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 VI:

Interlude

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 decided to take a break from using my hunter, Oloneise, and dragged my level 35 Night Elf rogue, Lovelyrita, out of mothballs. She has some dandy gear on (with some pretty damn nice agility enhancements), and it felt like it was time for a fast paced, almost action RPG romp in Azeroth. Besides, I was getting tired of the swamps of Menethil, and there were some quests in and around lush, green Hillsbrad that Lovelyrita needed to complete.

The only thing that can be a bit of a pain in the butt when questing near Hillsbrad is that it is a very popular area for raids to take place, as players from the Horde and Alliance push each other’s forces back and forth between Southshore and Tauren Mill. If you’re on a PvP server, you’ll have to worry about accidentally getting caught in the crossfire when these sorts of battles go on. Even if you play on a PvE server, things can get a bit choppy, especially if your computer’s specs are a bit on the slow side.

Thankfully, this week I tended to play at quite a late hour, usually logging in after 1AM Pacific Time, so there wasn’t very much happening in the way of raids. With that, I went on to tackle my first quest: hunting down mountain lions. These guys are around the Alterac Mountains, and are pretty easy to kill. If you get there at a time when no one else has been hunting them recently, sometimes there will be quite a few of them, so be careful of links when starting to fight. Luckily, since I was going in as a rogue, I could stealth myself and creep up on a lion without incident. The nice thing, too, was that there was a silver elite there, a mountain lion named Agara. She was level 34, but I was surprised how quickly she could be taken down. It didn’t take very long at all to kill her, though I was landing critical hits on her very

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consistently, which helped quite a bit. She dropped a green hat with some nice intelligence and spirit buffs on it, so that will be going on the auction house the next time I swing through Ironforge.

All in all, it probably took about a half hour to complete the mountain lion quest, after which I returned to Southshore to collect my money, treasure, and experience points. From there it was time to hunt down some nearby murlocs that a

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local Stormwind soldier was too lazy, and / or drunk to handle himself. If you plan to solo this quest, be very careful, as the murlocs you have to look for tend to be clumped into very large groups, usually around 8-10 of them to a pack. Thankfully there are a decent amount of these guys that are walking around far enough from everyone else that if you attack them, you won’t have a dozen other murlocs running after you. That in mind, don’t forget that murlocs flee once their hit points get low, so make sure to have a speed reducing attack ready before this happens, because if that murloc you’re fighting runs over to his buddies, you’re going to be in big, big trouble. Really, the best way to tackle this quest is to track down a mage, or another class with some nice AoE attacks that can take down these murlocs very quickly, or at least have a druid handy that can immobilize any additional murlocs that link during battle.

Seeing as there wasn’t anyone in my level range kicking around Southshore when I decided to start this quest, I had to take the slower route of picking off murlocs that were a fair ways away from the various camps along the coastline. This proved to be a tad plodding, especially trying to gauge depth when swimming underwater to attack a murloc that was far further away than it looked. There were a few times where the murlocs were spread far enough so to be able to actually attack the camps, but this didn’t happen all that regularly. A nice thing, though, when attacking these murloc camps is that they seem to have an unusually high tendency of spawning treasure chests. That being said, I must have had some bad luck last night, as the booty in the chests was very hit and miss. Sometimes there was decent weapons and armor in them, but more often than not half of the contents wound up being food. Ah well.

After a little while, I had finished up getting my body count for the murlocs, and headed back to Southshore to collect my post-quest goodies, after which the drunken Stormwind guard asked my to head a little ways East, and kill about 20 naga there that were getting a little too close to town for the local authorities’ taste. This quest only took about 20 minutes to do, and it gives some decent experience too, so it makes for a great quest to do when strapped for time. While chasing down naga, I put deadly poisons on one of my blades, with crippling poison on the other. I wanted to take down these naga as fast as I could, so I wanted any advantage I could get. With deadly poisons, though, rogues need to be careful when trying to use their gouge attack, especially if following up with backstab. If the deadly poison has taken affect on an opponent before attacking with gouge, players will need to get their backstab in very quickly, otherwise once the poison in the enemy’s blood damages it again, gouge will wear off, and you may not be able to get off backstab in time.

Anywho, killing the naga is by far one of the easiest quests that I’ve come across in some time (outside of fed ex quests, anyway). The naga are usually quite spread out, making it a cakewalk to peg them off. After the quest was completed I headed to Southshore once again, and talked to the guard. It was now that I learned that his commanding officer was a bit of an opportunistic ass, looking for a nice promotion at the expense of his subordinates. That being said, I eventually agreed to help the poor guard in the inn by getting a letter to one of the top officers in Stormwind, letting him know what sort of crap was going on in Southshore. This made for some incredibly easy experience, since all I had to do was hop on a griffon, ride the tram in Ironforge, and that was it.

By the time all of these quests helping the guard in Southshore were done, I had one more errand that I wanted to run in the area before heading somewhere else: to gather enough turtle meat to get the recipe for turtle bisque. While it was another seek and destroy sort of mission that required a lot of killing, it was a nice chance to explore parts of the Alterac Mountains that I had not been to yet. The easiest way to go after the turtles that you need in order to complete the quest is to follow along a creek that can be found just east of Southshore. As you follow it inland, it slowly winds into the mountains, and can be an relaxing way to see the region. As I made my way further along the creek, I passed Tauren Mill, as well as the home of what I can only assume is one of the witchdoctors that Horde shaman need to find as they gain certain abilities.

Running along the creek, there are tons of turtles around to attack. They don’t aggro either, so if you leave them along, they’ll leave you alone too. Surprisingly, it did take a fair amount of time to get the ten pieces of turtle meat that I needed, even with the beasts sometimes dropping two pieces of meat at a time. However, I did eventually get what I needed and headed back to Southshore, and completed the quest. For those whose characters are around level 30-36, turtle bisque is a worthwhile recipe to learn if you don’t have anything similar to it. The food restores over 800 hit points, and gives an additional eight points to spirit and stamina for fifteen minutes if you sit and eat long enough. Another thing to note about it is that it only needs one piece of meat, and one serving of spice each time you cook it, as opposed to some of the other dishes that yield similar results, which is nice since that way you don’t need to worry about requiring two pieces of meat in order to cook the food that you want.

For having not used my rogue in a couple of weeks, it was nice getting reacquainted with her. I had missed the whole combo system, and the fast paced battles that come with it. I even managed to hit level 36 while I was at it, promptly using my talent point to improve Remorseless Attack. Anyway, that’s about it for this week. Next week we may see the return of Oloneise, but it’s getting pretty tempting to take my rogue to 40 and getting her mount. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Mr. Nash

(April 24, 2005)