Drunken Pirates at Brewfest

Saturday night on International Talk Like a Pirate day and I thought for sure that we would be headed to the Caverns of Time for the Culling of Startholme.  I had run out to Booty Bay to see the festivities and get myself attired in pirate apparel.

The Dread Pirate Vikund

After that I recalled back to Dalaran and took the portal to the Caverns of Time to get myself in position by the summoning stone to help get everybody assembled.

Caverns Transit System

Then it turned out Bung was taking the night off.  So it was just the four of us:

80 Priest – Skronk
80 Mage – Ula
80 Warrior – Earlthecat
80 Paladin – Vikund

So we were all there in the Caverns of Time without a plan.

But one of Earl’s friends who had just rolled a character on our server and joined the guild mentioned on guild chat that Brewfest had kicked off.  The joy of being on a server in the East Coast time zone.

Well, that sounded like the best idea we available, so it was off to Ironforge to celebrate Brewfest… dressed as pirates!

The Twilight Cadre Pirate Crew

Brewfest was crazy.

It seems that just about everybody on the server decided Brewfest sounded like the best plan for a Saturday night.  The event was packed!

Brewfest Crowds

It was crowded enough to have that air of a day one MMO event.  NPC quest givers took seconds to respond, vendors were mobbed to the point that you were mostly likely getting “That Object Is Busy” as a response to your attempts to purchase things.  And when the Dark Iron dwarves showed up it was like a huge battle in Wintergrasp.  Only we threw beer.

And yet it was a lot of fun, very much in the way day one of an MMO or an expansion can be, a shoulder to shoulder crazy, hectic, spammy event.

We were there in our pirate garb working our way through the quests.  We did the Ram riding, caught our Worpletingers, and helped defeat the Dark Iron.  As one person said after the Dark Iron were gone and we were all piled on the NPC to turn in the quest so that there was a continuous stream of achievements spamming in chat, “Oh no! We’re going to crash the achievement server!”

We then took advantage of having a mage on hand and went off to hunt pink elekks outside Darnassus, Exodar, and Stormwind.

That taken care of, we looked to see if we could wrap up the big Brewfest event that takes place in Blackrock Depths.

We got the quest that sent us out there to talk to a spy in the bar area of BRD and headed out.  As expected, the path to the instance itself was cleared by a stream of people headed there.

A clear path to BRD

There was, however, no problem creating additional instances.  The appears to be fixed for our server group.

Once in we ended up removing our weapons as we cleared out any trash that was in our way.  That was partly to work on our unarmed skills, there being an achievement and all that.  But we also did it because we were still in pirate garb and there is something very satisfying about the animation of pirates punching people.  It isn’t hugely special or dramatic, but it just looked right.  I did not tire of seeing it as we pounded dark iron dwarves as we made our way to the bar.

And then we got to the bar and couldn’t find the spy.

We looked around, tried to talk to just about everybody, and eventually started a fight by drinking the beer on the table which let us punch a lot more dwarves.  But no spy.

We headed out, reset the instance, went back in, still no luck.  We checked the web for tips, but still couldn’t find anything that helped.

Eventually we gave up.  Later we learned that while Brewfest spawned for the game server at midnight Eastern time, it did not spawn for the instance server until the next day Pacific time.  Or so I was told.

We had run around enough and Ula decided to call it a night.  Earl ran off to work on a daily while Skronk and Vikund headed to Shattrath to get the achievement for falling 65 yards and living while completely smashed.  Drunken stupor is the achievement.  Be smashed yet not smashed I guess.

But something had changed since I got the Going Down achievement a while back.  I was able to walk off the Scryers platform and land on an awning for the achievement.  However, that seemed to no longer count as 65 yards.

So we spent some time trying to figure out where else we could fall and get the achievement, which lead to us dying a couple times each.  It also meant buying more alcohol in the lower city then flying up to some high point to try again.  Of course, I suppose we could have just used the Synthebrew Goggles, but I guess we were trying to keep things authentic.

Discovery:  Travel first, then drink.

Running or riding in WoW while completely smashed is annoying (yet oddly familiar), but flying while completely smashed is a challenge.

Eventually we figured out that if we just went to that spot on the Scyer’s Terrace where I first got the achievement, got on a flying mount, and hovered a just a few feet above the platform, we could dismiss the flying mount, fall, and get the achievement.

Drunken pirates at their worst.

And since Brewfest will be on next weekend as well, I am going to bet that we’ll be finishing up the BRD quest to kill Coren Direbrew together the next time we get together.