Posts with tag world-event

Deathwing will soon be here, attacking from above, bringing down terror and death onto the unsuspecting citizens of Azeroth.

At random, Deathwing will attack an entire zone and kill everything -- players, NPCs, mobs, creatures and critters. For your death, you get the feat of strength Stands in Fire. We don't know when exactly this will become active on the live realms; however, we are able to confirm it's active on the beta realms.

The full blue announcement as follows:

Zarhym

One of Azeroth's oldest adversaries will soon tear through the Elemental Plane to reforge the world in flame, but this foe won't be conducting his reign of terror from the confines of a castle or lair. Deathwing is a destructive force the likes of which adventurers have yet to see in World of Warcraft, and his appetite for devastation can only be satisfied by the shattering of the world. Following his explosive escape from Deepholm, Deathwing will cast a deadly shadow over the people of Azeroth as he wreaks indiscriminate havoc across the land.

Once free to terrorize the world, Deathwing will randomly choose territories in Azeroth to attack each day until his ruinous reign is brought to an end. A blackened sky will be the only warning before every living creature caught in his approach is consumed by his terrible fire. The unfortunate victims of his malice will receive a rare Feat of Strength... as well as a repair bill and corpse run.

When Deathwing returns, you'd best keep your eyes on the skies.

source

Players who're able to log on after maintenance is over today will discover that the Operation Gnomeregan and Zalazane's Fall world events are now available! These are two of the introductory Cataclysm world events. Head to Kharanos in Dun Morogh or the Echo Isles in Durotar to take advantage of these limited-time experiences.

To start the Echo Isles quests, you want to talk to Vanira, who is right next to Voljin in the Sen'jin village in Durotar.
To start the Operation Gnomeregan quests, you want to talk to High Tinker Mekkatorque, who is located in the Tinker Town district of Ironforge.

These quests are counting towards the Loremaster achievement.

More information on the event:

• Official Gnomeregan and Echo Isles announcement and information
• Operation Echo Isles / Zalazane's Fall: Transcripts and details
• Operation Gnomeregan: Transcripts and details
• Echo Isles / Zalazane's Fall quest summary and gallery
• PrintWarcraft.com offers original WoW posters

WARNING: This post is chock full of spoilers. Spoilers like you would not believe. If you'd like to be surprised about anything involving the Echo Isles and what is contained within, I wouldn't recommend continuing onward. If, however, you are clamoring for more information, read on!

There is a lot of great information about upcoming world events in the current patch 3.3.3 PTR. We've already posted about some of the story inside the Ruby Sanctum as well as what is being referred to as "Operation Gnomeregan". However, the trolls have their own operation underway in trying to take back the Echo Isles from the evil hex master Zalazane. There are lots and lots of spoilers about the quest line and the story behind it. Please note that this is just an assembly of transcripts from all of the sound files put in what appears to be a proper order.

Dere be some dark voodoo inside. Do ye have what it takes?

Blue posters in the official forums have started leaving comments about the earthquakes happening in-game, which as we reported the other day, appear to be linked to in-game mobs that are potentially ushering in the beginning of the Cataclysm world event.

The comments are somewhat cryptic, but that is par for the course with Blizzard. They like to tease -- to hold the carrot in front of you and make you run for it. But the evidence we presented Monday was pretty solid, and it's gained even more traction in the community and around the net; so this is an interesting follow up to it all.

The comments thus far after the break.

Whoosh. Well, that went by rather quickly, didn't it? Day of the Dead ends today. Two days is most certainly a short time for a World of Warcraft holiday, but fortunately, there was little to do. Just a visit to Catrina, buying a bread recipe, sharing it with some dead folks, and that's it. It didn't exactly go off without a hitch, either, as there were some known issues with the event. But everything was fixed, eventually, and the short event is now about to finish.

How did everyone find the short holiday? It mirrored the short holiday it was based on in the real world, and even similar holidays all over the world. In the Philippines, we got a non-working holiday for November 2, where most folks are off to the provinces visiting their dead. How did everyone's Day of the Dead go? Were you able to take a gander at the lovely dancing Catrina? Were you able to bake some (presumably stale) bread? What's your take on these short holidays? Personally, I think it's a nice touch. These blink-and-you'll-miss-it events similar to Pirate's Day are nice nods to our real world happenings. Hopefully, all of you got a chance to enjoy this new but brief world event.

Reader Verdus sent us a tip reminding us that this weekend is the one-year anniversary of one of the simultaneously most loved and hated events in WoW's history, the zombiepocalypse. Right around this time last year, infected crates started appearing all over the world, and that expanded out into a full-blown zombie invasion (which was so big it made it out into mainstream news). After the zombie plague had been quelled, the Scourge attacked with full force, leaving us to fall back and fight for our necrotic runes up until the expansion released. It was definitely a huge event, and now, a year later, I'm sure most of us (though not all of us) look back on it with fond memories.

And surely Blizzard learned a lot from what happened a year ago -- Linedan has a nice wrapup of the good and the bad that Blizzard may have taken away from the zombie apocalypse. The idea of turning players on players was great, but that unfortunately led to more griefing than most players would have liked (and the fact that, by the end of it, you couldn't avoid the zombies at all, probably didn't help). And for all of the disruption, there was no real reward (the eventual rewards came with the Scourge invasion, and then it was simply just farming tokens), and no real payoff (the final world event seemed half-cooked, and it was only implied that Arthas was the one who'd shipped the crates).

Obviously, if you've been paying attention to what players are saying about Garrosh Hellscream, confidence isn't high in the guy. Especially if, as rumored, he's going to be getting a promotion very soon. But lest your fears about the guy are overtaking your Horde pride, just wait -- Kisirani says that we haven't learned all there is to know about the son of Grom. He may yet show a more palatable side, as we're told that we "haven't seen the entirety of who Garrosh is."

And what better place to do that, she continues, than in the run up to Cataclysm. We already know there's going to be a world event, but Kisirani hints yet again that it's going to be quite sizable -- considering that she mentions it between Icecrown and the expansion release itself, we could just be talking about a whole content patch on its own. However it all plays out, it's quite clear that Icecrown is definitely not the end of this round of content, and the world we'll be playing in when Cataclysm actually releases will be very different than the one we know today.

So Cataclysm is coming and Kisirani is already working on an in-game launch event. It's gotta mean something right? Now don't get me wrong, even with my self-confessed zombiephobia, I loved last November's zombie invasion (though, at times, it got really frustrating). So now Kisirani is officially hard at work planning a new event to herald the beginning of an Azerothian cataclysm, I can't help but wonder what she has up her sleeves for us.

Is anyone else excited? I certainly am and it gives us something to focus on during the inevitable wait. To be fair, at least Cataclysm's not scheduled for 2012! We don't have that long to wait, we could be rolling Worgen and Goblins in just under/over a year's time. That just about makes it bearable. But it also leaves us with time to think about what Blizzard will do to introduce players to this brave new world.

Hit the jump to find out what we think could well happen prior to the launch of Cataclysm.

From the "duh, but still cool" news department comes confirmation that there will be an in-game launch event for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, WoW's third expansion.

Kisirani, your friendly neighborhood world designer, replied to a comment in the general forms today where a player said he'd be disappointed if there wasn't a Cataclysm launch event. Kisirani replied:

*rolls up her sleeves and idly kicks the crates from last launch event under her desk*

We're on it.

That's confirmation in Blizzard speak.

Will it be as badass as the Lich King launching his forces into Stormwind, Orgrimmar, and the rest of Azeroth? My guess is that it'll be at least 37 times as badass.

Zoltan of Aegwynn is the guy who's been sitting on top of the overall achievement point lists for a while, and he's just recently cracked the incredible total of 10,000 points. At the time of this writing, he's finished off a total of 908 out of 931 achievements currently in the game, giving him a total of 10,005 achievement points.

The Champion of Ulduar is the one that put him over the top according to his Armory profile, and strangely, he doesn't appear to have any of the Feats of Strength (edit: never mind, I read it wrong -- he's got plenty). He is only missing the two World Event achievements left (Brewmaster and the meta-achievement, neither of which are yet possible), the Sea Turtle achievement, and then a few more Heroic Ulduar endgame points. Given that the 3.2 patch achievements will likely come out before Brewmaster, there's no way yet to clear everything completely, but he's as close as it gets.

Very impressive indeed. Zoltan has just one or two people on his heels, and then the numbers drop out to a few hundred below 10,000 (and strangely enough, the top five players are all EU folks). There's no reward for all of those points (and Blizzard has no plans to offer any), but it's quite, as you might say, an achievement.

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.

So here's the deal. We've been told we have more Argent Tournament content coming, that's a given. As late as a couple days ago, Blues were telling us, for example, that we'll definitely see more ways to earn Champion's Seals.

In short, come 3.2, it seems more than likely that we can expect the Goblins to be done building that coliseum, and the next phase of the tourney to be underway. So the question is, what exactly will we see?

Thanks to the astute eyes of reader Jadissa, we can report that Noblegarden is no longer present on the in-game calendar. This is likely a clear indicator that the in-game world event is getting pushed back. Based on what we know already (that it will be part of other achievements), it should not be assumed that the event was removed.

We've spoke about the upcoming changes to Noblegarden before: it might get delayed, and it will be part of the overall world event achievement What a Long, Strange Trip.

There has been no indication from Blizzard when exactly it will start up, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it go live towards the end of the month. We'll have to wait and see when this start date is, and we'll be sure to announce it here on WoW Insider as soon as we know.

This is not an April Fools joke.

The time for loving is finally here! Officially, that is. You can do your love thing any day. On the other hand, today is the start of Love is in the Air, the second world event of the year. If you're looking to get that Achievement, required for the meta-Achievement to get that Violet Proto-drake, the best place to start would be The OverAchiever, where Dan wrote up a handy guide to becoming a Love Fool.

Now that we all have an excuse to act like fools for love, I have to ask -- what's the most foolish thing you've done for love in-game? I know one guildie who's been busily farming the various drake pets and the Disgusting Oozling to give to his lady love in time for the season. The cheesiest I ever got was when my wife and I took off to have a nice picnic on one of the floating isles in Nagrand, complete with roses, picnic baskets, and formal wear. I don't have a lot of money in-game, so all the extravagant gifts come from my wife instead.

This time, though, I think I'm going to bake her a Delicious Chocolate Cake and maybe a Bouquet of Black Roses. I know, I'm sort of cheap and uncreative, but hey, I'd love to hear some suggestions! I can probably pick up some Achievements along the way, and I could always use some reputation gains with my wife, after all...

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Love is in the Air and on WoW Insider. Check out our continuing coverage of the event and our guide to earning the achievement. And you better hurry; the holiday only lasts five days!