Journeys in Azeroth Archives:

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

Part VI

Part VII

Part VIII

Part IX

Part X

Part XI

Part XII

Part XIII

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Journeys in Azeroth

Part I: Oloneise Meets Whiskers

Warning: Throughout this article there will be several spoilers related to World of Warcraft. If this is a concern to you, please do not read any further. This is the only spoiler warning you will receive.

World of Warcraft has become the “It” game in recent months among MMORPGs. I’ve already reviewed the game, but now I want to take a different approach to looking at the title. I’ve made a new character, and this series of articles, Journeys in Azeroth, will follow his adventures. These will be more about the experience of gaming than any sort of critique which focuses on the technical just as much as said experience, and best of all, at least for me, it will be a deliciously self-indulgent trek, as I’ll be going where I want, when I want without having feeling I need to move to a new area for reviewing purposes.

That being said, recently I took one of my alts out of mothballs: Oloneise, a dwarven hunter. I had gotten him to all of level 9 before tucking him away for a while to focus on my main toon. One of the nice things about firing up this old character is that he was able to get 200% experience points for quite some time since he had been in a rested state for so long. After spawning in Ironforge (the Dwarven Capital), and double-checking what gear and abilities Oloneise had, I quickly flipped open my quest log to see what I had on my plate. There I saw a couple of quick quests I could go do in Brewnall Village, so I started making my way down to the frozen river below Ironforge, and cut across the frozen river, arriving at the isolated dwarven settlement.

One of the quests for the town was already completed. In it I had to go to the inn in Kharanos, and smuggle in some Brewnall beer for unsuspecting patrons to try. It would appear there is a bit of a rivalry between the brew masters of Brewnall and Kharanos, so the one from Brewnall wanted to prove once and for all that her recipe was the best. After telling the woman who had sent me on the quest that everything was taken care of, she quite happily handed me some money, and I scored some experience points while I was at it. It wasn’t exactly a lot of money or experience, but it was definitely some of the easiest one could come by.

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After this, I went on to my next quest, which required me to kill off some of the local wildlife that was making it very difficult for the people of Brewnall to get anything done, thanks to constant attacks. The quest actually required quite a few monsters to be killed, totally about 20 in all. I could see that I had my work cut out for me. Heading into the wilderness, Oloneise began to leave many an animal corpse in his wake, putting down boars, bears, and snow

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leopards alike. Sometimes things would get a bit hairy, as a lot of the beasts around here absolutely love to gang up on unsuspecting adventurers. There were quite a few times that I had to high tail it out of the woods with a pack of snow leopards in hot pursuit. Nonetheless, I hung in there and things progressed steadily. This was where the 200% experience bonus Oloneise had accumulated really began to come in handy, allowing him to soar through the levels. In fact by the time I had returned to Brewnall to collect my reward for the quest, he was already up to level 10 and ready to begin his training that would allow him to use a pet and be a true hunter.

Eager to take on a faithful companion in my adventures, I took Oloneise to Kharanos, a town not too far from Ironforge, as quick as I could to start his training. Upon finding the hunter’s trainer, it was time to get started, taming wand in hand (a device used during the training process to tame beasts, before players learn the ability). My first task was to find a boar to tame, and show to the hunter’s trainer as proof of my success, followed by repeating the process with a bear, and finally a snow leopard. It was all very straightforward; though the first time out with the boar it took a couple of goes to successfully tame the malicious little piggy. In the end, I decided to keep the snow leopard as my pet for the time being. He’s proving quite a good choice, being more of a finesse fighter, though certainly not the best for tanking. Nonetheless, I’m quite happy having my feline friend beside Oloneise now, and have aptly named the beast “Whiskers” as we set out to wreck some havoc on the troggs, trolls, and other troublemakers around Dun Morogh.

After completing my taming training, I was charged with the task of finding a hunter trainer in Ironforge who could show me how to train my pets. Before this, I figured I should probably make sure Oloneise has finished learning all of his abilities available up to this point before going any further. With that it was time to unload some silver and get those abilities up to speed. Most of the abilities would help with improving Oloneise’s gun skills, as I trained him in Concussive Shot, Arcane Shot, Aspect of the Hawk, and a few other skills that he needed. The nice thing about a lot of these abilities is that they stack quite well, allowing players to make minced meat of their prey, especially with a pet in tow.

With Oloneise’s skills up to date, it was time to head back to Ironforge. On the way, we popped by the home of a couple of gnomes on the outskirts of Kharanos. They had both been displaced throughout Azeroth, like so many other gnomes, after the destruction of Gnomeregan (the gnomish homeland), and now they were trying to save their brethren, who had been altered by the disaster there, turned into violent, mindless beings. As such, one of the gnomes, Razzle Sprysprocket, asked me to get him some spare parts carried by these doomed gnomes who now wandered near the entrance of the ruins of Gnomeregan. I gladly accepted, not so much from a sense of doing my part to save the gnomish race as that Razzle was willing to give me a pretty snazzy looking cape for my troubles.

New quest accepted, it was time to finish my pet-related training and head to Ironforge. It didn’t take long to track down the hunter’s trainer, who quickly gave me all of the remaining skills I needed to get started on a happy hunter-pet relationship. Now it was time to get down to business, and see just what my pet was made of, so I had Oloneise toss Whiskers some jerky to munch on, and it was off to Gnomeregan to complete that quest for Razzle.

As I made my way through the snow swept wilderness of Dun Morogh, I could see the plumes of green exhaust billowing out of one of the huge vents on the outskirts of Gnomeregan rising in the distance, and knew I was getting close to my target. Arriving at my destination, I could see a number of Leper Gnomes wandering around, the poor, altered gnomes that Razzle was setting out to save. While there were quite a few of these creatures in the area, they were usually spread out enough that there wouldn’t be many cases where I would need to worry about any unwanted links during my fights. With that, I set Whiskers on the nearest gnome and started some carnage. As Whiskers handled the up close melee combat and tanking, I had Oloneise unload round after round of buckshot into the gnomes from a distance. Things went very smoothly, as I was able to set my pet on the monsters, and the two of us could quickly take them down. If it looked like a link may form from sending in Whiskers, all I would have to do is shoot the desired creature with my gun to get its attention, and pull it away from its friends, after which I could have Whiskers attack, and get back to our normal combat routine. With a lethal one-two punch of snow leopard and blunderbust (one of the more popular firearms at this level), the Leper Gnomes fell fast, and hard, and before long all of the necessary items had been collected for Razzle to conduct his experiment in trying to cure these corrupted gnomes. Items in hand, it was time to head back to the gnome inventor’s home and see if his idea would work.

When we got to Razzle’s house, we gave him his components, and he quickly set to work completing his contraption. Soon after it was ready for a test run. Aiming the device at a caged Leper Gnome, Razzle activated the machine, and after powering up, it began to blast a bright ray of light at the test subject. After a while the gnome began to change, but unfortunately things didn’t go as planned, and instead of curing the altered gnome, the machine simply turning it into a chicken, which quickly scurried out the door. With many fantasy stories often casting gnomes as accident-prone inventors with huge imaginations and very little common sense, this outcome wasn’t very surprising. It would have been nice to have seen the Leper Gnome changed into something else, maybe a dog that wouldn’t stop humping Razzle’s leg. Nonetheless, it was obvious that Razzle had a lot more research to do if he wanted to make his experiment a success. At this point, I was beginning to have my fill of Kharanos for the time being, and decided to head out to greener pastures. I knew there was a small dwaren mine about halfway between Ironforge and Thelsamar suffering from a bit of a trogg infestation, so I dawned my new cloak that Razzle gave me, grabbed Whiskers and we set off.

Upon arriving, I could see the trogg problem at the mines was as bad as ever. Stopping by at a small dwarf camp nearby, I talked with a couple of the local foreman who were none too pleased that these smelly creatures had decided to make the mine their home. The dwarfs promptly asked that a number of the troggs be killed for which they’d reward me handsomely with experience points and some silver. Dropping into the quarry below, I could see that this would be a tougher task than some of the others I had been on previously. The troggs were packed a lot more closely together, and there were guaranteed to be some links that would force Whiskers and Oloneise to solo at least one trogg each at any given time. Undaunted we set to work clearing the area. It was slow going, with some close calls, and on a few instances we had to run for our lives after a bad link. Slowly but surely, though, we had taken care of one of the quests where most of the specific type of trogg we had to kill were in the more opened up quarry. Now it was time to head into the mine itself, where the more powerful troggs we needed to track down could be found. This proved a far more challenging task, as the danger of linking still existed, but now it was compounded thanks to the more confined space we were in, making it much more difficult to flee in this area. It was a tough go early on, and I had to revive Whiskers on more than one occasion, but eventually we found a rhythm and were able to finish the quest. Upon returning to the camp and talking to the two dwarves, I received a respectable amount of silver, and better still Oloneise hit level 11. I briefly jumped into his talents menu and used another point for his Aspect of the Hawk skill (I’m currently working on maxing out this skill), after which I decided that I had enough of all the snow for the time being, and it was time to head to a nice, lush region with plenty of foliage, and with a warmer, cheerier atmosphere. It was time to head to Thelsamar…

Mr. Nash

(March 17, 2005)