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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: 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: The 25 most entertaining achievements, part 2
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. Again, this isn't really a list of WoW's "best" achievements -- I think the term's too vague to be of any real use -- but I wanted to spotlight some of Blizzard's funniest, most compelling and most thought-provoking work. This is what we've done so far: OverAchiever: Pure Win The 25 most entertaining achievements, #25-21 The 25 most entertaining achievements, #20-16 (today's post)
The Classifieds: Where in the world is Sofa?
The Classifieds brings you weekly updates on news from around the WoW community. Have guild news or a Random Act of Uberness to share? Send it to TheClassifieds@wow.com. Waldo's for noobs. Carmen Sandiego belongs in the kiddie pool. The name of the game for deep-diving members of <Kumpania> (Turalyon [US-A]) is "Where in Azeroth is Sofa?" You see, <Kumpania> GM Cowpies is no couch potato -- he's got "Sofa," his alt, running all across Azeroth to find the ultimate hiding spot for a hide-and-go-seek contest awarding the lucky winner a cool 4,000 gold. Each day, contestants poke through clues posted on the guild forums and make their best guesses in guild chat. "If the guess is close enough to his location, he logs into the contest toon," explains guild officer Mellyne, "and if you're in line of sight, you win." A few sample clues: Sounds like a CLASSIC from 1973. When you figure out what these have in common, it will help you down the road: Benjamin Franklin, Ronald Reagan, Joan of Arc, John McCain, Hellen Keller, David Letterman, Phil Collins, Carol Burnett, Michelangelo, Barack Obama. It would be hard to put a square peg here. ... If I face NW of my location, I feel the bitter sting. You must "listen" and be "turned on" to get some clue as to my location. Sound like fun? <Kumpania> members think so, too. Despite a winner last week, everyone had so much fun that Cowpies/Sofa is starting another round with an all-new location and all-new clues. "We're not a raiding guild, we're a social/leveling guild that occasionally makes a Naxx run," Mellyne says. "This contest does wonderful things for us, bringing members together and getting them on our website. Even for the folks not participating, it's truly funny to watch everyone making their guesses." Kudos to Cowpies for donating the time, prize money and creative energy to make this four-year guild tradition such a resounding success. (And by the way, Sofa's location from the photo above is listed at the end of this week's column.) Let's crack open The Classifieds ...
The OverAchiever: The 25 most entertaining achievements, part 1
Back in May, we kicked around the idea of reversing gears after our series on "The 25 most evil achievements," and today I'd like to start the first in our series on ... well, I had trouble naming it. "Most fun achievements" is a bit awkward. "Best achievements?" Probably too vague, especially because we could all spend hours arguing over what constitutes a truly good achievement. "Least evil?" That doesn't do much to inspire readers. Finally I settled on "most entertaining achievements," and I hope that's a decent gloss on the series that will follow. Today we'll examine the first five, with more to follow next week. In a nutshell, I think these are the achievements that every WoW players should do, if only because they showcase some of Blizzard's best, most engaging or funniest work.
The OverAchiever: Guide to Midsummer Festival 2010 achievements
EDITOR'S NOTE: If you are looking for the updated 2011 guide, you can find it here. This year, the Midsummer Fire Festival will go live at 3:00 am server time Monday, June 21st and will run through 3:00 am Sunday, July 4th. While it doesn't outwardly appear to be a very time-intensive holiday -- the meta, awarding the Flame Warden title to Alliance players and Flame Keeper title to Horde players, consists of only six achievements -- three of them will have you trekking all over the world. We don't believe that the holiday has changed significantly from its 2009 incarnation (if it has, the information hasn't become available yet), but there have been a few changes to how you'll do some of the achievements, and the holiday's boss, Lord Ahune, also has an updated loot table. Consequently, I've updated and expanded our 2009 guide to reflect the changes we're aware of.
The OverAchiever: End of the Glory of the Hero
Welcome back to OverAchiever's Glory of the Hero guide. I honestly can't believe I started this series almost a year ago. Time flies when you're deliberately wiping Less-rabi over and over again, I guess. This is the full Glory of the Hero guide, organized by dungeon: Part I: Ahn'kahet Part II: Azjol-Nerub and Culling of Stratholme Part III: Drak'Tharon Keep Part IV: Gun'drak Part V: Halls of Lightning Part VI: Halls of Stone Part VII: The Nexus Part VIII: The Oculus Part IX: Utgarde Keep and Utgarde Pinnacle And today's guide, Part X: Violet Hold
The OverAchiever: The Glory of the Hero revolution
Greetings, fellow achievement hounds. This week we return to the Glory of the Hero series and tackle two dungeons at once: Utgarde Keep and Utgarde Pinnacle. This is the full Glory of the Hero guide, organized by dungeon: Part I: Ahn'kahet Part II: Azjol-Nerub and Culling of Stratholme Part III: Drak'Tharon Keep Part IV: Gun'drak Part V: Halls of Lightning Part VI: Halls of Stone Part VII: The Nexus Part VIII: The Oculus
The OverAchiever: Night of the Glory of the Hero
In 2009 I had started an OverAchiever series on completing Glory of the Hero that I wound up abandoning due to an influx of new holiday material. Because things are a little slow now while we're waiting for more information on Cataclysm and the final content patch, I thought it might be a good (albeit somewhat belated) time to revisit the series, especially because it's easy to get many of these achievements even in PUGs now. This is the Glory of the Hero series thus far, organized by dungeon: Part I: Ahn'kahet Part II: Azjol-Nerub and Culling of Stratholme Part III: Drak'Tharon Keep Part IV: Gun'drak Part V: Halls of Lightning Part VI: Halls of Stone Part VII: The Nexus And today we do everybody's favorite instance -- The Oculus! Get back here! You know perfectly well they're bribing us to stay with a goody bag these days.
The OverAchiever: Pure win
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. The following is an entirely arbitrary set of five achievements that I personally believe are a hoot. Eventually, I'd like to expand this in the same fashion as the evil achievements series, and I'd welcome any comments or suggestions on your own favorites. Namely, what makes certain achievements fun? Is there any achievement you've made a point of getting on each of your characters?
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.
The OverAchiever: The 25 most evil achievements finale
What are evil achievements? They're the soul-killing rep grinds, the raiding milestones that required sacrificing a farm animal to get, and even fun pastimes like battlegrounds into which a sizable dose of misery has been added. Eventually you just want to grab the nearest developer and shake him back and forth, screaming, "What the hell were you thinking?" Welcome back to our series on evil achievements, which has encompassed the following articles: Evil achievements: Spotlight on Justicar/Conqueror, The Immortal, and Accomplished Angler Evil achievements: The 25 most evil achievements, #25-16 Evil achievements: The 25 most evil achievements, #15-5 This week we'll examine the five most evil achievements in the game. Gird your loins and gulp your antacids, my brethren. You will find nothing but tears ahead.
Hunter beats Wrath of the Lich King
More evidence of the superiority of the hunter class has recently emerged: Caspi, hunter extraordinaire from the <Refuge> guild on the EU Taerar realm has officially beaten Wrath of the Lich King, having achieved 11,635 achievement points. This is no mean feat -- even though we reported just over a month ago that Caspi was getting close, the next most recent time we posted about something like this was last summer, when Zoltan had achieved 908 of 931 possible (at the time) achievements. Zoltan appears to be both in the same guild as Caspi, as well as very close to him in achievements points. I, for one, would like to take a moment and say on behalf of hunters everywhere to paladins everywhere: neener neener! Achievement points and achievements in general are an interesting mini-game, in that while you can earn points, there's nothing you can do to spend them. Still, it's a very difficult accomplishment that requires mastery of many other parts of the game. Some of the achievements that go into this take ridiculous amounts of skill, resources, luck and patience. Tip of the hat to Caspi!
The OverAchiever: Guide to Children's Week 2010 achievements
I had originally intended to run the last article in our continuing series on evil achievements this week but belatedly remembered that Children's Week starts this Sunday. Possibly I'd blocked it out due to the existence of School of Hard Knocks, but even that's not an excuse given that this miserable piece of work appears in my top five evil achievements article (and my own personal See Me In Hell list). As with other WoW holidays, Children's Week was heavily revised last year. We haven't seen any additional information for the 2010 holiday, so we're assuming that it's the same. Much of our 2009 guide had to be written on the fly as information trickled in from the realms that saw the holiday first, so for 2010, I've organized and expanded it past the cut. The Children's Week achievements and the meta For The Children are part of the year-long What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been, so you will want to get these done if you're working toward a violet proto-drake.
The OverAchiever: The 25 most evil achievements, Part 2
What are evil achievements? They're the soul-killing rep grinds, the raiding milestones that required sacrificing a farm animal to get, and even fun pastimes like battlegrounds into which a sizable dose of misery has been added. Eventually you just want to grab the nearest developer and shake him back and forth, screaming, "What the hell were you thinking?" This week we return to our series on evil achievements, which -- if you're just joining us -- started off with the two previous articles: Evil achievements: Spotlight on Justicar/Conqueror, The Immortal, and Accomplished Angler Evil achievements: The 25 most evil achievements, #25-16 This week we'll examine #15 to #6. To be frank, I would hesitate to characterize them as being in any strict order, as many are heavily dependent on RNG, and some will be easier for some classes or players than others. Next week, we'll be featuring what I consider to be the five most truly evil achievements.
The OverAchiever: The 25 most evil achievements, part 1
What are evil achievements? They're the soul-killing rep grinds, the raiding milestones that required sacrificing a farm animal to get, and even fun pasttimes like battlegrounds into which a sizable dose of misery has been added. Eventually you just want to grab the nearest developer and shake him back and forth, screaming, "What the hell were you thinking?" Last week I previewed three of the most evil achievements in the game, both to collect my own thoughts and to canvass commenters' opinions for a larger article. This week, I'd like to present the first set of evil achievements for your reading, wincing and antacid-chugging pleasure. A note on judging the "evil value" of achievements: I've been adding to this list for a while, and it's drawn from both the achievements we've covered in this column and some I've seen players complain about frequently in game. Obviously, there's no real way to quantify exactly how difficult or excruciating achievements are, so I'm going with the definition I gave above. Any incredibly difficult or RNG-saturated achievement made the short list, but I also tried to keep some unusual picks in mind. In this vein, there's an achievement in today's column that, while extremely easy by today's standards, was a screaming horror when it first debuted. I may wind up doing a list of honorable mentions as well. So, in no particular order, I am pleased to present World of Warcraft's 25 most evil achievements, starting with #25-16 this week.
The OverAchiever: Evil achievements
I love achievements, but sometimes you look at them and realize that somewhere on the development team lurks a sadist of the highest order -- and not just any sadist, but one with a business plan and an unwitting audience of 12 million players. What are evil achievements? They're the soul-killing rep grinds, the raiding milestones that required sacrificing a farm animal to get, and even fun pasttimes like battlegrounds into which a sizable dose of misery has been added. Eventually you just want to grab the nearest developer and shake him back and forth, screaming, "What the hell were you thinking?" Below are three of my top picks as the most evil achievements in the game, chosen via the scientific rationale of hating life and myself while doing them. They're selections from a lengthier OverAchiever I've been slowly assembling on the 25 most evil achievements in the game. While my main's a hair's breadth from the It's Over Nine Thousand! feat of strength, there are still quite a few achievements (many of them PvP-related) that she's missed, and I think it's pretty easy to underestimate the agony-value of achievements you haven't personally done. So, rather than simply ignore them, I'd love to get some commenting feedback on the worst, most annoying and most soul-destroying achievements of which you've been a part. Some may disagree on the ultimate difficulty of the following three achievements, but I remain undeterred from my belief that every single one has been milked from the angry teat of Satan himself.
The OverAchiever: Guide to Noblegarden 2010
Mercifully for those of us occupied with a big day of family events and chocolate this Easter, the Noblegarden holiday doesn't appear to have changed from its vastly improved form in 2009. No changes appeared on any of the PTRs over the past year, and as far as we're aware, there hasn't been any data-mined information on new items or bosses. Noblegarden will run this year from Sunday, April 4 (this Sunday) through Sunday, April 11. If you've never done Noblegarden before or only done its fairly low-key, pre-2009 version, it helps to know that Noble Gardener (the holiday's meta) is part of the year-long What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been achievement that rewards the 310% speed Violet Proto-Drake. What I've done here is collected our resources on Noblegarden into one easily navigable guide, updated and clarified where necessary, and also added some frequently asked questions that we received during last year's holiday. If you have any other questions, please drop them in the comments below, and I'll make sure they get answered. As with all WoW holidays, we'll be around as they go live to make sure any updates or changes are covered here!
The OverAchiever: More Accomplished Angler
This week we'll finish our look at the Accomplished Angler meta-achievement. As with all matters concerning WoW fishing, El's Anglin is your best friend here, and more particularly their page on fishing-related achievements (which also addresses a few we don't cover here, as they're not part of the Accomplished Angler meta). Continuing from our previous article on the first set of Accomplished Angler achievements: The Old Gnome and the Sea Apparently someone at Blizzard is a Hemingway enthusiast. At any rate, this achievement's easy as pie, and you'll get it after fishing successfully from any pool of fish in the game (although it does have to be fish -- it can't be the wreckage pools you need for The Scavenger). You can get this doing either of the following achievements --
The OverAchiever: Accomplished Angler
Once WoW's most disparaged profession, Fishing has experienced a resurgence in Wrath -- and it may get even better in Cataclysm, with developers studying fishing from other games like Animal Crossing in order to make it more fun. As far as I'm concerned, as long as they cook up another distraction like the Dalaran fountain in Cataclysm, I'll be happy. As with everything else concerning fishing in WoW, El'x Extreme Anglin' is your best buddy and a fantastic source of information on where to find fish, drop rates, information on pool spawns, and Fishing achievements. Accomplished Angler is a very work- and time-intensive meta-achievement, so I've taken the liberty of splitting this guide up. The first set of achievements you'll need: Grand Master Fisherman Sorry, folks, there's no real way to shorten this one; you've just got to keep fishing. One of the nice things about the profession is that you can level it anywhere -- the only penalty to leveling it in an area with higher "fishing skill" than you currently have is the amount of junk you'll catch versus actual fish. But on your way to Grand Master, you'll have put a lot of work in towards:
