Night Elf Hunters Everywhere

A few weeks ago my night elf hunter had just landed in Searing Gorge and was about to go off in search of some incendosaurs when a call in general chat caught my attention: Someone was looking for exactly one more for the quest Overseer Maltorius, which I knew to be a pretty tough group quest. The request for exactly one more struck me as slightly odd because it seemed to imply that they already had four people, and surely that was enough to take him down, pretty tough or not?

Never one to pass up an opportunity for easy group content completion however, I asked for an invite and soon found myself partied up with two other night elf hunters, who were both dead, causing me to deduce that they had tried to take him on with the two of them and failed. I guess they figured that just one more person was going to be enough to tip the scales and that "LF1M" sounded more enticing than a generic "LFM".

After reviving near the boss, they partially fought their way back out to meet me on my way in. We felt pretty powerful: Three hunters with their pets is almost like six players! We hatched a plan to use ice traps and our pets to distract all the adds and nuke down the boss. We executed it pretty well too, but unfortunately it wasn't a good plan: the boss had so much health that he was still far from dead when our traps ran out and our pets died, resulting in another wipe.

After we had revived ourselves and all our pets, we decided to take the weakest of the adds on first on the next try. I think the boss then ran into one of our traps kind of by accident so that we ended up killing all the adds first... and suddenly we were able to finish the whole thing smooth as butter, with nobody dying at all.

We then proceeded to run out of the area and kill other mobs around Searing Gorge for other quests for a bit before saying our goodbyes. Hunters for the win!

The other night I had another amusing encounter of a similar kind. Having just landed in Un'goro I saw someone call out for help with "the elite elemental quest". I asked if they meant It's Dangerous to Go Alone and they replied in the affirmative. I threw them a group invite... and they were dead by the elemental's cave. I couldn't resist joking: "I take it you tried to go alone?"

Once again it was another night elf hunter with a cat. In fact, she couldn't help comment on how similar we looked: not twins exactly, but we were both girls with green-ish braids and wearing several pieces of identical gear. Together we managed to make short work of Blazerunner - though my newfound friend managed to die again in the process - and after she'd revived I took a quick picture of us together before once again saying my goodbyes.

It's funny to me that there seems to be a theme here of all the soloers levelling nelf hunters and then coming together to help each other with the elite quests. Classic can be quite peculiar that way.

Tales from Southern Kalimdor

My little human rogue finally completed her journey from the northern tip of Kalimdor down to the very south of the continent and hit level sixty. We last met her in Thousand Needles, so these are my impressions of what I saw of Tanaris, Un'goro and Silithus.

Tanaris

Tanaris is still a good zone, but I struggled to be truly enthusiastic about it because I loved the old Tanaris that much more. I always felt that it was a very evocative zone, making you truly feel like you were on the edge of a desert on the ass end of nowhere. The dunes south of Gadgetzan seemed to go on forever, and the goblins didn't give a rat's ass whether you were Horde or Alliance, as long as you didn't pick any fights while within their walls and helped them steal water from the waste wanderers and booze from the local pirates.

The new Tanaris feels smaller somehow, and it is, seeing how almost a quarter of the zone has been flooded by the Cataclysm. When I flew over the shallows where I used to farm waste wanderers, I felt sad at the sight of the area's emptiness. In general, the zone feels way too busy for a desert now though, with hordes of NPC archaeologists fighting over the various ruins and the Southsea pirates being taken on by an entire army. The Horde vs. Alliance conflict rears its ugly head in Gadgetzan as well, with a girl gnome and a goblin whining endlessly at Marin Noggenfogger that he should join their respective side already. You can't help but feel sorry for the man.

One thing I liked was that there is a sort of intro quest line to Zul'Farrak now, which explains why one of the quest givers you meet on the inside is the ghost of a dead troll. It just strikes me as slightly weird design to make quests like that now, when ninety percent of dungeon runners might never even set foot into the zone associated with the instance anymore.

Another thing I found notable in this zone was that after completing all the quests I could find, there were still several sub-zones that I hadn't even touched. This gives me hope that the Horde quests might not all be mirrors of the Alliance ones this time and might actually utilise different environments to tell different stories. I'm looking forward to seeing this one from the other side.

This quest text made me burst into uncontrollable giggles.

Un'goro Crater

Un'goro is a wonderful zone. I was always quite fond of it to begin with - if Tanaris was the desert at the ass end of the continent, then Un'goro was the metaphorical pimple on that ass, not to mention a wild and untamed jungle. Plus it used to have lots of quests that led you all over the zone and gave pretty nice XP.

The new Un'goro somehow managed to capture the charm of the old zone (the developers added a small extra quest hub but on the whole the area still feels like proper "adventuring territory"), while also updating it to Cataclysm standards and adding some new bits and pieces. Old quests feel familiar and slightly streamlined, but not to the point where it feels like you're just being led around by the nose. I actually ran into more than one little surprise that made me go "Oho, what's that?" while exploring.

For example I spotted a little mound of earth with a blue question mark above it in the now abandoned Marshal's Refuge. Of course I had to investigate it, and found it to be the burial site of Dadanga the kodo. Nooo, not Dadanga! I still remember gathering dozens of Bloodpetal sprouts for you and being sorely disappointed by the way you rewarded me with a pumpkin and some moonberry juice. I decided to accept the challenge issued by the new repeatable quest and honour her memory by depositing some Bloodpetal sprouts on her grave. This turned out to be harder than I expected since the damned things don't show up on the herb tracker anymore and you need some pretty keen eyes to spot green sprouts on green ground, but in the end I did it. After depositing my gift, I was rewarded with a little speed buff that lasted a whopping twenty minutes. Still the same old disappointing Dadanga, even in death... /sniff.

One old quest that I was surprised hadn't been removed is the one to rescue Ringo the goblin from Fireplume Ridge. I kind of assumed that the way you had to lead him back to camp yourself and keep sprinkling water on him every so often would have triggered the developers' "not fun enough" sense these days. I guess in a way it did, because while you still need to use the water, you can apparently also keep him going by slapping him every so often before he falls over. I never quite figured out how that was supposed to work though, as the response to my /slap emote seemed very delayed and hardly ever seemed to do any good. It felt like a pretty cruel way to "rescue" someone anyway.

My favourite new addition to the zone were the Maximillian of Northshire quests. I don't think there was a single one of them that didn't make me go: "What the...?" They are incredibly silly and funny, but still manage to not feel out of place. The fact that I was doing them on a rogue added an extra layer of hilarity, as knight Maximillian was not at all impressed by my roguish fighting methods, and would idly stand by as I stunlocked mobs to death. Then he would charge off towards the nearest elite before I could restealth and make me facepalm. I would say the zone is worth doing for his quests alone.

Silithus

Unfortunately, Silithus still sucks. They cleaned it up a bit and removed all those old raid quests and weird currency grinds, plus a couple of quests where I have no idea why they took them out. (The Spirits of Southwind was a rather haunting story in my opinion, and The Calling gave the most interesting bits of lore in the entire zone.) Then they smoothed out a couple of bumps in what was left over, such as adding a remote hand-in here and reducing the number of items needed there (the dwarves down south tell you that "conveniently" another adventurer already brought them the parts they needed from the other two silithid hives, so you only have to go down into the one right next to them)... but that's it. Grinding for encrypted texts is still boring. Killing fifteen dredge strikers just to get a follow-up to kill twenty dredge crushers still feels uninspired.

I found this particularly disappointing since I remembered seeing this video of the 4.1 PTR and fully expected there to be some new and exciting quests with phasing in them. But nope, looks like none of that actually made it into the live game. I guess Silithus was Kalimdor's Arathi Highlands, aka that last zone that the developers didn't find the time for in the end. It's a shame because the story behind the zone has so much potential... but at least with Silithus we're already used to it being a boring place.

My ravasaur and me

Let me start this off by saying that I'm not a mount collector. According to the armoury I currently have seventy-six mounts on my main, but that's mostly due to feelings of "well, these vendors want to sell me some mounts and I have cash to spare, so why not" than anything else. In practice I've been riding the same land and flying mount for nearly two years.

Unsurprisingly I didn't care much when the Venomhide Ravasaur mount was released a couple of patches ago. I caught some information about it being intended to give the Horde an equivalent to the Alliance-only Wintersaber grind, but that was about it. It just wasn't something that interested me.

During my Loremastering however, I inevitably ended up running into Mor'vek in Un'goro at some point and well, he did have some quests to offer. I was kind of wary of him to be honest, going by what little I knew of the Wintersaber grind. I just knew that if he asked me to do anything more than once I was so going to be out of there.

I was surprised to find out that unlike the Wintersaber trainers, he didn't have a faction associated with him, he just told me that venomhide ravasaurs were too toxic too ride and that I'd have to become immune to their poison if I wanted to make one my mount. The following quest was pretty funny to do as a level eighty, as I was initially very confused about what to do - all the venomhides I approached died way too quickly to do anything to me. I then learned from the comments on Wowhead that I needed to let them hit and poison me, but level eighty strength posed a problem to this. Even meleeing them with my caster dagger and no strength killed all the raptors in only a few hits. Eventually I ended up in a pathetic fist-fight with one venomhide which managed to give me most of my debuff stacks. I thought it was most amusing.

Next I was asked to retrieve a couple of eggs, and before I knew it I had a venomhide hatchling in my bags. I summoned it and discovered that it used that relatively new "baby dino" model with the ridiculously large head, while being absolutely tiny and... it just looked too funny and cute. It also offered me a daily quest to collect some silithid eggs. Hey, I thought, that doesn't even require me to kill anything, I'll do that.

Days went by. Since I was still questing in the area anyway, I also continued to do my little hatchling's daily quests, especially as there seemed to be a couple of different ones for variety. (Though I swear that in the end, about two out of three times I got the one for roc feathers anyway.) After a while I started to wonder... was it growing? Surely not, but I seemed to remember it being so tiny, and it did look a bit bigger now... I got a definite answer on the eleventh day or so, when it actually changed model into that of a normal raptor, only still a lot smaller. It was growing!

I still had a couple of days of questing left by the time I finished with Silithus, but hopping through the Caverns of Time portal in the Violet Citadel made it easy to get down to Tanaris quickly if I wanted to. Also, I was starting to feel quite attached to the little bugger. The fact that it seemed to like feathers more than food gave it a sort of personality, and watching it grow as the days went by felt strangely fulfilling.

Yesterday it finalled shed its last baby tooth, and as I stood in front of it (picture above), I realised that it had - most appropriately - almost reached the size of a normal raptor. Handing in the quest to get my mount actually made me really happy. With the way things had been going, the game had truly given me the feeling that I was raising my mount myself, and finally being able to put the bridle on its head so I could ride on its back was a most memorable moment.

Me, Harvey the venomhide ravasaur, and Mor'vek with his own mount.

For the first time in years I'm actually riding a different mount around Dalaran again - I don't know whether I'll stick with it, but I like that this one isn't just a prize for grinding a reputation to exalted or getting lucky with the RNG. This little dino has a story.

I can only heartily recommend this experience to other Horde players, even if they are not usually ones for collecting mounts. Seeing that little bulge-headed hatchling grow into a fearsome raptor has been an experience unlike anything else I've done in WoW.