Back in the Saddle

Kronos has been back up again for a couple of days, but it's still a bit wobbly on its legs sometimes. I logged onto my paladin to see how things were going and a stranger ran up to me and traded me The Light and How to Swing It. However, before I could even do as much as say "thanks, stranger", I was disconnected and unable to log back in again. So, if you happen to read this, random stranger in Ironforge: I didn't mean to be rude, and thank you again!

Fortunately the server was stable enough for me to spend some time playing this Saturday, as I wanted to make use of the rested XP my new tauren hunter had accumulated during the downtime.

Before the servers succumbed to the DDoS attack, I had actually gone out and tamed a hyena as my second pet as planned, but I struggled with both of my pets being unhappy and absolutely ravenous 24/7. I had taken up fishing to keep my cat happy but didn't have enough suitable food for the hyena at hand, causing me to stable it for a couple of levels while I saved up random meat drops. Fortunately Petopia confirmed for me that this was just a side effect of the initial low loyalty level and that both pets would become less ravenous over time as their loyalty increased, which turned out to be true.

I also made a bit of a fool of myself when I meant to go to Orgrimmar to contribute some wool bandages to the war effort and kept looking for the zeppelin docking point in Thunder Bluff. After I gave up and googled it, I found out that this particular connection wasn't actually added until Wrath of the Lich King. Oops!

Two quests from Thunder Bluff reminded me of the existence of Ragefire Chasm. Maybe it's because of my early Alliance experiences, but I always kind of forget that this particular instance even exists, as I always think of the Deadmines as the lowest-level dungeon.

I decided that I wanted to run it. Fortunately there were plenty of LFG requests flying around, however I was soon reminded that things are a bit different when you play a pure damage dealer. On my paladin I could be relatively picky and wait for a group to be looking for a tank or healer at a convenient time, but when you play dps, things are a bit different. I would whisper someone who was "LFM", get no response, and a few moments later they were now only looking for a tank or healer. You just have to be quick and/or lucky... or you can take it upon yourself to be the person who actually puts the group together, which is a bit more work but also more reliable. So the next time I saw someone "LFG RFC", I snatched them up right away, and luckily it turned out to be a warrior willing to tank. It took maybe five minutes to put a full group together, and we ended up with "four undead and a cow" as one of my group mates put it.

There wasn't that much to say about the run itself. We had one near-wipe (the surviving rogue and I ran back out since we were still close to the door) but otherwise things went smoothly. Another time one of the two rogues fell off a cliff and died. I had to chuckle when a group member congratulated my pet (!) on levelling up, and that by name (!!). Quite a contrast to the silent LFG culture where you're lucky if people address you at all, never mind using anyone's name.

Back in the Barrens I also completed one of the more infamous group quests on Horde side: Counterattack! For those who never got to experience it, it's a group quest you get after hunting down centaur leaders in three different oases around the Crossroads (which is an annoying prerequisite to begin with). It involves an event where hordes of centaurs attack, until eventually an elite warlord spawns who hits like an absolute truck, able to two or three-shot players of the right level in average gear.

I was worried that it would be a pain to find a group for this, but as it happened one was forming up just as I was approaching the bunker with the quest giver to hand in the head of the third centaur leader. That said, even with a full five-man group people died to the warlord repeatedly, and most of the time I ended up desperately kiting him around the bunker. I've said before that I'm not very good at kiting, but it's interesting what the threat of impending death will do for your learning curve!

As an extra annoyance it turned out that the banner that he drops can only be picked up by one person at a time, forcing us to redo the whole event five times. One guy was even rude enough to quit the instant he got his own quest item, but fortunately everyone else at least agreed that this was very improper and definitely shun-worthy behaviour.

All in all it was a fun play session and allowed my hunter to hit level 20, a couple of hours earlier in terms of /played than my paladin. Plans for next time: to mop up the rest of the northern Barrens quests and get into Wailing Caverns!