Another quest from Winterhoof tasks players to go lure a nearby Yeti out from hiding. They don't tell me explicitly to kill him, but really - is there any other solution? Apparently, by blowing a horn that sounds like the Yeti mating call, said Yeti assumes I'm actually a female Yeti. Given the fact that I am quite clearly a male Troll with a badass Mohawk, the fact that he doesn't realize this for a good few seconds after seeing me face to face causes me to wonder about said Yeti's intelligence. Or possibly his eyesight.
Oh, poor William the Nearsighted Yeti. You will be sorely missed.
Further quests send me to Giant's Run, where we run into the Iron Dwarves. Much like the Dark Iron Dwarves, these guys are evil, though they've also got cool neon blue electricity all over their body so I have to give them a bit of a pass, right? They're busy at work carving runes into the bodies of the local Stone Giants in order to control them and direct them from nefarious - yet unspecified - purposes. We can't have that, now can we?
By the way, finding the Lodestone for one particular quest is a real pain. Yes, go search for a rock, young adventurer! A rock that happens to look much like every other rock around it, in an area filled with rocks! As well as giant beings made of rock! And smaller beings made of ... well, iron, okay, but it's still a mineral. Screw you, Lodestone.
Giving up on the Lodestone for now, I decide to explore Howling Fjord a little bit more. Whisper Gulch is particularly creepy, though I can't really say why the Dwarves from the Explorer's League all seem to have gone insane, other than A.) too much to drink, and B.) that's what good guys in Azeroth do. It has a wonderfully eerie atmosphere.
The Vrykul fortress of Gjalerbron, though, has a wonderfully sinister atmosphere. Yeah, so, you know how all the Vrykul are aligned with the Lich King? (Oh, by the way, they're all aligned with the Lich King) Gjalerbron is the center for this literally-unholy-union, where Scourge and Vrykul are fully united. There are Vrykul wandering around to kill, but also elite Liches that resulted in more than a few "Run awaaaaaaaaaaay!" moments for me.
Adventuring in the catacombs beneath Gjalerbron and encountering a new monster type that looks like an homage to Resident Evil and other survival horror games - this thing is truly and terrifically ugly - is also creepy. All of Gjalerbron has a very evil aura around it, and it works incredibly well. Though perhaps it's all bark and very little bite: preparing to deal with a Necromancer and his four bodyguards, I pop all my cooldowns only to find that the guards aren't actually linked to the Necromancer himself. In fact, I can pull and kill each one individually. Perhaps the Vrykul-Scourge alliance needs to hire better help.
Many of the Vrykul at Gjalerbron are all sleeping. I'm not sure why they're asleep, nor am I sure what exactly they'll do if they wake up (other than people seem to not want it to happen), but hey, it's not like beating up sleeping people is a bad thing, right? It's like assaulting the homeless - comedy gold, people! Only I don't go around attacking slumbering Vrykul in real life, of course.
Uh, right. Moving along then.
One of the dormant Vrykul is their king, Ymrion, who is in the process of being woken up by his Queen Angerboda. Perhaps she might just want to throw water on the guy rather than jumping through all these hoops. Thankfully, I'm awesome and successfully kill her before she can succeed ... though the timely arrival of a certain former Prince of Lordaeron spirits Ymiron's body away before I can take care of him too. I'm sure we won't have to deal with him later, though!
After returning to the Tuskar village of Kamagua and getting to play pirate for a little while - including some great comedic moments with a displaced captain of a rowboat and a human who wants to be a fancy-pants elf (quite the pirate, if you get my drift) ... it's time to be done with the Howling Fjord. We've spent entirely too much time here as is!
In fact, I think it's time to skip right to the good stuff. Don't you? And thanks to level 80 premades, we can do just that.
See you next time!
-TMTCJ(z)
