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Noblegarden 2009 (Apr 26 - May 2) - Quest Guide + Information!
It's time yet another hunt for phat loot in World of Warcraft, this time in the form of brightly colored eggs! We join together to "
share the joy of life and friendship
" all the while meticulously hunting carefully hidden eggs and nomming tons of chocolate!
Eggs have been hidden all across the places of our youth (namely, the starting areas for the Alliance and Horde races) for both young and old to discover and perhaps even be rewarded with a
fabulous
prize
! Simply head out to one of your faction's starting areas, grab some quests, and get out there and hunt eggs! Maybe you'll even earn some achievements along the way!
Noblegarden
begins on
Sunday, April 26th
at 12:01 AM (server) and ends on
Saturday, May 2nd
at 11:59 PM.
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Argent Tournament Guide
Update: Patch 3.1.2 introduced new mounts and reduced costs for existing mounts! See the
Rewards
section for more details!
The cold winds of the north blow over the frigid icy glaciers of
Icecrown
. The sun barely reaches the frozen lands with its rays. The Lich King gathers his power, his Scourge minions planting destruction everywhere. Bloodthirsty Vrykul shout promises to eviscerate adventurers too foolish to enter their lands. Yet, in the northernmost corner of the great glacier, something defies the self-proclaimed true king's threats. Workers' sweat flows like rivers, as hired hands build a Coliseum. Mounts scream in pain or triumph as their riders - men and women representing all the peoples of Azeroth - fight to prove their worthiness to members of the
Argent Tournament
and their own war factions.
Despite the imminent danger of the Lich King, despite the hatred between King Varian and Garosh Hellscream, and despite the weather for which "harsh" would be a soft word, the heroes of Azeroth battle to determine who will f
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Val'anyr, Hammer of the Ancients Kings
A little while ago we gave you a blog about the new
Legendary Healing Mace
. Now we feel ready to give you something more - the actual
Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings
!
As we feed on dataz, you will be fed on information. Here is what we know about the Hammer of the Ancient Kings:
Val'anyr is only usable by healing classes - druid, paladin, priest, shaman. No hunter loot!
You need 30
Fragment of Val'anyr
to start its short quest chain.
Fragments of Val'anyr have a chance to drop off all the bosses in
Ulduar
, on
Heroic difficulty only
. This means you can only obtain the Hammer from Ulduar-25.
In
Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings
, the final quest, you will be given an item called Shattered Pieces of Val'anyr. You will need to
throw
those in
Yogg-Saron
's mouth while he is casting
Deafening Roar
. You also need to fight and defeat Yogg-Saron with 3 or fewer Watchers assisting you.
Obtaining the Hammer of the Ancients Kings awards not only the legendary item, but the feat of strength [url=/?achieve
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Wowhead 101 - Using Weightings!
I touched on this a little bit on my first post '
Wowhead 101 - Using Filters!
', but weightings are so powerful they need a post of their own.
What are weightings?
Weightings, simply put, are similar to a ranking system. They allow you to assign "point multipliers" to each stat type on an item.
How do these "point multipliers" work?
Well I'll give you an example. Say you have a filter like
this
(I've added a some custom filtering as well so it only shows 2 results). You can see that the 'Score' is identical for both items. You can play around with the multipliers I've given to see how it affects the score. For example, you could assign a better weighting to stamina over raw health, which is really useful if your class has a talent that affects stamina.
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Small Change
I was writing a bit recently on the nature of memory, and something occurred to me.
You remember that Level 60 Troll Warrior that gave you the last couple of gold you needed to buy your mount back when you were level 40?
I sure do, but the sad part is, I'm sure he doesn't remember you.
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My Problem with Varian Wrynn
As someone who "grew up" as Alliance,
Bolvar Fordragon
(shown here in his old digs at Stormwind Keep) was something of a fixture in the Alliance and generally his storyline, quests and dialog seemed to be pretty well-written. Aside from that, many of us appreciated how awesome he was when we first saw him fighting off the
Onyxia's Elite Guard
that were hiding in the keep, surrounding Bolvar.
These days, we're looking at
Varian Wrynn
instead. I didn't think too much of it when Wrynn first showed up, but then I read up on his lore and I found myself rather unhappy with the general nature of the story and his background. My gut reaction was to dismiss the lore behind him as being simply
badly written
. I wouldn't have a problem with him if the story didn't have the somewhat perplexing sense of an attempted shoe-horn of a new character into WoW. I use the word perplexing because the word was used by the loquacious, frenetic and not-sa
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GDC 2009
A little while ago, as some of you may know, I was at
GDC
San Francisco (Game Developers Conference), and while there, I learned a lot about gamer culture.
Now, E3 is and always has been a press event—an event where game companies get to show off the new cool stuff that they're doing to the public and to each other. GDC, though, is an industry event—where it's mostly about meeting other people in the industry, awarding innovation in games, and the new middleware type stuff that's out there. Being someone who works in the game industry, and only a short drive away from San Francisco, I just had to be there.
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We Made The List!
So
I Heart Chaos
has named us one of the
100 Best Websites of the Past 100 Years!
I don't know how stiff the competition was, since I can't think of too many websites that were around 100 years ago, but it's still flattering to be named. :)
Here's what they had to say about us:
With over 10 million World of Warcraft players, there's a huge need for tips, maps, articles and information on items and abilities. Thottbot used to be the standard, but Wowhead appeared and suddenly made searching for anything any everything WoW-related easy and intuitive.
Thanks guys!
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Crossover Circus! With Prizes to Boot!
Many of you are familiar with many, many MMOs. From EverQuest to Dark Age of Camelot to The Matrix Online and everything else in between. Oh, and Warcraft! Others of us, however, are only familiar with a few, if even just one.
Zam.com
is hosting an Age of Conan
contest
called the "Venture into Hyboria." To enter, you visit their forum thread and write a short back story explaining how your MMO avatar made it to Hyboria. It can be serious, funny, or silly - some of you who are more inclined to back stories and RP might get a kick out of it! One lucky grand prize winner will get a GameRigs
custom desktop gaming PC system
in an Age of Conan case!
"Age of Conan", what?! Well, sort of. The idea of the contest is that your character from your favorite MMO (WoW, DAoC, whatever!) ventures into Hyboria, a setting for Age of Conan. Think of it as a cameo appearance by your character in another game!
Here's a
direct link
to the Zam.com forums. You want more prizes
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Wowhead Comic #18
Ding ding, me again.
This week's script was written by and stars Koren (the BE priest lady). She's been hunting that darn
Time-Lost Proto Drake
for gosh knows how long, (so have I /sadface) and is frustrated how quickly it is snapped up by other people in the hunt for it.
So, good luck to her, and I hope she bags herself this prize mount soon. <3 (and me too)
Note: Please, for the sake of her sanity and mine, pretty please don't reply to this blog post saying, OH I HAVE ONE, I FOUND IT SO-SO EASILY, etc etc. Or blood vessels will burst. And she might stab me in the head with a pen. And, uh, ignore the fact she can't actually use a crossbow ingame, for comic purposes it's nifty and cute.
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So...Now What?
So! It appears that
Yogg-Saron is already down
.
Now this makes me wonder. Does this mean that Ulduar, like the rest of Naxx's raiding scene, is too easy? 2 days is very fast to bring down Ol' Yoggy, after all (although Algalon is still undefeated).
And yet, this is how it was supposed to go, wasn't it? The regular content is supposed to be easy for the hardcore player, to be accessible for people who are still casual places. Should we be measuring based on the hard mode achievements?
I'm honestly not sure. What do you guys think, hm?
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WoW Quiz in Parade Magazine
So I was approached by
Parade magazine
a few days ago, asking me to create a World of Warcraft themed quiz for their magazine!
The quiz is now live on their website, under the
Celebrity Quizzes
section (I'm a celebrity! Who knew?). Feel free to head on over to the
World of Warcraft
quiz and give it a shot! I tried to create some questions that non WoW players could try, leading up to a few slightly more challenging ones.
Go try it here:
http://www.parade.com/celebrity/quiz/editors-picks/world-of-warcraft.html
Then post your score!
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Ulduar Bosses (Part I)
Hello, there, eager and not-so-eager raiders and readers!
Patch 3.1 is upon us! And with it, I feel confident enough to present to you something new. For the first time in Wowhead's history, we have boss information and strategies, fresh from the PTR, as soon as the patch hits the Live realms!
Without further ado, I give you
Ulduar
, updated with articles for three quarters of the bosses we have
any
information about!
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Wowhead: Talent and Pet Calculators Upgraded!
So in the process of building the code to support the upcoming profiling tool, we discovered that a few upgrades needed to be made to our trusty old
talent calculator
. In honor of the release of
Patch 3.1
, we've decided to release a few of our upgrades a little early. :)
Introducing our shiny new upgraded
Talent
and
Pet
Calculators! You'll notice a number of fancy new changes, but here are the ones we're most excited about:
Glyphs:
Our talent calculator now supports glyphs! Of special note: we used the glyph calculator for a while in beta and discovered that, while pretty, the normal glyph icons are frequently hard to identify at a glance—so we tweaked the glyphs to actually use the icon of the
modified spell
, rather than the glyph icon itself. Much easier to use!
Automatic Updating:
No more "link" button! The URL of the Talent and Pet Calculators now automatically updates whenever you add or remove a point—all you have to do is copy/paste the URL, and you're there!
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It's Big Patch Day!
So today is the big day! Patch 3.1 is upon us, and it's time to plumb the depths of Ulduar!
So while you're waiting for the servers to come back up, be sure to check our coverage of the new patch:
Talent Calculator
Release Patch Notes
New Items
Tier 8!
Blog posts
on the subject
And check back on the blog—we might have an update of our
own
to announce today...just a little one. :)
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Wowhead Comic #17
Happy Chocolate-and-Egg-day everybody!
We have to suffer without our bunnies and eggies for a little longer this year, but at least we get them for more than a day!
For 2009, Noblegarden will be hitting the servers soonly after Patch 3.1 is released, and will last for a week! So we'll all have plenty of time to get our pretty dresses and tuxes.
Peace. xx
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Happy Easter—er, Noblegarden
I'm off celebrating with the family this weekend, but I wanted to take a moment to wish you all a happy Easter, regardless of your religious persuasion (or lack thereof). Hope everyone has a wonderful day. :)
If you're off hunting for Easter Eggs today, I'll be joining you—my dad hides them every year, and every year they get harder and harder to find. Hopefully I'll be able to come back and post a reply with the most challenging find of the year...there's always one.
What about you guys? Where was your best-hidden egg? :)
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Rest In Peace, Dave Arneson
Dave Arneson, one of the co-creators of Dungeons and Dragons (with
Gary Gygax
, who died in March of last year),
died of cancer
last night in his home in St. Paul Minnesota. He passed away in his sleep, surrounded by his loved ones.
It's a strange feeling, now—it's like moving out of your parents' home. The great-grandfathers of Role-Playing Games have passed on. The future of Role-Playing Games is now in our hands. Take good care of their gift, dear readers. Dave and Gary would have wanted it that way.
Rest in Peace, Dave.
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Girls Don't Game
I know I've been doing a lot of short, link-out posts lately but I had to take the time to mention this one—according to the latest article on WoWInsider, WoW is now the
most played "core" game
in the 25-54 year old female demographic.
Ladies and gentlemen, the world is changing—and it's about time.
For those of you who want the link directly to the Nielsen report, it can be found here:
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/stateofvgamer_040609_fnl1.pdf
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Sci-Fi MMOs?
So I found an article on
Massively
a little while ago that talked about the dearth of good sci-fi MMOs on the market, and postulated some reasons why this might be. I love sci-fi, I was hooked on Star Wars at an early age (sorry Trekkies), and I've often wondered about the same thing—you can see the evidence of it in earlier blogs, like
this one
which refers to
EVE Online
. The article, if you're interested, is
here
.
Now there are a lot of interesting ideas posed in this article, some of which I agree with and some of which I don't. But what I really found interesting was the recently posted response on TechRadar,
here
.
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