WoW Journal - 8-April-2005

For a change of pace from tradeskills, I started the evening by looking through my quest journal, for doing some quests and gaining some xp. I still got one Maraudon and two Dustwallow Marsh quests, but all of these are elite, and I felt more like soloing. But there was one intrigueing quest in my journal, in which the archdruid of Thunder Bluff was requesting that I visit him. Okay, the quest was marked level 50, and I'm still level 47. But the visit to Thunder Bluff is obviously the easy part, the level 50 part will be where the archdruid sends me. So lets hear him out.

I fly to Thunder Bluff, and easily find the archdruid. And as expected he wants to send me somewhere: Find 20 samples of soil in the Un'goro crater. Hmmm, interesting, I've never been there. And the quest says I can pick the soil from ground spawns, and don't necessarily have to fight level 50 mobs. So I fly to Gadgetzan, and ride southwest through the desert, to reach the entrance of the Un'goro crater.

The crater is a nice place. It has a Lost World jungle theme, with dinosaurs, huge insects, and other monsters. And it is a veritable paradise of ground spawns. There are dirt piles for finding the soil, power crystals that are used for a quest there and for smithing, plants for a repeatable quest to feed a kodo, and herbs for alchemy.

To my delight I find Golden Sansam and Mountain Silversage in the Un'goro crater. Which are the two ingredients needed to make Major Healing potions. These restore 1050 to 1750 health, which is nearly twice as much as the Superior Healing potion I used before. Now the alchemy study is paying off, instead of buying overpriced Superior Healing potions in the auction house, I'll make much better potions for free for myself. Even with my large amount of hitpoints, one of these new potions heals about half of my life, which is a huge boon in combat.

I also do all the other ground-spawn pickup quests, and explore the whole crater, killing only very few mobs. Most monsters I see are above level 50, which is still a bit to difficult for me. In fact one of the regions in the crater is called "Terror Run", and I joke that this is exactly what I'm doing here. Wait until no monster is standing on the ground spawn, rush in, take it, get aggroed, and run away in terror.

I find 19 of the 20 soil samples I need, then find a stack of 4 in one ground spawn, which brings me to 23. I destroy the excess 3, and go back to Thunder Bluff to hand them in. There it turns out that the 20 samples are just the first part of the quest. I'm given 20 seeds and a pouch, and told that I need to gather more soil. Damn, I shouldn't have destroyed the excess 3 soil samples. Well, it doesn't matter, I will need much more than that. By clicking on the pouch, one seed and two soil samples are consumed, to give one evergreen shell. You open that shell and get a random herb. You can repeat that every 10 minutes. The goal of the quest is to get 10 morrowgrain, but up to now I tried it 3 times and found 3 different other herbs. Well, as the other herbs you find are used in alchemy, I'm not really complaining. I got 20 seeds for free, and I can buy more seeds for 9 silver each, I just need to gather lots of soil.

All in all I was having a lot of fun in the crater. And I was thinking again how good the World of Warcraft quests are. For one thing, the quest sent me into a new area to explore, which is always good. And then the goal of the quest is not just to kill X monsters of one type. Gathering soil and hoping for the right herb to grow from it is something different, and variety in quest goals is a very good thing.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:02 AM Permanent Link