WoW Journal - 17-April-2005

World of Warcraft is currently down, at least for me. There were some "database issues", which forced Blizzard to restart the servers. And then every single player in Europe tried to log back into the game at the same time, which the login server can't handle. So right now I can't reconnect, although the servers are supposedly back up. Well, that gives me time to blog.

So what did I do this weekend? Lots of things, but mostly solo questing. That made me ding twice this weekend, up to level 51 now. I would have liked to do a dungeon, but somehow couldn't find a guild group, and wasn't feeling like joining a pickup group. But I did lots of quests, explored lots of new regions, and gathered lots of exotic herbs.

I started finishing lots of quests in Stranglethorn Vale. Mostly involving killing trolls, or pirates. The quests were all green to me, so easy enough to solo. But one quest series leads to a final step which is level 46 elite, and I tried but couldn't solo that. Then I did a few quests in Tanaris, but there are still a lot of quests there which I haven't even spoken to the quest givers to.

Following the recommendation of Alan, one of the regulars here, I then took a quest in Un'goro crater, which starts when you find a crashed boat in one of the ponds. Following some clues leads you to the gnome Linken, who has lost his memory. Getting his memory back, and organizing a sword for him, is a long series of quests, which lead me to several zones I hadn't visited yet. Good! And at some point I finally realized that Linken was "Link" from the Legend of Zelda series of games, making a cameo appearance in WoW. Very funny. Unfortunately I'm still stuck at the last part of the quest, because I need to kill a level 56 elite there, while the remainder of the quest was soloable at level 50. Why do all these long quest series have to end in elite quests?

The part of the quest that took the most time was getting to Winterspring. This zone is only reachable by a long tunnel from Felwood which is full of level 53+ timbermaw furbolgs. To get through, I first needed to get faction with them up from hostile to unfriendly, so they wouldn't attack me when passing. There is only one (repeatable) quest to get faction up, which involves killing deadwood furbolgs. But every kill also give a slight faction increase. Nevertheless it took me at least 3 hours before I finally got my faction up. In Winterspring I just visited the quest NPC, and then went to the neutral city of Everlook there, to tag the flight path.

Felwood was good because most of the monsters there were around my level, and mass killing the deadwood furbolgs resulted in lots of xp. Then I got lucky and found a blue level 44 two-handed sword on one of the deadwoods, which I put on the auction house for 20 gold. It was also good because for the first time I found Arthas Tear and Plaguebloom herbs, enabling me to make some potions for which I had the recipe. Herbalism on the weekend is not really good, because in many places there are far too many players around, often competing for herbs. In the Un'goro crater I couldn't find a single herb of *anything*, because other players had picked them all. And I checked several times, as the Linken quest made me traverse the zone often enough.

On Sunday I spent some time exploring The Hinterlands. I liked the zone, there were not all that many players around, the monsters were in the mid-40's and thus easy for me, and there were lots of herbs growing there. The only disadvantage was that there is no city or village of the Horde, and thus no quest-giver NPCs, and no flight path. I ended up looking up the quests on Thottbot, and taking the Hinterlands quests from other locations all around the world.

In spite of all the quests I did, I didn't gain any nice new items. Many of the quests of the higher levels now only give money. And the green quests that gave items didn't result in anything I could use, being a bit too low for that. So I bought armor in the auction house instead. I really need to group more, even if that means pickup groups. It's too easy to get stuck with quests that are elite or dungeon, and require a group.
- posted by Tobold @ 5:56 PM Permanent Link