Have you even played Alliance in vanilla WoW if you haven’t done the Wetlands run, if you haven’t rolled up a night elf, become annoyed/disenchanted with the quest lines in their starter area, and decided to join your friends and guild mates over in Dun Morogh and Elwynn Forest?
Does the Horde have a similar traumatic journey? I mean sure, they have falling off of Thunder Bluff and being crushed by the elevator in the Undercity, but is there a cross country journey of similar hazard? Running from Thunder Bluff to Ogrimmar can get hairy I suppose, but there isn’t that level 22 crockalisk waiting under the bridge just where the mountain pushes the possible routes right up against the swamp and if you’ve managed to time your run with some other your best hope is that somebody else is going to get it.
So yes, as the leading two paragraphs strongly imply, I rolled up a night elf… a druid, because if you’re going to start over there you might as well get the one class only available to night elves.
Why did I roll up a night elf? Because Westfall has been so crowded this past week that making any progress there with my current characters has become futile to the point of frustration.
I know, it is a holiday week for many and a fresh new server still and that, in some ways, this is the most authentic recreation of early WoW so far, with Westfall constantly filled with new characters showing up… but I’d like to get those 15 Defias bandanas some time before the year ends and the way that they are being mobbed by the hungry masses makes that an uncertain goal.
This is likely the dark side of the level 25 cap, because it isn’t just level 15s out there with me, but often level 25s hunting for drops or those quest crates you need for faction boosts in order to be able to buy your runes.
Anyway, Westfall was frustrating and Loch Modan wasn’t holding me, though I know the ways around that lake as well as I do Westfall. I don’t know, maybe I could have gone the other way and brought my pally or priest to Darkshore. Instead I rolled up that druid and set off on the adventure that is being a night elf… which generally involves trying to find things in a very 3D environment with a 2D mini-map. Yes, that quest giver looks like they could be on the first floor of that tree… but no, they are way up top and you needed to run up and down for that and your trainer if you’re a druid or a hunter. It is enough to make your feet hurt.
There is so much free space on the first floor too…
Anyway, I knew I wasn’t going to stick around. I’ve done all the quests there in the past, just to say I have done them… and as I have written before, that makes my inevitable bolt for the Westlands more likely.
I waited for the quest to send me out to Dolonaar, one run in hand, turned that quest in, then just headed for Darnassus and the boat to Auberdine. There I ran down the dock to get the flight point and on running back up saw the Menethil boat was sitting there, ready to go. Was I going to make it?
Jumping for the boat
As it turns out, that is not close enough to make it. I bounced off the side of the boat then had to swim back to shore and run down the dock again.
Night elf in the pale moon light
I managed to not fall in the water again when the boat arrived back in Auberdine and on arriving in Menethil harbor I started to run down the road.
One of my favorite maps in WoW Classic Hardcore was the Wetlands and the heatmap of deaths along the road, the trail of low level night elves being devoured attempting to run.
I too met my fate in the jaws of a crockalisk right at that point after the raptors where the hills come up to the road on one side and the swamp on the other and there isn’t a lot of space to go around. The croc got me there.
About where I expected to fall…
I was almost beyond draw distance of Menethil Harbor… and you can see the croc chasing somebody else. I could have timed that better.
But the run back as a wisp let me revive past the choke point and after that the Wetlands were incident free as I made it to the first tunnel.
Out of the swamp ahead
That wasn’t a bad run… just one death. This isn’t a hardcore server, so there is just a bit of a repair bill. Now I just had to get past the orcs near the summit on the path, past the second tunnel.
Second Tunnel
What you cannot see there is that I forgot about the couple of orcs that spawn as outliers… and at that very moment one is chasing me. I died before reaching that tunnel.
But that was far enough. That got me a tele-mort to Thelsamar in Loch Modan.
A handy graveyard location
I chose to just take the gear damage hit and revive right there. The route was easy from there. I rolled on into Kharnos to pick up the quests for there and… well, it wasn’t like there was nobody there either.
Oh, you did all the boars already…
Sensing the state of things, I ran up to Ironforge and trained skinning. I was going to be wearing leather, Ula already had a leatherworker alt, and I could vendor the scraps for a bit of silver because we were going to have piles of light leather already.
I did a couple of levels around there, but on hitting level 8 I had to go to Stormwind because there is no druid trainer in Ironforge.
In Stormwind at last… I did the Winterfell transmogrifier thing
Stormwind is the place where most people congregate on the Alliance side. And there is apparently a rule that if you’re a level 25 Warlock and you got that run that lets you change form that you must be in that form at all times in town.
So now he is in Stormwind… and facing the same problem of crowds when he gets to Westfall. But he has a few levels and Elwynn Forest isn’t as crowded.
Oh, candles will be taken
And his hearthstone is still set back to the inn at Dolonaar because there are a couple of druid runes I need to go back and get when he has enough levels. But for now he is another alt. And I did probably the most reasonable thing ever with him on this run through Elwynn… I vendored the bag of marbles immediately on getting it as a quest reward rather sticking it in the bank as I have done with every character since time in memorial. I think I still have that bag of marbles on several characters on retail.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 