Thursday, March 4, 2010

It came from the sea: Lady Vespia

World of Warcraft has a lot of ladies. Yeah, I can hear you start up the "all girls are played by guys" jokes right now, but I'm talking about NPC's with the epithet "lady" something-or-other.



The naga seem to be very fond of retaining the titles their ancestors likely held in night elf society. There are a lot of princes, ladies and lords, found anywhere from the early zones of the old world to the raids of The Burning Crusade. And with the naga scheduled to be a big part of Cataclysm, I imagine we'll see a lot more of them soon.

Who is she?
Lady Vespia is one of the lesser rare mob nagas. Prior to The Burning Crusade, naga could not be equipped with any special armor or weapon options, so she basically has the standard female naga body type, albeit with a nice color scheme.

Where is she?



Lady Vespia may be found in the Zoram Strand, on the western edge of Ashenvale Forest in Kalimdor. She can usually be found near a small island right off the coast, slowly wandering around the island and swimming around the water.

Zoram Strand is the location of the well-known dungeon Blackfathom Deeps, a former night elf temple now long desecrated and infested with naga, satyrs and twilight cultists doing their evil deeds. The strand itself is littered with the remains of wrecked craft and great sea-creatures brought there by the naga.

What's her story?



I'm assuming that Lady Vespia belongs to the Wrathtail naga who infest the area, presumably having come here from the deeps to aid her brethren in some nefarious scheme related to the demonic or the Old Gods. Vespia is (like many other naga females) a frost mage, who uses water and ice magic against intruders. Female naga tend to dominate the males in their society (in a twisted reflection of night elf society), and presumably Vespia is a lesser leader among the Wrathtail, along with Ruuzel (who oddly enough is a melee type).



It's interesting to note that throughout the Darkshore questlines there is a constant theme of the naga emerging from the depths all over the coast and their huge slave-beasts washed up as corpses on the sand, and Vespia and her kin fit in with this.

A case of mistaken identity?

I should point out that Lady Vespia should not be confused with her fellow naga rarespawn Lady Vespira, who is found in Darkshore. Why such similar names? I have no clue.



Of the two (I'll get to Vespira eventually) I'm going to have to say that Vespia has the nicer coloration. There's just something about the subdued orange tones that looks very good, despite the model being quite old by now.

On a final note there has been some reports that Vespia can sometimes drop the quest item required for the quest Ruuzel, but as I can find no reliable information on this I'm going to guess it was a bug that's been fixed, or pure flights of fancy.

Until next time, stay out of the deep end of the pool.

~Dragonshade