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.