Posts with tag holidays

Some of you might have already gotten your Violet Proto-Drakes, a long, strange trip that spans one full year of playing World of Warcraft. Some persistent and conscientious players have already gotten their Brewmaster title along with the meta-Achievement, and I'm pretty sure it must feel pretty good. There's no more pressure to do all the holiday achievements now, is there? It's time to kick back and chillax.

For those of you who've completed the meta-Achievement, how do you feel? Does it feel good to ride around on that 310% mount? Are you among the first on your server to sport that dragonfruit-hued mount? What are you looking forward to in terms of World of Warcraft holidays now, considering you no longer have to chase after achievements? Are you excited for the new holidays and are you psyched to complete those Achievements, too, even though they're not required for the Violet Proto-Drake? Share your thoughts this morning. As for those who haven't gotten theirs, what else do you need to complete the meta?

Yaaaaaar maties, it be me again, Cap'n Phineas Blackbeard (ye may remember my old guide to the most piratical o' quests), and I be back again, today, September the 19th, because today, ye scurvy dogs, be Pirates' Day! My old flame Dread Captain DeMeza will be hanging out in Booty Bay and causin' all kinds of trouble under the nose of old Baron Revilgaz, so ye can head down to the southern shores, listen to some shantys with those old swashbucklers, and maybe even win some loot. If ye like, ye can even go and visit DeMeza with the scallywags from this here WoW.com site (though between you and me, some of them smell like the inside of a whale's belly, especially that landlubber Schramm). And of course, all of ye yellow-bellied scallywags should spend the whole day talking like a pirate as best ye can, and maybe even wear an eyepatch. Y'know, for the nightvision.

And just in case ye don't get enough grog today -- HA! Get it? "Enough grog"? A good pirate knows ye can never have enough grog! -- don't forget that Brewfest starts tomorrow. Stay tuned to this here vessel for more information about how ye can get all of the achievements and titles and dragons and treasure chests ye desire. Have a great Pirates' Day, and then get back to swabbing the poop deck, ye peg-legged, pox-faced mutinous cur! Dead men tell no tales! Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!

MMO Champion has datamined up some video of the new Pandaren Monk vanity pet that's been floating around, and as you can see above, it's pretty darned awesome. Just like the Grunty the Murloc pet, this one comes with some fun animations, and they look terrific. Blizzard has been pretty coy about getting the Pandaren into the game, and they're teasing big here, too -- this little bear's got moves that would make the Diablo III Monk hang his head in shame.

However, the question remains: how do we get it? At this point, it's just speculation and rumor -- some say it might be a special anniversary pet for people who've been subscribed all five years of the game's life, some suggest it might be part of the Cataclysm collector's edition (past CEs have had a pet in each one, including a Diablo figure in the first box), and still others suggest that the Monk will be a new pet in the upcoming Brewfest holiday. How do we get it, really? We won't know for sure until we hear it from Blizz.

Robin Torres writes WoW, Casually for the player with limited playtime. Of course, you people with lots of playtime can read this too, but you may get annoyed by the fact that we are unashamed, even proud, of the fact that beating WoW isn't our highest priority. Take solace in the fact that your gear is better than ours, but if that doesn't work, remember that we outnumber you. Not that that's a threat, after all, we don't have time to do anything about it. But if WoW were a democracy, we'd win.

Holidays are for all players, of course, but I think they are particularly appropriate for players with limited playtime. Sure, there are often raiding quests or achievements that we can't complete, but overall, the activities seem to be designed for casual gameplay. For the most part, I think I'm preaching to the choir, here. But every once in a while, I read comments from people who just don't get holidays and avoid them completely. So here is my sales pitch about why every casual player should give each holiday a try.

The first patch 3.2 PTR client is now available for download, which means it's available for datamining. The ever-resourceful people at wirebrain have done just this to all the achievements found in the client, and have unearthed some interesting new details. We are unable to verify this information right now, but here's what they've found.

Read on after the cut for:

• A new holiday.
• The names of the bosses in the new raid and 5-man dungeon, and their related achievements.
• A new Vault of Archavon boss.

To be clear, there will be spoilers.

It's that time of year again, folks. Frankly, I'm glad to be back in the realm of more reasonable and just plain fun holiday achievements, because I hated School of Hard Knocks, and wound up giving up and quitting the achievement after hours of fruitless battleground deaths. Fortunately, the Fire Festival has a lot less potential to drive you to the nuthouse, and a lot more potential to grant experience, gold, and cool items. From what I've seen, Blizzard hasn't changed the holiday since its 2008 incarnation, which is actually a good thing in a number of ways because last year's revamped and expanded Fire Festival was great.

A note on eligibility: your character will need to be at least 50 to hand in the items needed for King of the Fire Festival, and at least 65 to get the higher-level quests necessary for killing Lord Ahune in Slave Pens. With that said, we still recommend that lower-level characters participate, because you'll wind up with a ton of experience and gold even if you can't complete the meta-achievement.

Should you complete the meta, you will be awarded the "Flame Keeper" title. I've listed all of the required achievements in the order I think will be easiest/fastest for the average player to do.

UPDATE: Your character is currently unable to honor/desecrate any flame (including city flames) that you've honored/desecrated in 2008, which will make getting enough Burning Blossoms to purchase Midsummer clothing difficult, if not impossible. I'm still trying to find official confirmation that this is a bug (and I assume it has to be, as otherwise the meta-achievement isn't doable), but it also appears that fires have been added to Northrend as well. I'm heading ingame right now to assemble a list with coordinates and will update the post later.

Oh, Brewfest mount. How much you have taunted me over the ages. I still recall last Brewfest, when a guildy of mine was quite distraught that he was not going to get the mount before the festival ended, only to get it on his very last Direbrew kill (and remember, we used to kill that sad dwarf five times a day). I've never gotten one myself, but that may change this upcoming Brewfest.

Bornakk has just announced that "there is quite a possibility that a change is in the works" for how the mount is acquired, and that "it will most likely be easier to get." A return to a token-based system, perhaps? Just a higher drop rate? A reward for the meta-achievement? I don't know, but we'll be sure to report as soon as we find out.

The token based system might be unlikely, actually, since earlier in the thread he said "I doubt we will make them purchasable with tokens, if we want to make changes to this we will likely go a different route" (comma splice!). How do you think they're going to make the mount easier?

It's Memorial Day in the United States, a time when we celebrate the memories of our fallen soldiers by visiting memorials, breaking out the BBQ grill, and jumping into all of the swimming pools opening for the summer around the country.

There's a lot of interesting things that have happened the past few days here at WoW.com. Our new site is in full swing, and you can read about all the changes we've done.

One of the major additions to the site is the WoW.com profiles, which bring the famed social networking features right into WoW via our custom add-on. Check out what some of our users are already doing: Yamara34 just started up a brand new guild over on Proudmoore, and Mogri got lucky on the fishing daily.

A few major details about patch 3.2 were released on Friday, along with some clarification points by the blues. There is no indication when patch 3.2 will hit the PTR, but we're on the lookout for it. With a new 5-man dungeon, and a new 10/25-man raid, it will be sure to make a splash.

In addition to the new dungeons, patch 3.2 will nerf Jewelcrafting a bit. This is an unwelcome change for many players, and it has all the JCers up in arms.

We hope that everyone has a great time celebrating Memorial Day, and make sure you do it safely. For those of you not in the US, have a great Monday anyway!

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Welcome to the new WoW.com! Check out WoW.com's site documentation for information on the new profiles and add-on. Be sure to let us know if you experience any problems during our beta test. And don't forget to check out all the latest World of Warcraft news!

Crygil wants to know: if you could design a new holiday for the game, what would it be? I don't think I've ever heard the question asked before -- holidays are really just optional fun for more players, and Blizzard has always covered the basics (Christmas, New Year's, Thanksgiving, Halloween, etc.), and even added in some of their own by giving real-world holidays some Azerothian flavor (Midsummer Fire Festival, and of course Brewfest). Are there really any holidays they missed?

I guess Labor Day and Memorial Day are the two biggest ones -- maybe all of the NPCs could take a day off, there could be giant barbeques set up in the capital cities, or players could take a day to remember those fallen in the past wars. Or you could go another route and just make up your own holiday: Grumpyfool of Azjol-Nerub recommends Gnome Appreciation Week (a whole week?), where Azeroth's shortest denizens can get some love of their own. A more recently based holiday might be fun, too -- maybe once a year we could remember Arthas' (it was Arthas, right?) zombie attack on our homeland.

I doubt this is going to be used to determine actual Blizzard policy. Seems more like just a fun thought experiment. But there are definitely some interesting ideas in there -- if Blizzard ever wants to add yet another holiday to the calendar, there are plenty of ideas.

I've been looking at the Noblegarden items for awhile now, since they first showed up on the PTR. For some reason, it never hit me until I saw it on live realms how cool one item in particular actually is. For five chocolates you can buy your own Noblegarden Egg, which allows you to lay a Brightly Colored Egg. Yes, that's five eggs for one egg of your own, which is a pretty horrible exchange rate.

What's so cool about it? They're the exact same eggs you've been picking up that whole time, except that you can set them out. You can loot them right away for an added chance of whatever loot may be in them, but I'm not sure why you'd do that, except for possibly completing Dressed for the Occasion/Sunday's Finest. What makes it better is that other people can loot them.

What makes that so great? If you can get an organized crew (and their alts) together, you can set up your own Noblegarden Hunt for your guild or your friends and family. Laying an egg has a 1 hour cooldown, so each of you will only be able to set out one egg each, but with a sizable group that might not be too terrible. A brief hunt, but you can make it exciting! Feralas, perhaps? Icecrown? The interior of a cleared Ulduar? Just take it far, far away from busy cities or hubs. You don't want to lay an egg out in the Stormwind Trade District. Joe McMullet will loot that thing in a flash, and that's no good.

UPDATE: This guide has been revised for Noblegarden 2010.

Noblegarden 2009 should be going live on the European realms in a few hours and then start popping up on realms elsewhere over the next day. Because so much of the holiday has changed and we've fielded a lot of questions from players about what's going on, we decided to write up a quick FAQ to the new (and vastly improved!) holiday.

Help! Where do I go to get started?

If you're Alliance, head to Azure Watch, Dolanaar, Goldshire, or Kharanos.

If you're Horde, head to Bloodhoof Village, Brill, Falconwing Square, or Razor Hill.

What am I supposed to do when I get there?

There will be questgivers in all of these towns who will give you a new daily, The Great Egg Hunt, and A Tisket, a Tasket, a Noblegarden Basket. The former will reward you with an item that will come in handy for an achievement (more on this in a little bit), but for both you're going to want to get started hunting down eggs in and around these level-5 towns. Once you've finished these quests, in order to get Noblegarden achievements done, you're going to need to be a dedicated egg hunter for a little while.

What do the Brightly Colored Eggs look like?

See the egg in the article's picture above? They're all variations on these colors and patterns and not generally tough to spot (although they are considerably smaller than the perspective in the picture makes them appear).

As we suspected might happen when we learned that Noblegarden was removed from the in-game calendar, the Easter-themed holiday has been delayed. CMs are quick to note that it will be implemented "at a future date," but it won't be going live on April 12 as usual. We were warned that this might happen, so it isn't a huge surprise.

The likely reason for the delay is that patch 3.1 won't be ready in time, or at least that Blizzard isn't sure it will be - it would have to ship next Tuesday, April 7, to make it. 3.1 is a massive patch and I'm sure they don't want to rush it. Nethaera did mention in a reply that they are "still doing a little bug dance and squishing a few more before we decide [the patch is] ready to have its coming out party," which may imply that all that's left before the patch is ready is debugging. On the other hand, debugging can take a very long time, so we can't conclude too much from that.

Whenever it does come out (probably sometime this month), we will be enjoying a new, expanded Noblegarden. It's going for one week (previously, it was just a single day), and there will be additional content for us to experience, as well as presumably a title (since it'll be part of What a Long, Strange Trip, everyone's favorite holiday meta-achievement).

Well that'll teach us to assume -- earlier this week when mentioning the upcoming Noblegarden holiday, we pointed out that considering it was being tested on the PTR right now, we'd likely see 3.1 hit the live realms by the time Easter came around in the real world. But Kisirani has appeared on the forums saying, "Not so fast." Blizzard has apparently gained the power to cancel Easter, because they say Noblegarden and 3.1 will start when it's ready, not because there are kids hunting for eggs on the White House lawn.

So basically, if patch 3.1 isn't done by Easter, we won't see the holiday ingame until it is done. And while it'll be a little strange to be looking for eggs in May (if it comes to that), we have to agree that's the right decision: we all know what happens when Blizzard releases a patch that isn't fully tested.

We can wait. Noblegarden might not match up with the real-life holiday this year (if the patch does come late -- Kisirani still says this is a plan, so maybe the patch will be done by April 12th), but hopefully when it does appear, it won't be broken.

Elizabeth's wishes have been answered -- in-game Easter holiday Noblegarden has been extended to a full week according to the calendar on the PTR. That's six more days to run around getting eggs, not to mention doing all of the new Noblegarden achievements being included in the holiday. In the past, Noblegarden hasn't meant that much to players -- the rewards were never that great, and the fact that it was on only one day (a day usually reserved by most celebrating for family dinners away from the game) made it much less active than it could have been. But Blizzard has revamped the holiday, apparently, so be on the lookout for some eggs and bunnies starting on Sunday, April 12th.

One quick note for those of you worried about your Violet Proto-drakes: apparently still none of the Nobelgarden quests are included in the meta achievement. So there won't be any Bags of Candy or monthly Brews to get -- just enjoy the festivities.

And we'll give a shout-out to Kisirani here as well -- since she took over World Events on the Blizzard team, we've seen some great changes. Despite the issues with the Zombie launch event for Wrath, it was still a ton of fun, and we're pretty sure that she and her team also been behind the popular Brewfest and Hallow's End holidays as well. Excellent work -- we can't wait to see what the new Noblegarden is like.