Out Running the Argent Tournament

Phase 2 of Wrath of the Lich King Classic brought us the opening of the Argent Tournament up in Ice Crown.  And, as I noted previously, I was all in on that, and somewhat surprisingly so since it was something I ran to its extremes back in the day.  I keep running those dailies.

Don’t forget to put on the lip balm first!

Or, rather, I kept running those dailies.

I went out there almost every day and did the whole load of dailies

The list of all the solo ones

The thing is, there is an end goal for some of the dailies.  Once you do your tournament initiation, then you go fight for each of the races of your faction to become a champion of each.  It takes five days to become the champion, and there are five factions, so at the end of 25 days of dailies you get to the end of the last city and get a new achievement.

Champion of the Alliance

And then, that is it for the faction dailies, which are four of the eight daily quests you can get in the phase 2 version of the Argent Tournament.

That leaves me with four daily quests, three of which are solo and which I run through pretty quickly.  There is a fourth quest, which involves slaying Chillmaw, and elite dragon that floats around in a corner of Icecrown.

Watching Chillmaw circle

I have some vague memories of being able to solo Chillmaw and his three helper NPCs back in the day.  But I must have been much better geared or more talented back then, because right now he eats me up pretty quick if I try to challenge him.

So when I am doing the dailies I grab that quest and hang around where he spawns to see if I can find a group to work with.  That can be pretty hit or miss.  Sometimes I find somebody eager to help, sometimes I am hanging around alone.

I did try using the group finder interface that Blizz put into Wrath Classic.  A good idea in concept I suppose, but not very effective in practice.  I have yet to have anybody take me up on a group I have formed, and the ONE time I found somebody else who had setup a group, I couldn’t join because they were full.

I suppose that the group filled up proves that there is somebody out there willing to join… and who knows about the group finder.  But it has yet to work out for me.  I think our server might be a bit low on the population scale.

Now, if we were in phase 3 of Wrath Classic, with the rest of the Argent Tournament available, I would have an additional series of dailies to work on, the set that unlocks once you are champion of your faction.  But phase 3 is somewhere in the distance.  People are still doing Ulduar regularly if the LFG channel is any indication.

Also, I did find it odd that you cannot post in the LFG channel unless you have created an advert in the group finder.  I guess that is a feature, but it does complicate what was once a fairly straightforward operation.  Hey, come help kill a thing, it will be quick.

So I continue to pile up the currency from the dailies.  I have bought a couple of the gear upgrades, but it is the Argent Hippogryph I am saving up for.

Wrapped up in Wrath Dailies

I know that daily quests didn’t start in Wrath of the Lich King.  They were there at the end of The Burning Crusade.  But they felt tacked on and a bit tepid, as though they were more of a reaction to players hanging around at level cap than a plan.

In Wrath though, they were clearly part of the plan.  I knew they would be coming into Wrath Classic.  I was more interested to see what I would do with them, because I was very much split in my thoughts on the subject.

On the one hand, I wanted to wallow in all that was Wrath, to relive the glory days of WoW, or at least MY glory days with WoW, and do all the things once more.

On the other hand, I did all of this before.  I have a character in retail WoW that I logged in every day for months at a stretch to run dailies in Wrath.  He has the titles, tokens, achievements, and mounts to prove it.  Was I really going to invest all that time once more?

The first test was the Kalu’ak dalies, which you run into early on in the path through Northrend.  I did those dailies and ended up exalted with them on not just one, but two characters.

But the Kalu’ak are not exactly a steep climb to exalted once you have done their quest chain.  No, the real test for me was going to be the Argent Tournament.

Approaching the Argent Tournament

I basically spent the back half of Wrath leveling up an alt or two and doing dailies, and especially Argent Tournament dailies, until I was exalted with everybody I could managed.

And then I ran some more because I wanted some of the goodies in the various faction stores.

That was a level of commitment that a much younger me was up to.  But what about me today?

Meanwhile, the Argent Tournament starts out kind of slow.  You have to prove yourself by doing a couple of training dailies and one roaming quest daily that sends you out to do, among other things, kiss frogs until you find a princess.

Don’t forget to put on the lip balm first!

But once you get through the preliminaries you go to work for your home city faction and the tournament every day and suddenly you can start stacking up a pile of dailies to run.

I passed on one that is too high level for me at 78

At that point you are earning tokens, the champion’s seal currency, towards the goodies.  I started in at level 78, so I will have banked some for when I hit 80, which is the level requirement for the good stuff.

And then there are the champion’s writs that let you buy faction standing with the home cities, starting with your own.  I am, at last, exalted with Stormwind.

Exalted champion of Stormwind

And, having done that, I have moved on to the next city.  I’ll probably come out of this exalted across the alliance.

Will I keep going until I have earned the Argent Hippogryph?  We shall see.  I do have to watch out though, because running dailies also pays off in xp, so I might start out-running the rest of the group in levels.  Then again, we’re all about level 78 now anyway, so I can’t run very far.  And when I hit level cap the dailies start paying off in gold.

 

Friday Bullet Points with World of Warcraft and the Lunar New Year

The lunar new year is upon us, or will be officially this Sunday.  And with that in mind there are a few things that have come up with WoW related, and not, to the celebrations.

• Year of the Six Month Rabbit

It is the year of the rabbit… unless you’re Vietnamese, in which case we’re talking year of the cat… and Blizzard has a special mount to celebrate the year.  For just $25 you can get the Bright Foreseer mount… or, if you subscribe in six month billing cycles you get it as part of that package.

Year of the Rabbit in Azeroth

In addition, if you are playing Wrath of the Lich King Classic, you get the Hoplet bunny pet for being on the six month plan as well.

• Lunar Festival 2023

Today is also the start of the Lunar Festival in Azeroth, a chance to seek out the elders scattered throughout Azeroth, earn some achievements, and even get an easy ride to that Moonglade flight point if you do not already have it.  It is in both retail and classic, so choose you’re lunar new year destination.

• Wrath Classic Phase 2 is Live

Blizzard has launched Phase 2 of Wrath Classic, which for raiders means that Ulduar is live, and it even has a trailer.

For non-raiders like me, it means that the Argent Tournament is now live.  I’ve flown past the empty space where it lives a few times already, but now construction is under way and the tournament is open.

Approaching the Argent Tournament

This is where I spent a lot of time back during original Wrath, where I went exalted with all of the alliance factions, and where I picked up my favorite flying mount, the Argent Hippogryph.  It is my flying mount of choice in retail WoW to this day.

The Sun Was Cooperating For Once…

We shall see if we have the wherewithal to do any of that again.

The downside of Phase 2 is that is broke pretty much all of my addons.  Now I am waiting around to see which ones will get updated and which authors have wandered off to other games.  Always the hazard of addons and mods.

• WoW Closed in China

Meanwhile, things are not so hot for WoW players in China at the dawn of the lunar new year.  We heard back in November that a deal between Blizzard and NetEase might not be forthcoming, a situation that has come to pass.  As I pointed out in yesterday’s post, NetEase has been very aggressive and confrontational when it comes to the Blizzard deal, blaming Blizzard for any fallout, heaping scorn on their attempts to get an extension, and distancing itself from any attempt for current WoW players ability to save their current player data declaring that Blizzard’s download toolset, used to archive player characters, may contain security risks and could lead to loss of virtual items.

None of this is good for WoW players in China, who are suffering due to friction.  I remain a bit surprised at NetEase’s behavior.  They clearly are not interested in any goodwill from their former customers.  But this performance may be as much a warning to its other Western partners that if they don’t get what they want they are prepared to go for a scorched earth policy as it is a strike against Activision Blizzard.

Called Out in the Trial of the Champion

Saturday night on Labor Day weekend found us again short a gnome as Bung ran off to the wilds of Northern Sierra-Nevada mountains, where we hope he was safe from fire.  So the group was:

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

We decided that the Oculus was probably off the agenda.

Instead we thought we might scout out the Trial of the Champion.

The Trial is a five person instance up at the Argent Tournament that involves a combination of jousting that makes up the tournament and old fashioned “kill the boss” fighting.

The first thing we had to do for this was to get Ula up to speed on the Argent Tournament.

Earl, Skronk, and Vikund had all, to different degrees, explored the tournament and figured out the whole mounted combat paradigm Blizzard has set out.

Ula, however, had not touched the tournament up to that point.  So we got her out there on the training horse and helped her through the first starter quest to give her a feel for things.

Gnome Mounted

After our very quick intro course, we headed into the instance to give it a try.

Mounting up in the instance

The instance actually provides mounts.  There is an ample supply of mounts around the arena.  Earl was the first to note that there was no “heal” feedbag button on our instance mounts.  If you get dismounted, or if your mount is low on health, you can grab a fresh mount.

Mounted up, we spoke to the guy in the center of the ring to set off the event.

This takes a while as three sets of horde riders, one boss and three minions have to parade into the ring.  Eventually they settle down the combat begins.

The minions were manageable.  They came at us in groups of three and we took them down readily enough.

Then it was the three bosses, and things got interesting.

We held our own for the most part, though things were rather chaotic.

Skronk got dismounted and killed, but found that he could just run back to the instance from the graveyard, mount back up, and rejoin the combat.  That seemed almost unfair, until we brought down the first boss.

The big orc was face down on the floor and we all went after the other two.  Then we noticed he was upright again and walking towards the edge of the ring.  He walked right to another mount, got on, and rejoined the battle.

Turnabout is fair play I guess.

That confused us for a bit, but eventually we delegated somebody to pound on the dismounted riders every time the stood up to keep them from coming at us again.  Doing that allowed the four of use to finally bring down all three mounted bosses.

At which point the instance turns into a more traditional battle.  Our mounts disappeared and the bosses all stood up and clobbered us.  We were there swapping our lances out for our regular weapons and trying to figure out who to go after while the bosses were making chutney out of us.

We were all dead in short order.

Fortunately, you do not have to replay the whole start of the instance.  Once you are done with the mounted combat, you can focus on your regularly scheduled character class.

Eying our dismounted foes

So we were able to go back in, organize ourselves, get everything lined up, and get ourselves slaughtered again.

For the four of us, these through bosses were quite a challenge.  After a few tries we decided that victory was not going to be ours without our warlock.

We ended up just running some more quests in Icecrown, getting ourselves lined up to knock off a pile of group quests.  We did not, however, make it to those quests.  Like the Oculus, they will have to wait for another Saturday night.