Have you ever flown over the huge keep behind Gundrak and wondered what Blizzard had planned there? Have you wandered around Ahn’Kahet, marveled at its beauty, and wondered why there is so little down around Azjol’Nerub? I’ve often wondered about the things Blizzard didn’t have time to include. Ever since I heard about Legion Hold having been on the drawing board for Burning Crusade I find myself wondering at parts of expansions that never were. Lately, this tendency has had me thinking about Violet Hold.
Cute Fuzzy Meow
February 13, 2010
November 14, 2009
Don’t Worry, I Speak Newblett: Sons of Hodir and Level Eighty Shoulder Enchants Part One
Ah yes, once upon a time the only shoulder enchants came from libram world drops. Then Blizzard wanted us to become exalted with the Zandalar Tribe. Then they wanted us to side with the Aldors or Scryers! Does the madness ever end? Well, Northrend has a new twist on shoulder enchants: stolen men. Before I begin, however, I should preface this by saying that if you are a scribe and your inscription is near 400 Inscription you’re already set. Inscription offers dps, healing, tanking, and casting shoulder enchants that are leaps and bounds above the competition. While you can still use this guide as a way to familiarize yourself with Sons of Hodir and the other things they offer, the shoulder enchant focus isn’t really required. If you’re up in the air, Sons of Hodir offer Ice Mammoths, relatively cheap multi-passenger Grand Ice Mammoths, various blue-quality gear, a jewelcrafting pattern, and a tailoring pattern for a twenty-two slot bag.
Now, to get started you need to be at least level seventy-seven. You should have Cold Weather Flying to make this easier, but with loaner gryphons this isn’t strictly necessary. The quest you’re looking for is They Took Our Men! from K3 in Storm Peaks. This is a neutral goblin-run town that is located in the southern area of Storm Peaks. The quest is simple enough — rescue five goblins. After that, you’ll be sent into the mines, transformed into a frost viking woman, and sent along a very long epic quest. While the quest is fairly interesting, it isn’t necessary to complete the entire line of quests in order to unlock Sons of Hodir. About 3/4ths of the way in it’ll be unlocked, and you can stop there if you would like. If you finish the entire quest-line you’ll be given your choice from a few blues and offered two quests for Ulduar: Halls of Lightning. Also, after you’ve finished up at Brunnhildar Village with the Frost Viking women you’ll notice one of the huts has a couple of quests, and a daily quest opens up. While the daily often provides only cash, salted yeti milk, or snowballs it does have a chance to give you the Reins of the White Polar Bear.
((To be continued with Sons of Hodir Dailies))
Five Years of World of Warcraft
The Escapist interviewed Rob Pardo about the past five years of World of Warcraft and it’s an interesting read. Whenever you hear about him or Tigole, it’s easy to remember the assumptions they began with. Coming from a heavy Everquest background, they had some interesting views on hybrids and Massively Multiplayer Online Games, to put it nicely. While “growing up” in WoW made it easy to feel frustrated with their viewpoints, I think the article has at least one paragraph that is particularly noteworthy:
…We’d all lived the hardcore MMO life, so we held some things to be “truths self-evident.” Like, you had to have large raid sizes to make them feel epic, you needed to gate content by making players attune themselves to different tiers of content. On the PvP side, we said “Oh, you can never let people have a character on both sides of the PvP game.”
November 10, 2009
Ultimate Night Elf Hunter
Perhaps it’s the part of me that misses playing Warcraft 3 once a week with my friends, but I tend to think of the race/class combinations in terms of what their stereotypical unit was in Warcraft three. For the Ultimate series of posts, I like to take a look at what I consider the “ultimate” of that class — the titles, gear, pets, mounts, and flair items that really seem to work together to create the ultimate of a class. To start things off, we’ll be looking at the Night Elf Hunter.
November 9, 2009
And so it begins!
After much resisting, I’ve finally created my first World of Warcraft set of writings. To give some perspective on how long the game has been out, it’s now in version 3.2.2 and 3.3 (Icecrown Citadel) is on the Public Test Realm. I’m one of those “casual hardcore” players Blizzard is always talking about, the ones who may or may not raid and who may or may not delve into the player-versus-player aspects of the game. Alright, well, let’s get started.
The first of much big news from the Public Test Realm is six new mounts — four armored Frostwyrms, Arthas’ vampire pony Invincible, and the Large Love Rocket. There has been some speculation that the Frostwyrms are actually vehicles to be used in Icecrown Citadel, which would make me sad were it true. Much the same way Netherdrakes were the iconic mounts of Burning Crusade, I’ve always viewed Frostwyrms as being the iconic, though unobtainable, mounts for Wrath of the Lich King. While the top 0.5% of Arena teams per battlegroup get their shiny new Frostwyrm mounts at the end of each season, most of us mere mortals have had to resign ourselves to the fact that Frostwyrms would not be joining our mount collections. I would happily take up raiding again if Icecrown Citadel had an option to acquire a Frostwyrm mount, even if the armored versions are significantly uglier than the naked versions.
Having spent a lot of time attempting to farm the Headless Horseman’s Charger, I’m not quite thrilled with the prospect of trying to farm a giant love rocket mount. Still, part of me is excited as more mounts are added to the game. Ever since the game began, mounts have been one of the biggest draws for me. I love the Winterspring Frostsaber (“Wintersaber”), and it’s one of the reasons I went with World of Warcraft instead of one of the competitors at the time like Final Fantasy Online. Something about a blue saber-toothed tiger is just too good to pass up.
