f13.net

I'm a little disappointed.  3 or 4 days just to get to where I can do something besides train?

I hope it gets more interesting.

I LOVE it.  Of course, I'm a fan of Arthurian legend and always play a Paladin for that reason.  Mounted combat in a tournament setting is making me go Wheeee!

Yeah the run-up is a bit disappointing, but it caters to the folks who can't login every day.  If I only got to play on the weekends and missed all of the building of the arena I might be a bit miffed.  

I'm more miffed that the dailies require even more running around to a few different zones.  Hopefuly the last stage ones won't take as long and the stone/ wood ones will go away.

Anyone else getting folks who drop a duel challenge on them then run and hide in a mass of other players so you can't target them until the duel starts and you can see them again?  That's a bit of a nuisance as they get the first throw/ charge in while you're wondering where the hell they're at.

ahm, /tar playername?

When I know all the Ascii codes by heart that'll work just great, I'm sure.  Until then I have to click on Hi(accentgrave)tmeharde(umlat)r and Kiile(umlat)rsquid and the like.

 :awesome_for_real:

if there's no one around with a similar name, you can just do a /tar hi and /tar kiile.

Also, besides P and shift+6, by abnt 2 rules.

There's really no reason to do the stone/wood dalies.  They're a pita, and they don't give you anything for the tournament.

This isn't a staged thing like the island was, so unless you want the money there's no reason to do the goblin ones.

I liked the bit where I found out the Black Knight was an agent of the Lich King, recovered the weapons used to murder innocent competitors, and found a copy of his orders from the Scourge. I hand these in to the woman in charge, and she's like "Come back when you are a champion and we will find a way to defeat him!"

Um, hello! Murder weapon in our possession! Copy of his orders from the Lich King! Just fucking arrest him!

Yeah, or let me kill him. Why do I have to fight him in the Arena given that we've got the goods on him? I'd rather the quest have ended with some ambiguous evidence, and the lady saying, "I know he's guilty, but we can't quite prove it. The only way to stop him is to challenge him as a champion!"

Plus, I need a skeleton femur to conk some guy over the head? What have I been sapping people with for the last five years?

Arrest? He's fucking Scourge. Since when did we need a search and seizure warrant to take the shadow vault?

Shadow Vault was taken using Eminent Domain.

Well, I'd assumed in my little disbelief-suspending RPer's mind that he'd be arrested, publicly condemned with the evidence, and then promptly executed. I had forgotten that this is Azeroth, where justice comes in the form of adventurers stabbing you while you drink your tea.  :awesome_for_real:

So REALLY, the Black Knight offing those dudes shouldn't even be considered any big thing!

Well it's a little odd that they didn't rez after a quick ghost run.

I was hoping this would keep me occupied since there's basically no reason to PVP until the next season starts, but it's a glorified three daily quests. Plus two stupid goblin dailies nobody does.

I do the goblin dailies, they're super quick at least for me. It sucks that there isn't much to do as an aspirant but it's only three days worth of dailies to rank up. I already see people doing the valiant stuff, whatever that is.

Pretty much the same as the Aspirant stuff, except there's four dailies instead of three.

-Duel (and win) against three of the Valiant NPCs
-Fetch me a weapon (same as the Aspirant one)
-Kill ten scourge in Icecrown (same as Aspirant one, except you're killing two more so it'll take like ten more seconds)
-Fight a bunch of scourge guys with the jousting vehicles (fun, for me, anyway)

Doing this nets five tokens per day, need 25 to rank up.

Personally, I'm liking the Tournament, but I can see why some people would be underwhelmed.  It seems a bit less interesting than the Sunwell stuff.

The Sunwell stuff had the added attraction of the poopsock meter.

Got up to where I could joust some NPC. It's just a couple of daily quests, inordinately heavy on the Dumb Vehicle Shit. Yawn.

Oh yeah, the trick to easily defeating any NPC jouster? Remain stationary except for rotating to maintain facing, and never charge.

 :uhrr:

That takes forever, you can kill them quickest by waiting for them to walk away and charge, turn and break their shield. then melee until they try to get distance again. I'm not saying the programs still are rudimentary AI but it's a lot quicker to defeat them. Also, I'm assuming they do get harder when you rank up.

The stationary method works a lot better when you're in the middle of a sea of people all doing their own jousts in a ten yard square area and you can barely track what's going on. In any case, I already chucked my lance and went back to doing skybreaker dailies.

As you said. another terrible vehicle implimentation. Do you remember where they mentioned the defend move in the tutorial and told you how to use it? I don't either. But, if you put yourself in defend mode the npc appearantly trys to get range on you for a shield breaker, that's when you charge and then your horse jumps around him like a bunny hopper and you can sheild break him  at that time. Add some server lag and it's horrible.

Someone needs to remind them about those mistakes Tigole said they made when they released this expansion cause they keep making them, it appears.

I'm just glad that the first vehicle fight in Uldaur manages to not suck terribly badly.

All you do is apply 3 stacks of defense before initiating the fight, and reapply it whenever the opponent knocks it down. Spam thrusts when they're close, and shield breakers when they're not. Bam, that's it. There may be faster ways, but that's all you really need to do.

EDIT:  It's not terrible, it's just very blah. The combat isn't horrible or broken, it's just sort of clunky and simple. The non-jousting quests aren't horrible cockstabs, they just expect you to go much further out of your way than some others. The rewards I've seen listed as forthcoming aren't garbage, they're just hard to get excited about.

They tell you about the defend move in the melee tutorial.

This pretty much sums it up, after trying to get excited about the tournament this is how I feel. Even the "trample minions of Arthas' dread legion on your argent steed" daily is a lot less fun than other quests where you get to mindlessly blow stuff up.

It's not so unbearable that I won't stick with it for a couple of titles, achievements and vanity pets, but it's really not that interesting.

The snarky part of me wants to make a comment about the B or C team being on this game, while the A team has moved on to the Next MMO.   I agree it's all pretty uninspiring, even comparing it to the other vehicle quests.  Comparing it to the Sunwell run-up it's a yawn fest.

I really hate the interface.  It's clumsy.

Sunwell was so much better.

To me it seems like most of this stuff was probably well along the pipeline prior to the release of WoTLK, and it's a relic of an idea that didn't pan out so well.

I agree that most of these vehicle things were probably way into the pipeline before they figured out that people hate them. Personally, I don't think they will put another vehicle thing into a raid since they are far enough along that they can shift things.

I started these things last night. They suck. Period.

I"m already thorougly sick and tired of vehicle crap. It was amusing for about 10 minutes after I installed the expansion, but, for the love of God, quit with this misbegotten thing already! I like my character. I want to play my character, not some half-assed vehicle horseshit. This is the main reason I miss the Sunwell dailly hub: I got to play my own character. Imagine that! Yeah, it got tedious from time to time, but it was great for experimentation with new gear and fun to watch others screw up doing the quests.

I'll probably stick with it now (since I don't really have a whole lot better to do) just to score a few pets. My warrior might stay with it (God help me...) for a few minor upgrades. Other than that, I never want to see this part of Icecrown again.

Blizzard! No. More. Vehicle. Shit. Ever.

I haven't done it. I'm probably not gonna do it. I just won't support content releases that are primarily based around vehicles anymore.

I think some of you are remembering the sun well dailies a little to fondly. The only quest out of the whole bunch that was actually 'haha awesome' was the demon bombing run and even that lost some of it's awesome after the 45th time. Otherwise it was Kill these bastards, collect these items, use those items on those other bastards.

Yeah, but it didn't involve fucking vehicles AND they were all clustered in a nice, tight little circuit about 1/4 the size of Icecrown you could do efficiently and then bug off to do other shit.  To do the 4 tournament dailies at the second level you have to fly across to the other side of Icecrown, anywhere else in Icecrown with undead, Crystalsong and Grizzly Hills or Howling Fjord.  Even with a fast flyer that's a good 20 mins of flying.  I can't imagine the 3rd and 4th levels will reduce this any.

Yup, I had a nice route for the Sunwell dailies that got me all 11 or 12 done in the same time it takes me to do 3 or so of the tournament dailies. Also the idea that you were driving a visible progression and could compare how well your server was doing o others (via 3rd party websites) was cool. There was also more at stake with Sunwell. Pretty much everyone wanted to unlock the new badge vendor, the tournament so far doesn't have anything that feels like that.

Yea, the tournament is pretty much a grind for grind's sake. I was kinda sorta interested, then I got my Albino Drake and don't really needs mounts anymore. Meh.

The gear is pretty decent, on par with Heroic stuff.  Also,

(http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/news/2009/february/swiftforsakenwarhorse.jpg)

Isn't that just a rehue of the Baron mount?

Yeah, it's just a white skin of the epic Forsaken mount, just like Baron Rivendare's mount is a blue skin of the epic Forsaken mount.

It looks a bit like Sir Zeliek's (http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=16063) mount, but his is actually a different model.

Since the kissing frogs daily is one of the most retarded ever I made this macro

/use Warts-B-Gone Lip Balm
/tar Lake
/kiss

Spamming that makes the whole process a lot quicker and easier.

Good macro; mine has a /clear target line, though.   :grin:

The Sunwell dailys had plenty of suck in them, but at least I got to play my own character. That's my main objection. I don't like vehicle stuff particularly, and I didn't care much for the bombing run(s) either (and, moreover, the Skettis one was pure, unadulterated suck). Also, the environment was a lot more interesting than being stuck on the ass end of a friggin' glacier.

The occasional (emphasis on "occasional") vehicle thingy isn't too bad. It breaks things up. However, it's every other damned thing you do in Northrend and I'm way tired of this shit. Worse, it's in Ulduar. It needs to be put down NOW. I don't want to see another misbegotten vehicle quest or event until the Maelstrom, or whatever tne next expansion is--and maybe not even then.

Skettis sucked?  That was one of the easiest ones, I thought.  Well, unless you had a standard flyer, then I can see it truly, truly sucking.  Both Outlands bombing runs (orgila and Skettis) were designed with Epic flyers in mind, and normal flyers just got the shit beaten out of them easily.

Since Merusk has reminded me, we should probably agree that Ogri'la was the worst implementation of a 'sideshow' faction ever in WoW. At least the Argent Tournament has some interesting rewards.

Let's imagine for a moment you're designing new solo content, such as the Argent Tournament.  Do you balance it on the assumption everyone is in their DPS spec, or do you balance it to be tolerable for healers and tanks too?  Or do you make it a vehicle quest and then know -exactly- how much damage everyone can do and take?

Or you release it at the same time as dual specs and it becomes mostly a moot point.  :awesome_for_real:

My priest has dual healing specs  :grin:

I don't know what is to come, but the quests I'm on are jousting, kill 10 scourge and then some random 1 of 3 or 4 fetch this, give to that, type quests.

Is it my imagination, or was jousting easier yesterday and harder today?

I really really really hate jousting.

Oh good, I thought I was the only oddball that did that.

HEAL HARDER.

I don't know how they could really make these dailies any more tedious.   I'd rather watch that stupid Hodir ghost wolf run around for 10 minutes.

Well instead of each daily sending us across Northrend, they could've sent us back to the old world where the frogs we have to kiss are a 5m flightpath followed by a 10m ground mount run away.

Oh wait, maybe I shouldn't give them ideas.

What worries me is that you get five tokens a day, riight now you use these to rank up but presumably at the final rank you use tokens to buy things. Does this mean we'll only get five tokens a day still? That would make buying those 100 token items ridiculous unless you can do 5 quests per faction eventually.

You get different tokens at the final rank. Check the vendors and you'll see that you get "Champion's Marks" eventually, no idea how many you can get per day, though.

Exactly, the tokens change each rank but the amount per day doesn't seem to change. You get five tokens a day as an aspirant and as a valiant.

IIRC from the PTR you still get 5 tokens per day as a Champion.

It's actually worse.   When you hit champ, there's 3 dailies that give 1 seal, and one that gives 2... but it's a 3-man group daily.  There is a 1-time quest that gives 10 champ seals (actually, this might be repeatable for each of the 4 factions), so it shouldn't take long to get a 25 seal weapon or whatnot.  But yeah, you won't be seeing many people flying around with the argent hippogryph anytime soon.

I actually got an extra quest the other day, so I was able to get 7 seals.  I don't know if it was a glitch, or if there's a random chance of it occurring or what.

At least when you hit champ, you get rep rewards for that faction, or an extra 10g.

Rep rewards or gold? You mean those reps we've maxxed out over the last 7 months? Good lord.

Of course not, don't be silly.

They're for the for reps you've maxxed over the last four years (http://www.wowwiki.com/Champion%27s_Writ).

And they want forty of these for a vanity pet? Fifty for a fucking tabard? Bahahaha. I know there are OCD types out there (and in this thread) who'll go ahead and grind that while cursing their miserable existences because they just can't help themselves, but come on.

The Sunwell dailies were decent because they were all pretty straightforward killfests, but didn't require you to kill an obscene number of any single thing. They kept you moving between targets without requiring a lot of tedious travel. This tournament crap is nothing but tedium.

I think this whole patch has jumped the shark.

I detest that stupid wolf.

Summon the wolf while mounted, fun times.

Sunreaver + Argent Crusade, and an optional faction/gold.



Even with runecloth turn-ins, it's a pain to raise your racial factions.  It's not bad having another way.


These quests suck, especially the champion ones, but complaining about the rep rewards is dumb.

The only way I could see the tokens not being a total cockblock is if they let you do dailies for each faction as a champion but getting 25 tokens a day doesn't seem like something they'd do.

The only reason I'm doing this...stuff...on my shaman is for that damned hippogryph (he is cool looking). It's like questing Purgatory. 250 seals...5 a day...I'm going to be hating virtual life. Worse than grinding CC faction back in Silithus. Yeah, considering how bad that grind was, a 50 day grind for a flying mount seems typically Blizzard. Gah.

As for Uduar, well, admittedly, the flame leviathan fight was a hoot. We all had a pretty good time with that (as opposed to the PitA that Ignis was...). Just so long as it STAYS with the leviathan and doesn't appear constantly in every new raid instance.

You get the champion quests from the argent npc's in the neutral tent, so yeah, max of 5 per day.  However, some of them overlap with the valiant quests (undead kill quest, undead jousting, argent jousting), so it might be possible to do the champion quests along with one racial's valiant dailies at the same time. 

If that's the case, it's an extra 750 rep and 36 gold without doing any extra work.  I'll know tomorrow when my valiant dailies reset.

You could get the Cenarion Expedition hippogryph instead.  CE exalted rep, buy from vendor in Zangarmarsh. 

I'm a vanity pet junkie, but I'm not sure I care enough to continue jousting.  I really hate it.

I'm doing all except the jousting. It's only one seal. It'll take longer, but I'll keep my sanity.

See, I would be happier if I could do JUST the jousting. I don't have the intense hate for vehicle quests other people do, though.

It's the Go Get Me a Weapon quests I fucking hate. Fuck you, asshole, get your own goddamn weapon.

What I am hoping is that in Phase Two of this thing, they add more ways to get champion seals. Five a day is ridiculous considering the prices they have on the pets and such.

To complete the circle, it's the quest to kill mobs under Icecrown Citadel which annoys me the most. Jousting is dead easy now, and is conveniently close to the quest giver. Sword quests aren't too bad with an epic mount.

The vanity pets aren't soulbound, so they'll probably end up on the AH sooner or later.

I liked Sunwell dailies better (and I didn't really like those that much.) I will probably keep at this long enough to get my Ironforge tabard and stop. If I make it that far. The jousting is really annoying.

BTW there's a simple 'guaranteed win' strategy where you just put up 3 shields, hit thrust while wait for them to back off, do your throw shield break thing as soon as they get far enough away and immediately follow them so they never get to do theirs or their charge, and you get a couple hits in on them while they're only at 2 shields. You will never lose, but it takes a while (and also kind of illustrates the lack of depth in the whole vehicle thing.)

Vehicle quests are cool when you're driving a badass storm giant around and smashing the shit out of hundreds of dudes, and you don't do it every day. They're not so cool when you very slowly grind people down in a 'joust' that doesn't even act like jousting when done optimally, and you have to do it over and over and over and over again.

The lore pretense is laughable too.  This is some kind of tournament to see who will be best at fighting the Lich King?  .....send EVERYONE.

Oh and I don't think the Lich King is going to come out and JOUST WITH US.

My foolproof strat is:

start with shields up
spam thrust until they back up for a charge
Charge first, and pull a really tight loop on the carrythrough.
Spam shield breaker when you are pulling back around.
Repeat, add a defend to the thrust spam usually.

If you do it right, they will always be at 0-1 shields, and you'll never eat a shield breaker or charge (you keep the follow through loop tight enough that they're under range the whole time) and it doesn't take more than 20-30 seconds.

It's godawful boring however.

edit: and from the quest where you joust out front of the lich king's pad? Yeah, that's telling you that Icecrown will have a jousting event when it goes live. This is your Aces High, bitches.

Not only that, but there is a marked difference in response from the joust vehicle.  Maybe it's lag.  But it's so freakin hard sometimes to joust, and  other times a piece of cake.  Today was easy, yesterday was monstrous, day before was easy, day before hard.

Either they're fucking with it still, or response time is impacted by how many people are around.  The times when it's been easy are the times when few are around.  

I don't mind the jousting the mobs, or the retrieve weapons thing.  It's the npc jousting that I really hate.

Don't they focus group this crap?

This is how I do it, it's pretty foolproof.


 :oh_i_see:

They need to make the jousting part like phase four or something.  You know, so that people can wipe repeatedly on the vehicle part only after 5-15 minutes of flawless raiding.

That would make the Lich King encounter epic.

oh don't worry, there's plenty of wiping in ulduar without vehicles.

Same.  You can't shield-break => charge before the npc does it to you, so this is the way to go.

I mentioned this to a friend that I liked the concept of what was being done from a game mechanics perspective but that it felt like it was being hamfisted into the story. He totally supported the lore aspect of it. While I disagree, I do see the point (emphasized in the Ashbringer comic and Icecrown quests) that numbers aren't the key to victory against Arthas, but sending powerful individuals. If you deprive Arthas of the armies he needs (weak people slain by his forces who are raised to fight) , he'll be alone against other powerful figures.

5-man heroic-only Lich King would be terrific.

See, your method is the shitty way. I've gotten quite good at timing a charge/shield break when they try to get distance. Yes, sometimes they get a shield throw off or whatever, but that's a lot more interesting than doing nothing but thrust. And I still win.  :drillf:

I would definitely prefer more storm giant riding though. I loved that quest.

Winning at jousting is trivial in general. It's just shitty.

Since this is supposed to eventually lead to Argent Crusade rep, I'm thumping away at it a little bit for the time being. (There's really no decent way to get AC rep other than instancing, which I plain refuse to do anymore.) I'll do the jousting, the monster killing, and the monster killing via jousting, but there is no motherfucking way I am bringing that asshole one more weapon. Expecting me to fly to two completely different zones and back for one shit little daily is obscene.

I am NOT sitting in front of Lord Whatshisface waiting in line to kill him at 3am like this is motherfucking Everquest. Fuck whoever designed that shit.

Walk away now. I haven't done one quest up there, and I'm a happier man for it.  :awesome_for_real:

Just got to stormwind champion level, seems the cockstabs continue.

You can only get champion's seals quests from the Argent guys, so never more than 5 per day it seems, and 2 of those come from a 3-man daily. Decided to go for Gnomergan valiant, need another 25. I assume that because I already did the "kill 10 scourge quest" and the citadel scourge quest I cannot get those again from the gnomes, I only have a (different) sword quest to do. So 2 seals today, hopefully 5 tomorrow.

The argent dailies reward writs (only used to buy rep items) and purses. The pruse has 10g in them, so the dailies are a good source of gold if nothing else. The retarded thing is that you cannot buy Commendation Badges for writs until you are champion level with a faction, you can only champion your own faction to start off with, which most people will already be exalted with. So to get exalted with another city you need to grind to champion. Would be easier and quicker just to farm runecloth imo, even if I wasn't already exalted with all the home factions.

Champion jousting sucks, its exactly the same as the other jousting except they start out at 3 defend and reaply it faster. It's not harder, just slower. Also you need to kill 4 of them to complete the daily, rather than 3.

*yawn*

This is the grindiest grind they have EVER put into this game. It's a pure fuck you to non-raiders and I'm a raider so I feel for those folks. Seriously, the time investment is retarded.

That's a bit silly to say. It's not that grindy, it's just limited in how long you can grind it. There's actually very little grind.

If we think back to shit like Timbermaw or those stupid MC factions, those were far grindier in actual amount of time spent doing them. It's just that you could hunker down for a weekend and do it for 12 hours straight instead of being forced to simply gain 5 widgets a day for X days.

It may not be grindier than other stuff, but it's certainly shittier than grinding furbolgs.  At least there was no limit on how many furbolgs  you could kill in a day.

I'm already exalted with all the factions.  Why can't I start at Champion?

I prefer AQ turnins to this shitty shit.

33 days to one colored mount. 255 days to clear all the Argent Tournament stuff. It's just kind of stuck there. Compare and contrast with Sunwell, where you got a five man and an entire zone, or AQ where you had all the unlock stuff. Even if it were less grindy it would FEEL more grindy due to the just kind of stuck in there as a sop feel

My sanity begs to differ!

The grind cockblocks seem entirely there for the reason of preventing people from just sitting their asses down and grinding for 12 hours straight. It's essentially the game telling you to do something else now, and come back tomorrow.

It's grating in an "I want my shiney thing NOW" sense, but probably a bit healthier. I think I'd allow you to store 3 days of dailies for them though, to allow for a few days off without thinking you messed up your deadline.

I kind of like the jousting, as a change of pace.  What I don't like is having to do it every day and the horrid grind to get any rewards from it.  But the actual jousting I'm pretty good at, having discovered the same strategy Kild uses.

Well, pretty good at it when I'm not hit with the horrible latency spikes I've been getting with regularity since Thursday night.  Normal and green most of the time but a few times an hour it spikes up to unplayably red (1.5k+).  Pretty sure it's not Blizzard itself that's the problem, so it's either my router and/or modem (don't think so but not sure how to troubleshoot it beyond the unplug for a few minutes plug them back in method) or it's my ISP (good luck trying to troubleshoot it with them) or a problem between here and Blizzards servers.  Who knows.  I understand networking in a very broad sense but troubleshooting network problems is way beyond me.

Back to the actual Argent Tourney, the biggest problem I have with it besides the grind is how the dailies make you fly all the way to the other side of fucking Northrend to do them.  I'm looking at you, various Princesses in lakes with swords.  Otherwise I like the idea behind the sort of Ren Faire-ish atmosphere.

Lake princess snipers are my favorite people in WoW. <3

Hover over the lake waiting for someone who did the quest to spawn her <3 <3

Maybe, but the response will be "Okay, I logged in today for ten minutes to do my quests.  Like I did for the past ten days and will for the next month.  Why am I doing this again?"

Allowing downtime is great.  Let the player decide when they use it.

Yeah, I can see breaking it up into dailies to prevent epic 72 hour poopsock grind sessions from being the ideal path to reward, but there has to be a balance point between that and "advance for five seconds per day for the next seven years".

Oh trust me, I'd fine grindfests more fun than dailies. I HATE dailies. Ask me about my perma lack of head enchants and the amount of times thorgrim has bitched me out about it. <3

That has NOTHING TO DO with dailies you bitch. Get a tabard and run some dungeons. ><

I don't raid, I do like to BG, but I hate arena.

I can't really progress my character in bgs anymore.

So I can do the argent tournament and fishing daily for 30 minutes a day, and play alts.

Battlegrounds aren't a lot of fun with DKs running around.  Are they half DKs yet?

I ran a few BGs lately and it seems to me the DK level has dropped off quite a bit, actually. I don't know if that is true in every battlegroup.

It's because most dk's are alts so with the new content people are back to their mains again. Expect another wave of dk's in a couple months.

DKs are a bit harder to play now, people have wandered off.

Completely anecdotal, but in all my recent WG runs (normal BGs? as a priest? AHAHAHAHAHAHA) all I've been seeing are warriors out the ass and rogues. The warriors have all been blatant prot-dual'd to fury and having fun with it.

With Season 6 starting today, there's a lot of new Honor gear available with no rating required. There are also some new items on the Wintergrasp vendor that were put in last week. Should give you a bit more to do in BGs. Can't say anything about the DK zerg in there though, because I'm part of the problem. :awesome_for_real:

DK Zerg Ahoy!

I got yelled at by another DK for using Deathgrip in a battle yesterday.  "only bad DKs death grip. stop being bad." he said.  I think he was just pissed I killed the guy in 4 shots after he'd been fucking around for 10 seconds and only had him to 75% health.

Betrayer of Humanity is  :heart:

Only bad DKs use DG? lol.

Only bad DKs DG something out of a melee pileon, which is my usual complaint. 5 people mauling a flag carrier, some idiot DG's him off to the left away from his impending doom. :(

"We have finally broken through to the very gates of Mordo... the Lich King's Citadel! The cleansing of the evil that has plagued our world for so long is at hand! Build... an arena! Right next to the citadel of evil, that should work. I'm sure he'll wait."

Yeah, the location is pretty  :uhrr:

Of course, it's not that much different from uprooting the entire city of Dalaran and floating it a stone's throw away from the same Citadel.  I guess so the Kirin Tor mages can glare at Arthas menacingly?

Yeah it is a /facepalm of a plot development. I think it exceeds even ToA's "civilization... fading... MUST BUILD OBSTACLE COURSE".

The plan is actually to drop Dalaran from orbit on top of Icecrown.

Everytime I think I'm going to slog through this, I try and then quit again. I take back what I said about it merely being blah, the jousting is unremittingly terrible. Everyone with these complex strategies must play on servers with no people, because I can't see anything among the crowd of assholes jousting on elephants and have to basically just stare at my icons.

They did crowbar in a lore explanation as to why the AC are holding a tournament - firstly, it's to try and stop King Big McLargeHuge and Brick Shithouse Hellscream from having the Alliance & Horde declaraing open warfare on each other until after the Lich King is dealt with...and secondly, it's to piss Arthas off.

You mentioned having to wait for lord everblaze to spawn and having him being camped at 3am too. Whenever I go do that quest there's MAYBE one other person there and usually just killed him, he has a 30second respawn.

I think your server is proper fucked.

I ended up on a Pacific time server even though I'm Eastern, so technically it was only midnight when I got to Everblaze to find one person killing him and another waiting. (And a group of two showing up as I was standing there.) But yeah, still. Camped to shit at midnight server time. I'm just not dealing with this in 2009.

Gah, wrong thread.

Lore, lol.

I don't know why they didn't make his drop a glowy-everyone-can-click thing like they did for other gated event quest kills in Wrath, but... seriously, arriving to find 2 people there isn't 'camped to shit'.

Wow has seriously spoiled people.

Two to start, five of us standing there at midnight when I went LOL and took off. Am I supposed to feel bad that I'm spoiled? Season 6 is out and there's a bunch of purples to honor grind for (hateful costs less honor than savage did, yay) so thankfully I don't need to concern myself with this crap anymore.

Were any of them your own faction so you could just, group up with them?

One Alliance killing it, one willing to group, two Horde. If this were fun, or less annoying, or held the potential for some worthwhile reward, I probably wouldn't have given it a second thought. As it was, it was the metaphorical straw breaking the camel's back.

edit: derp spelling

Fair enough, I'm not going to defend the argent tournament on the grounds I think lore-wise it's kinda stupid. If I were a fresh 80 though it is certainly useful since the weapons are actually a lot cheaper than the vanity items and it's decent gold.

I'm doing them personally because I'm a pet whore.  I don't think it's any worse than quel danas which sucked for having overcamped quest mobs(doing the bombing run in the first week was ridiculous) and I think the jousting is quick/easy enough to not bother me but what really gets me is just how blah it is story wise. I simply do NOT care.

You can do the undead jousting & undead kill dailies for champion and 1 valiant race at the same time.  That's around 84 gold (if you choose the champion gold rewards) for basically 2 quests, which ain't bad.

Unfortunately, the champion daily jousters don't count towards the valiant daily.  Jousting 7 times sucks, even though I barely take damage doing it anymore.

I got my little squire today. I taught him about the world by making him do the Heigan dance. His mom is probably so glad he got assigned to the creepy human deathknight that immediately took him to Naxxramas.

I started doing the tournament. I was so...

so...

Jesus christ. I give up on WoW lore. If you only pay attention to the big events and consider that canon, it works. But the minutiae will leave you naked and ass-raped in a dark back alley off a city street while people walk by you, point, and laugh.

I will say this in their favor, the whole vehicle thing has been tightened up in general. I was just doing the "shoot down drakes" Shadow Vault daily for the first time since the patch, and it felt much more solid than before. I can't explain how exactly, it just felt better and it was much easier to be accurate at longer ranges.

Seven dailes for 125g is nice. You can double up some of the valiant and champion dailies, so if you're doing the killing scourge dailies for champion seals pick up the same quest from a 2nd faction for the valiant seals and earn more cash.

The commander mobs at the melee with 250K health are still a pain to kill. My best strategy is to wait for someone else to accidentally aggro one and then get a couple of charges in why they follow their initial target; the aggro on those mobs is really screwy.

I really don't care about the time limiting they are doing. Hell, they've done it since the first BC content patch when they added dailies. But, the sheer mind numbing boringness of these quests pisses me off completely. I think the Netherwing/Ogrila and especially Sunwell quest designs were all totally superior to this crap. The sword quests have retardedly long time sinks built into the travel time, and the jousting sucks for all the reasons everyone has mentioned. This is definitely C team output.

Assuming they all weren't the opposite faction, why not just spam invites. If they are grouped, just say Invite? That's what I and everyone else on my server does and it works fine. You join a group, kill the mob, loot, say thanks and leave. Not a big deal and saves waiting 1 min or so for respawns.

Ya I noticed the Shoot-em-Up quest had been fixed again. It seemed to me they lowered the hp of the drakes or upped the dmg on the cannons is all. Stuff died much faster than it used to.

Edit. I did it again today,  and tried to pay more attention to it, and not only have they upped the dmg on the guns considerably (3 hits kills a drake compared to 6+ before) but they also fixed the huge tracking lag the guns used to have. Now it doesn't take 10 seconds for the shells to catch up to the aiming circle when you move the gun around.

I will say, fuck whoever it was that decided to fucking have a fucking group quest daily. If it's not a dungeon daily, I don't want to fucking group for it unless I feel like it, assholes.

What lame DK can't solo a group[3]. <3  :awesome_for_real:

I just did that quiest today. it's a lot easier when you realize that the cuiltists that spawn leave bombs on the ground, avoid the bombs and the rest of the attacks don't do much dmg.

I probably can, it just pisses me off in principle.

That dragon's breath fucking hurts,  I had to duo the quest and I'm decked out in nearly all 25-man Naxx gear.   Then again, I started fighting him at 2/3 health and didn't know about the bombs.. Hrmm..

Update: Why no, no I cannot solo that quest.  :cry2:

Lern2DK

Man, you sucked it up on a group[3] IN FRONT OF YOUR SQUIRE!?

Seriously, that poor kid's image of you is SHATTERED. And after we took him to naxx :(

He saw us go 0 for 10 on Maly last night too.  :oh_i_see:

Ack, I logged at like, 12:30 assuming you didn't need me at that point for any OHGODFUCKIT WE'LL DO IT LIVE WITH TWO DKS

I think they didn't ask because they didn't have the heart to tell me I'd be the one kicked to get you in.  If they were smart they'd have subbed you in that one time I disconnected.

fighting giant space dragons is obviously not the work of kitties.

Thorgrim is not good at saying, "OK, this isn't working, any volunteers to drop so we can bring in a second DK?"

Although honestly, it was more tankfail and healerexploding than anything else.

Sounds like our recent Ignis and Kologarn attempts.   :awesome_for_real:

"Ohh crap, I fell again."

I think if we only had one of the three or so problems we were having last night instead of a perfect storm of Less Than Ideal, it would've been fine. One DK, one undergeared, new to the fight tank, and healers randomly kerploding did not make for the fun times.

Some of our DPS was semi-iffy too (myself included, I sux at being on spark duty AND doing any decent damn DPS), but that was really the least of our problems I think.

After running this for a couple days, I exploded last night into a profanity laced tirade about these stupid dailies, and how much I loathe them.  Particularly the jousting.

Sounds like our off-tank last night has a twin. "Oh shit, lag spike... yep, I'm off the edge."  :awesome_for_real:

"Oh hey, he does have legs and feet."  "... how do you know that?"  "I'm looking at them!"

I think a healer fell off.  Not sure how!

The hilarity really started when we finally downed him (10 man.)  Then I watched as half the raid fell through his body.

Also - OMG SARA.  /shivers

Also known as - please to be keeping your headphones on when you hit the antechamber.   :grin:

Score!   :drill:   Since all I want is the white dreadsteed I can now go back to my usual routine of ignoring crappy daily quests and rep grinds.  Five champion's seals and some gold is 1000x better than doing these daily quests for another month.   

I was surprised and rather pleased that if you don't need the faction-increasing items, the Champion quests give you an extra 10 gold, bringing the total for each daily up to 23 gold and some change.

Is that 10 mounts now available per side?  5 for 25 seals, then 5 more for 500 seals?  That could eventually bring me to over 90 mounts.  So close...

Edit:  The jousting doesn't seem so bad after doing it for a few days, but it is boring.  Charge, throw, shield, melee til enemy moves away, recasting shield til back to 3, repeat.

I thought the 250k champions were going to be a problem, but as it turns out, they're rather easy to deal with if you do the above pattern.   :oh_i_see:

Ah, but what if the new model for the 'Champion of the Undercity' mount is even better? What then?  :grin:

The champions go from loleasy to lolyoudienow very fast if you pick up adds, particularly the flying ones, as they strip your shields crazily fast and you go splat. It's all rather annoying.

You can also double up on some of the quests if you start the chain for another faction once becoming a champion.  So when killing 15 scourge you can also do the kill 10 scourge quest for an extra 13g (36g total for killing just 15 mobs).  The "At the Gates" quests also have some overlap, although the jousting quests don't as you have to defeat entirely different mobs.

I'm not entirely sure why one has to defeat entirely different NPCs for the jousting.  I'd prefer to simply defeat 4 champions, which one would think should count towards defeating mere valiants.  Alas, Blizzard doesn't see it that way.  Fortunately valiants are rather easy to beat down at this point.

I thought the group quest would be an unfortunate sticking point, but just one callout at 11 PM PST immediately got two responses.  I'm thinking of seeing if I can get groups to do the at the gates + omg dragon quests as a group one after another, which should simplify the at the gates quest immeasurably.  While it is not terribly difficult to solo the entire thing, one bad aggro can easily lead to your losing your mount.

The good news here is if you do manage to lose your mount, you can run back to the camp, and grab another mount fairly easily.  Doing so seems to reset the champions, whereas -not- doing so does not seem to reset the champions.  The lieutenants and scouts seem to be tethered as is normal.

I figured out how to solo Chillmaw as a DK. I'm ashamed that I didn't figure it out earlier.

I've also found I can get these and a few other dailies down in about an hour now for a nice chunk of change. Current circuit is pick-up the AT quests, get fly to the skybreaker and pick up the Slaves to Saronite, Kill 20 Vyrkul, Drag & Drop, Retesting the Tonic, No Rest for the Wicked and Not A Bug quests.  Then down to start the alliance escort quest to the Vyrkul village.

 That quest plus a few more Vyr gets me all 20 that I need, plus some Scourge kills.  Up to the saronite mines to do that quest and net a few more scourge kills.  Turn-in the escort, fly to do drag & drop, after drinking the cultist tonic.  Accumulate scourge kills, souls and drop the guys for that quest.  Fly over to kill the elite dude for no rest and finish up my required scourge.   After that siphon off voidwalkers for the bug quest then turn that in, hit the cauldron with the writhing mass on the way to kill chillmaw.  After Chillmaw's down it's to the gates to do the jousting quest, then turn-in on the skybreaker and the tournament grounds.   

In all it's a little more flying than QD, but since you ARE flying it winds-up taking about the same amount of time for the same number of quests.  It's just about finding the right synergy to complete them. 

Grinding up to a champion fight and losing because the fucking NPC is allowed to run off of the field and you aren't is god damned inexcusable clownshoes. Fuck.

Edit:  Helped a warrior and a death knight with a group quest, got them to gank my opponent in return. If at first you don't succeed, cheat. No wonder the Black Knight did it, this shit sucks. My paladin has a squire now, that's all I cared about.

The Tournament is all a clever pretense for building the ultimate weapon to use against the Lich King:

That one "Kill lieutenants/commanders/scouts in front of Icecrown Citadel" quest is getting increasingly annoying, to me.

First of all, the area is retardedly dense with monster spawns.  That quest is in something like a kilometer field in which all the important guys (commanders and lieutenants) spawn in like a two hundred square foot box.  You can't have a fucking jousting match when moving ten steps in one direction will pull ten more guys.  That's assuming there aren't any other players there, because if there are, then you'll all be sitting in the exact same spot waiting for the same guys to spawn, and you have the opposite problem.

Second of all, fuck those gargoyles.  Holy shit.  If they only took one hit to kill, they'd be bad enough, but having to sit there and chuck a spear, wait for the cooldown, and then chuck another spear, repeated ten times, is not fun.  Having to deal with them while fighting other riders is a huge pain, having to deal with them by themselves is boring as hell.

Third, there's something completely screwed with the distance detection in the jousting mechanics.  The game is often telling me I'm in range for a charge or shield breaker, I click on the icon, and it says "You're not close enough."  All the time, this happens.  Also, I keep getting some annoying glitch where I'm fighting a gargoyle, click on the spear attack, and my guy just stands there doing nothing, but it still triggers the cooldown.

Fourth, maybe it's just me, but the game is getting really weird about when it considers me to be "in combat."  A lot of the time, I have no idea who I'm alleged to be in combat with, since there's like five fights going on around me, so I've got to ride off to some distant corner of the map to use that healing spell.

The best way to do those IceCrown jousting bits, is to just group up. Invite every random retard you see in range and watch as everyone completes in 10 seconds.

From my observations with an extremely high ping connection (800+ ms) when you use a player ability it begins to execute immediately based upon conditions at the client (range check, mana check, etc.) and will retroactively cancel at the server if the client data is sufficiently desynchronized.  From observations with vehicles it appears even the preliminary condition checks are done at the server, since it's the only time I've ever seen the GCD delayed by my ping.

I find about 75% of the time gargoyles are in range for Thrust (1) which does 15K damage, so an instant shield-breaker+thrust combo kills them before they get a cast off. If you keep your eye open you'll also see odd ones skimming the ground which can be 1-shot with charge. The gargoyles are only super-annoying when you pull them while killing a lieutenant or commander.

If you're there with a bunch of other people, run through when there's just the foot soldiers and pull the commander up on the stairs.  Nobody runs around back there and it's free of mob spawns.

I very much dislike the Threat from Above quest.  For some wacky reason, Horde on my server are pretty damn uncooperative, it seems like I have to solo the quest every other day.  Possible, but annoying.  Of course, yesterday I had a full group of alliance land on my head while I was painfully going about killing Chillmaw, and they blew him up for me in about 10s.  Out of pity, I think.

The Commander + Lieutenants quest is more annoying than anything.  It's easy, right up til you aggro a gargoyle, at which point it rapidly goes to hell.

I need about 775 champion's tokens altogether for all 11 mounts, which I can tell you is not a very exciting proposition.  I'm hoping at some point they add more champion quests, preferably with not a single quest that suggests grouping to accomplish.  Stupid MMO players that try to solo everything.