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.