The OverAchiever: The 25 most evil achievements, Part 2
What are evil achievements? They're the soul-killing rep grinds, the raiding milestones that required sacrificing a farm animal to get, and even fun pastimes like battlegrounds into which a sizable dose of misery has been added. Eventually you just want to grab the nearest developer and shake him back and forth, screaming, "What the hell were you thinking?"
This week we return to our series on evil achievements, which -- if you're just joining us -- started off with the two previous articles:
Evil achievements: Spotlight on Justicar/Conqueror, The Immortal, and Accomplished Angler
Evil achievements: The 25 most evil achievements, #25-16
This week we'll examine #15 to #6. To be frank, I would hesitate to characterize them as being in any strict order, as many are heavily dependent on RNG, and some will be easier for some classes or players than others. Next week, we'll be featuring what I consider to be the five most truly evil achievements.
15. Firefighter
While Algalon was supposedly the biggest hurdle in Ulduar -- a hard-mode only encounter with attempts strictly limited to an hour per week -- he wasn't actually that bad once your guild got the hang of him. Consequently, it's not Algalon that most guilds remember as the most nightmarish and least-easily-repeated encounter of the raid.
That would be Mimiron -- and, to be more specific, pre-nerf Firefighter. Pressing Mimiron's big red button ushered in a host of additional fight mechanics reminiscent of a Biblical plague. Fire on the floor? You got it. Fire that followed you? Right this way. Given the fight's heavy DPS requirement, the need to keep moving was itself a killer, but the fun didn't stop there. For additional merriment, you had an AoE damage pulse, multiple insta-gib abilities, enormous tank damage, adds that could silence, and sometimes contradictory survival techniques (spread out to reduce Rapid Burst damage, or clump up to control the fire?) that combined for a terrifying encounter.
The proverbial cherry on top -- and arguably the most evil part of the encounter -- was the need to kill all three of V0-L7R-0N's components within 10 seconds of each other, as they'd otherwise just heal up. Surviving the entire encounter just to reach that point destroyed whatever morale your raid had left, and raid leaders usually lost it and started screaming for healers, tanks, noncombat pets, Chuck Norris, or whatever personal deity you worshiped to drop what they were doing and help the DPS kill the last component as the enrage timer ticked down.
"Stop healing?" you ask. "During Firefighter?"
Well, sure. It's not like most of the raid's going to be alive to see Mimiron's nasty little robot finally topple anyway.
If you watch any videos of guilds who managed this achievement early, you'll see an extraordinary degree of raid organization coupled with a whopping dose of sheer desperation. My friends, I salute you.
14. Chef de Cuisine
Finding and learning 160 Cooking recipes is a lengthy process that would be slightly more enjoyable if it weren't for the existence of so many faction-specific recipes and single spawns peddled by vendors in the arse-end of the world. One of the latter is a wandering goblin merchant who's only available for business for short periods in Desolace. If you were ever looking to recapture a bit of the sadistic Horde Onyxia attunement chain's charm, this would be your chance.
Unsurprisingly for Horde, which until recently also had fewer mounts and pets for their respective achievements, Alliance has the lion's share of the faction-specific recipes. Either way, if you have the poor luck to play on a server with sharks controlling the neutral AH, it's not uncommon to pay a 400-800% markup to obtain a faction-specific recipe -- and yes, you will almost certainly need all of them.
13. Earth, Wind, and Fire
This one should be fairly self-explanatory. I can't even think of any legitimate reason for it to exist other than as a developer prank, because they have to be aware that putting something like this in the game is a siren call to idiots like myself. There's no reward associated with it apart from the 10 achievement points for both the 10- and 25-man versions, it concerns what are now the three least-useful bosses in Vault of Archavon, and you can't do it without a specific raid composition, a highly-developed sense of masochism, and a bit of luck.
So why do it?
Because it's THERE, dammit!
Rare-spawn mobs would be delightful to hunt down if it weren't for the unfortunate fact that they're ... rare. While many of the rare mobs are actually pretty easy to get these days (the higher-level Outland zones are usually deserted), you can spend months trying to track down the last few you need from more highly trafficked areas.
My picks for the most troublesome of each:
One of the Outland rares in Terokkar Forest, Doomsayer Jurim, is often killed within minutes of his spawn time because he paths within range of the Shattrath guards. Running around Terokkar trying to find this guy only to discover his corpse at the feet of the ever-helpful guards is agonizing.
You'll have to fight legions of hunters to get a kill on Loque'nahak, as he's arguably the most beautiful, and certainly the most unique, pet skin in the game. On the very few occasions I've seen Loque'nahak up, there was always at least one hunter running around Sholazar desperately trying to find and tame him before someone killed him for the achievement, and I always felt bad when they got there just in time to see someone looting the body. I'm not sure I have it in me to kill Loque'nahak for this reason, and will probably not get Frostbitten until Cataclysm empties out Northrend.
One of High Thane Jorfus' three spawn points is directly outside the Argent Tournament in an area commonly used by players doing tournament dailies and anyone on the Battered Hilt quest line. Good luck with that!
11. Justicar/Conqueror
From our earlier article spotlighting three of the most evil achievements:
The Sentinels and the Outriders, the silliest and least pragmatic of all three BG factions, only cough up reputation for each successful flag dip. Not only does that mean that each reputation gain is zero sum -- the enemy teams can't dip a flag at the same time -- but it also means that your ability to farm rep is entirely dependent on how well your faction tends to play WSG. If you have the bad luck to play on a battlegroup where your faction consistently loses -- or, much worse, when your opponents have mastered the art of the turtle -- it's going to be a long, horrible slog toward exalted.
