I'm 77 Now What? Tourney

I'm 77, Now What? Tourney
Current Wowcraft build: 3.3.2.

Much of the 'end game' actually starts to open up to you when you ding 77, especially if this is your first character to that level. You get Cold Flying for the first time. You can start Hodir dailies. You can start Tourney dailies. You can do Storm Peaks and Icecrown quests (which, aside from the irritating zoning-affected group quests in IC, are really a lot of fun). You can queue in the Random Dungeon Finder for the high-end T7 (launch) dungeons, and you can wear one of the 4 dungeon-rep tabards while you do so.

Regarding the Tabards, being Tabard of the Kirin Tor, Tabard of the Argent Crusade, Tabard of the Wyrmrest Accord, Tabard of the Ebon Blade : you can pick up any of those as soon as you hit Friendly with the appropriate faction. (Those are all Wowhead links, you can find the location of the Quartermaster for each faction there. Protip: the Argent Crusade guy is hiding under a little tent near Tirion.) So even if you're not 77 yet, I'd recommend getting each tabard as soon as you can. Also recommended: get Kirin Tor first and wear it first; they're the main rep in Dalaran, so having them exalted sooner means saving money on repairs, reagents, waters, and anything else you buy there.

The first thing you should do when you hit 77 is buy Cold Weather Flying! Go to the flight area in Dalaran and look for the big blue dragonhawk. Fork over a thousand gold (it's a lot but totes worth it; take loans from your friends if you have to, you can pay them back really quickly) and fire up your shiny shiny flying mount.



I would recommend starting with Argent Tournament, or Tourney, first. Get on your shiny shiny flying mount and head north out of Dalaran, up to the north-east corner of Icecrown. You'll come to the Tourney area. Grab the flight point, then go to the left and find Justicar Mariel Trueheart. She's on the horse in the doorway of the rectangular tent that's on the west end of the Tourney grounds. She will send* you to the circular tent on the east end of the Tourney; north side for Alliance, south side for Horde. Talk to the NPCs there, and become an Aspirant. They will give you some "learn how to" quests on jousting.

(* - This Wowhead link contains a comment laying out all the tourney stuff in order. It's a very handy comment, for people who like lists. I will briefly go over points of note, but I will not be linking individual quests like they do.)

• Sanna's Tip: If your mouse supports this, I would highly recommend re-keying one of your thumb keys to 'move backwards'. This is not so critical on the stationary targets, but it will make jousting actual NPCs not suck. In fact, keyboard-primary movement is generally a really bad idea, if you can avoid it at all.

After jousting some stationary targets, you will get a quest to 'collect Aspirant seals', as well as access to 3 quests that give you Aspirant seals. But you need 15 seals and doing all three quests only gives you 5. You will need to come back for the next 2 days to get 5 more Aspirant seals.

Quick breakdown of the Aspirant quests:
You will always get the "kill 8 Scourge" one, which you can do right south of the tourney grounds.
You will also always get the "joust all the stationary targets" daily.
However, you will get one of the following randomly-changing Weapon quests: A Blade Fit For A Champion or A Worthy Weapon or The Edge of Winter. They break down as follows:

• Edge of Winter requires you to go to Crystalsong, kill a fiery guy (he has 12khp), take the drop off of him, go all the way to the lake in the north part of HF, and click the item on the dryad frozen in the block of ice. She gives you a sword to take all the way back to the Tourney.
  
• Worthy Weapon requires you to go to the big Wall between IC and Crystalsong and collect 4 flowers, then go to the lake where DB, Grizzly, and ZD meet. There's a circle of lillies in the water; drop into the middle of that, 'use' the flowers to summon the Maiden. She gives you a sword to take all the way back to the Tourney.
  
• Champion blade is a huge pita. Go to the lake in the middle of Grizzly. Use this macro:
  /cleartarget
  /tar Lake Frog
  /use Warts-B-Gone Lip Balm
  /kiss
  Jab that sucker repeatedly until one of the frogs becomes a human woman. Talk to her; she gives you a sword to take all the way back to the Tourney. This one mostly sucks because sometimes you get the girl on the 3rd kiss, and sometimes it takes you 20 minutes.
  

After you're done being an Aspirant, you get to become a Valiant! Being a Valiant is... an awful lot like being an Aspirant. Except for the Weapon quests, the quest are all different, but the concept of "collect seals over time" is still there. Now you become a 'champion' for your home city, and you need to do 5 days worth of dailies to finish that.

Quick breakdown of the Valiant quests. In addition to the random-cyclical nature of the Weapon quests discussed above, you will always get these quests, every day:
-- Joust 3 NPCs right outside your circle tent.
-- Kill 10 Converted Heroes. Your map will show you where they are.
-- Kill the Lieuts and Gargoyles and Footmen waaaay down on the south end of the zone. This one is sort of like jousting... but with more enemies coming at you. At least Lieuts are soloable now.

After the 5th day, you will be asked to go to the little circular jousting area that's just north of the square tent (way to the west) and fight... the Argent Valiant.

• Sanna's Tip: All those NPCs you get to joust every day? Turns out if you group with a friend (or technically even if you don't group), they can attack your jousting target. You should equip the lance, get the mount, shield up, and 'awaken' the NPC; your friend does not equip the lance, stays off the mount, and just... dpses the dude. The primary job of the mounted person is to get the shields off the NPC being jousted; let your friend take care of the doing-dmg part. This works for both the 3-npc jousting dailies from the round tent, and also for the 4-npc jousting dailies you get later from the square tent.

HOWEVER. This does NOT work for the fight against the Argent Valiant. In fact, if anyone other than you, grouped with you or not, does even 1 point of damage to your Argent Valiant, he will despawn and you will have to start all over. Fortunately, you only fight him 5 or 6 times, when you're done with each of the cities' dailies. Unfortunately, if you get too accustomed to having someone DPS your jousting npcs for you, this fight could be really difficult.

When you're done with that, grats, you've championed your first city. Now pick another city and start all over. Whee. Also, go talk to Trueheart again (there's a quest to talk to her), and she gives you an Argent Squire. The Squire is a little non-combat pet, a human or an orc boy, whose sole purpose in life is to follow you around any time you want, displaying a city pennant for you. On foot. In the cold. While you're on one of your shiny mounts. His parents were probably killed by the Scourge, and he probably thinks you're the most awesome dude since sliced bread. Either that or he's plotting to kill you while you're logged out.

... Moving on.

Trueheart also gave you some Champion Seals! And now you have access to more dailies that also give you Seals. Seals are, more or less, the main reason why anyone deals with Tourney. (The other one being, it's a great way to gain home city rep without having to turn in skidrillions of stacks of runecloth or do lvl 10 oldworld quests.) Seals buy a variety of things: a smattering of ilvl 200 gear; a small but potent array of ilvl 200 epic weapons; non-combat (and droppable) pets; and pricey, soulbound, coveted mounts. Most mounts are land mounts, but there are 2 hippogryphs. If you place any value in having many mounts, start saving your seals now. The pets, being droppable, are usually available on the AH, or you can get them later. Either way, these dailies are great xp and great money.

A couple of things to buy with seals that are pretty awesome, but only available for purchase after you finish all the cities:
Argent Crusader's Tabard - a 30-minute-CD port to the Tourney grounds, which does not share CD with your hearthstone.
Argent Pony Bridle - Give your squire a horse! Also, once every 4 hours, he will turn into a vendor or give you access to your bank or mailbox, for 3 minutes. 150 seals is a lot, but if you really want it, plan ahead and it won't be too bad to save for it.

At this point, the new Seals quests that have opened up to you are, briefly, as follows:
-- 4-jousting, aka, jousting the cheating Champions in the big rectangular area on the south side of the tourney grounds. It is STRONGLY recommended that you have a friend for this, unless you're just uber and crap. I hate 4-jousting, and I'm good at it. But I still hate it.
-- Killing 3 Commanders in that same area where you kill the Lieuts. Also highly recommendable to group for this.
-- Killing 15 Cultists; this can be done to the north-west of the tourney grounds.

At some point around here, you will be offered the quest chain starting with The Black Knight of Westfall? I believe one of the NPCs in the square tent gives you this. Yes you have to run to Moonbrooke. Yes, in Westfall. Do it anyway; it eventually allows you access to the Chillmaw daily, which is 2 seals. You do have to joust the Black Knight but he's such a pansy.

The nice thing about the Chillmaw and Commanders quests is, you can often find people in /1 who are looking to group for them too. /1 LFG TFA/COMM is something you will see fairly often, especially during more peaky-playing times.

So, repeat the 5-days-5-dailies and keep doing all the Seals quests available to you. After you finish all the cities, you'll get a couple new Seals dailies available. Also, you are COMPLETELY done with Weapon quests! Yay! (They have been replaced by cycling quests that occasionally take you to Storm Peaks. Still not as far away as that freaking ice weapon quest.) So, just keep doing Seals dailies and rake in the cash (by now you're probably long since 80).

But that's kind of a long way into the future. What else can you do as soon as you hit 77 and get your shiny CWF?

I will cover that... in the next post! I'm 77 Now What? Hodir.