battered-hilt
Latest
Battered Hilt BMAH woes have a happy ending
Night Elf death knight Krushin had a sad tale to tell. She had worked hard to scrape together as much gold as possible, and set out on the twisting path to a covert auction house at the top of the Veiled Stair, where a smiling panda named Madam Goya had the key to beginning the adventure that would be Krushin's greatest yet: the Battered Hilt. Krushin was elated when she discovered that her efforts had not been in vain, and that her life savings were sufficient to meet Madam Goya's demands, so she handed them over. But, alas! On receiving the item she discovered that it was no good to her. This Battered Hilt, for which she had exchanged every coin she had, could only be completed by her enemy: the Horde. She knew the risk of buying on the Black Market, but she had never expected to exchange tens of thousands of gold for something so utterly useless. Krushin had made a mistake, yes, and WoW Insider thought it a good idea to tell her sad tale to our readers, so they wouldn't fall prey to the same problem. There are two Battered Hilts, one for the Horde, and one for the Alliance. Simply mousing over the Hilt you're planning to bid on could avert tragedy, as the races that can use it are shown on the tooltip. But Krushin's story doesn't end there. After a fruitless exchange with an in-game GM, she contacted a senior one via email, and met with success! They recognized that it was a simple error on her part, and on her next login, she was able to start the quest. A happy ending for Krushin, but a tale of note for bidding with caution on the Black Market Auction House. Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.
The OverAchiever: The 25 most entertaining achievements finale
Every so often, I get tired of the self-seriousness that infests some of (OK, most of) the other work I do here and get the urge to write something purely for fun. After our series on evil achievements and the relentless misery of School of Hard Knocks, I'd like to spend some time on achievements that are nothing but an absolute joy from beginning to end. Here it is, folks; the last two achievements in our hit parade of World of Warcraft's 25 most entertaining achievements. This is the full series, if you're catching up: OverAchiever: Pure Win The 25 most entertaining achievements, #25-21 The 25 most entertaining achievements, #20-16 The 25 most entertaining achievements, #15-11 The 25 most entertaining achievements, #10-6 The 25 most entertaining achievements, #5-3 And today's post, the finale
Officers' Quarters: Mailbox roundup
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available this spring from No Starch Press. Here at Officers' Quarters I receive a number of e-mails every week that don't get featured in the column. Sometimes they are too personal and the sender requests that they do not appear on the site. Others are topics I've already addressed. Some are questions that don't require a long and detailed response and thus don't have quite enough depth to merit an entire column. This week I am featuring a few of these latter e-mails with the common theme of loot. If you think the topic requires more discussion than I've given it, tell us about it below! Culling the Strong Scott, I am a part of a raiding guild which has been having a lot of growing pains. I have been with this guild for several years and many of the new players that we get are very poor players in general. I can often out dps someone in my same class running with my spec who has better gear. My guild has a loot policy which gears the lower dps players first in an effort to help progression, even if they have better overall gear than me.
WoW Insider Show Episode 121: So long and thanks for all the Fah-jords
Our podcast reached the end of part one last weekend, as both Turpster and I announced that we'd be leaving the show. But we didn't let it become a sad affair -- Matthew Rossi and Chase Christian both joined us for some Warcraft discussion (including when it's ok to votekick someone, and lots of Battered Hilt discussion), and we finally were able to have one of our favorite guys stop by: Scott Johnson from The Instance podcast. It was a great show, and as usual, you can tune in at all of the links below. Thanks again for everything -- even though Turpster and I are moving on, the podcast will continue, so be sure to come back and see what they brew up for you. But it's been a heck of a ride these past two-plus years, and we've had measurable metric tons of laughs and fun together. Thanks so much for listening and chatting with us and all the emails and excitement. Enjoy the show, and don't forget to grab your sword and fight the Horde. Get the podcast: [iTunes] Subscribe to the WoW Insider Show directly in iTunes. [RSS] Add the WoW Insider Show to your RSS aggregator. [MP3] Download the MP3 directly. Listen here on the page: <cke:object width="290" height="24" type="" application="" x-shockwave="" -flash"="" data="http://o.aolcdn.com/os/ab/audio_player.swf"> <cke:param value="http://o.aolcdn.com/os/ab/audio_player.swf" name="movie"></cke:param> <cke:param value="soundFile=http://podcasts.aolcdn.com/wow/podcasts/12-21-09-wow-E121.mp3" name="FlashVars"></cke:param> <cke:param value="high" name="quality"></cke:param> <cke:param value="false" name="menu"></cke:param> <cke:param value="transparent" name="wmode"></cke:param></cke:object>
WoW Insider Show tomorrow at 3:30pm Eastern
My last episode of the WoW Insider Show is on the air tomorrow afternoon -- it'll be sad (I really love doing this show for you all), but hopefully it won't be too maudlin. Fortunately both Matthew Rossi and Chase Christian have agreed to join us, and of course Turpster will be on with us as well -- whenever the T is around, you know it'll be a good time. We'll be talking about the most popular stories in Warcraft for the past week, including the arrival of Winter Veil, patch 3.3.0a and all of the other hotfixes this week, and just because I think it's interesting, we'll talk about the Battered Hilt as well. And as usual, we'll answer your emails and chat live with all of the folks in the chatroom. You can email us any time of night or day at theshow@wow.com, and you'll be able to listen in to the show on the feed over on Ustream itself, or right after the break below. Please do join us, should be fun.
The ups and downs of the Battered Hilt
Yesterday, Bornakk said clearly that the Battered Hilt drop that starts the Quel'delar questline was dropping at the right rate, which is much less than when the patch first hit. And then of course, in last night's fixes, they went ahead and increased the drop rate anyway. He also claimed there were no plans to make it BoP, but who knows what'll happen in the future? For now, however, you can still buy and sell the quest item for quite a bit of gold. We'll have to see where the price eventually ends up -- on the staff here, we've seen anything from 8,000g to over 23,000g, and Twitter tells us that people are paying an average of around 12k or so, going up to as high as 30k (or even shady real money offers in online classified ads). Our own Matt Low has actually seen the drop three different times, and lost every roll. It drops off of any of the mobs in the Heroic versions of the Frozen Halls 5-mans, and as Bornakk says, any class can use it to come up with a pretty solid weapon, so the competition will probably keep the price high, depending on where the drop rate ends up. The silver lining, if you really want one, have terrible luck, and don't ever expect to have all that money, is that the price will probably go down eventually. Bornakk says that as people move up into Icecrown and start picking up weapons that are even better than the sister blade, demand is likely to drop off a bit. But he also says that Blizzard does want this to be a special and relatively rare item, so you'll still have to probably either be lucky or ready to grind it out. Good luck -- I'm out there searching for one with you.
In-game fixes for December 15th
Another day, another round of in-game hotfixes. This time the most interesting one of the bunch is the increase in Battered Hilt drop rate (the Battered Hilt leads to the Quel'Delar). Of course it could mean that the hilt drop rate was increased from 0.001% to 0.01%, but hey, at least that's one whole decimal place! Please note however that we don't know what the actual drop rate was nor what it is now. All we know that it's very low. In actuality, one could surmise that the drop rate was increased to combat some of the outrageous prices that we're seeing on the AH. 20,000 gold or more for a weapon that will be outdated in less than a year is a bit much. Quel'Delar in now unique equip. Naxxramas can now be cleared in any order for the Immortal and Undying achievements. The drop rate for the Battered Hilt has been increased. The Skeletal Slave in the Pit of Saron has had the ability to drop the Battered Hilt and other random drop epics removed. The entire list of in-game hotfixes from the past seven days after the break.
