It’s no secret that the Midsummer Fire Festival is my favorite in-game holiday. There’s something about celebrating the solstice, the beginning of summer, and well…fire, that makes me incredibly happy. Traveling from bonfire to bonfire, stamping out the opposing faction’s fires and lighting up my own – it’s a lot of world-traveling fun. The trick though is that every year you wind up traveling the Azerothian globe for hours looking for flames, and it can be even worse if they’ve been moved from the previous year.

This year, with the launch of Wrath, introduces a number of Northrend fires as well, and a number of dungeon fires that will likely be difficult to get to. So who do you turn to when you need all the best information about the Fire Festival?

WoWGrrl, of course! (PS – follow her exploits on Twitter at @wowgrrl – folks like me whose guilds are too small for endgame raiding can only live vicariously through her adventures!) She posted her Midsummer Festival Guide and Bonfire Locations yesterday, and it’s been my resource for where to go and how to get everything done – she has all the links to the necessary pages in one place for easy bookmarking! The tip on earning extra experience doesn’t hurt either.

To be fair, there’s a huge World of Warcraft community over at Twitter that I’m just scratching the surface of (although anyone’s welcome to follow me at @halophoenix for a mix of personal notes, WoW news, and other articles I write and inane thoughts I have) but it’s rich, full of interesting people, interesting people who are in character, and overall interesting characters. I ran down some of those folks in my post: Get Your WoW On…At Twitter!.

At the same time, what if you want to let your characters completely speak for themselves in a community that you already know will be receptive to their updates? Where do you go where the people there would actually be interested to read what your character is doing at any given moment? wowTwitter, of course, a spinoff service that looks and feels like Twitter, it’s just World of Warcraft themed!

When you sign up, you add your characters, and you can post at any time in the voice of your characters. Some people use it for RP, others just use it as a World of Warcraft centered Twitter, where everyone talks WoW pretty much all the time. Personally, I think the WoW community at Twitter is really rich, but if you’re looking for a community that’s maybe a little more receptive and easier to get into, or even someplace you might want to do a little RP, check out wowTwitter; it might be perfect for you.

Remember when the minimum level for the first land mount went from 40 to 30 and everyone who had slogged to 40 and ground gold to pay for it were all mad? Yeah well, that’s coming all over again.

Blizzard has announced some pretty significant mount changes coming “soon,” which means essentially we have no idea when those changes are coming, but when they do, they’ll make all the difference to those folks who are leveling alts and want the experience of grinding 1-70 a little easier to deal with. Faster speeds, lower costs, easier training, and lower minimum levels await you, thanks to the word that Zarhym let loose in the official forums:

In the next major content patch, we intend to adjust mount requirements to further improve the leveling experience in World of Warcraft. In addition, cast times for summoning all ground mounts will be reduced to 1.5 seconds, down from 3 seconds. The following is a breakdown of the upcoming cost and level requirement changes we are making for each riding skill.

* Apprentice Riding (Skill 75)

o 60% land mount speed
o Requires level 20
o Cost: 4 gold
o Mount cost: 1 gold
o Mail will be sent to players at level 20 guiding them to the riding trainer

* Journeyman Riding (Skill 150)

o 100% land mount speed
o Requires level 40
o Cost: 50 gold
o Mount cost: 10 gold
o Mail will be sent to players at level 40 guiding them back to the riding trainer

* Expert Riding (Skill 225)

o 150% flying mount speed; 60% land mount speed
o Requires level 60
o Cost: 600 gold (faction discounts now apply: Honor Hold [Alliance]; Thrallmar [Horde])
o Mount Cost: 50 gold
o Can now be learned in Honor Hold (Alliance) or Thrallmar (Horde)

* Artisan Riding (Skill 300)

o 280% flying mount speed; 100% land mount speed
o Requires level 70
o Cost: 5,000 gold (faction discounts now apply: Honor Hold or Valiance Expedition [Alliance]; Thrallmar or Warsong Offensive [Horde])
o Mount Cost: 100 gold

Now when Zarhym says “next major content patch,” a good assumption is that he means it’s coming in patch 3.2, currently in development but not yet on the PTRs. Or perhaps since 3.2 is in development already it’s actually coming in 3.3. Who knows, but I’m sure we’ll get clarification on this in the near future.

And of course, along with mount changes, druid forms and other class abilities that allow for faster travel speed will also have to be modified to keep the playing field level:

Movement Speed Training By Class

* Druid

o Travel Form: Requires level 16
o Flight Form: Requires level 60 (150% flight speed)
o Swift Flight Form: Requires level 70

* Hunter

o Aspect of the Cheetah: Requires level 16

* Shaman

o Ghost Wolf: Requires level 16

* Paladin

o Warhorse: Requires level 20
o Charger: Requires level 40

* Warlock

o Felsteed: Requires level 20
o Dreadsteed: Requires level 40

My alts are jumping for joy right now.

The folks over at WoW.com (formerly WoW Insider) thought this was incredibly corny, and yeah, they’re right – it’s terrible. But that doesn’t make it any less awesome!

Seriously, this is terrible, but I mean, how cool is it that even in the real world, even in a grocery store, and even when there are very pretty women involved, the Alliance and the Horde just can’t get along? Man, if this is how bad that whole factional divide is, Arthas has us proper screwed.

In other news though, the commercial is pretty damned funny. One question though: why didn’t the Horde woman turn into oh…a female Orc? I mean, I know the answer to that – they’re recreating the battle from the original WoW opening cinematic using the original box characters everyone would recognize, but still. Not only is she Horde, an Orc, but she’s also transgendered?

That’s okay though – we love both lovely ladies anyway. Who wants to bet on whether either of them actually play WoW?