The Value of Achievements

I love achievements.  I love the immediate sense of accomplishment.  I love the banner that flashes across the screen. I love the sound of an achievement ding.

When achievements first burst on the scene, I immediately set my sights on the ones that were the most accessible for me and my play style. This meant achievements that fell under professions, exploration, holidays and the general categories; anything that I could go after on my own.

Some would classify this sort of behaviour as typical of an “achievement whore” but I disagree.  I haven’t gone completely over to the dark side yet.  There is one thing that is holding me back.

I’m cheap.

Mum would say frugal and it’s part of my Scottish heritage…

Whatever you would like to call it, it is the one thing that is standing in between me and a few achievements.  You know the ones; those achievements that you can buy.

Mei Francis isn’t an exotic mount dealer.  She’s an achievement vendor.  Armored Brown Bear and Traveler’s Tundra Mammoth combined would cost be 16,600 gold.  If you’re not that interested in the justice point gear that you can get, fly back to Dal and pick up a Wooly Mammoth for 2175 JPs.

Another achievement that you can buy while shopping in Dalaran is the Ring of the Kirin Tor.  With an exalted reputation, it would only cost 6,800 gold.

Get to the Choppa would set me back 15,000 gold or more now that we aren’t all hanging out in Northrend anymore.

Goodness, at the end of Wrath, you could buy a Lich King Kill Achievement if you wanted to and had the gold for it.  On my realm, it was 20,000 for the 10man achievement, 40,000 gold for 25M.

As much as I love achievements, when it comes to buying them, I’m not a fan.  These gold-sink achievements are easy for me to ignore but not all achievements need to cost that much gold.

Currently, the one achievement that is taunting me is Stocking Up – Create 500 Heavy Frostweave Bandages. Yeah, I know.  How absolutely pointless.  But you see, I’m sitting at 418/500 and it’s teasing me with how simple it would be to complete it.  I’d only have to make 82 bandages.  With one easy press of the “create all” button, 164 pieces of frostweave cloth could be easily transformed!  I’ve already got all the cloth I need.  It’s just sitting in the bank, taking up space so really it’s not going to cost me anything that I don’t already have; however, there is still value in that cloth.  These days, frostweave cloth can sell from 1.50 to 2 gold a piece and because of that, I’m not quite sure if I’m willing to pay even 285 gold for an achievement.

Interesting to note that with Cataclysm, it seems that Blizzard is stepping away from the achievements that you can buy.  A good thing, in my opinion.

How about yourselves? What has been the most expensive achievement that you’ve gotten?  Or are there any ones that your “Scottish instincts” just can’t let you fork the gold out for?

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Days of Thunder (and Random Thoughts)

Thor, God of Thunder?

Thorn of blunder?

Torn us under?

No, no, no…

Torn asunder.

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You didn’t hear it here first!

You should have read it –>here<–, instead.  (With a screenshot!)

Quick, go check.

No, really.  DO EEET!

Great!  Thanks for trusting me! 😀

Anyway, as you are now aware, The Zug Initiative has finally beaten the Log-In screen.

That’s right!  Sindragosa is a pile of bones now.

It was a pretty big hurdle for us.  We had issues with it a month or two ago… well, mostly phase 3/final ground phase.  In our defence, we always seemed to have a slightly different lineup for whenever we made our attempts.  And actually, last night was no different.  We had two melee DPS that had never seen the fight and it was the first time I was doing it on my Death Knight (instead of my druid).

So, we did have a few hiccups in the first phases with our melee running away from the Blistering Cold thingy.  I also ended up getting too many frost breath debuffs.  300% reduced movement speed is all sorts of awful.  Fortunately, we ended up switching tanks after each air phase, which helped immensely.

Phase 3 still proved to be problematic.  The group got fairly scattered after each ice tomb, some ice tombs hit too many people, and some were a bit too far away from the group.  But each time we inched a little bit closer to Sindy’s demise.  15%.  13%.  10%.  We said “one more time” about three or four times…it was hard to give up after getting that close.

But something clicked on the successful attempt.  The healers did a phenomenal job of communicating when they needed to switch to tank healing.  The other tank communicated to me that he couldn’t get rid of his stacks so I used my defensive cooldowns as timely as possible.  We communicated to DPS positioning better (ie: not running too far, getting re-grouped up and not so scattered, etc).  It all fell into place and everyone was on top of their situational awareness.  We managed to lose only one DPS.  It was fantastic to finally get that beast down! 

Heck, we were so excited about overcoming this hurdle that we almost left Pacheco in a Frost tomb.  Even she forgot she was still in one. 😛

Anyway, it’s over 12 hours after the fact and I’m still pretty damn stoked about it.  And I’m looking forward to laying the smack down on Arthas!

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

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Cataclysm Guild Advancement

As you may or may not be aware, one of the things coming with Cataclysm is guild ranking. 

With that, there are guild achievements and guild experience to be earned.  And as your guild levels, there are various perks available to guild member.  There is also guild reputation, which is probably to discourage guild-hopping.

Anyway, if you don’t read World of Matticus, he has put up an excellent introduction to guild advancement HERE.

Overall, it sounds pretty neat, although I hope it isn’t overly difficult for smaller guilds like ours to advance.  But I’ll guess we’ll see.

What are your thoughts on the guild advancement/achievement system?

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A Cowar…Hero’s Guide to the Midsummer Festival

I PvP.  But I am terrible at it.  And unfortunately for me, you have to PvP your way through some of the World Events.

Midsummer Festival starts today and it’s the last event I need for the meta achievement.  But of course, it has a PvP component:., Stealing the Flames and Desecrating the Flames.  So, I’m learning a few things along the way and I’ve got a few tips to maybe help out surviving this mess. 🙂

Anyway, I’ll get right to it after the cut.

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