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 XII

I Think I’m an AH Whore

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.

Okay, so I said last time that I was going to go on a hard push with my Shaman to hit 40 in my previous update. Well, it didn’t happen. In fact, I’ve mostly been playing with my night elf rogue again, getting her all the way up to level 48. Spending much of my time doing quests in Tanaris, or exploring in Feralas. It was fun wandering around some of the more ancient, and all together creepy parts of Azeroth. But as swashbuckling as all of that was, the one thing I’ve finally come to terms with is that I can’t get enough of the auction house.

It all started while wandering around Feralas. I had been to a number of the “tourist traps” right along the road, picking fights with renegade Tauren, figuring out where Dire Maul was, and running for my life after accidentally entering the zone from Desolace while still a low-level, but marching out to the nether regions of this jungle was something I hadn’t done yet. Up to this point, I had never bothered to investigate some old elven ruins infested with ogres. It’s one of those areas that unless you’re a rogue who is able to stealth around, you will want to bring friends in order to check the place out. Much of the area has large groups of ogres tightly packed together, often five at a time, making it a huge pain in the ass for dealing with links.

Nonetheless, I kept on creeping about, trying to see what there was to see, finding lots of toppled pillars, mud, small ponds, and plenty of vines. Along the way the occasional solitary ogre caught my attention, so I would sneak up on them, pick their pockets (a number of them have a book called “How to Cook Man” on them, cute), then lay the beat on them. Eventually I came to the main structure in the ruins, looking exactly like the Parthenon-like building in Darnassus where many of the high priests reside. This particular building, though, was teeming with ogres. The main

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floor is even more densely populated than what one may find outside, but once one gets to the second floor, things become much more manageable. There are a couple of ogre warlords stationed there, and usually two or three mages that patrol the perimeter of the place.

When first starting to attack the ogres, they all appeared to be stationary, so first I went after one of the mages just standing around. These guys are very easy to deal with so long as

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you give them a swift kick when they start casting a spell, and maybe the occasional gouge to buy some time if Kick’s cooldown isn’t completed yet. Anyway, the first mage went down fast, so I ran up and looted him, re-stealthed, and moved on. A little ways over I saw a gigantic ogre warlord pacing back and forth. He looked rather intimidating in his heavy armor, and massive axe, but I knew he’d still be manageable. Things started out well, and I got him down to about 50 percent of his hit points pretty quick. However, by this time I noticed that someone else was shooting at me. Looking over, I saw that there was a mage just blasting away at my poor rogue. Handling these guys one-on-one is no big deal, but with two of them I really had my hands full. It didn’t take much longer to kill off the warlord, but looking at my health bar, and distinct lack of healing potions, I knew I wouldn’t be able to take down the mage right away. With that I used my Vanish ability, and looked for a safe place to eat something, and get back my strength.

It was at this point that I realized these mages walked in a circle around the outside of the upper floor of the building, so once I had regained my health, I proceeded to hunt down all of the mobs patrolling the area. After these guys were gone, I went on to kill the other warlord in the area, which proved to be a lot easier without some mage hurling fireballs at me the whole time. Upon looting the warlord’s corpse, I was treated to a rather pleasant surprise: my first piece of epic armor. Seeing those purple letters next to the armor really made my day. It was cloth gear well-suited to a mage or priest (for the record, what I found were Insight Robes), so they weren’t of much use to my rogue. That being said, I quickly hearth stoned my way back to Ironforge, and slapped the armor up on the auction house with a starting bid of 300 gold, and a buy out of 450 gold. When I logged in the next day, I discovered that the armor had sold for about 420 gold (it really blows my mind how much some people are willing to spend on gear in this game).

At this point I must have had close to 500 gold just laying around, and for a while I seriously contemplated simply saving the cash for my epic mount at level 60. This didn’t last long, as by the end of the day I found myself on a spending spree in the auction house. I grabbed myself a Widowmaker (a blue dagger with some decent stats on it), a new ring that jacked my agility into the stratosphere, and even managed to snag myself a bit of Shadowcraft gear, the belt, which I can’t even wear for another five levels (ah well, saves me one end game instance run I guess). Now I’m hoping the other piece of Shadowcraft armor that doesn’t bind on pick up, the bracers, show up on the auction house one of these days.

What’s really strange about scoring that epic gear is that I was tossing around the idea of soloing a few instances in order to make some money, but opted not to because I was more in the mood to explore, then low and behold, I get the purple gear. It just feels like one of those mildly cosmic gaming moments.

Mr. Nash

(September 13, 2005)


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