Project Lore

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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As you're reading this, the maintenance period for patch 3.1 has been extended, but very shortly, the gates of Ulduar will be opened, Emalon the Storm Watcher will start giving out free purples to whoever controls Wintergrasp, and duel specs will be live! Keep in mind that your talent points will be reset and you should probably take care of that before entering Ulduar. If you haven't already, go watch the official cinematic trailer. Note that it does contain spoilers if you have not completed the Wrathgate questline. Here are my observations from the trailer:

• Jaina Proudmoore has a new (old?) face! Instead of using the standard human female face model, she now has her own face that looks much more like her old model in Warcraft III. I've never played an Alliance character so I'm not too familiar with her "old" "WoW face" and like this new one much better.

• Garrosh Hellscream is one hotheaded little Mag'har orc. For being such a pansy when he was chilling in Nagrand, he is certainly taking after Grom.

• The Horde/Alliance conflict is being featured quite prominently. It makes me want to transfer back to a PvP server. It reinforces my suspicions that 3.2 may not contain a major raid and be PvP oriented.

• It is heavily implied that Yogg-Saron has influence over both Garrosh Hellscream and Varian Wrynn. I wonder if we will see a parallel of Grom Hellscream breaking free of the Burning Legion's influence by killing Mannoroth with Garrosh and King Varian. Not likely; maybe down the line leading us into the next expansion.

• Rhonin finally speaks! Rhonin is quite an epic character in the lore and seeing him play an active and audible role is awesome.

What is the first thing everyone is going to do in patch 3.1? Join up with your guild and hit Ulduar? Argent Tournament? Learn dual spec?

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