Filed under: Breakfast Topics

It was sort of lost in the shuffle between Love Is in the Air and the fact that we're technically not a sports blog, but this weekend featured one of the biggest events in American sporting, the Super Bowl. Believe it or not, even some of us uber geeks here at WoW.com's world headquarters like sports. Some of us even watched the Super Bowl. Some of us even watched it for a reason other than the commercials. (And honestly, the commercials sucked this year. Except the Google one. That made me melt and go all gooey and squeal with warm fuzzies.)

Anyhow, it was a good game, if not the best Super Bowl I've seen in years. But what it really got me thinking of was Warcraft football. Believe it or not, football in Warcraft is totally canon. If you don't believe me, you should watch the end credits for Warcraft III. With that in mind, I got to thinking about what an Azerothian football league might look like, what cities and villages would field teams, and who'd win the superbowl.

In every holiday that has you chase after a specific race/class combo, there's always that one, that elusive combo that makes the whole thing feel like a snipe hunt. For the Love is in the Air holiday, the Fistful of Love achievement requires us to shower 11 specific race/class combos with rose petals.

By the end of the holiday, you'll inevitably be wanting to give a fistful of something to one combo, and it sure ain't love.

For me it's the troll rogue. I swear they don't really exist, and it's just a cruel prank played on us by Blizzard. I've even gone so far as to stage a James Bondesque infiltration of the Horde district, complete with helicopters and a dashing dwarf parachuting onto rooftops. It's not that they just aren't out in public, but that they don't frickin' exist at all!

On the other hand, as a dwarf hunter, I know what it feels like to be the hunted. I do get sick of being constantly showered with petals at times. I even found myself hanging out in out of the way places and disguising myself as a ninja to avoid it. Perhaps I am someone else's troll rogue.

What race/class combo is your curse? Have you found yourself hiding from achievement seekers, and if so, how?

The yearly holiday Love Is In the Air went live today, and with it a host of new features -- a new boss in Shadowfang Keep, several revamped achievements, and overall a lot of spit-and-polish on a holiday that had been extremely frustrating to many players in 2009. Last year, your ability to get the meta Fool For Love done was entirely dependent on dumb luck over a 5-day period. Blizzard's looking to blunt the impact of RNG this time around by extending the holiday and introducing a much less painful means of getting the achievements.

So what are your plans for Love Is In the Air? Does your main already have the meta from last year, or were you among the unlucky souls doomed to keep getting the same candy drops? Are you planning on hitting the new boss in Shadowfang Keep? And are you, like me, just ecstatic that you don't have to spend days hoping for a Peddlefeet pet to drop?

Note: A few of us were around as soon as the holiday went live, and our FAQ on Love Is In the Air and OverAchiever on the holiday's achievements have now been updated to reflect the 2010 event. They'll be expanded later today with more information on the holiday questline and the new Shadowfang Keep encounter.

I hate leveling. I despise it with a burning wrath. I enjoyed it well enough the first time, but I never, ever want to have to do it again. I only have one max level character because I cannot bring myself to level another through all the pain and blood and hog organs.

Without question Blizzard is continually making leveling easier, increasing XP, decreasing the amount of XP you need to level, and offering a myriad of XP-boosting heirloom items. I appreciate that Blizzard is trying to ease my pain, but why do have to level from scratch at all? Why can't I just reroll at level 55 if I already have a max level character? Or better yet, why can't I assign an alt as my "apprentice" and he gets 10% of any XP my main would have gotten. Set it up so he levels around half the rate someone actually playing at leveling, but he can eventually get up to 80 without forcing me back into a glorified Fed Ex driver again, sorting through buzzard gizzards and reading wanted posters.

Leveling is a radically different game from the endgame. I appreciate that some people enjoy and prefer that game. But many of us prefer the other game, and we don't want to play the leveling game again. We've done it. We won.

What do you think? If you already have a level 80, should you have to level your next character from scratch? Do you think that leveling really teaches you how to play a class?

I love gear.

Heck, I'm a warrior. I'm required to love gear. And even more than gear itself I love gear with something cool extra, something like Ash'kandi. Not only is Ash'kandi pretty freaking awesome, not only does it have one of the best models ever (even this far into WoW's life cycle few 2h weapons have even come close to rivaling Ash'kandi's model) but it has neat flavor text that helps establish the weapon's role in the game world. This is Anduin Lothar's sword. This is the sword of the Lion of freaking Azeroth! Possibly the greatest warrior ever to walk the land and here is his sword!

One of the things I love about the new ICC wing opening, in fact, is discovering that flavor text like that is back. Unfortunately, I also discover that sometimes, model and text do not match up so well. We're going to talk about Lich King loot behind the cut, so if you don't want to know don't go any further.

This is it. The final gates of Icecrown have been opened up. If you need help, we have overviews and other resources to the encounters right here. While I'd guess that the majority of us aren't exactly competing for world firsts or even server firsts, progression is still progression. I know starting out that I had my own internal expectations of where our guild would be at and we've met them. We haven't cleared out all the new bosses yet but I know with time, we will be able to. Along the way, we managed to score a few unexpected achievements. I for one didn't recall going after The Orb Whisperer. Anyway, some guilds take their progression seriously. In fact, I think there are a few out there who purposely used a lockout from the previous week just to have the extra time advantage to work on Valithria and Sindragosa.

What about your raid groups? Are you happy with how you're progressing so far? Did they surpass your wildest dreams or are you discontent and think you should be further ahead?

Back-channel team discussion these past few days has been reminiscing about the Warcraft series' best bits of lore, and eventually discussion turned to the things that we wish Blizzard had revisited or expanded. Zul'jin came up, with people a bit uncomfortable that the great story promised by the Zul'Aman trailer didn't transition to the actual raid very well. "Both Horde and Alliance had perfectly good reasons to raid it," Rossi observed. "Instead, we go there because someone wants to plunder Amani riches."

That made us think about all the stuff we do in-game that kind of makes us...well, bad guys, for lack of a better term, and we started wondering -- what's the worst thing that player characters have done (or been asked to do)? Setting Teron Gorefiend loose has to rank pretty high up there. Then there's that torture quest out in Borean Tundra, which squicks people to this day. While we're on the subject of Borean Tundra, nobody particularly liked thinking about a daily quest offered in Coldarra, or the ugly results of Horde questing in Howling Fjord. If you wanted to look at the whole "player evil" thing from a larger perspective, you can even make a case that player-generated PvP is, within the context of WoW's lore, one of the more significant contributions to faction antagonism and war.

So what's the worst thing that your character has done -- or, failing that, the thing that you still feel the worst about? I've already got my pick.

No matter what your race, faction, or preference, there is a mount for you. Especially with achievements like the Mountain o' Mounts, you can have a different mount every day for six months if you wanted to. Certain...ah...'weight restrictions' have been lifted some time ago, so now no matter your in-game girth, you can ride on whatever you want.

Level restrictions have been changed as well, so you can now explore Azeroth on your discounted mount at a mere level 20! Try and think back to those days...the days of a fresh-faced you, on your main (or whatever), grabbing your first mount. While there are much more impressive creatures to ride nowadays, is there one that you hold close to your heart? Maybe you slogged through battleground after battleground, or ran the same instance/raid any number of times to get that special mount?
My first epic mount will always hold a special place in my heart, although I usually ride my White War Talbuk. One day, I'm aiming to get Anzu the Raven Lord, as I'm sure it'll be totally sweet.

So what about you, dear readers? For whatever purpose--roleplaying, vanity, sentiment--what is your favourite mount, whether you own it or not?

I discovered that many of the regular players in It came from the Blog, WoW.com's event guild, are using it as a getaway guild. Some of them lead or are regular raiders in progression guilds on other servers, but come to Zangarmarsh to get away from it all.

In a getaway guild, you can level a character without having to deal with your home guild's drama, responsibilities and requests. Sure, you want to be there for your guild and you don't mind helping out your friends, but sometimes it's nice to just play the game without all of the extra baggage that comes along with an ambitious guild. Of course, you can solo incognito or on another realm, but in a getaway guild, you have the social interaction without the expectations.

Do you belong to a getaway guild? Or is all your WoW playtime in one guild and you just stay out of Azeroth when you need a break?

Note: If you like the idea of a getaway guild, but aren't in one, you are welcome to join It came from the Blog on Zangarmarsh, U.S. Please see our FAQ for any questions.

I admit it: I'm a contentious person. Sometimes I deliberately say or do something just because it will irritate people. Usually, I try and use this power for good and I'm hardly pretending to be the most effective person at it even out of people I know, but the other night it worked out rather beautifully. I decided to go DPS a random because I was bored and wanted to play around with DPS ideas I had. Namely, if it was worth dropping some hit and expertise to hit 80% passive ArP which I could just barely do and I wanted to test it in a setting where the hit and exp caps were lower than in a raid where bosses are effectively level 83 since in heroics the highest level you'll face is an 82 boss. So I hit the queue, waited the 35 minutes (it was fairly late and close to server reset) and got a FoS pop.

As soon as we get in the tank says he's never done it before and do we think he should drop the group. We all try to be reassuring, since everyone's had to start somewhere and his gear was certainly good enough for a heroic. Then the first pull began and we quickly learned that he wasn't kidding about having never done it before and that the answer he was actually hoping for was that someone else would tank, because he clearly had no idea what he was doing, period. Furthermore, he was ridiculously hyper-critical of the healer (who didn't seem to be having any significant issues healing the group) and would go on long tirades blaming the healer for not having healed him at all when the healer was clearly dropping heals on everyone in the group including him. Drop to 90% on a trash pull because you ran up the ramp out of LoS? Yell at the healer. Take damage from one of the ghostly skulls and not get healed to full before pulling the giant skeletons? Rant at the healer. Frankly, I have no idea why the guy took it.

Finally, after the last pull before Devourer of Souls, where he deliberately went and chain pulled three of the Spectral Warders despite the healer having said OOM and then blamed the healer for letting him die when he had a 75% healing reduction debuff and the healer was out of mana, I'd basically had enough.

As we've discussed before, the Culling of Stratholme did slow the spread of the plague. But it's heartbreaking to watch Arthas slaughter innocent townspeople when they are looking to him for help. Wouldn't it have been better if he had waited for them to turn into scourge before killing them? Or was there a better way?

Should they have tried quarantining them until a cure could be found, perhaps? (Even though there isn't one.) It's a bit like a recent Fringe episode. Was it evil to consider killing all of the people infected with an extremely intelligent, contagious and fast-spreading disease? How do you deal with deciding between compassion for a few versus the survival of a race?

Could the ruthlessness that Arthas showed there be a symptom of weak morals that perhaps led to his demise as a human? Or was his swift, decisive action an example of his excellent leadership qualities and why he makes such a successful Lich King? Perhaps doing the right thing in Stratholme weakened his soul, making him more susceptible to corruption.

How should Arthas have behaved in Stratholme? Did his actions help corrupt him or show him to be already corrupted? What would you have done in the same situation?

I was inspired by the time travel talk from last Friday's The Queue. If you were able to kill Arthas while doing the Culling of Stratholme; you would prevent him from becoming The Lich King, but would cause a much faster spread of the plague. It reminded me of this great piece of short fiction, where going back in time to kill Hitler prevents time travel from becoming possible and is therefore strictly forbidden.

I'd like to go back in time and help Mankrik's Wife escape her violent and lonely death. Do we really need another reason to slaughter those nasty boar humanoids? Besides, I bet she had some really great quests that we missed out on.

If you could go back in WoW time and change something, what would it be? What do you think the ramifications of your change would be?

In the last year, I have noticed that Blizzard has been making more of an effort to reach out to its community. When I say community, I mean the artists, the writers, the singers, bloggers, theorycrafters, and everything in between.

From having the three major franchises join Twitter, to the Battlecry Mosaic, to contests galore -- tell me, what does this mean to you? Have you participated in any of these contests or events? I myself actually entered the Fan Art Calendar contest just last night, and while I'm hardly expecting to win, it was not only a fun project to work on but it made me realize that Blizzard has at least a genuine-looking interest in its artistic fanbase.

Are you guys enjoying the contests? Or do you believe it's all a big corporate sham to make Blizzard seem all moonbeams and kittens?

Discuss amongst yourselves!

Last week, there was a thread on the European forums about what really happened during the weekly downtime. Sure, some people said the boring answers of various things having to do with software and hardware. Others were more of the fanciful variety involving the hamsters that run the servers being fed. However, I like the more RP approach to the situation.

Goblins and gnomes are using refitted shredders to sweep the streets and repaint the buildings. Mankrik's wife has stopped playing dead for a little while and is grabbing a bite to eat with her husband. The stormforged dwarves are hard at work forging more drops for the raids that have reset. The streets of Orgrimmar are empty with tumbleweeds blowing down the streets and an old orc in a rocking chair is playing the theme to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly on an old harmonica (the music was in the tumbleweed's contract).

What do you think the World of Warcraft does while we're temporarily forced offline?