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