Posts with tag monkey

As you saw in our Darkmoon Faire video tour, the revamped Faire is now active on the PTR. It brings a batch of new companion pets and mounts for you to collect, including the Darkmoon Dancing Bear, the Swift Forest Strider, and seven brand new companion pets. Each of these mounts and pets must be purchased with game tickets, which are earned by winning the game attractions once per day.

Hop past the jump for all of the new pets and mounts and their ticket costs.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, a public service announcement:

An open letter to the guy who keeps breaking my sheep:

Please stop.

Sincerely,

Christian

P.S. -- Listen. I know it's Christmas and I should probably be doing a puff piece on things I want for my mage for Christmas or something like that. But I Simply can't stay quiet. We wiped 20 times in that heroic Grim Batol run last night, and though I know not everybody who plays this game reads this column, I have to do what I can. Evil triumphs when good men do nothing, or something like that.

I know The Burning Crusade happened like two years ago. I'm well aware that there's a distinct possibility you started playing the game during Wrath. Perhaps you either don't remember or don't have any idea what a "Polymorph" is or why it's not in your best interests to immediately begin whacking whatever I just cast it on as hard as you possibly can. I'm willing to allow for ignorance.

Mages, I can even understand it when you don't sheep things. Polymorph doesn't do any damage; in fact it heals its target! Why would you want to use a spell that doesn't blow things up when there are so many other delightful spells in your spellbook that do? It seems counter to everything we got into magecraft for.

Wrath was a long expansion. For the better part of two years, we spent the majority of our time chain pulling and AoE-farming our way through every instance in sight, concentrating on one thing and one thing only: DPS. Recount gave us a number at the end of every boss fight, and if that number was higher than the warlock's number, we had done a good job. Sure, the fights sometimes had mechanics we needed to pay attention to, but they mostly involved moving from one place to stand and shoot to another place to stand and shoot. We forgot a very important part of our jobs as mages.

We forgot how to sheep.

With the ease of Wrath of the Lich King raiding we're seeing guilds kill boss after boss at an alarming rate. And I'm not just talking about 5-man heroic bosses (those seem a bit hard, actually). I'm not even talking about 10-man bosses (easy cake). I'm talking about the big bad sorry excuse for a boss that is 25-man raiding.

Some guilds can roll their face over the keyboard and kill something.

Others just have their cat play with the mouse and keyboard for a couple hours.

Still others are hiring 25 monkeys to sit in a room together clapping their hands while throwing feces at the screen. The occasional flick of their tail hits the keyboard and presses any of the numerous iWin buttons currently in game that automatically kills a level 83 mob. While the monkeys are doing this and other disgusting acts, they're also writing Shakespearian dramas, fixing the economy, bailing out the auto industry and homeowners, and ending all wars through creating world peace.

This is what 25-man raiding has become. It's so easy a caveman monkey could do it!

Do boss kills even count for anything anymore? Not really, no.

Our weekly podcast is back again this Saturday (as it is every weekend, at 3:30pm Eastern on WoW Radio), and this week's show promises to be a good one. Not only is Turpster going to be on with us, and not only are we welcoming our new columnist Chase Christian to the show for the first time, but we're going to give away probably the best prize we've ever passed out on the WoW Insider Show: a Bananas pet monkey, straight from Turpster's WoW TCG collection.

Come for the giveaway, but stay for the discussion, because we'll be chatting about the raid tweaking coming in 3.0.2, the non-Honor wipe, Blizzard's big win in the Glider case, and AoE Tanking and why the devs seem to be passing it out like Hallow's End candy. And as usual, we'll answer your emails and questions -- drop us a note at theshow@wow.com, or join us live during the show on IRC at irc.mmoirc.com in the #wowradio channel.

Should be a great time, and hey, if you come listen, you might walk away with your own pet monkey! He'll clean and cook and do all kinds of things for your character in-game.* And his name is Bananas! What a great name for a monkey!

*Note: Monkey comes untrained. And it might be hard to train a noncombat pet. But look how cute!

Welcome to Know Your Lore, where each week Elizabeth Wachowski and Alex Ziebart bring you a tasty little morsel of lore to wrap your mind around. Sweet, sweet lore. Mmmm. Oh yeah, and it's late this week. Blame it on the severe dehydration. Or Alex, you can blame him too, if you want.

Continuing the Wrath preparation train, this week's Know Your Lore will take a look at one of the three Bronzebeard brothers. Not the King one or the dead one, but the eccentric, probably-should-be-dead one. The one and only Brann Bronzebeard, explorer extraordinaire.

Brann Bronzebeard is the very definition of a Jack of all Trades. He's an explorer, a linguist, a warrior, an archaeologist, et cetera, et cetera. He is the premier member of the Explorer's League, and while the guild was founded under an edict by Magni, Brann was one of its founding members.

With the release of the latest WoW TCG expansion, a new in-game pet has arrived, Bananas the Monkey. Looking into this has led me to a wonderful site dedicated to collecting all the non-combat pets in Warcraft. And when I say "dedicated", I mean "look no further than this site."

World of Warcraft Small Pet has checklists, FAQs, guides to getting pets exclusive to the opposing faction, screenshots, extensive information for each pet, you name it.

Now, I have a fair collection of non-combat pets, mostly from seasonal events like the mechanical yeti from Winterveil and Willy from Children's Week. I also quested for the Sprite Darter Hatchling out of Feralas back when the zone was in my level range. But this site is for the serious collector.

Check it out and then tell me: frightening obssession or one more kind of pleasant activity to pass the time in-game?