From a joke pre-wrath, to OP at the beginning of Wrath, to almost a joke again recently, following stealth nerf after stealth nerf, volley got a little stealth buff in the recent patch.
The AP coefficient of Volley has been increased from 0.0586 to 0.0837. Base points did not change. This probably did not make the patch notes. (Source)
Hopefully, this will balance it and make it competitive with other classes’ AOE. But seeing the note on MMO Champion got a little, ‘yeay!’ from me in any case 
Categories: 1
Today is the start of my favorite festival of the year – beer, oom-pah music, hairy legged dwarves in lederhosen – what’s not to love?! And today I achieved the meta-achievement for Brewfest, and scored myself the title of Brewmaster
Now, you won’t be able to do it all in one day, unless you had completed some of the achievements last year and still had some of the regalia. I already had two pieces of brewfest clothes sitting in my bank, and so needed 1 more piece, or 100 tokens, to complete the set and some of the achievements. You can earn at least 147 tokens on the first day. I also had my Great Brewfest Kodo from last year and was in the Brew of the Month Club, so a couple of the achievements were already filled in.
Here is your guide to completing the achievement over the course of the festival:
Coren Direbrew (provides 40 tokens per day)
Killing Coren Direbrew last year, doesn’t count, you will have to repeat it again this year. You must be level 75+ to be able to pick up the quest, as Direbrew has been upped to a level 80 elite. Lower levels can take part in a group, as the fight takes part in BRD with a low instance restriction. But unless friends are running you through, most people are going to want everyone in their group to be 75+ and have the quest, so that the group can kill him 5 times and have 5 lootings of the corpse. As with last year, he is pretty easy, and is a loot piñata. Our group 4-manned him easily, and could have three or possibly 2-manned him as geared 80s.
If you haven’t done this before, you may be able to pick up a quest – Save Brewfest! - from Darna Honeybock (a female dwarf) near the barrel thrower for the ram racers in Kharanos (Alliance) or Slurpo Fizzykeg in Durotar (Horde). Darna didn’t have the quest for Tin, so I headed straight over to Black Rock Depths. There is a spy in the Grim Guzzler (the neutral tavern part of the intance) who will give you the daily quest – Insult Coren Direbrew. If like Tin, you have your Direbrew’s Remote (dropped by Direbrew last year) you can teleport you and your party straight there. (Otherwise, use the transporters to your right just after you’ve entered the instance).
The fight is the same as last year, except Coren and the two barmaids are level 80 elites, and the little adds are 80 non-elites. Coren starts with 3 non-elite adds, you start the quest and you tank aggros all of them. Other non-elite adds will spawn behind/within the ranged party through mole machines. Part way through the fight the two barmaids will spawn. Its an easy tank and spank, just make sure your healer isn’t overwhelmed by the adds and watch for two other things. First, keep your backpack open and the first space free. Beer gets thrown at you – drink it as soon as it appears, or you get stunned when a second brew is thrown at you. Second, someone (usually the tank) gets a barrel on their head. This will incapacitate them for a few seconds. If this happens, make sure the squishies stay away from Direbrew.
The loot hasn’t been updated yet on Wowhead (Direbrew) – but I can confirm that he drops level 80 (ilevel 200) trinkets, equivalent to those purchasable for 25 Emblems of Heroism. I guess he still drops the mounts at the same low drop rate, plus some updated shankers and his remote, but we only saw trinkets on our first days runs. They don’t share cooldowns with the emblem trinkets, so both can be equipped at once and can proc at once.
Loot (someone helpfully listed these on wowhead – we saw the first three drop today):
Down with the Darkiron
The Dark Iron Dwarves will attack brewfest, appearing in the mole machines and trying to steal the three large beer kegs. To stop them, drink the beer samples on the tables next to the kegs, and hurl them at the dwarves. If the dwarves are successfully repelled, a cog is left on the ground, which anyone can click on to get the daily quest (and the achievement, the first time you do it). You don’t have to have taken part in the battle, so look out for the cog with a blue exclamation mark over it each time you are at brewfest.
Strange Brew
Drink all the brews listed for the Strange Brew achievement. All are available from the vendors at brewfest. I particularly liked the Mudder’s Milk – a reference to Firefly, one of my all time favorite TV Shows.
The brewfest diet
Eat all the Brewfest diet food listed. These can all be bought from the vendors.
Brew of the Month (requires 200 tokens)
If you joined last year, you should already have this achievement. Otherwise, you need to save 200 tokens and purchase the Brew of the Month Club Membership and complete the quest.
Disturbing the peace (requires 250 tokens)
Wear 3 pieces of brewfest regalia and /dance while drunk in Dalaran. You need to purchase a brewfest hat; shoes or boots; and dress or regalia. It will cost you 250 tokens in all. Go to the inn in Dal, buy 4-5 alcoholic drinks, drink until you get the emote you are smashed, then slash dance and try not to fall over.
Drunken Stupor
This is the same as the old Going Down? achievement, accept you need to be drunk when you do it. I jumped off the tower to the side of the elevator tower of the scryer terrace in Shattrath. Even if you’re Aldor the robots don’t bother you there.
Does your Wolpertinger linger?
If you don’t have the pet from last year, just do the quest to get one. Tip: speak to the quest guy, who will give you some glasses you can use to do this and the pink elekk quest (do this one too – its not an achievement but awards 40 tokens). The glasses make you drunk, without having to bother drinking, lol. And even better, when you take them off you are instantly sober.
Have Keg, Will Travel (requires 2 tokens)
You no longer need one of the permanent brewfest mounts to achievement this one. I was lucky enough to get a Kodo last year, so I’m all set. But if you don’t have one, you can use either fresh or preserved hops to transform your mount into a kodo to get the achievement. 20 fresh hops cost 2 tokens.
Ram racing
This is not an achievement – but you need to do the ram racing to get the tokens. There are a couple of training quests before you are let lose on the daily barrel run. For this you need to ferry barrels, back and forth along a course in kharanos or outside Orgrimmar. You get 2 tokens per barrel. The trick is to keep your ram at a gallop the whole time, and never let him get exhausted, plus to also take the shortest route possible. To do this you need to ride close to at least two of the four barrels of apples along the route. These give the ram more energy. You see two buffs, a circle (green = trot; gold = canter; red = gallop) and a ram with a number – if the number gets to 100 you get an exhausted ram for several seconds. Hot key the ram reign to a button, smash it for all you are worth, and race up and down, taking your ram close to at least 2 barrels as you go.
Barking
They’ve changed this slightly from last year. Its now easier, as you only have to get around the flags in the time, not back to the vendor. Once you get to the last flag, the quest is complete, and you can dismount from your ram and hand in later. Pick up the Barking quest from any of the three vendors. He gives you a ram, you need to race around Ironforge/Orgrimmar on it, past the flags at 4 locations. In IF they are in each of the quarters. I found if I kept my ram at a canter the enter time, he didn’t get exhausted and I did the quest in the time. There are no apple barrels for refueling for this one.
Besides the achievement you might also want to collect tokens for other items. Pet collectors will get excited by the new non-combat pet Pink Sized Pink Elekk, which costs 100 brewfest tokens.
And there you have it – your guide to Brewfest! Have fun becoming Brewmasters.
And why was I so interested in doing Brewfest so quickly? Well… for me it was the last part of the meta-mata-achievement What A Long Strange Trip It’s Been. So after killing Coren Direbrew there was a very nice reward sitting in my mail…. a violet proto-drake I’m one happy Brewmaster today – cheers!
Categories: Achievements
Until recently, I had never ventured into Onyxia’s lair. Being a BC baby, I’d missed out on many of the Azeroth raids. I wanted to be able to see Onyxia before Patch 3.2 came out, and the old Onyxia became no more, being revamped as a level 80 10 and 25 man raid. I had read that she was soloable by a level 80 (and even by epic level 70s who really knew their stuff), so I thought I would give it a go.
There is no attunement to get into Onyxia’s lair. The nearest flight path is Mudsprocket in Dustwallow marsh, and from there just ride on to the cave and go through the iron jaw like gate. You will of course, need to be a raid group (min level 55) to do this, although the other raid member does not need to be with you, or even in the same zone. In fact, I got Anelf to create a horde Death Knight, just so he could join a raid with me, so I could solo Onyxia.
There are only a couple of trash mobs before Onyxia. Clear them all, including the one standing near the door, that you can actually bypass, as if you don’t there is a chance they will add during the second phase of the fight.
The Onyxia fight has 3 phases. It too me 3 attempts to work out phase 2. Phases 1 and 3 were really easy. My successful attempt took about 25 minutes, as a Prot Pally, though I think I should be able to do it in less next time.
Phase 1 100% health – 66% health
A fairly simple tank and spank. She had a knock back, so try to tank her with you back to the wall, and not too close to the whelp eggs that are located to the left and right of the entrance. If you get knocked into the eggs, whelps will spawn and you will need to deal with them too. As an AOE Prot Pally, this is not all bad, you can use the whelps to regen mana/health if you need to, although for part 1, I didn’t find either a problem. Most of the damage is fire damage, so I used fire resistance aura, blessing of sanctuary, and judgement of wisdom.
Phase 2 66% health-40%health
At 66% health Onyxia becomes airborne and summons whelps. You need to continue to DPS Onyxia down, reducing her health to 40% to get her to ground again and enter phase 3. This was by far the hardest stage for a melee class. She does quite a lot of damage during this phase (mostly from fire balls), but she also moves around. I found it hard to stay in range for all my main DPS skills, and often when I did hit something, I would get an error message saying that I was facing the wrong way. Not continually DPSing also meant that I was not regenerating health and mana as fast as I normally would, so I was having to heal myself a lot. I found a good tactic, was to switch to targeting the whelps and AOE them down, before turning back to Onyxia, every time I got very low on mana/health since this helped me regen mana/health quicker than when I was targeting Onyxia who keep moving out of target range or behind me. Just persevere, use your bubbles, lay on hands, and potion if you need to during this phase, and DPS her down as quickly and effectively as you can. I don’t feel the expert yet, and would like some better tips if anyone has any, but feel confident I could do it again, and much better next time.
Phase 3 40% health to dead
After Phase 2, Phase 3 is cake. She is on the ground during this phase, and doesn’t summon adds, unless you get feared into them. She doesn’t have a knock back, but does have a regular fear. Took a little while, but once I got to this phase, I was always going to win.
Great fun, and epic battle. You get a feat of strength achievement, plus about 57G, several blues and purples, Onyxia’s head, which starts a quest, and an 18 slot bag. Once you are done, click on Onyxia’s head to start a quest, and take it off to Orgrimmar or Stormwind. You get your head placed on a spike at the gate – it makes you feel so proud 
Categories: Adventures of Piratejoe
You have probably all seen Blizzard’s Faction Change Service by now, for $30 you can change your character from alliance to horde or vice-versa. Your $30 also includes customizing your character, so if you wish you can change your name and sex too. You will of course be changing your race and physical features. If you want to change more than one character, you must pay $30 per toon.
The Faction Change service does not include a class change. If you are currently an alliance paladin you will convert to a horde paladin. You can select any race that is open to your class. In the case of the Paladin (prior to the Cataclysm expansion anyway) you have limited options on the horde side. As a Dwarf Paladin I had to become a Blood Elf Paladin. However, if I were transferring from a Blood Elf Paladin to the alliance I could have chosen between a Human, Dwarf or Draenai. Similarly, as a warrior making a faction change from alliance to horde I could have chosen any race but the Blood Elves; and from Horde to alliance I could have chosen any race, as all can be warriors.
To start the faction change click on the advert on the WOW logon page or go to the official website. Your character must not have any mail in his or her mail box (or on the way to his or her mail box), and must have been logged out for at least 20 minutes. It is a one-way switch only. You can only make the character switch every 60 days. If you decide you made a mistake and want to change back, you must wait 60 days and then pay another $30.
Your character must be over level 10. I thought this was strange. Who would want to pay $30 to transfer a character under level 10, except for a very involved role play scenario maybe? It only takes a couple of hours to get to level 10. With the speed of leveling now, I wouldn’t consider this for a character under level 60 or 70.
Because the service is so popular at the moment, I got a lot of “Server Busy” messages when trying to do my transfer and had to keep trying. You obviously need a credit card, but the process on the website is quite simple. Error messages may occur for things like mail in the characters mail box. If this happens you have to log back on to the character, clear it up and then wait at least 20 minutes before trying again.
It says the service takes several hours (although there is a note when going through the transfer to say it will currently take several days). It took just over a day to transfer my character. I’d read elsewhere that you could play the character during that time, but in the transfer information it stated that you could not. I didn’t try as I didn’t want to disrupt the process. When the transfer is complete you get an email, and an icon appears next to the character on the log in screen. This little square has the red/blue horde/alliance logos. You click it to complete the selection of your new race and customization.
Tips – things to do before you transfer:
Can you think of any others?
Transfer Complete – things to note
When your character is transferred many things will stay the same, you won’t lose the items in your bags, bank or money for instance, or most of your achievements or titles. But a few faction-specific items/achievements will change.
Conclusion:
All in all the process was pretty smooth, and I’m glad I went ahead and did it. The only negative, was the resetting of my argent tournament ranking, which I didn’t realize would happen at the time. Some people may think it a bit expensive, and maybe it is, but for me it has opened up new aspect of the game, now that my chosen play-style has changed for a while. You may have many reasons why you want to change, as long as you are sure about it, go for it and have fun .
Categories: Adventures of Piratejoe
Tagged: faction change
My male blood elf Pally, Piratejoe, thinks a lot of himself. He’s cool and sexy. He can solo dragons. He has good hair. And has practiced his jump in a mirror until it looks cool as a cat’s.
However, Piratejoe has a dark secret, one he hopes he can live down with his new Horde brethren…. You see, Piratejoe started life as a buxom female dwarf named Hollie, 
with cute dimples and a passion for Dalaran Donuts. But Hollie felt bored with her dwarf body and the well trodden alliance paths that had been too well explored by her taller and sexier sisters-in-arms, Tinuviel and Bluebear, before her. She wanted to beat her shield with her axe and scream, “For the Horde!” She wanted to run errands for her hero, Thrall, instead of that insane lunatic King Whiney. So one night, when she met a Goblin in the pub, after having one too many Darkmoon fizzy faire drinks, she took up his offer of The RedPill*. The Goblin said she would wake up, in a couple of hours, a new man!
*RedPill may cause unexpected side effects including (but not limited to) loss of friends, guildmates, argent tournament rankings and titles. Some achievements maybe lost, affects are non-reversible for 60days. Taking of RedPill is entirely at your own risk.
Two days later (and after the intervention of a god-like being to do important things like pick a name, hair style and tan), Hollie woke up in Silvermoon city, with a differently shaped chest and other anatomical parts, and a new name….Piratejoe. The Goblin was never seen again. Her Argent Tournament Squire had run off in horror, to be replaced by a gruntling, who seemed quite unconcerned. Someone had spray-painted her paladin charger red, and swapped her goats for chicken mounts. The first things she/he did was run to Orgrimmar and buy some cool wolf mounts instead. Riding round on a wolf, was much more manly and horde-like than a pink chicken. Her new body was pretty neat, Piratejoe’s chest didn’t flop up and down as he ran, and as long as he refrained from laughing or /dance he was pretty buff. Summoning his wolf and gruntling, Hollie/Piratejoe shouted, “For the Horde!” and rode off into a red Durotar sunset to explore his new life!!!
In The Adventures of Piratejoe (Part 2) I will cover the mechanics of the faction change plus some tips and tricks (some of which I did, and others I wish I’d thought of beforehand.)
Categories: 1 · Adventures of Piratejoe
As Anelf mentioned in a previous post, our foray into running a guild was pretty short lived.
Actually, I’m pretty relieved. While we have never been in a hard core raiding guild, we have been casually serious, organizing raiding for our guild, and raiding three or four times a week for nearly eight months. For the most part, we’ve enjoyed it. We wanted to organize the raids and work out the strategies, rather than been carried through content. We’ve had a lot of fun talking over WoW stuff outside of WoW, and made several friends within game.
But in RL we have also only used our tent once, and our mountain bikes not at all this year. Nearly every weekend we have stayed indoors, raiding. [Anelf's comment: That's what we call 'casual' raiding - weird huh! ]. So we decided it would do us good to give raiding a break for a while, and I have to say I’ve been having the most fun I’ve had in a long time in WoW. Once you get over the hang up that you don’t have to be up there ‘achieving’ at raiding and acquiring the top end gear, there’s a lot of other fun to be had with an eighty.
I’ve always liked soloing, exploring, revisiting old world content, mount and pet collecting, and the achievement system, so there is lots of stuff to do there. I will be writing another post on it soon, but one of the most epic fights I have had for a while in WOW was soloing Onyxia on my Paladin alt. I’d never been into Onyxia’s lair before, so it was great fun. Anelf and Tin then went to duo it (as once Patch 3.2.2 comes out Onyxia becomes an 80 raid instance, and will no longer be soloable). It was a simple thing to duo with two ranged DPS, one of whom could heal and the other who had a turtle tank. It was harder to solo with the Pally, because of phase 2, where Onyxia is airborne and becomes harder to hit efficiently with a melee class. Next week I will try soloing it with Tin.
My 80 Paladin has also gone through some changes, as you will see in the Adventures of Piratejoe Part 1 (coming soon). My male bloodelf Paladin, Piratejoe, has a dark secret…. he was once a plump female dwarf paladin called Hollie! Going through a faction transfer has given me a lot to do with Piratejoe, a whole set of different mounts to collect, and achievements to go for. I am also looking far forward towards the expansion, and thinking of building up resources on both sides, so my goblins and well as worgens will have a sugar daddy to help them out. Anelf is enjoying leveling some of his alts right now, but I am hoping to persuade him to try duoing some other old world raids with me, and perhaps go mount hunting in ZG and MT .
Categories: 1 · Tinuviel's Diary
