Just a quick FYI to let you all know that I updated our Tailoring Guide with new Burning Crusade information.  I finally bit the bullet and took up Tailoring on one of my toons - with WotLK coming down the pike I want to have all tradeskills covered.  The upside is that Tailoring is fairly easy to level, which I’m sure is why I haven’t had any complaints about our outdated Tailoring guide.

My noob isn’t quite to 375, he’s still stuck in the 350 range and I’m working on a section for the specialization quests.  I did all three of them yesterday, heheh.  That’s certainly an adventure on a level 66, I had to get help with killing the Nether-wraith for the Spellcloth quest.  Running to the Altar of Shadows in Shadowmoon Valley was scary too, but amazingly I got there without dying.  It might have had something to do with the Hordie farming Motes of Air nearby, lol.

And I hope you all enjoyed the free booze and festivities yesterday.  I know my bank is bulging with those nifty ground blossoms and I also got some shots of the fireworks in Booty Bay!

It’s been awhile since they offered premade characters on the PTR, and I personally have never indulged.  Since I’m generally there to test crafting items and occasionally noodle with class changes, I just copy my own characters.  This time everyone was making such a huge fuss over getting premades, I thought I’d do it just out of curiousity.

I picked a PVP druid and while the options didn’t allow me to choose a healer, somehow I got one :)  I haven’t actually done any PVP with her yet, but she’s got full Season 3 gear, 500 gold and 250 Badges of Justice!  There’s one other thing I wanted to show off, just for drool factor:

Makes you want to cry, doesn’t it?  I know you’ll appreciate the description text as well:

Dunno about you guys, but I’m leaking tears just thinking about having one of these for my very own!

This post dedicated to Mamabear and her never-ending quest for the biggest bag in existence so she’ll have enough room for all her herbs and potions.

After checking every couple of days for the new Tailoring patterns on the test realm, finally they are there today. There are three new patterns sold by Haughty Modiste in Steamwheedle Port. They are novelty clothing and require 245-250 skill and mageweave cloth to craft. Here are some screenshots:

I also have a dressing room shot of these items for those who want to know what they look like:

The thing that strikes me odd here is that this outfit greatly resembles the Tuxedo outfit that my bankers are currently wearing. I’m not sure why we needed another “suit” look for our toons. I do like the dress shoes though, I wasn’t able to find a Tailoring recipe to make black shoes for my bankers. Some of them are wearing whatever they were “born” in, which doesn’t tend to go well with their outfit. One thing to note, the Dress Shoes pattern is a limited supply item, the other two are not.

One more Tailoring item to share, which I’m sure Herbalists are drooling over:

I think it’s great that they finally added a larger herb bag, since Skinners and Miners have had 24/28 slot bags for awhile now. Sadly the only large herb bag currently available is from the old Cenarion Circle faction, which would be very annoying to grind up now that no one hangs out in Silithus anymore. Not that Sporeggar is much better in terms of practical usage, but at least it’s in Outland. The ingredients seem quite steep though, I’m guessing these will sell for several hundred gold on the Auction.

For those of you engaging in the Midsummer Fire Festival, you may have noticed that a few of the goodies for purchase are quite “pricey” in terms of blossom value. I myself was skeptical of the items since the descriptions are vague and you can really only afford one beefy object (maybe 2 if you do every possible quest and daily available). Therefore, it helps to know what you’re getting and that’s where this post comes in.

I’m sure most of you have seen the brazier in action by now, but not so many have seen the clothing. You may be wondering why you would spend 200 hard-earned blossoms on a pair of ugly brown slippers. I had the same thought myself, to be honest. While everyone else was buying the pet and the dancing chic, my weirdo son decided to be different and go for the outfit. Lo and behold - it turned out to be a reasonable choice! I just purchased two of the four pieces for Kaliope as well and here are a couple of screenshots:

As you can see, I have flames on my hands and my feet. The robe is what creates the flaming hands and the boots are what creates the flaming feet. You click on each item with a “use” effect to set yourself on fire The robe will actually cause you to start dancing as well. As long as you don’t move you’ll continue to dance indefinitely, unlike the brazier which has a 3 minute timer. You can also play around with it somewhat, my son was able to get his robe to shoot flaming arrows from his bow while fighting mobs in Shadowmoon Valley (this assumes you wear the robe while fighting, lol).

I also bought the brazier on my 64 warlock, since he’s a dude I guess he can indulge in some girl watching, heh. When you activate the brazier, it looks like this:

Apparently you can do a few emotes to the draenei dancer, including /kiss and /wave. If you do /dance, you will turn into a full size version of the dancer for three minutes. Here’s what my garden gnome looks like as a dancing draenei:

I hope you enjoyed this visual guide of the quest items from the Midsummer Fire Festival. Next I’ll be purchasing the flame pet, which actually looks more like a wisp pet. So if you are expecting to get a flaming ball, don’t bother with this. If you like wisps and want one as a pet, then go for it!

Ahune Update: A group of guildies went in again last night to try and get this boss down. This time we took 2 druid healers, a warlock, pally tank and shadow priest. The shadow priest was in blues/greens, but the rest of us were in T4+ gear. This was a long fight, and I had to innervate myself once and pot a few times, but we did finally get him down with no wipes! The only change we made in strat from the first try was beefier tank (18k hp vs 15k) and two healers instead of one. When the boss was vulnerable we all went on DPS, healers too. I’m sure our DPS went down from the original group and it took us four waves to get him, but we did it. BTW, the epic staff dropped and we gave it to the shadow priest That thing is very cool looking!

I guess the moral of the story is, if you can’t beat this guy cuz the adds keep wiping you out, try adding an extra healer instead of more dps.

There sure are a lot of bonfires in the world… of Warcraft (heh) aren’t there? If you have more than one toon, it can be confusing to remember who has been to which ones. This is why I copied the full list from WoWInsider and pasted it into a text document that I could print out. Then hubbie was kind enough to turn that into a printable that crams the full list onto one page instead of having to waste two pieces of paper. He thought you guys might appreciate me sharing it, since I’ve already printed three for myself

Midsummer Fire Festival Checklist

Now you can just print one for each toon and highlight the bonfires as you visit!

As I’m sure many of you did, I spent most of this weekend doing Festival activities. If your guild is dealing with the doldrums like mine is, this is a great opportunity to spark some fun. In my previous post, I touched briefly on the quests to collect fire from the opposition’s city fires. This requires you to infiltrate their city, locate the fire and click it to grab a token. If you get 1 city fire, you can turn it in to your city Lorekeeper for 25 blossoms. If you collect all 4, you also get a crown which goes with the festival outfit.

This quest has all the makings of a memorable guild event. You’ve got cross-faction taunting and the whole thing can be done while naked and/or drunk.  What’s not to love?  Last night I had planned to work my way through Kalimdor on my own, but a group of druids from my guild had already formed and was in the process of hitting Orgrimmar. I decided to venture there too since it was 2am server time, I hoped the city population would be light. I had no problem sneaking into the city and clicking the flame (hint, hop on the tent next to the fire, the Hordies don’t seem to look up). I was even able to restealth and walk away, but unfortunately I got lost and was busted trying to find the exit, doh! After that the Hordies were camping our corpses and killing us every time we popped up. It was quite a challenge, but we were happy to have our Orgrimmar flame token.

After hitting a few more Kalimdor spots, we decided to try Silvermoon City as our last hurrah before we called it a night. It was close to 4am server, so we really thought we’d breeze in and out. We made our way up there without incident and tried the same stealthing parade we used in Orgrimmar. Unfortunately one of the kitties got busted by a stealth-eye guard and we had to kill a bunch of guards and NPCs that were nearby. At this point, no Horde were in the area so we decided to just hack and slash our way through. We went all the way to the bonfire, killing all the various Silvermoon denizens who got in our way. Luckily we had come in a side entry and it wasn’t too far in We also picked up a couple of Level 8 Blood Elf groupies along the way who were watching the show. Once we had our fires, we debated stealthing back out, but we had killed everything. So it was decided that we would do a “Victory Parade” on our mounts and ride out in style! I have to tell you, there’s not much that compares with the rush of waltzing through the enemies’ city on your Sabercat while lowbies look on in awe. It was great, I highly recommend it!

Now I realize we did this at 4am with a handful of friends, but surely you could get a full guild raid going at prime time and achieve the same result. For guilds that may be looking for a way to jazz up the rank and file or lure folks back to the game, this would be a really fun guild event.

Ever since I tested this content on the Test Realms, I’ve been anxious for it to go live. Mostly this is because I’ve been coveting that flame pet for over a year and no one ever wanted to run five dungeons to get it. This year, you can purchase the flame pet for 350 burning blossoms, and there are lots more quests to collect them. I have a few tips to share for those of you not familiar with this holiday.

Free XP Train

For those of you who are still leveling on alts, you can get some very nice XP visiting bonfires. There are probably 2-3 dozen bonfires sprinkled across all three continents. Each one you visit gives you a bit of XP, a bit of coin and 5-10 burning blossoms.

Level 64 Warlock:

5400 xp and 1.6 gold for each Friendly bonfire I visited
10750 xp and 3.1 gold for each Hostile bonfire I visited

Level 69 Hunter:

6150 xp and 2.1 gold for each Friendly bonfire
12000 xp and 3.9 gold for each Hostile bonfire

As you can see, the hostile bonfires that are manned by the opposite faction are more lucrative. They also set your PVP flag when you desecrate them, so be wary of hostile players. But I got about 5 bubs of XP in a couple of hours doing this, nothing to sneeze at. Here is a page on the WoWWiki that lists all the bonfires if you want a reference.

Blossom Express

For those of you more interested in purchasing the beefy festival goodies, bonfires are also the best way to collect “money”. All items sold by the holiday vendors are bought with blossoms, so depending on how greedy you are, you may need quite a few. There are new 2 daily quests you can do, which reward 5 blossoms each. Or you can travel to all the zones and gather 5-10 blossoms per zone. I know which one I’m doing

Doing Dailies

The dailies can seem really intimidating when you first attempt them, but I have a few tips to share that might ease the process. For the torch tossing quest (aiming torches at braziers), make a hotkey on your keyboard and use your mouse for targeting. It’s much easier to cast quickly when you can keep one hand on the keyboard and use the mouse to target the brazier. Also if your timing gets off, skipping the next brazier can help you get caught up.

For the torch catching quest, you have to chase your torch’s shadow and try to stay on top of it the whole time. If you let it get away from you, you won’t be able to “catch” the torch. Also, I understand that you don’t actually have to click the torch, merely stand under it (this is now confirmed). Just follow your shadow and make sure you are directly on it when the torch lands. This is much easier if you pick a city with low crowding, such as Darnassus or Exodar.

New Holiday Boss

At first I thought this was quite exciting because I was expecting another Headless Horseman with easy epics raining from the skies. Sadly, it didn’t really turn out that way. I went with a quality guild group to regular Slave Pens and it was quite easy to clear to the new boss. He’s in the first large room, you just clear the front area to give yourself some space. We had a strong group with everyone in T4+ gear, but after five tries we just couldn’t kill the guy. We kept getting overwhelmed with adds that jumped the squishies. We had 2 tanks (druid+pally), druid healer (me), mage and hunter. Seemingly a good mix, but it wasn’t working well for us. I’m sure we’ll keep trying until we figure it out. But for now, beware. He’s a level 73 boss and he’s quite difficult, despite his location in a low 60s dungeon.

Brazier of Dancing Flames

This item has a rather vague description of “click to place your brazier of dancing flames” which really doesn’t tell you anything other you will create a brazier if you click it and you can hope that dancing is somehow involved. Yet Blizzard has deemed it to be highly valuable at a cost of 350 blossoms, the same as the flame pet. None of us wants to waste 1-2 days collecting blossoms just to end up with a dud item, right? Since I was already traveling around getting free XP for my man-slave Murkery, he is the lucky gnome who will be sacrificing his hard work for a questionable item. He got 12 bubs of XP and a ton of cash, so he doesn’t get to complain

I purchased the brazier and “placed” it, which put a brazier on the ground with a little fiery girl dancing on top. Not terribly exciting. So then I tried clicking it, but it’s not clickable. Turns out you have to target it and /dance to turn yourself into a fiery dancing girl. Sadly you will not be a fiery dancing version of yourself, but instead a full size version of the girl on the brazier (a draenei female). If you jump or move it will cancel the effect, but you can /dance again if necessary. You can also turn your camera position if you like without disrupting the performance. The item is on a 3 minute cooldown, so you can’t recast the brazier until then. All in all, an interesting item but I’m not convinced it’s more valuable than a flame pet. Personally, I had hopes that this would be a new “piccolo” style item, so I’m a bit underwhelmed by it.

I will add more info when I collect more, so keep checking back!

“Haris Pilton has launched a new line of bags and jewelry”

Being the chic that I am, this got me excited. The first thing I did on the PTR was visit Ms. Pilton to see what goodies she had in store. I took some screenshots to share with you guys:

Big bag = big price tag. Clearly they don’t want folks stockpiling this bad boy. Frankly, I think I’ll wait to see what WotLK has in store before I plunk down 1200 gold for one bag. But for those of you with lots of cash burning a hole in your pocket, Blizzard is happy to relieve you of some! One thing I’d like to point out though, is the quote said “bags” and so far all I’m seeing is “bag”. False advertising - you saw it here first.

Now there are a few other items here for the discerning shopper to surprise their WoW sweetie. Personally, I’d rather get a nice crafted Epic for 3k if my admirer has that kind of money to throw around, but that’s just me. I think the caption is cute tho:

Another new item for test on the PTR is a few Trading Card codes that they are actually making available to all. I’ve never seen this sort of thing before, but perhaps I wasn’t paying much attention. I did get in on the action with this one since Blizzard was making it so easy to access these items. Here’s one of them, called a Path Of Illidan. It gives you a stack of 100 fel flames that last five minutes each. I took a couple of screenies of me playing with it while also using a water walking potion (they stacked):

Heheh, I had fun with those things. Too bad most of us won’t be able to have them on the live servers <sigh>.

Just so you don’t think I’m a total slacker, the new Tailoring recipes weren’t on the PTR yet. Sorry, will have to wait a bit longer!

Yes folks, there’s a new patch on the horizon and a new PTR in the works. Since I hadn’t expected any additional patches before WotLK, I’m pretty excited that we got one. I’ve already copied my four 70 toons to the test server and downloaded the PTR client. Now I’m just waiting for the test realm to go online and I’ll be reporting on all the goodies. Stay tuned…