wow-achievements
Latest
Upload and browse screenshots at WoW Screenshots
From the makers of WoW Achievements comes a new site that's designed to collect and catalog nothing but screenshots from the game. WoW/Screenshots (clever) is a new site that's super barebones right now -- all you can do is view a few different uploaded screenshots or jump in and upload your own. But obviously, there's a lot of potential there -- if they can assign a rating system to screenshots, then you could have a Wowbash-style Top 100, with extra cool shots to check out from around the game. The website also says they're planning to put together monthly contests as well, so right now the idea just seems to be to populate the database, with the best entries coming to the top later.Of course, this isn't the only project designed to archive some of Azeroth's beauty -- we talked about the wallpaper project the other week (though that's more a project designed to hit every individual zone), and of course our great Around Azeroth daily feature has collected tons of great pictures from the game. But this seems like an interesting crowd-sourced way to do it, and with the WoW-Achievements folks behind the idea, it'll be fun to see what they come up with.
The OverAchiever: Voyage of the Glory of the Hero
98 out of 100 people at that party would walk over my corpse for free gum. -- "Veronica Mars." Ah, poor Veronica; so young, and yet so...correct. Well, let's not dwell on that for too long, because we've got more heroics to steamroll in pursuit of a badass mount. If you're just joining us or want a quick set of links, here's what we've covered in our Glory of the Hero series so far: 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 Let's get cracking. Head west, young player!
The Queue: Wherein The Queue has as much consistency as Smodcast
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky will be your host today.So welcome back to a full week of The Queue folk, and indeed this week will be a full one for The Queue. As Alex and I have mentioned before, when patches roll around and other big things come up our availability to spend a couple hours writing The Queue and The Daily Quest diminishes significantly. But this week nothing is on the radar, so here we are.Next week though, The Queue and The Daily Quest will only appear Monday and Tuesday; unless something unexpected happens. We have to prepare for BlizzCon and actually spend a few hours away from our computers packing and all that. But this week? We're all Queue'd off and roaring to go.Milesdfreeman asked..."Do we know anything about Patch 3.3 yet? What raids if any will it have? New features?"
The OverAchiever: The incredible Glory of the Hero
VERONICA: So what made you decide to be a cop?LEO: Uh, well, it's the same old tired story. I was sent here by the agency to do a strip-o-gram for Inga, an armed robbery call came in, I figured I was in uniform anyway, so what the hell.-- Veronica Mars, "Silence of the Lamb" Sooner or later I'm going to start running out of B-movie titles for this series, but that day is not today. We're all set with Halls of Lightning, so let's head to Halls of Stone to continue amassing achievements for Glory of the Hero. Again, if you've missed any of our previous installments, you can catch 'em here: 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 HALLS OF STONE The achievements here are somewhat more difficult than their counterparts in Halls of Lightning, and demand significantly more effort from your tank and DPS in particular.
Zoltan scores over 10,000 achievement points
Zoltan of Aegwynn is the guy who's been sitting on top of the overall achievement point lists for a while, and he's just recently cracked the incredible total of 10,000 points. At the time of this writing, he's finished off a total of 908 out of 931 achievements currently in the game, giving him a total of 10,005 achievement points.The Champion of Ulduar is the one that put him over the top according to his Armory profile, and strangely, he doesn't appear to have any of the Feats of Strength (edit: never mind, I read it wrong -- he's got plenty). He is only missing the two World Event achievements left (Brewmaster and the meta-achievement, neither of which are yet possible), the Sea Turtle achievement, and then a few more Heroic Ulduar endgame points. Given that the 3.2 patch achievements will likely come out before Brewmaster, there's no way yet to clear everything completely, but he's as close as it gets.Very impressive indeed. Zoltan has just one or two people on his heels, and then the numbers drop out to a few hundred below 10,000 (and strangely enough, the top five players are all EU folks). There's no reward for all of those points (and Blizzard has no plans to offer any), but it's quite, as you might say, an achievement.
Did you finish the Fire Festival?
That hot time of the year, the Midsummer Fire Festival, has now ended. Once again the denizens of Azeroth go about their humdrum lives without any brilliant fires and spirited naked flame-ladies dancing to and fro on the bridges of Ironforge. Life is boring. The Ice Stone Has Melted.But alas, not for I and my tabard! After a good half day of solid grinding I trekked my Paladin throughout the dunes of Kalimdor and the lush forests of the Eastern Kingdom, extinguishing the flames of the bastard Horde and honoring those of the blessed Alliance. All was done well, so say we all.It didn't take long though for me to realize that I didn't want to do this on more than my main. However I found myself exerting as much discipline as possible to finish the dailies every day on my dual boxing Recruit a Friend alts, pulling in about 50% of a level each day just from the daily quests alone. It was quite a nice XP bump.All in all I accomplished with the Fire Festival I wanted to, and it wasn't too bad of a time. Although I can definitely wait a year to extinguish another flame.Did you accomplish everything you wanted to with the Fire Festival? Are you satisfied?%Poll-31583%
The OverAchiever: Guide to Midsummer Fire Festival achievements
It's that time of year again, folks. Frankly, I'm glad to be back in the realm of more reasonable and just plain fun holiday achievements, because I hated School of Hard Knocks, and wound up giving up and quitting the achievement after hours of fruitless battleground deaths. Fortunately, the Fire Festival has a lot less potential to drive you to the nuthouse, and a lot more potential to grant experience, gold, and cool items. From what I've seen, Blizzard hasn't changed the holiday since its 2008 incarnation, which is actually a good thing in a number of ways because last year's revamped and expanded Fire Festival was great. A note on eligibility: your character will need to be at least 50 to hand in the items needed for King of the Fire Festival, and at least 65 to get the higher-level quests necessary for killing Lord Ahune in Slave Pens. With that said, we still recommend that lower-level characters participate, because you'll wind up with a ton of experience and gold even if you can't complete the meta-achievement.Should you complete the meta, you will be awarded the "Flame Keeper" title. I've listed all of the required achievements in the order I think will be easiest/fastest for the average player to do.UPDATE: Your character is currently unable to honor/desecrate any flame (including city flames) that you've honored/desecrated in 2008, which will make getting enough Burning Blossoms to purchase Midsummer clothing difficult, if not impossible. I'm still trying to find official confirmation that this is a bug (and I assume it has to be, as otherwise the meta-achievement isn't doable), but it also appears that fires have been added to Northrend as well. I'm heading ingame right now to assemble a list with coordinates and will update the post later.%Gallery-25803%
Achieved: Level 1 to 80 with no deaths
There are a few accomplishments in this game that truly amaze me anymore. Leveling characters is routine now, and having an army of high level alts at your disposal isn't something super uncommon anymore. However I have been amazed by this:Cautious, a Warrior, leveled to 80 without dying.She had no deaths. None. Nada. Zilch.There is no achievement for doing this, however I wouldn't blame Blizzard one bit if they went in and retroactively added one just for Cautious. Lord of the Rings Online has a no-death achievement, but only up through level 20. I got to level 18 without dying on LotRO on a recent attempt, however I perished when some "really really super awesome person" trained a bunch of mobs near me just as I executed an AoE attack. "Really really super awesome person" is what I called him too. Honest.A few months ago in The Queue a reader asked if there would ever be (or is) such an achievement for WoW, and my response at the time was no, there is not one now and probably would not be one later. I reasoned that including such an achievement would just present undue psychological damage on the player if they died at 79 from an unforeseen circumstance. I still don't think there will be one, but it's pretty awesome someone managed to do it sans in-game achievement. There are some interesting statistics Cautious had upon reaching level 80 without deaths. You can check out a lot of them on her armory profile, but those are inflated just a tad since she has played since reaching 80. Some of her key stats upon reaching level 80 include:
The Daily Quest: Rise of the Wordy Warrior
We here at WoW Insider are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. Still looking to get your hands on some BlizzCon tickets? WoW-Achievements.com is currently running a trivia contest, so head on over and give it a shot! Sideshow and Syrana take Memorial Day to Azeroth, honoring fallen heroes of the Horde and Alliance. We're a few days late, but have you roleplayers out there seen Too Many Annas' Friday Five this week? A good opportunity to take a look at the Varian/Garrosh conflict through the eyes of your character! One of our favorite blogs, The Wordy Warrior, has a brand new site and keeps the great content flowing: Check out An Officer's Guide to the Trial Period. Lorecrafted reviews the latest issue of the World of Warcraft comic. Click here to submit a link to TDQ
Are achievements optional?
There was an interesting discussion that happened on the official forums the other day, and I think it deserves a bit of light here on WoW Insider. Of course that thread devolved quickly into standard forum QQ and blue bashing, but hopefully that doesn't happen here.The thread asked: are achievements optional?This is a loaded question, for sure, so what I'm going to do is look at three different types of players and analyze what achievements mean for each of them. But of course to begin, it should just be said that any achievement is completely optional in the game. You don't need them, they deliver nothing to you that's necessary for your character to progress. The CasualThe casual is the person who chooses to play the game at their own pace for a little or as much as they want. The casual rarely, if ever, make appointments or schedule in game activities with other people. The casual may or may not be in a guild, and that's just fine. The casual is there to enjoy the game on their own terms.
Love is in the Air begins tomorrow
Love is in the Air everywhere I look around.Love is in the Air every sight and every sound.And I don't know if I'm being foolish, don't know if I'm being wise. But it's something I must believe in, and it's there when I look in your eyes.Tomorrow will mark the start of the Love is in the Air season event. Theoretically, from past events, it should start around 4:00 a.m. sever time. But whether or not that ends up being true, you'll have to check for yourself.You'll need to get finish the achievement Fool for Love in order to get the ultimate seasonal achievement What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been. The thing is... you only have a few days to get Fool For Love, so hurry up. The seasonal event ends early next Monday morning.Ideally you'll want to set aside some time tomorrow night; you don't want to be waiting until Saturday evening to do this. Unless, you know, you and your significant other are into that sort of thing. (I'm talking about playing WoW together. Jeeze... get your mind out of the gutter. You don't think I'm just going to sit here and make gratuitous Valentine's Day jokes for the rest of the week, do you?)So what are you waiting for?"AFK honey, need to become a fool for love." %Gallery-15723%
Tank Spot and WoW Achievements become official fansites
Tank Spot and WoW Achievements have both been added to the official World of Warcraft fansite program. The fansite program is Blizzard's way of recognizing sites they like, and really contains an excellent listing of places to get your WoW fix (besides WoW Insider, of course).Tank Spot offers great community with forums, videos, and guides to virtually every aspect of tanking. The folks that frequent the site are quick to offer sound advice, and can often be seen on the official forums providing key discussion within the greater tanking community.WoW Achievements is a relatively new site, and offers great information on all the achievements in-game and the players who earn them. One of the more interesting things on the site is a listing of the top players worldwide who've earned achievement points. If you're curious, the top player right now is Beelsebub over on Azuremyst EU. He's got 7630 achievement points, which is quite amazing.If you're interested as to why WoW Insider is not part of the fansite program, you can check out an article by Mike Schramm back in August of last year.
The OverAchiever: Completing Nothing Boring about Borean
Every week The Overachiever gives advice, walkthroughs and guides on completing your latest Achievement obsession.Last week, I kicked off this new column covering the "I've Toured the Fjord" Quest Achievement for the Wrath starting zone Howling Fjord. Today, as promised, I'm going to cover the Quest Achievement for the other starting zone in Northrend, Borean Tundra with "Nothing Boring about Borean" (A/H)But first, I want to highlight some excellent resources brought to my attention in the comments of last week's column. I stated that there was no way to track which quests you have completed and which you haven't. Turns out you can with an AddOn called Everyquest. It can only track quests you've done after it's been installed, but you can manually mark off quests you've done previously. An alternative is QuestGuru.Another good tip is to turn on your low level quest tracker if you are going back to older zones to finish off quests. You'll find it by right-clicking on the magnifying glass icon on the edge of your mini-map.Now, on to the good stuff!
Lil' Game Hunter achievement now set to 75 pets
In patch 3.0.8 there is a new achievement call the Lil' Game Hunter, which you get upon collecting a very large number of pets. The achievement gets you the pet pictured above, a little fawn. He's cute, and hopefully won't stop in his tracks when he sees my motorcycle's headlight.Previously the achievement required getting a total of 100 vanity pets, however that total has now been lowered to 75. That is much more accessible for people to achieve, and really requires just a little bit of farming and AH watching. Definitely within the grasp of more people than when it was 100, which would have required more-or-less getting your hands on some super rare pets and/or ebayed TCG loot cards (a subject which some feel is borderline ethical).Click on the above image to get a better view of the fawn, and start collecting now!I plan on taking him for a walk through Elwynn Forest when I get him.For help with tracking your non-combat pet collection, head on over to the most excellent Warcraftpets.com.
Celebrate Thanksgiving by slaughtering turkeys
This Thanksgiving there is much to celebrate in game. Leveling from 70 to 80 is the most fun many of us have ever had leveling, there's tons of shiny new gear in Northrend for everyone, and guilds everywhere are beginning to enter and enjoy the splendor that is Naxxramas.But don't let all this endgame stuff get in the way of the one true important achievement in Wrath. Friend or Fowl.After you've eaten your turkey dinner and said goodbye to the family, take some time and go kill 15 turkeys in under 3 minutes.
10 easy Northrend achievements
Northrend is finally available, and it seems like everyone is out in full force. There are so many new things to do and see that it might be pleasantly overwhelming at the moment. In order to help you find some direction, I've put together a list of 10 easily attainable achievements that you can earn in the next few days while questing. These are along the way, so you won't have to break your stride. Many can even be achieved today.1. Train one of your professions! A skill of 350 in any of your professions will open up the ability to train Grand Master, which will award you with the achievement, Professional Grand Master. Check out our guide to finding your profession trainers.2. Most level 70s will have at least two professions with a minimum skill of 350 by this point, so why not train them both to Grand Master? This will give you the achievement, Working Day and Night.3. If you have leveled Fishing, First Aid and Cooking to at least 350, and train their Grand Master ranks, you will earn the achievement, Skills to Pay the Bills. If you haven't, but would like to, then check out our guide to leveling Fishing to 375 as well as Cooking to 375. First Aid should be a breeze, as all you need is cloth! Still, should you find yourself at a loss, check out our Guide to Farming Cloth.
Armory going down for Wrath updates
Crygil posted early this morning that the Armory will be going down at 6 a.m. PST / 9 a.m. EST to prepare it for Wrath of the Lich King. The Armory will be down for approximately eight hours.He doesn't go into specifics about what will be updated, but we have some good guesses at what we could see included: Achievement listings Wrath of the Lich King items New reputations Faster character data updates Crygil also mentions that all the character data will be reset. This means that you have to log into your character to repopulate the Armory information on it. This is important if you have seldom played alts yet still refer to the armory data, or if you are currently applying to a guild that requires armory information.We'll have more concrete information on what this update brings after it's complete, sometime around 2 p.m. PST.
Some statistics to be removed from achievement tracking
Over the weekend Thundgot on the EU forums came out and said that the attributes section of the achievements tab will be removed from the game. You can find the attributes section right now by pressing "y" on your keyboard to open up the achievement window, then going to the "Statistics" tab located at the bottom of the window, then the "Character" heading on the left hand side of the window, and finally clicking on the "Attributes" section. Your attributes will look something like the ones above, but much more uber than my priest alt has.Thundgot makes a point of saying this will improve performance. If you think about it, many of these statistics revolve around "best" or "top" attributes from a character's dataset. Collecting this much information for each character will take a few extra process cycles each time an attribute changes, or each time damage is doled out (since many spells / enchants / procs change these numbers). Multiply this by a few thousand times for a character in a given night (due to potential changes via combat), and then multiply it by around 11 million people playing the game... and you get the picture.
Earn 5 fishing achievements today
The act of fishing, particularly if one does not find it relaxing, can seem frustrating and inspire impatience within the angler. It might surprise you then to learn that, with a little effort, you could earn five fishing achievements by the end of today, without worrying about rare drops. Itinerary: "25 Fish": Catch 25 fish. If you have done this since patch 3.0.2 went live, then your next goal will be 50, and so on. "The Old Gnome and the Sea": Successfully fish from a school/pool. This will have to be a pool of fish, not wreckage or water motes. "The Scavenger": Fish one item up from each of the five wreckage schools to be discussed in this article. If this cannot be completed due to the inability to achieve a working 305 fishing skill, then you will be completing the achievement "50 Fish." "Outland Angler": You must fish up one fish from each pool to be discussed in this article. If this cannot be completed due to low skill, you will be completing an achievement such as "Journeyman Fisherman." "The Fishing Diplomat": Fish something up in both Orgrimmar and Stormwind.
