There are a few quests I've done so far that have really made me squirm. I play Horde, and you just know that most things the Forsaken are wrapped up in are going to be kind of dodgy. A lot of our early questing in Northrend concerns the Apothecary Society's attempts to find a Scourge-specific plague (...right), and that doesn't end particularly well. I can sort of accept that, because the quest series skates a thin moral line between plausible deniability on the character's part as to the apothecaries' true intentions, and what actually ends up happening. But there's one quest in particular that has nothing to do with the apothecaries that really gave me pause. It's actually one that has an Alliance equivalent as well, although it ends somewhat differently there.

If you're not that far into Dragonblight quests and don't want to be spoiled, I'm putting it behind the cut.

On to part 2! This series of questions spans August and early September, and we'll keep moving forward this week.

Hoops asked....

How much gold roughly would you get from questing 70-77 (until you unlock the flying mount)? I was wondering if it would it be worth farming money beforehand or would the money from questing be enough.

Elizabeth answers: I'm not 77 yet, so I can't exactly address the question as asked, but I can tell you that I've made about 400g leveling from 70 to 72. That's just from questing, vendoring trash & unneeded greens -- and it includes some stupid deaths, plenty of repair bills(I blame Dalaran for many of them!), and training a couple of professions (35g to train a primary profession to the next skill level and 100g to train a secondary profession to the next skill level).

Allie adds: I finally started keeping track of how I was doing gold-wise while leveling. On the beta I leveled a lot through instance runs because the demand for healers was so high; on the live realms I've leveled mostly through questing. Between 70 and 76 so far (remarkably fast for me but my guild starts raiding next week) I've made somewhere in the region of 2K gold after training, repairs, professions, etc., mostly through questing and keeping my bags as open as possible to sell vendor trash. As Elizabeth observes, that part's key; Northrend vendor trash and greens sell for a LOT.

Wrath of the Lich King is finally here, and with it comes a whole load of new lore and stories to discover. I hope you guys are reading your quest text! I imagine all of these new quests will bring up a lot of new questions as well, and to that I say bring it on. For now, though, let's field some questions from last week.

Rosa asked...

Personally, I'm tired of Outland and demons and fantasy-tech and I'm glad to see Warcraft going gothic again, buuuut there's one thing that I love about Outland and I'm hoping it's not gone forever. Ethereals are, like, totally awesome, and my favourite unplayable race in WoW. The question I have is, do we see these guys anywhere in Wrath? And if not, do you think that we'll see them ever again?

This installment of All the World's a Stage is the thirteenth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself.

The Warrior is not merely a well-trained fighter who loves his weapons and armor and takes great care to wield them well -- inside each one is a boiling cauldron of rage and passion. By and large, warriors feel at home on the battlefield because it is the one place where they can express themselves, where they can finally let go of all the restraint society imposes on them and unleash all their emotions. Without his raging passion, a person would be much better suited to some calmer form of work -- it is this unquenchable fire which sustains a warrior, driving him into action in the midst of mortal peril.

Alliance warriors tend to focus more on training and weapon mastery, sometimes downplaying their rage so much that you hardly even see it. Some warriors like this (even in the Horde sometimes) may be so stoic that even they do not believe that they have any emotions whatsoever, although I doubt anyone who watched them fight could really agree. Something's got to make you willing to put on all that armor and risk death every day.

But Horde warriors are more likely to display their rage, bloodlust, and other aggressive emotions much more freely. Of course, it's possible that a Horde warrior could have a collection of stuffed animals, write poetry, and even play hopscotch with children, but their rage lurks deep within, and the essence of their profession is to let it loose.

We posted about this quest months and months ago, but of course now it's available on the live realms -- in the Utgarde Catacombs, which turns out not to be an instance but just a non-instanced quest area, there is a quest to retrive a "sacred artifact" of the Argent Dawn, which is basically a must-do quest for anyone that's a fan of the, err.. "bashringer," if you know what I mean. It's simple, so there's not much to spoil, but yeah, just a few quests in to Wrath, you're already wandering around epic lore territory.

And odds are that you've met the main guest of the expansion already as well -- I bumped into him during a walk through the spirit world in Wyrmskull Village, and he wasn't very nice to me already (and frankly, I saw a side of him I've never seen before -- having identifed myself as a Shaman for so long, it was extremely interesting to see him do the same). Blizzard promised from the beginning that we'd meet and greet with the lore heavyweights early on, and they weren't kidding -- we're right in the mix from the time we step off the boat.

I love it -- without getting too spoilery, what else is worth seeing in these starting zones? We almost got Keristrasza down last night in The Nexus, and it's almost hard to remember those days when it took 40 players to take down a dragon -- even solo and five man players get to do epic stuff nowadays. What have you done already?

So, there's this Wrath-release event happening. One of the side-plays during the event is a duel between Thrall and Garrosh Hellscream. And while Thrall was busting out all the Shaman mojo he could, he ultimately loses to Garrosh. Over and over. Why, Thrall? How could it come to this? Where did we go wrong?

In an attempt to understand how the Warchief could be struck low by the young pup, we here at WoW Insider bring you the Top Ten Reasons Thrall got pwned by Garrosh:

1. Thrall is secretly a keyboard turner.
2. Thrall forgot to repair his gear before the queue popped.
3. Garrosh has been studying the art of war at a Retribution Pally temple.
4. Thrall broke Line-of-Sight from his druid.
5. The Warchief was distracted by worry that Jaina might be in danger.
6. Since the release of 3.0.2, healing in PvP has been dang near impossible.
7. Thrall's heart just wasn't in it, since there's no Arena points this week.
8. Warriors still need a good nerfin'.
9. The RNG hates Thrall.
   
   ...and finally...
   
   
10. In Wrath of the Lich King, the devs all play Garrosh.
    

We hope this short list helps bring solace to the millions of orcs who have found their hero laid low by Garrosh Hellscream. We hope you can gird your courage, and find strength to join us on the way to Northrend. As the saying goes, it ain't over till it's over.

Redshift: Pursuit, by Slashdance, is a direct sequal to the piece "Redshift: Ty'zamar and Aislynn," and pretty much cements Redshift as an episodic series. A "diviner" has a foreseen the death of a Night Elf, and the conflict ensues from there. We brought you the trailer for this piece back in October, and are happy to be able to see the final product.

I was impressed with "Redshift: Pursuit", mostly for story and narrative purposes. I felt like the causal action from scene to scene was fairly meaningful, though the opening sequence was a little slow for my tastes. (It's probably just my personal preferences, but I like openings to get banging to action right away.)

Of course, the shout out to the Amani trolls really brings the story "home" to Azeroth, for me. Inclusiveness with the game's lore helps us identify characters and motivations, and provides a more solid base for the action to take place. I will definitely be interested to see what Redshift brings us next.

If you have any suggestions for WoW Moviewatch, you can mail them to us at machinima AT wowinsider DOT com.

Previously on Moviewatch ...

Welcome to Ask a Lore Nerd, where each week Alex Ziebart answers your quests about the lore in the World of Warcraft. If you have any questions, no matter how big or small they might be, ask them in the comments section below and we'll try to answer it in a future edition.

On this very special edition of Ask a Lore Nerd, we're going to look into the future, at what's to come in Wrath of the Lich King. There's a lot on the horizon, and a lot of questions about what's to come. We're going to try to be light on spoilers, but give some idea of what's going down.

Yeah yeah, so there's a Troll zone, we learn the origins of Humanity, we meet some Tauren relatives, there's some junk about Dwarven royalty and all of that crap. Who cares? What about the Gnomes? Where's the Gnome lore!?

This installment of All the World's a Stage is the twelfth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself.

From the way that warriors are available to nearly every race in the game as a sort of default fighter person, you'd think that they would be the fallback choice for any number of different sort of characters you might imagine. Any sort of regular shmuck could be a warrior right? You just gotta pick up some sort of weapon and start swinging it around at an enemy, yes?

No. Even though the Warrior class is available to almost every race in the game, every race has its own tradition of what it means to be a warrior -- it's not just a farmer with a pitchfork running around and trying to kill things. Warriors go through extensive training, learn to wield a wide variety of weapons, and train themselves in staying upright and charging about even while wearing all kinds of heavy metal on their bodies.

So today we'll look into some of the ways that the races of the Alliance understand what it means to be a warrior, and see which heroes your character might look up to, as well as the archetypes these heroes represent.

The Warcraft storyline has come a long way since Orcs and Humans. Bobbyjeh of Aman'Thul asked how Blizzard maintains their "seemingly endless lore and story arc. Nethaera responded that the company has a Historian on staff as well as an expanding department dedicated to lore. They cover all three of the major Blizzard universes. They help to keep continuity in the game and keeps things interesting for our resident Lore Nerd.

While I was doing the quest chain for my Swift Flight Form, I wondered to myself. What does someone who's been asleep for so long know about Outland? I've often wondered how it is that new Draenei characters all crashed "one month ago." As some pointed out, there has been some discontinuity in the Warcraft Universe. But Blizzard does a pretty good job of keeping their story straight. No stranger than C3PO saying, "Thank the maker," when technically, Darth Vader is the maker. We accept these plot holes and move on.

Fake Twitterers are all the rage these days -- you can sign up on the microblogging service Twitter.com as just about anyone and shoot out some parodic little "tweets," as they're called, for the instant amusement of anyone who wishes to follow you (I'm personally a big fan of the Mad Men characters tweeting). But now, the WoW community has its own fake twitter personality -- apparently the Lich King has found some time in between knighting Death Knights and plaguing the world to start up his own Twitter account.

No idea who's behind it, but I know a few WoW bloggers who twitter pretty often, including a few WoW Insider contributors. Whoever's tweeting for Arthas, they're doing a nice job, promising "cold deaths" to everyone, and steadily counting down the days until his Wrath is upon us.

I'm kind of surprised this is the first fake NPC twitterer we've seen -- sure, you'd think Thrall or Jaina would have tons of time to Twitter, and Kael'thas, assuming he's not quite dead yet, seems made for such an enterprise. If you are on Twitter, don't forget to follow our own WoW Insider account as well -- we won't offer you a cold death, but we will occasionally tweet about important posts and our own experiences with the game.

This installment of All the World's a Stage is the eleventh in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself. This article is largely a continuation of last week's article, which has been updated for accuracy.

There has been a great deal of change and evolution of the world of World of Warcraft, and to a certain extent, all the available player races have gone through changes because of the events that have taken place. The original release content had lots of dungeons and quests and things going on, but each one seemed to tell the story of a place rather than the story of a people. Like each place, the stories told there seemed static, as the players grew and moved on, the places all remained the same.

The Burning Crusade, however, began to change all that. Instead of just adding new content with each patch, some aspects of the old content were changed as well, with certain characters and peoples coming to the foreground as major antagonists. Players were no longer merely vague adventurers tasked with saving the world from one giant evil monster or another, their characters had vested interests in bringing about some change in their circumstances.

For no group of player-aligned characters was this as true as it was with the blood elves. From the time The Burning Crusade was released, up to now, when the next chapter of the Warcraft story (Wrath of the Lich King) is starting to unfold, the blood elves are the only player faction whose leader has turned into a major boss in a dungeon (not once but twice!), whose capital city has been deprived of one of its most significant residents (who also ended up turned into a major dungeon boss), and whose culture has undergone a complete turnaround over the course of this expansion's expanding storyline.

The draenei, of course, played a huge role in the story of The Burning Crusade, but in the end, they were mostly just very strong supporting characters. The blood elves were the stars of the show.

Stealing the Light

At this point it is important to draw a distinction between the blood elves who followed Kael'thas and the naga through the portal into Outland, and the blood elves who stayed behind in Quel'thalas and Silvermoon City. They were still one faction at this point, but a number of differences were starting to appear. For one, although the blood elves in Quel'thalas were drawing on fel energies just like their brethren in Outland, they certainly weren't surrounded by demons like Illidan and all his minions all the time, not to mention the vast energies of the evil Twisting Nether, which surrounded all of Outland. Thus, the blood elves in Outland were saturated to overflowing in magic and power, while the blood elves in Quel'thalas were still rather hungry for it.

Therefore, Kael'thas thought it wise to send the gift of this captured naaru, named M'uru, back to Silvermoon City, so that his people there could have more energy to help quench their magical thirst. Soon, however, the blood elves of Quel'thalas found a way to start using this power of the Light rather than merely feeding on it, casting spells and blessings in the same way that human, dwarven, and draenei paladins could -- while the other races drew on the Light through the power of their faith, the blood elves learned to control it as it flowed through M'uru.

The first blood elf to take up this path of corrupted paladinhood was Lady Liadrin, who then founded the order of Blood Knights that became infamous throughout Azeroth and Outland alike. Thrall and the other leaders of the Horde disagreed with the methods the Blood Knights had employed, but could not deny their strategic value on the battlefield.

The Sunwell Redemption

The final tie between Kael'thas and Quel'thalas was broken when Kael'thas' minions returned to take back by force the naaru, M'uru, which he had once given to his kindred so freely. Lady Liadrin and her Blood Knights would have been left without any of their powers had the naaru A'dal not reached out a hand to save her and her people. Lady Liadrin was deeply regretful of what she and her Blood Knights had done to M'uru, but A'dal forgave them, saying that M'uru had known all along what his role would be in this unfolding drama. The naaru extended his own Light energies to Liadrin and her Blood Knights, and encouraged them to assist him to stop the terrible threat that Kael'thas now represented to all the people of Azeroth and Outland.

The former "Lord of the Blood Elves," now quite insane, had brought the remaining strength of his forces back to Azeroth and taken over the Sunwell Island, just across the channel from Silvermoon City, and planned to use the hidden energies of the Sunwell's magic to try and summon Kil'jaeden into the world. The blood elves and draenei of Shattrath united to overcome this threat, and as their forces ventured deeper and deeper into the Sunwell fortifications Kael'thas had set up, they found that M'uru himself was enslaved as a guard the site where Kil'jaeden would be summoned. The heroes were forced to destroy his weakened body and stop the entropic energies which now began to vacuum up all life around it as the last of his Light energies seemed to drain away.

At last, of course, the heroes faced Kil'jaeden himself at the site of the Sunwell (perhaps your own character was among them), and, with the help of some dragons, they drove him back into the Sunwell Portal, away from Azeroth. The draenei prophet Velen arrived, along with Lady Liadrin, and spoke to the heroes, as he placed the last remaining fragment of M'uru's body into the Sunwell. The result is one of the best scenes in Warcraft lore, which you too can look on, as the last spark of M'uru's life reignites the Sunwell with the energy of the Holy Light, restoring once and for all, that magical life energy the blood elves need, as well as something far greater, something with the power to rebirth the entire civilization of the blood elves: Faith.

Welcome to Ask a Lore Nerd, where each week Alex Ziebart answers your quests about the lore in the World of Warcraft. If you have any questions, no matter how big or small they might be, ask them in the comments section below and we'll try to answer it in a future edition.

Last week on Ask a Lore Nerd, Offsprnge (one of your fellow readers) asked me to write this week's edition with some Eye of the Tiger playing. I guess I came across a little tired last week, so I'm going to do just that. To fit the groove, I ask all of you guys one favor: Read the questions and answers in the voice of Rocky Balboa. If it will help you get in the mood, go ahead and read it out loud in that voice.

And since we're already talking about it, Offsprnge asked...

Right, I think I got a good one by the way, perhaps it is so obvious I should slap myself, but the whole battle for Mount Hyjal features the Burning Legion invading with it's commander Archimonde, however, why are there hordes of ghouls, liches, necromancers, frost wyrms and "all that kind of thing!" (find the reference).

Again, like another reader mentioned, at the time the Lich King was still feigning allegiance to the Burning Legion. It doesn't pay to make the Legion suspicious too early. At the same time, the Lich King played a role in weakening Archimonde's forces: He used Illidan to destroy Tichondrius and his forces, which were to play support for Archimonde. The Scourge that were at the Battle of Mount Hyjal were sacrifices, pawns to keep Archimonde overconfident.