Egwene and Damer Ding 30!
Egwene and Damer are two characters that my wife and I play together. She plays Egwene, a Gnome Mage, I play Damer, a Human Paladin, and I blog about our adventures together as we level. If you want to read how we got started, the first part of the series can be found here. There are also links to the rest of the series at the bottom of this post.
The last time I wrote about Egwene and Damer, we had just hit 20, and were about to finish up questing in Redridge and then head on to Duskwood. I’ve never quested all the way through Redridge before - I usually do all of Westfall, and then head to Darkshore if I need more quests to get me to 20 - so I wasn’t sure how long we would spend there now that we could move onto someplace new.
I’m not sure what it is about Redridge that makes me want to move on. I really like the dark mystical feel of all of the Gnolls in the area. (And there are a lot of Gnolls. This has got to be the highest Gnoll population area in the game.) There are a couple of mage towers over on the east side of the zone that I always want to explore that add to that mystical feel. I get the sense that the Gnolls are working on some seriously bad magic that they’re going to unleash on the humans soon. I also enjoy how the town is right on the edge of the Burning Steppes - and 50,000 angry Ogres and Dragonkin - yet very few people seem to care about this.
But, despite all that, I’ve never really enjoyed Redridge as much as some of the other zones. Maybe it’s the rather blah scenery, or the somewhat repetitive quests… I’m not sure. Regardless, we both decided we were tired of Redridge not long after hitting 20, so we moved on pretty quickly.
Instead of heading to Duskwood next, we decided to go to The Wetlands first. Most of the quests there are completed easily, there’s not an undue amount of running, and there are more low-20s quests available than in Duskwood. Counting Damer, I’ve now leveled at least 6 Alliance alts through the Wetlands and I’ve enjoyed it every time. There’s a bit of nostalgia wrapped up in it, I think; I can remember questing there on my first toon ever with some of my old guildies and going there reminds me of the good times we had.
After the Wetlands, we split our time between Ashenvale and Duskwood. I think we went to Ashenvale first, to get the Expert Cookbook book for Egwene. Once we got there, we found a whole bunch of quests available, so we decided to stick around for a bit and quest. Things went pretty smoothly there, except that we both had to head back to Ironforge every two levels to train - Darnassus doesn’t have either a Paladin or Mage trainer.
(Speaking of that, I have to say that it’s a bit of a bother to not be able to do everything I want in every capital city. I understand that the lore comes into play at times, and I’m sure that Blizzard wanted to give each city its own unique feel, but you can find several instances of the lore being violated already (presumably to ease the gameplay). For instance, there are three Mage trainers in Thunder Bluff, and there is a Druid trainer in Silvermoon. Why just those? Why not make it easier for everyone, and put all class trainers in each capital city? It seems to me that there should be at least one enterprising Gnome willing to leave Ironforge in exchange for having a monopoly on training every Mage that passes through Darnassus 
)
After Ashenvale came Duskwood, which is another zone that I really like. The catacombs, the graveyards, the Ogre mound… there’s just so much to explore! I’m still not totally sure that I’ve seen everything there is to see, even after all of my alts that I’ve spent time in there with. And that place is Pally heaven too, what with all of the undead wandering around. We both hit 30 with a number of Duskwood quests still to do (thanks to the 2.3 leveling changes), so I think we’ll stick around here for a bit and finish them up before we move on to someplace new.
OK, there’s more I want to say about us hitting 30 so I think I’ll make this a two-parter. I’ll be back next week with some more thoughts on this and maybe even a word or two from Egwene. Have a great weekend, everybody!
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