The shifting quest chain
Finally done! I’ve been working on the Scepter of the Shifting Sands chain for a long time, longer than I should have been. Procrastination, my eternal foe, made sure of that, which lead to some sweat-inducing down-to-the-wire scrambling to finish off everything.
I’m surprised I haven’t blogged more about this quest, I could have sworn I had. In any case, this is honestly some of the most fun I’ve ever had playing WoW. There’s something that I’ve always found fun about trotting the in-game globe, from one far flung zone to another. It’s somewhat masochistic. Obviously, doing the chain now is very, very different from doing it back at 60 when it first debuted. Nowadays, the chain isn’t hard, just time consuming. It’s also worth some laughs, with some of the better writing I’ve seen in any quests I’ve done to date.
If you somehow can bang out the chain in the next 12 hours, I strongly recommend it. It’s a damn shame this quest chain is disappearing.
Anyway, when BWL was bugged in the 4.0.3 last week, my heart sunk, because I thought I was completely screwed. Unable to get past Razorgore, I’d have no real way to farm more elementium ingots and I didn’t really want to shell out an ungodly amount of gold for six of them from the AH. I resigned myself to what seemed to be my fate.
Thankfully though, Blizzard uncharacteristically fixed the BWL bug by Thursday night and I was able to head in there Friday and farm up two more elementium ingots (giving me 6 in total). I kicked myself for my poor luck, but the fire was reignited. I was going to get this Feat of Strength. I bought four more ingots from the AH for a princely sum of around 7k gold in total, which is a ton of gold, but (as I self-rationalized) if I’m not going to spend my gold on such luxuries as FoS-immortality, what should I be spending it on?
My inner Scrooge screamed bloody murder in protest, but by then it was too late.
By that point the red shard was done, and for blue I only needed the Onyxia chapter and the elite mob farming chapters (the mats for the subsequent steps in that chain were all lined up), and the green chain still needed to be done in its entirety. So, we then went to Onyxia’s Lair and nabbed her chapter, and I called it a night content that there wasn’t much between me and the Scepter, earlier heart attacks aside.
Saturday morning, Ildara and others helped me jump through the remaining hoops. We cleared out the green shard chain, redeeming the dragon Eranikus in the process.
And then I dodged off to go farm off the last two Draconic for Dummies chapters I needed. One in Winterspring, the other in the Blasted Lands. I first went to Winterspring, only to find some warrior also farming the same mobs. Rather than be slowed down, I just went over to the Blasted Lands to try my luck there. Thankfully no farmers there, but it still took me a chunk of time to get lucky with the low drop rate. About 50 mobs later, I had my chapter.
A quick /who search showed that warrior had evacuated Winterspring so I sprung over and hit the jackpot with grabbing my last needed chapter from the first Hederine mob I took out. Score.
Back to Tanaris and turned in both The Only Prescription and The Good News and the Bad News in one go. With my Arcanite Buoy ready, I then dragged Ildara (ok, she volunteered) with me to Azshara so we could summon Maws and roll a gas tank into his mouth.
In short order I had the third and final shard I needed, the blue shard.
A hop, skip, and a jump later and I was back in Tanaris and handing over the final shard to Anachronos and receiving in return the Scepter of the Shifting Sands.
It was done, nearly six months later. Shouldn’t have taken me this long, and shouldn’t have been nearly as much of a photo finish, but I’m grateful it’s complete and I will soon have another one of my precious Feats of Strength.
Good luck to anyone still scrambling to wrap this up!
14 Comments to “The shifting quest chain”
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@Anafielle
22 November 2010 at 3:16 pm #
Grats, Rhi! I know how badly you wanted to finish this thing off!
STOP SCREENSHOTTING YOUR UI. Its minimalism makes my UI feel all fat and ugly.
I just happened to finish this by staying up WAY later than I shoulda last night and geting the scepter at 3am this morning. I had done a lot of it almost a year ago for loremaster, and then a few months ago I realized I never talked to azuregos for the next part of the chain which I did even though I had long-since had LM completed (I love old quests). Did (I thought) everything up to the arcanite buoy, which I wasn’t going to spend the gold or farm the ingots for since I still need my thunderfury and I finally got the 2nd binding.
But after a discussion in vent with some guildies about stuff thats going away, my blood was already hot , and on a whim I checked AH for ingots. Normally there MAY be 1 on for 1400~2000g or so, maybe a 2nd, but for some reason there were about 20 up for 650g. Best 5k gold I’ve spent! Off to tanaris, get the bouy, kill the shark in azshara, and why didn’t anachronos give me the scepter? WTF?! quick check of wowhead to see if it’s bugged, someone mentioned not doing Erinaku series for green shard…/facepalm. Off to sunken temple, then world hopping to get the gate runes, back to moonglade for what is only one of the GREATEST events in all wow. I wish more people could see that, the entire place gets overrun by shades and you have to fend off erinakus attack while tyrande and malfurion work furiously to free him from corruption, which they do! huzzah!
Great quest chain, I’m really sad to see it go. Not terribly hard to do anymore as you say, but there’s just somehting truly epic in all the travelling and boss fights and raids you have to go through to get it done, veteran of wrathgate can’t hold a candle to it!
@Rhidach
22 November 2010 at 4:35 pm #
Completely agreed. Congrats on hammering everything out just in the nick of time!
Make sure that you’ve gone to talk to the guy at the gong in AQ. The quest chain doesn’t quite finish at Anachronos. (I almost forgot that one myself)
Dinaer’s last blog ..Setting up Power Auras to remind you to backstab
@Rhidach
22 November 2010 at 4:35 pm #
I got confused by that as well. Since we can’t get Bang a Gong! from Anachronos anymore, it isn’t readily apparently that you need to go to the gong anymore. But yeah, head over there, talk to the guy, get your item. I got the sword, which I’ll probably sell.
Never selling the Band of Icy Depths, though!
Congrats Rhi! I have always loved this quest chain myself. I found it to be one of the most involving series of quests in the game, beating anything that’s come out of TBC or WotLK, easily. It’s no small wonder why guilds were required to work together on servers in order to get the gates to AQ open, way back when.
Congrats on being one of the few who own a piece of WoW history!
@Rhidach
22 November 2010 at 4:34 pm #
Thanks! :)
Yea I finished up a couple of weeks ago, I had been waiting for a friend to catch up so we could duo maws but time slipped past and suddenly its 4.01. Eep!
I spent a couple hours farming Winterspring before I thought to recheck, I had the winterspring shard, What i was missing was Dr Weevil despite killing him several times for guildies back when aq opened. What happens when the DR mc’s a shadownourne warrior? Not pretty. The npc survived with 5k hp while the warrior stood over our corpses.
Congrats. I just missed finishing this up. Got the Red and Green chains, but didn’t get the last chapter from Onyxia, so no blue shard for me. It is a great quest chain though.
That quest text you screenshotted makes me think of raid achievements.
Someone at Blizzard did that quest and said the four most dangerous words in the English Language.
Big congrats! I hope they include something similar during Cataclysm.
Grats on the feat. I missed out on this, with clueless master looters in Ony pugs and whelp induced d/c’s. If only more than one person could loot it :(.
Congrats! Procrastination almost did me in as well; got my scepter ~3 hours before the servers went down to be Shattered.
After being stuck at work all weekend, I logged on yesterday to a pair of messages: one from a guildie including two ingots, the other from our (very casual) raid lead saying, ‘We’re doing MC & BWL tonight, and I’m paying for whatever ingots you still need.’ Cue tears.
We burnt through both raids and came out four ingots short. Had a minor heart attack when the RL (who had started the questline but never finished) accidentally looted the red shard before I did. Blizz was on the ball though; a GM had us sorted out within an hour. The RL bought the only ingots on the AH (10k total), and together he and I finished the rest.
I’m still in awe at my friends/guildies’ generosity; if it wasn’t for them I never could have finished this incredible questline. It’s a shame that, after today, no one else will experience it; along with the dungeon set and Druid swift flight questlines, it stands out as some of the best and most rich storytelling Blizzard put in the game.
@Rhidach
23 November 2010 at 9:43 am #
Great story! That’s so awesome that everyone banded together to help you bang this out at the last second. You have some great friends there.
I never did the dungeon set quests, and now I’m ruing I did not.