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 V:

Short and Sweet

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.

This week I didn’t have a whole lot of time to play World of Warcraft. It kind of sucks, but that’s just the way things go sometimes. Regardless, I did have some time to wander around the Wetlands, and even got Oloneise up to level 21. There may not have been a whole lot of time to play, but what little time there was I made sure was well spent.

If there’s one thing that stands out about the Wetlands, it’s that the area is so incredibly bleak. Sure there’s plenty of plant life, water, mountains, and whatnot, but there’s this brownish tinge to everything that makes the region look a little bit dead. Granted this is pretty much what one should expect from marshland, but playing too long in the Wetlands seems like a guaranteed way to induce acute depression.

Despite the dreary disposition of the region, there are plenty of murlocs and kobolds around that are just begging for a beating, and that was the name of the game this week. Before this, though, I got a quick quest from one of the crocolisk hunters in Menethil Harbour. The quest isn’t too difficult, but it does require some patience. It has players get four young crocolisk skins, and getting the first couple of skins is pretty easy, but after that getting the final two, and especially the last one, can seemingly take forever. What is nice about the quest, though, is that the crocs are spread out quite a bit, so the chance of suddenly fighting a swarm of the scaly beasts is highly unlikely. Even if there are a couple of chummy crocs a little too close to one another, playing as a hunter makes them easy to avoid since you can see what’s going on as plain as day with Track Beasts activated. After about a

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half hour, I had completed the quest, and swung by Menethil to complete the quest, and picked up the next stage in the arch. Since the beasts I need to hunt now are around level 25, I’ll be putting this quest on the “To Do” list for the time being.

In the meantime, it was time to go thin the ranks of the local murlocs who have a thing for harassing the nearby ships, and stealing their goods. This next quest

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required me to kill a dozen murlocs and bring back the head of one named Gobbler. Getting the body count was extremely easy, as there are tons of these little, gurgling buggers in the Wetlands. The major challenges that come with hunting them are that either there are a lot of them around at once, making it very likely that players will find themselves fighting two or three murlocs at a time, or that several players are in the area at once completing a murloc quest, or simply farming off of their drops. In this case, there are very few murlocs around, leaving those that want to complete quests having to wait quite some time for their prey to re-spawn.

When I got to the murlocs there were several instances where Oloneise and Whiskers had their hands full, fighting a small army of murlocs. Thankfully there were only a couple of deaths over that time, and the graveyard is right next to where I was hunting, making corpse recovery a breeze. The thing about murlocs linking that players need to watch out for is not so much the possibility of one of the things walking too close, or spawning right on top of you, but that these guys run away when their hit points get low, and they are fast when they’re fleeing too. As such, it is a good idea to hit the murlocs with some sort of an attack that considerably reduces their mobility, otherwise the thing will run straight into a group of enemies, and everything will suddenly become a whole lot more complicated.

What turned out to take the longest in completing this murloc-hunting quest was trying to find Gobbler. He’s not too hard too miss when he’s around, as he looks a little taller than your average murloc. The problem for me was that someone must have killed Gobbler, and he still had a while before he was scheduled to re-spawn, so I had some waiting to do. To keep myself busy, I ran around and killed murlocs, making a few silver while I was at it until my prey was available. Finally, he showed up, so I set Whiskers on Gobbler, and had Oloneise open up with his rifle. Before long, Gobbler was dead, I had met the last of my quest requirements, and it was off to Menethil to get my reward.

One thing that I noticed during my short stint in the Wetlands this week is that Whiskers is having more and more trouble tanking as he faces stronger enemies. His growling is working fine in terms of keeping hate; however, the cat can’t take a beating like he used too. The way things are going I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ll need to start looking for a new pet at around level 25. As it stands, I’m not sure how much more Whiskers has left in him. It’ll be sad to have to let go of Oloneise’s feline friend, but it’s looking more and more likely that Whiskers’ days are numbered.

But there’s no need to worry about that just yet, there’s still at least a few more levels of fun to be had with the snow leopard before we say our goodbyes. That in mind, I’m thinking about cutting Oloneise’s time short in the Wetlands, finishing off what few quests that are still in the logs for Menethil. Once those are out of the way, maybe it’ll be time to hop on a boat for the lush, magical land of the Night Elves, and go to Darkshore / Ashenvale for a while.

Mr. Nash

(April 16, 2005)