The last tour of pre-cataclysm azeroth continues!  This edition we’ll be leaving the wheat fields of the human heartlands and traveling to the shrouded forest glades of the night elves. But not without a brief stop at the capital city of the dwarves – Ironforge!

On one of my return visits to Stormwind,  I was approached by a dwarf full of himself and his ale, and he beseeched me to travel to the gates of Ironforge (actually he rather insisted!) and take part in the festivities of the dwarven holiday they were currently celebrating – Brewfest!  I don’t partake in drink too terribly much myself, beyond the occasional glass of wine. After the strenuous work of Westfall though, a small holiday actually sounded pretty good.  The goblin engineers have built a vast underground railway that runs from Stormwind to the dwarven capital, and it was this that I made use of to travel to the far city.  Once there I walked about open-mouthed at this magnificent testimony to dwarven engineering and perseverance.  Carved right into the heart of the mountains of Dun Morogh, Ironforge’s massive halls are forever filled by the sounds of dwarven hammers on steel, the smell of sulfur from it’s many forges, and the heat of molten metal that runs in rivers beneath the city’s walkways.  You cannot visit this city and not feel a bit of awe for dwarven workmanship.

Before Burning Crusade come out, Ironforge was the hub of player activity in WoW on the Alliance side.  Its close proximity to several level 60 instances, the fact that it had the only auction house, and the convenience of having a bank, mailboxes, and the auction house all close to one another all conspired to make this city the place to be in WoW.  Essentially, once you made your way to Ironforge, it was here that you set your bindstone.

Once I got over my initial tourist reaction, I made my way out the city’s massive front gates, turning back a few times and looking again in awe at the structure built into the side of the mountain.  Soon enough though I found the small fairgrounds the dwarves had set up in celebration of the holiday.  And there I must confess, I did spend the rest of the afternoon partaking in and enjoying the dances, festivities, and many diversions the dwarves had to offer.  And, truth be told, I do seem to recall having at least one (perhaps even two) flagons of their strong ale.  They can be persistent, those dwarves can.

I returned to Stormwind feeling refreshed, and ready for new adventure.  I was headed for the gryphon master when again, I was approached by a stranger – this time, a young night elf female.  She told me she had recently fled her homeland of Darkshore, and told me stories of Naga and Murlocs and worse.  I have wanted to view the distant forests of the Night Elves since I was a child, and so when she told me they were asking anyone, even humans, to aid them in the defense of their lands, I knew I would be going.  After a brief enquiry to one of the city’s guards, I learned ships sailed regularly from Stormwind to the port town of Auberdine, a small village perched on Darkshore’s sandy coast.  I made my way to the docks, enquired with a dockmaster, and within a short time found myself bound for distant shores.

This was another significant change to the game made during the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.  Prior to this, the only boat to Auberdine from the Eastern Kingdoms sailed out of Menethil Harbor.  Shortly after WoW launched, in an effort to get my wife to play, I talked her into rolling a night elf hunter.  I rolled a human paladin (tanking and healing in one, right?), and made the trip at level 1 from Elwynn to Auberdine.  This meant running through all of Dun Morogh, then Loch Modan, and eventually the Wetlands to take the boat to Auberdine.  I was level 3 from exploration experience alone when I arrived, and I quickly set my hearthstone to Darkshore.  Imagine my surprise and dismay as I figured out.. there were no paladin trainers in Night Elf lands..

Upon disembarking the boat, again I found myself walking about gaping like a child at the incredible sights of the elven lands.  I have spent much of my life in forests, but none such as these!  The forests of Darkshore are eternally cloaked in shadow, and ethereal wisps float amongst their branches and boughs.  There is a deep sense of peace and a feeling of communion with the elves and their forests.  But beneath it all, as I beheld the first sickly animals within moments of entering Auberdine, there was as well a deeper sense of a land in which something was terribly wrong.

I spoke with the elder in Auberdine, and they were indeed beset by trouble from multiple sides.  Many of the animals in the area had become sickly, and would need to be put down.  The firbolgs, a race of bear like humanoids that long have been allies of the night elves had become feral and vicious, reverting to more primitive ways and openly attacking any that approached their camps.  And there were rumor of the lethal Naga, a traditionally seabound race of reptilian humanoids, emerging from the seas and taking residence in some of the area’s caves and ruins.  The fact that the Naga were boldly encroaching upon the land and openly attacking the night elves was grave news indeed.

I spent almost as much time leveling night elves as I did humans in vanilla wow.  And so I have a great amount of fondness for many of the Darkshore quests as well, though I also remember some with gritted teeth.  I remember during the alpha trying to get that damn thistlebear quest to work right, the one where you have to lead the bear back to the guy.  It was notoriously finicky in the early days, and there were any number of ways you could inadvertently fail that quest.  And of course, an old favorite that I love to hate was the Buzzbox series.  Originally, Blizzard didn’t put sparklies over quest objectives in the world.  Many of the buzzboxes were off the beaten path, partially obscured by foliage, and in general royal pains in the ass to find.  And how many of us literally dozed off at the keyboard killing Nightsaber Patriarchs waiting for that last Nightsaber Pelt to drop.

As I went about Darkshore, assisting the night elves in whatever ways I could, I noticed a common thread amongst the problems of the night elves.  Many of the their problems were either arcane, or spiritual in nature.  As a practitioner of the arcane myself, I felt uniquely suited to these tasks, and was glad to be able to lend my expertise and knowledge to these people.  For instance, while exploring amongst the ruins of Bashal ‘Aran, I encountered a druid that had been imprisoned there through demonic magics.  The keys to his release lay amongst the gremlins and other demons that now inhabited the area, and I was more than happy to assist in the procurement of those keys and aid him in his release.

And in the town of Auberdine itself, alone at the edge of the pier, I encountered a man whose story broke my heart.  The spirit of his lover was imprisoned amongst the restless spirits of the Highborne that now inhabited the ruins of Amath ‘Aran, and the only way to free her would be to find and slay her corporeal form.  Though I bore her spirit no ill will, it was the only way to set her free, and so I completed the task. In the end, I was heartened to see that they were at least able to share one last tearful goodbye before her spirit left this world and moved on to the next.

Eventually my deeds amongst the night elves of Auberdine earned their trust, and I was invited to visit their capital city – Darnassus, on the island of Teldrassil.  Again I found myself moving in wide-eyed amazement, for nothing I had encountered could prepare me for the graceful and etherially beautiful city of Darnassus.  While Ironforge had been magnificent in the way it had been hewn through sweat and blood from the heart of the mountain, Darnassus was gorgeous in the manner of the kaldorei – both open and one with the forest in which it resided.  The elves made me feel both welcome and at home there, and I must admit I blushed nearly to my knees when I was granted an audience with none other than the High Priestess Tyrande Whisperwind herself.

While isolated, and even now still feeling much like a ghost town from the sheer lack of people that visit this distant city, Darnassus is still one of my most favored locations in Azeroth to visit.  It is perhaps, even because of the relatively few people here that when visiting, it is much easier to feel the world that the designers intended you to experience, and less of the cacaphony of the people that inhabit it.

One of the last tasks I performed in the lands of Darkshore involved, not the night elves themselves, but a dwarf from the Explorer’s League whom was excavating fossiles from a digsite near Auberdine.  Working with him, I was able to find sketchings of a rare relic that was made from a find at the site.  I began a search for the origins of the relic, and the search would eventually require me to return to my homelands in the Eastern Kingdoms, to the swampy, battlestrewn region of land known only as the Wetlands.  So it was that I bade goodbye to the night elves for a while, and boarded a ship bound for Stormwind.

Some final thoughts.  Delsenora entered Darkshore around level 15, and emerged at level 22.  It was around level 19 that I noticed a sharp upswing in her powercurve.  The introduction of Flame Strike, combined with Arcane Explosion, meant a dramatic shift away from the single pull, “fireball/frostbolt until dead” strategy, and a shift towards the more efficient “pull three and aoe them until they are dead” strategy.  I started practicing this, and upon returning to the Eastern Kingdoms, made my way over to Redridge and spent a great deal of time improving this strategy upon the gnolls there – while farming for linen and wool for my tailoring.  Lets just say that many, many gnolls died that day at the hands of an upcoming young mage expanding her knowledge of the arcane.. 

Next time, Del explores the Wetlands.