gray-items
Latest
Are common quality items rare to find?
Common may not be quite so common anymore. While working on an article about a legendary quest chain, I recalled the days of class quests -- specifically, the days of Molten Core and The Eye of Divinity, along with the Ancient Petrified Leaf that started the class quests for epic weapons. Epic anything was rare to see in the early days of vanilla, and even when Molten Core first came out, it was rare to see people decked out in purple gear. But these days, it seems everyone is wearing epics, as it's dropping from dungeons with alarming frequency. When you look at gear labels, each color of gear is assigned a different label. Common quality items are white, uncommon are green, rare are blue, and purple of course are epic. But as the game has evolved over time, each expansion offered more raids and more epic gear, which led me to the question -- just how common is common gear? How rare is rare? Is uncommon gear really that uncommon? I hit Wowhead just for a quick look at these items to compare numbers, and the results were actually pretty surprising.
15 Minutes of Fame: Come one, come all to the astounding Traveling Museum of Debris
From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame. Back in October, we profiled triple-threat collector Drrum's coordinated armor, pet, and mount collections, meticulously assembled and screenshot in complementary in-game settings. Last week, we chatted with collector Moonjade of Twisting Nether (US-A), who focuses on items somehow linked to game lore. This week, we complete our trifecta of collectors with an interview with a player who's assembled an actual in-game museum -- yup, curator-led tours and all -- of unusual gray items and assorted oddities. Now, we get crazy emails all the time here at WoW Insider about all sorts of weird things that've been found in game ... but man, I've never even heard of some of this stuff! Pestle, who's also GM of Infinite Asylum on The Scryers (US-A), manages the massive, multi-bank collection via Riplington E. Winchester III, the museum's intrepid gnomish curator character. The list of random items that she sent me is so long that there's literally no reader-friendly way to display it here (let alone the fact that it would take days to slap Wowhead links on all of it); we'll stream it for you in paragraph form just after the jump. For a visual idea of the scope of this massive collection, click through the gallery below before joining us to chat with its curator after the break. %Gallery-129232%
15 Minutes of Fame: No bank dust bunnies for in-game item collectors
From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame. 15 Minutes of Fame profiled the triple-threat collections of Drrum last fall -- an astounding trifecta of pets, mounts and armor sets painstakingly pieced together and then screenshot to dramatic effect in complementary in-game settings. Amazing stuff. And since cool collections that come in threes seem to be such a good thing, we're bringing you two more profiles of in-game collectors. This week, we'll visit with Moonjade of Twisting Nether (US-A), who collects armor and lore items. Moonjade's impressive collection of lore and legendary items make him a suitable ambassador for an entire subculture of players who collect various sorts of items during their game downtime. Then next week, we'll crank up the specialization rating and round out our trio of collectors with an interview with a collector who actually manages and gives tours of a virtual museum of gray items.
The Queue: Grey guilds
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's (almost) daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky be your host today.I'm just going to let that video speak for itself today, and get started on the questions. @sammagher asked... "Why do grey items even exist, if only to be sold to vendors or occasionally used as RP gear?"
Breakfast Topic: Your own in-game item
Yesterday, we posted about one of the coolest news bits I've read in a while. One of the items in Ulduar was named after Phaelia, one of the most respected voices in the Druid blogging community. Phaelia recently chose to put away the keyboard (or her Belkin Nostromo N-52te) to focus on her new baby -- or I should say, her sprouting seed. It's a fitting tribute to one of the game's most helpful players.Blizzard has been known to insert tributes in-game to the player community, the most notable of whom was Breanni, the mascot of WarcraftPets.com. Breanni was honored with an appropriate NPC in Dalaran selling cool vanity pet-related items. While getting a full-blown NPC named after our characters is probably way out of our league, a nifty in-game item is easier to fantasize about. Blizzard does it all the time, after all, with numerous items named after their employees or their characters, from ice cream to epic shields.It's daydreaming time. If you were to get an in-game item named after you, what would it be? Give it a name, describe what it can do. I honestly wouldn't mind a gray item myself, as I think many of the coolest stuff in the game are gray. On second thought, a gray would probably be way too cool for me. At best, I'm probably better suited for an "of the Whale" forgettable green. How about you? What would your World of Warcraft item be?
Breakfast Topic: Amazing grays
I picked up an interesting gray item in Wintergrasp the other day -- the Broken U.L.O.S.E. Button. Players who've played Alterac Valley will recognize it as the answer to the zone's gray drop, the Broken I.W.I.N. button. Even the flavor text complimented each other and added more whimsy to the already humorous items. One of the most memorable junk items from The Burning Crusade was The Stoppable Force, a parody of another Alterac Valley item, the epic Unstoppable Force.My wife enjoys fishing not just for the relaxing aspect but definitely for the profit. Take, for example, the Goldenscale Vendorfish. The name speaks for itself, as this piece of inedible junk sells for 6 Gold. That's still not her favorite gray item, though. The Broken Engine Part is another thing that anglers can get from fishing, and sells for 10 Gold. Not bad, huh? In Patch 3.1, though, Blizzard ups the ante with Porcelain Bell, a gray item that comes randomly from the Bag of Fishing Treasures. Lucky fishermen can sell this junk item for a pocket-fattening 100 Gold!Of course, Wrath of the Lich King introuduced us to a plethora of fountain coins, a lot of which are gray items. Among other things, I think Blizzard does an excellent job of infusing flavor into the game with junk items. There are over a thousand gray items that it's kind of difficult to pick just one. From puns like A Frayed Knot to lore-infused junk like the Dalaran coins to plain silly stuff like the Romance Novel series, there's just a lot of cool things going on with grays. What are your favorite or most memorable grays?
