Hallow's End is scheduled to begin in a few hours, and you know we loves us some candy. There's been a big change to the Achievement needed to get the "Hallowed" title (it's actually gotten a lot easier), the Headless Horseman has a new loot table, and -- well, it's been a year since we've seen it anyway, so here's a round-up of WoW Insider's articles on Hallow's End. As an FYI, we're also expecting patch 3.03 to hit alongside Hallow's End, and it should contain a number of bug fixes for problems that have cropped up since 3.02 hit Tuesday and some class tweaks. With that said, nobody's 100% certain of what's actually going to go live, so check back; we should have more information this weekend.

Read on for a guide to the holiday quests, the new Achievement related to the holiday, and some fun stuff you can do ingame til November 1st!

EDIT (11:50 pm EST): we've confirmed a few changes to the holiday with some readers on the EU realms, and I've updated the post.

Quests

• Call the Headless Horseman, which allows you to summon the holiday boss once per day per person in Scarlet Monastery graveyard. If you've never done the Headless Horseman before, don't worry; he's pretty straightforward, and we have a video guide here if you want a look at the fight. Wowwiki also has a nice write-up on strategy for him here. UPDATE: we've heard from commenter z3rb and another reader on the EU realms that this year it looks like each player will get TWO summons, and not just one. We're still waiting to confirm this on the U.S. and Oceanic servers as the event hasn't gone live here yet, but for now plan on having 10 attempts at the Horseman per 5-man group (assuming no one in the group has summoned him previously that day). And yes, the mount is dropping! UPDATE: more people have chimed in and let us know that the two-summon deal is the likely result of being able to kill him for the first time with a quest given, and the second time (for the daily) with your regular summon. It's unlikely to be a multi-day thing. Ah well.
  

• Masked Orphan Matron/Costumed Orphan Matron: Commoners in major cities will give you a quest to speak to orphan matrons in Brill, Falconwing Square, or Razor Hill (Horde), or Azure Watch, Goldshire, or Kharanos (Alliance). The matrons will give you a quest called Fire Training (Horde) or Fire Brigade Practice to practice dousing nearby fires with buckets of water. Once you've finished that, you can participate in Stop the Fires! (Horde) or Stop the Fires! (Alliance), which will occur simultaneously in all three of your faction's villages every four hours.
  

• Trick-or-Treating for Orphans: Commoners will also direct you to the orphanages in either Orgrimmar or Stormwind for Hallow's End Treats for Spoops (Horde) or Hallow's End Treats for Jesper (Alliance). These are pretty easy quests that just require you to visit your faction's major cities in order to pick up special candy for your youngster, and will also grant you some pretty nice faction rep.

• The biggest difference between the two factions' quests? You'll either engage in some mischief on behalf of the Forsaken, or gate-crash a party if you're Alliance. For the Horde, you can pick up Rotten Eggs and Stinking Up Southshore from Darkcaller Yanka, an NPC outside of Undercity. For the Alliance, you can pick up The Power of Pine and Crashing the Wickerman Festival from Sergeant Hartman in Southshore.
  

Hallow's End Achievement grants title

Some of these quests are actually Achievements in disguise, and for that you'll want our comprehensive guide to the steps you need to take for the meta-Achievement "Hallowed Be Thy Name," which will award you the title "The Hallowed."

Please note that there's been a big, and very welcome, update to this since that article went live; Blizzard has removed A Mask For All Occasions as a prerequisite to Hallowed Be Thy Name, I assume after realizing that collecting all 20 masks was next to impossible. So the two most difficult quests you'll need to worry about for this Achievement will be getting transformed by all the different wands, and getting the Sinister Squashling pet and Hallowed Helm. Still tough, but a lot more doable than trying to defy the statistical odds behind the mask drops.

Other Halloween goodies

And, while these aren't quests, don't forget to trick-or-treat at innkeepers all over Azeroth and Outland for various goodies and neat tricks like pumpkin heads, masks, and magic wands. Don't forget to visit the Wickerman Festival, done at 8:00 pm server time outside of Undercity each night of Hallow's End. We also have a few more things for you:

• Not getting lucky with the Sinister Squashling drop rate ingame? Make your own!

• A machinima trailer for Hallow's End fun from WoW Moviewatch.
  

• The Headless Horseman may drop a new -- and permanent -- mount this year!

• 16-slot and 18-slot bags are random world and instance drops during the holiday. While the Pumpkin 16-slot bags take the place of existing 16-slot bags on mobs' loot tables, the 18-slot Jack O'Lantern is an addition.

• Lots of spooky black cats will be appearing in cities as well. No stepping on them unless you want Bad Luck, and I think we can all agree that the drop rate on the Sinister Squashling is already bad enough to risk making it worse.

Enjoy your candy, and good luck!

Tags: achievement, achievements, crashing-the-wickerman-festival, hallowed-be-thy-name, hallows-end, hallows-end-2008, hallows-end-guide, headless-horseman, joystiqfeatures, mount, mounts, orphanage, orphans, patch, patch-3.0.3, patches, rotten-eggs, sinister-squashling, stinking-up-southshore, the-power-of-pine, tweet-this, undercity, wicker man, WickerMan

Filed under: Features, Events, Mounts, Guides, Bosses, Patches, Quests, News items, Achievements, How-tos