Today's PLP is actually a request. Reader Pol sent a request for this one (a while ago, actually-- sorry, I've been busy), and wanted to know the story behind these one easy-to-obtain and now very rare goggles.

Name: Speedy Racer Goggles
Type: Uncommon Cloth Head
Armor: 53 Armor
Abilities:

• +14 Intellect
• Pre 2.3, they've also got +14 Agility on them, but post 2.3, they've got +16 to healing and damage.
• Also, they're notable for being the only goggles in the game (I'm pretty sure-- someone speak up in the comments if this isn't true) that don't have an Engineering requirement to wear. If you have two professions that aren't Engineering, and you want to wear some shades, these are them.
• And as goggles in Azeroth go, they don't really look too bad. But there's a problem...

How to Get It: Erm, while these things were once super easy to come by, they're gone now. They used to be a reward for the Gahz'rilla quest that had you killing the big lizard in Zul'Farrak, but the other option from this quest was the famous mountspeed increaser Carrot on a Stick, so these goggles got neglected by most players coming through. Eventually, Blizzard decided that if no one wanted them, no one would have them, and the goggles got removed from the quest rewards, and are currently unavailable ingame.

But here's the thing. Blizzard, as you might know, recently did an upgrade of lowbie items, including lowbie quest items like these goggles. And these goggles, as you see above, did get upgraded. If anyone had them sitting in their bags, they'll see the +spell damage on the item, not the old Agility buff.

Does this mean Blizzard is bringing them back. Not necessarily likely-- instead of just tweaking each item separately, odds are that Blizzard just tweaked the recipes for the items, and thus this item got tweaked automatically. It may be coming back as part of the upgrades to Engineering (wouldn't it be great if Engineers could sell goggles like these?), but that's pure speculation at this point.

Still, this is a nice item. It's kind of a shame it got pushed out by Carrot on a Stick. Maybe we'll see the Speedy Racer Goggles again somewhere else in Azeroth in the future.

Getting Rid of It: Sells for 67s 45c to vendors, but if you got em, might as well hold on to them. They're as antique as items get in Azeroth.

Update: Commenter rockatansky points out that they are not the only non-Engie goggles. But I'd hazard a guess that they are the only vanilla WoW non-Engie goggles.

Tags: antique, gahzrilla, item, patch-2.3, phat-loot-phriday, phatlootphriday, quest, reward, speedy-racer-goggles

Filed under: Items, Odds and ends, Blizzard, Phat Loot Phriday