Hellfire

Quests and the New World

In the Burning Crusade, you start off on the Hellfire Peninsula, and the name pretty much says it all. Everything in site is very ruddy and brimstone in theme. It's an alien wasteland. Being that it's a war zone, the first quests you'll receive all involve quick strikes and killing monsters, but soon you'll move up to closing gates and assaulting fortifications.

There are a couple of quests that prove entertaining and break the mold of "kill x monster for the alliance/horde." After running a few basic errands, you're put on a wind rider and given a handful of bombs to close some demon gates. After you get back from that mission you go on another that requires destroying cannons, enemy forces and commanders. It's not a particularly difficult quest series but at least it's different.

The quest rewards that you'll see, even in the early levels, are an improvement over most commonly available level 60 gear in the core game. Certain basic equipment is very easy to get and well worth the trouble. In fact, most people will find that they want to quest as much as they can in the new expansion for the easy experience, so the rewards are just a nice little perk.

The Hellfire Peninsula is basically the starting area and re-introduction to the leveling process. Eventually, the quests start pointing you towards the Hellfire Citadel, which sits in the center of the Hellfire Peninsula. Inside is where you'll find a hotbed of evil orc and demon action. The insides of the fortress are composed of the first four instances in the Outlands The Ramparts and The Blood furnace are the two we will be taking a look at for right now because the other two are considerably higher level.

The Ramparts

The Ramparts is most likely the first place you'll end up going in the way of instances once you hit 60 and head outside of the core game. In this wing of the citadel, you'll be killing a few boss mobs and clearing off the walls. The first boss you run into once you've cleared out a bit is Watchkeeper Gargolmar. He just kind of wanders around his area with a couple of healers looking for guys like you! The group I had when I fought was all either 60 or 61 and wasn't too much of a problem. We killed off his healers and then blasted him down. Shortly after the Watchkeeper, we ran into our first bout of trouble in the form of Vazruden and Nazan.

Vazruden is the Herald of the citadel. He's riding around on his pet Nether Drake named Nazan. Once Vazruden spots your party, he drops down off of his drake and begins combat. During the battle with Vazruden, you have to dodge Nazan's fireballs, and after he falls you have to fight Nazan himself. Nazan is reminiscent of certain other boss fights throughout World of Warcraft that aren't very hard when executed properly, but can easily destroy a disoriented party. After Nazan lands, he starts throwing fireballs around like crazy and blasting whoever is in front of him with his fiery breath. After a few attempts, we killed those two and moved on to the, oddly close, third dungeon boss Omor the Unscarred.

Compared to the last two, Omor isn't really all that bad. He summons a few hellhounds that will usually head for the healers. These hellhounds are usually pretty easy to kill, so he's not that much of a challenge. When he gets lower in life, though, he will sometimes deflect spells. Once he's down, then that's about it for the Ramparts, but there's plenty more killing where that came from. Next up is the Blood Furnace.