Sunstrider Isle to the Ghostlands

[MongoJerry]

But first Neriad had a little unfinished business to conduct. She turned in the tainted arcane sliver and along the way noticed a quest giver, who instructs young Blood Elves on how to use Mana Tap and Arcane Torrent, near the gazebo who Neriad had missed before. Mana Tap drains a small amount of mana from an enemy and has a cooldown of 30 seconds. The Blood Elf does not get this mana. Instead, this action merely charges the Blood Elf with a Mana Tap charge, stacking up to three times. When the Blood Elf releases this energy using Arcane Torrent (cooldown: 2 minutes), everything is silenced in an 8 yard radius for two seconds and some amount of mana is returned to the Blood Elf depending on the number of Mana Tap charges the Blood Elf had.

These are good abilities, but they aren't as powerful as one might think at first glance. At first, it seemed like the Mana Tap / Arcane Torrent abilities provided a nice steady influx of mana, but as I leveled and as my mana pool grew larger, I became less impressed with the amount of mana returned. The extra ability to silence your opponent also sounds nice on paper, but for a priest, it's much less useful than you think. The main opponents for priests in group fights are warriors, rogues and to some extent hunters, and this ability doesn't help at all in those fights. When priests are fighting other spell casters, usually the combatents don't fight at melee range. I'm not saying that the ability is useless for a priest, but given the choice between Arcane Torrent and WOTF/Devouring Plague, I'd take the undead abilities any day for PvP. If you want to create a Horde PvE priest, choose blood elf because of the extra mana you'll get. If you want to create a PvP priest, choose undead. If you want to be strange, choose troll.

However, I should mention that the Mana Tap and Arcane Torrent abilities seem awesome for a rogue. A fully charged Blood Elf rogue gets 30 energy returned with Arcane Torrent. Plus, the rogue can silence spell casters that he or she is attacking -- like say silence a priest or paladin healing himself or herself. I just don't think that these abilities are that useful for priests beyond a small additional stream of mana.

And Neriad still hadn't yet found the Shrine of Dath'Remar.



Ah, there it is!

I ran around Sunstrider Isle three times and visited every landmark and moused over anything that looked like a plaque in an effort to find the stupid thing. I mean, yeah, once I saw the shrine, I recognized it for what it was instantly. The trouble was that it's way up north up a grassy hill, and there are so many "shrine" looking things on the island that it's easy to get confused. I mean, that fountain sure looks like it could be considered a shrine, right? That pond could be a shrine. Some of the floating platforms in the Falthrien Academy could also be considered shrines.

I'm not the only one who had trouble finding the shrine. In fact, the question "Where's the shrine?" seems to have become the Eversong Woods version of, "Where is Mankirk's wife?" in general chat.



So Neriad found the shrine and read the plaque and got some sort of disturbed feeling from the shrine of Dath'Remar. This really makes me wish I knew a more detailed history of the Blood Elves, because this went completely over my head.



After reporting back to Well Watcher Solanian on a quest she got at level 2, it was time for Neriad to head south and help those Outrunners. She crossed a bridge to the mainland and saw a large ruined city in front of her.



A quick check of her world map revealed that these ruins were none other than those of Silvermoon City, the once proud capital of the Blood Elves.

UP NEXT: The Ruins of Silvermoon