Posts with tag red

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

Grim Batol was founded by Wildhammer dwarves seeking to escape the legacy of the war that tore dwarf society apart. Led by Khadros, their thane, they marched north from Ironforge (originally the home of all dwarves, from Dark Irons to Bronzebeards to Wildhammers) after the death of King Anvilmar and the civil war that pitted the three main clans of their people against one another. Having lost the war, the Wildhammers chose to build a new, grand home for themselves in the mountains between the Wetlands and the Highlands. And it was grand indeed, for a time. In terms of pure architectural splendor, Grim Batol threatens both Ironforge and the massive constructions of the Dark Irons inside the Blackrock Mountain.

The Wildhammers did not dwell on their loss to the Bronzebeards. If making a new life for themselves in Grim Batol and the Highlands was hard, it was also exciting and a new challenge to be overcome, a new way of life to meet head on and overcome. Sadly, from these auspicious beginnings disaster would pile upon disaster. Armies would invade, fell sorceries would be unleashed, and in the end, the Wildhammers would abandon their once-great home.

It did not rest quietly.

Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly dose of Death Knight discussion.

Now that we've covered most standard pemutations of gear gathering in past Lichborne columns, I figured this week would be a good time to start talking about taking the extra steps to really trick out your gear. This week, will focus on gems. Not only will this help you take your gear to the next level, but it gives me a good excuse to talk about some new discoveries and discussions going on as we try to figure out the best ways to squeeze the most DPS out of a Death Knight. So to start, let's talk about which statistics you'll want to focus on when you gem.

Welcome to this week's edition of Scattered Shots, which is dedicated to shiny things and dust.

So by now you've seen our normal dungeon gear guide, our heroic dungeon gear guide, our reputation gear guide, and our holiday gift guide. Between all of them, you should be able to put together a nice solid set of gear that should let you tackle 10-man Naxxramas pretty easily. But grabbing the gear is the easy part. To go the extra mile, you need to grab those gems and enchantments. Let's look at some of the best gems and enchantments you can take along to secure your place in the DPS charts in Naxxramas.

Here's some nice news for Arena PvPers in the area of undocumented 2.4.3 changes: MMO Champion has discovered that the PvP gems that are currently purchasable for honor points are now available for Arena points as well -- 800 points each, to be exact. The full list of gems is as follows:

• Gleaming Ornate Dawnstone
• Smooth Ornate Dawnstone
• Bold Ornate Ruby
• Runed Ornate Ruby
• Inscribed Ornate Topaz
• Potent Ornate Topaz

All the red tabards on the Horde side really annoy me. How come everyone picks a red tabard? Isn't it enough that the Horde flag is red? Can't we have as much variation in our color schemes as we do in our tusk/horn/pigtail configurations? Red is so 2007.

Or maybe it's not. A study published in the Cyberpsychology & Behavior journal determined that teams who wore red while playing Unreal Tournament 2004 won 55% of the time over teams that wore blue. Another study from 2005 showed that wearing red gave an advantage to athletes in the 2004 Olympics, too. However, I'm not sure I buy the reasons given for this advantage, though. The neuroscientist who studied the Unreal Tournament matches thinks that because men turn red when they're angry this color acts as a psychological distractor. Sounds like some reaching, if you ask me.

Now, of course, in WoW we don't always wear the colors of our faction, but the predominance of red tabards on the Horde side and blue ones on the Alliance side may just put a Brutal Gladiator's Painsaw in the hands of those who claim the Horde has an advantage in the battlegrounds. But only if everyone wears red or blue. Hm. I wonder if I can change my guild's tabard color from green to red...

[Thanks, Avadann Kedeth.]

While the "rumor" that starts this thread is really stupid and completely untrue (that red quests will give you negative XP), later on, the thread actually clarifies a few things, even for me, about quests and the XP they grant at different levels.

Any quest you get has a level associated with it-- that's Blizzard's method of determining which quests you should do at which levels. As listed in the thread:

Grey - Trivial
Green - Easy
Yellow - Somewhat Difficult (Blizzard says "Normal," but some yellow quests are more frustrating than others)
Orange - Hard
Red - Very Hard

(There are addons, also, that will do away with the whole color thing and simply tell you what level your quests are-- I use MonkeyQuest.)

But here's the thing, and this is something I had wrong: every quest you do gives exactly the same amount of XP, unless it's gray. If a quest gives 4000xp, it'll give 4000xp whether you do it at red, orange, yellow, or green. I had previously thought that a red quest would give more XP (because that's how it works with monsters-- higher level kills mean more XP), but that's not the case with quests.

And here's the other thing I learned: while killing a gray mob grants no XP at all, gray quests do give XP, but it drops for every level the quest is gray to you. That number is determined by this formula-- gray quests are 5 or more levels below you, and the XP you receive drops as your level rises.

Finally, while the same XP is given for a quest no matter when you do it, it still might not be worth it to only do green quests-- 1100xp is great at level 17, but not as helpful at 22. While doing red quests won't actually give more XP, they will push that experience bar farther (because the bar is relative to the XP you need for next level). As with mobs, you generally want to be doing yellow quests, while doing orange or red when you can (when you have a group willing to help out) and green when you have to.