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Archive for the ‘Dragonblight’ Category

The Grizzly Hills Needs Priorities

Posted in Dragonblight, Grizzly Hills on January 13, 2009| 2 Comments »

I woke up in the Wintergarde Keep inn and saw I had some new mail.  It was a letter from Archmage Emmy’s father in Stormwind, writing to thank me for making sure his daughter’s last message made it to him.  It was obvious he had no idea I had also killed her.
Knife.  Gut.  Twist.
Luckily I keep some of Don Carlos’ finest in my bags for just such occasions.
The drink helped with the cold ride, too, as I made my way over to the Ruby Dragonshrine.  This is the last of the Dragonshrines for me- I’ve seen the black, green, blue, and bronze.  The Red Dragonflight are the ruling class when it comes to wyrms so it makes sense that this whole thing comes to a head in their home base. Their shrine, I am informed, is overrun with scourge.  (It’s Northrend, what else is new.)  I helped the Alliance forces gathered there contain the waves of undead, and then I was sent inside to help reclaim some of the fallen dragons.  This was something a druid, and a night elf, could easily sympathize with.  They didn’t want their bodies to be defiled by the scourge, but to return to the earth to give new life.  I gladly obliged.  I collected ruby acorns and planted them under the bodies of the dragons, which were seized by the seeds and shrank up into nothing, their final wishes fulfilled. I also located the source of the corruption.  Dahlia Suntouch, a former high elf who has guarded the shrine for centuries, was slain by a death knight duke of the scourge, and turned against herself and her charges.  I released her from her misery, and found a talisman that appeared to belong to Alexstraza’s consort.  I returned to Wyrmrest Temple.
Queen Alexstraza has given me the creeps every time I’ve spoken with her.  This meeting was no different.  She greeted me, “Hello Athorius.  It is good to finally meet you.  I have known you since before you were born.”  (As I said, I’ve spoken with her before.  Ah quest discontinuity.  Nevertheless- creepy.) From there I clambored up on a dragon, ran around and ate some blues, and torched the azure dragonshrine.  Not a bad way to end my time in the Dragonblight. From there, I headed to the Grizzly Hills.  And my gosh is it a change.  Here’s a place where humans and orcs have been trying to eke out a living long before anyone had heard of the Valiance Expedition.  Here, they still squabble about the pettiest things, mixed up with some very serious things like storing up sufficient food.  I felt bad about my lack of empathy, but it was difficult to come back down to earth after spending so much time in the ethereal.
So I ate some nuts.  They looked like they were put out for the taking, you know, like bar nuts.  They were…Amberseeds  (duh duh dum!)  These seeds are apparently the lambas bread of WoW.  You’re not supposed to eat a lot and a handful can feed an outpost for a season.  So the guy in charge made me throw them up.  Fun, right?  I even had to quest for my own ipecac.
Between that and the military hardliner I tried, I really tried, to rid myself of the feeling that these missions weren’t a waste of my time, that filling a storehouse was a real problem and that whatever was in that chest has to be important on a real scale and not a petty backward trader scale.  But tonight I just couldn’t.  So I went to Borean Tundra instead to knock out a few easy quests that felt like real progress.  I’ll come back.  Just not tonight.


Heartless Modera, or How I Learned to Love the Walrus

Posted in Dragonblight on January 10, 2009| 1 Comment »

Let me tell you about the Kalu’ak.
These walrus-men don’t inspire a lot of respect on first meeting.  I mean…bipedal walruses whose culture appears to be some kind of bizarre cross between Eskimo and Polynesian?  Give me a break.  (I didn’t cry during The Lion King.  Talking animals don’t really do it for me.)  My initial encounters with the Kalu’ak in the Fjord didn’t do a lot to change this impression.  They were obviously struggling to adapt an age-old lifestyle to a rapidly changing world, with the additional spice of Evil Afoot.  They got some quest help and I moved on to more interesting things.
This is the primary reason why I saved Moa’ki Harbor until the end of my time in the Dragonblight.  I was putting it off an unpleasant task.  (Walrus-men at war with raccoon-men…sorry, wolvar…does it get more ridiculous?)  Nevertheless, if I was going to rule out quests simply because I disliked the premise, I wasn’t going to get anywhere, so I trekked down to the harbor to see a walrus about a raccoon.
“The Dark One rides for again with his San’layn, the dragons fight their Nexus-war, and the Vrykul are reawakened.”- Elder Ko’nani
I blinked in surprise.  It turns out the Elder, at least, is not just a virtual proxy for a giant plush toy. (Unless maybe said toy is a Furby…those things were disturbing.  If you’ve ever had one fall over in your closet at 3am long after you forgot it was there, you’ll appreciate the full weight of that statement.)  He’s couching it in the terms of his people but he knows some bad stuff is going down in Northrend, and furthermore, he’s determined to protect his people from them.  It might not sound like much, but it’s a helluva lot more than could be said about, say, Staghelm, and he gets a lot more press.  As I arrive, the Kalu’ak of Dragonblight are preparing to flee, knowing full well that they won’t be more than a speedbump in the escalating carnage.
They’re struggling through the long winter like everyone else and they can use every pair of hands they can get.  Wolvar are stealing their supplies, emboldened perhaps by their leader’s priceless acquisition of pre-BC enchants on his fist weapons, and their lead fisherman is too old to swim after crab traps or haul a line anymore.  Certainly, he’s too old to defeat the cagey shark who’s ruining their traps.  Crabs are about my least favorite thing to kill in the game (my hunter has had a blue crab pet since level 12, or about 3.5 years real time), but it was for a good cause, so I rounded up the traps and killed a giant crab to lure the shark in.  Yea, food!
Things got more interesting when I went to talk to their shaman Toalu’u, who sent me on a vision quest.  He seemed to think Athorius would be unfamiliar with the concept, but as a druid who’s exalted with the Exodar (with corresponding experience in dream-realities and shamanism), Athorius took it in stride.  The Kalu’ak village of Indu’le has been destroyed.  Its inhabitants are all either dead or driven mad.  According to the giant statue I was sent to speak with, it was all the doing of the azure dragon’s crude attempts to redirect ley lines.  It was my thankless job for the next little while to kill unsuspecting spirits, still going about their daily tasks as though living, in order to release them to next world.  I’m really starting to hate the blue dragons.
The statue, Elder Mana’loa, then sent me to speak with their water goddess, Oacha’nea.  The name is kind of pretty so I expected something a little more classical, but it turns out she could be Lurker’s sister.  She tells me that the Kalu’ak must stay put or all will be lost for them.  Toalu’u’s words when I related events were haunting.  He told me his people believe that all souls are one with the magic of the world, and invited me to consider this in light of the azure dragonflight’s attempts to control all magic in Northrend.  (He also told me that I was “the one to save us from He Who Walks In Shadow” but if I had a copper for every time I’ve heard a variation on that line…)
At that point I was glad to be out of there, and eager to confront the dragons again.
I found the second focus and killed a troll mage, trying not to think too hard about it.  Archmage Modera was impatient for the information.  She told me the third focus lay in Indu’le Village.  She made absolutely no mention of the tradgedy that had taken place there, though she had to be aware since she knew of the damage.  Dispassionately, she ordered me to search every crevice of the town, even in the lake if I had to.  Fresh from the disaster, if she’d been more than an image I would have been tempted to…do things unbecoming to my character.
I set out to return to the lake.  It was still, cold and dark.  Corpses floated around me in the murky waters.  The eruption of magic had woken water elementals along with destroying Indu’le, and the elementals had their revenge upon the mages.  It was hard to feel any sense of satisfaction knowing that many of the mages were at least as much victims as perpatrators.  I found the bloated shell of an elf mage and searched it for the focus.  At that point, I realized the power was flowing towards the Azure Dragonshrine, and ran to see what had happened.
I looked down into the vast hole and saw mages toiling around foci, several arcane needles, a lot of dragons, and a large pile of bones with enormous amounts of magic flowing around them.  I stared for a long moment, images of the much larger bones to the north and the necromancers in the Black Dragonshrine flashing through my head.  Then I turned my elekk hard and fled back to Star’s Rest.
Finally, gratifyingly, a got a reaction from the archmage.  She was truly worried and directed me with all haste to Wyrmrest Temple to seek an audience with Alexstraza.  The letter she sent with me revealed Modera to be a “member of the six”, whatever that is.
When I got to the temple, however, I found myself blocked by the diplomatic hopes of my own faction, of all things.  The alliance ambassador is insisting I do something to ingratiate the reds with the alliance before seeing the Queen.  (Because, seriously, I haven’t done enough already for them.)
Grrrr.  Will the stupid never cease?  No wonder the blues have gotten this far…
End of night tally: 115/115 Dragonblight, with half a chain of dragon goodness left to go.
Next Stop: Grizzly Hills


In which Athorius does some Very Bad and Shady things

Posted in Dragonblight on January 8, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Athorius is generally a pretty good person.  Sure, he screws up now and again, but he tries his best to do the right thing- not always a particularly easy accomplishment in the world he inhabits.  Even with the best of intentions, however, sometimes events are beyond control.
The evening started off innocently enough.  Following up on an earlier mission to rid the landscape of poisoned wildlife, he went to the root of the source, killed a bunch of cultists, and took their poison suits back to a rather fanatical night elf for destruction.  (Terror of Elune?  Closet DEHTA member?  The world may never know.  He gave her a wide berth.)  Athorius also found a loving note from a cultist leader to a student, explaining the teacher’s pride in his favorite pupil and immediately afterward promising destruction should the student fail him.  (No wonder they were dressed up like tier 3 warlocks.)  Eventually, he’ll have a meeting with this “cult leader”, but for now there were more pressing matters.
The madness of the azure dragonflight is difficult to ignore in the Dragonblight.  The archmagus at Star’s Rest asked him to go south and analyze a focus on the beach.  The catch was the focus’ control was in the hands of a human captain of the azure forces.  No big- he’s dealt with such things before.  However, while searching her remains for the control, he found a folded letter.  This captain, a mage of some power who called herself Em, wasn’t working for the dragons.  She’d been conscripted against her will when the dragons threatened her family, but she was doing all she could to undermine their efforts from inside at great personal risk.  She’d written the letter to her father in case of the worst.  And Athorius had just killed her in cold blood.
If that’s not a fist to the gut, I don’t know what is.
He got the information- there was no point in making the accident a total waste- and trekked back to Star’s Rest.  The archmage was completely uninterested in the letter.  In fact, the more time goes on, the less interested she seems in the dangerous consequences of the azure’s plots altogether- she seems to see it more in academic terms.  On top of that, she had the balls to ask Athorius to go out and do it again.
Yes, that’s right.  There are other foci that need investigating, and other captains to be wantonly eradicated.
He’ll do it.  The azure dragons have to be thwarted.  But he’s not happy about it, and he didn’t have to do it today.
Angry, sad, and frustrated, he went to take care of a few chore-like quests, clearing up kobolds and magnataur that were threatening an alliance encampment.  Along the way he ran into a trio of goblins.  Like most goblins, they were trying to make and sell anything they could dream up.  It seemed pretty innocuous at first.  He gathered up materials for them, killing all manner of dangerous creatures and scourge in the process, but as their demands continued he felt increasingly uneasy about the situation.  The goblins had made no secret of the fact that they were selling to the soldiers at the Wrathgate.  However, at least some of the merchandise was going to the horde to manufacture weapons.  Athorius doesnt’ hate the horde with the fervor of some- he honestly believes the only worthwhile solution to that conflict lies in diplomacy- but he’s also seen the devastation they’ve wreaked on many alliance outposts, and anyone who’s seen the encampments in Howling Fjord knows the forsaken are up to something.  The idea of helping them arm themselves, even in the shadow of the Wrathgate, soured his stomach.
Then there’s the fact that they’re goblins.  They became more candid with each request, and it became less certain that they were selling as opposed to exploiting their customers.
When they ran out of errands, they sent him north to see another goblin, and this one was worse than the other three combined.  He was trying to concoct an elixir to help the ice giants fight off the jormungar worms, with the explicit purpose of gaining their trust in order to exploit a business opportunity later.  His motives were distasteful, but such an elixir would be useful to the giants, so Athorius helped him out.  Their leader, however, refused to trust the elixir (who could blame him?) and instead asked Athorius to slay the worm’s broodmother.
The goblin had another task as well.  He wants grubs to be captured alive to be used in Plan B.  As he put it, “When diplomacy fails, slavery is a perfectly viable alternative.”
End of night tally: 98/115 Dragonblight


Another Color Takes a Lick of Crazy

Posted in Dragonblight on January 7, 2009| Leave a Comment »

If Wyrmrest Temple didn’t make it obvious, the Emerald Dragonflight are not the only ones suffering from reptilian psychosis.  Their Azure brethren are also round the bend, albeit in a more complex way.  (Though, ultimately, perhaps not as detrimental, but I’m biased.  I play a druid.  They’re fairly invested in Ysera’s nightmare.)

Tonight I began by doing my cooking daily, as per usual- there are a lot of recipes to buy!- and then I went and healed an Azjol-Nerub run.  I liked Azjol-Nerub the first time I was in there, but now it’s kind of…well, it’s better when people can mainly avoid taking damage when they’re supposedly DPS.  We’ll leave it there.

After that it was on to questing.

Home is in Wintergarde Keep.  I rode north and met up with a representative of the Argent Crusade, a rather intense crusader.  He kept staring at me like he thought I might be a secret agent of the scourge or something- like he was testing my loyalty.  It was almost more like the Scarlet Crusade than the Argent Dawn.

Anyway, he had me kill some scourge trolls, and honestly regardless of his motives the world has to be better with a few less undead.  He sized me up and demanded I join his cause.  I did fly to Zul’Drak to complete the handoff quest, but I’m not quite ready to leave Dragonblight yet.  (And, frankly, Zul’drak creeps me out.  It should be an interesting zone, I will admit.)

Next I had some business in Star’s Rest.

Star’s Rest looks to be a kaldorei camp that is additionally harboring an image of an archmage, who is trying to figure out what’s happening at a nearby burial ground.  The Azure Dragonflight busted open an enormous crater and installed a mechanism in order to tap into a major ley line.  This woke a lot of the highborne spirits buried there, and they are not happy.  While I was investigating the matter for the archmage I cleaned up a bit, killing off servants of the dragons and defeating a major arcane elemental, Arcanimus, that had also been awoken.

The azure dragonflight has been busy.  They’re cutting deals with the Ethereum, and messing with the Arcanomicon.  The Arcanomicon is a map of all the ley lines in Azeroth.  The azures have been systematically breaking into them and sending all the power into the Nexus, though the mage seems to think the power is flowing in the wrong direction at this site.

I’m interested to get back to this storyline tomorrow.  When the dragons are restless, I’m betting they spread it around.

End of night tally: 79/115


Frostmourne and a Pirate

Posted in Dragonblight on January 6, 2009| Leave a Comment »

I logged in this evening after work and immediately flew to Dragonblight.  As soon as I landed I saw a warrior in general looking for help defeating Alystros.  Alystros is a giant green bird who, like most creatures pledged to the emerald dragonflight, is losing its grip on the reins of reality.  He’s also an elite group quest mob, which even the non-healers often have trouble dealing with alone.  Along with a warlock, we readily dispatched him.  This is the awesome phase of a new expansion, when enough people are questing for the group quests to be quick and easy to do.

After that, I was off to see a dwarf about a sword.

Orik Trueheart works for the Argent Crusade, which is the Northrend branch of the Argent Dawn.  He’s worried about restless spirits on the Forgotten Coast, and he wants me to investigate what happened.  He makes me a potion that he promises will only make me dead enough to trick my soul into temporarily entering the land of the dead.  Eep.

With some misgivings I downed the brew and spoke with the ghosts.  They’re waiting for Arthas to come back…which of course he never does.  Orik sends me back with an orb that allows the ghosts to see the truth of history, and I watch Arthas betray his men to gain vengeance for his homeland.  (I never played any Warcraft game prior to WoW, so this is all new to me.  For those who did, it’s nostalgic.)  The spirits are freed from their waiting.

I return to Wintergarde only to be told that the Scarlet Crusade has set up shop north of the carrion fields.  They ask me to find a book written by General Abbendis, dispatch some scarlets, and find a map that the psychic Zelig thinks may reveal Frostmourne’s original hiding spot.

The journal is an interesting read.  If you’ve done the death knight introductory quests, it picks up where that bad business with Abbendis and the Scarlet Crusade left off.  (If you haven’t, it includes the previous pages as well.)  Abbendis believes the light is speaking to her, and is growing uneasy in the wake of the Crusade’s newfound allies.  I met the new general earlier, when I was sent to kill Abbendis oddly enough, and I agree- you’d trust this guy not even as far as you could throw him.  They’re also creating “raven priests”, and given the raven’s association with death, this sounds like a 180 in their mission statement.

The map shows a cave conveniently labeled “Frostmourne Cave”.  Yes, seriously.  When I get there and view another scene out of history, it is revealed that Arthas’ dwarven compatriot, Muradin, long thought dead, is still alive, albeit with some memory loss.  Intriguing news!

I rounded out the night doing my cooking daily in Dalaran, and taking a trip back to the Fjord.  I had a few group quests there I wanted to finish up.  One of them went green when I dinged 74, making it soloable.

The Jig Is Up asks me to kill a pirate captain and retrieve his spyglass (requested, naturally, by his first mate).  When he reached about 1/4 health, he screamed out that I would never have his spyglass, jumped off a ledge…and was promptly EATEN BY A BEAR.

Let’s think about that a moment.

He was EATEN by a freaking BEAR.

The unexpected really cracks me up.

End of night tally: 70/115 Dragonblight
