Sunday, September 20, 2009

Brewfest 2009, or "WHY Did I Choose to Miss the Second Half by Moving?"

Lesson for all you little WoWers -- check the in-game schedule before setting the date for a three day drive with all your stuff to a new location. Otherwise, you'll end up moving in the middle of Brewfest.

Changes since Brewfest 2007 & 2008
  • ALL NEW PINK ELEKK PET!
  • Direbrew is 80 with 80 drops.
  • No longer need a mount drop for the meta achievement.
  • No longer need to drink 12 months of brews for the meta achievement.

Major Dailies/Quests That Give Tokens

First day gave me 125 tokens from doing all the available quests.

Dark Iron Invasion
There's a mini-quest you do where you pick up mugs off the table, drink, and chuck them (auto-targeting included). Dark Irons pop up every half hour or so and you find a table by one of the brew tents, drink, and chuck. A barker will refill you, so basically if you put the mugs on a hotkey you get to just spam it for 5 minutes.

The goal is to protect 1 out of your 3 kegs of Brewfest beer. If you make the enemy retreat (denoted by a /yell to retreat and number of losses), a gear will appear in the center of the grounds with a daily quest. (You don't have to help to get this.) Pick it up, turn it in.

Direbrew's Dire Brew (One-Time Only)
Kill him, loot quest item for 40 tokens. He's 80 with 80 loot and still has 2 rare drop mounts.

Do this in the first three days if you don't have a group of friends or guildies to do it with. I'm not even joking, it's the easiest time of the holiday to PuG it.

Check to make sure everyone in your party has a summon. This includes you. Just walking in does not equal a summon.

Prereq for Direbrew summon: Do the Welcome quest that gives you a reward of your choice of drink (available under the main banner leading onto the grounds). After that, head to Kharanos (A) or the road south of Org (H) to pick up Save Brewfest!

The rest is inside with Direbrew. Turn in, talk to Direbrew, he attacks.

Be prepared to meet him, because even if you don't kill him your summon is gone for the day.

Bark for _____
They give you a ram and you run around your city to the four flags. Read this quest before doing it if you aren't familiar with it. Alliance flags here-ish, horde flags here.

You no longer have to get back to the guy before your ram runs out, you can dismount once you're finished and ride back on your own.

Tips for Riding: Keep the ram's speed on yellow and put it down to bluegreen when you get your fatigue to 70. If you hit 100 fatigue, it will make you go super-slow.

There and Back Again
Keg deliveries have a limit of 3 and 10 token reward for the first. AFTER that, you can speak to the guy once a day, click through his dialogue, and turn in kegs for 2 tokens each until your ram timer runs out.

Tips for Riding: Whip your mount into a lather and keep it in the red riding speed. Brush by buckets of apples (more convenient placement this year, thank God) to remove fatigue, since hitting 100 reduces your mount to a crawl.

Pink Elephants (One-Time Only)
Go to the major cities. Bring drinks or your stein to use at the kegs. Get drunk. Use quest item on pink elephants:

Achievements

Coming soon...

6 comments:

  1. Something changed between last year and this in Down with the Dark Iron. The chance to hit the dwarves seems to have been reduced to a ridiculously low number or the way to hit was changed or something. I tried it twice and didn't hit more than a handful of dwarves total. Both times there were 5-10 defenders and the dwarves busted our kegs without taking more than a dozen injuries.

    Wowhead has some suggestions on how to beat it. One contributer suggested standing with your back to the keg your defending so that the dwarves' knockback doesn't send you flying. Also, the chance to hit appears to be better if your actually standing in the dwarve's hit box. So seems like a good suggestion. Another suggested making a macro that ensures you're actually targetting a dwarf before you throw your mug:

    #showtooltip
    /target Dark Iron Guzzler
    /use Complimentary Brewfest Sampler

    I'm going to try those tonight.

    ReplyDelete
  2. > Keg deliveries have a limit of 3 and 10 token
    > reward for the first. AFTER that, you can
    > speak to the guy once a day, click through
    > his dialogue, and turn in kegs for 2 tokens
    > each until your ram timer runs out.

    Actually, you can do it more than once. I don't know the time after which it becomes available again but it should be something like 10 hours.

    Done that during the weekend.

    > *** Pink Elekks On Parade
    > It has returned with Brewfest in 2009 for
    > US realms only; EU players currently have
    > no access to it.

    Sucks to be us...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Direbrew can be easy . . . can be . . . as easy as everyone says in Trade. But only if you have a good group that does it right. I have to admit, having never done it, I was the guy that did it wrong the first time and we wiped. Bunch of jerks were pretty rude about it . . . but they were also farming the mounts, having a hard time getting participants and (1) I hadn't used my daily yet and (2) I was the tank. So they were somewhat more tolerant.

    The issue I had is that Direbrew isn't hostile until the point that he rushes at the party member that pisses him off. I hadn't targetted him yet (being still confused on how I was going to target something that wasn't hostile). Then, of course, if the guy who pulls aggro runs away from the tank, it makes it even more difficult to target Direbrew. Eventually, his girls show up and slam kegs on your face that make you lose control of your character (like a blind or fear effect), during which time Direbrew ignores you. Which is bad if you're the tank.

    So the party leader instructed everyone to just target Direbrew and ignore the adds. Second and third times I started with him targetted, taunted right away and established at least somewhat decent initial threat. I'd throw an occasional AoE to maybe pick up adds . . . but really they're pretty insignificant so it's probably better for even the tank to just ignore them. At least it would have been for me. At level 78, competing with threat generated by level 80s doing 2.5-4K dmg, it's tough to hold on to Direbrew even spamming the highest threat abilities. Especially since it's a small area, meaning everyone (even ranged dps) is within the range that they just have to exceed tank threat by 110% to pull aggro.

    Anyway, with everyone focusing heavy dps on Direbrew, he dies relatively quickly. We even managed to kill him before his girls showed up to keg us.

    ReplyDelete
  4. One daughter throws the barrels, she's best aggroed by someone who is NOT the tank. Otherwise the tank will loose aggro on all mobs. She does nothing but throw the barrel so a caster can easily "tank" her.

    And if you catch the drink, you have to drink it or it will stun you. Whenever you catch the item, drink it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. If you're doing the pink elekk quest, for some reason there are also Teldrassil elekks in Shattrath. This saved me some transportation since my character in her 60s could do Elwynn and Ironforge, then hearth to Shatt, do the elekks there and take the portal to Exodar.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Tried the wowhead suggestions for Down with the Dark Iron.

    Putting your back to the Keg your defending: great idea. I was hit with the knockback effect several times without slowing down my chug & chuck at all.

    targetting macro: Targetted a dwarf just fine. Didn't seem to help hit him, though. Two of us defending only managed to bonk 14 dwarves before they broke our kegs.

    I'm always leary when people shout "bugged!" just 'cause they can't do something. I mean, I am a computer programmer. I realize bugs happen. I am also 100% certain that people perceive more bugs than actually exist. With this event . . . if it's not bugged then Blizz must want us to organize 40 man raids to protect those kegs. We'll see if anything changes after maintenance.

    ReplyDelete

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