So I went through my series of dailies for the hallows end event on all my characters when I noticed a rather obscure 'oversight' that I can't describe any other way than as a mistake in the game mechanics.
Of course we won't mind exploiting something as innocent as this little problem here so let me tell you how it's done:
The second someone starts the fires quest that summons the headless horseman to brill or razor hill you can pick up the quest 'stop the fires' from the questgiver.
Rather than participating in the event, log in all of your characters while the fires are burning and pick up the stop the fires quest from the questgiver on all the characters you can possibly muster. Of course it's handy to stack them all in brill or razor hill the day before.
Once you've got your 'stop the fires' quest on all your characters pick any one of the characters that have the quest and start helping with the fires.
Once you complete the event and the headless horseman is killed he will leave his head behind as usual and you will get the 'completed' message for your stop the fires quest on the char that's currently logged in.
While the pumpkin head is laying on the ground log in all your characters that previously picked up the quest and miraculously you will get a 'completed' message for the stop the fires quest on those characters aswell.
With a little bit of timing I was able to do the 'stop the fires' event on one character and get a 'complete' for 3 other characters without having to put out any extra fires (the rest of my characters were running around doing silly things so I didn't get them there in time).
So to summarize:
1. Start the 'let the fires come' event or wait till someone starts it
2. Log in with all your characters and pick up the 'stop the fires' quest while the fires are burning
3. Once your characters all have the quest help out with the fires and finish the event
4. Kill the horseman or wait for him to be killed
5. While the horseman's head is laying in town log in with all your characters that have the 'stop the fires' quest to automatically get a complete for them too
6. Profit!
You'll have to be pretty fast about it, as I sad in my previous article the head only stays around for 5-10 minutes so you'll have to log in all your chars in this timespan.
You'll want to park most of your characters in the inn at brill or razor hill when you do this. If your machine or internet connection is on the slower side then make sure you disable all your addons which will ensure the fastest possible load times in wow.
Either way a nice trick to skip the putting out the fires event on most of your characters without losing out on the quest reward.
I fully intend to report this 'oversight' to a game master next time I log in but I don't expect them to change it anytime soon.
Incidentally I also noticed that squashlings and hallowed helms now can drop from trick or treat bags that you get from innkeepers meaning the 'the hallowed' title will not be such an impossible task after all.
I also found a blue post somewhere on the public forums (I really should save those links) that the achievement for collecting masks will be scrapped from the meta achievment which means you can actually grab the achievement title with a little bit of effort this year and you don't have to collect 20 unique masks for it. The meta achievment will be changed come wrath or patch 3.0.3 whichever comes first which means if you have all achievements for hallow's end except the mask task you will still get your spiffy title.
All in all I am starting to really like this holiday ;)
Showing posts with label hallow's end. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hallow's end. Show all posts
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Hallowed XP
With hallow's end in full swing I had time to take a look at the various things you can do during the festival and in an effort to maximize my xp gain for my lower level characters I parked everyone in Brill (Tirisfall glades).
Brill? That's right... Brill. The primary reason for parking all my characters in Brill is that the headless horseman regularly swings by and sets the place on fire. The reason I picked Brill over Razor Hill (where the horseman also roams) is that Brill is generally a bit more populated (on my server) and the fires that the headless horseman throws around can quickly be limited to just one building (meaning everyone piles on the same target).
But I am getting a little ahead of myself here... the point of participating in the hallow's end festivities with all my characters are based around the easy XP of 2 daily quests that both take place in Brill (or Razor Hill if you are so inclined).
The two dailies are as follows: summon the headless horseman and help put out the fires by tossing water buckets at them. If you put out all the fires the quest is completed and the headless horseman will spawn. If you then kill the headless horseman (apparantly by caughing in his general direction) he'll leave his head behind which is a simple clickable object that gives you another quest that you can turn in right there.
That's basically 2 quests for the price of one each netting about 0.75 of a bubble in terms of XP (scaling based on your level) and a nice set of hallow's end candy, a broom, maybe some toothpicks, a mask or whatever other stuff you can possibly imagine dropping for hallow's end.
Notable here is that the horseman's head will stay behind for a while (seems to be about 5-10 minutes) after which the horseman can be called again.
This means you'll actually have to stand around and wait for the pumpkin head to despawn so you can complete both quests on each character. If you're greedy you can also skip the putting out the fires part and simply get the second one by clicking on the left behind head (that's where the gifts are).
Fighting the fires isn't difficult but it has to be said that it's a group effort. You'll need at least 3 people to get the fires under control and beat the hidden event timer but more people definitely make it easier.
That said you can simply click on the water barrel in the middle of town which gives you a bucket of water. Clicking on the bucket of water gives you the typical AoE targeting indicator and you should then toss your bucket at the fire. The bigger fires spread fire further around so it's definitely worth it to aim your buckets at the biggest chunk of fire you can find.
About 1 in 20 people have figured out that you can toss the bucket to someone who doesn't have one meaning you can create chains of tossing buckets from person to person and get the fire under control a lot faster that way. People however don't read tooltips and only posses a modicum of cooperative spirit so don't expect this to happen much.
If you have travel form or a fast broom or something that'll make you run faster, use it since it will greatly reduce the time needed to get those darned fires under control.
At 1.5 bubbles for the 2 quests and hallow's end going on till the 2nd you can hope for about a level's worth of XP for the entire holiday for each character.
Combine this with the other quests (like raiding the candy bucket at the inn in each town) and you're looking at an easy 2 levels worth of XP at pretty much any character level since the XP rewards for the quests scale depending on your current level.
As a side note: the achievements can be tracked via the achievement window and can be very helpful in determining what candy buckets you raided already.
Brill? That's right... Brill. The primary reason for parking all my characters in Brill is that the headless horseman regularly swings by and sets the place on fire. The reason I picked Brill over Razor Hill (where the horseman also roams) is that Brill is generally a bit more populated (on my server) and the fires that the headless horseman throws around can quickly be limited to just one building (meaning everyone piles on the same target).
But I am getting a little ahead of myself here... the point of participating in the hallow's end festivities with all my characters are based around the easy XP of 2 daily quests that both take place in Brill (or Razor Hill if you are so inclined).
The two dailies are as follows: summon the headless horseman and help put out the fires by tossing water buckets at them. If you put out all the fires the quest is completed and the headless horseman will spawn. If you then kill the headless horseman (apparantly by caughing in his general direction) he'll leave his head behind which is a simple clickable object that gives you another quest that you can turn in right there.
That's basically 2 quests for the price of one each netting about 0.75 of a bubble in terms of XP (scaling based on your level) and a nice set of hallow's end candy, a broom, maybe some toothpicks, a mask or whatever other stuff you can possibly imagine dropping for hallow's end.
Notable here is that the horseman's head will stay behind for a while (seems to be about 5-10 minutes) after which the horseman can be called again.
This means you'll actually have to stand around and wait for the pumpkin head to despawn so you can complete both quests on each character. If you're greedy you can also skip the putting out the fires part and simply get the second one by clicking on the left behind head (that's where the gifts are).
Fighting the fires isn't difficult but it has to be said that it's a group effort. You'll need at least 3 people to get the fires under control and beat the hidden event timer but more people definitely make it easier.
That said you can simply click on the water barrel in the middle of town which gives you a bucket of water. Clicking on the bucket of water gives you the typical AoE targeting indicator and you should then toss your bucket at the fire. The bigger fires spread fire further around so it's definitely worth it to aim your buckets at the biggest chunk of fire you can find.
About 1 in 20 people have figured out that you can toss the bucket to someone who doesn't have one meaning you can create chains of tossing buckets from person to person and get the fire under control a lot faster that way. People however don't read tooltips and only posses a modicum of cooperative spirit so don't expect this to happen much.
If you have travel form or a fast broom or something that'll make you run faster, use it since it will greatly reduce the time needed to get those darned fires under control.
At 1.5 bubbles for the 2 quests and hallow's end going on till the 2nd you can hope for about a level's worth of XP for the entire holiday for each character.
Combine this with the other quests (like raiding the candy bucket at the inn in each town) and you're looking at an easy 2 levels worth of XP at pretty much any character level since the XP rewards for the quests scale depending on your current level.
As a side note: the achievements can be tracked via the achievement window and can be very helpful in determining what candy buckets you raided already.
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