The Sons of Hodir revisited

As far as I understand, most people hate the Sons of Hodir. As for myself however, I established before that I'm actually rather fond of them, so it was a no-brainer that my shaman would work on getting exalted with them as well, even though she can get all the shoulder enchants she needs from my other four eighties, now that the things are bind-on-account.

Spinks nominated the Sons of Hodir quest line for the Pink Pigtail List of 2009, and with good reason I feel. Even if you disliked doing the daily quests, the quest chain that introduces you to the Sons in the first place is nothing but epic. What starts as a simple rescue mission for goblin miners ends up introducing you to a story of betrayal, forging of new trust and deceit. Plus you get to ride bears and drakes on the way, which is pretty damn cool.

My personal favourite part of the chain is one of the more quiet quests however, namely the slightly silly side quest called Battling the Elements. It's a vehicle quest in which you get to control the old giant Snorri and have to kill fire revenants, which doesn't sound all that special, but the way in which you "ride" Snorri alone is enough to crack me up:

"I'm Snorri and I play with a troll shaman. What's your game?"

Who's controlling whom there? Also, how many quests have got you helping the elderly? I actually felt like I was doing a good deed.

And then there's the implementation of course. You don't just kill the fire revenants, you pick up snowballs and put them out. That's just... genius! If you've ever been given a quest where you felt that the quest giver wasn't really asking you to solve his problem in the most sensible manner, this quest is the exact opposite. Why can't we always take out fire elementals like that? That would rule.

Now, as far as reputation goes, Tessy from Reflections from the Pond made a post not long ago in which she described going From Hated To Exalted In Less Than A Day. I took note of that, but I didn't really fully grasp the gravity of her words. I just noted that she said she got to exalted by handing in a whole bunch of Relics of Ulduar, which was already possible before, so that didn't strike me as too much of a buff to reputation gains.

So, imagine my wide-eyed surprise when I saw this - and I have to post a screenshot here because just describing it wouldn't have the same effect:


Note that these are two quests that I handed in right after each other, and they took me from not even being on the Sons' radar to halfway through honoured. In two hand-ins.

To give you some perspective, previously both of those quests took you to neutral or so I believe. By doing every other quest available in Dun Niffelem you could get to friendly, but then you would have to start doing dailies to get to honoured, which would then unlock a couple more quests and so on. This time around I started at honoured however. Okay.

This led to a bit of bizarre bending of the timeline as it was originally designed, and I did some quests in which the Sons praised me for my greatness at the same time as others in which they repeatedly declared that they were a bit suspicious of me and that I'd have to prove myself first. But who reads quest text anymore anyway, eh?

So I ran around Dun Niffelem, jumping back and forth in time to please the Sons in various ways, doing all the regular quests they had to offer me (which was a fair amount now, since they were originally supposed to be unlocked in chunks), did each daily once and handed in two Everfrost Chips. Funny thing about Everfrost, I could never find any whenever I was looking for it, but my shaman just kept tripping over it. In fact I found the first one while doing A Monument to the Fallen, and picked it up completely by accident because I thought it was a horn fragment.

And suddenly I got the message that I was already revered. After doing all the normal quests and one of each daily. The mind boggles.

I then did the revered daily as well and got three-hundred odd relics from my bank alt. I hadn't bought any, these were all relics that I had picked up while doing dailies with my other characters, and getting heroic Halls of Lightning/Halls of Stone as my random for the gazillionth time. I decided to hand them all in just to see how far I'd get, and what do you know, it was exactly enough to get me to exalted - with one relic left over. Who'd have thought that my shaman's very first exalted reputation would end up being the Sons of Hodir, and that after only one day of work? I almost felt a little bit disappointed, being left with no reason to come back and thrust hodir's spear again. Time to get my next alt to eighty I guess?