Journeys in Azeroth, Part Nine

The Armchair Empire has released the ninth installment to their "Journeys in Azeroth" diary series for Blizzard's World of Warcraft. An excerpt to follow:
Marching through the low-level tauren quests, things were very straightforward for my shaman. There's plenty to do, and their pacing is set out well so that there is no reason to do any grinding. The only time things got a little sketchy was while getting close to level 20 in the Barrens. There's a ton of quests that can be done at Crossroads, but the one problem is that there just aren't enough to get you to twenty. Players pretty much have to go to Ratchet, do some of the quests there, and possibly mosey on down to the Sepulcher in Silverpine Forest. The latter is actually a good idea if you're a tauren, though, since your reputation with the Forsaken will be only at neutral at the beginning of the game. Doing Sepulcher quests for a while goes a long way towards insuring that you can at least bump that reputation up to (friendly). In terms of questing at this point, though, things have remained pretty fun. About the only quests that have proven a bit of a drag are the shaman totem quests, as they can require a lot of legwork to complete. The quest for the water totem is proving particularly painful thus far, forcing me to travel halfway across creation to get things done.