My favouire (and also lore-relevant) rare mob in the game is *Snarlmane* . He is a lvl 23 undead rare gnoll on Fenris Isle, Silverpine Forest but most players probably don't know his history. Even though Illidan Stormrage's attempt to destroy the Frozen Throne with the power of the Eye of Sargeras was unsuccessful, the Lich King's power severely weakened and Arthas had to rush to his master's aid in Northrend. Due to the Lich King's weakening control a minor part of the Scourge became self-conscious, and led by Sylvanas Windrunner, they sought to conquer the remains of the Kingdom of Lordaeron by eliminating the remnant of the failed Burning Legion and the doomed last Alliance resistance. Thus the Civil War of the Plaguelands began. Despite the Legion's failure on Kalimdor, the remaining Nathrezim dreadlords still commanded a formidable force in Lordaeron, so Sylvanas and her Forsaken undead were vastly outnumbered. To overcome numbers of the dreadlords' armies, she decided to possess the local savage creatures' chieftains (and also the bandit lord, called Blackthorn) with her banshees to lead these armies against the dreadlords. Among the savages Sylvanas turned to her side was the ogre lord, Mug'thol (who was under Sylvanas' control until he found the Crown of Will to regain his freedom and you might know him from the eponymous quest), and also *Snarlmane* the gnoll warlord who appears as an undead rare mob in the times of World of Warcraft. How *Snarlmane* died is unknown, but apparently he was raised as an undead by the Scourge necromancer and former Dalaran wizard, Thule Ravenclaw.

Finding a rare mob in classic was an exciting thing, even though the loot wasn't all that great , just finding something odd in an area you thought you knew was magical.

Im not lucky or observant... except for when it comes to a Jedi Warlock upload! Keep up the awesome content =D

My favorite memory of when I first started playing involves Narillasanz. A fresh level 30ish warrior and friends, making the journey up the river to see what there is to see, suddenly obliterated by a massive dragon. Since 2007, whenever I'm in the area, I think of that and it makes me smile.

There is something uniquely charming about vanilla and the way it was designed, rare mobs included. Running into a rare that you'd never seen before could be spooky, but it'd also encourage you to group up and bring it down before somebody else did. The loot didn't even matter. The stories that WoW generated organically are what we all remember most fondly.

This guy doesn’t miss. These are the very types of wow videos I could listen to for hours: a mix of learning something new while exploring the old world we’ve grown to love over the last 20 years. Keep them up bro!

Woah these hidden stories were really cool! Makes you wonder how why they scrapped these questlines..

The unused Horde quest in the Wetlands means there was some intent that the player continued their questing from one zone to the other in EK instead of hitting a dead end at Arathi Highlands and having to backtrack to keep leveling.

These videos have been amazing! Please consider doing another like this.

This was cool! I'd love to see more cut content relating to quests and rare mobs, I've spent a LOT of time farming rares for greens to add to my collections or sell on the AH and I can't count how many times I've been like "Huh, I wonder what the story is here" when I find a rare Naga among a bunch of Murlocs or something. Great video!

Harvest Golem Mystery - one of the best Turtle WoW quest lines actually explaining with lore appropriate reasons why, where, who and when … too good to skip on that.

Damn. Need a series of this! I occasionally remember stumbling into rare spawns thinking "huh, seems to be some lore here". Always found the Dark Iron Ambassador in Gnomeregan interesting. Felwood also had some funny ones - uncorrupted beasts for example. Or Varo'then in Aszhara who got reduced from legendary commander(?) to a rare spawn, hah. Duggan Wildhammer in Easter Plaguelands too.

Harb Foulmountain kind of reminds me of Balgaras the Foul in the Wetlands. A dwarf warlock said to be the mastermind behind the Dark Iron attack on Dun Modr + Thandol Span, but Balgaras himself is a Bronzebeard dwarf, not a Dark Iron. Different clan, just like Harb & the Grimtotems, but allies all the same (probably because of Ironforge's poor view of warlocks).

Maybe back when they were creating Vanilla, it might just simply have been cases of "Whoops, this will overlevel players by the time they reach X and we can choose between tweaking the exp of all the quests or cull some of the easier to remove missions involving very few NPCs".

Keep doing these Rare Mobs investigations, so good!

Happy to have found your channel! Loving getting to experience more depth in the game world through your videos.

very cool video, rares mobs and unused quests are super interesting. You should make that a serie

Had no idea about the zeppelin above Dun Modir!! Rad

I farmed that ogre in Hillsbrad when I was leveling my rogue. I had a streak for about 2 days of grinding where I had the place to myself and where the ogre would pop up roughly every 10-15 minutes, and he dropped blues quite frequently. I earned a few hundred gold just farming that spot for those two days, but I decided to leave and chase xp when I outleveled them.

Neat! I remember running through Algaz on my shaman in classic and thinking it would have been a fun zone to have quests in. Shame the horde missed out on that.

Rare mobs have always captured my attention. Kind of like chests theyre usually located at the end of caves or in obscure places and thats what made classic great was you were rewarded for exploring the land!!!! Love rare mobs!!! 🥰🥰🥰🥰

There are actually a lot of interesting rares in WoW from Classic to WotLK. One of the most interesting and well known rares is Speaker Mar'grom, a rare in Blade's Edge Mountains. He's unusually chatty for a rare and has a lot of lines. He walks around the ogre camps and preaches to overthrow their Gronn overlords (which is quite interesting piece of lore if you know the story introduced in WoD, namely the story of Ogre Rebelion), but also preaches against seeking Ogri'la (either because he thinks a peaceful solution is fragile or because he doesn't believe in it). A noble soul trying to liberatehis people. it's a shame that he's a xenophobe and attacks everyone who isn't ogre. Another rare from BC I absolutely love is Doomsayer Jurim. He's interesting because judging by his race and clothing he's a member of Auchenai, but he's very far from Auchindoun Crypts itself. One hint as of why he is out in the field right now might be his warlock shoulderpads, which have a very distinctive look. I have two theories: 1) Those are supposed to be heads of his dead bretheren (Unlikely due to the shape). 2) Those are demon heads. And since demons has returned back on Outland, he decided to go outside and take vengence on Burning Legion. Unfortunately he's not Maraad or Ixamos and cannot be redeemed, so we'll have to put his troubled mind to rest. Lastly I'd like to point out Eastern and Western Plaguelands as points of interest. Why those two? Deathknights. And not just regular deathknights - rare ones. Why are they so interesting? Because they are named after WC III Deathknights, which implies that they are survived veterans from the Scourge campaign in Lordaeron. You have a lot of the old ones, such as Lord Darkscythe, Lord Maldazzar, Baron Bloodbane...the list goes on. While we speak of WC III vets I'd also like to point out one particular veteran that isn't in the plaguelands, but has connection to WC III - Illanna Dreadmoore. Illiana is interesting because she takes a last name after Duke Dreadmoore, which either implies she's either his wife/relative (and that he was an elf) or Blizzard was limited by male models at the time and softly retconned Dreadmoore into a female. But anyway, great video as always and I would love to see more like these!

I've never seen a video on these! I hope this is the start of a series.

Been watching this channel for a while and this video specifically is such good content, thought I knew all the hidden details of vanilla but never knew this as its a proper investigation into lore and files. Keep up the great work!!

Awesome stuff as always. Thank you for finding this

What could have been! I hope that as they continue to develop things like Season of Discovery, a lot of old unused quests and storylines get a new life in the live game.

Taming ‘The Rake’ as a Tauren Hunter …and Death Ravager as an Orc Hunter

Another excellent video really enjoyed it, keep doing what you're doing man!

Good research and better story telling, ty for the nice time

it seems to me, they wanted rares to have more meaningful objectives, turns out in practice would have been a nightmare, good call.

Fantastic video! Thank you so much!!

Hry JediWarlock! If you haven't done so, you should start a draenei playthrough because their starting zone is just as (if not more so) awesome as the blood elves starting zone. There's also a ton of environmental story telling. Even a campsite or two on the far side of the islands.

I'd quite liked Blizz to have implemented some quests to hunt down the rare mobs - make it another category of quest that you can pick up to hunt down a specific rare mob (like Warlord Ma'Ruk) instead of just giving them a quest item drop when defeated.

Great video and research! I love this game it has so many stories and secrets

you could have mentioned harb foulmountain having lines to the escort npc next to arnak

super fucking cool. and honestly, i was hoping they would do more with the things they cut in SoD but they never did.... such a shame

rare mob hunting was a fun way to keep exploring great places 🙂

This was very interesting to listen! I would love if this video turned into series

Would love to hear more of these, and your series on the terrain and rocks of Azeroth.

Jediwarlock, You're so talented! I had to hit the like button!

Relevant to the horde in wetlands thing, if u get into an alpha wow emulator (0.5.3) and go there as horde, the small arrow in the minimap will show dun modr as a point of interest, as it will tarren mill if you are in hillbsrad. Not sure it means anything, but thought i should share

This makes me wonder if the wetlands being a contested zone was just accidentally left in after the horde quests were cut. So much menethil harbor griefing that shouldnt have been possible

Hey Jediwarlock, something I was wondering about recently: how come the centaur in Desolace crowd around giant stone architecture, even though they show no sign whatsoever of being skilled builders anywhere in the game? I always used to assume these stone structures were made by the centaur, but recently it dawned on me that that assumption isn't so reasonable at all.

During early P2 on the way to level 40 in SoD, my brother was eating on a bridge in Thousand Needles and Harb spawned right on top of him, right on the bridge. He almost died to the knock back lol, and that's how I learned about that NPC.

foulmountain is likely not that deep outside of a developer oversight. Most grimtotem are safe-to-say; based off of the same set of npcs. One of the things included in this set of variables is voicelines for attacks/death/hurt, and if the game allows - friendly interaction-voicelines, of which the grimtotem dont have any. In the grimtotems case, they were likely just designed to be enemies, but Foulmountain; being more based off of regular tauren, likely keeps his friendly interactions because of this. You can hear the friendly voicelines if you mind control him - and you wont hear any if you mind control a grimtotem

I'm pretty sure you were super happy, more than ever, when you realized you have access to THE database with unused quests :D It's literally a what-if and lore goldmine

amazing as always

This is a great topic!!!

With the cut elementals on one of the towers in 1k needles he was prolly a NPC involved with that.

I have a headcanon/theory about Narillasanz (and some other wayward colored-flight associated dragons we fought in Classic). It's never quite gelled with me that our murders against these flights were just forgotten about after Classic and that, indeed, the next time we interacted with the main flights significantly in Wrath of the Lich King we were even friendly, allied, and assisting each other. I feel Narillasanz may very well be a "criminal" dragon or an outcast. It would fit in with the dragon's sense of justice as well. Alexstrasza, the Dragon Queen, being the Aspect of Life, would never sentence someone to death. Indeed, even when there's an obvious need to kill someone or something, Alexstrasza and her flight feel pain at having to do so. (Even at the Wrathgate, the red flight's breath was only to put those in agony by the New Plague out of their misery, as they were already lost. It was not meant to kill still-healthy combatants outright or they would have destroyed both faction's outposts there as well.) Perhaps Narillasanz was preying upon intelligent creatures, something the dragonflights are known to loathe. That would also explain why Narillasanz is flagged as not only hostile, but aggressive. The other dragons we fight in Classic could likewise be outcasts, criminals, or hiding from their respective flights as well. The ones we encounter for the Onyxia attunement especially: perhaps they had absconded from their flights, taking with them trinkets of great power that we happened to need - and that they had no right to possess in the first place. I like to think the quest NPCs were already in contact with leadership of the dragonflights at this time (and that's how the information and quest to retrieve these items fell to us) and while there was an uneasy truce, any kind of friendship, partnership, or cooperation between the mortal races and the dragons was in it's infancy at this time. This also explains why we only run into and work with a handful of dragons (mostly mid-to-low-level consiglieres) in Classic - and only towards the endgame, as the endgame portrays the events furthest down the timeline. I could go on, but I think you get my point without anymore verbosity. P.S. - I like your theory, but the close proximity to Alexstrasza's roost that Narillasanz is found in, as well as the fact that it's been four years, makes it hard for me to believe Alexstrasza's bleeding heart wouldn't have sought out them and any other wayward dragons in the Northern Eastern Kingdoms at the least during the intervening time.

Every hardcore player knows about Narillasanz

Don't forget The outrunners in the Barrens and Loch Modan! The Tauren rare in Loch Modan also curiously shares a surname with the civilian NPC Samantha Swifthoof in Stranglethorn vale!

cool we need more of this

great content!

The video is well made but I found it a little boring. Lots of speculation based on unused scripts. But props to bringing up something original

Great video indeed

Hi Jedi! Slight error at 5:34. There's a few rare mobs that technically _are_ related to quests -- specifically, they drop items that start quests. Several are in the Barrens.

I just finished a 2h long call, while seeing forward to this video the whole time I!

ive got maruks belt, warchiefs girdle. been trying to auction but no luck

so cool!

I actualy know what the zepplin wreck is referencing and its the event of "day of the dragon"

Man your content slaps

This is the season of discovery/ classic + we need, a season for them to implement the original unfinished pieces of classic

I suspect that Harb might have been connected to the burned inn bordering the barrens and the marsh. I remember that the questline strongly hinted that it was the Grimtotem from the south being the culprit and the closest Grimtotems were those in the thousand needles. I spent hours killing Grimtotems and looking for any named mobs hoping that one of them would drop an item of evidence from the inn arson that would start a quest to finish that questline since vanilla had several of those quests.

very Quality LORE

This channel's name is perfect for me. 😀

Lucky or observant? Nah, I just have rarescanner :)

I prefer these old dragon ui symbols.

how did u catch the raremobs on video tape?

+++ love all your videos

One teensy tiny correction that's more nitpicking than anything: Dun Modr is pronounced 'Mo-dra'. Otherwise, pretty interesting stuff.

I think the rare Tauren was suppost to be the original escort quest mob (not the female tauren) or maybe a decoy that u had to kill after talkin to.

you and your world of warcraft radio Voice~~ :3 always make the vids even more special. you got such a golden radio voice lmao, also why is narillasanz hostile? you'd think as he's a red drake he'd be at least neutral or friendly--

Lol I just fought Ma'ruk the other day on my rogue

yes

Oh my god the first drake, I remembered him from playing vanilla when I was like 11, and went looking for him several times over the years. I googled him and everything and couldn’t find any mention of him existing anywhere. Thought I was tripping. Thank you so much lol

Wauw.

I wish blizz added quest and actually tried out cool stuff for sod. Instead we got a copy pasta wotlk talent of runes, and bugs. Glad I decided to quit. People need to stop supporting such crap. This video is more interesting and shows that blizz could've used some of this...