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Where does he get those wonderful toys? Pandaren rares and loot
If there is one thing I have perfected in eight years of playing this game, it is filling my bags with useless stuff. I'm not talking about armor bits and pieces for transmog, or weapons with pretty glows, or bags full of crafting material like cloth or leather. No, I'm talking random baubles that will make you look like your neighbor. Or fling you in the air, without worry of what happens when you eventually hit the ground. You know, stuff. Everybody likes stuff. And who has the best stuff in Pandaria? Rare mobs, of course! But which rares have the good stuff? Which ones will let you summon a fleet of angered puppies in party hats to fight at your side? Or inexplicably get you ready for a day at the beach in the middle of a raid? Or turn you into a statue with no apparent purpose other than sitting there pretending to be a statue? You want useless stuff? Oh we've got all kinds of useless stuff for you, sorted by category.
Mists of Pandaria rare spawns offer unique challenges
Mists of Pandaria asks the ambiguous question, "What are we fighting for?" In the case of most players, it's loot and gold. There's a lot of fighting to be found in Mists, but in the case of Pandaria's rares, they offer something along with the gold and loot, something far more valuable -- experience. Not experience points, although you'll get it if you're in the process of leveling. No, the rares of Pandaria offer experience playing your individual class, and playing it well. There are several different types of rare champions scattered all over Pandaria -- hozen, jinyu, mantid, mogu, saurok, yaungol and pandaren. But these champions aren't like any rares you've seen on Azeroth. Rather than allowing players to simply stand there and beat the stuffing out of them, these rares have unique abilities that require tactics and skill to counter. Are they impossible to beat? Absolutely not, once you've figured out how to counter their bag of tricks. But you cannot simply stand and beat them up anymore. Movement is absolutely key, and so are stuns, interrupts, and other abilities that define a class. Rather than allowing you to just spam your main attack, you're forced to practice moving out of the way of attacks, which are clearly defined on the ground. You can't let them cast every spell, or you'll certainly die. And kiting is definitely helpful in most cases as well.
The OverAchiever: Guide to Bloody Rare
Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, we're back to flying endlessly around spawn points. So, how many of you are still with us after Frostbitten? My guess is that most of you are still circling Storm Peaks in a desperate bid at Vyragosa. My friends, I salute you -- but the rest of us are going to pack up and ship out to Outland. Bloody Rare tends to be slightly easier than Frostbitten for the simple reason that Outland is even emptier than Northrend, and there are no rares here competing for spawn times like Vyragosa and our old buddy, the Time-Lost Proto Drake. You'll still find a few people leveling their Wrath-era alts through Northrend, but the population of Outland players usually vanishes by Zangarmarsh or Terokkar. However, that's just been my experience, and as always, realms will differ. And no matter how empty Outland seems, there are still a few rares here that will drive you up a wall.
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.
Breakfast Topic: The game's most famous rare
I was taking my main through the new set of Northern Barrens quests recently when I found myself running across rare spawn mobs a lot. This in itself isn't all that surprising; you'll run across rare spawns pretty commonly whenever zones aren't occupied by eager levelers. I saw Elder Mystic Razorsnout, Swiftmane, and for the first time ever, Humar the Pridelord. Humar is well known as a popular hunter pet, and until Wrath, he was the only black lion in the game. And that got me to thinking: What is the game's most famous rare spawn? If I had to settle on one, my vote would be the Time-Lost Proto Drake, which has driven legions of players to the nuthouse in an endless struggle to find it, let alone kill it. Close behind would probably be Loque'nahak, another famous hunter pet. Curiously, it feels like most of the game's really well-known rare mobs are actually fairly recent additions to the game, although people who played during classic WoW might disagree.
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:
The Queue: Buzz buzz
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com'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.Today's edition of The Queue is a pretty short one, but it's an important one. I'm making a change to the format of this column, which will be explained in our very first question of the day. Why is it so short? When you read the answer to the question, you'll understand. I just ran out of steam after pulling that off. elstor asked... "What's with the music lately? Why did you have to start this?!" It's something we did for giggles once, people liked it, we kept doing it just for kicks. I'm pretty bored of it though! We should pick a new Whatever of the Day instead of songs. Extreme Stunt of the Day?Read this edition of The Queue while doing a kickflip out of a burning building and through the moving blades of a helicopter, then land in the middle of the ocean where you will wrestle a shark. While covered in bees.
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.
Seeking the Time-Lost Proto Drake
I don't know if we've mentioned this before, but even if we have, it's interesting enough to put out there again, I think. There is a dragon in the expansion that can be soloed, and drops a epic flying mount at 100% drop rate -- all you've got to do is find him. A few people have already nabbed the mount, and lots more are on the hunt right now. The mob in question is the Time-Lost Proto Drake: it's a rare elite spawn (but as I said, it's possible to solo it, especially at level 80) that shows up every six hours or so flying around the Storm Peaks. Unfortunately, none of the usual suspects have maps of where he's been seen yet, but we're hearing it's around the southern part of the zone. When he goes down, he'll drop the mount, a good chunk of gold, some Frostweave, and a random enchantment Talisman.An interesting tactic on Blizzard's part -- on the one hand, this is definitely a big change from the huge questlines and rep grind from the netherdrakes: just kill this one dragon and you're guaranteed the mount. On the other hand, the rare spawn rate, and the fact that it is a 100% drop rate means there'll be a lot of competition, at first anyway, for the kill. But the good news is that the odds will only get better -- if you're willing to do some dragon hunting for a few hours and have some keen eyes for what's in the air, you could pick up one of the coolest flying mounts yet.
