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.