Horde: Durotar

Next, I took my Troll home to Durotar.

You might want to take the quest “Hidden Enemies” from Thrall while you’re in Orgrimmar. While the chain doesn’t have any Durotar-classified quests in it, it leads us directly into Skull Rock, which we’ll be going through for some other Durotar quests. It’s also a prerequisite for a Ragefire Chasm quest. Unfortunately, Thrall was dead on my server when I tried to take the quest.

Durotar is really very simple. You start out in the Valley of Trials, keep going until you’re told to go to Sen’Jin Village, pick up all the quests there, then go to Razor Hill before doing of Sen’Jin’s quests. Don’t forget “A Peon’s Burden” along the road. It’s really quite hard to miss any of the quests here, with a couple of notable exceptions.

It’s possible to miss the goblin that gives “Winds in the Desert” if you head north any way other than the road. Alliance can do this goblin’s quests too, but I’ll probably mention it alongside any Barrens quests the Alliance may have. Don’t forget to stop by Tor’kren Farm for the quest to get the medallion from the crocolisks, there’s no breadcrumb that leads there. Also, when you’re told to go into Skull Rock to collect Searing Collars, clear all the way into the cave back to Gazz’uz for a drop that starts a quest. Finally, the easiest quest to miss is Rhinag’s “Need for a Cure” quest, which has a 45-minute time limit that shouldn’t be a problem if you’re higher level. Rhinag is near the zeppelin tower to Borean Tundra; more detailed coordinates can be found by using EveryQuest/LightHeaded.

Durotar is quite straightforward and easy, and I gained over 8000 reputation with Orgrimmar and the Darkspear Trolls by doing all of the quests listed under this category.

Alliance: Dun Morogh

You have to start somewhere, and with WoW’s natural progression of prerequisites upon prerequisites, the natural start is at the beginning. Every starting area is essentially the same. The quests are different, but each has a guarded “newbie area,” such as Northshire Abbey or the Valley of Trials. From there you are to quest until about level five, then you are sent to what I refer to as your “level five town.” Examples of this are Brill, Goldshire, or Bloodhoof Village. There is sometimes a secondary quest hub, but generally, completing the rest of the quests in the zone will get a new character to level 12. To start my Alliance Loremaster, I flew from Stormwind to my Dwarf’s former home of Ironforge to quest through Dun Morogh.

The only half-major hangup in this area is the fact that Stonegear’s Search is classified as a Dun Morogh quest, so I had to stop and pick that up in Ironforge, look ahead, and buy the 6 Incendicite Ore I would need for the followup. It only cost about 4g; not a problem. After turning that in and going to Coldridge, the “newbie area,” there was little issue doing the quests with only QH/Everyquest guiding me.

I found the lack of breadcrumb quests leading to Amberstill Ranch/Bol’Gar Quarry/North Gate Outpost a bit unnerving. Remember to look there! Tundra MacGrann’s quest is also quite easy to miss.

I also missed a breadcrumb quest. Do not take “Shimmer Stout” without taking “Rejold’s New Brew” first. This is supposed to lead you to Brewnall Village, but you’ll likely find your way that direction and take the quests there while killing the boars and wendigos that are a prerquisite for “Rejold’s New Brew,” or at least I did.

Turning in the last quest from Dun Morogh will have you in Loch Modan, but I intend to do all four starting zones before moving up in level range.

Project Loremaster: Addons

I thought I’d take a moment to talk about what addons I use, since some of them are really quite integral to leveling and questing.

Important addons for questing:

My UI is saturated with addons and looks absolutely nothing like vanilla WoW’s UI, but only a few are directly involved in questing. The two I’ll be relying on heavily here are LightHeaded, which is updated about once a month to parse the excellent comments from wowhead.com, and the fantastic EveryQuest, which keeps a list of every quest in the game and checks them off for your as their statuses change–abandoned, accepted, failed, in progress, completed, turned in–or you can manually set it to ignore anything you can never complete. Unfortunately, WoW’s API prevents EveryQuest from querying any quest it hasn’t seen, which means it can only keep track of what you’ve completed since installing the addon. EveryQuest is also built to interface with LightHeaded, so you can click on any quest in EveryQuest to load it in LightHeaded, and often click on the quest giver NPCs or any coordinates in the comments to put a spot on the map for yourself.

Speaking of coordinates, there’s really no getting around how useful they are, and it would be a shame not to have them. One addons you can use for this is TomTom which, in addition to giving you a small coordinate block you can put anywhere on your screen, takes “waypoints” set by clicking on coordinates in LightHeaded or set by other quest routing systems and points you there with a spinning 3D arrow. Another coordinate/waypoint/3D arrow system can be had by the awesome Cartographer. Cartographer packs a big punch with a lot of map enhancements, coordinates, waypoints, dungeon maps, and much more. It also has the bonus of extra “plugin” addons, such as the interesting-looking Cartographer_QuestInfo, which can plot the locations of all known quest givers on the map.

Of course, no addon discussion would be complete without mentioning QuestHelper, which tries to plot a route for you to finish your quests most efficiently, or the newer, less popular Carbonite Quest. QuestHelper is the granddaddy of all questing addons, and while it has a few disadvantages–it’s a resource hog on slow machines, has been known to cause disconnects in Dalaran, and it’s rumored that the original developer doesn’t even play anymore–I still prefer it to Carbonite, whose most impressive features aren’t available without a $1/month subscription fee that I’m not willing to pay.

Another addon that some people like to use to enhance their questing window is DoubleWide, which puts the quest text and the quest list in two separate panes, making both much easier to access. I’ve tried it and don’t feel I have the screen real estate to devote to a triple-wide quest pane (DoubleWide + LightHeaded), but I really love the idea of this addon and wish I could use it.

Personally, I use a mix of all these. For example, if you take TomTom and Cartographer right out of the box, you’ll have multiple sets of coordinates and multiple waypoint arrows, which will look rather ugly. I like to disable TomTom’s coordinates and Cartographer’s waypoint arrow. Realistically, I don’t even need TomTom, but I like its waypoint arrow just a tiny bit more than Cartographer’s. 🙂

Other addons

As I said, my UI is utterly saturated with addons. I think the only window I can bring up that’s entirely unmodified is the honor window. 🙂 For the curious, I’ll list and briefly describe the rest of what I have.

Item management – Inventory, bank, mail, auctions, professions

• Ackis Recipe List – Puts a button at the top of any profession window. When clicked, will show you what recipes you are missing.
• ArkInventory – Rewrites the bag interface entirely, letting you separate items into categories.
• Auctioneer – Auction database. Scan the auction house a few times a week and you’ll never wonder what price to post it for again.
• Postal – Mail enhancement. My favorite feature is the “Open All” button which takes the contents of any mail you have.
• RatingBuster – Breaks down items into actual numbers for you to look at. How much +crit is all that intellect going to be anyway?
• tekJunkSeller – Automatically sells grey items when opening a vendor window.
• VendorBait – Highlights the quest reward that’s worth the most cash.

Maps, minimaps, and more

• Atlas – Adds detailed dungeon maps, which I prefer over Cartographer’s maps. Also interfaces with….
• AtlasLoot – Designed for Atlas, this allows you to look up any dungeon drop, emblem-bought, Arena, profession-made, and more items.
• Chinchilla – My minimap enchancement of choice. In the end, they all do about the same thing: reshape the map, move the map, zoom the map, hide/move/disable buttons around the map.

Combat, unit frames, action bars, raiding, etc.

• Bartender4 – Allows you to customize your action bars in basically any way imaginable. I can’t praise this addon enough.
• ButtonFacade – Skins Bartender buttons so they fit in with your UI a bit better.
• Clique – Allows you to set “click-binds” to cast spells on whoever was clicked on. Typically used as a healing tool, and I’m no exception–my main is a holy priest.
• Cork – Shows your group’s missing buffs. Clicking on the frame, or assigning a keybind that calls clicking on the frame, turns into your one-stop put-all-my-buffs-up button. Very smart about each class; will tell you right out of the box to put up Inner Fire on your priest, your mana is too high for Viper on your hunter, you let Commanding Shout drop on your warrior, and so forth.
• CowTip – Enhanced tooltips, fully customizable with DogTags.
• DeadlyBossMods – One of the two most important addons that any raider should have. If you raid without it, you are doing the other nine (or 24) people in your group a disservice.
• Elkano’s BuffBars – You know that row of buff/debuff icons next to your minimap? This lets you customize them.
• Grid – What I use to keep an eye on my group or raid. Highly configurable. Indicator lights on the corners and sides of each health bar convey quick information about the status of each member. Healers should use this in tandem with Clique.
• IceHUD – More useful for solo work in my opinion, but gives you a Heads-Up-Display of your health/mana/cast bar/breath, the same information for your target and pet, and displays target-of-target.
• MikScrollingBattleText – Replaces Blizzard’s default Floating Combat Text, and does a fantastic job of it.
• Omen – The other most important addon for any raider (or 5-man-dungeon-crawler) to have. Displays detailed threat information.
• Pitbull – More unit frames. I only use this to show target and focus information, since Grid doesn’t handle this.
• Recount – Use to gauge your performance in a group, raid, or on a target dummy. The most informative meters I’ve ever found.
• teksLoot – When the fight’s over, we get what we all came for–the loot. This rewrite of XLoot is simply a new, more compact, and more informative way to display the loot-rolling box.

Other interface enhancements

• Altoholic – Keeps track of all of your character’s quests, banks, professions, achievements, reputations, bag space, and much more.
• CensusPlus – Takes /who scans to upload to warcraftrealms.com, which is a really great project that I fully support.
• Chatter – Chat box enhancements.
• Examiner – Enhances the “Inspect” screen to show stats, talent trees, arena teams, and more. Also caches anyone you’ve inspected.
• Fubar – Customizable information bars anywhere on your screen. The usefulness of this and all of the available plugins can’t be overstated.
• LeaveMeAlone – Has options to automatically decline group invites, duels, guild invitations, guild charter requests. Very useful at low levels when there is much less sense of courtesy.
• Livestock – Automatically summons a companion pet when desired and randomizes mount choices.
• NotesUNeed – Allows note-keeping about other players you come across. Very useful for that guy who was a jerk in your pug that one time but doesn’t warrant a spot on your ignore list.
• SynCamera – Binds keys to move your camera.
• TourGuide – Used with guides that can be found on the internet, this can be a great leveling aid.
• UrbanAchiever – Enhanced Achievement frame, allowing tracking of multiple achievements, remembering achievements after logoff, and auto-tracking of timed achievements (e.g. Arachnophobia).

Intro: Project Loremaster

What is this all about anyway?

I am a fairly recent World of Warcraft player, having only started playing seriously since about April of 2008. While I don’t feel qualified to call myself a veteran under the humorless gaze of the average in-it-since-beta player, I have delved into every store of knowledge about the game I can to have knowledge far beyond my play time. I raided to T5 content in BC before Wrath hit the shelves, and am currently raiding with a guild which, despite being somewhat casual, can clear through all available raiding content in a night.

But I want more.

I’ve been working toward Loremaster/Seeker on my main, but having done bits and pieces of quests long since forgotten while leveling up, it’s a bit like trying to put together a 3000-piece jigsaw puzzle with the pieces scattered haphazardly about Neverland Ranch. So the true goal of Project Loremaster is, I suppose, to see what it would be like to start fresh and do all of the quests in the game with a clean slate. To do this, I made two Death Knights–one Horde, one Alliance–on two different servers on which I have no other characters.

Why Death Knights? Well, let’s be honest; the average new player is not going to stumble across this blog. If anyone takes an interest in it, it’ll probably be a veteran who googled “loremaster” and stumbled on me. Maybe even that’s asking for too much. 🙂 Death Knights will allow me to flit about the low-level content as I like at 120% speed (On a Pale Horse), come with all Azerothian flight paths, and perhaps most importantly, will allow me to solo dungeons when I want to rather than have to LFG/beg for a run/put it off for 20+ levels.

Since I do still have mains to play and alts to level, this will go at my own pace. Additionally, I will want to spend some time prettying up this WordPress space; I’ve never used one of their blogs before. The project will begin, though. 🙂