One of the main quest lines in Silverpine Forest has you fighting werewolves. You start out small by killing the weaklings wandering the countryside, before you assault their mine hideout and then their main village. The village is full of elites so it's not a place you want to go alone. Especially not when playing on Hardcore mode. It's time to team up.
A risky adventure
Pyrewood Village isn't big. It's got a few houses, enemies are spaced out relativity fine and there are a few patrols walking around. There's an escape route through the main gates that isn't to hard to reach, especially when you can stun enemies and use sprint to get there. I teamed up with a mage to tackle this. Ideally we would have been more in the group, but we decided to go for it, even if it felt a little risky. No healer. No tank. Just pure damage.
Luckily, mages have Polymorph which turns humanoids and beasts into immobilized sheep for 20 seconds. This is a big help when pulling packs of two or more enemies. If my teammate wasn't a mage I would never have gone in here with only the two of us.
Staircase of doom
There's three quests that you can complete in this village. There's one for collecting shackles dropped of the general enemies you find around the village, there's one where you collect a book from a bookcase in the second floor of the inn and there's one where you defend a fellow Forsaken from an assault on the town hall. We did them all but it was not without breaking a sweat.
Anytime you go in a building in Hardcore World of Warcraft you take a risk. Buildings are tight spaces where enemies are often places close together. By pulling one you risk pulling them all. That almost happened to us in the inn when we were going up the stairs. There's a total of four mobs on the second floor, one of them being a boss, and we managed to pull three of them in one go. Thanks to the mage using Polymorph, Frost Nova and me being able to stun enemies we managed to take them down but we both dropped to around 20% HP. It was a heart racing moment for sure.
Had the boss pulled as well we would have been dead for sure. I'd have felt stupid if that happened because I've told myself at the start of this run that I'm not taking any risks. I would only have had myself to blame.
We also completed the quest at the town hall, and we failed once and had to get another person to come join us. It was a proper breeze the second time. We never dropped low even if we failed. We just bailed out early when we felt we couldn't do this on our own. It was a better safe than sorry moment.
Skruk is finished up in Silverpine Forest for now and will be heading over to the notorious Barrens. The most iconic Horde leveling zone in the game. He goes there at level 18 which is quite over leveled, but at least he will be safe.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.
What an adventure!
Pyrewood Village sounds intense, especially on Hardcore mode.
Any place like this can be intense in Hardcore mode. Luckily I have a lot of game knowledge about World of Warcraft Classic so I know before going in there. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people don't know what Pyrewood village has in store will die here.
Hardcore mode pushes players to think tactically and here I'm always looking for the balanced mode when paying something as I can't get those pushes lightly. Best of luck with Skruk’s next chapter.
I've liked the casual playstyle for a long time, but now I wanted something more tense and unforgiving. This game mode is giving me just that.
It's great to hear you're enjoying it. That's what games are for, right? To enjoy.