Does anyone know what’s going to happen with the Explorer achievement when old world flying comes into play? I’ve explored Outland and Northrend, and would rather save the Old World for when I can fly, but if they mess with the achievement because flying would make it too easy then I’ll get it out of the way now. Slowly. Curse you, 100% land speed.
I JUST realized tonight that you can joust with Champions once you get that far as many times as you want! I wondered where you got Marks of the Champion from…found that out far too late tonight to actually rack up many, but I think my next few days are going to involve dailies/jousting almost exclusively.
Thanks, Oak! Except for losing my way out of there, I did great with my cloth hunt and need to return there since I’m only skill level 186 and need to get to 210 - my next training step.
I also picked up some easy quests re: Doomsayer, cultists and elementals. Was it Rik who was looking for elementals and where do you find them?
Thanks
Q
PS: Also put up posters in Old Town and will infiltrate the cult next.
Unless something has changed, you can only joust with the Champions as long as you have the quest to do so (obtained from Luuri over in the rectangular tent). If you don’t have the quest, they say something like, “Are you sure you’re strong enough to challenge me?” You can continue challenging them, though, as long as you haven’t turned in the quest. I’m not sure if they continue to award Marks after the first four, but even if they do Luuri only wants four of them per day so I don’t think there would be any point in stockpiling them.
I found 'em 
More confirmation of my suspicion that all the various rifts in the world open up simultaneously: My paladin today was camping the Water rift spawn point at Sindragosa’s Fall, and got tired of waiting and flew over to the ruins in Crystalsong to see if the Air rift there was active. Nothing there, so I flew back to the Water spawn point. That one eventually spawned and I helped shut it down, then immediately flew back to Crystalsong, and there was the Air rift alive and kicking.
I gave links to the maps in this post up there.
Thanks, Rik. I’ll look for them in the easier places to get to. Hate having to camp, though and hope I won’t be in a group waiting.
Thanks
Q
Don’t worry about there being a group. More people just means it won’t take as long (but you don’t have to form a party - just wade in and start killing elementals). It’s not like a quest where you need to be in a group for everybody to get credit, and nobody needs to “wait their turn”. You’ll get credit just by being there when the rift “dies”, even if you don’t help at all.
The rift “dies” when you kill enough of the elementals (10, I think), so don’t attack the rift itself - attack the elementals. When enough of the elementals are dead, the rift will “die” and any leftover elementals will disappear. The fun part is that any nearby animals, monsters, or other enemies will help you - they’ll ignore you and attack the elementals instead, so go ahead and let them.
When the rift dies, you’ll receive a special buff, which is different depending on what kind of elementals you killed. If you get buffs from all four kinds (fire, water, earth, and air), you’ll get a special achievement. You don’t need to have them all at the same time, though, so there’s no rush - there should be at least a couple more weeks of this.
If the rift you destroy is in Northrend (since you’re level 80), you can right-click on the Mysterious Object that is left behind and get a quest to deliver the object to somebody in a capital city. That will get you 13 gold and 23 silver, and you can get the quest once per day.
I got “Tripping the Rifts” on my priest last night, while waiting in queue for a BG. Also did the (two new) Org elemental quests, which were kind of lame I thought.
For the second week in a row, we didn’t have enough guildies online to raid – only 7 folks showed up. The seven of us poked our head in RS just to see it, and we killed some trash, but really couldn’t put much of a dent in the first miniboss.
We didn’t get to the miniboss even; we wiped (repeatedly) on the third trash pack.
Sorry, guys. At this point, I feel like there’s a lot of better stuff I can do with my time than raiding. On the upside, once Cataclsym hits I’m sure we’ll see a big upswing in players, although there’ll still be some lag time while people get up to 85.
My guild got sick of wiping on 25-man LK last night and decided to go on a lark–a sexy, sexy PvP lark. So we ended up getting For The Alliance! Took us about an hour, and the only places we ran into any resistance was some token attacks in Ogrimmar and, for no understandable reason, a 10-man or so group from a Horde guild in Undercity. Why those guys would defend Sylvanas but not Thrall or Bloodhoof, I don’t know.
Also, we totally hijacked the Ogrimmar->Thunder Bluff airship. It ruled.
Alliance was having a really bad afternoon last weekend; first a group tries to kill Thrall, and gets wiped out; then we hold Wintergrasp; they manage to bash a hole in an outer wall with about 4 minutes left but that was the high point of their assault. Then the same group decided to take another shot at Thrall; this time I actually managed to get in on the massacre, which led to the best line in a while on local-defense chat:
“Whoops, we accidentally let Garrosh live, too.”
Once Cata drops, I’m not sure if we’ll keep up the ICC/RS raids on Mondays or if we’ll all just focus on leveling. Probably the latter - we can use Mondays for designated guild dungeon runs.
Apparently my friend got reaaaaaaally bored while I was out of town this weekend–I logged in to find myself parked in front of a furlbog in Felwood with a stack of feathers in my bag. I took the hint, turned in the repeatable quest for them a few times, and bam! Exalted with Timbermaw, which was the last faction I needed for my Diplomat title, since I’d stopped with them after hitting Revered for a recipe I wanted. 
The only people who can see your DPS are people who are physically near you (enough to register on their combat logs). Your DPS also won’t be a constant number–it will vary a lot based on the buffs you have, who or what you’re fighting, if you’re moving at the same time, etc. Even a hardcore endgame raider can have large fluctuations in their performance from fight to fight depending on the boss’s mechanics.
Grats on the upgrades and the lovely coordinated set. Even if the Pally helm does make me want to open a bottle of beer with your face. (Not that I can talk, though–I have a busted horn and pig shoulders.)
You’d get along well with my pocket healer–he often changes the tabard colors on our Horde guild on ET to match his Shadow Priest’s current gear.
You mean how it shows an actual render of your character in its gear? They did that a while back, but it’s still a great feature. Did you know that if you log in you can set the default pose for each of your characters? On any character, you can play around with the various animations, moving them forward a frame at a time, but on your own toons you can actually save those poses. (Careful, though–there doesn’t appear to be any way to create a “gallery,” and IIRC there’s no confirmation, so it just overwrites the previous one every time you save a new one.)
I had no idea about that one, but awesome! All the more reason to stop neglecting my poor Hunter in the BDL.
Congrats, and good luck on getting him down again with your tank!
Org and UC are the only two cities you generally get any resistance because TB and especially SM tend to be pretty deserted. And if you started at Org, like most raids do, they probably mounted the biggest resistance in UC because that was where they had time to get a group together. Grats on the bear!
If we don’t get it before Cata, I’m definitely going to want to go back and get Kingslayer at some point.
As far as I’m aware, the first Armory revamp showed your character in a 3D animated pose. The new Armory, redesigned for Cataclysm, defaults to a high-quality picture which looks much nicer.
Changing topics: I really ought to rename Nahren. It bugs me more than it ought to that there’s 97 characters with that name over all the realms. 
There’s only one Awsmpallytnk
Orrrrrrrrrly? Totally missed that when I was at the Armory yesterday, since my main has a set pose. I’ll have to check it out when I get home!
It’s not at the current Wow Armory address; follow the link in Shin’s post above to get to the new Armory site.
Oh, okay, it’s not an upgrade on the regular/live Armory yet–that’s why I was confused. I didn’t even mouseover the link since I can’t get to anything WoW-related from work.