Posts with tag breakfast-topic

The Environmental Protection Agency is issuing a warning to the Eastern Kingdoms, especially the Greater Gilneas/Sepulcher area: Absolutely toxic levels of love are expected to be in the air from Feb. 6 through Feb. 20. That's right, folks -- it's time for another semi-mandatory in-game holiday!

The Azerothian holiday Love is in the Air is based on the real world Valentine's Day holiday. There are some similarities, of course -- in Azeroth as in real life, the holiday involves romantic picnics, eating candies, and making very poor decisions while drunk. The activities are far more rewarding in Azeroth, though: Completing these, along with all the other holiday achievements throughout the year, earns you the 50-point What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been meta achievement, complete with a Violet Proto-Drake and free Master Riding. (For more information about completing the Love meta achievement, take a look at Allison Robert's The Overachiever: Guide to Love is in the Air 2011.)

How are you planning on spending the two-week-long holiday? Are you going to spend it working on your holiday meta achievement? Are you looking forward to farming Apothecary Hummel for his new ilevel 346 loot? Or maybe you'll just send your in-game sweetheart a Bouquet of Black Roses?

As for yours truly, I'll be spending the bulk of my time receiving gifts from my many suitors (hint, hint), flirting with blood elves, riding Big Love Rockets, and spending some quality time with my one true love -- myself.

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has destroyed Azeroth as we know it; nothing is the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion, from leveling up a new goblin or worgen to breaking news and strategies on endgame play.

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Can you believe it's time for the Lunar Festival again? I mean, can you believe it?

To be honest, it took me a while to figure out just exactly what holiday the Lunar Festival was. Most holidays in Azeroth mirror our own, but I don't really celebrate Chinese New Year. So of course, being the uncultured (though handsome) dolt I am, I assumed the holiday was inspired by the canceled CBS drama Ghost Whisperer. Apparently, though, the Chinese New Year is a pretty big thing. Especially in China. Go figure!

For those who don't know, the Lunar Festival is a three-week-long super-holiday that involves running around the world to meet and "honor" all sorts of elders. If the whole thing tingles the same obsessive-compulsive part of your brain as it does mine, you'll find yourself one-manning all sorts of old instances, trying to honor some inconveniently located, long-forgotten spooks for a handful of gold and some holiday-only currency. If you want more information about it, it's all here in The OverAchiever: Guide to Lunar Festival 2011.

It's one of the most brutal travel-heavy holidays out there, but if you're interested in scoring that 310% mount from the What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been achievement, it's required. But is it worth it? Will you be celebrating the Lunar Festival holiday across all your alts? Are you excited about corpse-hopping your way through the opposing faction's capital cities?

I already made my rounds last year, so I think I'll just take it easy myself. Maybe order in some Chinese and catch a Camryn Manheim film festival instead.

Back in Wrath, you could hardly call me a wheeler-dealer type. I had a couple max-level characters with about 10,000 gold between them. Frankly, it was more money than I needed. I had good gear, plenty of bags, and 280% flight speed. My alts were well taken care of. Not that I'm complaining. So far as problems go, having too much money is a good problem to have.

I planned to use it all to power level my professions in Cataclysm. And that's precisely what I did. It cost a lot of scratch to grind tailoring, alchemy, and inscription to 525. But as I was powerleveling professions, I was creating saleable products. And making money. Like an Azerothian version of Brewster's Millions, the harder I tried spending my money, the more money I wound up making. I couldn't spend away my money even if I tried.

Now, I'm "stuck" with even more gold than I had in Wrath. After reading up on what rich people do with their money, I decided to take my own best shot at getting rid of it. Sadly, despite my best efforts, I couldn't find a realtor to help me buy up Cathedral Square and turn the place into condos. I couldn't self-finance a bid for Congress. And I couldn't get my own reality show on E!

If you were thrown into your own Azeroth-centric version of Brewster's Millions, how would you empty your bank account? If you had more gold than you knew what to do with ... what would you do with it all? Make an army of well-geared alts? Corner the Vial of the Sands market? Or maybe you'd just plain give it away?

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Blizzard announced on Monday that the official forums we've been using the past six years will become read-only on Wednesday, Nov. 17. The forums will be replaced by the new World of Warcraft community site, which offers new and improved forums, as well as a bunch of other features. That's all good and fine, but Blizzard also said in half a month's time, it will delete the old forums and all the threads in it will be lost forever! Eek!

Wait a second ... What am I worrying about? Google Cache will likely allow us continued access to the old forum content for years to come, even after it's wiped off of Blizzard's servers. Still, in that moment of concern that all those years of information would suddenly be lost, I wondered: "What will I miss from the old forums?"

My mind immediately went to "I think my tank is seeing another healer," a thread about an healer suspicious that her tank is being unfaithful. The thread was so epic, WoW Insider actually already wrote about it. Just check out this excerpt from page 21:

She really ruined me. I was depressed about going solo. I was spending all my time in the Underbelly, knocking back Noggenfogger and bandaging myself to mailbox dancers. -- Grokthul

Also, as a PvP priest, how could I miss the comedic gold of "Disc priest/Shadow priest 2v2"? The OP had me at, "When the hunter comes to save giraffes, just darkness priest licorice beam his paladin to slow him," but by the time I read "ice tent," I couldn't breathe anymore because I was laughing and crying at the same time.

Are there any threads that stand out in your mind that you'll miss?

I started leveling a worgen rogue on the beta servers to get a better feel for the Alliance's leveling experience in Cataclysm, and it's my first time playing that class for any real length of time. After being introduced to the pleasures of Pick Pocket, the hostile inhabitants of the Redridge Mountains and Duskwood found themselves being relieved of their wallets with cheerful regularity.

While the money-per-hour from pickpocketing isn't great, it still got me to thinking -- if you leave the auction house out of the equation (class obviously doesn't matter there), are rogues the best class to play if you care about making money? If they're not, which class has it easiest if you're interested in accruing a nest egg? Someone's mechanics or advantages have to be the best for a would-be millionaire, even if the vast majority of income in the game really doesn't have anything to do with what you play.

Then again, the issue has a flip side. During The Burning Crusade, I would've said that protection warriors and paladins were at the greatest possible disadvantage for saving gold. High repair bills, terrible farming capacity, food, water, reagent and respec costs added up quickly for plate tanks. And until very recently, hunters were literally obligated to pay for every shot or arrow they fired. Someone's gotta have it best -- but someone has it worst, too. Which class gets soaked the most these days?

This year's BlizzCon was a little more sedate than last year's, but there was still a fair amount going on. We found out a little about patch 4.1, saw the cutscene that's been missing from the worgen starting area and the new Cataclysm login screen, and are perhaps still a little farshikkert from the reader meetup. As with any BlizzCon, there were some intriguing, thought-provoking and funny moments, and we're interested in hearing your favorites.

For me, it's a toss-up between the following, both of them from the general World of Warcraft question-and-answer session yesterday:

• Ghostcrawler's quip about the new alchemy two-person mount in Cataclysm: "Have you heard about the new alchemy mount? It'll be hard to get but fun to see who gets it first. It's awesome ... Who doesn't want to mount their friends?"
• A question came up on faction balance from an Alliance player on a Horde-dominated server, and the developers felt that more needed to be done to make the Alliance "cooler," that the "mythos and psychology" among players had developed to favor the Horde for PvP prospects. As the developers' answers ended, someone in the hall screamed, "Give us Saurfang!"

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BlizzCon 2010 is upon us! WoW Insider has all the latest news and information. We're bringing you liveblogging of the WoW panels, interviews with WoW celebrities and attendees and of course, lots of pictures of people in costumes. It's all here at WoW Insider!

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This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com.

Let's face it, not everyone likes their job. (I can get away with saying that because I don't work for this blog.) And what's true in real life is sometimes true in World of Warcraft, as well.

There are plenty of reasons why someone might want to drop one of his or her two primary WoW professions for another. (There might be a reason for dropping a secondary profession, but I can't think of one.) Maybe you were just new to the game and didn't grasp right away that skinning and leatherworking might not be the ideal profession choices for a warrior. Maybe you've just given up hope that a certain profession ever will live up to its potential (*coughengineeringcough*). Or perhaps you got caught up in the min-max-mania that Blizzard is currently trying to eradicate from professions. (At one point in The Burning Crusade, for example, mages with raiding aspirations were very seriously handicapped if they were not Spellfire tailors).

Blizzard has recently announced its short story contest, which has had several of us here at WoW.com pondering what we should enter. The choices themselves are fairly open with StarCraft, Warcraft and Diablo universes to choose from. StarCraft has military, covert ops, high technology, space silithids and galactic conquest. Diablo offers a darker fantasy realm than what we play in WoW, with stories of the occult, demons and undead, and heroes rising from hardship to overcome greater evils.

The Warcraft universe itself has a myriad possibilities to borrow, from dinosaurs to steampunk, with the hard honor of the orcs to the nonsensical gadgets of the gnomes. The upcoming Cataclysm also brings forth a lot of story possibilities, as does any time of great change. Races are opening their doors to previously shunned concepts such as night elf mages, while others are rediscovering a lost heritage in the Darkspear tribe's druids. The Lich King's grasp on the world has been beaten back and veterans of the war in Northrend will be returning home to try and resume their previous lives as merchants and farmers. Races like the gnomes and dwarves have had their eyes opened to their origins in titan creation, which could rock the very foundation of their ideals and beliefs.

So, I bring the question to you. What's the story you would write? Will you delve into StarCraft and Diablo or stick with WoW?

The 2010 Midsummer Fire Festival began earlier this morning, and this year some of the holiday's mechanics have been changed to reflect the dungeon finder's impact on the game. With the Crown Chemical Company apothecaries introduced to Love Is In the Air, we saw the last gasp of extensive holiday boss-farming for special drops. These days, you'll only get one crack a day per character at the mounts, pets, or unique drops off a boss (although you can continue to farm for the boss' normal drops). Truthfully, I'm happy about the change; spending ages waiting for alt after alt to make its way to an instance for another shot at a boss drop wasn't really anyone's idea of a good time.

Apart from that, what are your plans for the holiday? Does your toon still need the Flame Keeper/Flame Warden meta? Are you looking forward to Lord Ahune's updated loot table, or are you just hoping for a Scorchling pet?

While writing a recent news post on Blizzard's decision to open free transfers to Drak'thul, I nosed around the server's forums to see what the inhabitants thought of the coming flood. As a server that was converted from a PvP to PvE realm, opened to transfers, and listed as a Recommend realm to boot, Drak'thul's undergone a fairly drastic set of changes, and all within a short period of time.

As you'd expect, player feelings on the subject were mixed, but there was one former Drak'thul player who really got my attention. Drak'thul, he/she claimed, had been home to some of "the most mean-spirited PvP (he'd) ever experienced on ANY realm." It sounded like a tall claim, but there are a lot of other threads on the forum with oblique confirmations; players recall Alliance towns and quest NPCs "being camped 24/7," and holiday events and Alliance leveling zones being swarmed by opportunistic Horde players. Drak'thul became a low-pop server with a murderous faction imbalance -- Warcraft Realms listed the server's active population as 94% Horde before transfers were opened -- and I wonder how much of that be traced to the relentless ganking and camping campaigns three years ago.

I look at realms like Cho'gall with equally crushing faction imbalances, some of which started out with fairly balanced faction ratios, and wonder -- how the hell does this happen? What spurs the departure of so many players from a specific faction? Is it really that simple as a relatively small number of players exercising such an impact on what happens to everyone on the server?

While I am perfect in most every way, there is one notable area where I am lacking -- organization.

My desk at work has stacks of old reports, many from months ago. There are tons of Post-it notes all around with phone numbers and addresses; to whom they belong, I have no clue. But if it wasn't important, I wouldn't have written it down. The notes stay. (Especially the ones with scribbles of dinosaurs.)

My Warcraft life is no different. I was doing yet another run through of Hellfire Ramparts yesterday on my shaman alt, and I struggled to find a place to put Gargolmar's Hand in my bag. And Omor's Hoof. And ... oh god, there's a third item for this quest, too? What the heck am I going to throw out?

Somehow, the fact that I still had Ice Cold Milk in my bag eluded me for the last 40 levels or so. And Umi's Mechanical Yeti? I don't hate myself enough to spend an hour flying around Kalimdor to actually finish that quest. Six slots are full of Argent Dawn memorabilia. There are probably even a couple of grays in here, but I'll be damned if I can find them when it's time to vendor.

I tried solving the problem by creating a bank alt, but if you couldn't guess, the bank alt's bags quickly became a mess.

Are you a hoarder too? Is there something in your bags that's hopelessly out of date, and yet you can't bring yourself to get rid of it? And good god, man, what am I going to do with these seven stacks of Peacebloom?

Noblegarden 2010 begins today and runs through next Sunday. In 2009, the holiday was hugely improved and upgraded, removing much of the RNG that traditionally infested WoW holidays and adding some nifty rewards, achievements and an unusual non-combat pet that, er, makes more of itself when left to its own devices. I'm not sure you can ask for more than that, unless it's an uncrowded village center in which to farm eggs.

Are you planning on participating this year, or do your characters already have the meta-achievement Noble Gardener? If you got your start early this morning or on Oceanic and EU servers, how crowded are the towns?

If you need more information on Noblegarden, please head over to our Noblegarden 2010 guide.

There are drops that just seem to elude you. One of those for me was The Sun Eater. It wouldn't drop and wouldn't drop and wouldn't drop and then, finally, on a run I didn't even want to go on there it was. And then the rogue took it and I had to run it another 20 or so times before I actually got it. Not that I'm still bitter about that. Well, okay, I totally am. As in, if I ever get control of an orbital weapons platform and find out where that guy lives, well, there would be stuff raining from the sky.

Last night however I had the opposite experience. Last night, Lana'thel dropped my new precious. Amazingly, no rogues took it, and so I'm wandering around wearing the door from Satan's own El Camino as a shield. It's pretty much been the drop I've wanted the most from ICC ever since it opened up and I'm ridiculously, deliriously happy with it. (SInce I never saw the Elementium Reinforced Bulwark or Bulwark of Azzinoth drop, it's also the best looking shield I've ever had.) So in my state of giddy glee I move to ask you, have you had that surge of relief when something finally dropped lately? What was it?

Anne talked recently about all the bits and pieces that tend to accumulate in a packrat's bank vault, and I'm one of the guilty parties. I'm a hardcore collector of feral staves, tier sets, tabards, and assorted items that I just can't bring myself to delete (Seal of Ascension -- seriously, why do I still have this?). Unfortunately, the tendency carries over into quests as well. Over the course of doing Loremaster, I knocked off most of the older quests littering my log, and now I'm left with two. One's a nightmare to finish -- The Good News and The Bad News, which is part of the Scepter of the Shifting Sands line and an enormous pain in the ass due to the 10 Elementium Ores required. I've resigned myself to the quite-likely possibility that it'll be there for months to come.

The other one, much like the stuff clogging my bank, is something I can't force myself to drop. Echoes of War sent people to the original version of Naxxramas, and was required for the tier 3 questline. Incredibly enough, it was even shareable when Wrath came out, and our early Naxx raids at 80 had a good laugh over it. But I'm afraid to turn it in -- not just because the follow-up quest probably isn't there anymore, but also for some reason I don't think I can articulate very well. If I turned it in, I guess I'd feel like another little piece of old Azeroth was gone forever.

Do you have any quests like this sitting around in your log, and what keeps you from turning them in?