Midnight Profession Goals Achieved!

The other day I was very pleased to finally get this pop-up:

For the uninitiated, that's the achievement for raising every primary profession in Midnight to (the max skill level of) 100. (In case you're wondering, this is now my new 7th rarest achievement according to Data for Azeroth.)

On top of that, all my profession alts now have the purple version of all their profession tools and accessories. I actually made a little spreadsheet to keep track of that, and yes, it took a crapload of Abundance runs - but that wasn't a problem for me because I enjoy the Abundance event! In fact, I'd already gathered all the rare materials I needed from that a while ago; the thing holding me back on the last few crafts were other materials and concentration.

In general my attitude to this project was that I wanted to do it all "in house" with my alt army supporting each other and with minimal purchasing of mats or reagents off the auction house. At the same time, I also wanted to avoid crafting crappy or useless items just to skill up, which slowed me down some more as it often meant spending more time and resources on more expensive/harder-to-make items for skill-ups.

In that regard, the easiest crafting profession to level was engineering - I didn't start playing my engineer until quite late, but skilling up was so fast and easy that she soared right past the progress of several of my other crafters in no time. Especially compared to blacksmithing, all the crafts were so much cheaper in terms of mats, and engineers make a ton of profession tools (which were my focus) so she had lots of things to craft that gave multiple skill points each per craft.

Hardest for me personally were probably inscription and jewelcrafting, due to how many steps the mats for my desired items had to go through, with each step requiring use of concentration to get a good result, e g. prospecting ore to get gems, crushing the gems for shards, turning the shards into lenses and so on.

There seem to be certain "break points" with these where you can suddenly get the high quality result by simply using high quality mats - without having to use concentration on top of it - which speeds things up considerably, but I was probably assigning my points badly for those and it took a while to reach them.

Of course that doesn't mean that I'm "done" with professions - there are plenty of knowledge points left to earn in order to fully populate the various spec trees, but I've got to admit that's less interesting to me now, as I no longer have a specific personal goal to work towards, so it's just a matter of more gathering/grinding and fulfilling patron orders that aren't too expensive as and when they pop up.

Still, this was one of my major goals for Midnight, and since professions don't reset seasonally (please Blizzard, I'm not trying to give you ideas), there won't be as much to do on that front as the expansion progresses. Presumably there'll just be a couple of new recipes to collect in 12.1 and 12.2. 

A Peculiar Casual

I've been kind of fascinated by Data for Azeroth ever since I found out about the site via a Bellular video. What blew my mind at the time - around halfway through War Within from what I recall - was that it claimed that I was among the rare five percent who had completed the Khaz Algar Diplomat achievement (to max out your reputation with War Within's four base factions). The reason this was shocking to me was that it's something that's extremely easy to do, as every piece of casual content (quests, world quests, delves) awards reputation with at least one of these factions. I get that this isn't something raiders would spend time on, but I'm a casual and lots of other people are casuals like me, right? Right?!

As far as the Khaz Algar Diplomat achievement goes, my assumption did eventually bear out, kind of - now that War Within is in the rear mirror and all subscribers have access to its content even without shelling out extra for the newest expansion, Data for Azeroth says that more than 50% of all its tracked accounts have completed this achievement. I guess I was just ahead of the curve, so to speak.

Looking again more recently, I've once again been surprised by what sorts of achievements of mine are classified as super rare. Here's a list of my currently rarest achievements according to their database, as of today:

1. A Hal'hadar Walks into a Swamp - complete a quest line in Naigtal
2. Lorewalking: The Loa - complete the lorewalking quest about the Loa
3. Disguised to the Nines - complete all Decor Duel achievements
4. Omnium Folio Studies - complete the Omium Folio quest line
5. Doing Your Share - smelt 5 Enchanted Elementium bars
6. Prey: Hard Mode III - kill all Prey targets on hard mode
7. Champion of Ulduar - completed a deathless 10-man Ulduar run back in Wrath
8. Destined to be Legendary - craft a Sulfuron Hammer
9. Abyss Anglers: Jeju's New Rival - complete most Abyss Anglers achievements
10. Abyss Anglers: Top of the Class - swim through 250 schools of fish
11. Null and Avoided - get found but not tagged in Decor Duel five times
12. Prepared for a Showdown - complete quest lines on Val and Naigtal
13. Abyss Anglers: Myths from beneath - catch a mythic creature six times
14. Deployed to the Void - tag five players while seeking as a Nullifier in Decor Duel
15. Midnight Delver III - complete every Midnight delve on tier 11 with lives remaining as every role
16. Grand Magister's Sommelier - drink a lot of different wines during a rare Midnight world quest
17. The Ancient Keeper - acquired Rhok'delar before the Cataclysm
18. Bringing Order to the Isles - completed all order hall campaigns during Legion Remix
19. Midnight Delver II - complete every Midnight delve on tier 8 with lives remaining as every role
20. Abundance: Ain't Dun Till It's Dun - complete all the Abundance achievements
21. Heroic: Worlds Ahead - complete 15 different world quests on heroic Naigtal or Val
22. Collector's Edition: Netherwhelp - have the pet from the BC collector's edition
23. Abyss Anglers: Certified Depthdiver - earn 250k cumulative points in Abyss Anglers
24. Midnight Delver - complete every Midnight delve on tier 4 with lives remaining as every role
25. Amani War Bear - earned the Zul'Aman timed run mount back in Burning Crusade
26. Abyss Anglers: Pearls to the Abyss - acquire all the diving upgrades for Abyss Anglers
27. Tagged and Bagged - tag five players while seeking as an Arcane Ranger in Decor Duel
28. The Balance of Light and Shadow - acquired Benediction/Anathema before the Cataclysm
29. Abyss Anglers: Vintage Collector - collect 250 treasures
30. Abyss Anglers: Reservation for One - do a dive and do nothing but kill a mythic creature
31. Abyss Anglers: Pahk Trench Fins - buy an upgrade and catch 500 fish
32. Abundance: Artisan - earn 10k points from artisan nodes during an Abundance event
33. Flame Warden of Midnight - honour the flames in Midnight zones
34. Pinnacle Ritual Work - complete both ritual sites on tier 6 with all challenges active
35. Abyss Anglers: Now That's Anglin' - catch 100 fish from bubbles
36. Abyss Anglers: The Finest of Fish - catch a mythic creature three times
37. Sunreaver Onslaught - maxed out the Isle of Thunder rep on Horde side during MoP Remix
38. Abyss Anglers: Delicate Diver - catch all small creatures with nets
39. Kirin Tor Offensive - maxed out the Isle of Thunder rep on Alliance side during MoP Remix
40. Midnight Lumberjack - harvest 250 Thalassian lumber
41. The Whole Kit and Caboodle - unlock all upgrades in Decor Duel
42. Rise of the Ultradon Slayer - kill the enemy Ultradon in the Slayer's Rise epic battleground
43. The Key to Madness - open 500 bountiful coffers in delves
44. T-A-G that spells "Gotcha!" - tag five players while seeking as a Spellbreaker in Decor Duel
45. Algari Master of All - raise all War Within professions to max skill
46. Abyss Anglers: Luck of the Loa - catch an epic fish from a bubble
47. Putting Wilhelm Out of Business - return all of Omarion's notes from Naxxramas (part of unlocking the old Naxx resist gear to craft)
48. Showdown Success: Val - complete 8 different world quests on Val
49. Algari Delver II - complete every War Within delve on tier 8 with lives remaining as every role
50. Showdown Success: Naigtal - complete 8 different world quests on Naigtal

All of these are only owned by 3% of the player base at max. Some of them make obvious sense of course. Anything that's old and/or no longer obtainable is bound to be rare - 7, 17, 18, 22, 25, 28, 37 and 39 fall into that category.

Similarly, I wouldn't put too much stock into the rarity of anything that was only released as part of the most recent patch (12.0.7) about a month ago, because it makes sense that most people wouldn't rush to do every new thing on launch day. However, even if they did, Data for Azeroth only refreshes character data every few weeks (unless you request a manual refresh) so a lot of these probably wouldn't be nearly as rare if the data was truly up to date. That applies to 1, 2, 4, 12, 21, 34, 48 and 50.

The first big surprise to me were the number of Abyss Anglers and Decor Duel achievements on this list. Now, I'll fully admit that I did get a bit more into these than the average Joe after my initial feeling of simply feeling whelmed by their addition had faded. But uh... being a top 1%-er for casual mini games in WoW feels weird.

In a similar vein, I was surprised by some of the delve achievements that are apparently rare - not the one to open 500 bountiful coffers, that clearly required some level of grinding - but that even completing delves on tier 4 as every role is this rare surprised me. Looking at my achievement list beyond the 50 I reproduced here, it seems that people don't like doing delves as healers, as even the "do every delve on tier 4 as a healer" achievement has only been completed by 4% of players. Tanks and damage dealers have nearly double those completion rates. Still, while there are clearly a lot of people who've engaged with delves in some way (the "complete a delve" achievement is apparently owned by 92% of players), I once again appear to be among the most hardcore for this casual content.

There are a few more achievements that fall into this category: I won't deny that I clearly like the Abundance event more than the average person, and the Sommelier achievement does require you to have more than a passing interest in world quests. Flame Warden of Midnight was only available for a limited time, but I'm still surprised it's so rare, considering that there were only five new fires in obvious places, and it's basically free gold for a click. Then again, I'd managed to fly past the Harandar flame repeatedly without noticing it I guess...

For most of the profession achievements on the list it does make sense for them to be rare in my mind. Learning to craft a Sulfuron Hammer and getting all the mats for it is not difficult but definitely qualifies as an obscure old-school grind nowadays, and most players won't have any reason to learn how to smelt Enchanted Elementium bars, never mind actually doing it. Maxing out all the War Within professions was something that actually took a lot of effort and that I was actively proud of.

The 250 Thalassian lumber is not difficult either but I guess requires both at least a passing interest in housing (to learn how to gather lumber) and a love for gathering in general. I haven't gone out to "grind" lumber at any point but will happily grab a piece here or there as I see it, and over time that has simply added up.

The Naxx recipe gathering is definitely an obscure thing to do, something I didn't even see discussed on any news site when it came out and that I had to actively look up after learning of its existence.

The two (to me) funniest achievements on the list are probably Rise of the Ultradon Slayer and Prey: Hard Mode III. The former I got for the one and only time I got into a Slayer's Rise epic battleground, and I had little idea what was going on in it at any point, so I couldn't even tell you whether this is rare because it's hard or just because not a lot of people have even set foot into this battleground.

The Prey achievement is funny to me because it's three times as rare as the equivalent achievement for nightmare mode, even though it's easier - but I guess more people felt motivated to do the nightmare version for the gear rewards. The equivalent normal mode achievement is even rarer and I don't have it either because normal mode preys just give terrible rewards.

Still, I think what ultimately got me about all of this is the rarity of all of these achievements compared to some of the more common ones. Sure, you can say that almost every activity in WoW is only done by a (relative) minority, so it shouldn't be surprising that only 10% of players have a single Decor Duel achievement of any kind. But then I look at stuff like Myth of the Dawn, for which you needed to have done either mythic raiding this tier or a lot of M+ at level 10 or higher this season, and apparently one in five WoW players has this achievement. Or look at the achievement to beat the final encounter in the Voidspire raid on any difficulty (which does include LFR and the solo story version) - more than 40% of WoW players have done this! How have less than 20% of players ever clicked on all the Midsummer Fires in any expansion but 70% have timed an M+ key on level 10?

It's just wild to me that the WoW player base as a whole seems to be so endgame progression-brained that being someone who focuses on casual content seemingly makes you a rare weirdo in comparison.

Bringing Order to the Isles

There's a little more than a week left in Legion Remix, and a few days ago I finished my last achievement for this special mode. According to Data for Azeroth, Bringing Order to the Isles is now the rarest achievement I've got to my name, with less than one percent of all accounts having earned that one. That's rarer than even some of the old achievements I have that are no longer available, such as Champion of Ulduar or The Ancient Keeper, though I expect a few more people will get those last few quests in and tick the box before Lemix ends.

Bringing Order to the Isles required completing all class order hall quests for all classes, meaning both the basic campaign and the quest chain for the special class-specific mount. I had a lot of thoughts on these but I think I'll save those for another post because obviously twelve different storylines and mounts are a lot to talk about!

For this post I'll limit myself to the general experience of playing Legion Remix, especially compared to MoP Remix. Here's my final roster of timerunners and their /played time:

• Kinta, blood death knight: 4 days, 18 hours
• Flerence, havoc demon hunter: 14 hours
• Clar, mistweaver monk: 10 hours
• Axal, discipline priest: 12 hours
• Floo, fury warrior: 6 hours
• Bith, beast mastery hunter: 10 hours
• Bosan, retribution paladin: 14 hours
• Fangry, feral druid: 8 hours
• Whie, affliction warlock: 11 hours
• Tenderpaw, assassination rogue: 9 hours
• Rockpaw, elemental shaman: 7 hours
• Emb, fire mage: 6 hours

I felt a bit stumped initially, having to create twelve new characters when I had just levelled one of each class to 80 this expansion, but eventually I simply opted for some race/class combos that I'd never played before. Coming up with a fitting transmog for each one was actually the hardest part. As you can see, comparatively little play time was required just to level up and get through all the class order quests, with my death knight main being the only one with a significant /played time due to the fact that she did all the zone storylines, dungeons, raids and other achievement-related activities. And yes, I mained a tank again, how strange. It wasn't a choice with a lot of intent behind it; it just kind of happened that way.

Overall, the experience of levelling twelve new alts in such a short time frame felt weird. It's not that it's difficult exactly, what with how fast it all was, but from a gameplay experience it was honestly kind of terrible. I quickly gave up on even trying to sort out my action bars or understanding my talents, because it was all flying past way too quickly anyway. I just tried to remember a handful of buttons on each character and that was it. I'm someone who very much enjoys levelling alts in general, but the way Blizzard actively encouraged you to pump out new ones at speed in Lemix just felt weird. There isn't even a semblance of RPG left in playing that way, you're just trying to catch them all like some sort of Pokemon trainer, while also collecting and discarding shinies like you're in Diablo. It's bizarre.

In general I think I preferred the way the Remix experience was a bit more free-form in MoP last time around. I'm sure all the new structure they introduced for Legion helped with player retention, as the staggered content releases forced you to come back every so often if you wanted to see and do all the things, while the endless infinite research assignments for gear tried to hook into that part of your brain that likes to do dailies, way harder than anything in MoP did. And it worked, including on me! But it also shifted the experience towards being a bit more chore-like as opposed to the way MoP Remix just gave you all the content and was like "have fun, you figure out what you want to do".

And well, there was the whole "levelling twelve characters" side of it of course, compared to the five I chose to level up in MoP. It's weird because the moment I learned that Lemix was going to be a thing, doing exactly this in order to see all the class order halls was something I immediately considered, but only as a kind of "wouldn't it be crazy if I went that hard" type of idea. The fact that Blizzard put levelling one of each class in with the standard achievements for this event felt like it shifted the goal posts in way that I didn't really enjoy, and it's not something I'd ever want to do for a limited-time event like this again to be honest. They asked me to play this one a lot, and I did, but now the only direction for my investment to go in future Remixes is down.

But I guess that's Legion in a nutshell, isn't it? I already observed previously, after levelling through it for the first time in Chromie Time, that I could see why people loved it so much when it first came out, what with the expansion's coherent theme and steady progression with ever rising stakes. Revisiting Suramar was a delight, as I genuinely enjoyed seeing that story and all its characters again. (I love Oculeth!) But after Argus... where was there even left to go?

Doing all the class order halls this time around only drove home just how badly Blizzard screwed this up, actually. It kind of reminded me of how Bioware more or less made you the most powerful person in the galaxy during SWTOR's Knights of the Eternal Throne expansion. It was insane, something that was always going to be a terrible idea in an MMO, even one with a personal story in which you are the hero, because it was a high that wasn't sustainable and climbing back down from that peak was always going to feel bad. (People still grouse about it ten years later.)

And Legion (which actually came out around the same time) did a very similar thing with the artifact weapons and class order halls. I'm not sure the quest to deplete your artifact weapon is still in the game, but basically giving you the Ashbringer and then making you throw it away was always going to feel bad, no matter how they spun it. But the class order halls are just as bad in my opinion! These should always have been a permanent feature, not something for one expansion only.

For any character that was actually played during the Legion expansion it must have felt utterly insane to, I dunno, ascend to Skyhold in the heavens (as a warrior) and then just... stop going there once BfA came around. Same with the "Highlord" paladin no longer caring to hang out under Light's Hope Chapel. It's just nuts that they built the player character up to this level and then just shrugged and expected you to move on from it without a second thought.

I guess in that way, Legion Remix mirrored the vibe of the original expansion. All those achievements to level one of each class made sense in the context of all the unique class-specific content, but no other expansion has that much of it, so it wouldn't make sense to ask people to do it again in whatever comes next, and I expect it will feel somewhat less exciting. My bet is on a Wrath of the Lich King Remix next, to get us ready for returning to Northrend in The Last Titan (the expansion after Midnight). 

Starting to Wrap Up Legion Remix

Legion Remix has less than four weeks left to run, and I'm slowly starting to think about how to wrap things up. The phased approach Blizzard has been taking with Lemix makes the whole experience a bit odd, as they added a couple of quests with the release of the last phase that are all about how the timeline is collapsing and we need to say goodbye! Except then we still had more than a month left at that point.

I've ticked off all the Lemix-specific achievements except for needing to level four more classes to 80, and there's one lesser invasion point commander that keeps eluding me. Not much to be done about that last one other than going back to Argus over and over again for another roll at the dice.

The whole "levelling all the characters" experience has been nothing but wacky. By character four or five, thanks to the stacking XP bonus, it was no longer a matter of timerunning but more like... time-tumbling. XP was just happening to me. You could no longer call it "earning" experience by any stretch of the imagination. Even with every quest rewarding a gear box, the constantly rising levels made it impossible to keep up with even the game's most basic gear requirements, and the last leg of each levelling journey was once again a painful struggle even in normal world tier as I tried to kill things with gear that's thirty levels too low for the intended difficulty. Your best bet at that point is to hope for an easy carry through some random dungeons and raids, which does work a lot of the time (it only takes one extremely OP person in the group) but not always. Not exactly my idea of fun, which is one of the reasons I've been stalling on the last four characters. But I'm still working on it.

Most other achievements have been easy and unremarkable enough. Do all the quests once, do all the dungeons once etc. I did want to take note of a few that stood out though.

First there was "Building a Heroic Army", which required you to earn 200 points in Withered Army training in heroic world tier. The trick there is that your Withered don't scale at all and are basically a bunch of fragile little dudes that will die almost instantly if any mob so much as sneezes at them. This turns the whole thing into a challenge of avoiding mobs that do AoE damage and/or that take a while to kill, while guiding your little "army" through the area in a way that allows you to more or less one-shot any opponents you encounter so they don't have a chance to hurt your guys.

I only really engaged with the Withered Army Training briefly during my first run through Legion, meaning I was vaguely familiar with the system but with no real understanding of the details. I had quite a bit of fun running through normal difficulty a few times to learn the lay of the land and collect the various upgrade chests (even if it's my understanding that these don't really make a difference on heroic mode either). Once I finally felt like I knew what I was doing it only took me two or three more tries to get it right and I felt quite accomplished for finding a good route.

The other achievement that truly excited me was the one to either earn 999 ranks of the inifinte power progression or beat a M+ dungeon on level 49 or higher. I didn't think I was likely to have the motivation to grind out the power ranks (even at the time of me writing this, my Lemix main is only sitting in the 300s), but the M+ way seemed achievable. Together with the husband and a guildie we slowly increased our key level over the weeks as our power levels increased.

Ironically, at the higher key levels I saw way more boss mechanics than I've ever seen while running any of these dungeons in other modes. We failed the timer on our first Return to Upper Karazhan because we'd gone in blind and hey, it turns out you actually need to do mechanics on Medivh!

Our worst week though was the one when we had an Eye of Azshara level 40-something, failed the timer but decided to power through to the end anyway, just to then have to abandon the key at the very end as it turned out the final boss had an unavoidable mechanic that had buggy scaling and would one-shot even players at max gear and power level. (We confirmed this on the forums after a few wipes.)

However, the very week immediately afterwards I got a really easy key, which when we timed it turned into another easy key, which finally turned into a Neltharion's Lair (another easy key) 49, which we managed to time for the achievement. That felt pretty great. 

The reason we were always three-manning was that there was unfortunately less interest in this version of Remix in our little guild than last time. For raids we could also only get three to four people together. Still, we managed to make our way through all the mythic raids including Tomb of Sargeras (Archimonde was a pain but we got him eventually).

Mythic Antorus turned out to be the final obstacle and we were pleasantly surprised that we managed both Enonar and Imonar (though the latter was a hilarious shitshow - definitely a memorable experience, especially me always having to push him through his first phase by myself while the other two were put to sleep). The unexpected dead stop came at Aggramar, since we couldn't burn through his first phase before he did his knockback, and since the strength of that move is inversely proportional to how many people it hits, the three of us were always yeeted into space the moment he used the ability.

We eventually ended up building a normal pug for it, which I simply titled "Antorus for all" (since we knew we were capable of doing most of it with the three of us anyway and just needed more bodies). People applied faster than I could click "accept". It was a fun breeze that eventually ticked off my last raid achievements too.

I'll probably want to write another full post or two about Lemix once it's over, similarly to how I did for MoP Remix. The experience of levelling all these characters and playing through their class order hall campaigns has definitely been something. It's also been another generally enlightening reminder of what worked and didn't work about Legion in general - some of which I already wrote about a few years ago, but I think I have an even clearer picture of it now.

Comparing Zekvir and the Underpin

Towards the end of War Within season one, I made a whole post about my journey into Zekvir's Lair, from being largely oblivious to what it was all about to finally beating him on double question mark difficulty. I figured that season two was going to be less exciting now that I knew what this whole challenge mode thing was all about, and that turned out to be true, but that's not to say that it wasn't interesting at all.

Fighting the Underpin (the season two delve boss) on normal mode did admittedly turn out to be a bit underwhelming, as I defeated him on my warrior on what I think was only my second or third attempt. I wouldn't say that's because he was much easier than Zekvir though, it's just that it made a big difference that I actually had some gear from the previous season as well as a better idea of what I was doing.

The Underpin also seemed to be a lot more imbalanced in terms of how the fight played for different roles, and playing tank was actually one of the easier ways to do it. Based on how easy of a time I'd had, I immediately jumped back in on a healing alt and was horrified at how different an experience it was. I think I wiped about half a dozen times and then just gave up, because it was impossible for me to break his healing shield with my piddly healer dps, and dps Brann's AI was seemingly not smart enough to help me focus on the shield, instead getting distracted and shooting at adds instead. I was really put out by that and there was little helpful advice on this problem to be found online at the time, so I kind of just left things there and largely forgot about the Underpin again.

But of course! We're now at a point where the next major patch is barely two weeks away, bringing with it a new season and the removal of a bunch of content and achievements that are currently still live. With my FOMO kicked into overdrive, I remembered that I had yet to beat the Underpin on hard mode, and that I should better get to it.

I don't know exactly how long or how many attempts it took me, because the attempt counter is part of Deadly Boss Mods, which for some reason I just couldn't get to work on this encounter. Reading around, it sounded like there should've been a module for it, but even though I had the latest version installed, the Underpin just wasn't on the list of available delve fights in the addon. I made do anyway.

I still spent more than a few hours wiping on ?? difficulty and trying to improve my gameplay, but compared to the weeks-long project that was Zekvir ??, I got there relatively quickly. I wouldn't say the fight is necessarily easier than Zekvir, but it helped that this one actually played to the strengths of my warrior main, and that she was about as well geared by this point as a character not doing M+ or raids can be (not counting her cursed boot slot). This meant that unlike last season, I didn't have to worry about learning to play a different class/spec or gearing up an alt.

I managed to record my victory again and uploaded it to YouTube since I did the same last season:

You can see that I was still far from perfect, and there's one point around the 4:11 mark where I ate a huge chunk of damage that probably would've been a one-shot in lesser gear or on a non-tanky spec. But still, it was good enough and I'm happy that I was able to check this particular achievement off my list.

So how do I think the Underpin and Zekvir compare? Honestly, I'm a bit conflicted. Thematically, I found Zekvir kind of annoying and loved the Underpin. Zekvir wipes were really frustrating to me because I hated the way he went "Yeees, she will be pleased" whenever I died, because I didn't want Xal'atath to enjoy my wipes! (I guess that's a credit to Zekvir's voice actor though.) Meanwhile the Underpin was the complete opposite in that I loved the goofy music and all his silly voice lines. ("Tick tock, tick tock, ya interlopin' mooks!" is without a doubt my favourite.)

Also, it may sound a bit lame, but I can't deny that I liked the fact that he didn't take me as long to kill and that the fight was actually very doable on my main, even if that feels more like luck on my part than anything to do with good balancing and encounter design (refer to my horror at what it felt like to do even the normal fight as a healer as mentioned above).

Purely in terms of mechanics, the Underpin was a lot more messy and random, which I don't necessarily consider a good thing, though it did feel to me like there was also a bit more leeway there than there had been on Zekvir - on the latter, a single mis-timed interrupt could mean that it was a wipe. I did enjoy that the Underpin's "dance" was a little less rigid and more fluid in comparison.

That said, one thing it really suffered from was the fact that it forced you to spend a lot of time fighting your UI instead of the boss. The mechanic that requires you to kick bombs into the adds is just extremely clunky, as it's literally impossible to mouse-target them sometimes due to boss and camera positioning, meaning you had to enable the "interact key" to be able to kick blindly sometimes, and even then - well, it's right there in the last sentence, kicking the things around blindly was not very satisfying or fun.

Nonetheless, all in all I still enjoyed this encounter as well, and I've now made it my new goal to at least do the normal mode on all classes again, like I tried to do with Zekvir. I do kind of have to wonder how sustainable this "delve challenge boss" model is going to be in the long run though. I mean, isn't it bound to get kind of repetitive? I suppose you could say the same about raids, but at least there you have different roles and a much larger number of players to mix things up mechanically, while any fight that's meant to be something to do for solo players of any class is by necessity always going to be much more limited in terms of what it can demand. 

All Classes at 80!

This morning my mage hit level 80 from completing a delve, causing the achievement "Class Connoisseur" to pop up - for getting one of every class to max level. This is hardly an amazing feat nowadays, considering how fast and easy it is to level in retail, but I still felt quite a sense of accomplishment.

Back in my early days of WoWing, when I was at my most invested in the game, it wouldn't have been feasible for me to level up so many characters, as levelling was still quite time-consuming and you had to be really devoted to alting to have multiple max-level toons. When I reinstalled the game for Shadowlands, levelling was quick and I did ultimately level a few alts, but there wasn't much incentive for me to do this with a lot of different characters. It was only during Dragonflight that I got more invested again and started to bring more characters up in levels, which laid the foundation for me ultimately getting one of each class to 80 this expansion.

I wrote two previous posts about this process, which you can find here (in which I talked about playing evoker, warrior, priest and death knight) and here (for notes on hunter, druid, paladin, monk and rogue). This left warlock, demon hunter, mage and shaman for me to work on, which I'll talk about in this post.

Destruction Warlock

I've repeatedly stated in past posts that warlock is among my least favourite classes in WoW, and that the retail version of the class seems particularly confusing to me. The only reason I got this one levelled up was Mists of Pandaria Remix, and in a way it's no surprise that I left levelling her to 80 close to the end of my list. The class kit remained confusing to me the entire time, and a lot of my XP came just from flying around and picking flowers. More than once I died to regular mobs while doing this because I couldn't figure out what the heck I was doing.

And then I hit 80 and it was as if a switch had been flipped. I did the Awakening the Machine event and everything seemingly just exploded, regardless of which buttons I pressed. I one-shot normal mode Zekvir with ease and even gave ?? a try as a warlock for a while. It was weird.

Of course, before I could get too invested, patch 11.1 came out, and even though officially only a single one of my talent points had been reset, I quickly noticed that several of my key abilities had disappeared, and I haven't felt motivated enough to do a deep dive to figure out whether that's due to more talent changes, intentional ability removal or what. I just know that warlock remains a bit of a weird one to me.

Havoc Demon Hunter

My demon hunter was actually my first max-level alt back in Shadowlands, but at some point my interest in playing her kind of dropped off. I do remember that there was a period during Dragonflight when the class felt annoyingly squishy out in the open world, but that was later remedied, and now every time I do play her I think "This is actually kind of fun; I don't know why I don't play this character more often" but then I immediately forget about her again. Maybe that's just an inevitable side effect of having so many alts, especially since I'm not too keen on melee dps. I've been playing my monk a lot more and I guess that covers all my melee needs for the time being.

Restoration Shaman

Considering that this was my "Remix main" and that resto shaman was super flavour of the month during War Within season one, I was kind of surprised by how much I did not feel like playing this character. I've levelled her now, but I still don't enjoy playing her a great deal for some reason. My best guess is that it's because in the (very) distant past I used to enjoy playing resto as melee while soloing, but that doesn't really seem possible anymore in the current game, so all you're left with is shooting a lot of lightning bolts and lava bursts, a play style I never enjoyed. But even while actually healing, the spell selection feels weirdly limited and clunky to me somehow; I don't know. There's probably something I'm missing here but I'm not sure I can be bothered to find out what it is.

Arcane Mage

Mage is one of the few classes where I've actually played as all three specs at some point in the past. I still tend to think of frost as my favourite spec, but when I revived this old character it turned out she was still specced arcane from around Wrath of the Lich King and I decided to just roll with it. The optimised arcane rotation is supposedly extremely complicated, but in everyday play I mostly press one button over and over, with the occasional addition of two others if they light up with a proc. I'm sure it would give some people hives to watch, but it's fun enough for me. I was actually kind of surprised that I ended up leaving this character until last but that's just how things panned out. We'll see whether she can earn herself a better spot in my roster this tier.

Zekvir's Lair

If I recall correctly, Zekvir's Lair was promoted pre-expansion as being somewhat similar to the Legion mage tower challenges. I didn't play during Legion, and as I've stated previously, I'm generally happy to play at a somewhat more chill pace nowadays, but I do like a personal challenge occasionally. My personal journey to and through Zekvir's Lair has been quite an interesting one I think.

The husband and I didn't exactly rush to level cap, so it took a little while until we even considered visiting Zekvir's Lair for the first time. I think it was around the time that people were farming it to get quick vault credit for completing eight delves a week. If people are farming it eight times a week because it's easy, it can't be that much of a challenge, we thought. We went in together... wiped a few times on normal difficulty and then left again, deciding that clearly what we were doing wasn't working.

I decided to read up on the fight a bit and soon decided to give it another go by myself on my protection warrior, which quickly led me to success. Curious about how other classes/roles would fare, I then proceeded to do the fight on several of my alts as well.

As I levelled more characters to 80, it became a sort of tradition for me to have them fight Zekvir. It may not be that hard a fight on normal mode, but if you're someone like me, with a lot of alts you don't really know how to play, it pushes you towards learning a bit more about your class and spec. It won't teach you your optimised damage rotation, but it does encourage you to take a look at your action bar and figure out which buttons increase your mobility, which ones reduce your damage taken, and which ones temporarily increase your damage output.

At the time of writing this, I have all but one class at 80 (the slowpoke is my mage) and they've all done Zekvir's Lair on normal.  Even my crappy subtlety rogue, whom I still don't know how to play, got him down eventually, even though it took more than a few attempts. The point is though that you don't need to do great dps to beat him, you just need to figure out how to move and memorise both your offensive and defensive cooldowns, which I eventually managed to do.

I didn't give the hard mode much thought for the longest time. A guildie posted about beating it relatively shortly after the expansion launch, but at the time I didn't even know what the heck they were talking about so it didn't mean much to me. At some point I must have stuck my head in the door out of sheer curiosity, was probably killed by auto-attacks within a few hits, and decided that this was something to come back to at a later time.

With patch 11.1 creeping ever closer, I decided a few weeks ago that it was finally time to look into beating Zekvir on ?? difficulty properly (since there are feats of strength tied to doing so before the next season). I figured it couldn't possibly be too bad now with my prot warrior having geared up a bit to about 620 item level - but I failed horribly. I could just not do enough dps to get the egg down, and the slows from Zekvir's spit were also giving me trouble.

I decided to do a bit of research again, and while people had a number of tips for how to do better as a warrior, the general consensus seemed to be that the fight is a very different experience depending on your class and spec, and that prot warrior was one of the weaker ones for this particular challenge. Maybe I levelled all those alts for a reason after all, I thought... and decided to put them to the test.

I gave the fight a try on my warlock next. You may recall that warlock was another class that I didn't get on with while levelling... but when she hit 80, it was strangely as if somebody had flipped a switch and she suddenly turned super powerful overnight. I did an Awakening the Machine and everything absolutely exploded, even though I had no idea what I was doing. I tried Zekvir on normal mode and it was an easy one-shot, even though I had never even cast Demonic Circle before.

Giving Zekvir ?? a try on the lock didn't seem like that much of a stretch as a result. And I did feel immediately that it went a little better than on the warrior, but killing the first egg was still a bit hit and miss. Now, this character was actually around 35 item levels below the warrior, but I thought I had read somewhere that the fight scaled with gear anyway. I decided to double-check that, and it turned out to be wrong, so I took a break to do a bit of gearing up. I returned with an item level of just above 600, and my performance at egg killing did feel improved... but still not 100%, and other weaknesses of the class became more apparent now:

• Zekvir's melee attacks hit ridiculously hard, and as a clothie I would often die to random auto attack crits that had nothing to do with mechanics.
• My movement speed felt slow and I had difficulty dodging out of the deadly one-shot cones.
• While Demonic Circle worked to cleanse the snare from Zekvir's spit, it was only off cooldown for every other cast. Now, the theory here is that Brann in healer mode can cleanse the others, but his AI is kind of... inconsistent. I'd get the debuff, wait for a second to see if he'd cleanse, he didn't, and since it ticks for so much damage that you can't just wait around, I'd teleport back to my Circle, just to see his cleanse go off at the exact same moment after all... and then I had nothing for the next cast and would wipe. It just felt too unreliable and I found myself wondering whether there wasn't a class with an even better toolkit for this.

I eventually landed on windwalker monk, since this was a class/spec I actually felt I could play at a decent level. (I later read that ret pally might be even better, but my paladin is holy and I have no idea how retribution works at the moment.)

There was a bit of trial and error here too as I had to adjust my talents, but the experience immediately felt a lot better. With Tiger's Lust and no fewer than three charges of roll I had great mobility and didn't have to worry about Brann's skill at cleansing. Touch of Death made every other egg trivial to kill. However, progress still felt glacial, and after seeing comments that the recommended item level for hard mode Zekvir was apparently around 620 or so, I decided that more gearing up would still be helpful (I believe my monk was around item level 608 when I started).

So the next week I spammed bountiful delves pretty much daily. I had taken part in a lot of world activities but hadn't actually done that many delves, so I had dozens of keys saved up. It was remarkable how quickly I was able to get myself into a full set of champion gear, even while being dependent on RNG to an extent. I couldn't help but wonder if this was what my delve-loving guildies' experience of the expansion's early weeks had been. Aside from the delves, I also farmed valorstones wherever else I could get them, from buried wax and Siren Isle weeklies to world quests. After claiming my prize from the great vault the next week, I stood at a pretty solid item level 616.

And then I got serious about progressing the fight, parking my monk at the entrance to Zekvir's Lair and getting some attempts in whenever I had some time and could stand it.

This turned out to be... an experience. The extra gear meant that I was finally able to kill all the eggs almost all the time, but that didn't stop me from still finding other things to die to. It didn't happen nearly as often as on my warlock for example, but there were still times when Zekvir would just randomly crit with his auto-attacks and flatten me for no particular reason whatsoever. Sometimes I just failed to dodge a cone... usually when an add spawned on the little raised dais at the back of the room, which made moving to and from it less smooth. At other times, he just had to spawn an add at the complete opposite of the room and then cast every single ability to block my path consecutively. It felt so random and was infuriating.

Now, the truth is, there is a lot of randomness to the fight and you can absolutely get screwed over by RNG, but you can also mitigate some of those issues by just playing better. Positioning matters a lot for example - by keeping Zekvir in the middle of the room, the egg should never be too far away, no matter where he spawns it. But there was just so much going on in terms of dodging, running away, closing in again, finding where the heck Brann dropped his last set of health potions... it was exhausting and made me feel very old.

On Saturday I dedicated several hours to practising the fight, but quickly found myself demotivated. After more than fifty attempts on my monk it still didn't feel like I had made significant progress. Sure, I'd get into phase two every so often, but then I'd just wipe within ten seconds on the next attempt. It didn't feel consistent and like I was progressing at a good pace.

I thought about just abandoning the whole idea, but the sunk cost fallacy kept pulling me back in. Surely I hadn't spent all those hours grinding gear for nothing? Would I really have to go into the next season admitting failure after coming this far?

I kept looking for more ways to improve. I actually enchanted my gear and cooked some buff food, something I usually never bother with. I looked up a guide for how to dps as a windwalker - I thought it was interesting that every guide for Zekvir tells you that it's a marathon and not a dps race... but because you need to dance so perfectly for close to ten minutes, being able to shorten the fight even just a little, having one less egg phase and so on, made quite a noticeable difference to me.

I also decided that instead of banging my head against the wall for hours, I was going to limit myself to just a couple of attempts at a time, and then do something else for a bit, as I'd noticed that my first try of any given play session was usually the best, with my performance in subsequent attempts often deteriorating. By enforcing these breaks, I was able to make more attempts with a calm mindset and started to get to phase two more consistently.

The thing that killed me there most frequently were the "fucking fear balls" as I once swore out loud while my husband was looking over my shoulder. I even kept thinking about what an unfair mechanic they were, shooting out of his body at random angles at high speed, without giving you as much as a chance to dodge. Imagine my amazement when I finally realised that there was actually a visual indicator for where they would appear before they spawned, and that I could therefore dodge them reliably after all.

And today, it finally happened. I logged on in the early afternoon with the goal of just giving it one or two tries... and finally got him down after what must've been around 150 attempts across all characters over the last few weeks. My hands were shaking when the achievement finally popped, especially as I'd made a big mistake during the last few percent of the fight that had almost killed me.

I may be getting on in years but it's comforting to know that I haven't lost my reflexes completely yet, and I can still be unnecessarily stubborn as ever. I also feel properly ready for the patch now.

P.S.: The husband and I also did all delves on tier 11 over the course of the past few weeks. That was less of an adrenaline rush, but still required some care and patience at our item level, and I was still quite pleased with that achievement as well. According to Data for Azeroth, fewer than 1% of people have that achievement right now compared to 6% for Zekvir.

Anniversary Success

After the bad pug story from a few days ago, today I have a tale of a good one! From retail even...?!

However, first things first: The big event for WoW's 20th anniversary finally came to an end this week. I wrote about what I thought of all the different activities involved back in early November, including the fact that currency payouts were initially very restricted. Once the devs fixed that, I kept collecting celebration tokens for about a month until I'd gotten everything I wanted, and then I kind of lost interest.

That was until someone reminded me at the end of my Christmas holidays that the event was almost over, and I decided that I'd probably like to still polish off the remaining achievements that I hadn't completed yet. These basically fell into two categories: Secrets of Azeroth and the BRD raid.

With the Secrets stuff, I'd done a few of the Guest Relations quests but stopped at some point because I'd found them too tedious to figure out. This time around I just looked up some guides and powered through everything that was left with instructions up on my second monitor. So many of these puzzles were just way too fiddly and obscure. Ticking all the boxes still took some time (the story quest about the feast recipe for the pirates was absolutely diabolical, especially if you didn't want to just buy all the ingredients off the AH) but I got there over the course of one day, finishing off my hunt for crates in the early hours of New Year's Day.

The issue with the raid was that I had done it multiple times on LFR, but the two achievements for it required you to go into areas where a raid finder group usually wouldn't go, so I figured my only chance to get them done was to join a normal mode pug. Even though I hadn't set foot into anything beyond LFR since mid-Cataclysm (not counting the craziness of Pandaria Remix), I strangely enough wasn't too worried about that, as I'd repeatedly heard from credible sources that normal mode raids these days aren't really much harder than LFR. I invited my husband into a party on New Year's Day and suggested that we look to join a BRD normal raid together.

We only had one problem: there wasn't a single listing for BRD that evening, just Nerub-ar Palace runs as far as the eye could see. So I decided to be brave and simply create my own raid. I named it "BRD normal full run" and set the description to: "Let's get those achievements!"

You might think this foolish, considering that I didn't really know what I was doing, but I had faith that at least a couple of people willing to join our pug would know what to do and would speak up if we went grievously wrong. And... it worked out alright! After accepting absolutely everyone that applied over the next fifteen minutes or so, I realised that we were still a tank short, so I relogged from my evoker to my own prot warrior because I'm a glutton for punishment I guess I also had faith that the other tank would know what to do. First thing I did on zoning in was to hand them raid assist and they did seem to take charge quite happily, so all I had to do was help with rounding up adds, soak damage and taunt swap where appropriate.

We did have a couple of wipes, and one guy left after the first three bosses, but overall we progressed at a good clip, and my description had clearly attracted the right kind of people as at least half the raid piped up about missing the exact same parts of the achievements that we also needed and everyone gently herded each other towards them when we got to the right area.

It was also quite apparent that at least a few of our dps were even more clueless than I was (I'd at least watched a brief guide!), which usually became evident when someone was targeted by a soaking mechanic and ran for the hills to die alone in a corner instead of stacking up to survive. However, we were generally able to power through those losses just like you would in LFR, and the couple of times when things got too crazy and we wiped, someone did indeed speak up to inform us about just what had gone wrong, and people listened and did better next time. Everyone was friendly enough, and when we finished it was all "gg"s and thank yous.

I won't lie, I felt kind of proud that my first normal raid, my first pug raid, and my first raid organised by me - all rolled into one - went so well. Sometimes someone being willing to start the group is really all it takes.

Timewalking to an Unexpected Achievement

I only talked about timewalking on this blog once before, a little over a year ago. As I noted then, it's a feature I quite like, as it's one of Blizzard's (generally limited) efforts to let people enjoy old content as part of their normal gameplay. Sure, a group rushing through a heroic in ten minutes while AoEing everything along the way is not necessarily anything like the way that dungeon was experienced when it first came out, but it's still better than running it solo while over-levelled and just one-shotting everything. At least you get to see mechanics sometimes.

Last week was Cataclysm Timewalking, and there was a quest to run five of them for a gear reward box, so our little retail-playing friend group signed up for a full tour. It went well and I was actually reminded of how much I enjoyed the Cata dungeons at launch, so I decided to do the run-five-timewalking-dungeons quest on my demon hunter as well.

I've kind of reached the point where I'm reasonably confident queueing up to pug certain content in retail. I still think that the way people rush through dungeons is less than ideal, and makes for a terrible new player experience in particular as it means newbies just spend their time racing after the more experienced players without having the slightest clue about what's actually going on (thematically or mechanically). However, if you know the content you're queueing up for and mentally prepare yourself for the experience, it's generally tolerable.

One of the dungeons my demon hunter got thrown into was Lost City of the Tol'vir. The group rushed through AoEing everything as you'd expect, while I reminisced about how deadly many of those pulls used to be. However, when we killed the last boss, Siamat, something unexpected happened: I saw the Glory of the Cataclysm Hero achievement pop up, as well as a notification that I'd just earned the Volcanic Stone Drake mount.

I was briefly baffled but didn't have time to think about it too much, as I had to leap off the boss's terrace to quickly hand in the dungeon quest I'd picked up at the entrance (what with it being my demon hunter's first time there), and the rest of the group was already hitting the re-queue button.

It was only after completing my five runs that I could really sit down and take in what had happened. WoW's achievement system is a bit confusing with the way it mixes character-specific and account-wide achievements in some situations but not others, and my first thought had been that surely I just got some sort of character-specific achievement on my demon hunter that I'd already earned on another character. I even logged into my old troll priest, the original Shintar, to check her achievement log for comparison.

What I found though was that it was indeed true that it was my demon hunter who had earned me the Volcanic Stone Drake. Looking back at the various achievement dates, it looks like I made a bit of a push for Glory of the Cataclysm Hero in early 2011 and did in fact get all the achievements bar one: Headed South. I don't know why I didn't get that one in specific - I can only guess that it must've been challenging in some way, even if many of the Wowhead comments claim that it's super easy and barely an inconvenience. And then I never went back to try again even though I continued to play Cataclysm for another year after that.

Either way, getting that last achievement purely by accident twelve years later, in a timewalking pug that was just steamrolling the content, created a very brief flash of a connection to past me (who actually cared about this stuff) and made me feel very, very odd.

A Shadowlands Achievement

While discontent bubbles in the retail WoW-sphere due to the longest content drought following the launch of a new expansion in the game's history, I'm actually having a pretty good time with Shadowlands. I've long found retail WoW's "expected" content cadence unpleasant, not because getting new content is inherently bad (duh!) but due to it also always involving a relentless push to forcefully consign everything current to the dustbin of obsolescence at the same time.

The big project the husband and I have been working on for more than two months now are Torghast's twisting corridors. Initially I wasn't too thrilled by the idea, because while I liked normal Torghast well enough, our runs tended to last up to an hour as it was, and with the twisted corridors being three times as long, the thought of repeated play sessions requiring an uninterrupted three hours seemed a bit daunting. The game mode grew on me however, with the additional floors allowing for some truly ridiculous power combos by the end that set it apart from normal Torghast and made for a varied and entertaining experience.

I was wondering whether setting our eyes on the ultimate goal of completing layer eight was maybe a bit ambitious for our casual weekly adventures, considering that the recommended item level for the final layer is 225, while the husband and I are both capped at 200 or less due to the solo/duo-centric nature of our gameplay. As it turns out, it's perfectly doable with a lower item level though, and today we finally became the proud owners of our very own corridor creeper mounts. Since 9.1 appears to still be a couple of months away, we'll even get to enjoy the prestige of being able to ride in the Maw for a short while, before that patch turns that into business as usual for everyone.

I do suspect that going in as a duo meant that we had it relatively easy in terms of scaling, and I also haven't heard anything about either prot warriors or mistweaver monks having a hard time in Torghast in general. Not to mention that we'd also already maxed out our reputation with Ve'nari and bought all the possible power-ups for Torghast... still, it felt like an achievement, if nothing else for the sheer amount of time it took, and we did have to fail on the final layer twice before getting it down.

The first time we'd already lost several lives on the way to floor 17, at which point we got an awkward layout in Mort'regar where two elite deadsouls with particularly nasty abilities got the drop on us at the top of a staircase, causing us to die repeatedly and run out of lives, leading to our first and only encounter with the Tarragrue. The second time things seemed to be going smoothly until floor 12, where we ran into Patrician Cromwell, who absolutely destroyed us with one-shot abilities. I tried to look up some strategies and tips, but the comments on the Wowhead page I linked above mostly consist of people complaining about how overtuned that boss is and that they couldn't get him down either, so we eventually gave up before we'd even run out of lives as we just couldn't see a way of dealing with him.

Conversely, our run today was among the smoothest we've ever had, with only two deaths in total, both of which happened on the Coldheart mid-levels when I fell victim to ambushers from above. The final wing we had to contend with was Fracture Chambers and actually felt oddly chill in comparison, with the last floor before the boss consisting of more pottery than enemies. Such is the luck of the draw, but it still felt great to get it down. Now we'll actually have to start thinking of some new goals to pursue!

Account-Wide

(Hm, apparently this has been sitting in my drafts folder for over a month but I never posted it... might as well.)

One of the big changes to the game in Mists of Pandaria is that a lot of things that used to be bound to a specific character are now bound to the account/player instead. Now, as a general rule I have to admit that I'm not a big fan of this. I always feel for Bhagpuss when he's trying to explain to people why it matters that characters are their own - well, characters, and not just different puppets for the player to mess around with, even if you're not a roleplayer. I've always felt the same way really and never thought of that attitude as very peculiar... but apparently there are a lot of MMO players out there to whom these things don't matter. Still, to me it feels kind of wrong that a pet that I buy on one character should suddenly be available to any of my characters - without any kind of explanation anyway. However, I think WoW gave up on in-game explanations for convenience features a long time ago, probably around the time they introduced the dungeon finder. Anyway, with that out of the way...

Achievements

Now this is the one thing I don't mind becoming account-bound, because achievements have always been aimed at the player anyway. They don't really exist from an in-game point of view and are thus irrelevant to individual characters. When The Old Republic added an achievement system last year, they made it account-wide right away, and it's been working very well in my opionion. Once you're on your tenth alt in that game though, you won't see many achievements pop up anymore as you level, simply because you've already done it all - though there are still codex entries to collect on a per character basis (which are similar to achievements, but separate).

From that point of view, I like WoW's current idea of having both account-wide achievements (for the more difficult ones) and character-bound ones (for the easier ones). It combines the benefits of not feeling annoyed when you get a tough achievement while on an alt ("Why couldn't I have got that on my main?!") while maintaining a steady stream of flashy dings throughout the levelling process, even as you explore Mulgore for the fifteenth time.

The only problem I have with it is that the implementation in the achievement panel is wonky. For an example of what I mean, take the World Explorer achievement. That's labelled as account-wide, fair enough. The associated sub-achievements however are not, yet they still light up as already done even on a new character. Only if you dig deeper and check the sub-requirements for those achievements, they will show up as incomplete, and if you complete them, you'll get an achievement pop-up as if you'd never done it before. This is confusing and makes it hard to keep track of character-based achievements that are related to an account-bound meta. I kind of feel that they should have been able to find a better way to do that.

Mounts

Probably my least favourite new account-wide thing. It offers some convenience, sure - when my Worgen druid hit twenty, I could just pull out a random mount and use that instead of going to buy her a new one. (Well, strictly speaking I could have stuck with Running Wild on a Worgen, but I don't like that ability very much.) Not to mention that all my alts capable of riding have access to my Traveler's Tundra Mammoth now, meaning that they can pull out a vendor whenever and wherever they feel like it.

On the flip side though, that special connection between a character and his or her unique mounts is gone. When I looked at my new account-wide mount panel after having logged through a couple of alts for the first time, I was most surprised to find a Headless Horseman's Mount in there. I don't even remember when I got it, I'm guessing that one of my alts must have been lucky when I already didn't care that much anymore... but now I don't even know who it "belonged" to. And sure, I could ride my Amani War Bear on any of my characters now - but it'd feel wrong as they aren't the ones I earned it on. I just don't quite see the point other than bragging rights. Finding and earning the right mount for a new character used to be a rite of passage... but when you already have access to everything you've ever owned in the game, that journey is one that you can't really re-take.

Also, it feels like parts of the game haven't really been streamlined to take this new feature into account. For example if you do the Vashj'ir intro now, you still get a seahorse mount as a quest reward that you can't use and the only thing you can do with it is throw it away. (Delete a mount! The blasphemy!) I would've thought that the game should be able to recognise if you already have a certain mount and shouldn't clutter up your bags with pointless duplicates.

Pets

Like with mounts, I feel that there used to be a connection between characters and their pets, though I personally didn't perceive this as strongly as the link with mounts, as I've never been much of a pet collector. Still, this link is obviously gone now. However, I'm willing to be more forgiving with this one as I can see it being almost a necessity to make the new pet battle feature work - else you'd constantly find yourself running into rare pets on the wrong character. The fact that you can box some pets up and re-sell them also makes it an awesome way of transferring money between servers. Again, the only thing that bugs me is that some details feel unnecessarily clunky - such as that some pets are BoP until you learn them, at which point you can cage them and they become BoE. It's quite annoying when you already have three or more of a particular pet and instead of being able to sell it right away, you have to cage one of your existing pets and then learn the new one. Just seems... unnecessary.

Titles

This one I have slightly mixed feelings about. I can see the point of people enjoying the ability to carry the bragging rights onto all their alts, though personally I (once again) wouldn't much fancy using a title on a character that didn't actually earn it. Sure, I was majorly miffed when I only got "The Undying" on my alt and not my main back in the day, but pretending that it didn't happen and wearing the title on my main doesn't "un-do" what happened. I also noticed that some titles, while account-wide, have retained a level restriction, which just strikes me as really random. If I'm going to run around wearing "Hand of A'dal" on a character that didn't earn it anyway, why does it still matter what level that character is? Either way, I don't feel like there is much of a loss to me from being able to wear a different title - they never felt quite as special to me as mounts for example.

One reason I do like the new account-wide titles is that it takes WoW quite a while to give you any titles as you level up, and this way you can pick something from your existing collection while levelling. I don't mind using something silly like "the Love Fool" or "Jenkins" on a lowbie for example, as I don't have a particular attachment to these titles and it does give my character a little more definition.

Pilgrim's Bounty and Cooking

Cynwise said something funny in his guide to this year's Pilgrim's Bounty: "doing those first 350 points any other way is just silly". I have to admit that at first that comment actually stung me a little. Why is it silly? I love cooking (in game; in real life I'm terrible at it), and have done so pretty much for as long as I can remember. I remember being a level six noob with barely half a clue about anything in the game and eagerly cooking up Herb Baked Eggs and Kaldorei Spider Kabobs. At around level thirty or so, my friend who was wisely levelling her cooking and fishing in sync gifted me a stack of Sagefish Delights one day and I was like, OMG, eating these gives me an mp5 buff? Crazy! I also have fond memories of winning the recipe for Runn Tum Tuber Surprise in Dire Maul East and being told that I was extremely lucky.

I've always loved cooking for how it was a profession that benefited from almost everything I enjoyed doing in the game anyway. Explore and find a vendor in a remote location who sells an interesting recipe, hoard anything that might look useful to find out later that you can turn it into a tasty meal with the right recipe, quest to raise your cooking skill beyond 225, and so on and so forth. It always felt very engaging to me, and to this day I've maintained one to two tabs in my private guild banks that are devoted to nothing but raw cooking materials, gathered in one place to redistribute them to alts for later use.

However, looking at it honestly, I had to admit that I've really been struggling to level cooking on my new alts whenever I tried. With the new levelling system, you zoom from one place to the next and past many zones so quickly that you might never even see many recipe vendors, and you end up killing fewer mobs that might provide you with raw materials as well. Having alts "help each other out" seemed to have a very limited effect too, as I found it hard to keep track of who needed which recipes (Altoholic is supposed to track that in principle, but for me at least its profession tracking has been buggy for ages), and somehow pretty much every character seemed to run into the same skill point humps, needing stacks upon stacks of the exact same raw foods and I never had enough. As much as I used to love it, it had become annoying in its current incarnation. It worked when levelling was slow and had you traipsing all over Azeroth, but in this brave new world... not so much.

So I thought what the hell, might as well get it done, and so I've been spending a good chunk of the past two evenings cooking up Pilgrim's Bounty foods on various alts. (I still have a couple left, but we'll see whether I get around to them tomorrow.) I didn't just level my cooking either; basically I did the following things on all of my characters:

- I did the quest line that sends you back and forth between the cities to deliver different foods to different places.
- I ate at a Bountiful Table to complete the Share a Bountiful Feast quest and did Sharing is Caring while I was at it.
- I completed each of the dailies at least once, which was easy enough since I was cooking up lots of food to level my skill anyway, and got the Pilgrim's Progress achievement on the side.

If there were other people at the table with me, I threw food at them for "FOOD FIGHT!", but I didn't hang around to wait if nobody else was eating. Fun fact: even though I've been participating in this holiday in some form or another ever since its inception, it took me until this year to figure out how this achievement actually works. I used to think that it was just a random chance whenever you hit the button to share food. D'oh.

I also got The Turkinator on lots of characters, though not all, as I didn't fret about it if I had a streak of bad luck. As long as I got enough turkeys to do my cooking I was happy.

I only did Pilgrim's Pouch on one or two characters as I considered getting to the Exodar too much of a hassle in addition to the repeated back and forth for the quest line (most of the alts that needed skilling up were Alliance). This rang particularly true after I tried to take the portal to the Exodar from Darnassus one time and accidentally sent myself to the Blasted Lands with my hearthstone on cooldown. Arrrgh.

However, even without such mishaps these little adventures turned out to be quite a time-intensive endeavour, with each character needing about an hour to complete the whole tour, mostly due to travel time and the time it took to gather sufficient amounts of turkeys. It was all pretty relaxed though, and I watched some tv on the side and went AFK while on flight paths. Missing the boat over and over again also gave me happy flashbacks to my newbie days, though I never fell into the water.

The only thing that really got on my nerves was, funnily enough... people standing in the fire. Seriously, you don't need to stand in the cooking fire to use it! I noticed that it was mostly max-level characters in raid gear who were doing that, which then made me wonder whether it's some kind of subconscious way of being rebellious? An "I have to move out of the fire all the damn time, this one's not hurting me so I'll stand in it all day long" kind of thing? The thing is, I don't really care whether they stand in the fire in their raids or not, but being audio-spammed with incessant "oof oof oof" sounds gets annoying really quickly. This then got me thinking whether bad stuff on the ground wouldn't be easier to avoid if it always made your character make that sound... you might find yourself moving out of sheer annoyance, or else your guildies would at least yell at you for the same reason. (I vaguely recall a bug in DBM during ICC I think it was, where it kept making a warning noise on Blood Princes even if other people were moving with the shadow prison debuff... you bet that had me shouting at them!)

School of Not-So-Hard Knocks

Let me start off by saying that I think that the School of Hard Knocks is a very badly designed achievement. I thought so when I first saw its requirements; I thought so even more when I read people's accounts of how it was giving them a terrible time year after year. One of my friends even quit the game for several months after he had failed to get the achievement despite of hours of trying. For these reasons I decided that I wasn't even going to bother; I wasn't going to support what I considered an inane achievement by working towards it. I got all the other Children's Week achievements, just not this one.

But.

This year, I read this post by Vidyala and these posts by Cynwise, and they gave me reason to pause. Cynwise in particular impressed me, because here we have someone who is a dedicated PvPer, the kind of person whom you'd expect to hate this achievement the most, seeing how it fills up the battlegrounds with tons of people who don't actually want to pvp... and yet he has retained an amazingly positive attitude towards the whole thing, and not in a "yay, I get to gank some noobs" kind of way either. Not only is he encouraging people, telling them that it's all very doable, he also comes across as believing that it's doable without actually hindering your own team - the one fear that has been putting me off this achievement more than anything else.

So I decided to give it a try after all. I'm not completely inexperienced in PvP and actually have pretty decent gear for current levels, so it's not as if the battlegrounds themselves scared me. But some of those tasks required for the achievement... returning the flag in Warsong Gulch? I'm a healer, for god's sake, my job is to protect our flag carrier, not to chase the enemy. Can my role in the battle be any more diametrically opposed to what Blizzard wants me to do? How stupid. But well, no harm in trying, and I vowed to myself that I would not do anything outright stupid just to gain those achievement points. I wanted to see if it was indeed possible to get it done while playing the "proper" way.

Unsurprisingly, Arathi Basin was by far the easiest one, as base assaults are something that happens frequently throughout the game and no class or role is at a massive disadvantage while making them. In fact, I only had to ride straight out of the gate and up to the farm flag. Only one other person tried to go for it, and I managed to start capping about half a second faster. Done! I hung around for the rest of the game of course, and it didn't seem much different from the way Arathi Basin matches usually go. Bases changed ownership reasonably often, but then they always do. And Horde won, as we almost always do in this battleground. Nice.

Alterac Valley was one that I expected to be very difficult, considering that there are only four bunkers to assault, they rarely get retaken, and there were thirty-nine other people in the battleground who might potentially be competing with me. To make things even worse, Healbot pretty much crashed my game the moment I zoned in, since it couldn't cope with so many people in one place after the recent patch. By the time I had managed to disable it and the game was in a playable state again, the rest of the team was already halfway across the map. Not good.

I more or less got trapped in a defensive position, dying a few times and feeling rather unhappy when it started to look like it was going to be another one of those games where the Alliance perpetually choked everyone trying to go north off at Iceblood, slowly grinding the defence into paste as they advanced towards Drek'thar. Never mind achievements, that kind of thing is just painful.

However, after a while I noticed that the Alliance assault didn't seem to be as fierce as usual, and both towers and bunkers kept getting retaken. Of course! All the orphan minders were going towards the enemy objectives to get their 'cheeves done, and all the serious PvPers were suddenly playing defence because it meant that they got to gank clueless achievement hunters, which meant that nothing much actually got done on either side.

Miraculously I managed to slip through a hole in the Alliance force at Iceblood, with only a lock throwing a couple of dots on me, and made it towards mid-field. I was actually approaching some bunkers! Of course I then got ganked at the next choke point at Stonehearth, but since the Horde held Snowfall for a change I at least didn't get thrown back all the way down south. Eventually me and a couple of other Hordies managed to break the resistance at Stonehearth, and suddenly the world was open to me. Too bad that both Stonehearth and Icewing bunker were already tagged and swarming with people... but lo and behold, both Dun Baldar bunkers were still bright and blue.

I didn't really think that I would stand much of a chance on my own, but since I'd never know if I didn't try, I decided to simply ride up to Dun Baldar. Much to my surprise nobody bothered me on the road, and to my delight I found that all the archers in the bunkers had already been killed during a previous assault. A lone mage took a few shots at me but then turned away again - I don't know if she decided to just let me do my thing or got genuinely distracted by something else. Either way I had Dun Baldar north all to myself, and managed to assault it shortly before my side suffered a crushing defeat, as usual. Still, getting that part of the achievement done on the first attempt was a pleasant surprise!

Eye of the Storm was where things got harder. I half expected my entire team to go straight for the flag, but instead they decided to all crowd onto one base, which I found plain odd. The best theory that I could come up with was that we did indeed have a lot of PvP-inexperienced achievement hunters in that battleground, but that they had read somewhere that you couldn't run the flag without having at least one base, so getting exactly one base was what they focused on first. After we capped that one base, everyone kind of dispersed into all directions, and I found myself getting stunlocked and ganked by about four people at once every time I resed up anywhere. Looking at the scoreboard I got the impression that we were fighting a partial premade that had identified me as the only healer on Horde side and was thus having a field day. It wasn't encouraging and I decided to take a break from EotS for a bit.

When I tried again a bit later, people started out doing that single-base-capping thing again, but I managed to lure a couple of them towards the Draenei Ruins and soon we were holding at least two bases. I stayed there for a while, pondering how I was ever going to cap a flag when bases needed defending and so few of my team mates seemed to be willing to do it, when I saw a gnome mage emerge from the kerfluffle in the centre, trying to carry the flag north towards the Mage Tower. However, he had about half of the Horde team hot on his heels and it was obvious that he wasn't going to make it. I mounted up quickly and rode over. He blinked one last time to escape his attackers in melee, but a couple of ranged shots finished him off mere seconds later and he expired right at my feet. I picked up the flag and quickly ran back towards the Draenei Ruins, with my fellow Hordies who had also been trying to get the flag providing a magnificent meat shield. One cap later, I could tick the third item off my list. As the cherry on top, we won that match as well.

This only left the dreaded Warsong Gulch. I really couldn't see how I was possibly going to pull that one off as a healer, but then I hadn't expected Alterac Valley and Eye of the Storm to be so forthcoming either, so I was strangely optimistic. In my first match I simply rode towards mid-field with the majority of my team and assisted them with killing Alliance there for a bit. However, after a few minutes I noticed that nobody had bothered to pick up the flag on either side. A quick look at the map revealed that aside from the people engaged in mid-field, everyone else was camping the flag room, waiting for an enemy to try anything so that they could gank them and get the achievement. Presumably the Alliance was doing the same, so of course nobody was making any progress whatsoever. /facepalm.

Staying true to my vow to play properly, I decided that if nobody else was going to go for the flag, I was going to do it. The Alliance defenders appeared to have fallen asleep out of boredom, so I managed to run the flag and cap it without anyone bothering me much. Of course, when I tried this for the second time, everyone had woken up and soon the entire Alliance team was forming a big dog pile on top of my dead body. Oh well, at least someone on their side got their achievement I guess? At this point a friendly resto shaman decided to join me in my efforts, and together we managed to run the flag another two times despite more enemy attempts to stop us, seeing how they weren't particularly good or coordinated. I was quite content to end the match with a crushing 3-0 victory, even if I had got nowhere close to actually returning our flag.

During my next WSG match, I was pleased to see that the entire team actually left the flag room at the start, deciding to take the battle to the enemy instead of sitting around and hoping for some sort of miracle. I briefly helped the skirmishers in mid-field again but quickly noticed a lonely paladin making an attempt at grabbing the enemy flag. I felt conflicted for a moment, seeing how supporting the pally would only take me further away from any enemies that might potentially pick up the flag, but my rule to not play stupidly for the sake of the achievement still stood, so I joined her and helped to keep her alive.

As we were making our way back to our base across mid-field, I suddenly spotted a gnome mage - once again - trying to carry the Horde flag away. He was about to pass us on a parallel course only a few yards away, and I immediately had a flashback to Eye of the Storm as I saw the majority of my team working hard to bring him down. (I wish people were this focused on returning the flag during the rest of the year!) Since the paladin seemed safe for the time being, I ran over again... and yep, the mage blinked out of range of the melee just like in EotS, preventing them from getting that final grab in, and died right at my feet. One quick click later, both School of Hard Knocks and For The Children flashed up on my screen - after only six battlegrounds in total.

The pally and I continued to run the flag, and only on our last run did I notice the sad human hunter that had been in the Alliance flag room all along - that is to say, I had noticed him there before, but it took three assaults on his base for me to notice that he wasn't even attacking. Instead he kept spamming a macro asking people to /wait and /point-ing at his orphan. I felt very bad as I saw other people killing him mercilessly and making fun of him, and I barely had time to emote a /sorry to him before he died. If I had got that last flag I would have dropped it once, just for him, but the pally beat me to it again and had no interest in helping the poor guy out. I generally agree that battlegrounds are for fighting, not for co-operating with your enemy, but I'm also a hopeless sap. Here's to you, human hunter; I hope you got your achievement eventually and that it wasn't too painful.

Conclusion: Cynwise was right, it is possible to get those achievements while working at winning the battlegrounds at the same time, though I think that while doing so I probably used up my entire supply of good luck for the rest of the year, what with getting it all done so quickly and often against the odds. I should probably play a couple more matches before the end of Children's Week, just to make a point of helping other people get their achievements, in the interest of balancing my cosmic karma.