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 II: Woah, Green!

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.

Last week, I took my trust hunter, Oloneise, to level 11, and finally got him a pet. Things were going well in the snowy mountains of Dun Morogh in Dwarf territory, but I was getting a little tired of all the white stuff. That being said, I had Oloneise and Whiskers pack up their things, and start heading to the town of Thelsamar.

Overall, this last battery of play has been very productive, taking Oloneise up to level 16, getting him some nifty new skills (like new traps), and taking some time to level up engineering and mining. Thelsamar is actually a nice place to improve mining skills at lower levels. There are copper veins all over the hills and in the loch around there, so players can get plenty of ore and make it into copper bars in that area. Tin deposits are a little sparser, but there are enough to keep players going as they finish off levelling their character around Loch Modan, before heading to greener pastures.

Fiddling more with engineering, it has quickly reminded me how fun the profession can be for an alt character. If it’s your first time playing WoW and you’re working on your first character, I wouldn’t recommend going with engineering, as it really isn’t all that practical. But if you want to take a break from your main character, and build and alt, engineering is great fun to take for a spin. The profession allows players to make a lot of neat things to play with. Lately I’ve just been making different types of explosives to huck at enemies. They don’t take a lot of damage, but it’s fun to throw dynamite and such at mobs while my pet nibbles on them, and Oloneise is pumping them full of buckshot. Good times.

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Anyways, on to the actual adventures… The trip from Ironforge to Thelsamar does take some time. Walking there, I had to take Oloneise and Whiskers along a very long road that felt like would never end (I had forgotten how long the hike is). After passing through one final tunnel, I had reached Loch Modan, with its green grass, tall trees, and distinct lack of snow. The first valley you enter in the region when coming from Dun Morogh isn’t very big, but does

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have a dwarven outpost, with a pair of giant statues of dwarf kings (looking very similar to the pair of king's statues in Lord of the Ring). Quickly looking for any quests that could be done here, I zipped into the outpost and saw a couple of mountaineers with little, yellow exclamation marks on top of their heads. After talking to them, they informed me that the Troggs just won’t leave them alone, as there are yet more of these buggers around the Loch up to no good. What they would like Oloneise to do is thin the hairy beasts’ ranks a bit, to which I quickly agreed.

This would be the theme for the week: huntin’ them Troggs. These little buggers are everywhere in dwarven territory. I did get a brief respite, when a couple of the locals asked if Oloneise and Whiskers could smack around some nearby Tunnel Rats that were making nuisances of themselves. None of these quests did very much to help uncover the lore of the region, but going on these missions is very good practice for newer players that need to get a handle on mob management. The first thing lower level players (Lvl 10-12) will notice when swinging through Loch Modan for the first time is that there are a lot more mobs wandering around, and the vast majority of them will attack on sight. That in mind, players can quickly learn how to manage aggro, dancing around wandering enemies while in combat, so to avoid having additional mobs joining the battle, and consequently dying. I learned this the hard way when hunting some troggs in some caves near Thelsamar. One minute it was just Oloneise and Whiskers taking out a trogg seer, the next the boss of the area and his bodyguards were on my back while running in hopes they would give up and go back to their spawn points. They didn’t. I died. D’oh!

Anywho, besides this minor setback, it was a good week for questing with my hunter. I managed to clear the lower level quests for Thelsamar, which were pretty straightforward. The nice thing, too, was that they give nice amounts of experience, helping to level at a good clip over there. Now it’s time to head to one of the local excavation sites run by the Explorers’ League and see what the trouble is over there. I did some early investigating, and it looks like there’s more troggs to be dealt with. It should be interesting. These guys con orange at the moment. Hopefully Oloneise and Whiskers can drop them reasonably fast, and keep the down time to a minimum. I guess I’ll find out one way or another soon enough…

Mr. Nash

(March 25, 2005)