Welcome to the Big Show Kids

No more tropical paradises like STV. No more verdant rolling hills of Mulgore. No more exotic veldt of Nagrand. No kids, welcome to the frozen wastes. This is Northrend, and it is NOT a nice place to visit.

With a tear in my eye, I waved goodbye to my friends in Tirisfal Glades, took one last look at the Undercity, and braced myself for the cold.... luckily, as a Forsaken death knight, I probably won't feel it. As the zepplin pulls into Vengeance Landing, I see something new and interesting right away... Forsaken architecture. All we've seen of Forsaken towns before have been old human ruins, but this was a town built by the undead... and it suits us perfectly. I started questing and was pleased that with a few exceptions, the quests were mainly objective based rather than "Kill 30 of X or collect 20 of Y." There are some really enjoyable quest lines in Howling Fjord which is kinda sad because these days my leveling route mostly avoids Howling Fjord other than a few of the early quests out of Vengeance Landing.. its simply more efficient and rewarding to level in Borean Tundra. After taking 10 characters through Northrend, I got my leveling route down to a science. I met the Tanuka for the first time shortly after my arrival, and was a bit let down that they were really just Tauren with new faces (for the males, the females are lamely just Tauren clones). I knew they were related to Tauren but I was hoping they'd be a bit more unique. The Tuskaar filled that role though. And there are some really fun Tanuka quests, especially the one where the Tanuka brave accompanies you into the vyrkul place. There's also alot of twisted mischief going on with my fellow Forsaken, which is always a good time. But, before long, I got back on the zepplin and headed to Borean Tundra via Org.

Borean is where you start seeing the difficulty level bump up a bit (not that anything in WoW is really hard). It can be easy to get overwhelmed in the early quests here fighting the nerubians outside of Warsong Hold (especially if you come here at 68), they repop fast, have long pat routes and big aggro range. But, it was still early enough in the expansion cycle that there were alot of people leveling here and alot of us helped each other out. It is also here that us Hordies got our first real taste of Garrosh Hellscream and his douchiness. Sure, he was in Nagrand, but he was a fairly minor character at the time, no one paid him much attention other than maybe some Warcraft III Grom fanboys. But now, hes in charge of the Horde Expedition, and has turned into a giant D-bag, starkly in contrast to Saurfang the Elder who is ridiculously awesome. I'm trying to think of someone equally repellent on the Alliance side (besides all the players... kidding) to try to explain to you Allies how you'd feel if someone said he'd be the next King of Stormwind... then again, Varian IS pretty bad... but, yea, not as bad as Garrosh. Damn you Blizzard! I was glad to be rid of him when they sent me off to the Tanuka village, especially since I got an awesome blue 2H axe just for walking in the door. Borean is really a great place to level, theres tons of quests (I think maybe only Dragonblight and Icecrown have more) and alot of the quest rewards are really good. And it was cool when for the last quest in the zone, they have you escort a refuge Tanuka into the next zone, the first place that really looks like you'd expect Northrend to look, Dragonblight.