“Hey, can anyone tell me how to find Mankrik’s wife in WoW?” It's been a running joke among Horde-faction players ever since they first hit The Barrens.
That’s because Blizzard made that quest objective nearly impossible to find, as new World of Warcraft Classic players will be discovering. Along with 'Barrens chat,' which has become a meme representing the most-inane collection of dad jokes, Chuck Norris-isms, and other zone discussion in the game, Mankrik and his wife are the stuff of WoW legend.
Mankrik himself is easy enough to locate; he wanders Crossroads, the largest Horde settlement in the Barrens. There he asks passing adventurers to help him find his missing lady in WoW's Lost in Battle quest.
They were battling Bristlebacks (half-boar, half-human creatures) when they became separated and he fell, you're told. He awoke to find a healer tending to him, but with his wife nowhere to be found. And while he appears to have completely recovered from his wounds, he’d still like you to be the one to find her. Typical.
The reason for all the hype about Mankrik is the dearth of directions in the quest text. Unlike modern WoW—which gives you a giant golden arrow on the mini-map to tell you where to go for a quest objective—Classic Warcraft requires you to read the quest, check your map, and go exploring to find your target.
Here are the directions you receive from the quest for Mankrik’s wife:
- It’s a “small Tauren camp.” (Spoiler: there are no Tauren.)
- Their attackers were Bristlebacks, so presumably you can look for those. (But there really aren’t any in the immediate vicinity of his wife, when you find her.)
- He fell “on the Gold Road,” one of the longest paths in World of Warcraft.
You can see the Gold Road in the image below. It stretches the length of one of the longer zones in the game, splitting it in two from north to south. Crossroads is about halfway down. The tiny arrow near the centre is where Mankrik’s wife can be found.
There are ten different kinds of Bristleback monsters in World of Warcraft. At least four of which are found in The Barrens, in a large swath dividing the zone from east to west. They’re not close to the Crossroads, but that’s pretty much par for the course in WoW Classic.
To get to the right place, head south along the Gold Road from the Crossroads—as if you were going to Camp Taurajo—until you cross a dry riverbed. Look west and you’ll see a couple of small tents. If you’re using a coordinates add-on, they’re at about 49,50.
Mankrik’s wife (called Nadia, in case you didn't know) is on a patch of ground blocked by those tents. She is small, prone, and does a good job of blending with her surroundings. She's also labeled only as “a beaten corpse” if you mouse over her.
To complete the quest, you must inspect her, then inspect her more closely using dialogue options that pop up. Then make the long run back to Mankrik in the Crossroads with the bad news. Voila! Enjoy your nine silver.
