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 IV:

Moseying to Menethil

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.

Hurray! Oloneise hit level 20 this week! I was quite happy to reach this level, and it’s great to have Aspect of the Cheetah and Dual Wield at my disposal now. Not only that, but there’s actually a ton of handy hunter skills that become available at level 20. Besides the two already mentioned, there are a couple of extremely useful hate management abilities that I quite like so far, as well as a new freezing trap.

Getting from level 18 to 20 this week was quite fun. I was largely polishing off one of the quests around Thelsamar, taking down the nearby ogres for an elite quest. It would have been impossible to go it alone, so, luckily, I managed to find someone else who wanted to do the quest, a dwarf priest named Haggis. Tracking down the ogres was fairly easy for the most part, at least while we were outside of the caves across the loch from Thelsamar. There’s usually plenty of the big, bald bad boys wandering around, so the two of us went in and made a pretty good go of it.

My pet, Whiskers, made a pretty decent tank, even in spite of not having as high defense as something like a bear might. Once he established hate with an enemy, I have Oloneise open up with his gun, while Haggis kept Whiskers alive with heals and buffs. Generally this worked out well, though there were a few times nearby shamans, or other such ogre would get a little too close and start attacking. If there was only two ogres to deal with, usually we were able to take them both down. There were only a couple of times where Haggis and I had to run away with a small army of ogres on our backs. During these times it was actually surprising just how long the leashes on these guys were. We had run out of the mountains where the ogres live, and these guys were still following. It was starting to look like we’d have to run right into the loch to avoid the buggers. Thankfully the ogres finally gave up and went home, but it was a little bit nerve racking to see how far they were willing to chase players.

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Another thing I learned while doing this elite quest is just how important it can be to set a pet’s level of aggression to passive sometimes. Early on, Whiskers was entirely too eager to engage the enemy. I usually have him set to defensive, but even then he would go after some of the ogres at highly inappropriate times. Finally I set him to passive, and things started to work fine again.

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After getting the majority of the body count that we needed for the quest it was becoming quite obvious that we would need to venture into the ogres’ caves in order to track down some Brutes. This proved to be the most challenging part of the quest. The difficulty with the caves comes in that there are tons of ogres in them, and they are usually close together, not to mention that they’re stronger than their brethren outside. It would take a lot of smart pulls to finish off this quest, something made even tougher by the fact that I had run out of bullets (d’oh!). Nonetheless, Haggis and I headed in, and started to slowly look for the ogres we needed to kill to complete the quest. We had to fight our way through quite a number of mystics, but as we got deeper into the cave a decent number of Brutes started to appear. Slowly but surely we started to take them down, and before long we only needed one more kill to complete the quest.

Unfortunately it was about this time that Murphy’s Law decided to kick in, and two mystics jumped us at once. We made a pretty good go of it, but in time Haggis ran out of mana, and was cut down by one of the ogres, leaving Whiskers and Oloneise to fend for themselves. Soon after, Whiskers was dead too, and I was all alone. Luckily, I was down to one mystic, having killed the other, but Oloneise only had half of his health, and no healing potions available at the time. It was getting very close, but the mystic healed himself and shortly thereafter Oloneise was dead as well. Both Haggis and I laughed the whole thing off, though. The two mystics’ spawn points are very near one another, so avoiding them would have been quite difficult anyway. After a couple of minutes, Haggis had recovered his corpse, and proceeded to raise me. Once we had completely healed it was time to track down that final ogre Brute. Luckily, there was one nearby, so we ran over and took him down as quick as we could. Standing over the ogres body, it was obvious to both Haggis and I that the rest of the ogres in the cave would start to re-spawn quite soon, so the two of us decided to break out the hearthstones and get out of there post haste. Overall, the quest proved extremely fun, and I would gladly team up with Haggis again if the opportunity presented itself.

Later in the week, I still had about five thousand experience points to go before hitting level 20. With that, I headed to the excavation site near Loch Modan once again, and spent some time smacking around troggs. I’ve spent so much time around there, that it was quite easy working through the area, and clearing out the monsters there. The nice thing about it is that the way re-spawning works there, by the time you’ve completed a lap of the place, the area that you started from will already have fresh enemies there to kill, so you don’t have to deal with down time. It didn’t take long before Oloneise hit 20, and I took him to Ironforge straight away to get him as many skills as I could afford.

After training Oloneise in Dual Wield, Aspect of the Cheetah, and a few other skills, I decided to head back to Thelsamar. From there it was off to the nearby outpost on the way to the Wetlands. At the first tunnel by the outpost, there was a dwarf mountaineer who had a nice quick quest that required me to kill some nearby orcs, and break through to the coastal town Menethil Harbour. The orcs are actually pretty easy to clear out in the early going, as they are well spread out. However, as you make your way deeper into the orc occupied area, there are a lot more of them, and they’re much closer together. As such, the easiest way to go after them was to slowly pull away the ones on the edges of the little valley that they were occupying, and work inward. For the most part this strategy worked well. There was only one time that I ran into trouble, where Oloneise missed a Wing Clip. Shortly after this, the orc ran, and Whiskers went after it, drawing aggro from three other nearby orcs. We had to run, but quickly regrouped, and got the head count that we needed in order to proceed.

After killing the orcs, it was time to finish the journey to Menethil. It’s not too terribly far from Thelsamar, but nor is the town a hop, skip, and a jump away. The trek probably took around ten minutes, but it wasn’t too bad thanks to Aspect of the Cheetah. Along the way, I picked up a quick fed ex quest, delivering some crocolisk parts for a local trapper whose employer lives in Menethil. Upon arriving in the city, I quickly set up my new flight path for the area, and logged out.

Next week should prove fun, as there are plenty of murlocs in the area to chase around, not to mention quite a few other creatures indigenous to the Wetlands’ marsh regions. All of which will undoubtedly provide plenty of stories next weekend.

Mr. Nash

(April 9, 2005)


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