Posts with tag immortal

We've had some recent news concerning achievements in categories we've already covered, and my original intent this week was to play catch-up with that in addition to finishing off the new reputation, world event, and feat of strength achievements in Cataclysm. However, given equally recent news concerning achievements that are set to become feats (and may do so as early as patch 4.0.1), I thought it would be more sensible to cover the stuff that you'd want to do as soon as possible before it disappears.

I've cross-checked the list of known Cataclysm feats of strength against the feats already present in game, and as far as I know, this should be a comprehensive set of current Wrath of the Lich King achievements that will become inaccessible as of patch 4.0.1, patch 4.0.3, or Cataclysm's release (or at least, a comprehensive list as of the current beta and PTR builds).

I've written this list assuming the following:

• Although it hasn't been officially confirmed that all of these will disappear in patch 4.0.1 or 4.0.3 rather than the expansion itself, for the time being, I'm guessing it's one of the two patches you need to worry about.
• With the recent announcement of arena Season 8 ending on Oct. 12, 4.0.1 may hit in less than two weeks. Zarhym's post just made it clear that the season could end as early as the 12th, not that it definitely would, and there's still a lot of stuff to fix on the PTR and beta -- but every Tuesday from hereon is a potential patch day.
• Accepting Oct. 5 or 12 as possible patch dates, I've included an opinion on the feasibility of getting the following achievements done as quickly as possible.

What are evil achievements? They're the soul-killing rep grinds, the raiding milestones that required sacrificing a farm animal to get, and even fun pasttimes like battlegrounds into which a sizable dose of misery has been added. Eventually you just want to grab the nearest developer and shake him back and forth, screaming, "What the hell were you thinking?"

Last week I previewed three of the most evil achievements in the game, both to collect my own thoughts and to canvass commenters' opinions for a larger article. This week, I'd like to present the first set of evil achievements for your reading, wincing and antacid-chugging pleasure.

A note on judging the "evil value" of achievements: I've been adding to this list for a while, and it's drawn from both the achievements we've covered in this column and some I've seen players complain about frequently in game. Obviously, there's no real way to quantify exactly how difficult or excruciating achievements are, so I'm going with the definition I gave above. Any incredibly difficult or RNG-saturated achievement made the short list, but I also tried to keep some unusual picks in mind. In this vein, there's an achievement in today's column that, while extremely easy by today's standards, was a screaming horror when it first debuted. I may wind up doing a list of honorable mentions as well.

So, in no particular order, I am pleased to present World of Warcraft's 25 most evil achievements, starting with #25-16 this week.

I love achievements, but sometimes you look at them and realize that somewhere on the development team lurks a sadist of the highest order -- and not just any sadist, but one with a business plan and an unwitting audience of 12 million players.

What are evil achievements? They're the soul-killing rep grinds, the raiding milestones that required sacrificing a farm animal to get, and even fun pasttimes like battlegrounds into which a sizable dose of misery has been added. Eventually you just want to grab the nearest developer and shake him back and forth, screaming, "What the hell were you thinking?"

Below are three of my top picks as the most evil achievements in the game, chosen via the scientific rationale of hating life and myself while doing them. They're selections from a lengthier OverAchiever I've been slowly assembling on the 25 most evil achievements in the game. While my main's a hair's breadth from the It's Over Nine Thousand! feat of strength, there are still quite a few achievements (many of them PvP-related) that she's missed, and I think it's pretty easy to underestimate the agony-value of achievements you haven't personally done. So, rather than simply ignore them, I'd love to get some commenting feedback on the worst, most annoying and most soul-destroying achievements of which you've been a part.

Some may disagree on the ultimate difficulty of the following three achievements, but I remain undeterred from my belief that every single one has been milked from the angry teat of Satan himself.

After taking a two-week detour into guides covering the Love Is In the Air and Lunar Festival holidays, we're going to return to the list of titles available from dungeon and raid achievements. You can find part one here, covering everything from Argent Defender to Grand Crusader. This week, we'll pick up where we left off.

Herald of the Titans (requires an Algalon-10 kill under special circumstances) or Starcaller (requires Observed -- 10 player)

Herald of the Titans, much like its ToGC-10 counterpart Argent Defender, requires you to kill Algalon in Ulduar-10 without padding the difficulty with gear from higher-level raids. The result is arguably the coolest Algalon-related title apart from Celestial Defender, but it won't come without a ton of planning and a lot of skill. Starcaller is the same deal, minus the gear requirement.

Titles; they are cool, they are wonderful, and in a not-inconsiderable number of cases, they are very hard to get. Almost without exception, every single title in the game is also linked to an achievement. Today we're going to examine how you can get (or, in some cases, how it was possible to get) about half of the 19 titles currently available from dungeons and raids. Next week, we'll cover the last half, going in alphabetical order.

If you're a skimmer, the two toughest achievements are actually at the tail end this week, and if you're currently in Icecrown Citadel, there's two currently-unobtainable titles that may interest you here (in addition to another set next week).

Bornakk confirms something that a number of guilds still working on their Ulduar drakes have been wondering -- are they planning to eighty-six them as soon as patch 3.3 hits? Nope -- Blizzard hasn't changed anything from its previous policy concerning the drakes, and they'll still be warning us a month in advance if they do eventually decide to remove them. This started as a response to the removal of the Naxx-era drakes without much advance notice, which resulted in some very unhappy players being caught unawares.

What I always found interesting about the wording on Blizzard's policy is that they don't "currently" have any plans to remove the drakes at all, but they're keeping an eye on things. It makes me wonder if there's an ideal percentage of guilds or players they'd like to achieve the drakes each patch, and that numbers were short in Naxx and still short in Ulduar. The Naxx-era Glory of the Raider (heroic) was certainly uncommon and, for a competent guild, hinged almost entirely on their ability to get past the RNG-riddled and sometimes-buggy Immortal, then said to be the rarest raiding achievement in the game. For Ulduar, my guess is that achievements like Firefighter are probably the biggest stumbling block, although fortunately the achievements required for the meta are more dependent on skill and less dependent on RNG than Immortal. We'll keep an eye out for you, but for the moment, raiders, keep plugging away at those drakes.

Here at WoW Insider we don't always agree with each other. Whether it's debating the merits of various tanks on different encounters, the damage difference between pure and hybrid DPS classes, the ideal function of a particular healing class in raids, or the superiority of cake over pie, our back-channel discussion tends to be pretty interesting.

Eliah Hecht's article "25-man gear should not be better than 10-man gear" sparked a lot of great discussion with our readers and, I think, some illuminating poll results as well. The majority of responders believed that giving 10-man and 25-man raids the same loot table would result in a significant drop in popularity for 25-man raiding. Overall, I tend to agree with this, but I also think that Eliah touched on something that speaks to Blizzard's evolving sense of game design, much of which is evident in the transition between late Burning Crusade and Wrath.

I would like to call this the Sunwell effect, or "ingame rationality." To wit: don't incentivize players to behave in a manner contrary to your actual design interests. I believe this played a huge role in the differences between BC and Wrath raiding, and that it underlies why the 25-man loot table has to remain superior to its 10-man counterpart.

Ready Check is a weekly column focusing on successful raiding for the serious raider. Hardcore or casual, ZA or Sunwell Plateau, everyone can get in on the action and down some bosses. This week's Ready Check was inspired by reader Evan, who wrote in to tell us of some frustrating near-brushes with immortality.

Among hardcore and casual guilds alike, the achievement 'The Immortal' has caused nothing but a headache, even though finally pulling it off puts you in a very elite group of raiders. We misguidedly hoped that there wouldn't be a similar achievement in Ulduar, but 'The Immortal, Part Two' puts paid to that hope. However, it's substantially changed in difficulty.

Currently, you have to complete Naxxramas without a single raid member dying on any boss encounter within a single lockout. This makes for incredibly tense raids when things are going well, and incredibly frustrated raids when something goes wrong and puts paid to that week's attempt. We'll take a look at some of the things that can go wrong in Naxxrams a bit later.

This is extremely interesting. Guildox is a site that tracks raiding progression solely based on earned raiding achievements -- they check the Armory entry of your guild, and then add them to a list of who's toppled which instances and when. But they recently sent us a note about some overall data, and it's fascinating. Below the pulldown bar of the achievement listings on their site, you'll find an "achievement rate" stat. That is the percentage of guilds who've completed the selected achievement as compared to the number of guilds in their system who've completed any of the 10 or 25-man raiding achievements.

In essence, that's the percentage of guilds raiding who've completed that achievement. And the toughest achievement in the game right now is The Immortal, which requires you to get 25 people through Naxx without dying once. Only about 1.5% of guilds raiding have finished that one. After that, it's Heroic: You Don't Have an Eternity (take out Malygos in six minutes), and Heroic: Shocking! (bring down Thaddius without crossing charges). The hardest 10-man achievement is the non-Heroic version of the Malygos timed achievement -- The Undying actually isn't too bad, with almost 20% of guilds having attained it.

More after the break, including information on the easiest raiding achievements.

Here's an interesting Ulduar request from Hugner on Hyjal -- he wants to ask that there be no "Immortal"-style achievement in the new raid instance. He says getting the achievement has been super frustrating for his guild, not only because, you know, it's hard, but because with one simple disconnect at the wrong time, the whole week's attempt is wasted.

Of course, an achievement like that isn't meant to be easy. Some people in the thread suggest making it more like The Dedicated Few (so that not all the bosses have to be flawless in one run), but Bornakk says it's an achievement -- it's not required and if you really want to get the meaningless points, you'll just have to work around the disconnects. He's also shoring up discontent on the other side of things -- people are complaining that the Gonna Go When the Volcano Blows achievement is messing up their Sarth runs, because they're dodging insignificant damage rather than actually downing the boss. In fact, the easiest way to do that one is just to suicide in the very beginning (because the AoE can't hit corpses), and lots of people are doing that. Bornakk says change isn't likely -- the achievement is designed to be separate from gaining loot from the boss.

Bottom line on both of these is that they're achievements -- if they're hard or random or waste time, that's kind of the point. Blizzard may have caved on a few of the holiday achievements, but these endgame achievements aren't meant to be gotten easily or even without a little RNG help.

The vast majority of the time, WoW is just pure fun to play, and even nights spent wiping on a boss can be an oddly happy experience if you're running with a cool group of people and you feel like you're making progress. But we've all had that moment in a raid or a group where you realize that things have unstoppably taken a turn for the worse, and that there's not much (if anything) you can do about it.

I've actually had two of these in recent memory: being within one perfect Kel'Thuzad kill of server-first Immortal and then losing a single player to the second Frost Blast, and then having to call a Sarth 3D kill because people seemed to find an array of new and interesting ways to get themselves killed. The silence in vent on both occasions was pretty awful, and that these two nights occurred back to back probably didn't help anyone's frame of mind. I've had a Hunter buddy previously describe her worst moment as triggering the old Karazhan pet bug -- wherein you could aggro almost everything in the instance due to bizarre pet pathing mechanics -- when she was a trial member with a new guild. A Warlock friend still cringes when he thinks about the night he accidentally looted the Champion gloves off Curator, and then having to keep the group there for two hours while we waited on a ticket (back before any of us knew how loot transfers worked). Sometimes you realize the night's just going to stay bad, and that it's time to get out of Dodge. What was your worst experience in this vein?