The OverAchiever: New achievements in patch 4.2

Every Thursday, The OverAchiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, pet biscuits make us happy ... for a little while, at least.

We're going to take another break from our Mountain O' Mounts series to examine upcoming achievements in patch 4.2. We got an avalanche of news on these last Friday via MMO-Champion's datamining efforts on PTR build 14117, and they all look pretty nifty.

There are 16 achievements associated with the new Firelands/Mount Hyjal daily quest area, on which I have very little information right now, so we're going to examine those later. However, that still leaves us with new pet, legendary, dungeon, and anniversary achievements.

One of the characters I transferred over to the PTR was my main, who's sitting on a truly disgusting number of companion pets (though not, I was surprised to discover, disgusting enough to reach 150). To answer one of the more frequently asked questions I've seen since this achievement was announced, the Pet Biscuits here are functionally the same as Papa Hummel's Old-Fashioned Pet Biscuits, which are an absurdly fun reward from the WoW Trading Card Game. Papa Hummel's Biscuits double the size of whichever companion pet you've got out, and while they're single-use only, they're a pretty common TCG reward and stack to 250. When I first saw this achievement, I'd hoped that the reward was a permanent version of them, but of course it didn't make much sense to hand out two if that were the case ...

Which it's not. The Biscuits you'll find in your mailbox as a reward for the 100 and 125 companion pet achievements are also single-use only, and the effect disappears as soon as you log off. Cue sad face when I got kicked off the PTR server for approximately the millionth time since 4.2 went live and relogged to discover that my Black Tabby was once again a little cat. Oh, well. I've wondered for ages when WoW was going to introduce a squirrel pet (apart from the mechanical version, that is), and now we know.

Another new pet was announced in addition to Nuts -- the Creepy Crate. I'm hoping this is something like the little crate disguise you get on the Deepholm quest Quicksilver Submersion, but there's no word yet on how it's obtained.

As expected. Zul'Aman is actually an interesting case achievement-wise; the original instance eighty-sixed the Amani War Bear in the same Wrath of the Lich Kingcontent patch that introduced the achievement system in the first place. I have to think that this would otherwise have been in the game from the start and was surprised not to see it pop up alongside the Rise of the Zandalari heroics in patch 4.1.

Right now, this is a fairly tough achievement for a PUG to manage, given the general difficulty of the new and improved Zul'Aman, but it's by no means impossible -- and like the drake runs from heroic Culling of Stratholme, it's only going to get easier as the expansion advances and players amass better gear for their characters. Players in tier 11 already have a substantial advantage over their blue-geared counterparts.

As with the Zul'Aman achievement above, this isn't too surprising; we've typically gotten news of what Blizzard plans to do with WoW's anniversary celebrations far in advance (well, at least until last year). However, rather than the expected companion pet, the reward for logging on during the anniversary may be something else entirely:

• WoW's 7th anniversary tabard Right-click to change the appearance but not the effect of any currently worn tabard. Increases experience and reputation gains from kills by 7%. 10-second cooldown, instant.

Say what? Is the 7th anniversary reward going to be an amazingly useful tabard bonus, rather than a pet? That's something I can live with. It's not on the PTR, so I can't tell you exactly how it works, but it sounds like it replaces the graphic of your current tabard with the anniversary version and then adds the experience/reputation buff. What I'm not sure about is whether this buff is added only to the existing tabard's effects (the reputation gains you're awarded in dungeons for wearing Tabard of the Earthen Ring) or if it's a boost to all experience/reputation gains. It sounds like it's the latter, but hopefully we'll find out soon.

Not too surprising. Every legendary weapon in the game has an associated achievement, so we knew to expect this one. The Dragonwrath quest line looks amazing so far, and it's particularly interesting in that the player's guild also gets a companion pet -- Lil' Tarecgosa -- for their trouble.

Working on achievements? The Overachiever is here to help! Count on us for advice on Azeroth's holidays and special events, including new achievements, how to get 310% flight speed with achievement mounts, and Cataclysm reputation factions and achievements.