Halfway Houses

I occasionally get strange looks when I'm putzing around in The Barrens or Tirisfal Glades, working on low level quests.  I swear that some people must think that I'm the reincarnation of Don Quijote, or that I'm banished by my guild into doing some sort of bizarre penance or something before I'm allowed back into raiding.

Passing through Tarren Mill after having completed a quest from the Hinterlands, I was accosted by a 20ish Hunter loitering around the Bat Handler.  "Dude!  Yr an 80!" he shouted.  "LOL!"

"Yeah," I replied.  "I noticed."

 "U shouldn't be here!"

"I'm not going to be," I said and took the flight path to Light's Hope Chapel.

That didn't hold a Kobold's candle to the crowd that gathered around when I was in the Orc/Troll starting area, working on quests.  I finished a quest and left Quint standing around AFK for a moment.  When I returned, there was a crowd of about eight to ten L1-L5 characters surrounding my Pally.

Okay, I thought, this is weird.  I mean, you just go up the road to Orgrimmar and you can see boatloads of 80s around.

I popped out of AFK, and one of them asked "Are u doing the starting zone quests?"

"Yep."

"Y?"

"I'm working on Loremaster."

"Oooohhhhh," came the collective response.

"Yr crazy!" said one.

"Yeah!" said another.

A third challenged me to a duel, which I declined.

A fourth chimed in with a "That's not hard!"

"Maybe not, but not a lot of people do it."  I took that as my cue to split.

To be fair, the majority of the time I don't get a reaction at all, which suits me just fine.  Other people are doing their business, and I'm doing mine.  Since I'm the oddball high level character in these zones, however, I do try to make myself available should someone need some assistance on a quest.  What's the point of achieving Loremaster if you don't share your knowledge?

I've even had this Loremaster mentality creep over into some of my alts.  My mage, who is at L26, dropped into The Ghostlands to finally try soloing Dhar'khan when she found a L21 Hunter thinking the same thing.  I asked the Hunter what she knew of the fight.

"Nothing.  This is my first character," she said.

"That's fine," I replied.  "Even though this is an alt, I'm still fairly new myself.  We'll do this together."

I told her I'd pull the aggro so we didn't have the entire room on us, and then she could let her pet tank attack and take it over.  The strategy worked, sort of --I held aggro better than I expected-- but the net result was one dead necromancer, and one happy Hunter.

"Thanks so much!" she said.

"You're welcome.  Just so you know, you're about to be doing some traveling on the next couple of quests, so get ready to meet some of the leaders of the Horde."

"Cool!"

Ah, new players.


(Oh, the title of this post?  That's simple, really:  I'm officially halfway to Loremaster.  I'm actually much farther along, but I've only dinged Outlands and Eastern Kingdoms.)