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
Level 10 – Knucklerot and Luzran.
I cannot count the amount of times this chubby twat and his brother ground me into oblivion on Farfalla. Every time I ran away from one I would back straight into the other. They seemed to aggro on me as soon as I set foot into the zone – they practically came lumbering up to Tranquillien, swinging their clubs and gibbering with anticipation, to turn me into a bloody smear on the floor as soon as I left the safety of the inn or the flightpath.
Well, alright, maybe that’s being a bit over the top, but they certainly made me miserable for a while. Obviously, their model – the generic abomination – became ingrained into my brain, and when I finally visited Undercity (more about that later this week, by the way) it took me about ten minutes to dare to venture down into the lift area, because I was convinced the guards were going to smash me into pulp.
So yeah.
God, revenge is sweet.
Level 9 – Ghostlands.
First of all, I have to apologise for not posting yesterday (if there’s anybody reading my ramblings, that is.) I gave myself the day off to catch up with some family and do some other stuff, but now I’m back with my nose to the grindstone.
Anyway, this is Farfalla in the Ghostlands. As I’ve mentioned before, this is the second zone you go to as a Blood Elf (if you’re following the quest progression, that is, not just deciding to head off to the Barrens or whatever), which takes you from about level 10 to level 20. It’s a very different place to Eversong Woods. Geographically, it looks the same, there are blood elf ruins everywhere, lots of trees, a river, mountains and lakes – but this place was burned to the ground by the Sin’dorei themselves after the Third War, to prevent it from being defiled any more by the Scourge, as well as to make their victory worthless. As you can imagine, it’s a pretty sad place – the quests here are definitely darker in content than those in Eversong Woods, involving reclaiming lost villages and vanquishing High Elf spirits to put them to rest. Rather than being well-lit and green and autumnal, like the Woods are, it’s always dark and grey here.
The fountain you can see behind me in the picture is in the centre of Tranquillien, the town of the zone, which also has the flight path (something else I didn’t know about but soon grew to love – running all the way from Tranquillien to Silvermoon and back every two levels to train is not exactly fun times.) Again, architecturally it’s the same as all blood elf towns, except this one has basically been destroyed, and is still beseiged by Scourge and trolls and plagued animals and Light knows what else. Tranquillien is also a faction – you gain reputation with them as you quest, ending up Exalted pretty easily, which is nice because you get an awesome cloak (with a lot of stamina for the level) at that point.
Lore-wise, the Tranquillien faction is made up of blood elves and Forsaken (making this the first time in-game you encounter a different faction within the Horde.) The town was abandoned by the Quel’dorei as Arthas’ armies advanced, and the two groups are now working together to try and retake the town as a part of the Sin’dorei’s rebuilding of their realm. It’s also explained that the Forsaken there have been sent by Sylvanas, which is poignant, given that as Ranger-General of Quel’thalas she was in charge of protecting the land – something she’s not given up on in undeath. There’s an amazing quest to do with Sylvanas herself – amazing even if you aren’t an utter fangirl like I am – but I’ll be writing more about that later.
Anyway, the reason that this makes it onto my blog – other than being a new zone, which is fairly momentous as a low-level newbie – is because I have something to own up to. So here goes:
I hated the Ghostlands and couldn’t stand levelling there. It was dark, creepy and frightening, and the quests were harder than what I was used to.
Don’t believe me? It took me an hour and a half to complete one quest, where you have to find an abandoned wagon and collect the supplies off it to take them back to an NPC in Tranquillien. The screen was dark, I couldn’t see anything, and I kept getting attacked by zombies. On top of that, I was now playing on my own laptop instead of his PC, and without a mouse I was an utter failure at movement, which, when combined with the higher density of mobs in the Ghostlands, meant lots of deaths and lots of running back to my corpse. I remember beginning questing at level 11 in the Ghostlands one Saturday, and four hours later, I was level 11 and a half, with all my gear broken, one quest complete, and in an extremely bad temper. This was also my first encounter with elite mobs – mobs that have a lot more health, and hit much harder, than regular mobs for that level – two gigantic Abominations called Knucklerot and Luzran that made my life hell. I ran away from one and into the path of another more times than I can count.
So I didn’t level too much here at first. In fact, I was pretty much ready to give up the game as something I wasn’t going to be into if it carried on in the same vein – I don’t like horror. I rang my friend and ranted at him, and as a result, he did most of 11-16 for me. Slowly, though, I began to come around to the idea of playing again.Watching him quest helped a lot, plus he explained things to me – he forced me to apply DoTs and then turn around and run, for one thing, meaning I at least learned to keyboard turn (I know! Keyboard turning, the work of the devil. Believe me, it was better than nothing) – meant that I learned some more about game mechanics too, such as applying DoTs as I pulled a mob, so that I would get more damage out of them over the course of the fight. Once I was more comfortable with it I would usually take over again, but a couple of quests – the ones to do with Amani trolls and the ending quests in Deatholme – I just abandoned completely and let him do. It was either that or the laptop going out of the window.
Check back tomorrow for more rantings about Knucklerot and his friend, something I’m sure many a newbie who levelled for the first time in the Ghostlands can empathise with.
~Farf
Level 7 – Navigation.
Eh?
This brings back a lot of memories for me, much as it might look like a screenshot of Farfalla jumping against a blank wall (which is uncanny since it is a screenshot of Farfalla jumping against a blank wall.) At level 5, blood elf priests get a quest from the Priest trainer I talked about yesterday called Cleansing the Scar.
Farfalla, it is good you are here. The Scourge attack our city with such mindless hate that I fear the morale of our guard is breaking.
Hurry to the Dead Scar just south of the city where Jaela and her rangers stand ready. Fill them with the power of the Light through your blessings.
Basically, you have to find Ranger Jaela and her rangers, and cast Power Word: Fortitude (which is a buff increasing stamina) on 4 of them. Seems simple, right?
I laugh at it now but this quest annoyed the HELL out of me when I was trying to do it for the first time, mostly because it had a really sweet robe as a reward, so I didn’t want to just abandon it like I did with all the other things I found too difficult or scary (and if you think it’s been bad so far, incidentally, just you wait until you hear about my time in the Ghostlands.) Basically, you have to do this:
Simples?
It’s really, really not difficult, but for some reason, I hadn’t figured out that when standing in Falconwing Square the huge tall archway through which I could see the road continuing and signs of life was something that I could run through to get me to the other side of the wall on the map, where I needed to be. I somehow got it in my head that I must be able to get there through the inn. This idea, delusional as it was, was made much worse by an annoying buggy map – which is where my original picture comes in.
The screenshot at the top of this post is taken in the opposite corner to where the priest trainer is, right behind the First Aid trainer and across from the Cooking Trainer. I wasn’t able to replicate the bug that caused all that frustration when I took this the other day, presumably because they’ve fixed it by now (well it has been two and a half years.) Basically, when you ran up to that corner your map changed and the notification which flashes on your screen when you change zones came out, saying ‘Dead Scar’ in huge letters right at eyelevel. So I spent about an hour jumping at that part of the wall, both upstairs and downstairs, thinking that maybe it was like in Spyro where there were secret ledges in the wall that you had to jump at to unlock parts of the game.
So this makes my blog partly because it’s another opportunity to giggle at my noobishness, but also for a couple of other reasons. I mentioned a while ago that I never really played WoW without addons or wowhead.com, but that’s not strictly accurate. Basically, I played without addons and quest databases until I got to this quest and failed miserably at it, and then went crying to my friend, who did three things – added wowhead.com to my Mozilla bookmarks, and discreetly installed Cartographer on my computer, so that I could have a world map open, move my character and actually see the arrow representing Farfalla on the map moving with me, which saved a load of frustration. Then he did the quest for me, since I was far too mardy at this point about my failures to want to carry on playing (though I do remember cheering up when seeing how good my new gear looked at the end.)
The other thing about this memory is that it was the first experience I had of what I call class diversity in WoW. Basically, not all players get that quest in the first place. Only blood elf priests get it. There used to be a lot of similar little touches in the game. For example, each different race of priests got two racial spells – so blood elf racials were different to humans, which were different again to troll, etc etc. Other classes didn’t get racial spells, but they did get different variations. Warlock races have different quests to learn their various demon-summoning spells, as well as a quest chain to summon their demonic mounts and one to get a special robe. Paladins have a quest to learn Redemption (their resurrection spell), as well as their mounts, a bit like warlocks. Shaman have their quest chains to learn their totem abilities, druids have their quests for learning Bear form, Cat form, etc., as well as to learn Cure Poison, mages have quests to get special armour…you get my point.
Now, with the exception of priest racials, which were removed when Wrath of the Lich King came out, all of those things still exist in game. They haven’t been removed. They have, however, for the most part been made optional – warlocks and paladins get their mounts etc. automatically now, without having to do the epic – what I would call class-defining – quest chains. I don’t want to say too much more on this here, since I have a longer piece planned about the issue. It’s enough to say here that this was the first time I became aware of the implications of rolling one class rather than another.
Incidentally, it was also the first time that I took something about the game seriously, rather than logging off and walking away when I got fed up of it. By extension, maybe that was the first point at which the fact that I could eventually end up being a raider became a possibility. But that, again, is another story for another time. 
~Farf
Level 6 – Training.
Another short post today. One of the most annoying things about WoW when I began playing the game, and which remained really frustrating until fairly recently, was that when you made a character, you had to hit level 6 to learn the last set of spells that your initial class trainer (the one in the starting zone) would teach you. Your level 8 (and beyond) spells and abilities were taught by the trainer in the second area you move to. Obviously, the quests were designed so that you’d level to 6 and then be ready to move on and leave the area. But by the time you’d been through them a few times, and knew your route pretty well, it was entirely possible, if you were a player like me who doesn’t kill anything unless she has to (I’ve spent more time running away while a herd of ferocious skeletons/bears/mammoths/night elves/murlocs gallop after me than I can count) to finish all the quests and be level 5 and a quarter. So you’d head off to the next zone, sighing because you knew you’d do one quest, level up and then have to trek allllll the way back to the starting zone to train your final skills.
Luckily, it seems they fixed this a while ago, and I no longer bang my head against the desk every time I decide to roll the new flavour of the month class as an alt, giving me more time to roll my face against the keyboard instead, as demonstrated by this guide to elemental shaman keybindings! Which is in no way intended as a way of annoying my good friend Guntar.
Just kidding, though, Gunt – I don’t really play on a Mac.
~Farf
