Hidden Appearances

I have finally finished! I have collected all three of my mage hidden artifact appearances. This was a little goal that I set for myself, and honestly I thought I'd be done with it a long time before this. That wasn't the case. RNG can be a total block in some cases, and there is nothing you can really do to prevent that except to just keep trying and hoping that someday it will pop up or drop. Since my Ebonchill post is super popular, I thought I would post about getting my hidden appearances as well. Also, some of these require your artifact knowledge to be a certain level, but that isn't really an issue anymore (unless it's your main) due to the Artifact Research Compendium and the ability to send them to alts. I still decided to include the required AK as well just in case.

The Woolmancer's Charge (Requires AK 6)

I am a frost mage, and if I'm not playing frost, I'll be playing fire. Arcane is a spec that I can't seem to ever full enjoy so I'm rarely play it. Of course this would be the first hidden appearance I acquire. To start the "event" for a chance to get The Woolmancer's Charge, you need to travel to each Broken Isle zone and polymorph specific mobs. I won't go into detail here on the specific mobs as they can be found on the Woolmancer's page.

Next is the waiting part. You must wait until a volatile sheep spawns in your class hall. I believe a toast window will pop up to get your attention though one didn't for me. If this doesn't happen, don't worry. The sheep will be following you so it's not hard to miss. Right click on this sheep a few times and BAM, it will explode!

Now fly yourself over to Stormheim and look for an Extremely Volatile Sheep. Once you find this little guy, you're going to want to click on it like you did in your order hall to make it explode. I found making a macro to locate this one worked best. You can even use this to find the specific mobs to polymorph like I explained earlier:

/tar Extremely Volatile Stormheim Sheep

/script SetRaidTarget("target",8);

After this, head to the Tower of Azora in Elwynn Forest and complete the little event for your appearance. I personally find that this is by far one of the silliest and funniest hidden appearances. Plus the staff will sometimes let out this ridiculous scream on polymorph. It's too good!

Everburning Crystal (Requires AK 4)

This is the appearance I wanted the most, and I started working toward it as soon as I could unlock the Teleportation Nexus order hall perk. This perk puts portals in your class hall that leads to each zone on the Broken Isle. When the event for this hidden appearance is triggered, you will see the emote "You hear a strange crackling sound from the portals downstairs." pop up in your chat box when you are in your order hall. From there, take any one of the portals to be ported to this sub-zone of Frostfire Ridge.

 

Once there you will see two elementals. The larger of the two, Asher, will be the one who will give you the Everburning Crystal to unlock this appearance. This is another little macro that may help you check for the daily roll of the arcane and frost artifact. While it didn't work well for me (my frost one was always saying yes) others have had success with using it:

/run f="\124cffffff00\124Hquest:%s:0\124h[%s]\124h\124r: \124cff%s\124r";for k,v in pairs({[44384]="Daily Portal Event Roll",[43828]="Sheep Summon Daily Roll"})do print(format(f,k,v,IsQuestFlaggedCompleted(k)and"00ff00Yes"or"ff0000No"))end

The Stars Design (Requires AK 5)

I really wish I had been prepared when this actually dropped. The truth was that I wasn't even farming for it at the time. I was out in the world questing. This hidden appearance has a chance to drop off of basically any mob in Suramar. I know a lot of people love to farm around Moonguard Stronghold since there are lots of mob packs that respawn pretty fast. I was actually in the dangerous part of the city (yea, that part!), but I have no idea which exact mob it dropped from. While I wasn't actively seeking it at the time, I'm glad to finally have it. The Stars Design is a really gorgeous skin and definitely reminds me of a lot of weapons from Ulduar.

Of course each of these hidden appearances also have separate colors to obtain by doing dungeons, PvP, and world quests. I may just have to save those to talk about another time, lol. If you read through all of that, props to you. I know it was a very lengthy post. I don't care though because if it helps one mage out there, my job has been done!

Memories of Ebonchill

As a frost mage, I tend to have a bit more of an advantage when it comes to gathering reputation. Ebonchill has this lovely ability called The Council's Wisdom which gives us frost mages a buff that increases reputation gain by 5%. This is wonderful, especially as you're working towards that Nightfallen reputation to move forward in that quest line, but keep in mind that it doesn't persist through death. I also wanted to add that this also stacks with the Darkmoon Faire carousel buff. This buff can be acquired in Dalaran by talking to one of the Council of Tirisfal memories. These "memories" are actually NPCs that are located in certain parts of the city. While these aren't hard to find, I thought it would be nice to have a little visual guide for those who may have a little trouble or just want to see what the NPCs look like. Though to be fair, I spent way too long looking for Eldragosa who is a large dragon laying on a building. She's not hard to miss yet I ran past her a few times that day!

Blinks was the first memory I was shown via the quest, so I didn't have any issues remembering where this little guy is sitting. You'll have to go in a building for this one. He's on the balcony of the Photonic Playground at about 42,48.

One wouldn't think that a large dragon taking a nap on a building would be something hard to spot, but believe it or not, this one gave me the most trouble. I never thought of looking up while looking for this memory so imagine my surprise when I found it. Eldragosa can be found napping on the herbalist building at about 44,33.

Eve can be found reading a book near the Antonidas Memorial at around 47,17.

Little "Fidge" is pretty easy to spot since she's at a location you either hearth to or pass by going in and out of the city. She is at the entrance to Krasus' Landing at 61,44.

Fiora can be found sipping her glass of wine upstairs in the Violet Citadel. She is located by a table around 24,50.

Seanus (I wonder who he is a reference too... hmmm? lol) is sitting on the stoop of Glorious Goods. He can be found at 51,67.

Finally we have Vyrin who is looking over a map in the Legermain Lounge. He is standing toward the back of the room at about 48,41.

It's also worth mentioning that the quest Memories of Ebonchill tells us we can seek out a different member each day, sadly there is no achievement tied to this. Hopefully this little visual guide helped if you were having trouble finding them. Now you have no excuse to not buff yourself before going fight through those world quests!

Legion: First Thoughts

So Legion has been out a week, and I've had enough time to experience each zone, really think about them, and form my own thoughts about it all. Though it's still too early in the expansion to say "Oh my gosh, this is the best thing ever!", I will say that I'm having much more fun than I had at level in WoD. I have so much to do now that I'm max level that it's overwhelming, but also a breath of fresh air. I'm going to try not to post any zone spoilers, but if you didn't fully quest in an area, you may wan to skip out on reading the section below.

Stormheim: This was the first zone I decided to go to for only one reason - the Gilneas/Forsaken conflict. I was not disappointed, and I'm glad Sylvanas finally got the smirk knocked off of her face because she was doing some shady stuff there. I loved every quest, and the entire story of the zone. The landscape is beautiful and reminded me of the first time I ever stepped foot into Northrend (Howling Fjord). Since completing the zone and going back to explore, I've been finding hidden quests here and there, including one along the coast from a fine murloc gentleman.

Azuna: This was my next choice to quest in because I think that this is one of the prettiest areas in the Broken Isles even though most of it is crumbling into the water. I didn't really care for the intro quest where I was flown to the demon hunter camp, but I'm glad the zone got much better. The blue dragonflight quests and following the story of Prince Farondis made me fall in love all over again. As with Stormheim, the side quests were all really fun and even sometimes funny. I plan on spending a lot of time in this zone, especially after hearing that the mysterious Long Forgotten Hippogryph is around here. I love a good mystery!

Highmountain: This was one of my favorite comics, so I had "high" hopes, heh. I was disappointed. I didn't enjoy the repeat quests for each tribe to kill harpys, and I thought not only the main city, but the entire zone, was a bit of a pain to navigate. The only thing that I enjoyed were the side quests, and thankfully there are many good ones. I won't spoil anything, but there is also a snail race, and I think that is pretty cool. Aside from that, this is a zone that I am dreading bringing my alts through and will probably always save it for last.

Val'sharah: I saved what I thought was going to be the best for last, but it wasn't my favorite zone, and definitely not the worst. I enjoyed it. The zone was beautiful and the quests involving Xavius and the corruption was sweeping through the land was really interesting to experience. However, this area was definitely soured a bit by the ridiculous love story that is Tyrande and Malfurion. I get it, you love him. I don't need you to tell me every 5 minutes. *eyeroll* The final scene with Ysera was beautiful and brought a tear to my eye once again. Only Blizzard can invoke such emotions in me about a video game.

So after I completed the main quests for each zone and most of the side quests, I found myself about 2 bars into 109. What? This is the first time I was genuinely confused that I might have missed something, so I began sweeping back over each area. Sadly I guess because I didn't complete most zone objectives, this put me at a disadvantage. So going back and searching, picking up a lost quest here and there, I hit 110 on a tailoring quest. Pretty sad so I didn't even bother taking a screenshot. This was the first time I ever ran into this problem, and not one I was really happy about.

So now I've been venturing into Suramar a little more each day. I can't really comment on it other than it's beautiful and I really love First Arcanist Thalyssra. I make sure to check on my budding settlement daily and keep my elves well fed. No one will be mana hungry while I'm around! World quests are also great, and I've gotten a few upgrades. My final thing I need to get done are my dungeon quests for the other Pillars of Creation. As someone who goes into full panic mode to run stuff with random players, I will be trying to schedule a run with my wonderful friends so I don't have to worry. Anyway, I hope you are all having fun in Legion so far. Feel free to leave a comment below telling me what you liked or didn't like about your leveling experience!