I'm drowning in mats here!

1/31/08
Kukoshakaku, my lvl 21 Horde Tauren Shaman, was in need of leveling last night. He’s my leatherworker, and as such, he’s got a full bank already. Leatherworkers require a LOT of mats to operate, and it’s a pain to have to search for them, so it’s best to stock up when you find them for cheap. As an example, the Barbaric Bracers recipe requires 4 Large Fangs, 4 Small Lustrous Pearls, 1 Raptor Hide, 2 cured Hides (can’t remember if they’re medium or heavy), and Heavy Leather. Large Fangs stack in stacks of 5, not in stacks of 20. So in order to to make 5 of the bracers, you’d need 1x20 stack of pearls, and 4 stacks of 5 Large Fangs each. Not too mention all the heavy leather you’d burn through. Luckily, I’m in the practice of scanning through the Auction house for deals on gems and pearls for my Jewelcrafter, so I had built up quite a few stacks for both my Horde and Alliance Leatherworkers when they got to that level, and I had only bid usually about 3-6 silver for each of the Small Lustrous Pearls.

But enough of the digression. Like Morticide, I want to make Kuko into an engineer. But, he’s got a very full bank, and even his bags were kinda full. I reviewed his inventory, sent stuff he wouldn’t really care to equip over to Bane to disenchant, posted a few items on the AH, and found that I had cleared enough of the bags on my person to go out and quest. Since he was in Orgrimmar at the time, I headed over to Northern Barrens to kill Serena Bloodfeather, and turn in the Samophlange by the border of Ashenvale.

I went back to the Sludge Fen to get the 15 slugs for Wenikee, and also did the Shredder escort quest (The Escape). After that I headed into Ashenvale, to do the Warsong Scout report quest. Since I was there, I also did the moonwell phial quest at the Laughing Sister enclave in the middle of Ashenvale, and headed over to the coast to get the 3rd scouts report. I flew back to Splintertree post, filled the phial at the moonwell by Farfallen river, turned the reports in, and hearthed back to TB. After that I turned in Ishamuhale’s fang at Camp Taurajo, and did the Thunder lizard blood and windserpent scale quests. I also did the razormane quillboar quests where you have to kill a set number of thornweavers, geomancers, and water seekers, as well as the other one where you have to collect the 60 tusks.

Not hard to do, but I complicated matters by aimlessly searching north of Camp T, endlessly hitting /target lako to search for Lakotamani, one of the 3 (or 4) named monsters you can kill for a pickup quest to take back to Camp T. Otowanka is a thunder lizard, Lakotamani is a kodo, and there’s a windserpent in southern barrens you can kill as well. Supposedly, there’s a 4th monster, a scorpion, which is hiding out in the Sithilid egg hatching grounds, but I’ve never seen it, and I know I’ve spent some time looking. Look them up on Thottbot, you were supposed to get a permanent stat increase to 1 of your stats by turning them in, but I don’t think that’s true anymore.

Now I have to head to southern barrens to find Brine for my Shaman Call of Water quest. She’ll send me back up to Ashenvale, where I can finally turn in my 3 chapters of the shredder manual, since you have to be level 23 to get the quest. I believe I had Morticide be the designated mule for them while I was leveling Bloodshrike in Ashenvale many moons ago, so he could collect all 12 pages for each of my 10 characters. Anyways, I’ll be glad to get rid of them, and free up 3 slots of my inventory.I finished the night with a lot of copper and tin ore, some coarse stone, a lot more room in my inventory, and I gained 2 levels. Not bad for a few hours playing.

Oh, I just remembered I finished off the centuar quests in the Barrens too. I had killed Hezrul Bloodmark when I was killing turtles at the oasis south of Wailing Caverns, so I turned it in and did the “Counterattack” quest. I really, really don’t like that quest. The warlord Krom’zar you have to kill is a lvl 20 elite, he roams with 2 guards, and other centaurs keep spawning around you while you’re fighting him. I still haven’t made Kuko into an engineer, so he doesn’t have bombs to do AOE damage to all the centuars in the area around him, and he doesn’t have target dummies to distract the mobs for a few precious seconds that I could use to pound on one exclusively. So, I got killed about 3 times, but I was able to finally do it.

Also, while I was by the Wailing caverns, I went inside to do some of the outside quests. Since instances have been changed to have normal monsters outside the instance portal, instead of elites from the beginning, they’re a lot easier to deal with. I can do a lot of the quests on these low level instances by myself now. I was able to do the Serpentbloom, Mad Magglish 99-year old wine, and Fizzy drinks quest. I knew I’d be able to get the serpentbloom and kill Mad Magglish, but I wasn’t expecting the oozes outside the instance to drop quest items, for some reason. Oh well, any quest done is a good thing.