Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, it's myth-explodin' time.

Last week in the comment thread for OverAchiever: Achievements to do before it's too late, there were a few notes from readers who were worried that noncombat pet achievements were going to disappear in Mists of Pandaria. This shocked me, because I could have sworn I saw pet achievements flash across the screen during the spam I always get when I copy my main to a beta or PTR, and I hadn't been aware that these achievements were actually missing from the General category. I was also sure there would have been some pretty high-profile news about it if developers were planning to axe them. Especially with the introduction of Pet Battles, it seemed like a very strange time for Blizzard to get rid of related achievements.

Then again, these are also the people who put the Aldor Rise elevator and Warsong Gulch rep in the game, so we already know they're capable of real cruelty.

OverAchiever's pretty much pointless if I don't use it to investigate stuff that I could have warned readers about well in advance, and pets are serious business. So, another character copy onto the beta later, I have an answer for you about what's going on.

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Filed under: Achievements, The Overachiever

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, we joyride through Pandaria with fountain pen in hand. Old school, baby.

I'm back to scribbling. Every beta, a pile of poorly organized notes starts to grow at the side of my computer with numbers, observations, witty column titles (these I seem to have misplaced this time around), questions, gripes, and a truly stupefying amount of cat hair. I turn this pile into a series of articles on how druids are doing and try not to think too hard about having possibly misread my chicken scratch to ruinous effect.

(In unrelated news, until linking the above articles, I hadn't revisited the video I shot of a premade druid in level 85 blues off the Cataclysm beta and was horrified by the set of responses. Or better yet, here's the video I shot of female worgen casting animations. Oh, YouTube commenters -- you never fail to deliver!)

This is actually a collection of notes from the last several weeks on the beta. Most of them are bear-flavored, because there's not much point to questing as restoration unless your other hobbies include watching paint dry, snail racing, or the complete works of Schopenhauer.

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Filed under: Druid, (Druid) Shifting Perspectives

Blizzard has increasingly programmed NPC conversations into the game as a means of adding flavor to the world and personality to the characters with whom you interact, and some of them are just amazing. In the classic game, these conversations started off very simple, with Stormwind children running around driving everyone crazy with arguments over which misbegotten whelp had stolen the other's doll or something like that. In Outland, you could catch performances of stand-up comedy in the World's End Tavern in Shattrath. By Wrath of the Lich King, mortally wounded NPCs insulted each other from separate bunks in Crusader's Pinnacle, and major lore figures argued about interfaction strife at the Argent Tournament. But I think it's tough to argue that Cataclysm hasn't been a million times better.

For my money, it's tough to beat the flavor conversations you tend to hear in goblin outposts (yeah, I've been on a goblin kick lately), including the one above, which occurs in the aftermath of the Azshara quest Mystery of the Sarcen Stone. Finding blood elves and goblins together is a recipe for comedy either way -- the two races could not be more different -- but this is what happens when the blood elves' preening sense of history runs headlong into the goblins' morally questionable pragmatism.

What's your favorite flavor conversation in the game?

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Filed under: Breakfast Topics

I wasn't sold on the Bilgewater Goblins initially. When they and the worgen were announced in the run-up to Cataclysm, I had to wonder if there was any compelling reason to play what felt like a green gnome over a badass werewolf. (Yes, I was young and foolish in those days.) That changed quickly when I hit the beta and found them to be a hopelessly endearing race despite (or perhaps because of) their fairly amoral approach to life. I loved the little details in their towns, from the empty Chinese take-out boxes scattered around their inns to the little dinghies that fly underpants in place of flags.

Credit where credit's due -- most of this is the work of the Blizzard props team. These folks are also the reasons that Gilneas is so magnificently creepy, with its creaky windows, flapping sheets, and papers drifting across lonely towns. What little details do you particularly enjoy about the race you play as a main?

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Filed under: Breakfast Topics

I was taking my main through the new set of Northern Barrens quests recently when I found myself running across rare spawn mobs a lot. This in itself isn't all that surprising; you'll run across rare spawns pretty commonly whenever zones aren't occupied by eager levelers. I saw Elder Mystic Razorsnout, Swiftmane, and for the first time ever, Humar the Pridelord. Humar is well known as a popular hunter pet, and until Wrath, he was the only black lion in the game.

And that got me to thinking: What is the game's most famous rare spawn? If I had to settle on one, my vote would be the Time-Lost Proto Drake, which has driven legions of players to the nuthouse in an endless struggle to find it, let alone kill it. Close behind would probably be Loque'nahak, another famous hunter pet. Curiously, it feels like most of the game's really well-known rare mobs are actually fairly recent additions to the game, although people who played during classic WoW might disagree.

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Filed under: Breakfast Topics

I was healing a Well of Eternity PUG a few days ago when I got a whisper from the group's warrior tank.

Warrior: Could you help me out with something?

Me: Sure, what do you need?

Warrior: If Varo'then's Brooch drops at the end, would you roll on it for me?

Me: Um ...

I'd been off in my own little world watching health bars and thinking about next week's Shifting Perspectives column and hadn't paid any attention to the group's composition. It turns out the DPSers were a mage, a hunter, and -- oh, there we go -- a frost death knight. So in the event that the strength trinket dropped, the warrior tank wanted me to roll on it and, if I won, give it to him over the DK. He probably asked the mage and the priest to do the same thing, but the group was quiet in party chat, so I have no way of knowing.

We had a small and, to his credit, civil conversation over it, and there are a few issues here on which I'd like to get readers' opinions.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion

Bashiok took some time off from being a Diablo III miniboss to hit the forums and provide some insight into recent issues with the servers. (And by "recent issues," I mean "more popular than free drugs in a crackhouse.") The sheer number of players trying to stay logged in has kept Blizzard working overtime to try to keep the servers stable. These problems have largely been ironed out, but we'll see continued maintenance in each region to make sure that stays the case. The North American servers had one such maintenance period for an hour this morning at 5:00 am PST/8:00 am EST, so it probably won't be too long when it does happen.

Two additional points of interest (you'll find the full post past the cut):

• The launch of the Real-Money Auction House on May 22 has been postponed.
• They're looking for potential fixes for early achievements that either weren't being recorded or were being lost between logins.

And Blizzard -- this is just throwing suggestions out here or whatever -- did you ever try making a game that sucked?

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Filed under: Diablo 3

Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, time is of the essence. Where have we heard that before?

I recently talked to a player who managed to solo most, though not all, of the Glory of the Hero achievements from Wrath. He mentioned ones like Share the Love that been impossible to complete without putting a group together, and as you can imagine, getting four more players for heroic Wrath achievements isn't the easiest thing in the world at 85. People who want the achievement for their alts are rarely interested in doing a meta piecemeal, and this is probably going to get worse, rather than better, once account-wide achievements go active. Once someone's got a red proto-drake on one character, they almost certainly won't repeat the process on one of their alts.

The vast majority of achievements get easier as you level up, but the canny achievement hunter will pay attention to the ones that don't. As the game changes, players' priorities and interests change, and older content has a tendency to fall by the wayside. It's best to strike while the iron is hot.

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Filed under: Achievements, The Overachiever

Is it just me, or are the realms kinda dead today? Well, that's probably because everyone in the known universe (with the possible exception of on-call firefighters and paramedics or surgeons who are not currently engaged in removing brain tumors) is off playing Diablo III. That's fine. I don't judge.

But sometimes you need something to do whenever other people aren't around to provide mental stimulation. Here are a few quick suggestions that will make your in-game life slightly more interesting until everyone gets back (and a lot more interesting afterwards):

1. Submit a GM ticket asking if WoW's orientation around gear upgrades constitutes a dismissive critique of the nudist lifestyle. (Editor's Note: Don't do this.)
2. If you have guild bank privileges, feng shui the contents.
3. If you don't have bank privileges, spam the officers with letters accusing them of betraying the proletariat.
4. Macro /y BOING to your space bar.
5. Edit guild ranks to more accurately describe members. "Officer" is a less descriptive term than "Untrustworthy Gurthalak-Stealing Suck-Up."
6. Run through Stormwind/Orgrimmar shouting that the Rapture has occurred.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Humor

Like Mat, I read through Reddit's /r/wow community a few days ago and really enjoyed an interesting thread about an Alterac Valley match versus a multiboxer. In case you haven't heard of this, it's a great story. The multiboxer in question was a Horde player with 30+ characters (!) camped in Drek's room and, predictably enough, he was annihilating anyone who peeked in. The Alliance had all but given up when someone hit on the bright idea of summoning Ivus the Forest Lord and letting the now-86 elite loose on the multiboxed raid. It worked, and not only did Ivus handily curb-stomp the multiboxer, but the Alliance also won the match.

After reading this thread, it occurred to me that I've never seen a single Alterac Valley match where anyone summoned Ivus or his Horde counterpart, Lokholar the Ice Lord. I started playing at the beginning of The Burning Crusade, and I get the impression that the days-long AV matches where these summons and special events were common largely ended in classic. But you know what? Now I really want to see what kind of havoc one of these bad boys could wreak on a gloriously unsuspecting enemy, and it's vaulted to the top of my WoW To-Do list.

So what's on your WoW bucket list? What haven't you done in the game yet that's on your list of goals?

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Filed under: Breakfast Topics