Project Lore

If you have been killing Coren Direbrew as often as possible this year, you probably noticed the increased drop rate for the Direbrew's Remote as well as both of the Brewfest mounts. They now all seem to be a flat 5% drop rate. If you are lucky enough to get a remote, there are some novel uses for it besides teleporting your group to the Grim Guzzler during Brewfest. Something you should be doing already is visiting Plugger Spazzring when you have the chance. He resides upstairs in the Grim Guzzler and sells a few items which you can resell or have fun with: Recipe: Transmute: Fire to Earth (maybe a 10g profit), Dark Iron Ale Mugs (useful for getting Jubjub during the Darkmoon Faire and very pricey on the AH during that time), and the Sulfuron Slammer, which gets you drunk quickly and lights your feet on fire. You can also kill him; he drops the Schematic: Goblin Jumper Cables XL, which teach Goblin Engineers to make Goblin Jumper Cables XL. These can only be made by Goblin Engineers, but used by Gnomish Engineers as well. They are all but obsolete with the Gnomish Army Knife, which shares a cooldown and supposedly has a higher rate of success, rumored at 75% over the 50% rate of the cables. Regardless, the schematic continues to fetch a fair price, and hey, if you are going to hearth anyway, why not take a stroll to Blackrock Depths to try grabbing some? Another useful way to use the item is as a teleport to Searing Gorge. With the new "ghetto hearth" in patch 3.2, if you leave your group in an instance, you are teleported to the nearest graveyard. With this in mind, if you invite someone to your group, use your remote to teleport to BRD, then drop group, you will end up at Thorium Point. This is useful for Horde players who would otherwise have to fly from Undercity to get there conventionally. While not much of interest is around Searing Gorge, its useful if you decide to do Molten Core or Blackwing Lair, and it could be a useful ability come Cataclysm time. If you are the type of person who likes to get kicked out of raids, you can use it during the Razorscale encounter. It may confuse some people who are expecting some adds, and you can mock people who run up to it and accidentally teleport to BRD. Other uses are purely for visual effect or strange curiosity. Using it in nonsensical places always gets me a laugh. For example, how exactly would the mole machine get you from Outlands or Dalaran to BRD, as it not connected by earth? How does one burrow through a bridge? And, of course, what better way to impress n00bs or spitefully leave a group than using your mole machine? Be warned that you cannot use the remote while in an instance you are saved to, like heroics or raids, so you will look silly if you try to use it and fail.

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One of the first things I did after patch 3.1 came out was check all of the new achievements. Which of the new titles would I go after? What new and interesting boss mechanics lay ahead in Ulduar? Where might I be spending most of my time doing dailies? All of these questions were answered by looking through the long list of achievements that Blizzard added in the latest major content patch. While doing that, one of the things I noticed was that above the Argent Tournament tab of the World Events achievements was a tab with no achievements available inside - the Darkmoon Faire. I asked a few guildies if anyone else had noticed or cared about this, but alas, I am was alone in my everlasting quest to increase that meaningless number by a few points. Today on the Blizzard forums, there an official response from Bornakk, kind of. Well, all he said was, "No comment at this time. >_>" My personal hopes are that a revamp of the Darkmoon Faire is coming that will add in all sorts of achievements. One that I came up with was something like this:

Also, adding in new features to the Faire would probably make getting the Insane in the Membrane feat of strength just a tiny bit easier. Any of you have ideas for expanding Darkmoon or adding achievements?

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