Roamin' Holidays

I love this time of year. The kids are back in school, the weather is starting to get a fraction less unbearable (God damn you, Al Gore!), and the WoW holiday season is beginning in earnest. This past week has seen no less than three celebrations start and they’ve been…well, there. Like 90% of the playerbase, the level of excitement I get from an in-game holiday is directly proportional to what achievements and/or lasting benefits I gather from it. So, in order from “suck” to “best”, this week, we have…

“Harvest Festival” – No achievements, just a table of free food and a rather lame quest to go visit the Plaguelands. Yay.

“Pirate Day” – One achievement for talking to the one npc who does the one thing you can do: wear a pirate costume. Ok, it sounds lame (it is), and you lose the costume if you shapechange or die, but considering it’s a one day event, it was “all right”.

“Brewfest” – Finally! A holiday worth celebrating! It’s got it all: ram races, monsters you can only see while drunk (pink elephants, no less), defending giant kegs by chucking empty steins at invading dark dwarves, and mostly contained in a few hundred yards. There’s only two main hitches to this one, as far as I can tell. The biggest being that in order to ‘win the event’, you have to sample all twelve of the beers of the month club. This means that even if you get the 200 tokens to join the club, it’s still going to take you a year to get the achievement. The second seems to be this “Direbrew” fellow.

A little research said this guy is a boss that spawns in the ‘Grim Guzzler’ tavern portion of some dungeon, so I ventured there to see for myself. This began a series of misadventures I’ll simply call “Where in Blackrock is Strev Now?” Finding the dungeon hub itself posed only a slight challenge: it’s a honkin’ big mountain located in an otherwise desolate zone. Inside the mountain, it took a little exploring before I realized I could run across giant chains suspended over magma to access the center of the volcanic underhell. A few minutes later, I’ve crossed a quarry and have found the portal to the Penultimate Vanilla Experience: Blackrock Depths.

I wisely decided that my frost spec would aid me more in the battles to come, so I flipped over to it, summoned Steve, then entered the portal. Seconds later, I cursed, wasted my ‘cold snap’ and re-summoned Steve, who had dissolved when I had entered the portal. I should have taken it as an omen.

The dungeon itself was populated with a vast array of level 50-something elite dwarves, fire elementals, and more bosses than one could say rightly belonged in a dungeon. I found a number of doors and gates that would only unlock with a ‘shadowforge key’, so I kept a lookout for it as I plowed my way through the underground city like a starved gnomish Godzilla. Most potential adversaries just avoided me outright unless I stepped on their toes, but when I did draw attention, it was by the boatload. A guide to the dungeon I had found said that “trip one” through the dungeon was primarily to kill bosses x, y, and z for some quests and get the Shadowforge Key so giant chunks of dungeon can be avoided in the future. I cleared the entire first ‘section’ of the dungeon, including a particularly nasty fire elemental that had taken three shots to kill (Yes, I realize this guy probably used to wipe whole parties—that doesn’t mean I can’t laugh at it now.) It was around this point that I realized I needed a quest to get the damn key and the mobs I needed to kill for it were already dead. Terrific. I logged and decided to try again later.

BRD: Take two. Armed with a little more knowledge and substantially less clothing, I ran across the chains over the magma and promptly cannonballed to my painful firey death. For once, this was a planned activity and my naked nosedive ensured no damage to my equipment. But why undertake such a foolish venture to begin with? Well, it turns out the only way to get the Shadowforge Key quest is from a ghost you can only see if you’re dead. As I began the quest, I wondered precisely how many naked gnomes he’d chatted with over the years and I wept as I tried to convince myself I was the first.

This time as I committed dwarven genocide, I picked up a couple of McGuffins that dropped along the way and laid claim to a shiny Key hidden away in some statue. I was now prepared to shortcut my through the dungeon, as I was out of time for that run.

BRD: Take three. With key in hand and a few false turns, I found my way to a “Manufactory” loaded with golems, workers, and some artificer. On the floor lay an interesting blueprint for a repair bot I wasn’t allowed to pick up, as I wasn’t an engineer. After a couple more turns, I found my way to the Grim Guzzler! I practically beamed with joy as I ran around and found… absolutely nothing of interest. No Direbrew, no trigger mob or item, nothing to indicate how I was supposed to trigger the boss event. After killing the patrons out of spite, I returned to Ironforge to drown my sorrows in ale.

In retrospect, it was probably a good thing I wasn’t able to figure out the trigger—from what I hear, I’d be hard-pressed to get the boss down to half before he’d do me in. He’s level 80, isn’t alone, summons adds that stun, and it’ll require a group.