Posts with tag halloween

On the patch 4.1 PTR, we saw hints of a grand new Hallow's End event would be in the works. The Cataclysm has certainly shaken things up, and the Forsaken now have a near and constant enemy in Greymane's worgen. The patch 4.2 PTR was updated this evening with a whole batch of new loot for both Hallow's End and Brewfest. The new epics (such as The Horseman's Sinister Sabre) are ilevel 365, and you can check them out right here.

Hallow's End Loot:

• Band of Ghoulish Glee
• Seal of the Petrified Pumpkin
• Wicked Witch's Ring
• The Horseman's Signet
• The Horseman's Horrific Helmet
• The Horseman's Sinister Sabre

The Forsaken have already carpet bombed Southshore with plague, so their annual ritual of tossing innocuous stinkbombs into town probably isn't going to have much of an impact anymore. We aren't sure how Blizzard is planning to update Hallow's End for Cataclysm yet, but the patch 4.1 data has some hints as to what we can expect this year -- at least the fun and games portion, if not the lore.

Mixed in with the latest additions to Wowhead's database are new versions of the Hallow's End masks. Rather than replacing your helm slot, it appears that the masks now go over your helm slot -- meaning your human female can wear her tauren male mask while raiding Blackwing Descent without losing the stats on her epic helm. As an added bonus, it appears the masks that aren't player races also supply a stat buff of their own. The Naga Masks, for example, are consumed on use and provide an intellect buff.

Today is Halloween in the physical world and also the last day of Hallow's End in Azeroth. There is just no escape from costumes and candy, no matter where you go. For me, that's a good thing. This is one of my favorite holidays, being No. 3 of the four major chocolate holidays of the year. And I love the in-game version as well, with its silly achievements and delicious XP and/or cash for alts.

While most U.S. children will be trick-or-treating this evening, the bulk of the Halloween parties have already happened. In game, most of the dailies and achievement attempts have already occurred as well, but you still have time to try for your goals until tonight.

Do you participate in Halloween? If so, what did you and/or your child go as this year? Do you participate in Hallow's End? How close are you to finishing your goals?

Oxhorn has been a busy man. First, he's released Ox Chop as a celebration of Halloween. In this short video, the character Oxhorn and Professor Evil go to visit the Headless Horseman. Sadly, the encounter doesn't go well and everyone leaves empty-handed.

Second, if you enjoyed this video, Oxhorn has even released a ringtone that goes with the video. It's a pretty nice little side-thing to go with the video, especially given that some of the best parts of Oxhorn videos are his music.

If you enjoy Oxhorn's video, drop by his live show some time. I've attended a few and they are pretty entertaining. Enjoy the video and have a great Halloween!

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Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an email at machinima@wow.com.

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World of WarCrafts spotlights art and creativity by WoW players, including fan art, cooking, comics, cosplay, music and fan fiction. Show us how you express yourself; contact our tips line (attention: World of WarCrafts) with your not-for-profit, WoW-inspired creations.

And you thought we were done with Halloween references! We simply couldn't resist wrapping up the season with this latecomer: a young Murloc from the family of Tyrialfrozen of US Ursin. The little gurgler's mother adapted the costume from a Wal-Mart baby tiger costume pattern. Her instructions, as channeled through Tyrialfrozen:

"Follow the pattern for the body. There wasn't anything special, just good old sewing machine and scissors. The same was done to make the main part of the head. Next was the blue and white stripes, which were sewed directly on the head. For the red hair/spikes, she cut out long strips and soaked them in half-and-half water/glue and then cut up the bottom. They were then sewn into the head through small cuts.

"The eyes were ping-pong balls that got cut in half and painted. In order to get them on the head, she had to hot glue them to some string, which then was sewn on. Next, she added some white fleece teeth, and to cover everything up, she put in a red fleece layer in the head. In order to close the front, she added some Velcro. Last was some red trim and 'feet' and a zipper."

We've got a full gallery showing the construction process as well as the finished product (and something extra), after the break.

Happy Halloween, dear readers! Today's the day, the spookiest day of the year! In the real world, prepare yourself to sit through hours and hours of random children in costumes ringing your doorbell begging for treats from strangers. In Azeroth, you only have two days left to finish your various Hallow's End achievements, everything disappears into the aether on November 2nd it ends tonight! Whoa!

Halloween is being celebrated in worlds beyond Azeroth and our own, too. All month long, our sister site Massively has been covering the numerous celebrations going on in the various ongoing MMOs, from Free Realms' Spooky Spectacular to Aion's Harvest Revel. If you're interested in any of those, head on over to Massively's Halloween roundup to check out their coverage, as well as a screenshot gallery of some holiday eye candy from those many games. Some of the events were quite cool, so I highly recommend taking a look. Guild Wars still has some pretty fantastic aesthetics.

As long as you're all here, I'm curious: Are you dressing up today? If so, what's your costume? If it's something WoW-related, we would love pictures! And are you taking anybody Trick or Treating, or will you be giving out candy? Personally, I'm dressing up as a chubby computer nerd (it's a classic) and handing out Dum Dums by the handful.

The Guild is on holiday vacation this week -- instead of the latest episode in the series (which is episode 9, and will come out next week, we're told), they've posted a Halloween special video, which you can watch over on MSN or right past the break below. It's more than just a chance to don their actual guildie costumes, too -- they go on a "socially acceptable real-world looting" run, with each guildie terrorizing one unlucky couple in their own special way. What's scarier than a Tuesday with all the servers down for maintenance? Vork showing up at your door.

And while we're on the subject of The Guild, our good friends at Massively got a chance to speak with a few of the cast members at GameX earlier this week -- Jeff Lewis, Robin Thorsen, and Sandeep Parikh got cornered by Massively's cameras, and talked with them about Wil Wheaton, MMOs, and Sandeep's famous backflip. Have a happy Halloween, Guild fans, and we'll be back next week with the third-to-last episode of season 3.

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Like The Guild? We do, too! We chatted with all of the folks at BlizzCon, including Felicia Day, Sandeep Parikh, and Jeff Lewis and Michele Boyd. We also saw their panel, and the guys were nice enough to stop by our meetup as well. Stay tuned here every Tuesday for a brand new episode of season 3!

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Blizzard has announced that they've partnered with a company called Windlass Studios to release real-life versions of a couple popular in-game banners and tabards. $40 will get you a banner of the Alliance or Horde, while $80 will get you a real-life faction tabard to wear. Each of the pieces is apparently 100% cotton, and silkscreened with the familiar faction insignia. Very interesting -- we've seen some nice fanmade pieces before, but these are commercial releases bearing official logos.

The company has also released a latex rubber version of Frostmourne -- it's not quite as nice as the Epic Weapons metal version, but then again, it's $149, and the metal version is over $400. I still wouldn't spend over $100 on a rubber sword, but hey, if that's your thing, there you go. And speaking of spending money on rubber costumes, the Blizzard store is also chock full of Halloween costumes this year, and there are a few other masks, including Illidan and a new Draenei mask, floating around the Internet for purchase as well.

We had a fun show as always on our podcast last Saturday -- Gregg Reece joined Turpster and I to talk about the most popular stories of the last week. We talked at length about Hallow's End and how it's going for everybody, the new LFG system coming to patch 3.3 and what to expect in there, as well as last week's developer chat on Twitter and whether or not Blizzard should do it again.

And of course we answered your emails, and actually went longer than I think we ever have before. Not three hours long -- we're only doing that if we can get 25,000 followers on Twitter (and hey, though we're not there yet, we're actually moving pretty steadily towards that). But it was a nice long show this past week, full of the usual information and fun. Hit it up to listen on any of the links below, and enjoy -- we'll be back next Saturday afternoon as usual.

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Don't forget to join It came from the Blog for some Hallow's End fun today!

• When: 4:30pm EDT (2:30pm Server Time, 1:30pm PDT) Today
• Where: Meet at Falconwing Square on Zangarmarsh (U.S.)
• Who: Any Horde character, any level. There will also be a second part of the event for epic mounted, flightpathed characters.
• What: Various Hallow's End activities in the Eastern Kingdoms.
• How: Ask Robinella or any It came from the Blog Lurker for an invite to the guild.

We will be doing some all level activities for the greater portion of the event and will finish up Trick or Treats in the Eastern Kingdoms with the epic mounted/flightpathed (yes, they will mostly be death knights) players.

Have any questions that are not answered here? Please see our FAQ.

We hope you'll join us!

We've been getting a few queries from you readers lately about the upcoming Hallow's End holiday (it starts this Sunday) and what's new, but honestly, we haven't heard anything solid yet. You can assume that the usual festivities will be happening, so you can definitely plan to run the Horseman and go around getting your candy, but if anything else is new, we haven't heard it for sure yet. There is one tidbit -- Bornakk has confirmed that, like Coren Direbrew, the Horseman will be set for level 80s. And we can assume that means that there will be some new loot to obtain as well. But other than that, anything else that goes down for Hallow's End this year will be a surprise.

Not that we won't tell you about it -- of course we'll have coverage up as soon as we see anything new, and if you need help getting any of the achievements or quests done, we'll have help for you there, too. Just a few days left until our favorite holiday in the game -- can't wait!

Hallow's End is almost upon us, and Blizzard has once again announced their annual pumpkin carving contest. This is always a hoot -- I was only ever able to do the usual jack-o-lantern (once I did a Batman symbol, but it never really worked out), but there are always some real professionals in the mix on these contests, as you can see in the gallery below. Basically, carve a pumpkin featuring something Blizzard-related, showing "high levels of originality, craftsmanship, and possibly humor," light it up with a candle or other source, and then submit a picture over on the site by two weeks from today, Wednesday, October 28th.

And some nice prizes this year: the top five submissions will all pick up a nice 32gb iPod touch, apparently supplied by none other than Apple (and of course you'll be able to run those Blizzard mobile apps if you win). Good luck to everyone who enters -- go grab your knife and the biggest "gourd-like squash" you can find and get to carving!

Those party hosts in Sleeper Cartel on Perenolde are at it again -- they're holding yet another in-game party, this time to celebrate Halloween, and it sounds like another player-run blowout: free food and drinks, costume and trivia contests, and lots more. There's something called the Dead Man's Run, and we have no idea what that is, but it sounds like a bunch of low level gnomes will die, which is always run. They tell us they're planning on having a live DJ spin tunes, just as they did at their summer party. And they'll have player-run questlines to do as well. You have to give it to them: Sleeper Cartel never seems to run short on creative things to do in-game.

I'm sorry to say that, as much as I've reported on these, I've never actually been to one. But I think that'll change with this party -- it kicks off at 7pm MST next Saturday, October 24th, on the US server of Perenolde, and they're holding it at what they say is one of the creepiest places in the game, the Ruins of the Scarlet Enclave (a.k.a. the Death Knight starting area, sans leveling Death Knights). I just marked it on my calendar, so I do believe that I will see you there.

It's that time of year again -- I just saw a seasonal costume store opening up near my apartment here in Chicago, and that means that we're almost to October, when all kinds of official and unofficial Halloween costumes from all of the year's biggest brands appear. Last year we had some Orc masks and old-school armor and gear (and we may see some of that stuff again this year), but so far the only new thing we've seen is these latex ears, in Night Elf and Blood Elf style, over on Amazon. For just $12, you too can have inordinately large pointy ears, signifying that you're a magical creature from Azeroth.

Cheesy? Maybe so, but then again, that's pretty much what dressing up on Halloween is all about these days. If you happen to see any other Warcraft-related costumes during the season (either officially licensed by Blizzard or knocked-off by some shady costume designer), make sure to take a picture and send us a tip. And of course if you enjoy seeing real people dress up as fictional Warcraft characters, you'll love our pictures from BlizzCon. Enjoy.