Project Lore

Feeling a bit down on your luck lately? Run into one too many ganks, Ulduar wipes or failed PuG runs? Perhaps it's time for you to take a break from the grind and get to know your toon's chivalrous side through the Argent Tournament. Now I know some people in our Project Lore forums have expressed skepticism about how popular the Argent Tournament will be in the long run. Others also seem enthusiastic about the idea. I, for one, love being able to kick back for some casual game play in the tourney. I've always thought that WoW has taken a new look at Azeroth as a different kind of take on medieval times. But the Argent Tournament is a bit less subtle, which I find refreshing. We don't have to dig deep to find plenty of pop-culture references that provide framework for how we visualize medieval times. You know, the romanticized, Hollywood version with valiant good guys who wield legendary weapons to defeat a corrupt and overbearing government and win over the hot (and virgin) woman. Right away for the tournament, you start quests investigating a mysterious black knight who is said to be able to defeat anyone who is unfortunate enough to meet him (I won't ruin it for anyone who hasn't started, but it's a fun quest line!) Then you'll progress into proving your jousting worth and venturing around the world to either gather various items, kill random bad guys or rescue helpless maidens (I don't think it matters whether your toon is male or female!) It all leads to more jousting until reaching Champion status and working toward buying some tournament rewards. If you want to speed through the new addition, or if you want a closer look at what you'll be getting yourself into, definitely take a look at iTZKooPA's guide to the Argent Tournament. As for me, I am thoroughly enjoying taking my time through these quests (on my husband's main, haha, I'm still leveling!). It makes me want to join a RP server and see what kind of fun plot lines are being worked into the already awesome tournament goodness. I definitely call the Argent Tournament a win for WoW. So what does everyone else make of the new Argent Tournament addition? Is it holding your interest, or something that you'll be over within a week or two? I'm hoping that the coliseum area continues getting built up so that it maintains a fresh feel.

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It has been nearly a week since the Argent Tournament launched alongside patch 3.1 and there remains much confusion about the new addition to solo gameplay.  Solidsamm started the festivities late last week, but Blizzard created the contest in such a way that progression through the various stages moves at a smooth pace.  You never feel that the next step is out of reach, just a few days away.  Damn them knowing how to dangle that carrot so perfectly! You're a bit behind if you haven't started your dailies by now, as the first Champions will be crowned today, but don't let that stop you.  To help you on your journey we have compiled all you need to know about the Argent Tournament's daily quests in a neat little post, rather than spread across the great reaches of WoWHead.  Since many of the new NPCs are still unknown to WoWHead, we will also present you with their locations where needed. Before we dive into the daily quests we need to get you situated and out to the tournament grounds.  The grounds are located in the northeastern part of Icecrown, directly above Sindragosa's Fall.  As you fly into the area you'll be greeted by the first two dailies that are sheerly for monetary gain, A Chip Off the Ulduar Block and Jack Me Some Lumber.  They have nothing to do with the tournament, outside the illusion that you will be helping the crusaders build the actual Coliseum.  At this point you should familiarize yourself with the new camp, as it is quite large.  Fly around and pick up all the quests you see, you should find the following four quests in addition to the previous pair: 1.  The Black Knight of Westfall/Silverpine - This begins the Black Knight quest chain that progresses throughout you tournament ambitions.  Just do the damn quest chain, it's a pop culture reference that shouldn't be missed. 2.  Mastery of Melee/The Charge/The Shield-Breaker - These three quests are designed to teach you the basics of horse combat.  Grab your steed and head to the dummy location noted on the above map.  They are a cakewalk.<br> 3. Up To The Challenge - Now that you've mastered the basic moves of jousting, you can begin your run to Champion.  This quest forces you to collect Aspirant's Seals, which are rewarded from the following quests.  You can complete this in three days time if you do all the dailies offered to you.  *NOTE* One of the last three quests will be assigned, not all of them. 4.  Aspirant's Challenge - When you turn in your 15 Aspirant's Seals for Up To The Challenge you will be given that challenge, defeating your first jouster.  Head over to Squire David by the training dummies to begin you battle.  Your first battle will be an easy one, use Shield-Breaker and then Melee for the easy win. 5.  A Valiant of Capital City - Yay, you won!  Now you can head to the next level of jousting, the Valiant rank.  Fly to your faction's tent, locate your race's tournament rep and begin your ascent as a Valiant.  The rest of your dailies will be given by this representative or the buddies surrounding him/her. 6.  The Valiant's Charge - Time to collect some newfangled Valiant's Seals. At a maximum of 5 seals per day, you'll need a full business week to finish off this rank.  Don't worry, there aren't many new quests to participate in, so it should mostly be on cruise control.  The three random dailies from the Up To The Challenge section return with no changes.  Training in the field is repeated, but bumped up to ten kills instead of just eight.

• The Grand Melee - I hope your original jousting match was incredibly easy, because if it wasn't than this may be difficult for you.  You're tasked with taking down three Valiants in this feat of strength.  Be aware that you Shield (hotkey 4) can stack up to three times.  Before you go into combat get it stacked and allow the cooldown to pass, then start the battle.  Shield Break your opponent until they come into melee range and then melee.  While in melee keep your shield active, as the attack and buff are on separate CDs.  If you can keep a shield up while you opponent's is down during the melee skirmish, then it'll be an easy victory.
• At the Enemy's Gates - Here's another easy traveling quest.  Head down to Corp'rethar in southern Icecrown - clearly marked on the map - and smash some Scourge skulls.  The combat is exceptionally easy, just make sure you are attacking the Lieutenants and not the Commanders.  The Commanders are far more difficult and not part of the quest criteria.

7.  The Valiant's Challenge - The same as step four, but a bit more difficult.  Chalk it up as another Grand Melee battle. 8.  A Champion Rises - At this juncture you as essentially done with the quest line.  From here on out it is just about grinding additional reputation, seals and coin to use for those delicious rewards.  Oh, and of course those achievements and titles, how could I forget those.  In association with that, the Valiant's Charge quest will re-open for all of the other races.  If you so chose, you can re-run them for added Achievements. 9.  Eadric the Pure/The Scourgebane - I haven't gotten to this point yet, so I don't know exactly why you do one and not the other of these.  Perhaps it is a simple choice or it has something to do with your reputation for Ebon Hold vs Argent Crusade?  They don't appear to be faction related at all.  Either way, both NPCs are on the tournament grounds themselves.

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So in case you have been living under a rock, Ulduar is here! It is finally time to do and experience everything we have been reading about and looking forward to for the last several months! It is an exciting time to say the least.

I know I had developed quite a shopping list of things to do. So many, in fact, I am having a hard time deciding what my first stop will be when I can finally log on!

The Ulduar instance is obviously my number one priority, but I have a few stops I am going to make before I hit the zone it. I logged out at the trainer so I could pick up my dual-spec right away, after that I’m sure I will head to the AH and see how bad I am going to get gouged for new the glyphs.

Of course I will have to take some time to set up toolbars, gear, and glyphs for my new spec. Then I’m sure I will have to fight with some newly out-of-date add-ons.

Once I get all that house keeping squared away, I am heading straight into Ulduar-10! The idea is to see if I can get some boss tries in before our schedule Ulduar-25 run later tonight. I’m not going to lie, my guild is planning on hitting Ulduar 25 hard, so I imagine I won’t find much time for anything else once we get in there.

That being said, I definitely see the appeal of looking at some other stuff before charging right in. After all The Argent Tournament sounds like great fun, and of course doing some heroics with dual specs in place could present an interesting challenge.

There are lots of new directions to go! So what are you guys going to be up to the moment you log on?

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The many of you looking forward to the Dual Spec feature coming in Patch v3.1 will be slightly annoyed to hear that the supporting Equipment Manager feature has been cut from the patch.  According to Bornakk - in an odd April Fools RPing thread - the feature has a few "issues" that still need to be banged out before it will meet Blizzard's quality standards.  I haven't played on the PTR enough to know exactly what the issues could be, but it seems that we will be using ItemRack (remember Outfitter has ceased development due to the UI Policy changes) for awhile longer.  Per Blizzard's mantra, it'll be ready soon, which this time means "some time after patch 3.1."  Speaking of patch 3.1, that leviathan of an update will likely be going live in late April. The slashing of material isn't that big of a deal, as the Equipment Manager is still coming, but more of a sign of how huge Ulduar's patch is going to be.  Perhaps more was bitten off than the company could chew.  At the same time, I would much rather Blizzard cut these "lesser" content additions rather than delaying the entire patch.  For the Equipment Manager, we have had several third-party addons to choose from since WoW launched back in 2004.  Granted, the more robust the default UI is, the better.  It is much easier if we can spend the least amount of time, memory and processing power on addons as possible. In the meantime, time to prepare for Ulduar, grind up 1000 spare gold, sharpen those daggers for the Argent Tournament and attempt to down the second Old God.  One more after Yogg-Saron and I can be labeled as an Old God Serial Killer by the FBI.  Sweet, a title to strive for!  What do you multi-speccers use for gear swapping at the moment?  Anyone come across Equipment Manager issues?

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Project Lore has been hitting Patch 3.1 pretty hard this week.  It all started on Tuesday when the servers went down for general maintenance.  This allowed Blizzard to pop v3.1 onto the PTR and post the official patch notes.  As the week has rolled past, various bloggers have plugged their thoughts on the big picture, small but exciting details and incremental changes.  Today we will give you hard information on the ninja implementation of the Argent Tournament and a first look at some of the upcoming gear. We didn't get many details when the Argent Tournament was announced on Tuesday.  Basically, all we knew was that it would be organized by the Argent Crusade, and would open up new daily quests with a collection of rewards from gear to mounts.  After much poking and prodding by the community, Blizzard Poster Zarhym laid the groundwork for the tourney .

• The Argent Tournament is a permanent event .  It will not disappear like the Naxxramas/Wrath Invasion or end upon completion like the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj.
• Players will begin working with the Crusade to construct a massive, instanced, none PvP-based, coliseum.  It'll be added in a later patch indefinitely - think Isle of Quel'Danas mechanic.
• The event is currently in Icecrown, but Blizzard is still working on the content.  So it may not be relegated to a single zone.
• The tournament itself will launch with Patch v3.1.  Additional content will be forthcoming in subsequent patches.
• Blizzard has given a reason for such a tournament when a war against the scourge is progressing.  The Crusade believes that their competition will breed the best warriors and filter out those who can lead.  Coupled with that, it unites all contenders behind a single banner and purpose.

Courtesy of MMO-Champion, I present you with the Argent Tournament's collection of banners and tabards.  The gear and mounts can be found individualy in this meta post, but don't get too giddy.  Some of this stuff will cost hundreds of Champion's Seals - the new currency being launched with the tournament. You also may want to take a peak at the Tier 8 weapons and sets that Boubouille and co. have dug up.  Everything looks awesome, so long as you ignore the diamond-shaped 2h sword series and the atrocious Druid set.  My personal aversion to Blizzard's interpretation of daggers continues however.  In my opinion, daggers should be very small blades, not the size of my arm - or SolidSamm's entire body - but they new ones do look cool.  I just wish they were more compact. Can I get an Amen on the Druid set being awful?  I know they are earthy and all, but come on.  That is probably the most ridiculous set of shoulder armor I have ever seen.  On the flip side, I absolutley love the Rogue set.  The helm and the rest of glowing aspects of the collection make it simply badass.  I can't wait to fail at collecting it.  Why a stealth character would want to glow is beyond me though...

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Big news on the content front, Content Patch 3.1 has hit the Public Test Realms and is now ready for testing.  This isn't entirely shocking, the PTR Character Copy went live on Friday so it was just a matter of time.  Unfortunately, if you didn't get the memo over the weekend then you are out of luck.  As of press time, you can no longer get in the Character Copy queue.  On the flip side, this is Blizzard, so they could open up additional slots at any moment. Once you manage to get on the queue, half the battle is won.  The wait time on the queue has dropped from a few weeks to a few days in the span of hours.  Fear not prospective testers of Ulduar, the controversial Dual Spec and all of those class changes, you should be tearing it up in v3.1 by the end of the week.  Players quicker on the draw than myself have already logged into the the PTR and given us some early information on the unnamed patch's changes. For starters, the poor toons out there better read up on our collection of gold generating posts.  As it stands now, the Dual Spec feature will cost level 80s 1000g to train, which should not be difficult to swing.  The big news of the PTR isn't these small kind of details in my opinion.  That would be reserved for the discovery of a previously unannounced feature, the Argent Tournament. The new world tournament will open up mounted combat to us and a whole lot more.  The super secret Argent Tournament - props to keeping the feature on lockdown this long - will unleash a new set of daily quests for the Argent Crusade, enabling players to score new items, titles, banners, tabards, pets, mounts, all new achievements and more.  Being a bit of a lore nut, I find the tournament a creative way to subtly hint to players that the Crusade is extending its reach into Icecrown , while becoming a powerful faction to the rest of the citizens of Azeroth.  This will make their move against Arthas more progressive - thus, realistic - than just having them pop-up next to the Citadel en masse. I have never been one to go nuts on the PTR.  For starters, I hate spoilers.  Past that, I tend to dislike having abilities or features, getting used to them, and then seeing them ripped away from my grasp when the patch goes live.  Perhaps SolidSamm will spend more time than normal, but I highly doubt it. Anyone lucky enough to get on the PTR already?  Like what you see?  Or, are you stuck waiting like most of us?  What are your thoughts on the new tournament?

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