Tales from Azeroth 4: Highlights From Levels 11 - 30

My journeys throughout Azeroth have continued and I will share a couple of bits from level 11 - 30 that I feel are worth mentioning because they were enjoyable parts of my experience.

Duskwood

One of my favourite areas is Duskwood, a contested area south of one of the Alliance newbie zones. Duskwood is home to the Alliance town of Darkshire.

Duskwood is very close to a mid-level contested area, Stranglethorn Vale. Stranglethorn Vale has at least one Horde outpost. Because of Duskwood’s proximity to Stranglethorn Vale, and because there are quests in Duskwood for characters from levels 18 - 30 (approximately), it becomes an ideal place for mid- and high-level Horde to cause trouble for lowbies. When in Duskwood, you will frequently see the “Darkshire is under attack!” notification pop up in your chat log. Though Duskwood is a target for Horde, there were plenty of high level Alliance folk about, assisting lowbies with their quests or responding to calls for aid.

I really like Duskwood because of its haunted forest theme. The creepy music sets the atmosphere nicely. The quests in Duskwood, though they were mechanically more of the same, were less irritating because the back-and-forth traveling between questing site and NPC rewarder was not too bad in terms of time taken and distance traveled. There were a lot of Alliance folk doing quests, so there was no shortage of questing partners. Even when no one was questing with me, it was nice to see so many players so busily going about their business.

One of the reasons I liked questing in Duskwood was that the quests were entertainingly written. Some of them featured a detective or murder mystery aspect, which I really appreciated. At least one Duskwood quest involved me going to Stormwind and nearby areas to continue. I really like this aspect of questing because it connects the characters in Duskwood with the rest of the characters in the game world. I tend to enjoy quests that involve me traveling, because it gives me an opportunity to explore.

Blackfathom Deeps

The first instanced dungeon I’d ever been in was Blackfathom Deeps. I was level 24. I joined the LookingForGroup chat channel and spent what felt like a great deal of time trying to find a party to quest with. After about 45 minutes, a level 36 Night Elf messaged me and aid he would attempt the dungeon with me, but we didn’t think our chances of success were high. We died a few times. After resurrecting again, traveling from the Grave Yard outside the instance, and re-entering the dungeon, we came upon an Alliance party of two level 20-somethings and two level 40-somethings who were also going to attempt the instance. The level 36 Night Elf spoke to one of them privately and then I was invited into the group. The level 36 Night Elf then wished me good luck and left.

The party I joined were all communicating with TeamSpeak or Ventrilo. I had to pay attention to their cues in-game so I didn’t make a nuisance of myself. It was challenging to do this, and quite entertaining. After a while, another high level character they knew wanted to join to help out, and I summoned him from Stormwind using Ritual of Summoning. With the high level players in the party, we quickly cleared the instance, though I was only able to complete one quest before they all decided to call it quits.

This dungeon did not inspire in me the same level of frustration as the Deadmines because the high-level characters in the party were not level 60s. They were level 40s, and there were some close calls with enemy encounters. The challenge made this experience more fun than Deadmines. I think that I learned a lot more about how to function in a dungeon because the runners were not able to kill everything in one hit. It was a lot of fun, and though I wasn’t questing with a group of similar-level characters (so the challenge level was lower), the experience was great and it was nice to quest with a decent bunch of random players.