Talk:The Schools of Arcane Magic

Notes about this article
The Higher Learning achievement has introduced a marvelous new facet to the game in the form of randomly-respawning books in Dalaran. At the time of this writing, very little solid information is available, and WoWWiki seems the perfect place to start consolidating, expanding, and verifying it.

Currently, this information on this page comes from two primary sources — a post on the WotLK beta forums by Aikiwoce and my own in-game observations, supplemented by the Bookworm addon. The information in Aikiwoce's post is consolidated from a number of other posts also from the beta forums. As such, nothing on this page is set in stone. In particular, the following areas need special attention:


 * Spawn locations
 * Several locations (LL1/2 and VC1/2 in particular) are easily confused when going purely by description. It is possible that some of these are not, in fact, separate locations.  In addition, there is no guarantee that all spawn locations are currently known.  Two spots to watch are the bookcases opposite VC3 (near the Purple Parlor portal) and the empty bookcase in the Parlor itself.


 * Book lists
 * Even if all the other information in this article is accurate and complete, the book lists need filled out. This is particularly true of locations LL1, LL4, and VC2, as those books do not respawn on server restart (or possibly even don't exist, as per the prior point).  The Bookworm addon linked above is invaluable for filling out book lists, as it records the book's title and text and your own location when reading it (ideally, you should therefore be standing on the book when reading it).  If you decide to use a book-tracking addon, it's worth running "/console reloadui" after recording a book, to prevent data loss in the event that WoW crashes due to server or client instability.


 * I have looted LL1 and believe I took a screenshot of it - so I can confirm that LL1 is a valid spawn point. --Poena (talk) 14:00, 28 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Screenshots
 * All the screenshots currently in use on this page were taken by me based purely on the descriptions in Aikiwoce's post. As such, none of them include the books themselves are therefore completely unverified.  They need replaced with screenshots that show the actual books.  Ideal screen shots should:
 * Include frames of reference, such as nearby static NPCs (with names) and prominent architectural features (such as doorways).
 * Not include UI, players/pets (including the "photographer"), or patrolling NPCs.
 * Highlight the book's exact location in some manner. Currently, a rectangle of #7fff7f green with an opacity of 50% is used.


 * Respawn timer
 * This was observed to be about three hours during the beta, but appears to have been shortened to an hour and a half. This could be a change, an incorrect observation, the result of a randomized respawn timer, or even the result of multiple spawn locations for the same book objects.  (A la herb, ore, and fish nodes.)  The last possibility could also explain the failure of LL1, LL4, and VC2 to spawn after a server restart.


 * I have a feeling that LL1/LL2, LL3/LL4 and VC1/VC2 are shared spawn points. This would make sense as it would compress the current "11 location for 8 books" to "8 locations for 8 books."  We can already see from updates made to WoWWiki that the same book is spawning at those points (VC1/VC2 for example). --Poena (talk) 14:00, 28 November 2008 (UTC)


 * I can confirm that the books do take 3 minutes to despawn, but I've now camped three books using Blizzard's ingame stopwatch to wait for a respawn returning to my computer at 1 hour into the respawn timer (because I tend to believe that Blizz does a +/- 15 mins or so on these things to keep it a bit random) and waiting until 2 hours deep, and the books have not respawned. So 1 hour 30 minutes may be incorrect.  Sadly, on each of the three occasions I've had to log to do other things so was unable to continue to sit and watch to see when the books spawned.  One day... --Poena (talk) 13:14, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

17:28, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

New location found?
I've found a new location in the "A Hero's Welcome" inn. It's up in the top bedroom that has the balcony overlooking "The Beer Garden". So far, I've only seen the Common/Orcish dictionary at this point. Wenadin (talk) 01:12, 26 November 2008 (UTC)


 * I believe that book is always there. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 01:27, 26 November 2008 (UTC)


 * No, it despawned as I typed the location in. Although, I just logged in and it was back and the same book, so it may just be the same book. Wenadin (talk) 05:59, 26 November 2008 (UTC)


 * I just checked this location and only found the dictionary as well, gonna check again in a couple of hours. Qeslak (talk) 07:36, 6 December 2008 (UTC)


 * The Alliance and Horde inns both have a spawn point for flavor books. They are not currently related to this or any achievement. Alexei-Uther (talk) 23:02, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

New Infos from Live Server as of 6th December 2008
I'm playing on EU-Lothar and i created an extra chat channel for this achievement. After a while we had enough people to camp every spawn point for most of the time. I have got the achievement on two different chars now and can report the following facts:


 * Spawn locations

At the following locations spawn NO books. - Legerdemain Lounge #2 - Legerdemain Lounge #4 - Violet Citadel #1


 * Respawn Timer

Respawn Timer for all spawn locations was ALWAYS - 3 hours - 3,5 hours - 4 hours It was never under 3 hours.

And I can only recommend to make a new chat channel for that and advertise that channel. There are lots of people out there doing the same and together it is so much easier. Use it to collect the spawn times and once you have the times from all locations it is easy to control it because of the 3-4h timer. Most of the time on our server there are about 5-25 people in the channel. And between 10AM until 2-3AM we have mostly complete coverage of all spawn points. And we used a simple macro to keep track of the last known spawn times: (its in german, but you should know what i mean) /6 - Letzte Sichtungen: - /6 Balkon 19:54 /6 Zita oben 19:58 /6 Festung 20:29 /6 Zita unten 20:38 /6 Kristall 9:03 /6 Gasthaus unten 10:00 /6 Gasthaus oben 10:14 /6 Besucher 10:49 /6 - Respawnzeiten 3h, 3,5h oder 4h -

So everybody knows when to expect the next spawn for a specific location.

When i have some more time, i will revisit and update the wiki article.

Akira2007 11:14, 6 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Great stuff, thank you! This is a some really good data; I've added it to the article.   03:35, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

New Info from Live Server as of 27th December 2008
I've spent the last several days watching books (nothing like the holidays for free time) and I can conclude that there is either a shared timer for some spawn locations, or there is a different timer than the suggested 3/3.5/4 hour timer. There have been many instances from when I have seen a book spawn, then despawn, and then no book spawns again in that location within the suggested window of three to four hours after. Either it spawned sooner, before I got there at the three hour point, or it spawned at a later time, or it didn't spawn at all due to a shared timer.

I have also witnessed respawns that DO match the timeframe, so they are still viable spawn timers... I have seen evidence, however, that there is either an additional spawn time beyond those three possibilities, or the shared spawn timer is a reality.

On another note, I can also confirm that the respawn timer starts counting from when a book is first read, not from when it spawns or despawns. Alexei-Uther (talk) 23:14, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Commonly Used Abbreviations
All servers that I have been involved in this achievement on use a /bookclub chat channel and the abbreviations that are used on this channel can look foreign. Maybe they should be listed.

--Kapnos (talk) 07:42, 22 February 2009 (UTC)
 * DVC = Dalaran Visitor's Center
 * LLL = Lower Ledgermain Lounge (#1)
 * ULL = Upper Ledgermain Lounge (#2)
 * LVC = Lower Violet Citadel (#1)
 * UVC = Upper Violet Citadel (#2)
 * TOF = Threads of Fate
 * VG = Violet Gate
 * VH = Violet Hold