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 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 5 – Falconwing Square.
A bit of an extension of what I was saying the other day, about realising how big the world was. Eventually you finish everything you can do on Sunstrider Isle and you get a quest sending you down to another quest-giver standing between the island and a bridge leading to Dawning Lane, a big road-type thing that joins it onto Silvermoon City. You’re told that the last person to attempt the journey was murdered by the Wretched (those blood elves who’ve gone feral because of their lack of magic: Mr. Fel-Rel-Stupidly-Difficult-To-Spell-Name the Banished is the leader of the Wretched on Sunstrider Isle) and that’s it’s a dangerous road to take because they’re perfectly happy to kill you and try and steal your magic. (Presumably this wouldn’t be a worry for rogues.) Then you retrieve the package the murdered outrunner was carrying and take it on to Falconwing Square where you take it to the Inn and get introduced to concepts like hearthstones, rested XP and professions (all again new on me.)
You have to remember that between level 1 and level 6 I had died approximately 8003 times. It wasn’t until I asked my friend why that little man wearing red armour had appeared on my screen that he realised how bad I was at what I was doing and decided to keep an eye on me. So I accept the quest and the giver says ‘I’m not going to lie to you; the path to Falconwing Square can be extremely dangerous if you leave the safety of Dawning Lane. Do you feel up to the task, Farfalla?’
Of course I accept, but having recently been told by a friend truly amazed by my noobness that I probably wanted to take things like mob levels and quest text a bit more seriously, or alternatively just run around naked and save myself the repair bills, I’m a bit more concerned about playing competently now. So I proceeded down Dawning Lane.
What you can see in the screenshot is Farfalla at the north-west end of the road, which then runs to the south-east. The buildings on either side are an Elvish town a bit like the ones in Sunstrider Isle but they’ve all been taken over by the Wretched who are swarming everywhere, and there are these huge robot things patrolling round too. Not good, and of course the quest text is extremely serious business, so I decide I’d better be careful. It takes me about five minutes to traverse the route because I insist on going down the dead centre of the path, so I’d be at least risk of pulling. The squiggly plants on the grassy island you can see on the picture caused me much headache because I couldn’t get over them – I eventually had to quickly make a little detour to the right-hand side and then immediately switched back into the middle when I was past. On the positive side of things, I reassured myself, I would be hidden by the plant from the mobs on the other side, so they wouldn’t be able to see me.
This makes it onto my blog because I look back really fondly on knowing almost nothing about WoW and just doing what seemed to make most sense at the time. 
~Farf
Bal’a dash, malanore!
Or greetings, traveler! Dorky as that may perhaps be.
Welcome to my blog. Perhaps a little explanation is in order. I’m a fairly regular girl from the UK, but one thing that makes me stand out amongst my friends is my love of gaming. My friends don’t game, and they don’t understand why I do. I’ve been playing World of Warcraft for two and a half years now, from the release of the Burning Crusade expansion. I made a character on my server the first day I picked up the game, a Sin’dorei priest named Farfalla, and since then I’ve barely put her down, going from utter newbie who couldn’t even make her character turn around and run, to a hardcore raider as a holy priest in the Sunwell pre-3.0, flirted with RP on another server, and then to a casual raider, first as shadow and then holy again, in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.
I haven’t only become a (fairly) skilled priest during my time in this game. I’ve made some really good friends, friendships that endure outside of Azeroth, and had some really good times. I’ve laughed with friends in Vent, screamed until my throat was hoarse the first time we downed Illidan as a guild, endured the agonising 1% wipes on Kalecgos and Brutallus, banged my head against the wall until I survived in PvP, felt the strange, disorienting feeling of having guilds full of friends fall apart. I’ve farmed countless minipets and mounts, way before the Achievement system was implemented and even more obsessively after. I even met my boyfriend in Azeroth, and we’ve now been living together for a year. I’ve changed as a person, for the better, in all kinds of ways, some of which would have happened anyway as I went from an adolescent to an adult, and some of which happened as a result of my experiences in WoW.
I’ve done some really stupid stuff too. I’ve got too deep into the game and messed up my university course because of it. I’ve been that emo dramaqueen girl that you all know on your server, the one who logs onto the game for attention. I’ve cared about what happens in-game to the extent that what happened outside of it became far less important, and hurt my family and friends in the process. All of these stupid things I’ve done have also helped me grow.
So what is the reason for this blog? Partly I’d like my friends and family to see what it is I enjoy about gaming. But another reason is that today, Blizzard announced their third expansion to the game. Titled World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, it’s going to change the game world as we know it, ripping apart the continents of the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor and changing the face of Azeroth permanently. And while I’m giddily excited about this prospect, it also occured to me that the places where some of my best in-game memories were formed are going to disappear forever. I want to record those places and memories, before they disappear.
So, here we are. 80 levels to develop my character to full strength, so 80 posts to chronicle Farfalla’s journey in-game.
For the Horde! Anar’alah!
~Farfalla
