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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)
The OverAchiever: Endangered achievements
With Cataclysm news ramping up lately, one of the things I've been thinking about is the possibility of certain achievements going bye-bye. While achievements have only been in the game since patch 3.0.2, we've already seen a few of them (and/or their rewards) go to that big MMORPG in the sky. Blizzard's tended to do this when an achievement would simply have been too easy past a certain point, or -- as with Timear Foresees -- when game changes rendered them obsolete. Below are four achievements that I think might be facing the firing squad as we ramp up to Cataclysm. (I'm sure there are more, but these were just the ones that occurred to me first.) I'll be revisiting this article later to see if I was correct about any of them.
Missing help for World Explorers
This post by homestar over on WoW Ladies LJ reminds me of an issue we'd let drop by the wayside: where exactly is that help that World Explorers were supposed to get? Right now, as you move around the world trying to pick up the World Explorer achievement (and title), there's no real way to tell exactly what places you've explored and which you haven't. Obviously, the map colors in as you wander around, but it's not so granular that you can tell exactly where you need to go, so if there's only one small location you have to visit, as with homestar, you end up wandering around desperately trying to find that one little place you haven't hit yet.The good news is that Blizzard already mentioned we would get help for this. The bad news is that it was over a year ago. Bornakk said that we'd have a way to tell on the map just where locations had been discovered and where they hadn't been seen yet, but since then we haven't really heard anything more about it. Obviously, a few things have been added to the maps, including quest icons, and instance maps have been added as well, but where's the Explorer help?At this point. you have to think that Blizzard has moved on -- maybe whatever update Bornakk was hinting at did make it into the game and we just didn't notice it. But more likely, they couldn't figure out a good way to do this, didn't have a lot of call for it, and decided to spend the time on something else. Especially with the upcoming revamp of old maps, maybe we'll see maps that are a little more helpful in terms of getting the full Explorer achievement.
[1.Local]: I can haz in-jokes
Reader comments -- ahh, yes, the juicy goodness following a meaty post. [1.Local] ducks past the swinging doors to see what readers have been chatting about in the back room over the past week.The green-eyed loot monster contemplating readers from the top of this week's We Have a Tabard appeared to be the source of some agitation for one reader. "I wish each and every person who ever used an 'I can haz' joke was firebombed into oblivion, including the author of this story who posted that braindead image," complained Preston. "Internet memes are some of the dumbest trends on the planet."Readers seemed to feel otherwise, peppering this week's comments with insider jokes, geek references, internet memes and a generally wry outlook on WoW and life. Join hands around the bonfire, boys and girls, and let us indulge in an entire post's worth of internet memes and dumb trends ... courtesy of our very own readers.
Dwarf levels solely by exploring, gains World Explorer at level 17
Here's a cute story to brighten up your Sunday. Tenen, a Dwarf Warrior in Modan Co on Moon Guard, decided that he would start at level one and only explore. No quests, no killing mobs, no PvP. Just exploration. Seventeen levels later, he's explored every single outdoor zone in the game, and completed the World Explorer achievement. So if you wanted to know how much XP you could get just from exploring, there's your answer. It took four days of playtime to accomplish. Of course, he couldn't do it all on his own; aside from the ravenous mobs, some areas are simply inaccessible without a flying mount. He got some summoning help from a cooperative Warlock. The Charge skill was also apparently useful in getting to some hard-to-reach places. Congrats to Tenen! It's always nice to see players do something a little different. [Thanks, Frijona]
The Daily Quest: Of World Achievers, Hit-capped skullduggery and Priestly Discipline
We here at WoW Insider are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. The solo-oriented WoW Alone blog details 12 Tips to Completing the World Explorer Achievement. You'll have to scroll down the post to get to the tips. The Ailis in Hunterland blog has posted A Guide to Gearing Your Enhancement Shaman for Raiding. This is the first of four planned posts. Zaltu at One Rogue's Journey tackles two reader submitted questions: the importance of being poison hit-capped and gemming for Expertise. Mystic Chicanery looks at the history of Warlock class balance and where it's headed in 3.1 including best specs, best pets, spell hit rating and AddOns. The Shadow Weaving Priest blog has a three part series on Discipline Priests: How to assess Disc Healing Overhealing and the Disc Priest Calculating Shields and Absorption Submit a guide, post, podcast or resource for inclusion in TDQ and we'll consider it for a future post. Click here to submit a link to TDQ
World Explorers to get some help with achievement
Demiron of the US-Elune server bought forth a concern about the new achievement system on the official forums recently: How does a World Explorer get all the world explored, especially the enemy faction capitals and cities? I'd like to assure Demiron and people like him that it really is possible. Alex even wrote a nice handy mini-guide to sneaking into the cities to get Crown of the Fire Festival which should work for exploring too. If you're not a stealth class, it can be harder, but knowing the location of a few back doors and having an epic mount speedy enough to outrun guards can help a lot in those cases. One other concern for a World Explorer, though, is figuring out exactly where they have and haven't been, and for that, Bornakk did drop a nice little hint in the thread: There will be a way to see which places you haven't explored so that you know where to go to get that shiny new achievement ding. More help for achievements is certainly a good thing, and should help those of us scatterbrained enough that we can't quite remember if we covered every square inch of Stranglethorn or not. Hopefully, this type of help can extend to other achievements as well, so you don't have to figure out whether you have 500 daily quests to go for that achievement, or only 50.
