Skruk has progressed his life into the 20s. It's always nice reaching these kind of rounded milestones in games, and especially when you're playing the game on a hardcore mode it starts feeling like a real achievement. Level 20 is now officially the highest level I've been in Hardcore World of Warcraft and each level from now on will be setting a new record.

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The Barren Barrens

Level 20 was reached by questing through the Barrens. This is one of the most iconic leveling zones for Horde players due to its size and amount of time characters spend here. You can start leveling here at level 10 and you don't have to leave until you're will into your 20s. Some people may spend 10-15 hours leveling through the Barrens alone. The Barrens chat is also a notorious place. Does anyone know where Mankrik's wife?

Coming here at level 18 didn't make the Barrens much of a challenge. I had to start out by completing grey quests to catch up which means my experience yield in the beginning was quite low. I would sometimes be killing grey enemies that doesn't give any experience. Luckily the quests still do.

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The Barrens mostly consists of killing wildlife to find out what's corrupted them, while also dealing with the Quillboar and Harpy incursions. Most quests lead up to the dungeon called the Wailing Caverns and I hope to have all quests in place and ready to go there at level 20. It's another risky play to go into a dungeon but this one should be easy enough with a good team and it yields some amazing rewards. One of the swords from a quest reward is amazing for rogues.

I did of course also complete the iconic quest of finding Mankrik's wife. Back in the day when the game didn't have quest trackers the Barrens general chat would be full of questions from people asking where to find his wife. It's been a meme in the community for 20 years, and both Mankrik and his wife has become such iconic characters that they both showed up as NPCs in the 20 year anniversary event for retail World of Warcraft.

All in all it's a sad story where you end up finding his wife beaten and dead.

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Ding, level 20

Now that I've made it to level 20 I need to start preparing for the Wailing Caverns dungeon. I'm gonna have to run around to a few towns and pick up quests and then craft some potions and foods to have some personal buffs to make it easier. Dungeons are always a risk so let's hope the life of Skruk doesn't end at level 20.

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^{All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.}

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