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Tips for the Wrecking Ball achievement
This forum thread is full of great advice and tips for the Wrecking Ball achievement, in which you've got to get 20 killing blows without dying in a battleground. The key here seems to be to find a place with lots and lots of folks to kill (a spawn point, like the graveyard in WSG, works great, or you can hide behind the big groups in AV), and then just hanging out there as far out of the way as you can get. Having a pocket healer won't hurt either, and playing fair isn't really part of this one -- you want to duck in when you're sure to win the fight, and run like crazy when things even threaten to go against you.Some people say that doing it at a lower bracket can help, too, because unless you're uber geared, it'll be better to go after lower levels than have everybody in the BG be 80. It actually sounds like it's easier than it seems -- as long as you set yourself up in the right place and be really careful about getting stuck in a fight you can't win, you should be able to walk away with the points. Good luck!
The Daily Grind: In-game achievements
When I'm not playing MMOs, I'm usually found on a console. Of all the numerous machines and debugs I own, my Xbox 360 is my favourite. It's the one console I saved hard to buy and waited the longest for. While I think it has some of the best games, it also has Achievements. It's really sad, I know, but I love that little ding and onscreen notification which lets me know I've achieved something in-game. From finding a secret area or finishing a game, there's something about that noise which is rewarding. But now achievements have started popping up in MMOs (in the form of actual achievements or special titles for completion of certain quests) and it's so much fun. What is it about being rewarded? Are we just rats being given cheese for completing a maze or do achievements help keep interest in a particularly long quest chain or boring instance we'd never otherwise complete?
The OverAchiever: Glory of the Hero strikes back
HARROW: I know him. And I think he's a psychotic lowlife.MAL: And I think calling him that is an insult to the psychotic lowlife community. -- Firefly, "Shindig." Another OverAchiever, another Firefly quote. I wonder how much of the series we'll manage to get through here before we finish off Glory of the Hero, because this is one looooooong meta. Having gotten through Azjol Nerub and Culling of Stratholme two weeks ago with a few breaks for holiday achievements along the way, it's time to hit Drak'Tharon. Next week we'll be tackling Gun'Drak (which, as Amanda observed this morning, contains one of the more frustrating achievements). Live trolls, dead trolls, undead trolls, we got your trolls right here, pal.DRAK'THARON KEEPConsumption JunctionThis has a tendency to confuse players because most aren't aware that Consume even exists (and I was among them; my group got this achievement entirely by accident). Consume is a buff that Trollgore gains based on how many things -- NPC or player -- are within his line of sight when he casts it. The adds that run down the stairs toward him? Any of your groupmates within line of sight? They're all potential Consume charges. He attempts to re-cast the ability roughly every 15 seconds.
The Queue: Zordon, no!
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.A lot of people were confused about the picture I used in The Queue a couple of days ago. You know, the one with the German writing on it. That edition of The Queue was titled Mercenaries, and the person depicted in that picture was Götz von Berlichingen, a German mercenary from the early 1500s. He literally had an Iron Fist. As in, his hand was crafted out of iron. Go read up on him, he rules.idkanything asked..."A question on guild leadership. Our guild leader has decided to stop playing WoW but he didn't transfer the guild to someone else before he left. (It's a long, not very exciting story.) We don't want to just disband and reform under a different name because of the gold in the gbank. Does anyone know the procedure for getting the guild transferred to another person? Is there a certain amount of time that has to pass?"
Daily Chores achievement is no longer a chore
Many people have noticed a change in the Children's Week achievement Daily Chores. The achievement no longer requires you to do the same daily quest five days in a row with your orphan out, but instead requires you to do a total of any five daily quests with your orphan out.Let me rephrase for the hard of hearing:You can just do five daily quests today with your orphan out and you'll get the achievement. You don't need to repeat the same quests for the rest of the week.It should be noted that this is a hotfix applied this morning, and that the achievement text is you'll see via your achievements window is incorrect. This change is likely due to the gigantic failure that was/is A Simple Re-Quest.So this is the first nerf bat to the Children's Week achievements. School of Hard Knocks coming up next?
The OverAchiever: Guide to Children's Week achievements
All right, folks, we've got another sub-achievement needed for What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been (and thus the 310% speed Violet Proto-Drake) on our hands here. I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that most of the achievements for Children's Week are fairly straightforward, and should be easy (and even fun) to complete. Appropriately enough for a mini-holiday, most of the achievements are simple, amusing, and not too time-consuming. The bad news is that one of the achievements may be a huge headache to get done, and unlike Noblegarden, your character has to be at least 75 in order to get all of the achievements needed for the year-long meta. Children's Week runs from Friday, May 1st at midnight through Thursday, May 7th at 11:59 PM. Got your kiddo? Let's get cracking.EDIT: This article's been revised and updated to reflect new information and the hotfixes that have gone live since initial publication. All information herein should be accurate as of 11:30 AM EST Saturday May 2nd.
Breakfast Topic: How's Noblegarden going so far?
The title seems self-explanatory; are you enjoying Noblegarden? How many people are participating on your server? Do you already have the achievements done, or are they a work-in-progress?I have to admit I'm writing this expecting a lot of comments to come back noting that it's pretty hard to get this holiday done when spawn points on the eggs are camped 24/7. For my part, I vastly underestimated how much of a nuisance that was going to be on the live realms. That aside, Noblegarden does seem to be one of the more efficient holidays, particularly if you get lucky with item drops, and I think this is also the first time Blizzard's made it possible to get all the achievement items you need as purchases in the event that Lady Luck spends the week being an indifferent mistress. The ability to buy achievement items certainly settles what was by far the biggest complaint concerning Love Is In the Air. For that holiday, your ability to complete the meta-achievement was ultimately determined by the RNG, to the point where Blizzard hotfixed the drop rate on a key achievement item after the forums went kaboom. This time around, you don't need to worry about that as long as you can get enough Noblegarden Chocolate. Time to knuckle down, plunk a frosty beverage at your side, and tell that jerk who's camping your spawn to go find his own friggin' eggs. Ahhhh, the holiday spirit!
The OverAchiever: Guide to Noblegarden achievements
UPDATE: This guide has been revised for Noblegarden 2010. In honor of Noblegarden, we're running a special-edition OverAchiever today, dedicated to what you'll need for the meta-achievement Noble Gardener. Should you finish, not only do you get a spiffy new title, but you also get to check off another set of achievements toward What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been, the yearlong achievement-palooza rewarding a 310% speed Violet Proto-Drake. Because Noblegarden has been extensively reworked, most of what you'll be doing this year is completely new, and some of this guide is going to be comprised of educated (or not-so-educated) guesses as to the difficulty of the achievements on the live realms, and tips on how to get them done. I'll let you know if I just plain don't know something or have to hazard a guess based on PTR information, but fortunately most of the holiday is pretty straightforward. We're only going to cover the achievements you need to worry about for the meta, as everything else you can achieve is really based on luck and doesn't count toward Noble Gardener. Let's get started!
The OverAchiever: Insane in the Membrane
Most of you are excited for 3.1 so you can start raiding Ulduar, or take advantage of the new class changes. But I know what some of you are on pins and needles for. It's the new title The Insane. Insane In The Membrane is exactly what it sounds like -- an achievement for people who are completely nuts. To earn this title you must be willing to spend a lot of time destroying and raising obscure factions in Azeroth. I mean a lot of time. It requires that attain the following:Honored with Bloodsail Buccaneers Exalted with EverlookExalted with RatchetExalted with Booty BayExalted with GadgetzanExalted with RavenholdtExalted with Darkmoon FaireExalted with Shen'dralarYep. If you want to get started on this brain-breaking journey, just follow the jump.
Breakfast Topic: Ignoring achievements for roleplay reasons
This is Bedrock. He is what many might call "Achievement obsessed." (Yes, I know, there's a slightly different word most folks use, but this is a family blog.) He's the kind of chap who's run Stratholme about five million times, desperately hoping for the Baron's horse to drop. And yeah -- he's even on his way to the "Insane" title.But among Mr. Rock's tour of Azeroth, there's one achievement that he just can't bring himself to do. Yes, my friends, Bedrock is not yet DEHTA'S Little PEHTA.Bedrock is a Hunter on a roleplay server. He likes to roleplay, even if he doesn't spend every moment of every day full of "yea verily" and "thee" and "thou." But he identifies with his character, and generally tries to achieve some level of immersion. And whether the DEHTA crowd is a joke or not, he just can't bring himself to do war against his personal idol. Mr. Nesingwary is somewhat a hero for Bedrock, and collecting the ears of Hemet's friends just doesn't seem right.So, for roleplay reasons, Bedrock has ignored the DEHTA achievement, even though he's also one of the Achievement hounds. What about you? Is there any quest out there you refuse to do, because it just doesn't seem to line up with your character?
Spiritual Guidance: The Undying experience of a Priest
Every Sunday (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of PlusHeal, a new healing community for all restorative classes. This week Matt offers some tips and insights for the Priest aiming to go after the Undying title! I wanted to share some thoughts and tips this week on a successful Undying run I participated in with my guild. It continues to be one of the most challenging achievements in the game. To put it bluntly your entire raid group must navigate and clear out every encounter in Naxxramas without dying to any of the bosses. The amount of coordination, luck and skill needed is high. Remember that dying on trash is perfectly okay. It's the bosses where you can't afford to lose players on. But I want to let you all in on a secret. There's a trick to earning the Undying.
Are achievements optional?
There was an interesting discussion that happened on the official forums the other day, and I think it deserves a bit of light here on WoW Insider. Of course that thread devolved quickly into standard forum QQ and blue bashing, but hopefully that doesn't happen here.The thread asked: are achievements optional?This is a loaded question, for sure, so what I'm going to do is look at three different types of players and analyze what achievements mean for each of them. But of course to begin, it should just be said that any achievement is completely optional in the game. You don't need them, they deliver nothing to you that's necessary for your character to progress. The CasualThe casual is the person who chooses to play the game at their own pace for a little or as much as they want. The casual rarely, if ever, make appointments or schedule in game activities with other people. The casual may or may not be in a guild, and that's just fine. The casual is there to enjoy the game on their own terms.
Ulduar achievements unveiled
Wow. MMO Champion, long trusted to datamine anything that's not nailed down to the floor, brings us the complete (to date) list of Ulduar achievements added to the 3.1 PTR, and yeah. It's long. Blizzard promised us some new achievements for Ulduar, but I wasn't expecting a list THIS long. Or this hilarious.There are the expected "kill these bosses" achievements, the inevitable "kill these bosses while doing something hard" achievements, silly achievements you'll get without trying, and more. Bear in mind that many of these numbers, and even some achievement criteria, are either incorrect or placeholders. Don't freak out. The full list is after the jump and is, of course, quite spoiler-heavy, so stay away if you want your Ulduar experience to be as pure as driven snow.The rest of you, though? CLICK. DO IT. COME ON.
New Cooking recipes coming in patch 3.1
I was excited to hear the other day that leveling cooking will be a little easier, as more recipes are likely to go grey a little later, but Bornakk has more good news for cooks after patch 3.1. He confirms that new recipes are going in as well, and he can think of two off of the top of his head (so hopefully we'll see even more than that).That will, as he says, make the Chef de Cuisine achievement that much easier as well -- it'll probably still be a pain, but at least there'll be a few more options to pick up new recipes. And I'm curious to see what the new food does, too: I like cooking the usual stat food as much as the next culinary expert, but I'm almost more interested in the fun stuff like Last Week's Mammoth (what a bummer) and the good old Delicious Chocolate Cake. Those cosmetic items make cooking much more fun than just the usual stat buffs that most food give.So we'll keep an eye out for new recipes. Completists will have at least two more to grab with the new patch.
The Immortal clarifications by Bornakk
This was hinted at the other day when the idea of an "Immortal" achievement for Ulduar was thrown around, but Bornakk has stepped up to clear up exactly what's supposed to be happening with Naxx's ultimate "flawless victory" achievement.He clears up all the questions that people have asked. To get the achievement, you only have to be present for Kel'thuzad, as long as no one has died on any of the other bosses. And "dying" on the other bosses means any deaths at all -- including wipes, or any other deaths while bosses are engadged. Deaths on trash are apparently fine, and will not lose you the achievement, but if anyone dies on a boss, the raid ID is lost for the week and you've got to start over again next time (of course, you can still go through and get all of the loot and other rewards, so it's not a total wash).It's tough, no question, but remember that this is an achievement, not a part of normal progress. It's designed to really push your guild (or at least show you've got some good gear). While most of Naxx won't give an experienced, well-geared guild much trouble, achievements like this one can and should be more of a challenge.
UPDATED: Brew of the Year removed from Brewmaster achievement on PTR
EDIT: Bornakk says that the achievement will be replaced in the meta achievement with one that requires you to simply sign up for the Brew of the Month Club. And for those who doubted my psychic powers: Noblegarden achievements are being added to Long, Strange Trip.Following the pattern of removing achievements that take a while to complete from the holiday meta-achievements, Blizzard yanked Brew of the Year from Brewmaster on the current 3.1 PTR. This means that anyone who was missing it now has yet another fair shake at getting their Violet Proto-Drake for completing all of the other holiday achievements for What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been. I'm pleased that players who missed that one achievement can still have a shot at the big prize, but man, there seems to be an awful lot of meta-achievement caving lately. It just creates the impression that complaining about something will get it changed, and I don't think that's what Blizzard wants players to believe.To be fair, it was physically impossible for Death Knights to get this achievement until sometime in 2010. This is a good change for them and I'm okay with that. And no, I'm not against Blizzard removing unfair achievements from reward-bearing metas. This was also the only achievement which was impossible to complete during the event itself. We'll see if the pattern holds after people miss another impossible-to-miss achievement in the Noblegarden set. Grats to those for whom this achievement change will make a difference, and early props for your purple dragon.
Tips on completing Higher Learning
Higher Learning is one of the most peaceful achievements in the game (all you have to do are read a few books that spawn around Dalaran), but it's no less desirable for that -- the achievement grants a miniature Arcane Elemental pet that looks awesome. Teniblue over on WoW Ladies has a few good tips if you're trying to get all edumacated in Dalaran -- she's got links to two addons (including the perfectly-named Dalaran University) to use to help you track spawn times, and she's got a link to Breanni's great guide over on WarcraftPets.com (which our own Allison R. touched on briefly in a recent OverAchiever post).What's fun about this achievement is that reading the books won't delete them, so it can be very social -- people have created #bookclub channels on many servers to keep track of when and where books are appearing in the city. That makes it a lot more fun than the, say, cooking daily quest that sends you after mushrooms in the sewers. It actually makes this social game, well, social.So next time you see a book sitting around the city, be sure to give a shout to the chat channel -- here's one in-game situation where everybody can benefit from a little extra chatting.
Finding unfinished quests
Alan on LJ is having a problem I've been thinking a lot about lately -- like me, he wants to go back and finish the Loremaster achievement, which asks you to clean up all of the quests in the old continents. But like me, he's wondering just how he'll find all of those old quests -- unfortunately, there's no way to know which quests have and haven't been done, and while of course, there's a "low level quest" tracking option, that still requires you to run around to all of the different quest locations to find them.A forum thread like this one is a huge help, but still, there's no way in the game to really go back and easily find which ones we've missed. Even with a list like that, you might spend twenty minutes trying for a drop before realizing you've already done that quest. Blizzard promised us a little while back that they'd be changing the "discovery" mechanic (so that we'd be able to see on the map which areas we hadn't discovered for the achivements yet), and an option like that might be helpful for cleaning up old quest -- say that low level quest tracking might work over the entire map, or there might be a magic box in Dalaran that would have whatever quest items we might need.The good news here is that Blizzard has built a fair amount of leeway into the quest achievements -- you won't need every single one to get the points, so the more obscure drop-based quests can probably go undone without worry. But just like the World Exploration achievements, a little more help finding the quests we might have missed would go a long way.
WoW Patch 3.1 PTR: New Noble Garden Achievements
More patch 3.1 information, this time the Noble Garden achievement revamp. Noble Garden is an Easter like celebration, complete with eggs and all other sorts of festivities. The event has been rather mundane in the past, especially compared to some other events like the fire festival or Halloween, but that appears to no longer be the case.You might be wondering why the Playboy Bunny is displayed as this article's image.Well, one of the achievements for the Noble Garden is to "Use Spring Flowers to place rabbit ears upon females of at least 18th level." And that to me just screams getting the title "Hefner," and I mean, Kendra was 18. So it's all good.The list of Noble Garden achievements after the break.
Rumor: MS survey mentions non-gaming achievements
Loot Ninja dug up an alleged Microsoft sponsored Xbox 360 survey that brings up some interesting achievement topics. Specifically, questions that inquire about non-gaming achievements (like watching a certain amount of DVDs), having them unlock in-game content and even pitches the concept of having a virtual "in-game way to view your Achievements list." Similar to the proposed PlayStation 3 Trophy Room in Home.Seeing how much we adore the 360's achievements, we're willing to support most any plan (gaming related or not) to expand the number of ways we can increase our Gamerscore. Most of the survey questions are good ideas, except for the one that asks about swapping pop-up messages for environment based notifications. Bad idea. Removing the iconic bleep-bloop would be an unforgivable sin.[Via Kombo]
