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WoW Archivist: Patch 2.4 -- Fury of the Sunwell
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? On March 4, 2008, Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dungeons, passed away. A few weeks later, Blizzard dedicated the final and meatiest patch of the Burning Crusade expansion to Gary's memory. Unlike the raid- and druid-centric patch 2.1, the big nothing of 2.2, or the old world revamp (and another raid) of patch 2.3, Fury of the Sunwell had boatloads of new endgame content for everyone. Blizzard also provided a trailer for the patch that showed the history of the Sunwell and revealed Kael'thas' diabolical plan. Redefining realm-wide events Kael'thas had to be stopped. The naaru convinced the Scryers and the Aldor to work together, forming a new faction to retake the Sunwell at the Isle of Que'Danas. The Shattered Sun Offensive represented a massive evolution of the realm-wide event concept after the very popular Gates of Ahn'qiraj event ushered in the idea. Daily quests, introduced in The Burning Crusade, were the key. The Gates event required players to gather and turn in crafting supplies. Though you certainly felt like a contributor by forking over dozens of stacks of cloth, the gameplay aspect was lacking. Only one guild per realm could participate in the complete quest line. On Quel'Danas, everyone could experience the story as it played out. Instead of turning in items, your realm earned credit toward the next phase of the event when players completed dailies. Rather than a one-time event, the phases changed and unlocked different parts of the island to show the Offensive's progress. Eventually the united Scryers and Aldor built a town, complete with a blacksmith for repairs, alchemy lab, portal, and statues to honor the fallen. Each new phase also brought new dailies and new rewards that could be purchased with gold and "badges" (TBC's equivalent of valor points). All of these changes were permanent, so you didn't have to log in on a specific day in order to enjoy them.
Alternative leveling in the Isle of Quel'Danas
I'm bored of Northrend. It is beautiful and has lovely music and is full of lore and I'm bored. It's the new Outland for me and my alts. Other ways to level abound, of course, but they all have their drawbacks and are various levels of "Been there; done that." as well. So I took Tizzi, the bored goblin mage, to a place where my aged druid spent many grindful days: the Isle of Quel'Danas. We complain about dailies now, but Quel'Danas (also known as the Sunwell Isle) was the land of too many dailies for our quest log. Grind, grind, grind we ancient Burning Crusade players did, so we could be of the Shattered Sun and get some lovely loot besides. When Quel'Danas was the in-thing, everyone was max-level, so there was no XP -- just the cash, gear, and camping. Oh, so very much camping. The Isle of Quel'Danas is vacant of players now, but is otherwise unchanged. It resides in a bubble in time, much like Outland, and the NPCs are still there to give quests or be slaughtered.
Why the Burning Crusade didn't suck
Yesterday, Brian Wood explored his thoughts on why Burning Crusade sucked. He did it in-character, playing the role of Grandpappy Frostheim, laying out his thoughts in the persona of a grumpy, crusty old dwarf telling the young'uns how bad things were back in his day. You can't take a persona like that seriously -- and you're not supposed to -- but the piece made me think about why I love Burning Crusade so much. Even after all of this time, it remains my favorite expansion, though Mists of Pandaria is pretty darn good. Yeah, Burning Crusade had its faults. It wasn't as well-balanced as most remember, it had more than its fair share of annoying gameplay mechanics, and the fact that the developers hadn't yet solidified the roles of 10- and 25-man raids was a real drag at times. If Burning Crusade were released this year, it would have a terrible reception. There have been so many quality-of-life improvements made since its release that players would never want to live as we did in Burning Crusade ever again. Despite that, it still had many elements that I loved, and still love. Many of these things are nebulous and completely up to personal tastes -- what I love, you may hate, and that's fine. That's how opinions work. Stranger in a strange land To me, Outland defined the Warcraft franchise's storytelling capabilities. Though Warcraft often utilizes the same fantasy tropes you see just about everywhere in the genre, it wasn't afraid to be different -- we went to a new, completely alien planet. The playable draenei were a race of people who traverse the stars. The ethereals were merchants from another plane of existence. Outland was not just a subcontinent of Azeroth, it was a new world entirely. While it has been done in fantasy, it isn't done very often.
WoW Archivist: 5 years of daily quests
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? Just like Officers' Quarters, another WoW staple has recently celebrated its fifth anniversary. Daily quests were added to the game a little over five years ago, on May 22, 2007, in patch 2.1. One of Blizzard's big selling points for Mists seems to be its huge amount of daily quest content. Dailies are undoubtedly going to be a big deal at level 90. Blizzard has even lifted the daily quest cap that has stood at 25 for several years, so players will be free to do whatever dailies they like across the entire history of the game. Dailies seem like such an obvious and critical element of WoW, but they weren't part of the vanilla game. In this week's Archivist, we'll explore how daily quests began, how they have changed over the years, and how Blizzard is trying to recreate the glory days of daily quests in Mists. WTH is this blue exclamation point? Has a single piece of designed punctuation ever been as famous as WoW's chubby yellow exclamation point? It even has its own merchandise. Believe it or not, the exclamation point was one of Blizzard's biggest innovations when they created the game. No longer did you have to chat with every single NPC in town to figure out which one of them needed a favor -- a staple of RPG games for decades. Now you could tell at a glance which NPCs were willing to pay for a bit of random mercenary work. I remember how odd that first blue exclamation point looked. They had been yellow, after all, for two and a half years. Changing its color seemed like sacrilege. After accepting the quest, it had the word "(Daily)" next to it in my log -- it felt like both a promise and a warning. Daily quests were an exciting new element, but they were not without their critics.
Is it time to kill daily quests?
You know me, always looking to kill stuff. Hear me out, though: I'm not saying we should kill repeatable questing here. Repeatable questing, first given to us in World of Warcraft with the inclusion of the Skyguard and Ogri'la questing hubs, was later expanded upon with the Isle of Quel'Danas as part of the Sunwell patch and has been with us ever since. Throughout Wrath of the Lich King and into Cataclysm, we've seen new daily quest hubs come and go. (Cataclysm currently has both Tol Barad and the Molten Front as hubs, plus other dailies for reputation factions such as the Therazane ones.) I'm not specifically arguing against the concept of having questing hubs that offer repeatable quests for a reoccurring reward. I'm asking why must they be daily?
Official SSO quest guide
The official US website came back up an hour or two ago, and with it came a "reputation tips" guide for the Shattered Sun Offensive. Now I asked myself when I saw this, of all the factions, why SSO? They're one of the easiest, not to mention most profitable, factions out there; surely people can just do a bunch of dailies and get to Exalted in a week or so.However, it turns out that although this presents itself as a faction guide, what it really is is a quest guide. It covers all the Isle of Quel'Danas daily quest as well as the SSO-associated Outland dailies. While you won't find anything new in there if you've done the quests a few times, newcomers to the Isle may find some useful tips, such as: Do Further Conversions and Arm the Wards at the same time. You can take the readings for Know Your Ley Lines while being attacked. You don't have to have killed the Emissary of Hate to plant the banner on him for The Battle Must Go On; just find the corpse. You have to be wearing the goggles to see the distortions for The Multiphase Survey. Your Flare can pick up charges off the Incandescent Fel Sparks for Blast the Gateway even if you're not the one who kills the Spark, as long as you're nearby. I must confess, I've stopped doing the dailies altogether now, as I'm Exalted on both my 70s and have faster ways to get gold when I need it. But it is certainly one of the more enjoyable reputation grinds.
Evade me no longer
For some reason, the first evade bug moment I remember happened in Zul'Farrak. We were clearing the basilisk pulls before attempting Antu'sul (why is it that the optional bosses always have a couple of sweet warrior drops?) and the mage in the group wanted to skip the whole thing. Impatient, he decided to start nuking away from atop one of the hills surrounding the area and managed to pull aggro, but the basilisk couldn't path up to him (and to be honest I'm not sure how he got up there) and promptly went evade. He wouldn't come down because he rightly knew the mob would hit him, and so it took us a solid ten minutes of arguing before he finally came into the monster's reach so that I could taunt it.I'm thinking about this because of the Isle of Quel'Danas dailies, specifically the quest Crush the Dawnblade. For some reason whenever I do this quest I run into Dawnblade Summoners who are evading. This puzzles me because I can't understand why a ranged mob is evading: it doesn't have to path to anything to hit it, just get into range. Is there some way a hunter or some other ranged class can shoot them but stay out of their range?
The changing face of WoW 2.4
When Blizzard released patch 2.4 for World of Warcraft in March, they brought a plethora of changes to all types of end game play. They introduced new casual daily quests, a new five person dungeon, and a new raid zone for twenty five person play; all of this on a new island off the northern coast of the Eastern Kingdoms called the Isle of Quel'Danas. Many who play WoW consider patch 2.4 to be the largest and most complex patch to date, sans the actual expansions. It is quite rare for Blizzard to open up a whole new zone in a free patch, and even rarer for them to completely change the raiding landscape (a staple of WoW) by removing attunements and lifting other restrictions. Despite having a large and successful release of the patch, Blizzard has continued to update the game in with Patches 2.4.1 and 2.4.2. They offer more tweaks and changes that make the WoW community even happier. Take a look through our gallery for a highlight of the changes we've seen in 2.4 through 2.4.2. %Gallery-8792%
WoW, Casually: It's great to be level 70 and casual
Each week or so, Robin Torres writes WoW, Casually for the player who has 2 hours or less to play at a time.Let the raiders have fun with their world firsts, Blizzard also kept those of us with limited playtime in mind when designing the Sunwell activities. If you are level 70 and haven't gone over to the Isle of Quel'Danas, get thee to a Flightmaster in Ironforge or Silvermoon and get in on the fun.You may think with all the hubbub about the new bosses like Brutallus that the new Sunwell zone is raider-only territory, but you would be wrong. The daily quests there are fun and easily doable solo. You earn a lot of money, a lot of rep with people who will give you cool stuff, and you help your server progress through the new content. There has never been a better time to be level 70 and casual.
Inspecting across factions, let's all hold hands now
One of the little things that snuck by in the 2.4 patch notes is the ability to inspect players across factions. Horde can look at Alliance folk's gear, and Alliance can look at Horde people's gear. They can only do this when no one is flagged for PvP, however. This is a really neat feature. My friends and I often times play "guess the gear" on the Horde toons we pass during our PvE adventures. We solve our arguments by looking them up in the armory, but now we'll just be able to right click on the Horde character's portrait and choose "Inspect." Pretty nifty.Now... the real question becomes, where could this lead? For a long time players have been wondering if one day we'll be able to group across factions. Blizzard has obviously been leaning towards cross faction interaction and friendly support for a while now. We had the AQ gates opening, the recent goings on in the Isle of Quel'Danas, and lots of quests where you have to help out a member of the opposing faction.
Phase 1 Dailies: Blast the Gateway
This is the companion quest to "Blood for Blood," and is given by Magistrix Seyla up at the Throne of Kil'Jaeden ("The Missing Magistrix" is a prerequisite). In "Blast the Gateway" you take on a mission to help shut down the Legion Gateway, by means of an interesting quest mechanic. Right-click the supplied Sizzling Embers to release a pet Living Flare, which follows you around. Contrary to what WoWWiki says, I find that it will not despawn if you use your flying mount, as long as you don't get too far away from it (so be careful on your epic mounts). Find and kill the Incandescent Fel Sparks, which are fire elementals that wander the Throne area. They have a fireball, but like most of the mobs involved in the dailies, they're not hard to kill. Every a Fel Spark is killed with your Living Flare nearby, the Flare energizes. Note that you don't actually have to kill the Spark yourself; if you see some other people killing one, go help, and any flares in the vicinity will get energized. Once your Flare accumulates enough energy (it takes about five eight kills), it will become "unstable" and turn green. Take it over to the Legion Gateway, near Magistrix Seyla, and it'll release its fiery power. Done! Talk to the Magistrix for 12g and 250 Shattered Sun rep. I did have my Flare despawn on me once, but I think I flew up very high or something. I've definitely had it follow me on my flying mount just fine. But you should be careful, because if it does despawn you have to start the quest over.
Phase 1 Dailies: Blood for Blood
Now that you've completed "The Missing Magistrix" and teleported to the Throne of Kil'Jaeden in Hellfire Peninsula (or flown there if you've already done the teleport before, but completion of "The Missing Magistrix" is required for this quest), you're ready to do Blood for Blood and its companion quest, Blast the Gateway (next post). Magistrix Seyla at the Throne assigns both quests. Blood for Blood goes like this: Kill Doom Heralds, those big swordy demon things you see stomping around, and loot their blood. You need four, and it seems to be a 100% drop. The blood powers the Felblood Siphon that you'll use in the next step. Find Felblood Initiates (pictured) casting wavy green things at the structures on the ground and cower at their eliteness. Now use the Felblood Siphon on them, and, just like the giants from Ferelas, they will weaken into non-elite pushover Emaciated Felbloods. Kill. Do this four times, and you're ready to return to the Magistrix for 12g and 250 Shattered Sun rep. This was a fun quest, although last night it was absolutely impossible to find any Felbloods because of all the players competing for them. Much easier today though; they might have upped the spawn rate (edit: they did). The Felbloods stun briefly when you use the Siphon on them, which gives you a chance to get some distance and/or cast a spell. Next up is Blast the Gateway, which is a good quest to do at the same time as this one. I wonder where Kazzak is hanging out, though -- has he always been killed when I've been up there, or did they move him?
Phase 1: The Missing Magistrix
This isn't actually a Sunwell daily quest -- it's a one-time thing -- but it is done on the Isle of Quel'Danas, and it does open up more dailies (keep an eye out for posts on "Blood for Blood" and "Blast the Gateway"). "The Missing Magistrix" is picked up from the Shattered Sun Staging Area, and asks you to go look after an operative gone AWOL by means of a portal and a scroll. You do need a flying mount to get this quest, since if you didn't have one you won't be able to get back from where you're sent without burning your Hearthstone.Finding this portal seems to be very difficult for people, so I'll provide as much information as possible. The coordinates are 48,44 It's south and very slightly east from the Staging Area It's subtly indicated on the map in the screenshot It is a wall of green glow similar to the Dark Portal into the Outlands Once you get to the portal, right-click the Captured Legion Scroll in your inventory to be teleported to the Throne of Kil'Jaeden, where Kazzak usually hangs out. Don't do this if you're not read to go to Outland, since there's no reverse teleport (at least, not yet). The portal is guarded by some non-elite demons, but you can avoid fighting most of them by going around behind. Once you do port through, you'll appear at Magistrix Seyla's feet, ready to turn in the quest and get to demon-slaying. Easiest 9g ever.
Phase 1 Dailies: Erratic Behavior
Continuing our examination of the phase one daily quests in patch 2.4, here is "Erratic Behavior." It is easily done at the same time as the other Isle of Quel'Danas daily, The Sanctum Wards. It's gotten from the Shattered Sun Staging Area, and asks you to convert five Erratic Sentries into friendly ones by means of the magical crystals they give you.The Erratic Sentries are found in the same place as the mobs for The Sanctum Wards: an arc starting at the Staging Area and proceeding broadly southwards along the western shoreline. They're non-agressive (yellow) mechanicals (pictured), and although they're level 70, it's still uncommonly easy to kill them. Sometimes they can be found reduced in health bandaging themselves up, and in general they move a bit oddly -- I guess that explains the "erratic" part.After you kill and loot, target the corpse and right-click the Attuned Crystal Cores in your inventory; the Sentry will turn into a friendly one and stagger around briefly before disappearing. Note that you can't convert corpses that you haven't killed yourself. Convert five corpses, and you're done. Return to the staging grounds for 9g, 150 Shattered Sun rep, and warm fuzzing feelings for helping get to Phase Two. This quest is still available in Phase Two, but renamed to "Further Conversions."
Phase 1 Dailies: The Sanctum Wards
Welcome to the first post of a new series on the daily quests available in Patch 2.4. I'll be going through all the quests that are available in phase 1, one by one. This is one of the two daily quests on the new Isle of Quel'Danas, and it's called "The Sanctum Wards." It goes well with Erratic Behavior, which I'll cover in the next post.The quest itself is pretty simple, and goes in two parts. Hunt down Wretched Devourers and Wretched Fiends, and slaughter them for their Mana Remnants. You'll need four Remanants, and the drop rate felt like it was around 50%. The mobs are only level 68, and don't pose much of a problem; they do a puny drain life/mana and a very short silence. They can be found starting in the Shattered Sun Staging Area and spreading in an arc down near the western shoreline. Once you have your four Mana Remnants, come back up near the Staging Area to a Crystal Ward (pictured, at 49,35) and right-click the stack of Mana Remnants in your inventory. There's some nice pretty zapping effects, and you're done with your quest. 9g and 150 Shattered Sun rep await you. You have now completed one of the two quests that will progress your server towards Phase Two, so thanks for doing your part! This quest is still available in Phase Two, but renamed to "Arm the Wards."
Burning Crusade content offline [Updated]
According to numerous reports and several personal experiences, much of the Burning Crusade content is offline on several servers, both in the U.S. and the E.U.. When attempting to access a character in any of these locations you will be presented with an error that says "World Server Down."This is no doubt from the mass of people who have flocked to the Isle of Quel'Danas in order to see the new content. While the realms and content are being bumpy tonight, checkout our extensive collection of patch 2.4 information.I'll update this post as the night goes on with the latest realm announcements. Stay tuned!Update: Realms are all online, although a tad bumpy.
