And Quiet Flows the Maraudon

I have to come up with a new title scheme for these posts about revisiting instances, as I tend to fall back on “Return to N,” where N represents a dungeon we have done before on the alliance side of things.  See last week’s post, Return to Zul’Farrak.

This week the post is about Maraudon, and as you can see, I latched onto the “don” at the end of the name when looking for a title.  Other, alternative titles were:

• Maraudon Pardo
• Maraudon Juan
• Maraudon Quixote
• Maraudon Ameche
• Maraudonnie Brasco
• Maraudonnie Darko
• Maraudonnie and Marie
• The Last Maraudon
• Unagi Maraudonburi

And with all those (and more) to choose from, I decided to go the obscure route.

Maraudon, like Uldaman, has a good chunk of its quest content out and around the front of the instance rather than inside.  That meant getting a couple of us to Shadowprey Village to grab the flight point and then move to the meeting stone to bring people in.

Hurmoo and Azawak riding to Maraudon

You can see that Hurmoo has a new mount there.  I realized that I still had a referral zhevra left over from getting my friend Xyd hooked on the game for a while.  I decided that Hurmoo would benefit most from a new mount.  The poor zhevra looks a bit overloaded.

Once to the stone we started pulling in people as they arrived and running them to Shadowprey for the flight point and the quests you need to pick up over there. (Most of which you cannot share.)

Hanging out by the meeting stone

Once there, the team was:

44 Blood Elf Paladin – Enaldie (Ula)
45 Tauren Druid – Hurmoo (Vikund)
45 Tauren Druid – Azawak (Skronk)
45 Orc Shaman – Earlthebat (Earlthecat)
45 Undead Mage – Bigbutt (Bungholio)

As you can see, the instance runs once a week are moving us right along when it comes to levels.  I’m not sure we’ll be level 80 before Cataclysm comes out, but we might well be in Northrend.

Once we collected the quests and went in, we headed towards the orange side.  The idea was to blow through as much of this instance as we could in one night.  Last time around we needed three visits to wrap things up.

Despite being there three times before though, our memories of the place were pretty hazy.  Orange was chosen because it seemed right.

We worked our way around, knocking off Noxxion and finding our way to Lord Vyletongue.

Lord V is in!

That turned out to be the right route, as we then turned about and found our way to Celebras, defeated his possessed version, and knocked off a quest.  That also got us the Scepter of Celebras which turned out to be a nice weapon upgrade for Hurmoo.

After that it was through the turtles, over the falls, and up to Landslide for a quick visit.

Then it was back down and around to the main boss, Princess Theradras.

The Princess on her island

Once a fearsome fight, she did keep us busy for a bit, but the outcome was never in doubt.  And with her death we got the achievement for the dungeon.

Royalty out of the way, we dropped down in into the water below to wrestle with Rotgrip.

Crikey, it's a croc!

Rotgrip out of the way, we climbed out of the water and headed towards our last target, stopping only to say hello to Elder Splitrock who hangs around in Maraudon during the Lunar Festival.

It must get lonely down here

Then it was Tinkerer Gizlock and we were done.  Gizlock was nice enough to drop the Hypertech Buckler, which Earl really wanted about two and a half years ago when we were here.  But since his shaman is the only shield wearer in the group, he got it this time around.

At this point we realized that we had a couple more quests outstanding.  It was nearly midnight by that point and we weren’t keen to go chase down stuff that seemed to be outside the instance, so we decided we would wrap that up next Saturday and then head on to the next destination, Sunken Temple.