30 September 2010

Brewfest!

What a wonderful holiday! I love holidays in WoW. Even in the game world, having decorations everywhere, doing daily holiday quests, or even hanging out at the special holiday event area feels distinctly festive. This year the feeling is particularly comforting - living in a country with a different culture from my own means not being able to go out and see holiday decorations (although USian culture is very popular here, so I am treated to Halloween without the candy, or Xmas without the family).

The purely game-related reasons I love holidays are twofold. The first is the possibility for achievements. I`m always a little sad when I go to do quests or dailies and discover that I`ve already gotten all the available achievements. Similarly, it`s a bummer to realize that some are unavailable to me on lowbie alts. The second reason is the opportunity to rake in some extra gold or XP from quests and dailies. Because I am so neglectful of my alts, I always take advantage of easy XP boosts during holidays.

In this regard, Brewfest is both fun and disappointing! I did all of the lead-in quests: zapping the hallucination elekks, running rams, catching wolpertingers, chucking mugs at S.T.O.U.T., staving off Dark Iron invasions, and beating down Coren Direbrew. Sadly, aside from the Coren daily, the quests reward only Brewfest Prize Tokens and no gold or XP! So, despite wanting to hang around Brewfest on my alts and soak up the atmosphere (right down to that incredible music), since I don`t particularly want Brewmaster on them, there`s no point! In good news, my freshly-80 pally has gotten upgrades for both of her terrible trinkets, the likes of which we shall never speak of again. The Coren daily is also another source of frosties for my 80s, and although I don`t need them on Beko, they will contribute to my eventual Justice Points collection, and what`s more, I want the holiday kodo mount!

The LFD change for the Coren daily has come up in discussion a few times lately. There are definitely some drawbacks - no more cycling alts through to get tons of chances for mains, only 1 daily chance instead of 5 due to lack of a summon quest, no passing or trading to someone who needs it, the agony of getting duplicates (or nothing at all) day after day. Still, I think the most important bonus is the ease with which players can now queue and port directly to the boss. On an oceanic server, and playing at sometimes unusual times, it can be hard to find 4 other people willing to trek down to BRD to do a holiday boss. Even if you can manage that, it`s likely that they have already completed their daily and screw you out of an opportunity (I remember tons of QQ over this last Halloween). Then, should anything drop, there`s always the one person who swears up and down that you should all Greed on things you need, then swoops in and Needs. Worse yet, you Need because you need the item and get lambasted for ninja-ing. So, overall, I think the LFD holiday boss change is amazing despite any drawbacks it might have.

The loot table for Coren Direbrew has not been updated for this year. Since I am eager to gear up my paladin I do sort of wish that I could rock up, spend about 30 seconds pretending to tank Coren while he runs back and forth between the insanely geared DPS, and walk away with 232s or something. Still, for seconds` worth of a queue and minutes spent in the actual dungeon, level 200 trinkets falling from the sky ain`t bad. And since you can`t vendor them anyway, people who actually need them will get them, rather than it going to someone rolling for vendorspec.

If you need a guide to the achievements associated with this holiday, WoW Insider has a guide here.

Because they are not related to any achievements it is missing some quests that are sources of Tokens or other goodies. A complete list can be found on wowhead here. Also not required for the meta, but for pet collectors, a Pint-Sized Pink Pachyderm can be bought for 100 Brewfest Prize Tokens from the Brewfest vendor.

Additionally, because I kept finding myself starting to do a quest/achievement and losing my buzz, I recommend you pick up a pair of Synthebrew Goggles. That way you won`t have to fill your bags with booze and keep drinking to maintain the required level of intoxication. And they are super stylish!

If you want to take Brewfest with you everywhere you go, you can run one of the following scripts to hear the music:
/script PlaySoundFile("Sound\\Music\\ZoneMusic\\BrewFest\\BF_Dwarves1.mp3")
/script PlaySoundFile("Sound\\Music\\ZoneMusic\\BrewFest\\BF_Dwarves2.mp3")
/script PlaySoundFile("Sound\\Music\\ZoneMusic\\BrewFest\\BF_Dwarves3.mp3")

/script PlaySoundFile("Sound\\Music\\ZoneMusic\\BrewFest\\BF_Goblins1.mp3")
/script PlaySoundFile("Sound\\Music\\ZoneMusic\\BrewFest\\BF_Goblins2.mp3")
/script PlaySoundFile("Sound\\Music\\ZoneMusic\\BrewFest\\BF_Goblins3.mp3")

and stop it with: /script StopMusic()

Happy Brewfest!...hic!

2 comments:

  1. I love brewfest too, but damn, wearing those goggles gave me such a headache!

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  2. When the blur gets to be too much I turn off Full Screen Glow, but the part that really pisses me off is being unable to run/ride in a straight line. On a land mount it`s already mildly irritating, but swimming or flying it`s a total nightmare! At least you can take the goggles off, unlike drink-induced drunkenness you have to wait out DX

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