Wednesday, September 24, 2008

HowTo: Ram Racing

Ram racing is a fun little event that you can do every day during the brewfest. The first thing to know is that if you already did your ram race training (maintain 8 seconds of each of the different speeds) is that the quest giver does not have a nice purdy exclamation mark over his head for the daily quest.

You can still start the ram race every day by talking to the ram racing instructor (next to the tent outside of Ogr).

You cannot however abandon the 'quest' and restart it. Once you start racing and you mess up somehow (a random disconnect or whatnot) you're stuck waiting till the next day to try again.

The ram race itself is fairly straight forward, you do not race against other people but you race against time. When you start the event you get 4 minutes of race time and you have to run down the road, pick up a beer keg (the npc will throw it at you) and race back to your starting point.

For every turn-in you get 2 brewfest tokens and some extra time on your clock.

Before you start the ram race make sure you have the reigns hotkeyed and you noted the location of barrels full of apples (are they apples? They're red looking anyway). There should be 3 barrels on the road to the NPC that tosses you the keg.

In the Ogr ram race the first barrel is behind the tent you start in (in the little fenced in area) the second is about halfway the track and the last is behind the NPC tossing the kegs.

Now nab the quest and head straight for the 2nd barrel (not the one behind the tent but the one further down the road). Mash your reigns hotkey to get you up to full speed and keep mashing it once in a while to maintain full speed.

If you hit all the barrels on the way you will never have to slow down but be warned: You have to actually trigger the barrel effect (sometimes it doesn't when you are too far away or there's too many people around the same barrel).

What the barrel does is simply keeping your ram from getting tired. You get a little exhausion indicator in your buff bar, when it hits 100 your ram is exhausted and will slow down significantly. Don't let it get to a 100, make sure you hit a barrel before it does or you will lose valuable time.

After the 2nd barrel race towards the NPC that tosses you a keg. You only have to get semi-close to him for him to toss a keg at you and you don't have to do anything special so adjust your trajectory slightly to hit the last barrel on the track and turn around.

Head back via the 2nd barrel toward the tent. I usually do a semi-circle around the tent so I can hit the barrel behind the tent, when you do that you usually complete your delivery and get your 2 brewfest tokens.

Don't stop racing until your ram unsummons and remember you get a little more time each time you turn in a keg.

The quest does not give XP and only rewards brewfest tokens which can be turned in at the token redeemer in the brewfest camp (incidentally the wolpertinger pet can be bought for a mere 45s from that vendor without using any brewfest tokens).

For some added fun start the quest at the same time with a few friends and see who has the most tokens at the end of the race... I recommend betting hefty sums of gold on the outcome to really get that adrenaline rush going.

Either way, enjoy the beer and don't race rams while you're drunk.

Oh and if you want to make your life really easy you could probably make it a guild thing, post a lock on each side of the course and just have yourself summoned back and forth... but that's just the lock inside me kicking up dust.

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