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Warcraft Wednesday: The Lunar Festival

The latest holiday in World of Warcraft, the Lunar Festival, started last Saturday and runs until February 12, 2009.  (Which, by the way, is the day after Love is in the Air begins.)  This festival, at least for me, is a little more fun than the last one.  During the Christmas holiday, I just never got into the quests and events.  I’m not sure if I didn’t feel like there was anything in it for me, or just wasn’t buying into the idea.

However, the Lunar Festival has been a bit different.  It reminds me more of the Midsummer Fire Festival, with quests and tasks that I didn’t mind repeating.  It also has driven me to travel to places in-game that I haven’t visited before.  You see, there are a large number of Elders in various scattered locations around the world.  The main objective of the Lunar Festival is to visit each one and honor him.  It provides a neat little bit of insight into some of the history of those locations, as well as some faction rep and a Coin of Ancestry (used to purchase some of the holiday items).

The whole objective for me is to try and get the meta-achievement for the holiday, but it looks like I won’t be able to pull it off at the moment.  My main is only level 77 at the moment, and the rest of the Elders that I need are in the Northrend dungeons – at least one is in a heroic version.  That means I won’t be able to get to those until I’m level 80, and I don’t feel like rushing there in these couple of weeks just for this.  It goes against my achievement addiction, though.

For an interesting side effect of this event, I’ve had to visit some of the old instances that I never had the chance to experience.  I then decided to go through all of the dungeons that I didn’t have the achievement for, whether or not I had finished them prior to the launch of the achievement system.  It’s pretty interesting soloing all of those dungeons as a holy priest.  I haven’t tried much over level 50 yet.  This has led to a lot of farming of enchanting materials, since I can disenchant everything I come across.  I’ve been throwing all of those on the auction house and I’ve almost recouped all the cash I spent getting cold weather flying.  I’ve also created a bank alt, and it’s helped out a ton with organizing my auction stuff.  The only things I’ve had trouble selling is the Bolts of Imbued Netherweave and Primal Mooncloth from before the expansion.  Nobody seems to want it, and they are relatively expensive items.