World of Warcraft has a lot of poop quests, these are the best ones

Few things in the fast-moving and constantly-changing world of video games have enough longevity that they can be described as traditions, but World of Warcraft’s poop quests probably qualify.

There’s been at least one quest in each expansion since 2007’s Burning Crusade that contrives some reason to send your god-slaying hero elbows deep into a pile of feces. The good news is that World of Warcraft characters wear gloves. That they never take off. Or clean. And wear while they eat.

The scatological adventures had been relatively subdued in Warlords of Draenor and Legion; only one quest in each of those expansions had you directly handling shit. But Battle For Azeroth is a return, in many ways, to WoW’s roots. And apparently one of those roots is poop quests, because I’ve seen three of them in less than a week of playing.

Fan sites have already compiled exhaustive lists of quests and references to poop, so this isn’t a guide to getting your hands dirty; instead it’s a highlight list of the five best poop quests Blizzard has ever done, and one honorable mention. And two of them are from the new expansion.

It turns out you can shine a turd. Here are the five times Blizzard has done it best.

Honorable mention: A Rare Bean

So, there’s trouble among the water elementals at the Throne of the Elements in the Nagrand region of Burning Crusade’s Outland. The Draenei elementalist Lo’ap has a plan to cleanse the corruption, but you’ll need to be able to breathe underwater in order to confront it. Don’t worry, though. He knows just how to help you with that.

Nagrand is a lush savannah, populated by roaming herds of antelope-like Talbuk, elephant-like Elekk and rhino-like Clefthoof. Which means Nagrand is covered in piles of shit. And in those piles, you can find a Nagrand caracoli, a rare bean that enables underwater breathing.

So Lo’ap sends you to sift through the piles of rhino and elephant dung looking for this special treasure, and the quest reward is five “Nagrand Cherries” which you can consume to allow you to breathe underwater.

This one makes the list because you pick these seeds out of the poo, and then put the seeds into your mouth. And also because poop-sifting for rare beans is a real thing in the real world.

5. Fertilizer Duty

OK, first of all, this Battle for Azeroth world quest is called “Fertilizer Duty,” and “duty” sounds like “doody.” So this is already a winner out of the gate. But what really makes this quest is the incredibly tight reasoning that justifies the escapade.

Your faction wants to start farming in the harsh Vol’Dun desert. And, apparently, what you need is fertilizer. So what you are going to do is take a bunch of steaks and then you’re going to sneak up on some hyenas, and throw the steaks at them. The hyenas will eat the steaks, and then they’re going to poop. And then you sneak up behind them and steal the shit.

Just to go over this again: You need food. You have steaks. Your mission is to facilitate the exchange of steaks for dogshit. Which will be used for agricultural purposes. Why not skip the farming process altogether, and just provision the 7th Legion with steaks? If we’re dead set on this agricultural boondoggle, we should still let the soldiers eat the steaks, and just tell them to poop in the fields. They may look at you funny, but they’d probably do it.

And even if we accept that it is strategically necessary for the 7th Legion to get its hands on a bunch of shit, there are many ways of obtaining shit. Why is the go-to plan for shit-gathering to send the Champion of the Alliance into a den full of hyenas carrying a satchel loaded with bloody steaks?

4. Pooped

The Order of the Cloud Serpent raise majestic Chinese-inspired dragons in their sanctuary located in Pandaria’s Jade Forest. And if you undertake the job of raising a cloud serpent from a hatchling by doing daily quests for a couple of months, you can earn the honor of riding one of these beasts as your very own flying mount.

But the Order of the Cloud Serpent are playing a prank on you: They gave you a hatchling that is riddled with intestinal parasites. As a result, your serpent, panicked and in pain, will escape from its pen and shit uncontrollably all over the landscape, and the excrement will be crawling with aggressive carnivorous worms. Knowing this will happen ahead of time will not save you, or the dragon. There is nothing you can do.

You will have to kill the worms and clean everything up before the Order discovers the mess, instead of calling in a dragon veterinarian or demanding that the Order give you a serpent that isn’t sick.

Also this is a daily quest, so it will happen over and over and over.

3. Shizz Work

So, this guy in Burning Crusade’s Hellfire Peninsula lost his keys, and he thinks his dog ate them. Actually, the dog is a demonic felhound, because this is, after all, the Hellfire Peninsula. The guy wants you to take his demon dog for a walk and root around in the poop and find the keys after the felhound does its business.

This quest is special because of when and where it happens: Hellfire Peninsula is the introductory zone of World of Warcraft’s first expansion. This was the first time Blizzard had added new questing zones since the game’s launch more than two years earlier. It was the first time Blizzard had raised the game’s level cap. And it was the first time Blizzard had hit the reset button on gear and accumulated progress.

So, you came through the Dark Portal and into the new zone resplendent in matching epic raid sets from Vanilla WoW’s 40 man raids: Molten Core, Blackwing Lair and Naxxramas. And you were immediately confronted with green quest drops that were superior to that dearly won gear, and you started switching those iconic pieces out for random green quality armor.

And then, this guy asked you, the hero who had faced the Elemental Lord of Fire, the Prince of the Black Dragonflight and Kel’Thuzad, right hand of the Lich King, to walk his dog and root around in the dog poop to see if it contained his lost keys.

And when you rooted around in the poop, it gave you a debuff called “stanky,” which turned you green and made stink lines come off of you. Stay classy, World of Warcraft.

2. Rodrigo’s Revenge

Rodrigo has an idea to play a prank on the denizens of Battle For Azeroth’s pirate fortress of Freehold. He’s got a giant, sick parrot, and he wants you to ride around on this huge bird, spraying hot torrents of diarrhea all over everyone. The goal is to shit on a hundred pirates.

1. Mmm … Amberseeds.

This right here is the gold standard for poop-related adventuring in the World of Warcraft. This epic quest chain begins when you find a bucket of delicious nuts in the quaint Amberpine Lodge in Wrath of the Lich King’s Grizzly Hills region. You’re a hungry adventurer, so you eat the nuts.

But it turns out the nuts are special magical Amberseeds, which the people of Grizzly Hills are relying on to feed them all season. And they need them back.

So, you’re sent off to collect the ingredients for a powerful, magical laxative, and then you are dispatched to the outhouse to retrieve the goods. When you return the amberseeds, they are restored to the bucket for the next hungry adventurer to find, allowing the cycle to continue.