Hey there, I’m Paul. I’m not a WoW player, in fact I don’t play many video games at all these days, but I am into puzzle solving. A friend of mine had been telling me off and on all about the difficulties the WoW community has had with this puzzle, and convinced me to take a crack at it. I think you’ll be pleased with what I’ve put together here.

My friend has been sending me all the theories the community has put together, and I’ve been reading through them all to see if any seemed particularly worth pursuing. This was easier to narrow down with the most recent (9/12/20) hint. Here are the ones I determined to have relevant information. Credit where it’s due.

https://tiggeroni.github.io/map/index.html

https://tiggeroni.github.io/opera/index.html The food and Opera Hall maps from TiggerOni

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gHGIwqJLmxlb47akpPOM6jkq6hC9GOTsxbe6c4rQbLg/edit Raere’s Jenafur Journal

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sE3kt1aVV9xDn11gwyih1uDQu-MvRL-fhUkY8U8cKuE/edit Raere’s Meat Key

Several people who had a copy of Amara’s Wish sheet music

Folks like Chad and Jen and countless others who were sure that the kibbles in some way defined a music staff, made more certain by the most recent hint.

Two piles of treats

Set the 4/4 beat

The rest of the stanza

Is lined up neat

Upon the tiles

You place your notes

Eight morsels make the music

That our musician wrote

So I was sure that the first column where the kibbles are would be where a time signature would go. Can’t be placing music notes there.

It then specifically mentioned the tiles, as opposed to the floor or lines.

We know we need to use 8 foods, and the assumption has been meat for a long time.

“That our musician wrote” I couldn’t see this being anything other than Amara’s Wish. I figured this was an important tool that people were ignoring because it’s part of the “reward,” but just because it’s not intended to be reverse engineered, doesn’t mean we can’t. It does mean that if true, there must be a method to finding it in game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLPJxPfW8Wk

While the song is all chords, the melody clearly sticks out. It moves cleanly across a single staff.

And it’s 8 notes.

If we’re placing food on tiles, we should also be looking at food on tiles. That’s when I found...

This picture in Raere’s Meat Key theory. Back in their Journal, they had this collection of pictures

A pattern found in multiple locations of 4 horizontal and 4 vertical to the next piece

The viewing angles don’t make for pretty lines in Paint when the hallway curves, but I promise the end labeling result is accurate.

If we assume that the Raere found the correct starting point, 4 tiles to the right is the next note, and the distance up determines placement on the staff.

However… this is where things got a little wonky.

That hallway makes this very ugly, but it still seemed to be 4 over. I didn’t much like the idea of estimating when so much else so far is clearly defined. However, for the moment I decided close enough is good enough.

This however, was a roadblock.

I wanted to get to this space, because #9 lines up with the next room, where the three foods appear to mimic the end of Amara’s Wish, but a 9 count didn’t fit the pattern.

Maybe my counting method was wrong.

Bingo.

Now, the tiles in the next room are smaller than those above, but following the 5 count gets you lined up perfectly with the set of lower tiles.

And the 5 pattern continues on these tiles.

So now I had 8 mapped foods.

Look familiar?

So maybe we had our notes. But how about placement? Back to the Opera Hall.

We know they’re placed on the tiles. Both the hint and where all the food was found were inside the tiles, not on a line.

We know there are 8 notes, giving us a symmetrical space to work in.

We have a 9x8 section of the floor.

If each row is a line or a space from the music staff, and each column is the next note, if the theory is correct then there are only two possible options.

Note how the first 5 notes ascend one line/space at a time, and then the next line and space are skipped for the final 3 notes at the top.

Time to test.

No luck with the Blue line.

Red worked though.

Cheers.

Paul.