Darkmoon Faire ConclusionsFollow

I thoroughly enjoyed how accessible it was, to all level players.
And it had a VERY authentic carnival feel to it.
I loved the humor in the quests and games, as well as in some of the "off hand" NPC dialogs.

One thing I can easily see: the AH being flooded with Oily Blackmouth for the next few days!

I also appreciate that it is once a month. I think I would overdose if I had to do the dailies literally every day. Flying over the whole carnival grounds held up by nothing more than gossamer wings of fairy dust, with death or serious injury nothing more than an accidental press of [1] away... It's fun, but I wouldn't be able to do it absolutely every day. No matter HOW badly I really want those pets and mounts.

Edited, Dec 11th 2011 8:17am by capcanuk

So far, I've only have a few minor gripes with the Faire.

The games were fun and all, but there were a few things that just didn't feel "right" about them:

The Gun Game: When there's a bunch of people there, they like to stand up on the counter to get in front of each other and when you have a tauren or three up on the counter, it starts getting nearly impossible to see the targets and more importantly, the green arrows. What they SHOULD have done, is put the targets in the area like the Turtle/Gnoll/Tonk games, teleport people out who step in it, and put the targets further back in this area, and remove the overhead canopy so that you can tilt the camera down a little and zoom out.

Tonk: They need to either let us aim the tonk's cannon (make it shoot directly in front of it) OR make it so that the tonk stops shooting at the ground randomly. It doesn't even make sense why the tonk shoots at the ground when there's nothing there. I can be sitting there, a target 5 feet in front of me, hit "1" and the tonk shoots 90 degrees to the side.... at the ground.

Turtle Game: Don't know why, but sometimes your character refuses to throw the ring where the targeting circle is. I'll have the targeting circle one place, hit "1" and the ring goes waaaay off to the side. Why bother giving us a targeting circle if our character isn't going to throw there?

Cannon: They need to get the bugs out of the hit detection. There was a time I landed in the exact same spot as someone else. They got the achievement, I didn't. I only had a measly 3 points. Other times I landed noticeably "off" and I got the full 5 points.

Gnolls: Mostly happy with the game, though they could remove that Stun they put on you when they teleport you. I finish the quest, walk clear out of the gaming area, turn the quest in, and WHOOSH. "STAY OUT OF GAMING AREA LOL LOL" and I'm standing there going "come on lemme go already". Also, 5 or so seconds added onto the timer would be nice, it is frustrating when I consistently come up 1-2 short of being able to turn the quest in, and have to use another token, get stunned AGAIN, blah blah.

Otherwise:

Slightly higher drop rate on the artifacts would be nice too. I did like 6 northrend dungeons, 2x stratholme, 1x brd, 2x H-Seth, 1x N-SFK (except last boss, stupid fail group), 1x WC.

Artifacts gained: 1.

Oh, and another minor gripe:

They could have at least offered half XP/Money from a normal level-appropriate daily gives.

But these dailies give zero money or XP.

Otherwise, I might have been tempted to do them on my alts for extra snippets of XP between times of waiting for Rested to build up, or days I didn't feel like non-daily questing at all.

They are also a "waste" in terms of Money/Guild XP, since they give none, but yet you kinda have to do them if you want Pets or Mounts.

Even the Argent Tournament still gives some money (12-15g per quest!) and 20k personal XP (5k guild XP) per quest.

Again, DMF gives zip on both. Except for, of course, the monthly profession quests. Even the "gather 250 trophies!" quest gives zip.

It was all right. Definitely better than the previous incarnation. I do have a couple of issues though, my main one being the limits on ticket wins. It bites that you can only win, what, 150 tickets per month at most? I'd prefer to have the mini-games be repeatable as much as you'd like, but make the first time give like 5x the reward, and guild/regular exp and maybe a money reward (or more thematically, a random bonus item, like additional tickets or tokens or a prize). Would be fine to raise the prize prices to compensate, but right now it felt like a waste of 5 dailies without almost any reward. Blah.

Because in real carnivals, you expect to walk away making a profit, right?

Last I checked, WoW isn't a real carnival and WoW gives you XP and money for doing something mundane as walking up to a candy bucket and dipping your hand in it or talking to a ghost who gives you a coin.

I ran over to the DMF on one of my alts and got his dungeoneering guide. In his low level dungeons the artifacts drop about every other dungeon and I havn't had to roll against anyone for them yet. I have about 12 of them so far and plan on mailing them to my main to help his pet collection. Could be a really lucky RNG streak though.


If it keeps up it might be worth it to try next month unless Blizzard makes the artifacts BoP.

Yeah, but the Darkmoon Faire has always been based off of a shady, kinda creepy carnival. They didn't make it to be a daily hub, they made it to be something you could sink time and gold into so you can get some cool rewards.

WoW gives you gold and experience for doing the holiday things because it's a nice bonus around the holidays. It's something besides the usual questing, dungeons, etc. that you can do to advance a character. It's meant as a fun little thing to do for certain times of year.

The Darkmoon Faire is a grind, not a holiday. They've tried to make it as fun a grind as possible, and it's a grind that can only happen once a month, but it's still a grind.

You're making the claim that the Darkmoon Faire and a holiday are the same thing - they're not, and they won't reward you the same. So don't go in there expecting to be treated like it's just another holiday.

Which dungeons are you running? They don't drop in all of them. Wowhead has an excellent guide here. As with all RNG-based things in the game, you may just have bad luck.

I got the Ornate Weapon from Stockades first try, the Monstrous Egg on my 3rd Nerub'enkan kill in Stratholme, Mysterious Grimoire from 3rd Gandling kill in Scholo, Imbued Crystal I killed Ras Frostwhisper 5 times before going into the Nexus and getting it off my 5th kill of Ormorok, and I never saw a Treatise on Strategy drop, despite doing heroics all week on 2 toons. I farmed all the low level stuff with an 85 btw. So yeah, random drops are random.

And I despise pvp, so I purchased all 3 battleground artifacts from the AH.


Edited, Dec 12th 2011 7:18pm by Tellaria

Random side note:

I just picked up the archeology quest from the fortune teller you summon with the lower-level darkmoon decks. Obviously I can't do it now, but yeah, threw me for a loop...

Isn't there a NPC in SW/OG who gives you a quest with directions as to where the portal is?

I think that's only if you hadn't already done the intro quest before. Only a couple of my characters were able to get a quest from them but they teleported you to the portal regardless.


The person was just to the right of the steps into the AH in the trade district.

Edited, Dec 13th 2011 8:12am by MrTalos

Nah, it was earlier. I checked the in-game calendar because I thought I'd already missed it. Noticed there was still a couple of days left, so I started looking for one of the NPC guys that give the intro quest.

There was a noteworthy lack of such NPC guys, though.

It's a kind of magic.

I had this with some of my characters. The NPCs were there but no !

It didn't seem to relate to level or anything else. Certainly one of the characters who got no quest had no chance of ever having done the DMF before.

The teleport was available to all though.

And Maz, they were in bright green with pointy hats and labelled "Mystic Darkmoon Mage" or somesuch. They were in IF as well as two in SW. You must have had your shades on or something

More likely someone parked their dragon on one "for the lolz"

It was nice that the prices scaled with level so my lowbies got ported and bought tokens for a lot less than the 85s.

I'm afraid I got greedy with my last character there and thought "The next skillups are cheap - I'll pop back to SW and do them then use the +5 on the expensive bit" And of course the clock struck midnight and the fair closed just as I landed in Goldshire

I managed a few Sea Ponies until I came to my senses and realised that I don't collect pets.

The cannon nearly killed my 85 rogue from two launches without wings. I decided that the laptop was lagging and that had better wait till I got home.

The games were a bit bleh but ok I suppose if you like that sort of thing. I did like the atmosphere and the classic Blizz humour. All in all I'd say well done.

And my Engineer will be first in the queue when it returns

Some people reported that the Quest wasn't showing up because they did the quest (of the same name) in previous years.

This is a known bug, so him missing the "!" is quite possible.

The NPCs are indeed wearing bright green with a green-and-purple Darkmoon flag beside them.

In Stormwind: Near the Trade District AH, right beside the steps.

Orgrimmar: Along the wooden plank walkway between the two zeppelin towers, near a large Horde flag, not too far away from the Flight Master.

These NPCs will teleport you to Elwynn Forest and Mulgore respectively, right next to the DMF portal. The one in Orgrimmar is quite nice, if you are still doing Fishing/Cooking dailies and don't like Orgrimmar's quests and want to try the ones in TB instead.

Big, strong man like you -- shouldn't be afraid of a little boom-boom.

It was on different characters. I am an altoholic.

It got to the fourth character I think when I suddenly thought "why am I doing this? The only pets I have are the ones Blizz keeps giving me"

It does give me a certain feeling of pride though to realise that the Sprite Darter that I got from a fun quest has now turned into a farming nightmare of rarity