The folks at Blizzard: SVU have finally put to rest a 16-year-old cold case — Mankrik’s wife has been found. As reported by Wowhead, Olgra, wife of Mankrik, can be found in World of Warcraft Shadowlands’s Maldraxxus zone, where vengeful and warlike spirits are sent to rest.
According to Wowhead, reporting on the Shadowlands beta, Olgra is “now a gladiator for the Undying Army, and is in the area squishing Ranishu mobs.” Finding Mankrik’s wife used to be a rite of passage for new Horde players upon reaching the vast Barrens zone. Players would find the distraught orc Mankrik, who, after being overwhelmed by a swarm of quilboars, awakens to find his beloved wife missing. He asks you to find her, a difficult task due the sheer size of the search area. In the early days of WoW, before addons and updates simplified finding quest objectives, if you got lost or stuck on a quest, you simply asked your question in your zone’s general chat channel, hoping some charitable soul would provide the needed information. New players, all stuck on the same quest, frequently spammed Barrens’ Chat (a channel notorious for being a wretched hive of scum and villainy) asking “Where’s Mankrik’s wife?”
As a WoW player, I spent most of my time playing for the opposing Alliance faction, and yet, for the handful of times I rolled Horde, I remember having trouble finding Mankrik’s wife. The question became a meme in WoW mythology, representing something exceedingly difficult to find even though you do eventually find her…or rather her corpse.
When the Cataclysm expansion changed the starting areas, the quest to find Mankrik’s wife was removed and the bereaved orc built a small monument in her honour. Here’s hoping that Shadowlands, dropping November 23rd, reunites players with even more beloved and long-dead characters from Warcraft’s past. Personally, I’m looking forward to seeing Old Blanchy again.
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