I went on a quest today.
It was a long quest. A dangerous one. A quest that took me into the heart of enemy territory. I faced terrifying monsters and impossible odds. All for a single treasure:
A torch.
Players have recently discovered a new, coveted item in World of Warcraft: Forever. It’s called the Night Watchman’s Torch. It’s a “toy” item that lets your character hold a light-producing torch in their hands for a period of time, while still letting you have a weapon equipped.
Players love it:
Why is this such a big deal, you ask? Well, for one, World of Warcraft has never had a toy like this before, nor is there really a way to have a proper, working torch like this in any version of the game. There are weapons that are torches or torch-like, and many that light up or are on fire. But none of them actually cast light around the way this does, in such a way as to properly light up dark areas. It’s never been necessary in World of Warcraft, which is largely not a super dark game that would require such light sources.
But WoW: Forever…well, it doesn’t need them, but it can benefit. The improved lighting effects mean that some areas are brighter than normal, but others are darker, or misty, or have interesting shadows. Holding a torch, as shown in the video above, really adds a lot to the feeling of mystery and danger and adventure. It’s a cool little touch, the kind you want to see given the philosophies of the team making WoW: Forever.
So obviously, I wanted one for myself.
I wanted to try to get a torch today to show you all, with some nice screenshots. So I checked where this thing is located: it’s apparently on a dead body in Duskwood which, if you’re unfamiliar, is on the south end of the Eastern Kingdoms, just south of Stormwind. Oof.
I play Horde, almost exclusively. It probably would have been easiest to just roll an Alliance character I didn’t care about and corpse-run my way down to Duskwood for the torch, but for some incomprehensible reason I decided—today, the day of a massive maintenance patch that would drop this afternoon and take hours—that I wanted to get this torch on one of my “main” Horde characters in the beta.
Duskwood is a zone for characters largely in their 20s, and I don’t have one of those. No one does. The beta, as of yesterday morning when I was doing this, capped everyone at 20. The big update raised that cap to 30, but at the time I was doing this, Duskwood was a bit of a dicey zone for anyone. My highest-level character was my Skyborne Elf, who was level 14, and also inconveniently located in Mulgore, which was…well, not the farthest possible zone from Duskwood, but certainly a non-ideal trek.
I’m a shaman, but not a high enough level yet to have Ghost Wolf. No one has mounts yet. I haven’t even been over to the Eastern Kingdoms at all, so I have no flight paths to speak of. I will be walking, then, across multiple zones in Kalimdor, taking a Zeppelin to Eastern Kingdoms, and then walking all the way from one end of the continent to the other, dodging high-level enemies and Alliance guards the whole way.
I can think of no better journey to take in an old-school beta!
So here I am in Mulgore! Actually, I’m not fully sure where in Mulgore this is supposed to be. I seem to be up north, in a newly repurposed area for the Skyborne Elves to hang out. I guess this is where the zeppelin dropped me off at the end of the Skyborne questline when I left from Valanaar. Sure, okay.
I need to catch a zeppelin from Orgrimmar to Undercity to get started on my hike across Eastern Kingdoms. Fortunately, Mulgore and Durotar are right next to one another, so this shouldn’t take long. I’ll just start walking down this road in a generally eastward direction, and I’ll surely—
Hm. Okay. So this is the Barrens, not Durotar. I had to cut through a small part of Stonetalon Mountains and now I’m here. Still, this is fine, The Barrens is a pretty straightforward zone in the old world, and also not far from Durotar. If I just stay on the main road and head north, I’ll make it there in no time.
Made it to The Crossroads, everyone’s favorite stopover in Kalimdor questing! I went over to grab the flight path for easy return later on and discovered I actually already had the path to Orgrimmar unlocked! I didn’t have to walk the rest of the way to the capital! I hopped aboard and zipped over the Barrens into Durotar.
I landed in Orgrimmar. The zeppelin is actually outside the city walls, so I head through the main square and gate, turning once to take in the atmosphere:
The zeppelin is packed and everyone is happily chattering away. This is fun. I don’t think I’ve been in this big a crowd in WoW in years. Maybe at an expansion launch.
As we pull into Tirisfal Glades, everyone starts daring each other to jump off. We Skyborne Elves, with our floaty ability, start leaping first, and then everyone goes. Eventually there’s a huge crowd running to the Lordaeron gates. I don’t join them. I’ve got places to be.
I’ve got a long way to go, but I pause a second to take in the gorgeous atmosphere of Tirisfal Glades. The lighting improvements really do make such a difference in atmosphere. It’s spooky here!
I’m the little arrow up top. You see the green highlighted region, second from the bottom? That’s where we’re going.
Per that map, you would THINK the most direct path would be around the lake to the east, but I’ve quested up here before and I know better. East is the Plaguelands, and I cannot survive there for even a few seconds. No, we’ll be going around the lake to the west through Silverpine Forest:
I stop in The Sepulcher briefly to grab the flight path, then continue south until I start to see autumnal foliage and enter the Hillsbrad Foothills. This is where things start to get dicey.
Hillsbrad is a higher-level zone, and there are monsters here that can kill me. If I stay on the road, they mostly won’t bother me, but a few will stray close to the path and aggro me at even a long distance if I’m not careful. And I do get whomped by a few spiders along the way when I stop in Tarren Mill for the flight path, though I manage to outrun them before I die:
After a near-miss with a bear, I see the wall in front of me, and cross over into Arathi Highlands.
Now we’re getting into extra-scary territory. There are fewer folks on the road out here than before, and most of them are running in the opposite direction. I’m also starting to see more Alliance players. I’m on a PvE server, so that’s not a problem for now, but there are other worries…
Damn spiders. Fortunately, the graveyard isn’t too far away. I reach my body and am back on the road again in no time.
Next up is the Wetlands, which is a mostly uneventful run. But we’re starting to reach the end of familiar territory for me. As I mentioned, I almost exclusively play Horde. I think I leveled a Gnome once maybe, so I have a vague recollection of some of the zones ahead of me, but I’ve never been to the Wetlands or its adjacent zones before. I see a signpost with five different locations posted on it, and have no idea if I should head east or west in order to keep moving south. I end up choosing the eastern path, into Loch Modan, and this will prove to be a bad decision:
I take a brief rest stop in the tunnel to grab a bite to eat away from my desk, and as I walk back something catches my eye. A light! A moving light! Hey! What does that guy running by me have? Is that the torch?!
By golly, it is! How cool! The light bounces off the walls as he runs by and emits a gorgeous glow I can see slowly fade as he disappears further in. I finish my sandwich and follow him after a few moments. Soon, that will be me!
Soon!
Right?
Okay, so a couple of bad things are all happening at once here. First, Loch Modan is Alliance territory primarily. As such, it’s filled with Alliance guards of an absurdly high level who can kill me in one hit. Which is why I am now dead. Second, because I was hit by a guard, I am now flagged for PvP, which I do not want, because it means other players also flagged for PvP can hit me until the flag wears off.
Third, as you can see in the chat box, the server is going to shut down in 15…14 minutes. I ask in chat if they think I can make it to Duskwood, to which “Banick Truthseeker” asks, “how fast can you run?”
Probably not fast enough. But we’re going to try.
The one upside here is that the Spirit Healer I’ve been dumped at is dead center of Loch Modan. If I’m willing to take Resurrection Sickness, a horrible debuff that will make me 100-percent useless in combat and made of paper for ten minutes, I can spawn right here and skip all those guards I was struggling with, as well as make up a few minutes of running time. Great. Off we go then:
God damn it.
Shit.
oiwhfiwuhgiwuhgow;’bwWG
It takes me about six or seven corpse runs and a lot of wasted time, but I make it into the tunnel leading to…Searing Gorge. Great. There really were no good options here. I originally intended to go to Duskwood by way of Dun Morogh and Elwynn Forest, but those are both Alliance starting zones and are probably full of high-level guards. Searing Gorge is a different nightmare of high-level crap, but at least it won’t flag me for PvP and largely will keep me off the roads.
(Some hunter has stuck a Hunter’s Mark on me for a laugh I guess)
I am briefly stuck at the gate to Searing Gorge. It’s locked, and requires a key. I nearly have a breakdown. I turn around and head back up, frantically trying to come up with a better plan that won’t involve running back through all those Alliance characters. I don’t have one.
Which I guess is fine because this side is now locked, too, and I’m…trapped in the tunnel?!
I run back to the other side, trying to work out how I got in here to begin with, and a nice Night Elf on the other side tells me in Darnassian, which as a Skyborne I helpfully understand, that the beta has a convenient lever right next to the door that I can pull to get in without a key. Brilliant.
Searing Gorge!
But it’s not to be.
Here’s where I was when the server shut down yesterday.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to play again yesterday. But I will continue this journey, and hopefully get my torch. I just wanted to share this ridiculous trek with you because of how much fun I inadvertently had today just trying to go get a stupid toy. Travel in modern WoW is a very different beast. You can fly everywhere. Everything has portals to everywhere else. Mount speeds are very fast, and there’s basically no friction unless you want to go to a very specific spot in the old world with few travel options, and even then it will only take a few minutes. This sort of long, dangerous run across the world fending off high-level monsters and enemy players is the sort of thing that’s faded from the game with time, and exactly the sort of thing I want out of World of Warcraft: Forever.
I will get my torch. And when the game comes out, I will probably also make this ridiculous run to get a torch on my main character, who I can assure you will not be starting the game anywhere near Duskwood.
I’ll probably try to be a higher level, first.
