With Patch 3.1 comes the argent tournament. Just like Netherwing or Ogri'la, you progress through the tournament in phases. Instead of rep grinding you grind tokens. Suck it, humans! The tokens don't use the currency menu so enjoy losing another inventory slot. On most of them you ride a vehicle. Here are its abilities.

Thrust: Hits for 3250 damage, 2 sec cooldown.
Shield break: 5-30 yard range, 2k damage, removes one stack of defended, does 2k damage, 2 sec cooldown. It has a flight time and requires you face your enemy.
Charge 8-30 yard range, 8500 damage and removes one stack of defended, and gives you the buff Charge that makes your horse go faster for a few seconds.
Defend: Stacks up to three times, each stack reduces damage taken by 30%, 4 sec cooldown

1. The aspirant phase. There are two gold-only dailies available immediately. You have to do some quests to unlock the other dailies which give Sunreaver rep and a total of 5 tokens per day. You need 15 tokens to progress. One is to kill any 8 scourge in, a random selection of three quests that eventually send you to the other side of the map (Howling Fjord, Grizzly Hills, or Dragonblight), and an extremely repetitive daily where you just practice using your vehicle abilities.

2. The Valiant phase. This is where I am now. You need 25 Valiant tokens to progress and get five per day from the five dailies. The only one really worthy of discussion is The Grand Melee. To complete The Grand Melee you must collect three tokens. You get one for each valiant you defeat. Here are the strategies I've developed:

Silvermoon City: I tried a couple times. It didn't seem particularly hard and I couldn't find any special strategy. It seems to just be "Try not to suck". I got it to about 5%, so I'll try to beat it tomorrow.

Undercity: When you charge, they're immobilized for a couple seconds. This is probably the key to beating them, but I couldn't figure out how to make use of it. I don't believe I ever even got it below half-health.

Thunderbluff: This valiant moves very slowly and never charges. He Thrusts very hard. I was able to defeat him by just keeping at max distance and shield breaking.

Orgimmar: He uses all of the standard abilities, but if you charge him, he 'counter charges' and does some damage. The Trick is that he's snared and doesn't counter-charge for ~4 seconds after you hit him with shield break. Shield break, charge, defend yourself, shield break, charge, etc.

Sen'jin: He has three abilities. If he's more than a couple yards away he starts spamming Shield Break which has a .5 sec cast time with no cooldown. He periodically runs away from you and starts the spam. He takes no damage from Charge. Sit on his face, try to make enough distance to get shield breaks off on him now and then, keep your shield up, and spam thrust. If you're feeling lucky, charge him when he runs away, run through him, and get off a quick shield break. Have him oriented so when he runs away from you he doesn't run outside the argent tournament area. If he does so, he resets, you're stuck in combat, and you'll have to dismiss your mount and get a new one.

3. Champion phase: I don't know.

Anyone have strategies for the UC or silvermoon valiants? Are the alliance valiants just model swaps of the Horde ones or do they have their own unique abilities? Anyone able to fill us in on the rest of the tournament?

They're in the currency menu for me.

Are you on the Champion level? Maybe the final tokens (can't remember the name) goes into currency as you can perceivably collect quite a few. I'm still running around fighting the valiants and the valiant's seals (I think they are called) are in my inventory.

For the Silvermoon valiant I couldn't really figure out any tactic. He tried to gain distance a few times, but I tried to just stay on him and use the small advantage you get from starting with three shields up when engaging. It was close to raid time so I just wanted to get it done before logging back onto live.

I defeated the Undercity Valiant, but only because someone else was beating up on it. I'm planning to test some more tomorrow when I have some time.

Actually it will come with patch 3.2 or later:
MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Argent Tournament Timing?
At least that is how I understand this.

I believe that post referred to the coliseum, which isn't up on the PTR either. The dailies seemed to refer to it not existing yet, so I'm presuming that the Tournament can go live without it.

From my (limited) understanding, the Tournament was supposed to have elements similar to the AQ war effort and SWP; where various goals had to be met in order for certain phases to show up for each server. My guess is that is what they are referring.


My guess is this quote refers to the fact that if not all servers build the coliseum in time, it will be added/unlocked via a future patch.


Edit: Is there anything that we will need for the tournament that we can start collecting, on live, right now?

The duels with the NPCs are pretty ridiculous at the moment. I think I remember a blue post indicating that they were going to be adjusting (nerfing) them.

Think about it as "unlocking" Isle of Quel'Danas in 2.4. There are 2 daily quests on PTR from goblins - one to collect stone from Stormpeaks and another to collect wood from Crystalsong Forest - that is/will be most likely phase one. After your realm finish those enough times (or timer kicks in) another phase will open and more daily quests will open. At the end your realm will build Colloseum or something else will happen.

They've said the Coliseum won't be in until 3.2 so saying it's phased like Quel'Danas is somewhat misleading. It might be like that eventually but currently there's no phase 2.

Yes, I'm at the champion level. The valiant seals don't need to be in the currency tab since their only use is ranking up.

The champ seals are in currency tab.

The simple strat to beating the valiants/champions/etc is to stack defend, engage, thrust till they back off to charge you, shield break them and close the gap before they can charge.

This strategy alone has defeated every last combatant I've fought.

If it works for you, go for it.

Shield up before starting the fight. Champions also start off with 3 shields up, which makes it tougher.

My tactic was as follows:

Get range, then a Shield Break/Charge/Melee combo. With 0 shields, after the shield break, this does about 13k damage (1400 for Shield Break, 8500 for Charge, 3250 for Melee).
If your charge is on cooldown, concentrate on refreshing shields and Melee
Move out slightly to shield break if the mob adds his, then back into melee range before he can charge you
Repeat until mob dies.


I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think they're separate. It should be fairly simple to confirm, and I will do so when I log on tonight, unless someone else already has.

The champion quests are from a different set of questgivers. I started my second Valiant quest, but only one daily questgiver came up for the weapon retrieval (I guess different "factions" have a different weapon quest). The others weren't available, because I'd already done them that day.

I think that this means the following:

1) Valiant/Champion quests are separate, and can both be done at once.
2) Different Valiant "factions" share the same dailies "A Valiant's Field Training", "The Grand Melee", "At The Enemy's Gates"
3) Different Valiant "factions" can have different choices from "A Blade Fit For A Champion", "The Edge Of Winter", "A Worthy Weapon"

However, this only gains you one seal, and doesn't mean you ca complete the next valiant "faction" any faster.

Also, when you start a match, stand behind the NPC at max dialog range, i.e., as far from the center of the ring as possible. When you start the match, the NPC will run towards the middle of the ring, and spamming break/charge gets you a free opening shot with little or no return damage.

Once you're meleeing, it never fails that your opponent will eventually start to run away, giving you an opportunity to break/charge again.

Yes, you can do both; I started the IF Valiant quests today while simultaneously doing the Champion quests after finishing SW. I'm not sure this is intended (it's odd to be working on "Kill 10 Scourge" and "Kill 15 Scourge" at the same time) but that's how it is right now.

EDIT: For a full round of Champion + Valiant + Goblin (wood/stone) dailies, taking spoils bags instead of writs, the payout is 172g in perhaps 30 minutes of work.

There are two aspects of the Champion's dailies worth nothing:

1) If you need major city rep with a city other than your "home" faction, the Writs are not unique and can be saved up until you unlock the ability to champion a city you do need rep with.

2) Pay attention to the cost of Runecloth on your server. If you can get 3.5 stacks for 10g, you're better off getting the money bag and buying Runecloth for your rep, at least financially. Runecloth costs seem to be dropping a bit with the addition of the Argent Tournament, so this may actually be a reasonable route.

The Champion's dailies are a fun diversion for now, but I can't say as I'm looking forward to killing the same elite and the same mobs down by Icecrown Citadel every day for the next 8 months to get all the mounts, pets, tabards, etc. Hopefully the addition of the Coliseum in 3.2 will bring additional means of earning Champion's Seals. In the meantime, I wish people on my server would stop tagging the Commanders and kiting them away and keeping them alive.

Can you do a race's valiant dailies indefinitely if you don't turn the 25 valiant seal quest in? They seem to be a decent source of rep (1k per day) if that's the case.

Presumably yes. You could just destroy the Valiant's Seals from your inventory if attempting to complete the quest gave you an error. If you did that, you could theoretically be earning 1k rep per day with two factions--1k from the Writs from Champion's dailies, and 1k from the Valiant's dailies. You wouldn't be able to earn 2k/day from the same faction though, as you wouldn't be able to buy their Commendations until you complete the Valiant training and become a Champion with them. (Though I guess you could save up the Writs until you're halfway there, then upgrade to Champion and turn them all in.)

You can go beyond 25 valiant seals. I had one of the weapon retrieval dailies from a previous day that I missed out on doing the dailies. After doing the previous day's weapon retrieval, I got the current day's quest too. I still have the 2 extra seals while I'm doing the valiant quests for Exodar rep now and they even count toward the new valiant quest total.

It's also worth thinking about how much time it would take you to farm the runecloth yourself. Most, if not all classes can farm UD Strath pretty efficiently at level 80, and that's a pretty fast source of RC.

If you are looking for off city faction, run the level 1-10 starter quests for that race. Faction return is always 100% and 10% of that is applied to all the other cities.

For the ones who like to run BG's, you can get exalted with Alterac Valley, by turning in Storm Cyrstals. Once you are exalted with the Stormpike, you then get alliance rep for each set of Storm crystals you loot from killing the opposing faction. (You will need alot of them, but then again, some people are running alot of BG's). No sense missing out on free reputation, especially if it's for Alliance rep, it goes for all 5 cities.

(This will also work for the horde side, but I'm speaking from the Alliance side of course)

Lets get back to exciting Argent Tournament discussion!

I'm sure most of us saw this coming, but Blizzard confirmed that there will be additional ways to earn Champion's seals in the future. Good news for those of us who aren't exactly excited about the prospect of ~250 days' worth of dailies just to get all of the rewards from the tournament.

Source: World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Argent Tournament is not worth it.....