3. Blade’s Edge Quests
These give Ogri’la and Sha’tari Skyguard reputation. At Honored Skyguard you can catch a free flight straight from Skettis to Ogri’la, and vice-versa. These quests give you monetary rewards and Apexis Shards, which are used to power some quest items, buy rewards from the rep vendor (including health and mana pots that work in the Blade’s Edge plateaux and Gruul’s Lair) and buy flasks from the crystalforges in Forge Camp: Wrath and Bashir’s Landing. These flasks can be used in Gruul’s Lair, and are very useful for it. In the early days of these dailies you will be scrounging for Apexis Shards (which also drop off mobs killed in the area); after a few weeks, you’ll have more than you know what to do with.

3.1 Precursors:
These are the worst precursors of the lot, because they include 5x 5-man quests. Most of them can be 3- or 4-manned, but the second-last quest absolutely requires 5 people to summon the boss.

They begin with a quest from an ogre in Lower City (below the Scryer bank) to speak to Mog’dorg the Wizened, at the Circle of Blood in Blade’s Edge Mountains. Mog’dorg will give you 3x 5-man quests to kill gronns and loot items from them.

They are:

* Grulloc – near the entrance to Gruul’s Lair in Blade’s Edge mtns
* Maggoc – paths around the Death’s Door area in Blade’s Edge mtns
* Slaag – in a hut in the Barrier Hills, on the north edge of Shattrath

Now, there’s an important trick to these quests. The gronn all drop their quest items on the ground, and it is clickable by anyone nearby; it doesn’t have to be looted off the body, and there’s no limit to how many people can loot it. So if there’s a 5-man group going through just ahead of you, just help them out and you can loot the item too when they’re done. However, if you get your own 5-man group for it, the item is (as far as I know), bugged – if there’s anyone in your group that has already done the quests, the item will not drop at all. So you may need to form 2 smaller groups, and make sure that the group with people who haven’t done the quest is the first group to tap the mob. (Some reports say that this bug has now been fixed; however, if you’re having problems with the quest item not dropping, check it out just in case.)

Once you’ve finished these 3 quests, head back to Mog’dorg, and he gives you a quest called Grim(oire) Business. This quest takes you to the NE of Blade’s Edge mtns (just near the bridge to Netherstorm) and absolutely requires 5 people to summon the mob. Everyone stands in little fiery circles and when all 5 circles are full the mob appears in the middle; the fight is basically just a tank and spank (with massive shadow damage, so Prayer of Shadow Protection/Shadow Resist Aura really helps) with one twist: at one point the mob enrages/grows, and everyone (including the tank) needs to run back into the fiery circles briefly to dispel this effect, or it’s almost-certain death for the party. Note that this mob is the same as the first 3 in terms of looting the item he drops (can loot another group’s kill; can’t have party members who’ve already done it). Also, you want to move out of those fiery circles as soon as the effect has been dispelled; if you stay in there too long it’ll summon a second copy of the mob, which is of course wipe city.

After that it’s back to Mog’dorg again, and he’ll give you the final quest: Into the Soulgrinder. The quest spot is on the valley floor of Blade’s Edge, west-ish of Evergrove. Once the quest item is activated, non-elite spirits appear and must be killed while the elite is slowly being summoned by the quest item. It’s a little similar to (although much easier than) the last event of the level 60 warlock epic mount quest chain, in Dire Maul. Once he is summoned, it’s a standard tank and spank, and the item he drops can be looted by anyone (and again, I think it’s a case of not having a previously-completed person in your party too). He summons mobs to help fight you, but they’re not a particularly big deal.

Once you’ve handed in the last quest item to Mog’dorg there’s an extremely cool ogre event – stick around for it! – and then he sends you off to Ogri’la.

Once you’re at Ogri’la (and there’s a Skyguard camp connected to Ogri’la, as well), there are a couple more easy precursors to do, but to be honest I’ve almost completely forgotten what they are. Basically it’s just a matter of doing all the non-group quests you get given, until you have access to the daily quests below.

3.2 Quest Details:
There are four daily quests in Blade’s Edge mountains, although one of them is only available when you hit Honored with Ogri’la.

Generally, be careful on flying mounts in the Blade’s Edge plateaus, as there are four circling elite dragons who’ll breath fire on you and dismount you (incoming ‘thin smear’ death) if you fly too high and/or get in their way. Try not to fly much above the level of the crystal formations if you can.

Emanations
This is much like the ‘Simple Simon’ electronic memory game many people used to play as children. You activate a crystal shard, and it spits out ever-increasing color sequences that you have to mirror by clicking on colored buttons on the ground. For instance, the first one might be a yellow beam, so you click the yellow button; the second one might be a green beam and a blue beam, so you click green and then blue; etc etc. You wait for each sequence to finish before inputting the colors. The first version of this quest requires you to complete it up to a six-color sequence; the repeatable daily version requires you to complete it up to an eight-color sequence.

Tracking the color order is almost impossible unless you have an incredible memory, so there’s several ways to do it. You can use a mod called Ogri’lazy, although I don’t personally like it; you can write whispers to yourself as the colors are flashing, to tell yourself what to press, or you can write it down. I do the latter, which is why there are scraps of paper reading “GBYYY” and “RYBRBBG” all over my desk.

Rays
Now this is where all the tanks and healers come into their own! This quest requires you to find Aether Rays (fairly easy to spot as they’re the only non-aggro mobs, ie look for the yellow nameplates). DPS them down to below 20%, then use the wrangling rope on them to tame them. Repeat four times, then hand in.

The tricky bit is not accidentally critting at 21% and killing them. Cries of “&*(@#$% rays!” in guildchat can generally be attributed to an unlucky crit.

Note that this quest can be griefed by other people, if they choose to kill the ray you’re about to wrangle. For the sake of blood pressure, dismiss them as a tool and move on. I recommend trying a different quest for a while, as the people who do this generally love to follow you around and kill every ray you pull.

Bombing
Like the Skettis quests, there’s a bombing run. The environmental danger here is not birds, but ground-based Legion Fel Cannons, which swivel around and track people on flying mounts; they fire a sequence of three fireballs before taking a break and then firing again. If you get hit by a fireball or run into an explosion, you get dismounted and hit with the “Fel Flak Fire” debuff, which does a nasty fire damage dot. Plus falling damage. Whee!

If you’re on a non-epic mount, your best bet is to stay up hiiiiigh – the dragons don’t patrol over the forge camps, so you can get high enough to get out of the range of the fel cannons – and just swoop down and bomb when your bomb cooldown is up, then swoop back up out of range again. If you’re on an epic mount, I recommend staying in constant motion, swooping around the camp and loosing your bomb every time the cooldown is up. Note that the cooldown is being halved in patch 2.2, so the limiting factor will be mount speed instead of bomb cooldown as it is now.

Banishing
This quest is only accessible once you’ve got Honored Ogri’la reputation. You have to run around the forge camps killing demons, within range of portals (which you place using a crystal that the questgiver gives you). Some tricks:

* The demon needs to be in range of the portal, signified by them having a glowy purple cloud around them, and/or lines of purple lightning between them and the portal.
* If the portal despawns before you kill your demon, no credit. If you think your portal’s been up for too long, put down another one: better safe than sorry.
* If you’re killing a demon and it’s not in range of your portal, but it is in range of someone else’s, they’ll get credit. Which means that assholes may try and pull your demons off you and kill them at their portal instead. Do everything in your power to hold as much agro on your mobs as possible, to prevent them from being able to.

[Quick links: Dailies I: Intro, Dailies II: Skettis, Dailies III: Blade’s Edge, Dailies IV: Netherwing]