Tag Archives: quests

Kalithe and the Two Tribes

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The other day, my Death Knight did a little bit of questing in Scholazar Basin. I figured it could be worthwhile opening up the Frenzyheart/Oracle dailies while I still got experience for it. The trouble is, I’m a gorloc lover at heart so I always feel terrible doing any quests that sabotage the cute little things. As for Kalithe, well, I suppose that deep down she feels the same way, but sometimes she just goes into a kind of brainless blood lust, usually brought on by following orders. In her own words..

It all started with this silly woman telling me to go and get her the remains of some big cat. So, naturally, I found the big kitty and killed it. That was the beginning, see, suddenly these raccoon guys started shouting at me. Apparently I stole their kill or something, so then they told that me I had to be their new slave. Bit of a jump, to be honest, I was only following orders after all, but hey ho that’s unlife for you. Sometimes you get abandoned for a couple of years, and sometimes the guys sending you on quests don’t actually know best. I was curious about the raccoon men so I headed over to see what all the fuss was about.

Well these.. “Frenzyheart”, as they call themselves, are actually insane, and I would know. Nuts. First, they told me to go and poke some little monkeys in order to basically piss off the matriarch to bring her out into the open and kill her. I was a little iffy about that one but a kill is a kill. Then they had me killing a load of giant, flying insects. And next, they made me chase chickens around the place with a net! Chickens!! This is animal cruelty I swear, if I weren’t so against the organisation and perhaps cared a little more, I’d probably have contacted D.E.H.T.A about all of this.. But then again these raccoon men were still paying me.

After that craziness, I was told to ride a crocolisk over to the Mistwhisper village, or “big-tongue shrine” as they called it. I will admit, it was pretty damn cool riding a crocolisk around Scholazar Basin! But then they had me hunt a few of these gorlocs and sabotage their shrine.. This was the point where I really started to have my doubts about these raccoons, I mean.. poking baby monkeys is one thing, pushing it, but a thing nevertheless, but killing semi-intelligent and innocent beings? Highly uncool. But the thing is, once I get going I find it hard to stop – must be a side effect of losing my soul for a time.

Once that little morality issue was passed, I rode back to the Frenzyheart village to speak with the High Shaman and he wanted me to capture a gorloc for him so that he can.. hmm.. “make it tell him things”. Very dubious by this point, I came across an injured “big-tongue” just a little way away and just as I was about to pick the little guy up a crocolisk attacked. They might be cool to ride around on, but if you aren’t a particularly powerful creature they can be deadly. So I killed it. I tried to claim it as self defence but the raccoons still kicked me out. Oh well. The gorloc seemed to take pity on me as he led me back to their village. Well, being offered a place rather than told I’m their slave is a much better deal, so whilst I felt a bit uneasy collecting “shinies” for their shrine, they also had me killing big snakes which was much more within my comfort zone. For the record, they tried to get me to make peace with the High Shaman, they aren’t particularly fond of the hatred between the two groups, however he pretty much knocked me off the cliff. Lucky I was with Sparkles at the time so I didn’t fall too far, but the Frenzyheart tribe are seriously crazy.

See, then I started feeling bad. The gorlocs started getting angry that the “big dumb puppy-men” messed with their shrine, and um.. well.. *shifts a little* you already know that story. But I was able to make up for it by killing a bunch of the raccoons and steal back their treasure.. and by just not telling them that I had a hand in the events. The Oracle gorlocs are a peaceful tribe, but I simply can’t see that ending well.

Anyway, the next thing that happened really made me hunger for vengeance. I’ve never been so sad and angry… scratch that, I can’t really remember my entire life, and I’m quite often sad and angry. So I was very sad and very angry. I can understand a little cruelty, but torment really hits me, I can’t stand for that. See, the ‘Rainspeakers’ simply wanted me to go and tell the ‘Mosswalkers’, another tribe of gorlocs in the Basin, that they hadn’t visited the shrine in a while. Fair enough. But when we got there, me and Moodle, such a sight.. the undead had completely ravaged their village and were tormenting and disrespecting the near-dead gorlocs all over the place! I was distraught. You can imagine the state Moodle was in, even though he had suspected as much before we arrived, he hadn’t expected it to be the undead. I killed as many of the scourge as I could, and I tried to save the Mosswalkers, but most of them died right there, thinking that it was their fault for not visiting the shrine enough. Have you ever seen a Death Knight cry? That broke me. I had to get vengeance. This is exactly the kind of thing that absolutely sickens me.

Moodle, the wisest gorloc I have had the pleasure of meeting, told me that their leader probably resides within the fallen pillar but that he needed to go back and tell the High-Oracle what had happened. That was fine by me. Altruis the lich was tough, and he spoke big, but I managed to take him down on my own. There are times when vengeance is much sweeter when dealt by your own hand. One day I will return to the Oracle tribe, but in the meantime I have unfinished business with the Frenzyheart raccoons.

Plants vs. Zombies

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I was going to write my 20 Days of Warcraft (which I’ll try and get back to later if I have time), and I was also going to squee a lot about all of the things that appeared yesterday: The Orgrimmer changes, the sight of the Barrens from the air, the new pets, my new favourite NPC the Psylosopher (which I can neither spell nor say), and so on.. but I started doing a quest yesterday evening. The first couple were easy enough but later on it gets quite difficult. There’s a brilliant comment on WoWhead that really helped me but I think a blog post would be helpful too.

You'll want to have something like this, perhaps a few more spitters and rocks.

Start by putting down 3 Sunflowers. These give you the sunpower you need to put stuff down. When you have 3 of these, you’ll want to start blocking off the approaching zombies. The rocks you see above only cost 15 sunpower and them them busy for a little bit while you gather more sunpower to put down spitters to kill them off.

Next, you will want to work on building your defenses. To do so, you’re going to need a lot of sunflowers, at least 2 rows. Inbetween putting down spitters and a row of freezyas, perhaps with the odd rock thingy thrown in to hold them back. Once you have enough down, you have to build your sunpower to use the pumpkin bombs to defeat the larger mobs or heavy groups of zombies.

If you get overwhelmed, the green trucks to the left of the sunflowers will zoom forward, if mobs get that far, and clear everything in its path – including any sunflowers you might put down before it goes. It is only useable once and if mobs breach that part of the field again, they will enter the house “eating your brains”, so do watch out, it’s best to not have to use those.

It’s a difficult quest, but very fun, and as far as I can work out, you can do it from about level 20ish, after that the money rewards scale with level. I got 30g for the final quest at level 80, and of course:

Dustwallow Marsh Questing

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So I took your advice, I logged in last night and made my way to Theramore. Okay, originally I headed to Booty Bay so that I could boat to Ratchett and run to Dustwallow but it was pointed out to me that I’m an idiot and there’s a boat from the Wetlands, but in the end I got there. I had been there before, I’ve done the Horde and faction neutral quests on every character that passed through those levels, and on my first Draenei Hunter I had done a couple of quests in Theramore before moving on.. possibly to Stranglethorn Vale, I can’t remember. Anyway, I got on with it. I roused the Agitators, stole the propaganda, spread the propaganda, killed some pirates, and a little later on spoke to Jaina, who, for once, didn’t cry, but man that quest ended abruptly! What a frustrating so and so she is.

And why is this guy wearing a blank guild tabard? He’s clearly in a guild.

I guess I’ll go and finish off what I was doing today, I still have yet to go and talk to Nat Pagle, and I haven’t found a quest requiring the use of cannons yet! I can’t leave without shooting people with cannons, there’s something not right in that.

The Ampitheater of Anguish

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A friend of mine ingame, Candy, got his Paladin to 75. It was always his pride and joy, after the amount of time he put into it in vanilla, I really can’t blame him! He asked me, “What level can I do the Ring of Blood thingy?” I said 75, and off we went a little bit later. Of course I took Soupdragon, mostly because it’s much easier to be smacked in the face and Death Strike than to remember a class I haven’t played in a while. While I was waiting, I noticed a couple of players had wiped on the last bit of the Ampitheater quests and the mammoth was just standing there, obviously bugged. They seemed to be struggling so I decided I’d let them sort it out, tag it, and I’d tank it for them, however, the Warlock jumped in the mammoth and stupidly I attacked the other guy.. and tagged it. It was a bit of a mess, we all died, ran back over, I hopped into their group, helped kill it then got on with helping Candy, who was pretty damn happy to get a new hitty stick.

A little before that, while I was flying around on my Gryphon (this is important, I’ve played as Horde for so long the default Gryphon mounts Alliance get are, to me, gorgeous and I’m so jealous!), I noticed something I’d never stopped to be able to notice before. In the Ampitheater of Anguish, and I guess you’ve all seen this, but I’m an unobservant doofus sometimes, there is an audience. Walking around the audience is a Goblin vendor who sells snacks and occasionally lobs a bag of peanuts at one of the spectators! I thought this was excellent, and I wish I’d noticed it all of those times I’d been here before.

Dragons and Pilla’s

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PUGs

My evening last night began with me joining the Looking for Random Dungeon tool (LFD) and then being teleported off to Blackrock Depths. Unlike every other time when I’d been plopped in next to the instance portal, I was part of the way through the instance and half of the party was dead. A new feature in 3.3.3 which I adore: if you join an instance already in progress, you will be teleported to where your party members are, rather than the beginning of the instance. Lovely!

All but the healer, who happened to be from Argent Dawn also, left the group. I had no reason to leave, he seemed to be a nice guy, so we requeued with the Hunter who’d joined not long after me and seemed to be a sandwich short of a picnic but hey, win some, lose some. The new Paladin tank who joined, seemed okay, if just a little clueless. I asked if we could do the Ring of Law, a nice, quick, easy boss with something for everyone, depending on the boss that spawns, which really is half of the fun. The healer replied, “That’s fine by me.” The tank replied, “which way lol xD.” The hunter pinged the map a lot and said, “xD anywere.” Slash sigh.

Thankfully, the healer led the way. We went down one of the many corridors at the beginning of the instance (I don’t think I will ever know my way around BRD properly, I always, always get lost in there) where the tank had a blast running off, chain pulling each pack of Dwarves. When we reached the Ring of Law, we stopped and the healer tried to point out that there was “A quick boss here.” The tank carried on his merry little way, and died. Of course he blamed the healer, it couldn’t possibly be his fault for running off, right?

We eventually convinced him to head back and do the boss, and halfway through the fight he bubbled. I didn’t notice until me and Mr. Mageypants died from aggro and at the end of the fight, the tank said, “Oops, I bubbled, sorry!” Pfft. Better be. I left after that one. The healer was a nice guy but the tank and the hunter were a little bit moronic. That and I didn’t really fancy clearing every individual little room.

Quests

Afterwards I decided to quest for a little. I’d swept through Searing Gorge the night before on Fae, to get a bit of Loremaster done, and I’d never really noticed what a nice little quest hub it is. You pick up about 10 quests that you do in the same area, I especially liked the ones in the underground Cauldron, it doesn’t take too long to do them and nets you maybe a level or more of experience depending on your level, amount of heirlooms, and rested experience. Not to mention a Landin’ Pilla and a pile of Thorium Brotherhood rep.

I headed down to the bit where you pretty much have to kill a load of pink dinosaurs and this level 54 Orc Rogue was doing the same quest, so he invited me to a group. The first sign of a polite person! He smiled, he said hello, he asked how many more I needed, to which I told him, “8 more, you’re free to leave when you’re done,” and he said goodbye! This is very rare, I’m too used to my own server which seems to be very much ‘first come, first serve’ when it comes to killing mobs, maybe a ‘thx’, and I’d forgotten that people can sometimes be friendly.

After we’d finished, I had a nosey check of Recount to see what spec he was, noticed he was using Ambush, which made me curious. I spotted ‘Hemoarrage’ and couldn’t resist whispering him again, “How are you finding Subtlety by the way? :) ” As it has been buffed in the patch and I’d been thinking about testing it out to compare it to my current build. We had a nice chat about the differences, he mostly told me that it was, “a little less damage, but more utility.” So, basically, great for PvP and questing, but Assassination still seems to be the most fun for levelling in my opinion, it’s still more damage, and more burst. I was considering staying Combat for a while because of all of the lovely energy regenning talents and Blade Flurry, but I’m a Mutilate convert it seems.

Boosts

Whilst I was finishing my quests, I received a whisper from somebody I didn’t recognise. Usually, this is a whisper from somebody asking for a SAN invite, but they were asking, “want a free BRD boost?” I did a quick /who and saw it was a guilded level 80 Warlock, nobody I knew. I don’t like to impose on people, even when they ask and I didn’t know this person, so I asked, “Are you going for the achievement?” They replied, “No, boosting my alt.” Fair enough, I guess that makes me the follow monkey. They put their alt on follow, and I just have to keep up and not get them killed or stuck behind things.

I inspected their Paladin alt after I’d died and run back in (picked up the quest to get the Shadowforge key though, not that I need it on my Rogue) and saw that they were wearing the cloth heirloom chest and shoulders, no neck or helm, grey level 2 bracers, some really crappy stuff. This was obviously a ‘recruit a friend’ boost. I asked if they were going for the zebra mount and they replied, “nope.” I guess they didn’t want to talk, so I figured I’d stay a little while and bail out after a bit. Following somebody quietly while they kill stuff isn’t really my idea of fun. Their plan seemed to be to clear most of the prison area, the first boss and reset. I’d rather quest, though after I’d dinged 53 she bailed out anyway. I gained about 50% of a level from joining them, can’t complain. Afterwards, I finished off in Searing Gorge, where, for the second night in a row, the damn dragon scared me half to death.

Note to Self

Argent Dawn is not like Vashj, there *is* such a thing as a nice person. I always said that if you expect stuff to suck, when it doesn’t you’ll have a pleasant surprise! Does that make me an optimistic pessimist?

Faction Change Guide

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I was personally excited to hear about Faction Change and Race Change services Blizzard announced to be implemented. Now that Faction Changes are available in the US and EU, I decided to lay down the basics.

First of all, these do not include a free server transfer and you can only change one character’s faction in one payment. Now that PvP realms allow you to have both Horde and Alliance on the same server, there are no server limitations. The only thing you are limited to is races, for hunters (see ‘Racials’), for example, you cannot switch from an Orc to a Gnome. This service comes with character customisation and an optional character name change. If you want to eventually change back to your original faction, you may choose a different race to the one you originally chose. Though bear in mind, Blizzard are working on race changes.

Faction specific items will be switched. You will not lose anything in the process. This includes, but is not limited to, gear, vanity pets, mounts, achievements, titles, reputation (a full list of faction counterparts can be found here). All quests and quest items will be reset, though restored if switched back to original faction. If, for example, you have completed every quest in Storm Peaks, you will keep the achievement, however, you will be able to redo the quests for money. Items which are not faction specific, i.e. Food and water, will be unaffected by the change.

Friends lists, ignore lists, guilds and arena teams, as expected, will be reset. You will be able to keep your earnt honour, arena points, marks, emblems, however pending arena points may be lost in the transaction. Bear in mind if you have any pending auctions or mail in your inbox that this will block the faction change. For a level 80 character, the gold limit is 20,000g, be sure to leave any additional on other characters or with friends if you’re feeling generous.

Another thing I have been lead to believe, as with a server transfer, any saved instances will be reset. If you cleared Ulduar on a Wednesday and faction changed on the Thursday, you should be able to clear it again before the end of the week. Though please don’t quote me on this.

Efficient Alt Levelling

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I level quite a few alts, I think I’ve got it down to a tee, can level quite fast when I set my mind to it. Though mostly these days I take it easy. However, there are a few things I use that seriously speed it up. No, not levelling guides, I find half of them slow me down either because I’m trying to decipher what they’re saying, or because they’re saying “do this quest in Azshara, now pop over to Eastern Kingdoms and get the flight plan and hand in some stuff, then go back to Winterspring and kill some yetis, then scare the goblin’s friends with the yetiâ€? and so on..

Anyway, for starters, the heirloom chest and shoulders, I make sure I have both of these before any trinkets, weapons, any of that, because they do stack (have had a few people ask) and the 20% extra experience while levelling is insane. It counts with the experience from quest hand ins as well as killing mobs. So very worth getting. If you have enough emblems you’re willing to spare, or enough Champion’s Seals, go for the weapons and maybe the trinkets if you want.

Next, I make use of my mods, sorry, I like them too much. I have LocationFu for my Fubar, this can tell you which instances are good for your level, which zones are good for your level. It can be a little buggy but nice for those moments where you just can’t decide. QuestGuru gives a nice quest tracker, I found something was blocking me from tracking the quests I wanted to, so having this enables me to track/untrack whichever quests I want in my log. You can also hover over the quest name in the tracker to show a mini tooltip, like that which you’d see if the quest was linked to somebody. I also use QuestHelper, sorry, I got lazy after levelling my Draenei. Used to use a combination of TomTom and Lightheaded, which I’d recommend if you don’t want to use QuestHelper, but I couldn’t be bothered to go through setting waypoints anymore. Without the mods, I make sure I have co ords on my map, and leave WowHead open in the background for easy access if the quest log becomes unhelpful, okay, I leave WowHead open anyway, it’s always useful for something.

Aside from that, after levelling quite a lot, I know where to go and how to level efficiently. I like the pick up a pile of quests, complete them all, especially combining the ones closest together (which is why I like TomTom/Questhelper so much for this) and handing them all in at once. Going back and forth all the time seems a little unnecessary to me. Also, I absolutely love the flying mount changes. Being able to fly around between quests 60-70 in Outlands, and then buy a Tome of Cold Weather Flying (Bind on Account from the Cold Weather Flying trainer, 1000g) which enables you to fly in Northrend as soon as you get there (requires level 68) just makes it a lot faster.

However, if any of these make levelling less enjoyable for you, don’t do them. Simple as. This is just the way I manage to level :)

I got my druid to 65, and then I thought I wouldn’t mind levelling my Death Knight who was 67. I can’t decide which one to level now, think a few friends would prefer the druid, but a part of me is thinking that I’m going to get bored of it, it’s taken me this long to level I know I will, also speccing resto, I don’t think I’ve lasted as a healer yet. Death Knight I know I enjoy, and I prefer the class to Ret Paladin. We’ll see ^^

Farming Netherwing Rep

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So, I randomly decided to farm the Netherwing rep I never got around to doing in TBC. It’s 20 achievement points (with the exalted and the Skyshatter race) and a few mounts, as well as something to do. Me being the completionist I am anyway.

Aside from a couple of slip-ups with an irritating ret paladin in the mines, around about half past 3 (GMT) … the time he’d be coming home from school, it’s been going very well. I use my turtle to AoE farm the mines, hoping for Egg drops from the mobs, and skinning them for that silly skinning daily (this is also a very good place to farm the ore for the mining daily), and checking around for egg spawns as I go. Fly around the island checking for eggs, and then around the building on the mainland, checking on the ground, in crates, in buildings, behind drake riders. I find quite a lot of eggs doing this, and for herbalists, the island is a good place to complete the herbalism daily.

I also completed the hidden quests, one drops from the elite on the island, the flayer in the middle. It drops a hand which starts a quest to kill the slightly bigger flayer. Another is a drop in the Slime covered objects which drop from the Oozes in the mines after you hit friendly. The other is from a broken in the mine near the Netherdrake, which asks you to kill a few of the Murkblood in the caves. Along with these, the races are very good extra rep.

As well as these I do the regular dailies. The Booterang quest will always be one of my favourites. “Why it put Booterang on skin WHY?!” Just love to Booterang those orcs and then poison them, aren’t I lovely :P . Anyway, that’s pretty much all, just farm a lot of eggs and it takes no time at all.

Woah Woah Influx of news Oo

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Don’t you hate it when your PC crashes mid blog post when you haven’t even thought about saving it yet and the auto save hasn’t even triggered itself? Sigh.

Anyway, as I was saying. Whilst trying to complete a few quests I was met with “Go check MMO. NOW!” So off I trotted only to be met with the news that all of the recent Cataclysm news, including the new Goblin/Worgen races, class combinations (Tauren Paladins woohoo!), as well as a huge revamp of Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, has now been confirmed by Blizzard.

I recommend you go check MMO-Champion for yourself to see. Also the direct link to the blue post for easier finding later on. The race/class combinations can be found nicely laid out here. World of Raids have some awesome live blog coverage going on from Blizzcon if you’re interested in uptodate Cataclysm/Blizzcon news as it happens.