Change of pace

Incredible as is sounds, but I *do* have a life outside of virtual worlds. A this Real Life ® is currently bombarding me with work-related stress. I wasn't able to play WoW for more than half an hour the last two evenings, and from next Sunday to Friday I'll be on a business trip to the USA, and I won't be able to play there either. And if I don't play World of Warcraft daily, I obviously can't keep up a daily WoW journal.

I'll still be writing about my adventures on Azeroth for some time, but starting from now the format is changing. I'll write when I found the time to play, and something to write about happened. The journal entries will be marked by date instead of with a continuous day count.

One episode I forgot to mention from my adventures last weekend was traveling from Booty Bay to the Swamp of Sorrows. The main purpose was to tag the flight paths in Booty Bay, Stranglethorn, and the Swamp, so I could travel there faster in the future. I'll still need to tag the flight path in Badlands to connect the north and the south of that continent by flight paths.

Anyway, arriving in the northern part of Stranglethorn, I suddenly remembered that the Kurzen Medicine Men live there. At that point I was level 33, which is just the good level to fight them. And while as Horde I can't get the quests against the Kurzen camp, the medicine men still drop the Jungle Remedy, a potion which cures both poison and disease. Very useful, especially for a warrior. I'm able to cure poison with the First Aid skill, if I have the components, but didn't have anything to cure disease yet. So I stayed there a while and killed medicine men, until I had a full stack of 10 Jungle Remedy.

Interestingly there were also a number of alliance players around, because, as I mentioned, they get quests for that place from the alliance rebel camp. But as this is a PvE server, and them and me were busy fighting mobs, we didn't fight each other. You can't talk or group with them either, although you can communicate with the /emote command. But even without talking, we ended up working together sometimes. When they or me pulled a too large group, the other picked one or two mobs away, making life easier for everybody. I prefer it that way.

Another spot I'd like to mention is the Alterac Mountains, which I visited in my short play session last night. Me now being level 35, the ogres there make good enemies. They are slow, and while they hit hard, they don't have any nasty special effects, and they don't run away to alarm their friends to your presence. Of course that is only true for the normal ogres around the Alterac Ruins, inside the ruins are elite ogres which are a lot nastier. I used to hang out in the Alterace Mountains with my druid on the US server a lot, as it was a good place for herbalism. Now with my warrior it is a decent place for mining, having both iron and mithril. Though I should go there in the early morning on the weekend, on weekday evenings there are too many other players mining there.

I was looking for mithril because I just spent nearly 8 gold on some rare smithing plans for mithril spikes. These spikes can be attached to a shield, which then deals 16 to 20 points of damage on every successful block. A nice addition to my shield from the Scarlet Monastery. The only problem I have is that the utility which parses your log and measures your damage per second, which is included in Cosmos, isn't working since the last patch. I'll have to check whether I can update or replace that somehow, I'd like to know how much damage I'm dealing with my different attacks.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:04 AM Permanent Link