Project Lore

The titles that we choose to have emblazoned over our toons (or lack thereof) can say a lot about what kind of players we are. And it also can say a lot about who we are in terms of what captures our attention in-game.

Personally, I choose a title based simply on what I think sounds cool. I'm partial to Champion of the Frozen Wastes, Merrymaker, the Hallowed and, now that I've got it, the Love Fool. None of these were particularly difficult or time consuming, I just like the way they sound.

But that would be different if I had any of the five badass titles that we've previously written about (the previous list included The previous list included Salty, Loremaster, of the Nightfall, the Immortal and any arena title), or any of the other extremely rare and difficult titles out there (I'm looking at you, Kingslayer). Add to that list a plethora of other titles such as the Exalted and the Insane along with some now-unobtainable titles. Now any of those, I would wear proudly.

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I'll admit it, Icecrown Citadel is already starting to wear a little thin. No, my guild hasn't conquered it yet. And we haven't even started Hard Modes (which seem to be a mixed bag in terms of difficulty themselves), but we're sort of at that point where everything is on farm except for one or two fights that we continually butt our heads against week after week.

Progress, at this point, is being made at a snail's pace. So, with little else to do when I log on and we aren't raiding, I've been turning my eye towards earning old world achievements once again. At the top of my priority list have been those associated with faction reputation (like Timbermaw Hold or the Argent Dawn) and the notoriously frustrating Loremaster title.

For those of you not in pursuit of such goals, finding and completing every quest can be quite maddening. You can't always depend on quest hubs, as some start as drops from random creatures, or can only be found in the farthest corners of a given zone. The hunt only gets worse the more that you complete, since the remaining ones are all that much harder to discover.

But if there's one thing that makes this journey far more annoying than it needs to be, it's all the absolutely useless junk that finds its way into your bags! Isn't there an easy way to solve this problem?

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Azeroth's "Season of Love" comes to a close at 11:59 Pacific Time this evening. Considering the coming events, it's amazing we'll see one at all this month next year.

After much frustration with Love Is In The Air in the past, and having my account hacked just a few days before the festivities began, I was initially fretful that I wouldn't get to participate much at all. But much to my surprise, it went smoothly, and I completed all essential meta-achievements except for "I Pitied The Fool" on the first day of my return.

Once I obtained that, and thus, my Violet Proto-Drake, I stopped collecting charms and tokens altogether, leaving several of my other achievements dangling in the wind. But today, on the last day of the event, I decided to pick myself up, turn in all those charms I got from running Icecrown Citadel the past week, and make the most of what was left. Following the jump is a short list of things you can do with the time remaining:

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Alright, I fess up. Despite my open disdain for this Valentine's-inspired holiday, it really wasn't so bad this year. In fact, when I regained control of my characters (after an unfortunate hacking incident), I was pleasantly surprised to see that Blizzard had addressed many of my problems with the celebration.

Sure, you still have to hoof it from city to city to get all the (otherwise exceedingly simple) dailies done, but at least I don't have to figure out what musky sludge to lather up with in the hopes that one of the Undercity's (dearly departed) Abomination guards might find me cute, only to be rebuffed by some of the ugliest creatures in existence.

Ahh, to gather charms by doing what a Rogue does best... killing things!

But that brings me to my next point. Hunted relentlessly and without remorse during Pilgrim's Bounty, I now find myself on the other end of the equation.

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I'm sure most of you have noticed by now when running your daily random heroic that there have been a few changes to dungeons to make them run a bit faster. Patch 3.3.2 brought with it several changes that decreased the number of times a boss does a special move, making the encounters quicker and less annoying. And for anyone still working toward earning Glory of the Hero, the changes are bringing that Red Proto-Drake almost within our grasp.

Many of the changes also make their related achievements substantially easier. Let's take a look again at the recent changes that will affect achievements.

The Nexus

• For Chaos Theory: Anomalus will now use the Create Rift ability only once, down from 3 times, reducing the number of rifts that you have to fight through.

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The last few weeks, I've become quite the little achievement whore. And since my main character wasn't around for the grand days of Vanilla WoW and the Burning Crusade, she has plenty to catch up on -- questing, rep, professions, dungeons and raids. In fact, some of my guildies with the same state of mind have started running old school achievement content on Fridays. it has been lots of fun - not only to see the content and old loot, but also to get that shiny message popping up saying that you've earned an achievement.

I also have a few alts, none of which have hit 80, and I've come to realize something: While I may love achievements on my main, I really don't care about what achievements my alts do or don't have. Sure, there are plenty of achievements that I'll get along the way if I level the way that I plan to, but other than those, I won't go out of my way to earn anything special.

It's a weird state of mind. I guess I think of it this way: If I've done the achievement once, I've already achieved it. Why go through the hassle again on an alt, unless it's something that I need to do to reach a completely unrelated goal in the game? We need to have a way to track achievements on multiple characters - not to tell us our total number of points, but instead the number we would have if we added up all the different achievements we've gotten altogether.

But I also can see another point of view:

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Some of the first unofficial information coming out of the new build of Patch 3.3 includes a preliminary list of achievements associated with the Icecrown Citadel raid and 5-man dungeons. The breakdown and running analysis follows:

Icecrown Citadel 10-man Stand-Alone Achievements

These are the achievements associated with individual events and/or bosses. This is most certainly a cursory list, as they do not cover every encounter in the raid as past achievements have. The early inclusion of these, specifically, may indicate that these bosses will be available for testing soon, as they are all included in the first section of the dungeon.

• It's a Trap! - Survive the Ice Jets in Icecrown Citadel.


• Unboned - Defeat Lord Marrowgar without anyone taking damage from Bone Cyclone.


• Thirty One - Defeat X (-this is a placeholder variable-) of Lady Deathwhisper's adds with her bombs and the defeat Lady Deathwhisper.


• I'm on a Boat - Claim victory in the Gunship Battle in which every raid member visits the enemy gunship only once.


• I've Gone and Made a Mess - Defeat the Deathbringer with fewer than X (-this is a placeholder variable-) raid members suffering from Garrote.

Icecrown Citadel 10-man Completion Achievements

These are the achievements awarded for completing different wings of the raid. By looking at each individual feat, we can see the full list of boss encounters for Icecrown Citadel.

• Storming the Citadel - Defeat the first four bosses in Icecrown Citadel: Lord Marrowgar, The Deathbringer (could it be Saurfang or Bolvar?), Lady Deathwhisper, Claim victory in the Gunship Battle.


• The Frostwing Halls - Defeat the bosses of The Frostwing Halls in Icecrown Citadel: Rescue Valithiria Dreamwalker (sounds like a friendly member of the Green dragonflight being turned), Sindragosa (you'll finally get to go toe-to-toe with that Frost Wyrm you see every time you log into the game).


• The Plagueworks - Defeat the bosses of The Plagueworks in Icecrown Citadel: Festergut, Rotface, Professor Putricide.


• The Crimson Hall - Defeat the bosses of The Crimson Hall in Icecrown Citadel: Defeat the Blood Prince Council, Queen Lana'Thel.


• The Frozen Throne - Defeat the Lich King in Icecrown Citadel: The Lich King.


• Fall of the Lich King - Defeat every boss in Icecrown Citadel.

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Icecrown Citadel, from the bottom, up.

For those of you keeping score, that brings the list of boss or primary encounters in Icecrown Citadel to 12. To reiterate:

Lord Marrowgar

The Deathbringer

Lady Deathwhisper

Gunship Battle

Valithiria Dreamwalker

Sindragosa

Festergut

Rotface

Professor Putricide

Blood Prince Council

Queen Lana'Thel

The Lich King

Icecrown Citadel 5-man Dungeon Achievements:

These achievements are associated with the three 5-man dungeons that lead up to the raid: Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, and Halls of Reflection. Unlike the raid achievements, this is probably a comprehensive list.

• Icecrown: The Forge of Souls - Defeat the bosses in The Forge of Souls: Bronjahm, Devourer of Souls.


• Icecrown: The Pit of Saron - Defeat the bosses in The Pit of Saron: Forgemaster Garfrost, Ick and Krick, Scourgelord Tyrannus and Rimefang.


• Icecrown: The Halls of Reflection - Defeat the bosses in The Halls of Reflection: Falric and Marwyn (Arthas' closest confidants in the Third War), Survive the encounter with the Lich King (could this be a Metroid-style escape sequence?).


• I Feel Good - Defeat Bronjahm in The Forge of Souls on Heroic Difficulty without letting him cast his big spell.


• The Faced - Defeat the Devourer of Souls in The Forge of Souls on Heroic Difficulty after having interrupted his big nuke.


• Don't Let It Go to Eleven - Defeat Forgemaster Garfrost in The Pit of Saron on Heroic Difficulty before he gets 11 stacks.


• Don't Look Up - Clear the hallway before Scourgelord Tyrannus in The Forge of Souls on Heroic Difficulty without anyone taking icicle damage.


• We're Not Retreating; We're Advancing in a Different Direction. - Escape from the Lich King in under two hours and eleven seconds.

Don't be alarmed by that last one. It's undoubtedly one of Ghostcrawler's "let's give the our players a heart attack" placeholder numbers. The encounter will not take two hours and eleven seconds!

Feats of Strength

There's only a single new Feat of Strength listed, but boy is it a doozy!

• It's Over Nine Thousand! - Earn more than 9000 achievement points.

I'm only at 5130 myself, and I don't see that number increasing significantly anytime soon. It may not seem impossible, but the closer you get to the maximum, the thinner the margin, since you'll have done most of the achievements you knew you were capable of.

What say you of these achievements, friends? Cool? Uncool? Hard? Easy? The boss-related ones give us some hints about how those encounters might work. What do you think of their potential capabilities?

Keep in mind that the 10-man stuff isn't complete and the text is not final. Not to mention that there are likely 25-man versions of each one, as well.

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Wishful Thinking is a column for the theorycrafting behind World of Warcraft.  No, not the number crunching madness perfected by the folks at ElitistJerks, but the features, abilities, and design ideas that the Project Lore writers conjure from their squishy pink stuff. Well, readers. I don't know about you, but I've been working on that old Loremaster title for some time now. It was easy enough to complete all of the Northrend zones, perhaps because they were freshest in my mind. But the old world? Not a chance! On my main, Amatera, I must've leveled through those areas at least three or four years ago. And if you're like me, then you know the real pain isn't necessarily doing all the quests you missed, but finding them in the first place. Why, just the other day, I decided to pick up the torch again and make some progress on the achievement. I flew over to Tarren Mill and found a whole bank of quests that I had never actually finished. I'm talk at least six or seven missions that I apparently didn't touch on this character. Of course, I thought I'd done them, but that might just because when leveling up one of my numerous alts, I made sure to clear out the area before moving on. Time had fogged up my memory, and in all likelihood, I pushed Amatera forward to new zones where there were better experience-gaining opportunities to be had and never looked back. Oh, and then there's Nagrand. The only zone in Outland that I've yet to get the questing achievement for. I've heard it's a little harder to finish on the Horde side, and that I'm not the only one who's had trouble with it in the past, but at the same time there are people that have obviously done what, for me, seems currently impossible. In other words, I must be missing something. One possible candidate is this quest: I'm Saved! But the problem is that the NPC needed to complete it spawns seemingly at random. I've spent long spans of time at Nesingwary's camp waiting for her to show up and she never does. Do you know what makes it even worse, though? I need two more quests to get the Nagrand achievement. And I have absolutely zero clue as to what the second might be. This is why I'm putting out the call to Blizzard: where's my completed quest log? It seems like such a simple feature to implement that you might wonder why it wasn't included with the game when it launched. I'd love a way to easily check an online database against a list of my finished quests to figure out which ones I'm missing. Sure, there's always flying from hub to hub and picking up tasks from NPCs with punctuation over their heads, but others aren't that easy to find, like those that might require a random drop from a group of enemies. And it goes beyond achievement tracking, too. I can't count the number of times someone has asked me if I've completed a specific quest and I've had to go all the way back to the quest-giver to see if there was still an exclamation point there. It's a real shame, because they've made some significant improvements to the quest log over the years, and they're set to do it again with 3.3. The only two reasons I can think of for not implementing a completed quest tracker is because there is either some technical issue preventing them from doing so, or it's simply something they don't deem important enough to spend time developing. I'd like to rule out the former, because it seems that the game already knows what missions you have and haven't done. After all, achievements like the Loremaster ones can keep track of them numerically. They'll tell you how many you've finished, just not which ones. Currently, the only solution is to download an add-on that can do it for you, but they tend to only be able to log quests you've completed since installing them, and not any of the ones before that. I feel like I'm about to give up on my Loremaster title, but there is one shining hope on the horizon. I speak of: account-wide achievements. When Cataclysm hits, I already know I'm going to roll a Goblin alt, and I can make sure that I do everything right from the very beginning. Not to mention, of course, that the quests themselves will likely change with the expansion, meaning that Loremaster achievements will likely be reset, or moved to Feats of Strength and replaced with new ones for the old world anyway. But this is one of those simple conveniences I still can't believe hasn't made its way into the game just yet. What say you, readers? Wouldn't it make your life a whole lot easier?

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Earth, Wind, And Fire is arguably one of the toughest achievements in the game, requiring that you kill all three Vault of Archavon bosses within 60 seconds of each other, but the 10-player version has was completed by both Premonition (first) and Mediocrity (second) this week. Thankfully, the latter recorded the whole affair so we can see just how they pulled off this monumental feat!

I'll admit that when I first heard about the achievement, I thought it would entail engaging each boss at the same time, with the raid separated into several 2-3 man groups, but it turns out that they can be pulled out of their respective rooms without resetting. This ends up being key to Mediocrity's strategy, and it allows them to make the groups a little more even. They start with the newest Vault boss, Koralon the Flame Watcher, first, and while whittling down his health, drag him all the way over to the dungeons' namesake, Archavon the Stone Watcher. At this point, it's important, even when tanking two separate bosses at once, that both of the tanks stay near each other in order to reduce the effect of Koralon's Meteor Fists attack. Presumably, a second group is staying on Emalon the Storm Watcher this entire time, who would be much harder to lead around the instance with all of his adds in tow. Sadly, we don't get to see precisely how they handle the Overcharged minions, since this video is only filmed from one perspective. Besides, I really can't imagine having to deal with all three bosses' area of effect attacks at once! It looks like we'll still have to wait a little while before anybody nails it on 25-man, but I imagine that it couldn't be significantly harder since your numbers wouldn't be spread quite so thin. The real important thing here just seems to be getting the strategy down and knowing each boss well enough to automatically respond to their individual abilities. Tough or not, I'd love to see more achievements like this thrown into the game. It reminds me a lot of the live raid they did at BlizzCon this year, where they pit the aforementioned Premonition against several different raid bosses at once, arena style. How about you, readers?

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I've had a ton to keep my busy in WoW since dinging level 80 a couple of weeks ago. There's rep to grind, daily heroics to run and farming of the ToC to be had (building up my purple collection FTW). But on the side when I have a few moments (or hours) to spare, I've taken up exploring Azeroth. Perhaps it's not something that most players would have at the top of their priority list after hitting 80, but so far for me it's been a bit of a nostalgic way to re-visit the old world, run through parts I've never seen before, and earn some achievements in the process. Plus, now we have an even more compelling reason. With the imminent destruction of Azeroth in the Cataclysm, this could be the last time I see some of these zones before they are changed forever. Sure, I'll likely visit Orgrimmar and UC, but the surrounding areas? Probably not. And we still don't know what the expansion will mean for exploration achievements - if a zone is completely altered to the point of being split in two (I'm thinking Barrens), will the old exploration achievements be locked? The same could be said for questing in the Old World, but that's for a later conquest. Maybe there will be some middle ground on the issues, but I'd rather not take my chances. Anyhow, back on point. I started out in Kalimdor, from good ol' Durotar, where I had neglected to uncover Kolkar Crag. Then it was west to the grasslands of the Barrens, where my Zhevra visited her long-lost cousin. I worked my way west and then to the north, finishing off a couple of uncovered areas in each zone of Thousand Needles, Feralas, Mulgore, Desolace, Azshara, Stonetalon Mountains, Ashenvale, Felwood and Winterspring (and /love-ing every critter I see along the way). One of the high points: running into a pack of Worgen hiding out in Ashenvale and beating up on a few of them (good practice for future PvP fun). There also was Moonglade and Dark Shore, neither of which I had stepped foot in before. So far, I've finished up 14 of the 20 zones in Kalimdor, but I've still got a long ways to go before hitting that coveted Explorer title. It's easy to forget, when hidden away in the deep corners of Northrend, how vast and diverse Azeroth is. My secret pleasure - I've really enjoyed running into some of those humanoid tribes that you don't see too much of anymore: The Centaurs, Ogres, Furbolgs, Harpies and Wildkin of the world. I suppose Murlocs still are a pretty common sight, but I also made a point to run over top of every single murloc I came across, just to hear their gurgling battle cry while I galloped away. And more fun is yet to be had. I still have more nostalgia to come as I finish up Kalimdor, then head to the Eastern Kingdoms. Has anyone else taken to exploring lately? What about any other achievements that you want to get before the expansion? Don't worry if not - it seems that we'll still have quite a while before it comes out.

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