Kalimdor and Northrend

Mulgore

Thunder Bluff wasn't half the problem that Silvermoon and Orgrimmar had been - we were able to add it to our maps just by getting close enough, and we didn't have to try to get inside.

Unfortunately it still put us into PvP mode for 5 minutes and during that time, while looking for a secluded spot to wait for it to wear off, we ran into a level 80 Hordie. He followed us while we ran around some, then he went PvP and attacked Kate. He may have had a bit of a shock when a mere level 74 knocked his health down to 10%, but unfortunately for me he was somehow able to heal himself, at least three times. I kept the bugger fighting for what must have been a couple of minutes and I know I had him on his knees several times, but eventually I ran out of mana, I'd used up all my healing options, and he got me. Still, I have his name and I'll be watching for him when we hit level 80.

After that we both held off from resurrecting until our PvP went off, then at least we were able to explore the rest of Mulgore without further problems. With that, our exploration of Kalimdor was complete.

The Howling Fjord

With Kalimdor completed we have only Northrend to complete, and we already had five of the ten regions completed - Borean Tundra, Dragonblight, Grizzly Hills, Zul'Drak and Crystalsong Forest. Of the rest we've explored almost nothing, except that we'd covered all but a handful of the subregions of Howling Fjord. Our plan was obvious - go to the Fjord and finish those last handful. Along the way we had a quest to finish off ("Ancient Armor of the Kvaldir", or something like that).

It went pretty easily, as all the areas we needed to cover were close together in a strip down the eastern coast. The Armor of the Kvaldir we found on a ship anchored next to a small island a little way off the coast, and once we'd got it we were able to save even more time because there was a small plane we could use to fly to Scalawag Point, just south of the Ancient Lift. All we had to do then was let the lift take us right to the person we needed to turn in the quest. He gave us another quest, to take the armour and three other items that we'd picked up on related quests to a graveyard and place the items on the correct graves. We've yet to complete that one but we'll get to it soon, I'm sure.

Sholazar Basin

Yesterday we started off in Valiance Keep, or rather on the ice floes off the coast there, fishing. I was mostly interested in Musselback Sculpins, since the grilled sculpins are great for boosting stats. I was able to get a whole stack of twenty, and shortly after that Kate finished getting the Suckerfish she wanted and we moved on.

Next stop was Fizzcrank Airstrip on the way to the area to the northwest, where there are a bunch of fire, earth and air elementals. We spent quite a time there knocking the elementals down for points and the various crystallized elements, then we moved north and got our first sight of Sholazar Basin.

Sholazar is a very pretty area, in some ways similar to Un'goro Crater only smaller, more fertile and very crowded with large snakes, crocolisks and big cats. There's also ore there worth mining, and a lot of herbs, it seems. Most important, there's a flight point pretty much in the middle - which is great because we mapped perhaps half the area and we need to go back to finish up, and the flight point will make that very easy.

Durotar: The Silvermoon Strategy

We decided to begin our exploration of Durotar by getting Orgrimmar out of the way first, and we started by trying the idea I mentioned yesterday - I swam under the bridge leading into the west side of the city in the hope that I'd get close enough to register on the map. It didn't work; even as close as I got to the walls by the gate, I still obviously wasn't close enough.

That left the other strategy - the one that had worked, after a fashion, in Silvermoon City. I used a Free Action potion this time, giving me 30 seconds of immunity to stuns, then jumped on my horse and ran like stink across the bridge and into the city, with three orc grunts chasing me. With the grunts latched onto me that gave Kate the chance to follow me in without being attacked.

We'd got Orgrimmar on the map the second we'd cleared the bridge and I was some distance from the bridge and gate before the potion wore off and one of the grunts managed to stun me off my horse, and they started bashing the hell out of me. I fired up Divine Protection to give me a chance to heal myself, mostly so that I could get further from the gate before they wiped me, but to my amazement the grunts stopped attacking me and ran back. I can only assume that I'd run them beyond their range. In any case I was inside Orgrimmar and still alive.

Kate tried to get to where I was and would have made it too - most of the orcs wandering around were around level 65, I think - but she got a little too close to a level 80 elite and I couldn't get back to her in time to help out (not that I would have been any help against that guy). At least I was still alive and able to use Redemption to resurrect her in a safe spot.

We had one other thing to do - the Fishing Diplomat quest (not 'Ambassador' as I wrote yesterday), which requires catching one fish in Orgrimmar. We didn't have much time but I'd found a pond a little further down the path into the city centre, and we were able to get to the bank and start fishing. It was a little tense - there was a low level horde guy running around on a mount the other side of the pond, no doubt shouting out our prescence (in addition to the 'Orgrimmar is under attack!' messages that would have been appearing in the local defence channel). But we were able to get our fish, get the achievement, and hearthstone out before a horde of Horde showed up. Phew!

Hearthstoning out took us back to Dalaran, of course, so we had to get back to continue exploring the rest of Durotar. So we took the portal to Darnassus and flew back to Ratchet, then crossed the river into the southern part of Durotar. The rest was routine, just criss-crossing the region until we'd filled in the map.

Time was up, and with the last region of Kalimdor to be mapped being Mulgore just to the west of where we were we decided to ride back down to Ratchet and stay in the inn there. Our next target is Thunder Bluff, and again once we've done that we can finish Mulgore and with that, Kalimdor will be ours.

Exploring

One of our goals for a while has been to explore every region so that we can complete the exploration achievement. Until recently it's been more of a background goal, because we've put levelling at a higher priority, but starting the other day we decided to push forward with the exploration. And so we started by finishing up all the areas in the Eastern Kingdoms.

Kate had two little subregions of the Deadwind Pass unexplored (I'd explored these a while ago, mostly by accident when I fell into the gorge and couldn't find my way out) so we started there and got those out of the way.

The next stop was the Badlands - we'd simply never been in there with these characters, so we had to run the entire area to map it. The same was true with the Ghostlands and Eversong Woods. That's where we ran into a problem...

Silvermoon City is a major Horde settlement, and there are two subregions (the city itself, and the ruins) that are on the list of areas that have to be mapped to complete the region. The problem is that the only way to map those areas is to go inside the city walls - past pairs of level 65 elite guards. It was tough, as expected, but we did at least manage to get it done even though I got wiped at least three times. Mostly I would run in first and get the guards' attention; they'd wipe me but by that time I was inside the wall and so all I had to do was wait to become unflagged before resurrecting. At that point my map was updated, and if I got wiped again getting out, at least I was outside the wall. In the meantime, because I'd taken the heat Kate could follow me in without the guards going after her. Not the most elegant strategy, but it worked.

Once Silvermoon was done, that completed the Eastern Kingdoms and we moved on to Kalimdor. We had a lot of areas where we'd explored all but a couple of subregions, and a couple that we'd barely touched, such as Silithus. After a marathon session all we have left to cover is Durotar and Mulgore. Neither should be too tough although both have important Horde settlements - Orgrimmar in Durotar and Thunder Bluff in Mulgore. We'll just have to see how that goes and if one or both is Silvermoon City all over again, so be it.

I have a plan for Orgrimmar: there's an entrance on the west side with a bridge going across the river, and the guards are on the far bank away from the city wall. I'm thinking that if we sneak down the east side of the riverbank we might be able to avoid attracting the guards while still getting close enough to the wall to get the city on our maps. If it works, we should also be able to fish - we only need to catch one fish to complete the "fishing ambassador" quest, so it should take less than twenty seconds.

Of course, that may not work and if that's the case, we're probably back to the Silvermoon City strategy again. We'll know soon enough.

Dalaran

Getting to Dalaran was as easy as I'd hoped - we flew to Valgarde and found Baron Ulrik von Stromhearth in the inn there; he's one of the five people who give out the quest that takes you to Dalaran. We were in Dalaran in seconds.

Once there we found the Hero's Welcome inn and set our hearthstones without problems. We also found the flightmaster and it turned out that there are connections to several flightpoints at ground level that we already know - we should be able to fly to Dalaran from anywhere in Northrend.

Last stop was the hall containing the portals. From Dalaran we can port to Stormwind, Ironforge, Darnassus, the Exodar and Shattrath. This is going to make things so much easier... we really have no need to take the ships between the major continents or use the dark portal any more, I think.

Level 74

Kate had got to level 74, while I was only 60% of the way there from 73; it took a while to catch up but I flew out to Amberpine Lodge in the Grizzly Hills and, using that as a base, went a-questing in the area around. It went mostly pretty quickly, at first at least, because the first handful of quests could all be taken care of in the area close to the lodge. Later came quests that meant heading farther out, and ultimately I ran into a couple of quests that I couldn't get through. Actually I think the failure was simply not knowing the best way to handle things, and if I had another go I think I might be able to deal with them.

One involved helping someone escape from a logging camp in the north, and as part of it you have to jump on a horse that the escapee is controlling. We became overrun with enemies and I think it was because I didn't use the burning lamp oil the way I should have. That was a wipe.

The other quest was in Voldrune, and for this one I had to release a dragon (easy) then fly it off to attack the level 74 elite bad guy at the top of a nearby tower (hard). We didn't make it.

Since my objective was to level up I dropped both quests for the time being and headed off to find Gryan Stoutmantle (who I'd last seen at Sentinel Hill) at the Westfall Camp to the east. He had another couple of quests including one to clear out some undead scum from a mine to the north, and it was while doing that that I got the last handful of points and hit 74. Yippee!

We should now be able to get to Dalaran. The way I understand it, we can pick up a quest from any of five different people - one in Valiance Keep, one in Zul'Drak, two in Dragonblight and one in Valgarde (which is the closest from where we're both settled at the moment). The quest is to take some item (I don't remember what) to someone in Dalaran (I don't remember who) and to make it possible the quest giver will port you right to the place. Couldn't be simpler.

So when we get there the first objective is not to close out the quest but to find an inn and set our hearthstones. I'm fairly sure there'd be an inn but if for some reason we're not able to set our stones, the next option is to find a flightmaster. The potential problem with that is that the flight point may not be connected to any of those we have, in which case we'd have to locate a connecting flight point on the ground to be able to fly back.

If both of those things fail, the third option is to abandon the quest that got us there instead of closing it out. If we do that, then any time we want to get to Dalaran all we have to do is take the quest again. Not an ideal solution but it should work.

Catching Up

It's been waaay too long since I last wrote about our adventures in Azeroth and Outland. Looking back I see that the last entry was three months ago, at which time we were at level 62 and in the Terokkar Forest outside Shattrath.

Much has happened since then. Kate's character is now at level 74 and I'm a little way behind, but not far; we've explored most of Outland and half of the regions of Northrend; we got flying mounts. So much has happened that there's no way to go into detail - for one thing I can't remember it all and even if I could it would take a couple of weeks of constant writing to get it all down. So instead I'm just going to give a very rough overview of some of the things we've done, then pick up with what we've been doing recently.

Outland

As I recall, we did enough questing and grinding around Outland to finally hit level 70, at which point we were able to go and buy our flying mounts. That was tough - Shadowmoon Valley, where you have to go to get the requisite flying training (which is actually just the next level of riding training), has some very tough baddies and they wander all over the place including onto the roads. As a result, just getting to the trainer can be a rough trip. Getting back isn't half as bad because instead of staying on the ground you have the choice of hitting the flight master or flying your own mount. We chose the second option, which at that time turned out to be a bad idea because I didn't even make it as far as the Terokkar Forest border before being knocked out of the air by a spell from something below me. Still, it was a learning experience in that we now know that flying over hostile settlements is not recommended.

Being able to fly makes some things much easier; for one thing you can go over regions infested with baddies and thereby avoid them, which we did in Zangarmarsh while moving between quest locations, and you can also get to areas that are impossible to reach any other way. It was thanks to this that we were able to finish our explorations of Zangarmarsh, Nagrand, Blade's Edge Mountains and Hellfire Peninsula.

Northrend

We'd actually visited Valiance Keep at the western end of Northrend, and Valgarde in the east, some time ago, but since several sources suggested that Northrend in general wasn't a good idea for anyone under level 68 we hadn't gone beyond the walls of either.

Of course, once we did hit 68 that opened it up for us and we started exploring the Howling Fjord and the Borean Tundra very soon after. That included making a trip by land from west to east so that we could find all the intermediate flight points, making it possible to fly between Valgarde and Valiance whenever we need to.

Starting from the coastal strip that we explored as part of that run, we've pushed northward to explore and quest. It didn't take long to finish exploring the Borean Tundra and since then we finished mapping Grizzly Hills and Zul'Drak (which we went into more than anything to get the manual for making Heavy Frostweave Bandages) and then moved into Dragonblight. Once that was finished (just the other day) we went north into Crystalsong Forest.

Recently in Northrend...

Crystalsong is tough at level 73, I can tell you. Most of the baddies wandering around are level 78 and higher; I can just about handle one level 78 wolf without help, but I'm fairly certain that's my limit - a 79 would slice me up. And we've seen level 80 mobs in the area.

Still, by being careful we were able to complete the map and along the way we found the ruins underneath the aerial city of Dalaran, and along with that found the portal crystal that we should be able to use soon to get into the city itself. The way I understand it, as soon as we hit level 74 we can get a quest that will give us one opportunity to portal in; once there, we should immediately find an inn and set our hearthstones, so that we can go back any time we choose just as we currently do with Shattrath.

Last night we did something much simpler and less risky; as part of the 3.1 patch it became possible to see Nat Pagle the fishing trainer and get a new fishing pole that adds 25 to your fishing skill, so we went out there to get one each; and it also made available a new Clamlette Magnifique recipe, from Quickcleave the cooking trainer in Gadgetzan, so we flew down there to get that too.

I had to dip out at that point so I hearthstoned to Shattrath and took the portal to Stormwind so that I'd be in a convenient place for the ship to Northrend when I get in later today. Kate stuck around in Northrend and hit level 74 - so I have a bit of catching up to do. Once we're both at 74, I think our plan is to do whatever we need to to get to Dalaran as soon as possible.