...A Nagrand Slam to be precise.
I took a quick break from decrepit old-ass quests to try and punch out a couple nagging achievements in Outland. I had just a handful of quests left in Terrokar, Nagrand, and Blade's Edge to finish off Loremaster of Outland. Terrokar was a breeze. Found a couple quests in the lower city and around Auchindoun and busted them out in no time. Nagrand... different story.
I was totally stuck at 70 quests and couldn't find anything ANYWHERE, so I did some research. Turns out I missed an escort quest from Sunspring Post. The Totem of Kar'dash So then I was stuck at 71. Whee.
I did more digging, and found a lead on a quest chain in Shadowmoon Valley called Altrius. I had done quests for Altrius before, but he was offering me nothing. I went out to Shadowmoon and sure enough, at the Sanctum of the Stars (I'm a scryer) there was that one quest. I flew back out to Nagrand, and ol' Altrius was offering me 3 new quests to kill a few demons. They were spaced across all of Outland in a giant Triangle. Zangarmarsh, Netherstorm, and Shadowmoon. That brought me to 74. Then he offers one last quest: Illidan's Pupil where you just listen to his story, click, 'complete' and gather your achivement. 75/75-- DONE.
Happy Halloween, beezies.Sidetracked by holiday events and raiding TOC25 normal and TOC10 hard, I'm still managing to push forward with progress. I got to run Lower Blackrock Spire about four times. I wish dungeon quests were laid out a bit more sensibly. The way they are now, you wind up running a dungeon several times as different quest areas give you quests in there. Sometimes you finish one, and get a follow-up to go right back in. /argh.
Quest of the Day: Mother's Milk
One of the quests that Ragged John in the Burning Steppes gives you, Mother's Milk requires you to go into Blackrock Spire (lower, of course) and engage in battle with the giant spider matron: Mother Smolderweb
Druids should be pretty familiar with her, as she used to drop our Wildheart Boots. Epic druids could solo her back in the day, as we could stealth though basically the entire instance in cat form.
Anyhow, she puts a poison debuff on you that's called "Mother's Milk." Occasionaly it procs and causes you to be snared in a spider web for a few seconds. It's pretty annoying and it has no duration. You have to either cleanse it off yourself or be "milked." For the quest, you must leave it on and go have Ragged John "milk" you.
It's another example of how quests generally used to be more odd back in the early days of WoW.
The horseman cometh
Ah, Hallow's End is upon us again. This year I am actually working on achieving Hallowed be thy Name
I started out with none of it completed, and find myself just needing Sinister Calling and a whole bunch of candy buckets. And G.N.E.R.D Rage.
Sadly, the quests associated with the event are not counting toward my ultimate goal of The Loremaster but it's a fun diversion, nonetheless.
In other news, my regular 10-man ToC/ToGC group now has Twin Val'kyrs down on hard mode. Faction Champs was hard, but it was fun. I'm starting to hate TOC less... starting.
These innocent-looking crystals are actually poop. Cliff Giant poop.Quest of the day: AzshariteDescription
The ancient cliff giants of the southern region of Azshara consume the rock and buildings of the land for sustenance. The excrement from their consumption is a highly malleable and extremely strong crystal known as Azsharite.
The formations litter the southern arc, but few are ever recovered due to the extremely violent nature of the giants.
You are to venture south and recover enough of the Azsharite for the creation of the weapon's body. My felhounds will aid in the recovery of the crystal
There is one recurring theme in WoW quests other than grueling travel, inane "talk to the guy next to me" quests, and helpless escort-ees; it is definitely poop. This poop comes in two distinct varieties: The crystal formations as shown above, and these little fellas as shown to the left. If they eat rock from the land and buildings, why do they seem to eat trolls... and then poop them out whole? Blizzard: your lore is paper-thin, lol.
I'm 430-something quests done in Eastern Kingdoms, and just under 400 in Kalimdor. Raiding is cutting into my questing time. Heroic Northrend Beasts 25 in TotGC still proves elusive. The tanks continue to get rofflestomped from 100% health to zero in 0.2 seconds flat. What great design. Let's not make it more FUN, let's just make the encounter based on whether or not the RNG decides to kill your tank. Woo-hoo.
Flying into Astranaar-- capitol of one of my least-favorite zones: Ashenvale.
Not really knowing where to start, I just picked The Hinterlands at random. There wasn't much there aside from a questline to save Sharpbeak. This, of course involved traveling across the entire continent several times. This is apparently a core quest design mechanic: soul-crushing travel. Riding across a 2000+ yard zone is fine. 10 minute flights back and forth and inter-continental ship travel is awful.
I'm so used to being able to pop into epic flight, point to the distance and hit NUM LOCK.
From there I worked on quests in Stormwind and all over the world, really. They send you off every which way. Each place has several NPCs offering more quests, and things just branch out until you forgot what the hell you were trying to do in the first place.
The first time I ever played World of Warcraft was in public stress-test beta in the Fall of 2004. I rolled a Night Elf Warrior. I have no idea what I named him. I picked Night Elf because I always played NE in WC3.
As I did some questing, I eventually found myself in Darkshore and in the forest there, I saw another player transform into a bear. "WOAH! THAT WAS SO COOL!" I thought. I moused over... he was a Druid. Druid eh?
I stopped playing the beta because the game was really sweet, and I didn't want to get too far just to have it erased when retail came out. However, I knew what i wanted to be.
Flash-forward to November 23, 2004. WoW has just launched, and I picked up a copy. When I got home that evening, I flipped though a few websites looking for an elvish name generator. I decided I wanted to roll a female character. I had always played male characters in Star Wars Galaxies, but I didn't really like the way Male Nelfs looked like 'roided out vampires. I went female. I have her long blue hair, no face markings, pale blue skin, and named her Eulynn. Her full name is Eulynn Ironmoon-- but alas, there are no surnames in WoW.
I was playing with some friends I had made in SWG. They were human and Gnome, and off leveling up in the Eastern Kingdoms while I was toughing it out in Kalimdor. I did the quests in Teldrassil, and moved on to Darkshore. I have always said that Auberdine, Darkshore is my home town. I love that little village. The house next to the Inn is mine, because I say it is. :D
I did most of the quests in Darkshore, and started to move into Ashenvale. I was probably getting near level 20. I really did not like Ashenvale. Darkshore was bad enough with all of the running back and forth from town to the southern end of the zone. Back in those days you didn't get any kind of mount until you were level 40. Druids were lucky enough to get Travel Form at level 30. Besides, at that time it seemed like 100g was an incredible amount of money.
I made the big trek over to the Eastern Kingdoms. You could sail from Auberdine to Menethil Harbor, Wetlands. Then you had to run across the entire zone, full of level ?? crocs that would eat you in 1 or 2 hits if you strayed anywhere close. After the long and punishing run across Wetlands, you went down into Loch Modan, and then eventually you could reach Dun Morogh and find the massive Dwarven city of Ironforge. From there, you had to take the Deeprun Tram to Stormwind City, and then move on foot through Elwynn Forest and into Westfall where I resumed questing.
After Westfall, I moved into Duskwood, then Stranglethorn Vale. There never used to be a flight point at the rebel camp in STV, so questing in the zone was not fun-- as is is very large.
After STV, I wasn't quite sure where to go. I did some questing and grinding in bits and pieces in various places. Desolace, Stonetalon Mountains, Thousand Needles, Tanaris, Feralas, Un'Goro, Azshara, and Winterspring. As I got higher in level I quested less, focusing mainly on grinding mobs and running instances to get the last bits of XP.
In my low 50's I started running instances like Scholomance and Stratholme. Back in those days there were no caps on how many people you could have inside instances. We would run them with full 40-man raids. It was crazy. Even in a raid it still took hours and hours to clear Scholomance. There were SO many trash mobs in there. There's a lot now, and it's been thinned out considerably from it's heyday.
Once I hit 60 I started doing raids in Molten Core and Onyxia's Lair, so I all but quit any kind of questing until The Burning Crusade Expansion, in which quest hub designs were VASTLY improved, making questing a very efficient and much more fun way of gaining experience than just grinding mobs.
So now I am left with a bunch of areas that I never really quested though completely. I did a few here or there.. skipped some dungeon and group quests when I was solo, and overall am left with having really no idea where to even begin.
I suppose I am fortunate enough to have started from the very beginning of WoW and have done a bunch of quests that are no longer available in-game. The Onyxia key questline, is one I can think of.
So, stay tuned. I will have more updates, including how my first day went. What went right, and what went horribly wrong.
I'm normally not one for blogging-- but I have decided to share my experiences while striving for one of the biggest (in scope, definitely) achievements in the World of Warcraft: The Loremaster.
For those who may not know, there is an MMORPG called World of Warcraft that has been running for almost 5 years now. Henceforth referred to as WoW, the game has attracted over ten million subscribers and is, by far, the largest massively multiplayer online RPG in the western world.
A couple years ago, Blizzard added an achievement system to the game, which should be very familiar to anyone who is familiar with Xbox360 games. You unlock these achievements by completing certain tasks in the game. Many are fairly pedestrian and require no real effort to obtain, some require you to perform difficult tasks in boss encounters, and many are for going above and beyond the level of dedication of the typical player.
Some achievements reward you with titles that appear next to your name in-game, some give you nice-looking tabards to wear over your armor, and some reward mounts. Typically these are flying mounts, many of them various kinds of drakes or proto-drakes.
Glory of the Raider for example, was one of the hardest achievements to obtain before Patch 3.1.
The quest I am embarking on, to achieve Loremaster status, isn't particularly difficult. It just involves questing... LOTS of questing.
World of Warcraft's world of Azeroth is currently represented by three continents, Kalimdor, The Eastern Kingdoms, and Northrend. The world of Outland is a diffrerent planet entirely.
These zones break down into two main categories: Old-World, and New-World. Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms are what I call "old-world" continents. These are the original two continents that were in the game when it launched in 2004. There are no flying mounts, flight paths are more scarce, the zones are larger in size, the terrain isn't nearly as pretty, and the quest structure is--- not good. There will be plenty on that as we continue.
The Loremaster is a meta achivement, meaning it's requirements are other achievements. These are:
Loremaster of Kalimdor
Loremaster of Eastern Kingdoms
Loremaster of Outland
Loremaster of Northrend
Both Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms Loremaster achivements require that the player complete 700 quests in each continent.
When I started I was about halfway there-- with over 300 quests completed in each continent.
What follows is my experiences knocking out the remainder... what a long, strange trip it will be.
