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The OverAchiever: Guide to Bloody Rare
Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, we're back to flying endlessly around spawn points. So, how many of you are still with us after Frostbitten? My guess is that most of you are still circling Storm Peaks in a desperate bid at Vyragosa. My friends, I salute you -- but the rest of us are going to pack up and ship out to Outland. Bloody Rare tends to be slightly easier than Frostbitten for the simple reason that Outland is even emptier than Northrend, and there are no rares here competing for spawn times like Vyragosa and our old buddy, the Time-Lost Proto Drake. You'll still find a few people leveling their Wrath-era alts through Northrend, but the population of Outland players usually vanishes by Zangarmarsh or Terokkar. However, that's just been my experience, and as always, realms will differ. And no matter how empty Outland seems, there are still a few rares here that will drive you up a wall.
The OverAchiever: Hunting rares and you -- A guide to waiting around for months
Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, the thrills of real-life hunting (lots and lots of waiting around) are yours to be had in-game. Admit it: You still get a little thrill of excitement whenever you run across a rare mob. There's always that thought that this -- this -- is going to be the time you kill something with a silver dragon around its portrait and something fantastically rare drops. Maybe it'll be a world drop like the Lei of Lilies. Maybe it'll be one of the game's first epics, a Staff of Jordan. Maybe you'll go out of your way to kill something and find a plate Of the Boar shoulder on it, and you'll wonder why you bothered in the first place. But hunting rares is, as they say, the triumph of hope over experience. There are four achievements in the game concerned with hunting rare mobs, and they'll keep you running around Outland and Northrend for a while. These achievements might get a lot harder when Mists of Pandaria hits due to cross-realm zones. They're not exactly easy to do right now, but they certainly won't get easier if you have to compete against a raft of off-server players. While we're not 100% certain that that's how things will function, right now I would classify these as achievements to do sooner rather than later. The only reason they weren't listed in that column is because I didn't think of them, but a few canny readers made the Cross-Realm Zones + Rare Mobs = Oh Shiznit connection.
The OverAchiever: The best achievements for making gold
Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, if you're not the 1% already, you will be soon. By their very nature, most achievements either directly or indirectly cost you gold or are at least associated with some extremely unpleasant trips to the Auction House. We had a small discussion on just this point last week. But there are always exceptions, and there's a set of achievements in the game that will earn you a healthy nest egg if you care to go looking for them. From my perspective, stuff like Got My Mind On My Money doesn't count, as it's just a reflection of how much gold you're looting in the game and not in itself a means of earning income. I'm after the stuff from which you almost can't help but make gold. Concerning general achievements: Perhaps not surprisingly (given the overrepresentation of general achievements in last week's The OverAchiever: Got 100,000+ gold handy?), you're going to have a tough time finding a way to make money here. Most general achievements either cost you something (e.g., Into the Wild Blue Yonder) or are otherwise divorced from the game's financial side (e.g., Friend or Fowl?). I actually can't find a single achievement here that doesn't meet one of those two conditions. Look elsewhere, folks. You will not be making money from the general achievements slot.
The OverAchiever: The 25 most entertaining achievements, part 3
Every so often, I get tired of the self-seriousness that infests some of (OK, most of) the other work I do here and get the urge to write something purely for fun. After our series on evil achievements and the relentless misery of School of Hard Knocks, I'd like to spend some time on achievements that are nothing but an absolute joy from beginning to end. This week we continue our series on World of Warcraft's most entertaining achievements. This is the full series to date, if you're just catching up with us: OverAchiever: Pure Win The 25 most entertaining achievements, #25-21 The 25 most entertaining achievements, #20-16 The 25 most entertaining achievements, #15-11 (today's post)
