Adventures in Redridge

This post is a sort of part two to my epic paladin adventure from Saturday, because it was followed by more (if slightly less epic) adventures on Sunday.

It started with me wanting to test my new Verigan's Fist against the gnolls in Redridge that had given me some trouble before and realising to my chagrin that it had been a while since I'd last wielded a two-handed mace as my attacks kept missing completely. Fortunately it only took a couple of gnolls to level up to a more useful skill rank, at which point the low-level gnolls started to melt before me like snow in the sun.

I wasn't content with this and proceeded to the area with higher-level gnolls east of town, where I had the quest to kill Lieutenant Fangore. Alas, while I could take on two same- or slightly higher-level gnolls with ease now, they were just too tightly packed in that area (Fangore himself came with something like three or four adds as well), so after several aborted attempts that always ended with me either running away or dying, I had to admit that my newfound strength had made me a bit cocky.

Fortunately a distraction awaited in general chat, where someone was looking for more to do the elite quests in the orc keep. I love that place! We ended up with a full group of five, and after a couple of pulls I just kind of slipped into the tanking role while the other pally in the group focused on healing, without us having had any formal discussion about it. The other three players in the group were all squishy clothies (a warlock and two mages), so it just made sense, you know?

We had a wipe or two at the entrance to the keep (it's easy to overpull there, and sometimes other mobs in the area that you might have killed earlier will start to respawn unexpectedly) but we didn't let it get our spirits down. I made sure to pull more carefully from then on and we cleared the place out.

Only problem for me: I only had one of the three quests for the area and the other two weren't shareable. I'd only really noticed after joining the group and didn't mind running the place twice. Typically, I was given the two missing quests as soon as I handed in what I had after the first run. Fortunately, another group was forming up already, so I volunteered again. One of the mages came with me as she'd had the same issue with the quests. "Fancy seeing you again," I joked.

In this run we were only four and had a dps warrior taking on the tanking role. The fourth person was another paladin, and this time around there was some confusion about who should be healing. The other paladin seemed very keen on healing people to full after every combat so I thought I'd leave her to it, but then I noticed that she rarely paused to cast heals while in combat and in fact her mana bar barely moved at all... but we made do. We had a few more wipes around the entrance with this group, presumably due to having been a man down but also because the warrior had issues not getting too many mobs out of the keep at once, and eventually I volunteered to make the pulls since I already had experience (/flex).

In both groups we continued to run around and kill things together for a bit even after finishing the keep, easily getting Fangore down and even doing the quest in the easternmost tower, which I couldn't remember doing before.

All of this took quite some time, so once the second group had finished, I needed a bit of a break. I logged back on in the evening to finish off the northern area with the orcs and the escort there. To my disappointment, nobody responded to my inquiry in general chat, but I just started slowly killing orcs by myself and suddenly the warrior from earlier zoomed past me into the cave with Corporal Keeshan. I asked if he was here for the escort as well and he replied in the affirmative so I threw him a group invite.

With the two of us, we were unstoppable. In fact, I slacked off a bit and wandered off to mine an ore node here and there while my warrior friend killed things, just pausing to top his health bar back up every so often. By myself, things had been slow, but together we were a whirling ball of death. The warrior also confessed that he'd tried to solo the escort earlier and had failed, but with the two of us AoEing things together and me keeping both of us topped up we didn't even break a sweat. It was a great finish to my weekend of WoWing.

I keep hearing comments from people saying that levelling content is dead and that it's hard to find groups for things, but that's definitely not my experience on Hydraxian Waterlords, even a year after launch.