[Beta]: PSA Regarding the Brazier of Flickering Flame

For those working their way through the Pandaren starting area on the beta, you’ve probably encountered a handful of hassles related to bugged quests and objects.  This can be really frustrating because the starting area is both phased and linear, so there’s no question of just skipping a quest to come back to it when there are fewer players online (and, let’s face it – there are never fewer players online).

By far, the quest which caused me the biggest headache this weekend was The Challenger’s Fires.  Without giving anything away, this quest requires you to light a torch from a Brazier of Flickering Flame which is located on the ground next to the questgiver.  Then you will use the torch to light several other braziers around the area.

Simple enough, except that the brazier itself is constantly covered by a literal pile of pandas:

I’m not sure why exactly this is going on – there seem to be griefers who AFK on top of the Brazier at pretty much all hours of the day, and the situation is further complicated by all the players who are standing as close to the Brazier as they can as they try desperately to right click on it and complete that quest objective.

While you are trying to click on the Brazier, you will probably see lots of players spamming a command that looks something like:
“/c interact Brazier of Flickering Flame”
(Or, if you were playing in this area when I was this morning, you may have been one of the morons spamming “/c interact Blazer of Flickering Flame.”  Facepalm.)

Don’t do this.

This command does absolutely nothing, and everyone in the area continues to spam it in /say because they just saw someone else do it, who saw someone before them do it, and on and on.

I was finally able to complete the quest thanks to some Googling and some advice from the few pandas in the area who weren’t spamming the useless macro.  Here’s how:

1. Turn your graphics all the way down to low.  If you usually run with Multisampling above 1x, turn in down to 1x.
2. Position your pandaren right next to the Brazier.  You can usually see the fire flickering a bit below the other players.  I found it helpful to pivot my camera so that it was directly over my head.
3. Turn your graphics all the way up to Ultra, changing Multisampling to 8x.
4. Hit Ok.

This should cause your graphics to reload, and when WoW’s graphics reload they bring up scenery and object images well before they bring up images of character players.  If you are lucky, and lucky actually means having a less than cutting-edge graphics card here, you will have a window of a second or two to click the Brazier before that pile of pandas loads.

Even knowing exactly what I needed to do and knowing precisely where my cursor needed to be so that I could spam-click on the Brazier, this still took me several attempts.  Keep cycling your graphics back and forth from low to ultra, and then right click repeatedly on the Brazier.  It may take a few minutes, but you should be able to complete the quest objective this way.

Good luck with the Brazier boss, and happy beta questing!