Guest Post: Garrosh’s Adventures in Outlands – Part 1

[Hi! Meznir here – Telwyn’s hubby. Today I’m doing a guest post about WoW. Telwyn quit the game a few years ago as he hated the direction the game was going, but I’ve been carrying on without him. We had the idea of me occasionally posting about WoW so that the blog still covers that game.]

So I was doing my daily read of Blizzard Watch this morning, in particular Anne Stickney‘s post Know Your Lore: Why Grommash Hellscream shouldn’t die, when I did a double take on this sentence:

But there was a wrench in the works that was quietly thrown in during Burning Crusade, and his name was Garrosh Hellscream.

Burning Crusade?!? My first memory of Garrosh was meeting him in Borean Tundra, during Wrath – so where was he in BC? I did some googling and found this video. I thoroughly recommend watching it as it explains the lore of a huge chunk of WoW and a lot of the background to Warlords (ignore the last bit of Mists speculation at the end of the vid):

Watching this video, I began to realise what I had long suspected – a heck of a lot of WoW’s plot is explained through quests that only Horde players get. I play Alliance mainly and haven’t seen any of the chains mentioned in this video.

“Hey Garrosh & Jorin – How’s it going?”
“He has refused to give us assistance. Ogres are rampaging through my town and he sits here, weeping into a fire. What has become of us? What will become of us?”
“Um – I stepped into the middle of something didn’t I?”

I decided I’d go on the hunt for Garrosh in Outlands. The video conveniently shows the quest “There is No Hope”, so I backtracked that on Wowhead to “A Visit With the Greatmother” in Nagrand.

I looked at my quest completion achievements in Altaholic and saw that my level 85 Boomkin had about half of Nagrand (Outlands) done, so I logged him in and blew the dust off his feathers. I hadn’t played him since Cataclysm and my first thought was: “Wow – the Tauren Boomkin models really look dated now. They REALLY need to update those.” (and no I will NEVER use that heathen glyph!) I then saw my action bars had a lot of blank spaces… Cue a large chunk of time reading through spells, choosing Talents and reading Icy Veins to try to work out how Boomkin plays these days (Boy has it changed!)

But I’m going back to do old content, so I don’t need top DPS rotations to one-shot things, so I eventually headed off to Nagrand (after a bit of a hunt to find where the Hellfire Peninsula portal had moved to).

So I arrived at Garadar in Nagrand and found no quests. Had I already done the quest and its precursors? The only way to find out was to install the Quest Completist addon and check:

Nope – not done it, though also not available yet.

tbone47’s comment on Wowhead told me that this chain has three precursors: The Impotent Leader, Altruis’s chain and Murkblood Invaders. Looking at Quest Completist, I found I’d done Altruis’ chain, so I only had the others to do. Murkblood Invaders is only one quest, but I decided to leave that for now in case I went there during The Impotent Leader chain.

So next I found myself trekking off to Terrokar to find out why the Ogres had attacked Jorin Deadeye’s village of Kilrath.

Be vewy, vewy quiet. We’re hunting bunny wabbits…

It was then that I faced my next problem:

Oops!

It seems that both being high level and the stat squish going wrong, means that getting Unkor to submit, rather than insta-die was impossible. I even stripped off to nothing bar my tabbard and punched him and he still died immediately. So I managed to grab a friend with a level 60 Death Knight to punch him for me and complete the quest.

Now I feel guilty…

Lantresor of the Blade! He’s the half-orc, half-draenei who everyone in WoD gets as a Follower to mine in their Garrison. It looks like I’m going to kill two Lore birds with one stone!

It was on this hand-in that I realised that Garrosh was the “Impotent Leader” of this chain.

I’m sure that this had nothing to do with our leader being an impotent whelp… If only he’d gotten a fraction of the passion that his father had…

Next stop was the Burning Blade Ruins, to send a message to the Ogres (in the only way Horde know how).

“Look for the gigantic flaming pyres” – REALLY?!?

I also did the Standards and Practices side quests while I was here.

A bit more killing of Ogres at Hal’aa and I was off to see Lantresor.

“In another dimension, I’m a lowly miner working for you?! Never!”

I’d done his quests Alliance side, and that Wowhead comment didn’t say they were pre-requisites for Garrosh’s chain, so I decided to leave his quests for today. Instead, after a bit of a chat, a few insults and refreshing my memory on his lore, I headed off to search the roads of Nagrand for the Murkblood Invaders.

That bridge really doesn’t look strong enough for three Elekks…

Handing in the Invasion Plans to Garrosh, I found that he still wasn’t giving me the main quest chain that I wanted. More reading of Wowhead found that you also need to do the escort quest The Totem of Kar’dash. So off I flew to Sun Spring Post.

“Tell me where the Totem of Kar’dash is hidden”

Note: You have to kill the two Murkblood Brutes next to the Mag’har Captive for his quest to show up.

I escorted him out of the camp. Returned to Garrosh… And STILL he didn’t have the quest chain for me! I’m really missing The Secret World’s way of showing you what the pre-requisites for a quest are!

Looking at more comments on Wowhead, it seems that I did have to do Lantresor’s quests after all! So back I flew to the Burning Blade Ruins and then on to Kil’sorrow Fortess  and Laughing Skull Ruins to pit the Shadow Council against the Warmaul by killing people and planting the banners of the others on the bodies.

Who shall I dive bomb first?

“Me wanted to make it believe… Me wanted to make it real. Dey tink for shure it Shadow Council now!”

I was then very glad I played someone who can wield polearms!

Nice for transmog!

And then finally I had what I was looking for:

Finally!!!

To be continued…