So another festival is ‘roon the corner and this time I want tae make sure I’m in on the action frae the beginning!

I decided to drop by the PTR due to a few posts on the fact that some pets (vanity and otherwise) as well as some other mobs, npcs etc. had changed size. My favourite pet is my faerie dragon and I wanted to see if the tiny thing grew any. I wasn’t disappointed!

My little dragon is huge - shame it won’t stay that way!Anyway, fire festival! Anyone who has read anything on this blog might have noticed that I like my festivals. I enjoy taking part in these out-of-the-routine events and getting the small, if inventory space wasting, items. I decided, thus, to do a quick rundown on all of the quests I could do by myself on the PTR.In Shattrath there was a quest called ‘Playing With Fire‘ given from the flame juggler on one of the bridges out of Shattrath. This simply sends you to a capital city to talk to a ‘Fire Eater’ at one of the large midsummer bonfires in a capital city.

When you can pick up a quest similar to the previous years fire quests which involves you going to visit a flame ‘Warden’ for the Alliance or flame ‘Keeper’ for the Horde. This involves going to a flame ouside any Alliance or Horde settlement and talking to someone, similar to the way the Lunar Festival elders are done, to get a fire blossom (more on those later). These is also a quest called ‘Honoring the Flame’ which means actually ‘talking’ the the Warden/Keeper through their dialogue to get some rewards. This quest, unlike the others, involves you going back to hand it in at one of the bonfires in a capital city. Up until now the quests are a lot like the previous years - if done in a slightly different way. Now onto the new stuff.

Flame Tossing
In the capital cities are rows of pedestals with fire in them:

You are given a torch and told to throw them at the pedestals when indicated. The ‘indicator’ is a hunters mark which appears for a few seconds over the top of the pedestal and you have to manage 8 within around 30 seconds for the first quest. I’d reccomend keybinding the torch as it is very hard to click and then then target in enough time to toss the flame before the indicator dissappears.

When you manage to get one on time a long trail of fire shoots down into the flame on top of the pedestal. If you are late in doing one and the mark has moved by the time your torch reaches the pedestal then you should just ignore the next mark - it takes too long to target and I certainly found I could never ‘catch up’. Just wait for the next mark and start trying again. Once I got the hang of it I didn’t find this quest too hard.
Oh and do note that you can’t move too far away from the festival bonfire (which the quest npc is standing by) or the torches you’re carrying will ‘go out’ - or in other words you’ll get an error message telling you that you must be within range of the bonfire.Once you’ve done this (and, I believe, the fire catching starter quest) you can do it again. This next quest is a daily and requires you to do more than 10 tosses though you get a little more time per toss as the marker hangs around a tiny bit longer.

Flame Catching
This quest really irritated me at first. I started out really happy at the idea of brand new types of quests for a festival but this had me cursing until I got the hang of it. You are given a small ‘bundle’ of sticks which, when you light at the festival bonfire, you can toss into the air. These I also hotkeyed though there isn’t as much of a point except convenience as, when you light them, you want to be able to see as much of the screen as possible. The torch, once lit, flies up out of your hands and you have to chase it. In my case, with a widescreen, I very quickly lost sight of the torch when it went up and simply followed the shadow on the ground. It was fiendish the first few times - if you don’t get right underneath where it falls you will be hit by a fire AoE and dot and will take quite a bit of damage - I didn’t notice how much until I nearly died after a few tries.

This quest was a real pain to get used to - it doesn’t really explain what you have to do besides ‘catch’ the torch three times. What seems to work best is to follow the shadow - it will get smaller as the flame arcs up and then big again and then dissappear - you want to be standing just under or a little forward from where the shadow ‘dissappears’ and clicking on it. It didn’t seem to pick up by landing on me and one or two clicks didn’t always seem to pick it up so I just spam-clicked the area it was coming down on. As soon as you ‘catch’ the flame you’ll toss it up again (usually behind yourself) and you’ll need to repeat this. For the pre-quest it’s three times. Once you’ve opened up the ‘dailies’ by completing this and the fire tossing pre-quest you will be able to do fire tossing again - but this time you have to do ten tosses in a row. If you’ve gotten the hang of the quest by now you’ll have no problems.

After doing these quests it seems to unlock a blessing when you leave the cities - ‘Bonfire’s Blessing’ which, at 70, gives you a 30% chance to do 700 fire damage when you attack. I’m assuming this scales down dependant on level but I can’t transfer a lower level character to try it out at the moment.

Summoning Quests
The other set of quests are the nice bit of juicy extra story. In this, I believe, they’ve outdone themselves over even the new Brewfest activities as old lore gets a bit of a mini-rejuvenation. The Twilight cultists are back and they’re out to cause serious trouble! I won’t go into the story line as you can read it youself whilst you fly.. which you’ll be doing a lot of whilst completing these net few quests.

You pick up the quest ‘Unusual Activity‘ from one of the Earthen Ring members standing near a summer bonfire. These tell you to go to the Zoram Strand in Ashenvale and go check out the new encampment of Twilight Cultists to find out what they’re up to. This quests line should be no problem for anyone over leve 18-20 though I’m not sure at which level you can pick it up. You go along to the Zoram Strand, find the group and kill them until you find a comunication in the form of a letter. I got it on first kill.

You go back to the nearest city bonfire (Rut’theran for Alliance, Org for Horde) and hand this in and are given ‘An Innocent Disguise‘. Yay, yet another disguise quest! You get to be a crab

This time you go a little further north on the beach and listen in to a conversation between the Twilight lot and (are you surprised at all? some nagas! Another quick trip back to an Earthen Ring quest giver and you will find you’ve unlocked two quests - ‘Striking Back‘ and ‘Ahune, the Frost Lord‘. The first is soloable and seems to have a seperate quest depending on your level - the second is not and requires a foray into Slave Pens. As I couldn’t get a group on ptr (it was 4am..) I can only describe the first, for now.

Edit:  The quest giver on the live servers gives you a totem which summons a ’spirit guide’  who you can hand your quest in to rather than running back and forth.  /cheer.

Striking Back
The level 70 version of this is relatively easy and I’d assume will follow a similar path to all of the other level quests. You find a pillar where twilight cultists are summoning a ‘lieutenant’ of the Frost Lord, you clear them a bit and then you summon and kill the creature they were trying to call forth. The level 70 sumoning stone is just outside the Dark Portal on the Hellfire side.

It summons a big ice giant which goes down pretty easily - no harder than any other heavy-armour type does at its level. Though be aware and try not to get smooshed when it falls over.

_{(It doesn’t do any actual damage but that has to hurt, right?)}

All of these quests reward some gold and an amount of fire festival blossoms. In past year these blossoms were used to give you a buff by tossing them into a bonfire - but not this year! Similar to the Brewfest Festival these flowers have become tokens with which you can purchase items from the festival. I took a quick screenie of the rewards list on the ptr.

By the looks of it they’ve cut down the journey into Dire Maul and alike and have given you the chance of getting the items by completing the dailies for blossoms and gathering extras from fires outside each alliance settlement. Doing all of the above quests netted me over 50 blossoms (picking up a few from bonfires beside the flight paths I visited) so I don’t think it should be very arduous to get at least one of these items if you really want it.Personally, having had trouble getting the captured flame in previous years, I’ll be getting my non-combat pet and maybe some petals (since putting petals on your raid leader is always fun…). I’m wondering what the Brazier of Dancing Flames does - the name sounds familiar from previous years but I can’t recall properly - perhaps someone can fill me in? The vestments and sandals are just a fun outfit for ‘rp’ purposes I guess, the mantle seems to be the exact same as previous years and the juggling torches are a new take on the whole ‘leather ball, rock, etc’ items in which if you throw them up another person can catch them. You get a few of these for completing the Flame Catching daily, too.The smorcs, if anyone is interested, give the following buff:

p>
Can’t remember, either, whether this was the same as last year or not but I guess it’ll save a few fishsticks whilst they last. In fact, they might stack… any healer care to comment? You don’t need to have done any quests to buy these.One other small thing I noticed is that this year the flames are blue and golden. I’d guess to go with the theme of the summoning quests. This effect also carries on to any fiery festival brew you might have been holding onto. It looks really pretty now.

Oh and, as a last aside. They’re so definately dailies that Blizz decided to make sure you didn’t get confused.

It is a daily daily!