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The OverAchiever: Hunting rares and you -- A guide to waiting around for months
Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, the thrills of real-life hunting (lots and lots of waiting around) are yours to be had in-game. Admit it: You still get a little thrill of excitement whenever you run across a rare mob. There's always that thought that this -- this -- is going to be the time you kill something with a silver dragon around its portrait and something fantastically rare drops. Maybe it'll be a world drop like the Lei of Lilies. Maybe it'll be one of the game's first epics, a Staff of Jordan. Maybe you'll go out of your way to kill something and find a plate Of the Boar shoulder on it, and you'll wonder why you bothered in the first place. But hunting rares is, as they say, the triumph of hope over experience. There are four achievements in the game concerned with hunting rare mobs, and they'll keep you running around Outland and Northrend for a while. These achievements might get a lot harder when Mists of Pandaria hits due to cross-realm zones. They're not exactly easy to do right now, but they certainly won't get easier if you have to compete against a raft of off-server players. While we're not 100% certain that that's how things will function, right now I would classify these as achievements to do sooner rather than later. The only reason they weren't listed in that column is because I didn't think of them, but a few canny readers made the Cross-Realm Zones + Rare Mobs = Oh Shiznit connection.
The OverAchiever: The best achievements for making gold
Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, if you're not the 1% already, you will be soon. By their very nature, most achievements either directly or indirectly cost you gold or are at least associated with some extremely unpleasant trips to the Auction House. We had a small discussion on just this point last week. But there are always exceptions, and there's a set of achievements in the game that will earn you a healthy nest egg if you care to go looking for them. From my perspective, stuff like Got My Mind On My Money doesn't count, as it's just a reflection of how much gold you're looting in the game and not in itself a means of earning income. I'm after the stuff from which you almost can't help but make gold. Concerning general achievements: Perhaps not surprisingly (given the overrepresentation of general achievements in last week's The OverAchiever: Got 100,000+ gold handy?), you're going to have a tough time finding a way to make money here. Most general achievements either cost you something (e.g., Into the Wild Blue Yonder) or are otherwise divorced from the game's financial side (e.g., Friend or Fowl?). I actually can't find a single achievement here that doesn't meet one of those two conditions. Look elsewhere, folks. You will not be making money from the general achievements slot.
The OverAchiever: The 25 most entertaining achievements, part 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. This week we continue our series on World of Warcraft's most entertaining achievements. This is the full series to date, if you're just catching up with 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 (today's post)
The OverAchiever: 5 lucrative achievements
Last week we discussed a set of achievements likely to drive the average player to the poorhouse. This week, in the spirit of consoling people who may not necessarily have a Traveler's Tundra Mammoth in their immediate future, I'd like to present a series of 5 achievements where at least one of the following is true: They're an unusual means of making gold in a way people wouldn't necessarily expect, or: It would be almost impossible not to make a pile of gold while doing them. Now, a disclaimer; the most obvious picks here would be achievements like Got My Mind On My Money or The Bread Winner, but they're more a record of your previous looting and questing rather than being something you really have to go for consciously. I'm on the lookout for slightly more interesting ways to grow rich from achievements that are not so directly concerned with moneymaking:
Northern Exposure Map helps you hunt rare game
One of the more time consuming set of achievements to get is the rare spawn killing achievement, if only because you need to compile information on every spawn, then head over to their spawn point and wait, then hope you grab the monster before someone passing through sees the Silver Dragon and gets the loot gleam in their eye. We can't really help you with the last two, that's up to you. What we can do is help you with the first. For the Northrend achievement, Frostbitten, that we have a map submitted by tipster Mike, player of Paksenarrion on Bonechewer. It's a hand color coded map of Northrend that shows where each require rare spawns. It's pretty basic, and Mike admits he took most of spawn information from sites like Wowhead and Thottbot and has only managed to find about half of them himself, but it's a nice start. Myself, I doubt I'll ever seriously pursue Frostbitten unless It's the absolute last achievement I have to work for or some such. Still, for those of you who seek the bragging rights that come with a massive luck-based time sink, maybe this map will help. And if nothing else, Northern Exposure only requires you kill one of the rare spawns, so knowing thier spawn points can at least help you keep an eye out while you quest and pick up that quick achievement.
