Filed under: Achievements

Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, things are about to get a little easier.

Between Ghostcrawler's blog post and Zarhym's additional notes on the forums yesterday, we now know a lot more about how account-wide achievements are going to work. No preamble this week, folks -- let's get right to it. A lot of questions were answered, but there are still a few unknowns.

Question: Will all of my achievement titles be accessible from every toon?

Answer: Probably, but there may be restrictions on their use.

I've been looking to farm some nice titles out to alts that have done absolutely nothing to deserve them (who isn't?), and what we do know is that Blizzard's looking for a way to do this. From how GC's written about it, I'm wondering if this might actualy go live after Mists of Pandaria has already shipped, because Blizzard's talked about the technical limitations previously, and it's apparently still at work on it.

We also don't know when these titles will become universally accessible. For example, your level 1 monk may not get access to Kingslayer until level 80 or Defender of a Shattered World until level 85, which is sensible insofar as my level 1 monk was not in much of a position to save anyone with Jab as the full extent of her repertoire.

For now, put this firmly in the category of "Probably going to happen, but don't expect a firm date."

Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, you might as well come back next week.

So here's the deal: This article's kinda stupid. I really wanted to write about pet battling this week, because if the idea of running around the world raining destruction on everything with a small animal of indeterminate origin doesn't appeal to you, then you are probably a communist. But pet battling has been functionally disabled on the Mists of Pandaria beta (you can only access it at level 90, and the current level restriction is 88), so all I can really do is nose around and dream of what's to come. If you want to skip this week's outing and return at a time when we're doing something a little more relevant or useful, I don't blame you. Go with blessings.

And yet I still really wanna write about pet battling.

My first pet in the game was a prairie dog sold by Halpa in Thunder Bluff. My next was a Black Tabby, which I camped Ambermill for the better part of two days to get off a now-vanished mob known as the Dalaran Spellscribe. While I have amassed in excess of 150 pets since then, the original two have accompanied me across the world into the darkest depths of the ocean and to the top of the highest mountain peaks. They were there when my guild sent Kil'Jaeden packing. They were there when I was alone in the darkness. They were there when the Lich King fell. They were there when I got my ass handed to me by a slightly less cooperative version of the Lich King.

And by God, they're going to start pulling their fricking weight around here.

User CJGibson over on Reddit's /r/wow community made an excellent point earlier today concerning the Children's Week pets that are only available while the holiday is running.

Ordinarily, it's only possible for one character to get three pets each year: one from the classic Azeroth quests (Piglet's Collar, the Rat Cage, the Turtle Box, or the Snail Shell), one from the Outland quests (Elekk Training Collar, Egbert's Egg, Sleepy Willy, or Legs), and one from the Northrend quests (the Curious Wolvar Pup or the Curious Oracle Hatchling). But you know how in Mists of Pandaria all of the non-combat pets on your account will be shared amongst your characters? If you run a series of alts through the quests and pick different pets on each one, you'll have all the pets on all your characters once the Mists of Pandaria content patch hits (or, at the latest, once Mists itself does).

The tip was so brilliant that I slapped myself for not thinking of it, so I wanted to draw some attention to it here as quickly as possible. Pet hunters? Save yourselves four years' worth of waiting, and get cracking.

If this is your first year with the holiday and you need any help with the achievements, you can find our guide to Children's Week here.

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Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, children are the future, damn them.

Being the dedicated achievement hunter that I was and am (why else would I be writing this column?), I worked tirelessly on all the requirements for What A Long Strange Trip It's Been when the achievement system debuted in patch 3.0.2. This even extended to planning months in advance for the Brewmaster title before achievements even hit the game. My efforts were coming along quite nicely until Children's Week, when an unstoppable force (me) hit an immovable object (School of Hard Knocks) -- and physics being less predictable than our teachers led us to believe, it turns out that bodies in motion do not always remain so.

For an entire year, the only thing that stood between me and that purple proto-drake was that one damn achievement. And every year, I return to this guide and flinch at having to think of it again. So let's do this, folks, and then we shall speak no more of it for another year. This is actually a great and fantastically fun holiday, with the exception of that one thing.

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. This year the holiday runs from Sunday, April 29 to Saturday, May 5.

Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, the calm before the storm.

We're between two major holidays at the moment, and frankly, both of them are kind of problematic. I was accustomed to thinking of Noblegarden as a happy event with a not-too-onerous time commitment, but after fighting off a horde of egg hunters in competition for the 500 Noblegarden Chocolates necessary for the Swift Springstrider, I'm not so sure that's the case anymore. Under the worst-case scenario, some poor bastard new to the holiday who wants all the achievements and the mount could find himself hunting a whopping 865 chocolates.

"But you don't need the mount," you point out. "Getting the Strider is entirely optional."

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Oh, and next Thursday, we're on to Children's Week. I think we all know what to expect during Children's Week.

So you know what? Today we're going to do something dumb, silly, and fun to make ourselves feel better before Children's Week hits and we lose all faith in humanity again. We don't often talk about tiny, one-off achievements in this column, but I think we can afford to make an exception. Yes, folks -- it's time to make some cookies.

Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, a harvest of eggs, chocolate bunnies, and general practitioners to cluck over our cholesterol numbers.

I still think this is the single greatest holiday screenshot I have ever captured.

Noblegarden is one of WoW's less stressful holidays overall -- which is good, as you'll have to deal with Children's Week later in the month. Noblegarden will run this year from Sunday, April 8 (this Sunday) until Sunday, April 15 (well, technically Saturday at 11:59 pm server time, if your calendar reads the same as mine). If you've never done Noblegarden before or only done its pre-2009 version, be aware that Noble Gardener (the holiday's meta) is part of the year-long What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been achievement rewarding the 310% speed Violet Proto-Drake.

The one new thing that I can confirm in 2012 is the presence of the Swift Springstrider, which can be purchased for 500 (!) Noblegarden chocolate from holiday vendors or found randomly in eggs. (However, nobody knows what the drop rate is like. I would bet on "bad.") This is pretty much the same deal as the Swift Lovebird from Love Is In the Air -- it's a way to keep players who already have the meta involved with the holiday.

MMO-Champion majordomo Boubouille wasted no time at all datamining the recently released Mists of Pandaria beta client and has made available many of the achievements players will be able to gain in the next expansion. Here are some of our favorites:

Wild Side Take a ride with Armsmaster Harlan's Blades of Light for at least 10 seconds and live to tell the tale on heroic difficulty.

Armsmaster Harlan is the replacement boss for the Scarlet Champion Herod. Harlan is two times as awesome as Herod because he has two shoulders and a Firelands warrior hat. Don't mess -- he means business. This dungeon boss mechanic just sounds like fun, and heroic Scarlet Monastery just excites me way too much.

Our friends over at Wowheadnews have a whole slew of new dungeon achievements for you to look over. Some of these are really interesting, such as Soul Saver, which makes me wonder what exactly is meant by defeat. It's also interesting to find out that most of the titles earned via achievements will be account-wide. I wonder if that will work retroactively? I have a few titles I'd love on my alts.

Here's some of the achievements that caught my eye.

• Soul Savior Defeat Lillian Voss without allowing Lilllan's Soul to reach 24% health in Scholomance on heroic difficulty.
• Mosh Pit Get a combination of eight players and Scarlet Defenders caught up in Armsmaster Harlan's Blades of Light on heroic difficulty.
• Rattle No More Defeat Rattlegore without allowing him to gain more than five stacks of Rusting in Scholomance on heroic difficulty.
• Hate Leads to Suffering Defeat Taran Zhu while every party member is at maximum hatred in Shado-pan Monastery in heroic difficulty.

I admit that I'm very, very interested to see the stories for the upgraded Scarlet Monastery and Scholomance heroics, especially considering the long history of those two instances and their ties to the lore of the game over the years. These achievements just make me even more curious.

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Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, we wonder how to make more work for ourselves.

Not everything in the game is destined to be an achievement, but every so often you find yourself doing something and thinking, "Yes, I deserve 10 useless points for this." This feeling is most likely to occur while playing after a few beers and having one's sense of artificial outrage over the state of the world heightened for a bit, but sometimes you really find yourself wondering why demonstrable accomplishments in the game aren't actually achievements.

When I started writing this article, I toyed with the idea of including a list of (largely snarky) possibilities like the following:

• Pugging an Outland dungeon that doesn't have a death knight in it. (Don't tell me that luck doesn't play a role in any achievements, because we all know it does.)
• Successfully skipping Baine trash without anyone butt-pulling a mob pack and dying.
• Participating in two hours of trade chat without the word anal appearing once.
• Leading a raiding guild for one month or more without suffering a psychotic breakdown.

But these aren't achievements. They're myths, like unicorns and balanced budgets. Let us try to examine more reasonable suggestions.

At this point, I'd recommend to everyone still working on these achievements that you save up your artifacts and turn them all in during one Faire, in order to ensure credit. For the goblins among us, however, this means it's still a good gold-making opportunity, so check out our guide to profiting off the Darkmoon Faire.

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Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, if you're not the 99% already, you will be soon.

Perhaps today's title is a bit misleading, so allow me to get to the point: These are all really frakking expensive achievements.

We talked about this two years ago in OverAchiever: Straight to the poorhouse, and everything on that list is still valid with the exception of Dual Talent Specialization (once 1,000 gold and now 10). Back then, my criterion for what constituted an expensive achievement was anything that cost 1,000 gold or more. These days, there are even more ways to empty your wallet in pursuit of points, but I have to wonder: Is 1,000 gold a lot these days? It's still a lot of gold, but is it a lot of gold? That's up to you. I think it's just enough for most players to consider something a serious, if not necessarily crippling, purchase. But don't worry: If you're looking for crippling purchases, I've got those here too.

This list won't necessarily cover every expensive pursuit in the game for the simple reason that not all of them are achievements, but if you've been sitting on a pile of gold wondering what to do with it, why not go get yourself some extra points? Who doesn't love suddenly finding themselves bereft of funds?

When the Raid Finder was first introduced, I had high hopes for its impact on the game. While the main reason behind the implementation of this system was arguably to get as many players experiencing raid content as possible, at the time, I was more interested in the impact it would have on the progression races between all of the top guilds in the world. I have always had a great deal of admiration for players in these types of guilds and have watched intently during each new tier as they all vied for world firsts. I believed the Raid Finder could benefit this type of competition by preventing heroic encounters from being nerfed while the content was still current. Surely, I thought, if so many people are able to experience raiding like never before through this new tool, Blizzard would have no pressing reason to make heroic encounters any easier.

Well, it seems I was wrong, for in the very next tier of content Blizzard released, we saw progressive nerfs to these difficult fights. Personally, I prefer to keep these encounters the way they are, at least until a new tier is released. Something just feels wrong to see the hardest fights available made easier through a series of hotfixes. Even with respect to my own guild's progression, having sweeping nerfs hit Firelands just as my guild was putting in some really good attempts on Ragnaros felt like Blizzard moved the finish line, taking what would have been a very gratifying kill and turning it into an accidental one-shot that contained none of the catharsis we had felt during previous boss kills.

What do you think? With the Raid Finder now a reality and a new expansion looming on the horizon, do you think the difficulty of heroic raid encounters should be static, like those from tier 11, or should they be more flexible?

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Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, the phrase "low-hanging fruit" comes to mind.

While I collect suggestions for our next article on evil achievements, I thought it might be amusing to turn toward achievements that are considerably easier to get. The 17 achievements (and one Feat of Strength) in today's column are all things that you can do without any real preparation.

I'm going to ignore the super-obvious picks (Shave and a Haircut, anyone? You don't need me to tell you about that) and head straight for the more esoteric stuff. I'm also going to bypass extremely expensive achievements that, while quick, will bankrupt the average player, so nothing like Grand Ice Mammoth. (Looks like I need to update OverAchiever: Straight to the poorhouse, come to think of it.) I briefly considered including achievements that you can only get at the end of a long quest chain or reputation grind but canned that idea too. For example, Skyshattered is relatively easy these days with a 410% mount and a little practice, but you'll only be able to access it after a quest grind, so nuts to that. I also eliminated You'll Feel Right As Rain, Critter Gitter, and Fungal Frenzy for that reason. They're all easy, but you can't just toddle off to get them unless you've already put some work in.

These are all achievements that the average player -- assuming a friend or two, a tiny bit of luck, and a little time -- can just run out and get whenever he or she wants.