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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.
Shifting Perspectives: The Druid of 2008
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week, our author is completely spaced out on cold medication, and is somewhat concerned that her raid performance has improved under the circumstances.The time has come (the Allie said)To talk of many things.Of Roots and Bash and Travel Form,And Strength (which scales with Kings).Why Tauren cat form sucks so hard,And whether trees have wings!And, yes, before anyone asks, I'm tripping on too much cough syrup and ibuprofen after receiving a belated viral Christmas gift from a relative. So I'll just put this out there right now; this column's probably on the weird side. I took a long look at all three Druid specs over 2008 and saw a few sad things, a few happy things, a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants, and now I'm channeling the famous Mary Tyler Moore episode "Chuckles Bites the Dust," and that has to stop because I do not believe Mary Tyler Moore ever played a Druid.If you're completely uninterested in reading an account of any spec that's not your own -- although that would make me weep into my little cup of generic label cough syrup -- here's a set of quick links to each: Balance Feral Resto
SK Gaming interview: Kil'jaeden, Sunwell, and why to stack +haste
var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/pc_games/WoW_Insider_interviews_top_World_of_Warcraft_raider'; Recently WoW Insider caught up with Neg, a restoration-specced Orc Shaman who raided with Nihilum before leaving recently for SK Gaming. An experienced player who has seen all of Blizzard's raid content, from Molten Core through Sunwell Plateau, Neg's talked to us previously about high-end raiding and what Sunwell was like on the PTR. As he's become one of a small group of raiders worldwide to finish the whole zone, we've asked him some follow-up questions about guild stability during the transition to Wrath, what Sunwell was like going live, why there are so many Shaman nowadays in high-end raiding, and the best and worst raid content on offer in WoW.If you didn't catch our first interview with Neg, you can find that here, but read on for an inside look at the toughest raiding you'll find in the game:
SK release Kil'jaeden video
As promised, SK Gaming have just released their video of their world-first kill of Kil'jaeden. They call this fight "all about absolute perfection in terms of execution," and "definitely the hardest boss ever made and an impressive final boss." Of course, this video contains full spoilers for the KJ fight. I'm just going to assume SK's site will go down, so I'm embedding it from Filefront above, and linking to WarcraftMovies if you want to download it. It's shot from five points of view, though SK promises that it is not "messy" -- hemo rogue, resto shaman, enhancement shaman, and two different destro warlocks. And since people are always curious, the music used in the video is, according to SK: Airbase - Ocean Realm Alex M.O.R.P.H. - Walk the Edge (B2B Woody Van Eyden Mix) To download in glorious 1680x1050 WMV, head on over to WarcraftMovies (edit: apparently a WCM premium account is required to download the full-res version). An H.264 version is due in a few days.Edit 2: Here's a high-quality version at Filefront; thanks, bdew.
Kil'jaeden's Soul Flay hotfixed
Let's give a quick timeline on what's happened with respect to Kil'jaeden (as a boss) so far in WoW. When patch 2.4 went live, on March 25th (26th in Europe), the Sunwell Plateau, the 25-player raid of which KJ is the last boss, was opened, but several "magical gates" were interposed between would-be KJ-killers and the demon himself. The last of these gates, giving access to KJ, was opened on May 20th/21st. SK Gaming got the world-first kill on him on the 24th, and Method and Nihilum quickly followed; and Deus Vox got the US first on the 27th, with Exodus following the day after (thanks, hyos). Nobody else has killed him, as far as I (and WowJutsu) know.That may or may not be about to change, due to a new hotfix just implemented last night. According to Lead Encounter Designer Daelo, a change has been made to KJ's Soul Flay ability. It now uses "a much simpler rule" to determine its target: the target of Soul Flay is the player with highest threat against KJ (typically the main tank, I would think). Daelo notes that this is not intended to make the encounter easier nor mor difficult, but rather to produce "a more consistent, more understandable, and more enjoyable Kil'jaeden fight." Folks who have done this fight, do you think this is a good description of the change? Or is it a nerf, in the long tradition of nerfing raid bosses?
Final Sunwell gates open today in the US
I'm surprised it took this long for a tip to come in to us about this: the final gate in Sunwell Plateau is open today on the North American realms. This means all the raiding guilds who can down M'uru now have a chance to test their skills against Kil'jaeden, boss of the Burning Legion and, more than likely, the final baddie of The Burning Crusade. How long until we see the world-first Kil'jaeden kill? The gates should probably open for the European realms tomorrow, which is their maintenance day.Not much is known for sure about the fight, since nobody's actually done it yet -- the PTR testers of patch 2.4 didn't manage to down M'uru, and if they had the gates probably wouldn't have been open -- but we do have some pretty solid speculation on what raiders might be rewarded with when they eventually do manage to drop the guy. And yes, I am very happy that I get to use that image of KJ in a top hat again.[Thanks, Desustorm]
An illustrated guide to Kil'jaeden's hats
With M'uru now apparently substantially nerfed, and several guilds having been past him for a few weeks anyway, the top guilds are now biding their time until they can face off against Kil'jaeden himself. Before they can do that, one last Sunwell Plateau gate needs to be opened; my guess on when that will happen is May 27, two weeks from yesterday, but no-one knows for sure. So I thought I'd jump the gun a little and give you all a preview of the loot we should be able to expect from what will almost certainly be the final raid boss of The Burning Crusade, thanks to MMO-Champion. None of this is confirmed, of course, because nobody has actually fought him yet, but given the item levels, and the fact that we haven't seen them anywhere else yet, we can be pretty sure these are KJ drops. And an odd number of them are helms.%Gallery-22869%
