Rhok'delar Again

A bit less than two years ago I wrote about my night elf hunter's acquisition of Rhok'delar, Longbow of the Ancient Keepers, the epic bow from the max-level hunter class quest that starts in Molten Core. I already had a weapon better than the bow at the time, but I still enjoyed facing off against the four elite demons you needed to kill as part of it as a test of my skills and to prove myself as a "real" hunter.

Much to my delight, the first time my tauren hunter on era did a full MC run with my new guild, Majordomo dropped the Ancient Petrified Leaf that starts the quest chain, and I won it. This time the bow would be an upgrade too! Still, I wasn't in any particular hurry as I didn't have the Mature Black Dragon Sinew from Onyxia yet, so I took it rather slowly.

Also, having a blog was definitely a godsend in this instance - while the overall experience of completing the quest chain had definitely been memorable last time, it's not as if I had committed every single piece of tactical advice in regards to the demons to memory. I was really grateful to past me for taking such detailed notes about what helped me achieve victory against each demon last time, making the whole endeavour significantly easier this time around, despite of my gear being a bit worse.

Artorius in Winterspring was my first target again, and things went pretty similarly to last time. I did die once when he managed to get his DoT on me, and had to reset a couple of times when things got hairy, but then I got him down quickly enough (and unlike last time, he didn't finish me off with his DoT either). I thought it was noticeable that I had a weaker weapon this time though as I had to kite him nearly all the way to Everlook. The most time-consuming thing was actually getting him to stop in a good place to start the fight - I initially got a bit confused about his pathing and actually wasted a lot of time clearing mobs in an area that ultimately wasn't actually relevant.

I didn't attempt any other demons that night, as I ended up assisting a guildie with some quests in Winterspring after depositing my demon head in the bank, so some time passed until I picked things up again. I think it was more than a week later when I found myself doing a few leftover quests in Silithus, and as I approached the south-western Twilight cultist camp, I thought to myself that I might as well have a go at challenging Nelson.

He had been by far the toughest opponent for me the first time around, killing me multiple times, but this time around things went much better and I didn't die once (just had to reset the fight a few times). More by sheer luck than any sort of planning I ended up encountering and stopping him very close to the Scarab Wall, and as it turned out the ruins in that area are far better suited to kiting the little bugs he summons than the ramp that I had tried to make work for me so desperately last time, based on what was apparently the recommended strategy.

Encouraged by my success, I hopped over to Un'goro to track down Simone there. Like last time, quite a few resets were required until I got the initial pull right, but aside from that she was once again not a tough fight. That said, my health got very low towards the end and I had to use a health potion, which I think was due to the fact that I had been slacking on my melee weapon skill this time around. As it was only around 280, I got a lot of dodges and parries, meaning I did a lot less damage to her and she more to me.

After that I had another break for a bit, with a small, related interlude: One day during my lunch break while working from home, the call went out to come online for Azuregos. Our five-manning adventures back on Hydraxian Waterlords not notwithstanding, I'd never actually killed Azuregos "properly" with a guild group, so I was happy to be in on the kill. I also won the Mature Blue Dragon Sinew, which can be used to redeem a quiver from the same set of quest givers that give the bow quest. On Tir I'd not gotten the quiver until much later, and not from killing Azuregos but from a random drop while farming elite dragonkin in Winterspring. It kinda tickled me that things went so differently this time.

Not much later I figured that I might as well lop off the last demon's head and I went to the Burning Steppes late at night to confront Franklin the Friendly aka Klinfran the Crazed. Here, too, my lack of weapon skill came back to bite me as he actually killed me once when several of my wing clips missed in a row, but it did not take long at all to re-try and get it right.

So now I've got my Ancient Rune Etched Stave, ready to be turned into a nice bow... but I'm unlikely to get it any time soon as I'm still not even attuned to Onyxia, meaning the sinew will likely remain a bottleneck for a while. Annoyingly, the Horde attunement chain features a step where you need to kill four elite dragons across the world, and basically nobody wants to do that unless they are on the quest themselves (understandably), and I haven't had any luck finding anyone else who is on that step right now. I also haven't quite reached the level of comfort or desperation to ask anyone outright to just help me out, even if it doesn't do anything for them, but I wouldn't be surprised if it came to that eventually. Still, I don't think I'm likely to get the crossbow from BWL in the meantime, seeing how it seems to be a rare-ish drop and somewhat in demand. Can't be lucky with everything!