One Day In Stranglethorn Vale

As part of of my current achievement hound activities on Aetherna, I found myself down in Stranglethorn Vale, looking at increasing her standing with the Zandalar Tribe. I've been buying bijous and coins off of the auction house whenever they were available, so I had a nice stack to turn in and start building rep. While that's a pretty useful (if slow) way to grind out Zandalar rep, apparently the best way is to run Zul'Gurub repeatedly.

The problem with ZG is that it's a 20-man raid instance. Most of the trash mobs in the instance are soloable by a decently geared level 80, but just getting in to the instance requires that you be in a raid. Yoi! A quick message on general chat in STV, though, and I found someone interested in coming along.

You see, though ZG is an older instance, it still gets farmed. There's folks like me, working on rep. Then there's folks like Bal, who wanted to take down Bloodlord Mandokir and try for the rare (0.1%) Swift Razzashi Raptor drop.

When I found out he was going for the raptor, I told him - "If it drops, it's yours". Don't get me wrong - I like mounts, I've got a passel of 'em, but at the end of the day, they just don't thrill me like some people. So I was happy to get someone alogn to help out with the run, grind out some rep, and if the mount dropped, well, good for him!

When we got to Mandokir, though, he turned out to be just too tough for the two of us. A guildmate was willing to come help out, though, which was just the edge we needed. Along the way back to Mandokir, though, we wiped... disturbed a Voodoo Pile, and Aeth got possessed by the Will of Hakkar, and proceeded to fry everything in sight. Two dead pallies later (why, oh why can't I be that effective in PvP?) she was standing alone amidst the rubble.

Bal and my guildmate laughed about it as they ran back, but it was a bit embarrassing for me. After we downed Mandokir, I learned that (a) apparently, Hakkar has a thing for mages, since I got possessed three more times! and (b) after being possessed, you can still Ice Block and wait out the possession. Nice to know, that.

Yep, we downed Mandokir... and we did, indeed, see the raptor drop. Bal got his mount, and afterwards, I asked him how long he had been trying for it.

"This was my attempt."

Holy sweet Aunt Fanny! One try, one mount!

I'm probably going to be running ZG a few more times. If I see the mount drop again, I'm going to start hiring myself out as a lucky charm for folks trying to farm the raptor. Hey, what can I say - Hakkar likes me.