Posts with tag rare

We're Going To Need A Bigger Bag. Yes, Blizzard, we do need a bigger bag. Thank you for pointing out the startlingly obvious. Instead of giving us bigger bags, you decided to compound the problem by giving us new and awesome toys. What am I supposed to delete to make room for my Falling Flame? It certainly won't be my Golden Banana or Rainbow Generator. I guess I'll just make do with only having 3 free bag slots.

Before this turns into a rant on bag space, let me get right down to it: Falling Flame is just awesome. It's one of the many new vanity items available on the Timeless Isle.

When a couple friends of mine in high school would talk about the lizard-people living underground, controlling the world's governments and manipulating our society, something tells me they weren't talking about the saurok. Much like the grummles (a miserable race of gnome-like Sherpas, though some people are quite partial to them), the mogu shaped the saurok through the powers contained within the waters of the Vale of Eternal Blossoms.

Their intention was to make the saurok their enforcers, their troops, their battle-worthy servants that would reinforce borders and protect the mogu empire. Instead the saurok grew out of control, so much so that the mogu emperor lead a campaign to rip the souls out of the rebellious reptiles.

Now, you may be thinking about that old saying, "my enemy's enemy is my friend," right? Well, unfortunately that's not true all of the time -- in this case we just have two enemies, much like that one Shado-Pan daily. While the saurok don't have the resources or power of the mighty mogu, they are still quite the nuisance.

There are a number of saurok champions scattered across Pandaria, all of which share the following abilities:

• Grappling Hook Much like Rushing Charge, Grappling Hook will prevent you from straying farther than 20 yards away from the target, at least for more than 5 seconds at a time.
• Vanish The saurok sheds all DoTs and disappears into the shadows. Don't freak out like I did the first time I fought one; it didn't evade, it just took the cowardly rogue's way out. You do have a shot at hitting the saurok before he disappears, so make it count.
• Smoked Blade If you failed to bring the saurok out of stealth, he will use Smoked Blade which hits for 55% of your health.
• Vicious Rend A stacking bleed that deals moderate damage, Vicious Rend also functions to provide a sort of soft enrage for the saurok rares -- you need to kill them before the damage from the bleed, in addition to other sources, becomes unmanageable.

The enigmatic, apostrophe-loving mantid remind me a bit of the aliens in the movie District 9 -- bug-like, unpleasant looking creatures that, despite appearing to be foreign and strange, harbor the same kinds of emotions and instincts as humans. And while the mantid don't have large puppy dog eyes to draw our sympathy like the prawns, they do have a rich and complicated history that simultaneously invokes sympathy and uncertainty.

The Klaxxi are fighting a war against their own people, attempting to restore sanity to the mantid by dethroning their fear-driven queen, while being regarded as heretics by the remaining dominated legions of their kin -- but can we really trust them? Our alliance with the Klaxxi may simply be a marriage of convenience, and as soon as the empress is dealt with and their house is in order the re-unified mantid may turn their sights back to the pandaren, and us.

For now, however, there are a few "evil" mantid champions that need to be dispatched, all of which share the following abilities:

• Blade Flurry – The bug will wildly jab and prod in a cone in front of itself, dealing massive damage to anyone caught in its swath.
• Tornado – Summons a tornado that travels in a circular path, triggering Harsh Winds for any players that get too close.
• Windsong – Buffs the mantid's attack and movement speeds and makes it immune to snares and roots.

To squash these bugs, lots of room will be required as you will need to keep clear of any tornadoes that spawn. Ranged classes will find kiting to be near impossible while Windsong is up, meaning that the majority of this fight will have to be conducted within melee range, unless you have a tank chum. Run through the mob when he begins to cast Blade Flurry if you're in melee range, otherwise just get the heck out of there.

One thing I noticed while leveling was how much of my inventory was being filled with zany flavor items and mountains of random stat food. Between that and the pandaren racial bonus, Epicurean, I formed this preconception that all panda-shaped people loved to eat food and do kooky things, so imagine my surprise when NPCScan informed me that a pandaren rare was within my scanning range just waiting to go toe-to-toe.

I like to believe that maybe these particular pandaren are just looking for A Worthy Opponent (see what I did there?), and that I just get so caught up in the exchange of punches and blows that I forget not to kill them.

Like the jinyu, and the rest of the rare spawns, the pandaren rares all share the same set of abilities:

• Spinning Crane Kick - A whirlwind of feet and pain, the 3-second cat for this attack can't be interrupted, but the target can be stunned or crowd-controlled during the animation. Just to be safe, make sure that you don't engage the pandaren in an enclosed area.
• Chi Burst - The pandaren will only use this ability if you are more than 15 yards away from them, a mechanic surely designed to force you to deal with Spinning Crane Kick in some fashion. And at over 200,000 damage per cast, I would say it's pretty effective.
• Healing Mists - The one ability you will want to save your interrupt for, Healing Mists heals the pandaren for 30% of their maximum health. Stuns and crowd control should also work if you find your spellbook lacking a reliable interrupt.

The main strategy here is to stay close to the target for the most part, only moving away from it during Spinning Crane Kick. Also, interrupting Healing Mists will prevent you from dulling your blades against the bears' furry backside while you race to outpace the healing.

While leveling through Pandaria on opening night, Dan Desmond and I made a point of tracking down and killing any rare elites that haplessly wandered into our path, eventually earning us the Could We Find More Like That? achievement by the time we hit the level cap. A key part of our setup was the addon NPCScan, which would alert us to any rare elite within targeting range, and of course the plucky gumption that only a retribution and a protection paladin can bring.

While the rare elites aren't nearly as difficult as their denomination may imply, they're also not to be taken lightly. Each type of champion has a skill set of three abilities which can prove to be very deadly if the proper precautions are not taken.

The rare elites that hail from the jinyu have the following weapons in their arsenal:

• Water Bolt This is an ability with a cast which, despite the temptation, should not be interrupted. You'll need that 15 second cooldown for the next ability which is far deadlier. This is the ability that the jinyu will be throwing at you the most.
• Torrent This channeled attack does 28% of the target's maximum HP as damage every second. It must be interrupted immediately, or you'll be dead in no time.
• Rain Dance The jinyu will channel this spell (it cannot be interrupted) and toss balls of water into the air, which will then come crashing down around you. Don't stand in one place, to avoid getting hit. Each ball of water will deal 65% of the target's maximum HP as damage.

So, essentially, the way to defeat the jinyu elite is to keep moving during Rain Dance and be sure to interrupt Torrent ASAP. The key to fighting one is more awareness than anything else.

Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, we're back to flying endlessly around spawn points.

So, how many of you are still with us after Frostbitten? My guess is that most of you are still circling Storm Peaks in a desperate bid at Vyragosa. My friends, I salute you -- but the rest of us are going to pack up and ship out to Outland.

Bloody Rare tends to be slightly easier than Frostbitten for the simple reason that Outland is even emptier than Northrend, and there are no rares here competing for spawn times like Vyragosa and our old buddy, the Time-Lost Proto Drake. You'll still find a few people leveling their Wrath-era alts through Northrend, but the population of Outland players usually vanishes by Zangarmarsh or Terokkar. However, that's just been my experience, and as always, realms will differ.

And no matter how empty Outland seems, there are still a few rares here that will drive you up a wall.

I was taking my main through the new set of Northern Barrens quests recently when I found myself running across rare spawn mobs a lot. This in itself isn't all that surprising; you'll run across rare spawns pretty commonly whenever zones aren't occupied by eager levelers. I saw Elder Mystic Razorsnout, Swiftmane, and for the first time ever, Humar the Pridelord. Humar is well known as a popular hunter pet, and until Wrath, he was the only black lion in the game.

And that got me to thinking: What is the game's most famous rare spawn? If I had to settle on one, my vote would be the Time-Lost Proto Drake, which has driven legions of players to the nuthouse in an endless struggle to find it, let alone kill it. Close behind would probably be Loque'nahak, another famous hunter pet. Curiously, it feels like most of the game's really well-known rare mobs are actually fairly recent additions to the game, although people who played during classic WoW might disagree.

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Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

Epic gems are here, and they're designed differently than we're used to. To be specific, they're designed without fairness baked in, which is somewhat of a new feeling for people who weren't around buying epic gems in The Burning Crusade.

Fairness is actually the wrong word for this. Life isn't fair, and neither is WoW. Instead, I'll talk about balance. Blizzard has gone to great lengths to ensure that the game remains fun for as many people as possible by trying to avoid changes that suddenly disadvantage an arbitrary subset of players or shift the desirability of choices made a long time ago.

Balanced changes don't force competitive PvP and raiding group to play the gold-making game to be on a level footing with the competition. They also don't provide a tangible itemization difference between the profession perks of different crafting professions.

This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the AOL guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages.

I used to farm Attumen in Karazhan every week for the Fiery Warhorse mount. I used to farm Anzu in Sethekk Halls every day for the Raven Lord mount. I used to farm the quest in Brunnhildar Village every day for the White Polar Bear mount. I used to farm a lot of things ...

One of my longest-running farming attempts was for the elusive Time-Lost Proto-Drake. I would fly around The Storm Peaks for hours while working on homework, watching shows on Netflix Instant, waiting for random heroic queues, etc. After a few months of diligent hunting, my determination to find, kill, and loot the reins of the Time-Lost Proto-Drake was incited all the more when a friend just happened to fly past the dragon on his way from Ulduar to Dalaran.

At first, I was upset that the mount I sought so dearly had fallen haphazardly into his hands. Soon, though, I realized that if someone could get the mount by sheer dumb luck, it would be much more likely that I find it through persistence. After I spent several more months farming, however, this same friend just happened to see the shadow of the Time-Lost Proto-Drake flash by while he was questing in The Storm Peaks on the new Worgen mage he created when Cataclysm dropped. When I saw him flying around on his second TLPD mount, that was the last straw for me. I gave up the hunt.

What items, mounts or achievements bring out the farmer in you? How long have you been farming for that seemingly unobtainable something?

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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 Insider's pages.

Getting random drops always involves a bit of luck. In a PUG, not only do you need to have what you want drop, but you have to manage to win a /roll as well. In guild groups, you have to have DKP or whatever currency your guild uses for a loot system. Gear for the most part comes from time; eventually, you get the loot you need, but getting these random drops becomes far worse when farming for low drop-rate items such as pets and mounts. Baron runs, heroic MgT runs, Anzu runs, ZG trying to farm the various whelp and raptor pets ... some of us spend hours or days or weeks, and still never see it.

I have been on a pretty major achievement kick since prior to the Cataclysm launch, topping off old reps, farming pets and mounts, doing fishing achievements, all the things that take a back burner to leveling and new instances and raids. Trouble is, I have awful luck. Being a druid, I have run Anzu so many times I lost count and have never seen the mount; same with Baron, ZG and heroic MgT. No mounts from any of these places in hundreds of attempts. On the other hand, I have a guildie who has both ZG mounts, both Brewfest mounts, the Horseman's Reins, Anzu, and Rivendare's Deathcharger. He even got two of the raptor pets from ZG the same week he got the mount.

How lucky are you when it comes to farming rare drops? Have you been able to go in and get the drops in a few attempts, or have you given up in frustration, cursing the WoW gods?

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Some concerns have been expressed recently over the abysmally low drop rate of the Big Love Rocket. The drop rate was thought to be lower than 1-2% and Bornakk chimed in on the forums to confirm it. I'm not much of a big mount fanatic myself. The only rare one I have is the Obsidian Drake mount from Sartharion with 3 Drakes up. Now that I think about it though, I have yet to see anyone in Dalaran ride around with one of these rockets. As it stands, the drop rate of this rocket mount will not be raised anytime in the near future. Heck, even if they did, I know with my luck I would never see one of these.

If you're curious, as of today, there have only been 74 players with the Big Love Rocket Feat of Strength across North America and Europe. North America has seen 17 Big Love Rockets compared to the 54 for European players.

if you want to read more about drop chance and probability, check out Brian's post about it back in January. It's guaranteed to make your head spin!

Yesterday, Bornakk said clearly that the Battered Hilt drop that starts the Quel'delar questline was dropping at the right rate, which is much less than when the patch first hit. And then of course, in last night's fixes, they went ahead and increased the drop rate anyway. He also claimed there were no plans to make it BoP, but who knows what'll happen in the future? For now, however, you can still buy and sell the quest item for quite a bit of gold. We'll have to see where the price eventually ends up -- on the staff here, we've seen anything from 8,000g to over 23,000g, and Twitter tells us that people are paying an average of around 12k or so, going up to as high as 30k (or even shady real money offers in online classified ads). Our own Matt Low has actually seen the drop three different times, and lost every roll. It drops off of any of the mobs in the Heroic versions of the Frozen Halls 5-mans, and as Bornakk says, any class can use it to come up with a pretty solid weapon, so the competition will probably keep the price high, depending on where the drop rate ends up.

The silver lining, if you really want one, have terrible luck, and don't ever expect to have all that money, is that the price will probably go down eventually. Bornakk says that as people move up into Icecrown and start picking up weapons that are even better than the sister blade, demand is likely to drop off a bit. But he also says that Blizzard does want this to be a special and relatively rare item, so you'll still have to probably either be lucky or ready to grind it out. Good luck -- I'm out there searching for one with you.

We mention a ninja of the Onyxia mount in this week's Guildwatch, and while researching that, some other forum threads came up, including these two, both from General, where people say with conviction that given the chance, they'd take the Onyxia mount and never look back. They have a point -- it's one of the rarest random mounts in the game, on a raid that's definitely PuG-able. Chances are low that you'll ever see it, much less win it on a random roll, and so for a lot of people, it'd be worth the namechange and the server transfer you'd have to pay to escape your new ninja reputation.

Personally, I wouldn't do it, but that's really only because I know there are lots of rare mounts in the game that I'll never get (sigh, Red Proto-drake, I covet you), and one more isn't that big a deal. Not to mention that I like the guilds I'm in and the people I play with, and who knows what they'd think of me if I stole the mount from them or someone else. But not everyone feels the way I do, I'm sure, so let's ask: if you had the chance, in a PuG or a guild run, to steal the Onyxia mount as your own, would you take it? And if you would, is it just because it's so rare and special?