Level 11 – Swimming.
Ahh, swimming. This is more of ‘Farf being an utter noob’ (I should really add that as a category for my posts, to be honest.) Anyway, there’s a quest at the Farstrider Enclave which has you jump into the lake next to it and despatch some ghosts, which apparently are hanging around after dying during a shipwreck in the area. There’s also another quest, given by one of the ghosts, on an island in the middle of the lake, which asks you to dive to the bottom and retrieve some charms from piles of mud there.
To be able to do these quests you have to be able to go below the waterline. I got them before my friend took over levelling for me, and decided to attempt it – it didn’t seem too hard, anyway. Of course, being me, I could not figure out how you went underwater, at all. At first I thought maybe it was a skill (something like Diving, a bit like Parry or Block or whatever) that got unlocked after you completed a certain quest (in Spyro 2, you only got the ability to headbutt once you’d been taught how to do it in the game, by that Tinkerbell character, whereas in Spyro 3 you can do it from the beginning) but after I searched all over the Internet I couldn’t find anything about it. So I figured you’d need to press some special combination of buttons – after trying everything on my keyboard, that didn’t work either.
At this point I was completely fed up. I’d died several times from ghosts aggroing on me and me not being able to face them to kill them – come on, I couldn’t work out how to get underwater, I was hardly going to be able to kill a mob without being able to see it properly (especially, like I said the other day, because the Ghostlands are so dark and creepy) – and yet again I’d spent hours on a quest without making any progress at all. A very fed up Farfalla made a phone call to her WoW-playing friend, who yet again roared with laughter at my failures.
Of course, to swim you just press down both mouse buttons and move the mouse forward. Except I wasn’t playing with a mouse, I was playing on a laptop with a touchpad, and at that point I was doing everything with my keyboard – I didn’t use the touchpad at all, which meant I was just swimming round in frustrating circles. I eventually had to find out how to bind keys so that I could bind Page Up to Pitch Up and Page Down to Pitch Down, which meant I could actually get underwater and deal with the quest. Hurrah. Great success?
Of course not. I now had to deal with the little bar that kept appearing at the top of my screen as soon as I went underwater. All I understood that it appeared when I dived down, it disappeared when I reached the surface again, and if it ticked down to nothing while I was still underwater I took massive amounts of damage for no apparent reason that I couldn’t seem to be able to heal through.
It was my Breath bar, of course. Back in the day when I was doing these quests, you didn’t get the cushy three minutes underwater before running out of breath and dying that you do now – you got one minute. That made certain underwater quests really difficult – the ones in Stranglethorn Vale on the Vile Reef and the ones in Faldir’s Cove, hidden to the south in the Arathi Highlands spring to mind – although of course being in a 10-20 zone this one was still really easy. Despite that fact, I was bobbing around underwater like I didn’t have a care in the world – well I didn’t, until I died. Even worse, when I realised what was causing the problem, I went the other way and became ridiculously careful, not spending more than 20 seconds underwater – which meant doing the quests was even harder.
I do think these quests were a contributing factor to enraging and making my friend level a bit for me. That and the run between Tranquillien and the Farstrider Enclave. I only found out very recently that there’s a path over the hills – on all my characters I’d just been haring it cross-country, which was not exactly good times in terms of avoiding corpse-running. Anyway, annoyed as I was at the time, I include these things here because frustrating as it was, it is certainly a memory, which is what this blog is all about.
Tomorrow, happier times at Windrunner Spire.
~Farf
