me what I could be selling the cloth for.

Archaeology remains at 0, because it doesn't exist.

I've nearly finished off the last of the Duskwood quests. I spent a little bit of time killing worgen in the woods and a cave full of ogres before utterly failing to solo a level 32 ghoulish boss named "Stalvan". I'm going to actually miss this place in another level or two when I formally move south to Nesingwary's camp. I'm now 1 bubble shy of level 28, which is the earliest you can pick up his "kill all the animals" quests. Unfortunately, the great inventory suck quest of "The Green Hills of Stranglethorn" doesn't unlock until 30.

Pages for TGHoS drop off pretty much any random mob, they don't stack, and there's 16 different pages to find, if I remember correctly. The idea was to foster communication and trades between players to complete the quest, but it is really just a miserable experience all the way around. I think that I'll either run Gnomeregan or grind out the worgen until 29 to minimize the amount of time I have dead inventory.

Stock Aides

Fun Fact: Despite being the cornerstone of commerce for the Alliance, Stormwind doesn't have a damn butcher. If I wanted meat for my wolf, I'd have to either risk life and limb cleaving it from the denizens of the world or go to the Lion's Rest Inn in Goldshire. No, not that kind of meat. Seriously, that's the nearest butcher. So back to Duskwood I go to murder a hundred of Fluffers' extended family.

A bit later upon viewing the acre of corpses, not for the first time I regretted dropping skinning. Still, Engineering has been paying off in sheer convenience as I replenish my own ammo stocks in the field. I digress.

With pouches bulging with wolf meat, I turn my attention to one last quest which rewarded a 12-slot ammo pouch (Heaven itself!) and finish it quickly with help from a couple of random people. At last, I can return to Stormwind.

My Expert Fishing book hadn't sold yet and with a 15 silver listing fee it was making me a little nervous. I took to advertising in trade chat. "Tired o' bein' limited to 150 fishin'? Don't wanna swim all th' way t' Booty Bay fer th' book? [Expert Fishing: The Bass and You] now on th' AH fer jus' 1g35s." Miracle upon miracles, it actually sold. Th' pets will eat tonight!

It was about this time I heard a group looking for "2 DPS for Stockades 25+ and good to go!". I hastily offer my services and am invited. There's a round of brief, "Hey!" and "How's your night going?" that's a welcome change of pace from the silent dungeon runs of LFG Retail.

I give a quick heads up, "Doing great! Growl is off, Pet is on Passive."

This surprised the tank, a Warrior. "And you're SURE you're a hunter?"

"Dispellin' the myths since 2004."

As an aside, with the passive pet, he only attacks what I tell him to when I tell him to and once it is dead he comes running back immediately. With defensive, as long as I'm in combat he will continue to chew on random things. This gets Really Bad Fast when you have a dungeon like Stockades that has a lot of human mobs that run when low on health. Cuts back seriously on those "Oopsie! Adds!" moments that make hunters generally reviled. Same thing would hold true for warlocks, but their imps are range attackers, so it's less of an issue for them.

What followed was an incredibly smooth and speedy run, so much so the healer remarked. "This is going a lot better than I expected. I'm barely having to heal."

"I could go full huntard if ya like."

"No… I'm good."

In the end, we finished five dungeon quests and walked out with packs stuffed with wool. Between that and the wolf meat, my inventory looked like a shepherd's nightmare. Fluffers would prefer cooked meat to raw because now he is DOMESTICATED and as luck would have it, I had the perfect recipe, but…since my cooking was maxxed out, cooking the food would be a waste of potential skill-ups. Unless… oh god, here we go again.

Fifteen minutes later, I'm making a corpse run in the Barrens because I'd forgotten the main path to Ashenvale is guarded by level 40 elite Horde guards. After some judicious sprinting and Fluffers' Noble Sacrifice, I'm able to break through and walk in the Night Elven lands for the first time. Absolutely beautiful. The forests are hauntingly serene and a stark contrast to Duskwood, which are serenely haunted.

I note the quests in this area are on par with what I should be doing and I may pursue those later.

After some futzing around, I locate the general goods vendor that sells the [Expert Cookbook]. Silly me, looking for a cook. I buy a single copy, learn it, and cook all the meat. Fluffers chewed happily on Seasoned Wolf Kabobs as I camped for the night.

The Wolf of Worg Street

One of the more delightful things about Classic is that some key and pretty core elements of your class may go pretty much unexplained. As a result, I was left wondering why, at level 24, my kitteh still hasn't been able to learn "bite" or "claw"… or anything other than the "growl" I've taught him. After internet research, I discovered I was doing huntering wrong. This should come as no surprise to anyone, really.

What I should have been doing was taming a variety of pets, finding the ones that actually had skills (apparently I managed to get a cat that was brain damaged) and let the pet use those skills until I learned the skill and could then teach it to other pets. Ugh. Still in Duskwood, I bought a slot in the stable for a few silver so I could park ScratchFever, and went out into the world looking for animals to tame. As an aside, there's only two stable slots and the second costs five gold, so that's going to be a while.

The first animal I came across was a majestic cat. Long, lean, the color of night...and slightly lower level. Much prettier than Scratch. I terribly wanted to tame it, so I set a frost trap down and positioned myself just so and reached out my hand, beckoning. The druid wasn't having it, though, so I went off to tame wolves and spiders instead.

After taming and releasing a half dozen random animals, I started to get a little irked. None of them had skills and I was starting to wonder if I had to nurse them up to a certain loyalty level or something to expose. I went back to the internet. So, it turns out one of those optional skills I'd saved silver by not picking up was actually a bit essential for what I was trying to do. "Beast Lore", when cast on an animal, would update its tooltip to show health, armor, damage, whether it could be tamed-- and what skills it knew. DOH! Back to Stormwind.

Fast forward a bit and I'm jogging around, examining animals. I find a wolf with "bite 3" and tame it. It runs around a bit, chewing on other wolves, and I learn the skill! Hooray! I run back, pick up Scratch, teach him How to Make Holes with Teeth, and send Mr. Wolf packing. Since I was in the neighborhood, I went back to the wolves for a little grinding then happen upon a slightly larger wolf-- with 'bite 4' AND 'howl 2'. Holy crap!

I run back to Duskwood, kennel the cat, and dash back to Wolfie 2.0-- only to find him being skinned by a roving pack of murder hobos. Sigh. It takes me another 15 minutes and a couple of respawns to find his long lost brother. Turns out wolves only eat meat and fish don't count. Fortunately, my newfound friend isn't above wanton cannibalism and I was able to keep him satiated while learning his skills.

It was at this point it dawned on me: why in the hell am I learning these skills to teach the retarded cat when I can just. keep. the. wolf? The wolf isn't as loyal (yet), but is slightly higher level and a sleek black. So, "Fluffers" is now my current pet.

Then, I decided to invest in buying the next rank of fishing. I inaccurately stated I'd have to find Nat Pagle for this one-- he's Artisan level. The Expert level is from a book sold in Booty Bay. Stranglethorn would be a Corpse Run from hell and I didn't feel like swimming for half an hour, so I decided to get to Booty Bay the dumbest, most circuitous way possible: Fly to the dwarven lands, run to the Wetlands, take the ship from Menethil Harbor to Theramore, run through the Barrens, and take the boat from Ratchet. Score a bunch of flight paths and WIN!

Yeah. First time, I somehow fell off my taxi into the Burning Lands near the Elwynn Forest border. THAT was fun-- dodging level 40-something drakes then falling off a cliff trying to get back to Stormwind. The second trip attempt fared better. I arrived in Menethil JUST as the boat was leaving-- I hopped on with a split second to spare… only to realize I'd neglected to get the flight path. Sigh. So that became a not-so-quick round trip to correct before I was off on my adventure again.

It was really, REALLY nice tromping through the Barrens again as I remembered it. Lush savannah grasses, wild animals grazing and wandering, a herd of gazelles rushing past. Troll shamans dying horribly to lightning-powered rhinos. Wonderful, really, and worth the mild aggravation. Booty Bay was almost how I remembered it. The only thing missing were the dozens of skeletons; very glad I went with a non-pvp server this time.

I wound up picking up two books, one for me and one for the AH-- I figure I'll save the next guy some trouble for a minor 35% shipping and handling charge.

Legendarily Drunk

Ah, holiday weekends. With absolutely nothing pressing, I spent more than a few hours in Azeroth. Friday night I'm wandering around Stormwind, fishing for cat food (Seriously, I'm starting to think ScratchFever has a disorder or something) and a guild advert catches my eye. As an aside, one thing we don't have are add-ons that send mass, unwanted invites to people, so recruitment messages are more prevalent. Anyway, this particular message was a group of drunkards seeking more like-livered individuals to join them on their adventures. I was already pretty drunk, so I ask for an invite. Thus, I became a member of "Legendarily Drunk", which considering how I spent my weekend, an apt tag.

It's a "medium-RP" guild and I was perhaps their tenth member or so-- at the time, everyone around level 12-15, and we established a goal of "Let's do Deadmines on Monday"! By the time Monday rolls around we're sitting at maybe 30 people or so, have a small Discord set up, and the average player level is 15-18 with some significant outliers. Unsurprisingly the group is super-friendly. I seriously doubt we'd ever clear Molten Core, but for casual dungeon running or quest groups, it'll be just fine.

For myself, I suddenly had a goal. "Deadmines-ready". Well, the dungeon is roughly 17-21… let's do this! I'd been bouncing between Westfall and Rockridge Mountains for a while completing quests. To my utter delight, my explorations had yielded a field of level 17-18-ish crabs tucked in the far southwestern coast of Westfall. Like others of its ilk, they weren't needed for any quest and offered an easy non-stop xp factory. My grinding was interrupted only by a wandering 20 elite murloc and the occasional need to empty my sacks.

Eventually I wandered into Duskwood and started the process of cleaning the forest of wolves and spiders. Everything in Duskwood has you running from one end of the zone to the other, so I contented myself with murdering every virtual animal between point a and point b every time. Duskwood at level is a truly terrifying place. Everything has a huge aggro radius, the monsters wander a lot, and your adversaries aren't squeamish about putting 10 minute debuffs on you. (Ah, Classic!) Still, I persevered -- by Monday I was picking off skeletons from a distance and my cat had been envenomed so many times I was genuinely surprised when the green fur reverted to white.

Upshot: by the time the group was ready for Deadmines, most of the team (warrior, paladin, warlock, and priest) were all level 17-19 and I was 23. This was, of course, a blessing and a curse because "aggro management is everyone's responsibility". Scratch got to off-tank a few times when the pulls got dicey and we got overwhelmed a couple of times (only one full-team wipe), but the dungeon itself was a major change of pace from retail. Every pull is slow and calculated. Bosses are generally tank-and-spank affairs with no real mechanics to worry about beyond "Oh, god! He spawned a couple of adds!" It was righteously fun. There isn't so much "don't stand in the fire", but "watch for patrols and don't face pull things".

After the quests were turned in and our party disbanded, I returned to Duskwood to finish up a few miscellaneous tasks that culminated with hitting level 25 and summoning the abomination, Stitches. The whole Abercrombie (aka The Embalmer) questline is my all-time favorite Classic quest series and I absolutely hate what they did to it in Cataclysm.

Funding my adventures continue to be a constant challenge. At 25 I've scraped together in the neighborhood of 9 gold or so. While this seems like a veritable dragon's hoard of wealth, each new skill is costing me around 60 silver and there are a LOT I've skipped at this point. ("Do I REALLY need 'track undead'? "Dude, you're hunting in Duskwood!" "Yeah, but do I NEEEEEEEED it?") If anything, the choices I'm making now really underscores how terribly they stripped fun utility spells and skills from Retail over the years. I'll get everything eventually, but it's just judicious thriftiness for now.

Engineering is paying off in utility, if not in coin. Not running out of bullets because I can carry the things I need to make more on the fly is nice. Very nice.

My next plans for the coming days is taking care of some lingering issues in Duskwood and getting together a group for the Stormwind stockades.