Posts with tag midsummer-fire-festi...

Ah, summer in Azeroth. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and blood elf rogues are camping the poor Alliance at the Orgrimmar Midsummer bonfire. Truly, the greatest holiday. However, something is amiss! Mean old Lord Ahune is out to stop summer forever! Whatever shall we do?! (Actually, I live in New York. Please, take the humidity, Ahune.)

With 2010's Midsummer Fire Festival, Blizzard has introduced a new avenue to enjoy the holiday bosses that creep up for most special events. This year, for the first time, Frost Lord Ahune is queue-able in the random dungeon finder. Have you tried it yet? Because it is amazing. Spectacular. Mind-blowingly awesome. Hands down, the addition of the holiday bosses to the random dungeon finder is the single best thing to happen to WoW since the dungeon finder itself. All of the petty crap that came along with finding people to summon the holiday boss, people demanding item reservations and a million other hurdles are gone. Years have been added on to my life because I never have to put together that perfect group again for maximum summons of the holiday boss.

What do you think about the inclusion of the holiday bosses to the random dungeon finder? Do you miss the old days of the rolling boss summons, or do you cherish the new days of one-chance-bag-per-day? You know how I feel, so let's hear from you!

Are you overwhelmed by all of the awesome info from the Worldwide Invitational? Do you need a break from earning your Season 4 gear? Does the news of Diablo 3 make you want to participate in more fire-related activities? Then come join us today for the It came from the Blog Midsummer Fire Festival event!

• When: Today at 4PM Pacific (5PM Server, 7PM Eastern)
• Where: Orgrimmar, Zangarmarsh U.S. Server
• Who: Any Horde character, any level
• How: Send a tell to Robiness or any guild member to get an invite to the guild and the raid
  

I'm currently farming shards on Robiness for summoning purposes, so don't worry if you can't get to Orgrimmar easily. And the quests we'll be doing can be done by any level and in a raid, so make a new character if you don't have a Horde character on Zangarmarsh already.

We hope to see you there!

Each week or so, Robin Torres writes WoW, Casually for the player who has 2 hours or less to play at a time.

If you haven't bought into the whole Midsummer hype yet, allow me to try to convince you. This year's Midsummer Fire Festival is possibly the most casual-friendly WoW event. Still you may ask, to paraphrase a guildie, "What's so great except for a useless pet?"

This holiday is not about the loot.

Sure, I got myself a Brazier of Dancing Flames, but I had the blossoms burning a hole in my pocket anyway, so why not? Midsummer is really about every other reason we play the game: progressing our characters, seeing the world, supporting our faction and, most importantly, fun.

When I read through the forums, I see numerous threads lamenting over the lack of world PvP. The Burning Crusade added a handful of PvP objectives that often go unnoticed and the towers in the Eastern Plaguelands seem pretty lonely since everyone moved on to Outland. Since the beginning of the Midsummer Fire Festival I've seen at least a temporary resurgence in actual PvP. Of course the ganking is still going on, but I've seen many more fair fights.

The way it works is you try to keep your own fires burning while putting the flames of your opponents out. I've seen numerous mini raids on major cities and massive skirmishes near the small-town fires. Like many players, I've got to give props to Blizzard for adding this mechanic to the festival. The buffs are pretty awesome too.

I've enjoyed this celebration more than any WoW holiday in the past. Have you been joining in the desecrating fun?

Remember to check out the "It Came From the Blog" event this Sunday, June 29 at 7Pm Eastern.

Like Bigfoot, it's so elusive that photographs are rare, but some WoW players have caught a glimpse of what may be an upcoming PvP reward from Wrath. Or maybe it's just a bug. Or -- and I have a nickel bet on this one -- it's a nice little prank Blizzard's playing on us in return for our snooping around for information on the expansion. Whatever it is, though, it has left at least one footprint. We've gotten a few tips that upon inspecting a player's Tabard of Summer Flames, the Horde side reward from the Shards of Ahune quest, the tabard's tooltip describes a very different item called Tabard of the Victor. Even though the tabard's design matched the Midsummer quest reward, the description was quite different.

First of all, the Tabard of the Victor requires Level 80, which was our first clue that it was probably not meant for pre-Wrath eyes. The tabard binds on pick-up, provides 250 Armor, +20 Stamina, +10 to All Resistances. Upon equipping it, your resilience rating improves by 15 and it increases movement speed and life regeneration rate. The funniest part -- and what makes me think this could be a prank by our dear game designers -- is the tabard's use is described as: "Use: Show how heroic you are! (55 Secs Cooldown)" and the bottom line description is, "The Mark of a True Hero." It seems that perhaps the glitch was caused by an error in the cache because when it was cleared the tabard's description correctly matched the Summer Flames tabard.

[Thanks, Jagoex and James Vertovec!]

Well, except for those torch quests, which seem to be tripping a lot of people up. Like any good summertime tourist, Stryper of <Destruction> on Moonrunner always brings his camera with him. This time, he's caught a Festival Scorchling outside of Booty Bay as he begins to change form into Ragnaros. Unfortunately, in the rigidly class-based society of WoW villains, the Scorchling has no hope of advancing his station in life. And Ragnaros has got to be super-powerful by now -- after all, how long has it been since any adventurers have killed him?

Do you have any unusual World of Warcraft images that are just collecting dust in your screenshots folder? We'd love to see it on Around Azeroth! Sharing your screenshot is as simple as e-mailing aroundazeroth@wow.com with a copy of your shot and a brief explanation of the scene. You could be featured here next!

Remember to include your player name, server and/or guild if you want it mentioned. We prefer full screen shots without the UI showing -- use alt-Z to remove it. And please, no sunsets or terrible-looking Mike Myers movies. What is this, 1997?

The long-awaited third episode of Blizzcast, Blizzard's official podcast, has just gone live. Blizzard's US web sites are still down, but you can listen to it and read the transcript on the European site. As usual, since this is a Blizzard podcast and not a WoW-specific one, they spend some time covering the Starcraft universe as well, including an interview with Dustin Browder, SC2 lead designer, which I won't cover (good material on Zergs though). But later they brought in Jeff "Tigole" Kaplan, WoW lead designer for dungeons and raids, and here's what I found interesting in his segment:

• The original WoW raids were too hardcore early on; in BC they eased up on that and they hope to continue this in Wrath.
• Lessons learned in BC:
  • Heroic loot needs to be definitely better than normal-mode loot
    
  • Introductory raids need to be more friendly – he says "I don't want to say to casual players, but a little bit more accessible to people in general." Cites Maulgar and Mags as examples of less-than-friendly intro raids.
  • How to itemize raid content vs. other content