Monday, February 2, 2009

Seeking Loremaster

I'm not normally one who cares much about the achievement system in WoW. It's a nice feature, but more often than not when I gain one it was unexpected. "Oh, wow, cool." is usually the first thought that crosses my mind when an achievement procs.

Which is pretty much exactly what happened to me about a week or so ago while leveling Nord. I hit the 2000 quest achievement, which of course "unlocks" the next step up which is 3000 quests. That achievement carries with it a title, "Seeker," and I got to thinking that would be a nice title to give my oldest and longest played toon.

So I start looking under the "Quest" tab on the Achievement window and I get another surprise. I'm only about 95 quests from "Loremaster of the Eastern Kingdoms."

So Nord has been catching up on a lot of old lowbie quests in the Eastern Kingdoms. And I've discovered a number of things.

1) I'm stumbling over quite a few of what might be called "secret quests." Take Sweet Amber for instance. It's a level 44 quest in Westfall. Who is ever in Westfall at level 44? If you're not, you'd miss this chain entirely, so I imagine not many have ever done this chain. Got another one in Stormwind to take a poem to Shattrath. Given the content of the poem, I get the feeling that one is memorial to somebody.

2) If you're looking to gain rep with Classic WoW factions, this seems to be the way to go. With a lot of the changes made both recently and a while back to mob rep and quest rep, you can rapidly gain reputation this way. Nord is almost exalted now with both IF and SW.

3) I still hate one of the patterns of Classic WoW questing, which I call "Let's go 'round the world for this quest." This quest is a good example. You pick it up in Stormwind. It takes you to Stonetalon in Kalimdor. You turn it in back in Stormwind. Thankfully, this sort of quest is from a bygone age. Now, if you pick up a quest in say Dragonblight, odds are good you complete it there.

4) My final observation is the sense of surprise I have in discovering just what quests Nord managed to skip while leveling. Being an altaholic, there are not many quests in these lowbie zones that I've missed, but apparently some of them got done on my alts but never on Nord. Slaughtering the once uber-deadly Defias Pillagers and getting quest credit for it was kind of fun on a level 75. :-)

3 comments:

Cainam said...

Thanks for the tip about Amber... I don't think I've done it and I'm only like 5 quests away from eastern kingdoms.

Avouz said...

I did not mention this in my post, but Sweet Amber is another "round the world" quest by the time you get further down the chain. You'd be better off looking elsewhere to complete EK Loremaster in a timely fashion.

Cainam said...

Yeah... well... for a mage at least it's not as bad. Still a pain. Needles to say, I did it. I was having trouble finding more quests anyway. Turned out I needed 9 more,so I did 2 light house in westfall, those 5 and 2 of the buzzard gizzard quests that I had not completed in blasted lands. Ding. EK Loremaster.

Kalimdor will be mroe of an issue. I'm at 420 of 700. I know I need to do Darkshore, Ashenvale dustwallow marsh and silithus. Here's hoping that will get me close.