With my “Tourist Guide” series I attempted to present a comprehensive guide to the Argent Tournament and their goings-on in Northrend, so let’s look at the new content coming in Patch 3.2.
This post is Part IV in the series, a guide to all the new content introduced in Patch 3.2. This includes a new quest hub, new rewards, and changes to existing quests.
- Part I: explains the scenario and the location, the side quests and the Aspirant stage of mounted combat.
- Part II: covers the Valiant stage of the mounted combat event and questing.
- Part III: covers the Champion stage of the questing, and where to go from there.
- Part IV – The Argent Tournament in Patch 3.2: covers changes to the Argent Tournament, and delicious new content and rewards.
Caveat: Due to the PTR login problem, this guide has been developed with the aid of notes and screenshots I took earlier in the PTR testing process. I’ll update the guide with the most recent information as soon as I’m able to access the PTR again, but for now I felt an approximate guide was better than no guide at all. (Note that I’ve only included information where I’m reasonably confident it’s correct.)
New Rewards
There are a range of new rewards available. (You can see existing rewards in Part III of my Argent Tournament guides here.)
- Mini pets:
- Silver Covenant/Sunreavers: Shimmering Wyrmling – this is BoE, but requires Exalted with the Silver Covenant or Sunreavers to use. 40 Champion’s Seals.
- Argent Crusade: Argent Pony Bridle – BoP, 150 Champion’s Seals. This upgrades the Argent Squire or Argent Gruntling you receive in the first stages of becoming a Champion; once you’ve done this upgrade, your Argent minion can give you access to your mail, your bank or a vendor, once every eight hours.
- Tabards, all 50 Seals each:
- Silver Covenant (Alliance only) – requires Exalted
- Sunreavers (Horde only) – requires Exalted
- Argent Crusader’s Tabard (looks like a fancier version of the Argent Crusade tabard, see right) – requires Exalted
- Ground Mounts, 100 Seals each:
- Silver Covenant: Quel’dorei Steed – requires Exalted
- Sunreavers: Sunreaver Hawkstrider – requires Exalted
- Argent Crusade: Argent Warhorse, Argent Charger (the latter is paladin-only). These both require the Crusader title.
- Flying Mounts, 150 Seals each:
- Silver Covenant: Silver Covenant Hippogryph – requires Exalted
- Sunreavers: Sunreaver Dragonhawk – requires Exalted
- 1 new banner for the Argent Crusade, costing 15 Seals.
- Bind-on-account chests with a 10% XP bonus (which stacks with the heirloom shoulders), costing 60 Seals each. (Other heirloom items will now be purchasable with Seals as well as Emblems of Heroism.)
New Achievements
There are, of course, a number of achievements relating to deeds in the new 5-man dungeon (Trial of the Champion) and the new raid zone (Trial of the Crusader). In addition, there are two new achievements relating to the Argent Tournament world event:
- A Silver Confidant, for the Alliance, requires you to have reached Exalted with the Silver Covenant and Champion status with at least one city.
- The Sunreavers is the Horde equivalent, requiring you to reach Exalted with the Sunreavers and Champion status with at least one city.
New Quests
The new quests generally focus around two plot points in 3.2: either keeping the tournament competitors happy (and, usually, well-fed), or helping save the Tuskarr of Hrothgar’s Landing (an island to the north of the grounds) from the aggressive invading Kvaldir.
The following new dailies can be found in your faction’s tent. They both require Exalted with Sunreavers/Silver Covenant, and reward one Champion’s Seal each.
- One NPC from your faction will give a random daily selected from the following: killing kvaldir, performing last rites for the tuskarr, retrieving stolen supplies from the kvaldir, simply killing the kvaldir, or rescuing Crusaders from the Scourge.
- The other NPC from your faction will give a random daily selected from quests to collect shark meat, collect jormungar eggs, or finding snobolds for a magnataur.
The following new dailies require you to be a Crusader, and are given by new NPCs in the Argent Crusade tent near Crusader Rhydalla. They give one Champion’s Seal each unless otherwise stated.
- High Crusader Adelard gives one daily from a random selection to kill various Kvaldir NPCs: Ornolf, Kharos, Yngvar, or Drottin.
- Crusader Silverdawn gives one daily from a random selection including gathering soul crystals north of Corp’rethar, killing kvaldir and attacking a North Sea Kraken (which looks like Tethyr or Lurker Below), and possibly other quests.
Changed Quests
There are a number of changes to existing quests. As a general rule, the dailies will now send you further afield, and you will no longer be able to “double up” and complete the Valiant and Champion versions of a daily by killing a single set of mobs.
- A Valiant’s Field Training used to require you to kill 10 Scourge in Icecrown. Now it specifies 10 Converted Heroes, north of Corp’rethar.
- Taking Battle to the Enemy used to require you to kill 15 Scourge in Icecrown. Now it specifies 15 Cult of the Damned members anywhere in Icecrown.
- Battle Before the Citadel used to require you to kill 1 Boneguard Commander, 3 Boneguard Lieutenants, and 10 Boneguard Scouts (which overlapped nicely with the Valiant version of the quest, At the Enemy’s Gates). This now requires you to kill 3 Boneguard Commanders; the Valiant quest remains unchanged.
Remember – more details to follow, as soon as the PTR is accessible again!
Gah… the changes to the current dailies suck.
Well, they would suck if I actually did them more often :P
The requirement of killing 3 Boneguard Commanders seems like the one that will really hurt. The changes to the “Kill Scourge” quests aren’t exactly pleasant, but they just mean you’ll need to spend another ten or so minutes farming. I can see the large packs of Converted Heroes being a pain for someone with little AoE though. Managing to pull out and solo one Boneguard Commander is hard, pulling three out is likely to be a chore. On the other hand, since most people seem to group up for the quest it’s unlikely to make much of a difference. I wonder a lot about how the newer dailies will go.
I suspect they changed it because there’s often spare Commanders sitting around cluttering things up, while Lieutenants are hotly contested; this will even it out a bit more.
As for the Converted Heroes, if you’re careful and pull from range, you can pull them one at a time – you wait until they’re in a line formation, then pull one off the end. I’ve done it before, but it’s easy to mess it up.
Pulling a whole wad of converted heroes at once is actually a lot of fun for a paladin (even a Holy) — it can get a little dicey, but it’s a great place to use Holy Wrath. It will be a little less easy now that Exorcism will have a cast time, though.
When Battle Before the Citadel changes to require 3 Commanders, it should be changed to a Group (3) quest.
On a personal level, I haven’t done the BBtC quest in weeks without having done it with the group that did TfA with me, so this change doesn’t hurt too badly. It might take a little longer, since the Commanders survive individual hits better, but it might even be shorter since you don’t have to compete quite as much for spawns. The change to Taking Battle isn’t that bad either – the Cult of the Damned have this giant set up northwest of the tournament now (you get pointed in that direction with the return of an old enemy, it was only a flesh wound after all) and they seem to have much less health than the average Icecrown mob.
This has nothing to do with this post, but I was wondering what holy paladins were planning on gemming now.
Pre-patch I know most were going straight intel, but now that doesn’t seem like a great idea.
:P
On my DK, I tried Death-gripping one Fallen Hero and quickly got overwhelmed when the whole bunch came down on top of me. I died last night from what I think was a DoT from one of the cultists several seconds after I killed him.
My main dislike is that they are that much more time consuming: I could stack them before with Blood of the Chosen or Slaves to Saronite (for the AC rep). Now between those, the Hodir dailies, and Troll Patrol, and going to HF to pickup the sword, I spent two hours last night just doing dailies. And I am looking at that same grind for at least a couple more weeks.
If I ever get around to doing this content, I’ll definitely come back here for the information! I would like to have a little kid running around on a pony to do errands for me.
The converted heroes can be single-pulled or 3-pulled (with a hunter’s multishot) from their groups and probably pulled in other combinations. Just have to be at range, they are NOT linked in the normal way, but will pull all their friends if you stand to close to one.
I frequently break up those groups of 7 into 3+4 using multi-shot as the first pull (and keeping pet on passive at start so he doesn’t body-pull the other 4).