There will not be any new posts for a little bit, I’m taking some time to visit family in Florida for Thanksgiving. I’ll return to my usual posting pattern on Monday.
I must say, it seems like everyone is having trouble with the airlines this Thanksgiving. I left out of DFW Airport at 5:30am and didn’t arrive in Florida until 4pm. I should have been here at about 11am, having caught the 9am layover from Atlanta, but they didn’t let about ten of us on the airplane. It was still there, still connected, by they had “opted to stop letting people on early,” leaving ten of us stranded in Atlanta until the 2pm flight out. While about three-fourths of the time I’m fairly happy with Airtran, it seems like a quarter of the time things end up like this. Ultimately, though, I got to spend some time in the C-gate area where I spent so much of my college travel days. While I didn’t stop off at Seattle’s Best Coffee for lunch, it was still a little bit reassuring. And I’m in Florida now with family and friends, so I can’t complain too loudly. I hope everyone else has seen their travel plans go off without any trouble!
Also, Pilgrim’s Bounty is going strong on the live realms. While I had hoped to get up a guide for this holiday, there just was not enough time. My only advice for now is to make sure you get at least two sets of dailies in so you can get the hat, chest piece, and 8 turkey-shooters to blast those rogues with. Well, perhaps it’s not my only piece of advice — if you have any alts with cooking under 350, you can use this holiday to immediately take them all the way up. Start in Elwynn, head to Ironforge once pumpkins stop giving skill ups. After that, head to Darnassus, and finally end in Elwynn with turkeys. You’ll go from 1 to 350 paying only a few copper per skill up. What a holiday!
Alright, so you’re looking to work on your Sons of Hodir reputation. Last week we talked about unlocking their reputation, this week let’s talk about the dailies and repeatable quests. Our first repeatable quest is Hodir’s Tribute, available once you hit Neutral with the Sons of Hodir. Lillehoff will accept 10 Relics of Ulduar and grant you 250 reputation. Relics of Ulduar drop from almost anything in the Storm Peaks, Halls of Lightning, and Halls of Stone. For a long time, they were fairly useless items and many people simply vendored them. Now you can use them to soften your Sons of Hodir grind. Chances are you already have ten from unlocking them. I suggest you turn them in earlier rather than later, due to the progression of daily quests. The higher your reputation, the more dailies you can do per day, and those dailies often grant more reputation. You can also stockpile them for use on an alt, though remember that Sons of Hodir Exalted shoulder enchants are becoming Bind on Account in patch 3.3. Still, if you have a tailor hoping for the 22 slot bag pattern or an alt hoping for a cheap mammoth, it’s not a bad idea.
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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))
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.”
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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.
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Most of my time in game lately has gone towards helping my better half with her Insane title. For those who are unfamiliar with the title, it requires the following:
- Honored with the Bloodsail Buccaneers
- Exalted with Booty Bay
- Exalted with Ratchet
- Exalted with Gadgetzan
- Exalted with Everlook
- Exalted with Ravenholdt Manor
- Exalted with Shen’dralar Ancients
- Exalted with Darkmoon Faire
Phew! Quite a list, isn’t it? It’s intimidating, to say the least. What interested me the most was Ravenholdt (1,405 Lockboxes) and Shen’dralar Ancients (about 100 Diremaul runs for librams, then a combination of 100 Scholomance or Stratholme runs to get the Bind on Pickup materials to turn in the librams). That didn’t interest me at the time was the Darkmoon Faire, because like most people I worked under the misconception that Fuzzy Rabbit Feet, Bushy Tails, and Rugged Armor kits would allow me to gain reputation. The reality check for this title arrives when you realize that after friendly, the only way to increase your reputation with the Darkmoon Faire is through turning in decks of cards. Lots of decks of cards. About 1,680 decks of cards.
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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.
