Mysterious Buttons

A couple of weeks ago I finally got to spend a few hours in the Caverns of Time, which I said I’d explore for Jaedia’s explorer task*, having never visited before.

I’d love to say I spent ages looking around, chatting to giant dragons and small kids, but that’s not exactly how it went. A couple of guildies were running older instances and wanted to go do Black Morass. I saw this as a great excuse to get myself into the CoT so quickly hearthed back to Dalaran and ran through the portal in the Violet Citadel. A short dragonride later and I was standing in the central cavern of CoT being generally impressed with the ginormous-ness of the ginormous dragon sitting in the middle.

Unfortunately, Black Morass has a reputation requirement that I just didn’t have, and for whatever reason neither Andornu or Nozari would let me have any quests. After a short while scouting about we decided to see what else we could do and, after a couple of false starts, ended up in Mt. Hyjal. Once in we couldn’t find the exit. And we were on 25-player mode. Feeling foolish, we decided to give it a go anyway — a warrior tank, a shadow priest and a ret paladin.

Amusingly, we made it reasonably comfortably through the first eight waves of trash. Our spriest switched to a healing spec after the first wave and I was judging light, “seal”-ing light and gulping down honeymint tea in the gap between each wave. We were alive all the way up to Rage Winterchill, who did nasty things to us and thoroughly disabused us of any “imba” notions we might have had. We then brought in backup from the guild, and cleared all the way to Archimonde before the lateness of the hour and a problem dispelling his debuff wiped us and broke the group. It was a shame to have made it that far and not finish, but I’m sure I’ll go back at some point.

While we were waiting for backup, I took the opportunity to go for a look around the and take a couple of tourist photos. I took quite a few more, but they kept devolving into photobomb!

* I don’t really RP at all, and I probably have more feel for the characters of my mage and hunter alts. As alts, they have their own personas, vs the my-avatar-in-a-virtual-world approach I have with my main — a bog-standard human paladin with fancy hair. When I do think of him as a character, I think “decent, but perhaps a bit dim”, and I have a general idea of how he might respond in most situations, but he doesn’t have much of a personality.

So I don’t think I can complete the explorer task to the high standard so many people managed, and (despite all evidence to the contrary) I don’t want to handwave a rough attempt and call it done. So I fail the task. I did still have a good time exploring the CoT though!