for-the-alliance
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Complete your For the Alliance achievement before patch 5.4
Last week, with the help of a great group of folks, I was able to complete the For the Alliance! achievement on my priest. But wait... Garrosh won't be around for much longer. I logged onto the PTR to visit Grommash Hold to see who's inside. Spoilers: It's empty. Well, there are a few of the standard NPCs around, including the Archaeology trainer, but there's no warchief to be found. Not unexpected. At this point in the storyline, Garrosh is being the ultimate butt and everyone's pretty distracted. What does this mean for Alliance looking to complete the For the Alliance! achievement if there's no Garrosh? Sure, there will be a new leader to kill, but we really can't guess when the achievement will be updated once patch 5.4 hits. If you can gather a group before then, do so! It's unfortunate that Orgrimmar can't be cross-realmed -- this part of the achievement must be completed with people from your server. To avoid being caught and overrun, arrange the raid via social media or within your guild. Word spreads quickly when these runs go public. Good luck!
The Queue: O Warchief! My Warchief!
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. Why is the Queue late!? The sky is falling! What will I do at work!? I'm bored! Sorry about that. Turns out time flies when you're making BlizzCon plans. kurtsmith1983 asked: Weird question if we do end up killing garrosh in next raid instead of just leaving him hurt and in prison. Will we get the achievment for slaying the warchief and have it count towards For the Alliance achievment cause i want my bear mount
The OverAchiever: In which Alliance has it much worse than Horde
Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, we are grateful to play Horde. This past week, I was tabbed out of the game writing an OverAchiever on Bloody Rare as a follow-up to our guide on Northern Exposure when something interesting started happening in the background. In the sliver of laptop screen dedicated to WoW, the chat channels exploded with warnings that the Alliance was attacking Orgrimmar. Given that the Midsummer Fire Festival is still going on with lots of players busy stealing enemy fires, this isn't particularly unusual. I shrugged and went back to work. And yet, the warnings just kept coming. Curious, I tabbed back into the game to discover that a full 40-man Alliance raid was fighting its way to Garrosh Hellscream. Other players said that none of the other Horde leaders had been attacked, so I can only assume the raid was starting For the Alliance! with the toughest foe among them. Now, Garrosh is by no stretch of the imagination anywhere near as popular as Thrall was, but lots of Horde players are still willing to defend him from attack because, well, he's got his moments. Orgrimmar's central district quickly became a lagfest of epic proportions as dozens of players who'd been gossiping in trade or loitering around the Auction House rushed to defend Garrosh. The Alliance raid was ultimately defeated, but they rallied and tried again -- unsuccessfully -- an hour later. This was the first of three days that I saw the same Alliance raid desperately trying to kill Garrosh, and something started to niggle at me by day two. Namely, For the Alliance! and For the Horde! are among the very few achievements that are significantly tougher if you play one faction over the other.
The OverAchiever: Mountain O' Mounts from achievements
Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, 10 little points are all that stand between us and a new ... something. Many of the mounts this week be familiar to you if you've read The OverAchiever: Pimp Thy Ride, which I wrote before the Cataclysm content patch with an eye toward the number of people who wanted to slap a 310% mount on their toons before it had to be trained. Sadly, none of the mounts described in that article, barring one, will grant Master Riding for free now. Also read: Combining The Ambassador and Mountain O' Mounts Mountain O' Mounts in Outland Mountain O' Mounts in Northrend Mountain O' Mounts in 5-man dungeons Mountain O' Mounts in raids
The OverAchiever: The 25 most entertaining achievements, part 4
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. We continue our series on World of Warcraft's most entertaining achievements this week, and this is the full series if you're just joining 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 The 25 most entertaining achievements, #10-6 (today's post)
Knitted mitts for the Alliance
We are so glad we get to use bigger pictures now, especially when they show off something this cool. Mirthical made these Alliance-branded fingerless mitts (actually, we're not sure that lion is an official Alliance logo, but he's cute enough) for a friend of hers who was such a big Warcraft fan that she put an Alliance crest on her wedding cake, too.The design is great, though -- she borrowed the cuff look from a neckwarmer, and that lion came from a sticker someone else made. We're not sure why you'd wear open gloves like that (probably a girly thing), but even if they aren't super warm, they do at least look comfy. And Alliance have to represent when they can, we guess. Grab your... mittens and fight the Horde?
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.
Breakfast Topic: The not-so-easy achievements
If you're like many of us, you've probably looked at the Achievement system coming to the game in patch 3.02, picked a few favorites, and considered getting some of them done before Wrath hits and all hell breaks loose. The last few weeks before an expansion tend to be relatively relaxed and quiet, leaving you with plenty of time to, say, Explore Kalimdor, visit zones you may have missed for 1500 Quests, or just convince more factions that you're really not so bad.Some Achievements, however, are a little tougher, particularly those that will reward your character with a special title or mount. While I'm not sure I want to think about what something like For the Alliance! is going to be like, the one that I'm most concerned about is the Fishing Diplomat one. It's an an achievement needed for Accomplished Angler, and requires you to fish something up in both Orgrimmar and Stormwind. My main is a Tauren Druid, so fishing anything in Orgrimmar is a piece of cake. Stormwind, less so. While I can stealth into the city easily enough, fishing necessarily leaves you exposed for a period of 15-20 seconds. I don't think it'd bother me as much as it does if it weren't for the team of bored Alliance on my realm who typically camp quest objectives during holiday events. While I somehow doubt they've got the numbers or inclination to cover every inch of the Stormwind canals, I'm equally doubtful that my eight-foot cow's presence in the city will go unnoticed.I don't really have that much to worry about compared to the Hordies going after Old Ironjaw (in Ironforge) or Alliance going after Old Crafty (in Orgrimmar) for the Old Ironjaw and Old Crafty achievements respectively (what sadist came up with the idea of having you fish for a 0.1% drop in an enemy city?), but one thing's certain: some achievements are going to be more taxing than others.
New achievements and mount rewards in beta build 8962
Like most Wrath beta patches, build 8962 comes packing new achievements. This patch doesn't have a massive list like some previous builds, but what it does have is pretty cool: Leading the Cavalry - Obtain 75 mounts, be rewarded with an Albino Drake. For the Alliance! - Slay the leaders of the Horde, be rewarded with a Black War Bear. For the Horde! - Slay the leaders of the Alliance, be rewarded with a Black War Bear. Glory of the Hero - Complete all of the Heroic Dungeon achievements, be rewarded with a Red Proto-Drake. Glory of the Raider - Complete the Normal Difficulty raid achievements, be rewarded with a Plagued Proto-Drake. Heroic: Glory of the Raider - Complete the Heroic Difficulty raid achievements, be rewarded wtih a Black Proto-Drake. What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been - Complete the World Event achievements, be rewarded with a Violet Proto-Drake. (Note: World events means holidays here, like Brewfest, not things like the Ahn'qiraj gate event.) The rewards are definitely the most noteworthy part of this. Wrath of the Lich King is introducing a ton of new mounts, so it won't surprise me to see massive diversity in what people are using after the expansion has been out for awhile. There are plenty that come from things other than Achievements as well, but we'll get to those later.[ via MMO-Champion ]
New PvP title and mount
Tigole announced a slight change to PvP Achievements and excited more than a few people -- myself included -- by noting that players who complete the Achievements For The Horde! and For The Alliance! will be rewarded a Black War Bear. Players who manage to reach the respectable 100,000 Honorable Kill plateau will unlock the 'of the Horde' and 'of the Alliance' titles. Currently in Beta, slaying four enemy faction leaders award the title while getting 100k HK gave no rewards.While the Amani War Bear will be unattainable when Patch 3.0 hits, but it seems like there might just be a replacement -- will guilds be organizing these new 'bear runs'? I certainly hope so. I was never a fan of the Amani War Bear, or bears as mounts in general, but a PvP mount that rewards killing all four of the opposing faction's leaders? Oh man. Where do I sign up? I certainly hope that the mount will sport a different, non-troll armor model as well as faction insignias and the requisite reds or blues. These new bear mounts might just be incentive enough to get players to raid enemy cities and, hopefully, get to 100k HK along the way.
The Art of War(craft): World PvP Achievements
Ah, world PvP. In many ways, world PvP can be considered the purest form of PvP because when it happens -- if it's not done in association with a quest or other form of reward -- it is PvP for the sake of PvP. Some of the best times I've ever had doing PvP was in Hillsbrad Foothills, defending Tarren Mill and attacking Southshore. I miss the times when the World Defense channel would be flooded by calls to defend the Crossroads. There's also something very pure about coming to the aid of a faction leader under assault. And when Wrath of the Lich King finally arrives, I have a good feeling it's going to happen a lot more often.I wrote about the many Achievements related to PvP, such as the retroactive Achievements that you can work on before Patch 3.0 hits, as well as the numerous Battlegrounds Achievements. Although PvP for the sake of PvP is extremely fun, Achievements will actually reward something that previously never got anything more than bragging rights and a silly grin. Today we'll look at the numerous Achievements that work to encourage world PvP.
Wherefore art thou faction PvP gear?
Okay, so back when the old Grand Marshal and Warlord PvP sets were scrapped in favor of Gladiator gear for honor, I was actually pretty dismayed, but not for the same reason as most others. I wasn't really concerned about "Welfare Epics" or "AFKavers" simply standing at the entrance of AV and getting good gear because of it. I was sad because the look of the sets was going away! Yeah, that my sound a bit crazy, but bear with me for a bit, let me explain myself.
