Last year the Elite Muffin Parachute Brigade air dropped into various parts of Azeroth on New Year's Eve, and conquered the shit out of places like Auberdine and Menethil Harbor.
This year various scheduling conflicts conspired against a repeat performance (translation: I was the only one who didn't have something better to do that night) so I decided to just tool around a bit myself.
After a few failed Teldrassil jumps, I had the awful realization that this was going to cost me way more this year than it had last year (lol epix), so I decided to switch toons and take Belkar up for a spin around the airport and the farms. So armed with four mugs of "unique" featherfall brew, off I went.
Here's Belkar air dropping into the airport. Notice the festive holiday getup
Here's the standard "HAY GUYZ I'M AT THE AIRPORT!" screenshot everybody has to take
I wanted to get some different screenshots than I got last year, so I went over to the Dun Morogh side of the mountain and took a few shots looking back into nubville. Here's a shot of Gol'Bolar Quarry
Here's one showing the quarry and that lake with the hole in it
Here's a decent shot of that eternal battle between dwarves and trolls that you can see from the air when you fly from Ironforge to Menethil Harbor
I went over to look at where the trolls were coming from. Turns out they just spawn on one corner of the lake and run to their deaths at the hands of the mountaineers. While I was over there checking things out, a few of them spawned and aggro'ed ME instead. Rather than dismount and lose my reindeer, I decided to just train them back to the dwarves. Here are the trolls incoming
And here's the mountaineers making quick work of them. I really love this screenshot, I took it just at the right time.
I also had to get a shot of the famous waving guard. You've probably had him wave to you as you fly past. He stands there and waves constantly. Poor dude.
My goal for the trip was to jump down into Menethil. So I had to get to the farms first. I wanted to go down the big waterfall you can see from the gryphons, so I meandered over that way.
Here's something weird I never noticed before. Right at the top of the waterfall, there's these three bears just wandering around aimlessly
You may have noticed that actually, only two of the bears are wandering around. The third is actually sitting down. It looked so funny, I had to stealth up and take a snapshot of the two of us together.
So here I am poised to make my way down the waterfall. For whatever reason, I wanted to do it using as little beer as possible--this would prove to be a bad idea, as you will see.
First stage completed successfully! Here's a progress shot
And here I am getting ready for the final hop. Just a quick jump down into the pond, and I'll be at the farms!
...Ok, so that didn't work out the way I'd intended. I refilled the beer, and tried again. On the way back, I decided I had to get another shot of that crazy bear.
Here's a shot from where I SHOULD have been ten minutes ago, if not for my crazy idea that I could clear the rocks and land in the pond without any problems at all!
So here I am, finally, overlooking my goal; Menethil Harbor.
And now, the jump!
Approaching Menethil...
Coming in for a landing. Here we see the difference between epic mounts and regular mounts. Last year I landed to the right of the forge after taking off on my epic mount. With Belkar's lame non-epic strider, I barely made it to the land.
So that was kind of underwhelming. So here's some added, random bonus shots from my other jumps of the night. Nothing too spectacular and not much different from last year, but it was fun.
Here's Hamirack coming off Teldrassil. SHOCK! HORROR! What is that he's riding? A TALBUK? Blasphemy!
Here I am floating majestically above the trees
This is as close as I got to Auberdine this year. You can just see the buildings through those trees. I've decided that without either hax paladin bubble or hax paladin horse aura, it's just not possible to make it directly into Auberdine. The one time I tried and I was on a perfect line towards Auberdine proper, I got whacked by the fatigue damage literally one tick away from safety. Perhaps a potion would have done it, but I don't know.
Here's me sticking the landing. I totally didn't aggro that strider either, even though it looks like I'm practically landing on top of him.
Here's the map showing my landing zone. I always manage to overshoot to the north and come in either north or east of Auberdine. This year I managed to end up a little south east of town and still didn't manage to actually pass over it.
These Moonkin sure are happy this was just a training exercise and I wasn't actually parachuting in to commando-raid their little village.
And finally, here I am fulfilling a dream! Last year when we jumped into Menethil, I very much wanted to clear the buildings and land in the middle of town. I came very close, but I actually landed to the right of the forge.
This year, on New Year's Day, I was able to trade Germaine some of my spare beer and we headed out to try our luck. And with hax paladin horse aura, we made it!
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!