Hunting Rares for Fun and Profit

I'm still puttering around on my paladin alt on Gehennas occasionally and have got her up to level 20 at this point. Now that the main PvE cluster has reached a more "normal" level of population, I'm almost getting nostalgic for the quieter times, and playing on Gehennas currently scratches that itch. I almost consider it a special challenge to play there, what with being all by myself most of the time. I'm generally not someone who uses the AH a lot, but I do use it sometimes, and I'm usually all over opportunities to do group content. Having to limit myself to soloing and having to procure any and all items I might need by myself just feels kind of novel right now.

Around the level when I would usually start looking for a Deadmines group, I was killing some murlocs on the coast of Westfall when not one but two rare mobs barrelled into me almost simultaneously, which got me to wonder just how many rares there were in the zone. This quickly evolved into a fun new pastime.

Rares in Vanilla honestly weren't that amazing, often just dropping a generic random green, if even that. I mean, in Vanilla even getting a green feels pretty good, but I'm thinking in comparison to later iterations of the concept, when their loot was upgraded considerably and they were changed to give massive amounts of bonus XP when killed.

Anyway, like with so many things in the human starter zone, you can tell that the devs had time to think about the rares a bit more than they did in later zones, and there are some pretty unique ones with special loot tables. For example there's a zombie called Leprithus that spawns either on a small graveyard or near the border to Duskwood and only at night, and his drops are a great pair of leather gloves called Ghoul Fingers as well as a cursed sword that shoots shadowbolts.

My favourite so far however has been the rare Foe Reaper 4000, which can spawn on most of the fields with harvesters on them and seems to be almost guaranteed to drop a non-unique ten-slot bag. As bag space became a real issue when I moved to Westfall and started picking up all the various quests asking me to collect animal parts, this discovery was an absolute godsend. I've killed him four times so far and actually feel pretty good about my bag space for my level now.

I've tried to hunt him down more often than that, but some days other players on the server actually make their presence known even if I don't see them personally, just because all the rares in the zone are dead. While the population is extremely small, there seem to be a few genuine levellers, and I suspect that all the higher-levels are on the cluster specifically for easy farming of PvP ranks or raw materials, and since you're still able to freely transfer from Gehennas to Firemaw, their activities might even feed into the Firemaw economy for all I know.

This isn't all bad for me though, because I've been surprised to find that I can actually sell things. The auction house is usually empty aside from my listings, but I guess that's precisely what gives them so much exposure and someone is usually happy to snatch up a cheap green or stack of trade goods. And then, just as I was starting to feel good about my financial situation and like I'd earned enough gold to be able to at least afford all my training for the near future, I found this in the mail:

So now my little throwaway alt has 100 gold at her disposal randomly and is basically set for life. I also replied to the sender to thank them and let them know that if they were feeling lonely, there are other servers they can go to that are actually active and free transfers are available. I don't know if they'll ever see the reply, but I'll remember their kindness. Their mission to make me smile succeeded.