Recipe Hunt in the Burning Steppes

Ula has been working on her tailoring in WoW Classic and has been able to make us 14 slot runecloth bags for a while now.  But we have recently started getting a felcloth drop now and then, which she can convert to mooncloth, which can be used to make 16 slot mooncloth bags.

It takes some time, as there is a cool down on the conversion, but she also needs the mooncloth bag recipe.  There was one available at the auction house for 48 gold, but that is a lot of cash for us.  It is also a drop from various mob around Azeroth.  So, when we got online on Sunday and didn’t have a plan, we decided to go see if we could farm some mobs for a while to see if we might get lucky.

The nearest likely mobs were over in the Burning Steppes.

The Burning Steppes, squeezed in between

According to WoW Head, there were a few different mobs that might drop the recipe.  We decided to concentrate on three groups that were fairly close together.

The usual suspects

While at Morgan’s Vigil we also made sure everybody has the quest for drops off of the Blackrock orcs, since we would be slaying them in great numbers.  Once that was in hand we mounted up and headed across the zone.

Mounting up at Morgan’s Vigil

There were, of course, no Blackrock Battlemasters in sight when we arrived at the first location.  But we needed drops and it seemed likely that they shared spawn points with the other Blackrock orcs, so we slew them all, out and about and inside the fort they were around.

Clearing the halls

We had a bit of a problem with Grark Lorkrub, a named orc inside the fort with the Blackrock orcs.  He would de-aggress and run away when we fought him.  Later research showed he was a quest mob for a Horde quest that requires players to beat him into submission and then escort him to Searing Gorge.  Still, we found if we sat right on his spawn point and kept beating on him without letup, we could kill him.  It wasn’t worth the effort in the end, but we managed it once.

We never did run across and Blackrock Raiders.

But the Flamescale Wyrmkin were out in force, and were elites, so we were able to dig into them for a while.

Flamescale Wyrmkin

Naturally, the recipe did not drop, though that did not stop me from thinking it would every time it was my chance to loot.  Go optimism.

While we did not get that, we did rack up a bit of xp as we ran around and slew mobs.  Moronae and I both hit level 59 while we were out there and Skronk and Ula got close to the mark.  Level 60 is in sight now.

After about 90 minutes the mob grinding started to wear a bit thin and Skronk asked aloud what I was thinking, “Don’t we have a quest to finish up for Moronae in Blackrock Depths?”

I mean, it was right there.  And we did still have to get the shadowforge key for Moronae.  So we headed off up the ramp and into Blackrock Mountain for another visit to our most visited instance.

Blackrock Depths map

All we had to do was get through the main floor, through the Ring of Law (6), and around to the monument to Franclorn Forgewright.  Moronae already had the drop from Fineous Darkvire from a past run. It would be easy.  We zip in, we pick up the key, we zip right out again.  It’s BRD.  It’s like going into Wisconsin.

Getting through the main open area was easy enough, and the Ring of Law… well, we drew the Eviscerator yet again.  He was easy enough.  Then it was through the back gate, up the ramp, past the crowd upstairs watching the Ring of Law events, and to that first set of five mobs that gave us such heartburn in one of our early runs.

We had gained a few levels by then, something proven when, in an effort to get a closer look at them, Ula wandered into aggro radius of the group and started the fight.  In we went.  And we got the wandering fire elemental that passes up and down the hall as well.  Still, we held it together and by virtue of experience and being nearly level 60 we knocked them all down and nobody died.

All six down as we recover

From there we could see our target.  There was another group to deal with, then the boss who guards the monument, but neither group was a big risk so long as we were ready before the fight started.

Just a boss to remove before the monument

Once they were down there was a little bit of figuring out how to turn in the quest.  There isn’t a big yellow question mark or anything.  Vanilla WoW had conventions, but wasn’t 100% locked into them.  Once that was accomplished, we took a group shot.

On the invisible ledge before the monument

Then Ula opened a portal to Ironforge for us.  From there we flew out to Morgan’s Vigil to turn in the Blackrock orc quest.  It was there that Skronk noticed that he still had an ogre head in his bag from one of the other quests.  However, when we went out to where the quest is supposed to send you, Skronk found that he did not have the quest and we couldn’t get it from the quest giver, so he probably got credit when somebody else did it.  Vanilla WoW was also pretty bad about clearing up quest items from your bag.

While we were out we ran across Volchan, the wandering level 60 boss in Burning Steppes, and managed to drop him fairly easily.  The loot was yet another mail item.

After some mucking about at Morgan’s Vigil to figure out Skronk’s quest issue, we called it a day and recalled back to Ironforge.

Everybody stoning home

While we didn’t do much in the instance, that is our tenth run in and about Blackrock Depths, and we’re still not done yet.