The first steps.

Well, cloudchaser was taken, so my shaman is now named cloudcaller, still a dreamy name for a Taurahe.

So, there he was standing, with the big yellow ! before him. Now I have done the tauren starting area a few times, so I knew how to run, and what to expect. Get a jug, kill some plainstriders, kill some wolves, kill some bears, some thistleburs...

Well, somethings have changed, the thistleburs are no longer aggressive, so the valley became a cake-walk. The times I died there in the past. And the mana-cost of your Lightning Bolt is only 3, combined with the all-new super mana/health regen till 20, I could just spam LB.

At lvl5 you get your first totem, the earth one. You need to walk all the way back into the thistlebur valley and kill two shamans, and then you have to find a stone. Not hard, a little time-consuming though.

After that, I made my way out of the starting-zone, picked up a lot of quests, and walked to Thunderbluff to learn skinning and leatherworking. It took me some walking around to find a skinning knife. The LW-supplier doesn't have one. I found a trade-goods vendor on the lowest level tucked away in a tent, so I missed her twice, that sold one.

Back to bloodhoof, and start killing everything that moves. After two circles I reached level 10 (luckily SAN had some bags in the guildbank). So the next stop was a quest-giver in the barrens for my next totem.

I took the new zeppelin to ogrimmar, to pick up the Flightpath, and to learn some more weaponskills. The zeppelin had a vend-o-matic (yeah, food and drinks) and a gear-o-matic (where I could get a skinning knife....).

When I reached the zep-tower, I noticed a yellow ! on the map. Apparantly a troll wants me to get some anti-dote. I have never noticed this quest until now, well, what would you do in that corner before the tower was put there?

Now, this lvl10-shaman-quest... that's time-consuming. The NPC in the barrens send you up the hidden path to a troll. He then wants two reagents. One is dropped by lvl12-13 casters, who stand in the middle of a lot of other thistleburs, and some patrolling hunters. The other reagent is in a cave North-East of... that orc-town. It is also on a place you will almost not see, unless you walk to it.

After returning the items, I had to fight a fire-elemental. To my surprise an 80-pally was standing on the top. What is he doing there, this is for shammans only, but, well, he just healed me, while I killed the elemental. And back to the original quest-giver to get my fire-totem.

This quest took me about an hour I think, the places are not that close together, and I did some detouring (killing scorpids and getting crossroads-fp). I had hoped to reach lvl15, and do a random, but only reached 11.

And now, the barrenschat....