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The OverAchiever: The gold coins of the Dalaran fountain
Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, we finally get the last damn coin. In response to some questions from last week, yep -- we'll be heading for some Firelands achievements after this (and the conclusion of our Mountain O' Mounts guide), but I did want to finish our series on the Dalaran fountain first. The gold coins are arguably the most interesting of the bunch, or at least they concern most of the more significant lore figures in the World of Warcraft universe. As before, getting all of the coins will grant you A Penny For Your Thoughts, Silver in the City, and There's Gold in That There Fountain, with the completion of all three granting The Coin Master and one more notch toward Accomplished Angler. EDIT: This guide is now finished! You can find the full series here: The OverAchiever: Dalaran's magic fountain The OverAchiever: The silver coins of the Dalaran fountain The OverAchiever: The gold coins of the Dalaran fountain
The OverAchiever: The silver coins of the Dalaran fountain
Every Thursday, The OverAchiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, we're still after that last coin from the Eventide fountain. Welcome back, folks. We return this week to the next installment of our miniseries on the Dalaran fountain's magic coins. Getting all of the coins will grant you A Penny For Your Thoughts, Silver in the City, and There's Gold in That There Fountain, with the completion of all three granting The Coin Master and one more notch toward Accomplished Angler. It's really in the set of silver coins that you get a sense for just how dangerous this fountain can actually be. Most of the people who tossed coins into it never saw their wishes come true. Of those who did, most probably wished they never had. Why is this fountain's existence even tolerated by Dalaran's municipal services? Is it considered an historical artifact or something? EDIT: This guide is now finished! You can find the full series here: The OverAchiever: Dalaran's magic fountain The OverAchiever: The silver coins of the Dalaran fountain The OverAchiever: The gold coins of the Dalaran fountain
The OverAchiever: Dalaran's magic fountain
Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, we detour back to Dalaran with a fishing pole in hand. I'm actually writing this on July 4, so I'm in the mood for a little fun while we're waiting for the dust from patch 4.2 to settle. If you've been around the site before, you've probably seen my worshipful odes to the Dalaran fountain, which I still think was one of the best and most brilliantly eccentric parts of Wrath of the Lich King. (I think archaeology's very similar overall, even if Blizzard's still working out the kinks.) While I took a look at some of the coins almost three years ago during the Wrath beta, it occurred to me recently that we never actually did a guide to them and their importance to WoW's mythology. So here's the deal: You're in a magic city. The city has a magic fountain. Lots of very important, somewhat important, and unimportant people in the world made wishes and tossed coins into the fountain, and the fountain (being magic) remembered them. Some of the wishes are funny, many of them are sad, many are quite thought-provoking, and a few are simply tongue-in-cheek references to the Warcraft universe (Archimonde's is probably the standout here). If you fish all of them up, you'll get A Penny For Your Thoughts, Silver in the City, and There's Gold in That There Fountain, with the completion of all three granting The Coin Master. So if you're going for the fishing meta Accomplished Angler (ha ha! sucker!), you'll need the coins even if you're not interested in the lore behind them. You monster. Warning: If you're still playing your way through The Burning Crusade and Wrath content, there are a lot of lore spoilers in here, so be careful. EDIT: This guide is now finished! You can find the full series here: The OverAchiever: Dalaran's magic fountain The OverAchiever: The silver coins of the Dalaran fountain The OverAchiever: The gold coins of the Dalaran fountain
The OverAchiever: The good, the bad, the ugly, and the weird
Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, we reminisce on that auld lang syne ... that nobody really misses. It occurred to me recently that we've never really done a retrospective piece on achievements. Sure, we've rounded up stuff like entertaining achievements and evil achievements, but we've never really looked at their impact on the game as a whole. There's an article in that, but it won't be this one. New Year's Eve is tomorrow, and I'm in the mood for some brainless fun. While I was writing this article, a number of the achievements that came to mind were the product of tier 7 raids, and I think I know why. Wrath raiding achievements were the first time Blizzard had experimented with their inclusion in raid content, and the implementation occasionally had some bizarre results. There was also the pressure cooker of having to finish Glory of the Raider before the rewards disappeared (a very belated announcement), and there was never that sense of urgency with Ulduar or Icecrown achievements. Anyway, let me know what you think.
The OverAchiever: The 25 most entertaining achievements #5-3
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. Today we're going to get close to finishing our series on World of Warcraft's 25 most entertaining achievements. This was originally supposed to be #5 through #1, but ... well, I think the last five achievements are all complete knockouts, so I devoted a bit more time to each. This is the full series, if you're catching up: OverAchiever: Pure Win The 25 most entertaining achievements, #25-21 The 25 most entertaining achievements, #20-16 The 25 most entertaining achievements, #15-11 The 25 most entertaining achievements, #10-6 and today's post, the 25 most entertaining achievements finale, #5-3
The OverAchiever: More Accomplished Angler
This week we'll finish our look at the Accomplished Angler meta-achievement. As with all matters concerning WoW fishing, El's Anglin is your best friend here, and more particularly their page on fishing-related achievements (which also addresses a few we don't cover here, as they're not part of the Accomplished Angler meta). Continuing from our previous article on the first set of Accomplished Angler achievements: The Old Gnome and the Sea Apparently someone at Blizzard is a Hemingway enthusiast. At any rate, this achievement's easy as pie, and you'll get it after fishing successfully from any pool of fish in the game (although it does have to be fish -- it can't be the wreckage pools you need for The Scavenger). You can get this doing either of the following achievements --
The OverAchiever: 5 of the best lore-related achievements
Let's be honest; the best lore-related achievement is without question Loremaster, which requires you to do the vast majority of the game's quests. But that's pretty self-evident -- "To get the best lore experience in-game, do the quests, which contain virtually all of the actual lore!" -- and thus kind of a cop-out from my perspective. So what I'm going to do with this edition of OverAchiever is pointedly ignore the fact that Loremaster is the most important thing you should do as a dedicated lore junkie, and turn to some other options that tend to be overlooked. As with our article on Twenty-Five Tabards, this is not an exhaustive guide on how to do each achievement, but simply a starting point if you're either interested in Azeroth's history, or interested in your character becoming more deeply involved in the developing story. As an early warning, 1 of the following 5 achievements is no longer doable, but I've decided to include it as I think the inability to do it at this point in time could be considered part of Azerothian history.
Breakfast Topic: Do you treat Azeroth as a virtual extension of the real world?
It never ceases to amaze me how huge Azeroth is. As I've leveled and explored, installed expansions and patches, that wonder has never left me. But of course, one of the reasons I like WoW so much is it's not all about fighting and killing things twenty times larger than me. This week I've been fishing in the Dalaran fountain, along with half of my server. No, don't worry, this is not going to be a repeat of our earlier Breakfast Topic, even if It's a skill I've been trying to level for ages. So I'm fishing and I suddenly see my GM waving at me, dressed in her fishing gear (which also seems to include an Elegant Dress). So I invite, we get on voice chat and start talking while we fish, discussing everything from our real lives to the most recent wipe on Sapphiron. It takes me back to the days in my previous guild where I would meet a friend of mine to do some questing and then we would retire to a tavern, buy drinks, find chairs and chat over voice. Considering she lived four hours from me, it was the closest we could get to a girl's night out in the pub. It's little things like this which make me thinks WoW is not just a game, it's a virtual world. More often than not, I log on not to play but to chat with friends who are scattered across Europe. Do any of you out there treat WoW as a virtual extension of the real world? Do you meet friends for a night out or use voice chat in lieu of a telephone call or in-game mail over email? Speak up, constant readers, and drop your comments in the usual place.
Breakfast Topic: Amazing grays
I picked up an interesting gray item in Wintergrasp the other day -- the Broken U.L.O.S.E. Button. Players who've played Alterac Valley will recognize it as the answer to the zone's gray drop, the Broken I.W.I.N. button. Even the flavor text complimented each other and added more whimsy to the already humorous items. One of the most memorable junk items from The Burning Crusade was The Stoppable Force, a parody of another Alterac Valley item, the epic Unstoppable Force.My wife enjoys fishing not just for the relaxing aspect but definitely for the profit. Take, for example, the Goldenscale Vendorfish. The name speaks for itself, as this piece of inedible junk sells for 6 Gold. That's still not her favorite gray item, though. The Broken Engine Part is another thing that anglers can get from fishing, and sells for 10 Gold. Not bad, huh? In Patch 3.1, though, Blizzard ups the ante with Porcelain Bell, a gray item that comes randomly from the Bag of Fishing Treasures. Lucky fishermen can sell this junk item for a pocket-fattening 100 Gold!Of course, Wrath of the Lich King introuduced us to a plethora of fountain coins, a lot of which are gray items. Among other things, I think Blizzard does an excellent job of infusing flavor into the game with junk items. There are over a thousand gray items that it's kind of difficult to pick just one. From puns like A Frayed Knot to lore-infused junk like the Dalaran coins to plain silly stuff like the Romance Novel series, there's just a lot of cool things going on with grays. What are your favorite or most memorable grays?
The wishing fountain
I have a few alts on Sisters of Elune and occasionally browse their realm forums for news. I'm glad I did last night, because I ran across a thread that was surprisingly absorbing. You may remember a few articles we ran way back during Wrath's beta about the Dalaran fountain and the coins you can fish up there. They're brilliant, albeit tiny, little insights into the lore concerning classic characters in Warcraft, and incidentally they're also the subject of their own achievement.The forum thread in question is about the coins your character would toss into the wishing fountain during or after their tenure in Wrath. Sisters of Elune is an RP realm, so naturally people came up with a lot of funny, poignant, and elegantly minimalist coins that reflected their character's history or possible future. The whole thread's great, but I particularly liked these:
Ask a Beta Tester: Dalaran coins, environment effects, and AoE tanking
I ran into two common questions last night on the Dalaran coin post, so I thought I'd start off by answering those here. I apologize if we haven't yet gotten to everyone's questions; most of them, like Gurluas' question concerning The Missing Diplomat and the high elves in Northrend, we're just not 100% sure of the answer to yet, but I'll keep trying. Keyra asks...Just curious...the gold coins all have "Use: Throw this coin back into the Dalaran fountain", yet I've seen people commenting (as well as the author) that they'll carry the coin in their packs. What happens when/if you throw the coin back in?When you toss a gold coin back into the fountain, you gain the "Lucky" buff for 2 minutes, increasing your chance to fish up any and all coins from the fountain (rather than fishing hooks or goldfish). You don't have to toss them back in if you don't want to, in which case they'll just occupy a bag slot like anything else, or you can sell them to a vendor (not for much). But most people throw the coin/s back in because fishing the coin up is enough to give you the Achievement for getting it. Particular coins would be carried solely for personal or sentimental reasons, i.e. I can definitely appreciate the irony and RP value of grimly hunting Arthas down like a dog while carrying a symbol of Sylvanas' wasted hopes.Rexigar asks...Question though, do we have to keep the coins for the achievement or does it count when we throw it back in?It counts as of the moment you've fished it up. No matter what you do with it afterwards, the Achievement's yours. The same mechanic is true of everything else; once the game "knows" you've done something and an Achievement's gained, nothing can take it away.
The funny, morbid, and sad coins of the Dalaran fountain
Level up fishing so you can fish in the Dalaran fountain. I'm serious. This completely nonsensible and illogical statement is brought to you by the 53 tiny lore moments you'll get if you'll just sit yourself down somewhere and level up fishing. Yes, it's boring having to fish up dozens of useless fish to get to the good stuff in Outland and Northrend. Yes, you could be farming up gold or materials that will help you level in Wrath. I don't care. Go fish.You see, while you'll be fishing up a lot of equally useless fish in the Dalaran fountain, you'll also get coins. No, not in the sense that you'll be fishing up ingame money, but you'll fish up coins tossed into the fountain of this very old city by 53 people, many of whom will be known to you if you've played the game for any length of time. Some of them, perhaps most of them, are funny. Some are serious. Some are heartbreaking. I admit to a touch of being a lore geek, and it was wonderful being allowed a peek into the irreverent or hopeful or sad heads of Jaina Proudmoore, Thrall, or Stalvan Mistmantle. It is idiosyncratic little touches like this that make WoW hopelessly fun to play, and it is my fondest wish that whatever person at Blizzard who thought this up is pulled off whatever they're doing right now and chained to a desk until they come up with more stuff like this.So, if you don't do anything else with your time between patch 3.02 hitting and Wrath going live...level up fishing so you can fish in the Dalaran fountain. But don't read any further if you're not interested in Wrath spoilers, because there are a few here...
