Reflections From The Pond

Posts Tagged ‘achievement’

Ladies and gentlemen, I proudly present last evenings achievement:

It was a merry crew of bold adventurers who entered Naxxramas last night, a few of us brand new 80’s, others had reached that milestone one or even two weeks ago, none of us had set foot in there in this new 10-man variety of the old 40-man raid.

As you may have read in my last post, it was a mission into the unknown (mostly), and it was a great success! Two tanks, two healers and six dps’ers beat the crap out of the three bosses (eventually) our own way and we had a blast doing it!

It was no piece-of-cake walk in the park run, we suffered several wipes but we recovered, discussed tactics, opinions and what had happened and we tried it again another way or the same way only paying attention to different details.

In cases of indecisions the almighty raid leader (me) was offered the choice of the last word. “Kill all the widows friends first and the old lady next.” *Raid kills off the four henchmen in point five seconds and the widow proceeds to seriously pwn us.* New last word: “Let’s keep them alive while we concentrate on the widow.” And so on.

I am so extraordinarily proud of my guildies who volunteered to go with me on this first exploration run! Thank you guys, this amazing and unexpected success is all because of you!

And when you taste the sweetness of a successful kill, the bitter taste of the wipes is all forgotten and you just can’t wait to savour the sweetness it again! Which, incidentally, may happen tonight because the bold adventurers are set to go for yet another run!

Wish me luck again!

These new Achievements really are my cup of tea – what better way to spend the last weeks before Wrath than revisiting all of the old world and do all those dungeons and raids once again so you’ll get credit for them.

Tessye, my rogue, my master fisherman and master cook, is of course doing all the achievements related to those professions.

Last night I was flying around in Outland fishing and killing stuff to complete the Outland Angler and the Outland Gourmet achievements, when I saw that there was a nice little mission called the Lurker Above.

Never been raiding with Tessye but so what, these days you don’t need an attunement to enter SSC and she is a rogue with Master of Deception and Camouflage, she can sneak past most mobs.

(And by “sneak past”, I mean keeping to the side of the gangways, bypassing mobs, cause looking away for a split second and running right into a bog giant will get you spotted and killed, no matter how good a sneaker you are – this I discovered the hard way.)

So, I got a sweet guildie who were exploring the world and thus not unwilling to be in a raid group with me to make just such a group. Enter SSC and stealth up. I thought for sure some on the mobs would be able to see through stealth, but none did – they were all unable to see me! Well, except that bog giant I had that unfortunate close encounter with.

I stealthed along to the gangway support strut that makes a handy ramp down into the water and went down. Sadly, the fishies in the water could see me so I went down for real as well :-(

Since I am such an avid fisherman and do the daily fishing quest, I have a lot of Elixir of Water Walking in my bags, so for next try I popped one of these before I dared venture out over the water. For some reason I did submerge once I left the ramp, and the fishies were onto me pretty fast, so try #2 was a fail as well :-(

Well, not like I was gonna give up that easily! I had engaged all the guild in my tries through gchat and I couldn’t just back down now, could I? They even almost started a bet poll on my chances of one-womanning the Lurker if I ever got to his little isle.

So, next try, on the platform closest to the isle, standing just above the water, I drank an Elixir, went into Stealth again and then I popped my Sprint.

But it was still the same, as soon as I went into the water I sank down! Luckily, this time I jumped up asap, managed to get up on the water surface and started sprinting over the water to the isle.

And I got there! Not a single fish attacked me!

Could fish the Lurker up in peace and quiet in the little isle…

Took me a fair few tries before the old cunning fish finally took the bait and came up for me, but I am now a proud accomplisher of The Lurker Above!

And no, I didn’t one-woman the old smelly bucket of dead carp, he took one hit at me for 17 k and I went down like a very dead rogue :/

In the WotLK (or maybe in the next patch already?) I understand that so called achievements will be available. I have steered clear of reading much about the beta testing or the Wrath news that has been flooding many WoW-sites and blogs because I want it all to be fresh and new for me when I first enter Northrend, but some things I have not managed to avoid, and achievements was something that stuck.

If I understand it correctly an achievement will be some sort of in-game goal to aim for, but I don’t know if there will be any special rewards upon achieving the, er, well, achievement.

It would be nice if you could set up achievements of your own as well, like a to-do-list of things you want to achieve in-game (dammit, is there another word for this? I feel like a broken record, repeating the word all the time), and there are plenty things I have done or participated in already that feels like achievements.

Just a few basic ones here:

- Level a character to 70 – Check! Got a rogue, a druid, a warlock, a priest and a warrior to 70.

- Get Exalted with Darnassus by level 40 and get a tiger mount – Check! My shaman got Exalted at around level 35 and has never had to ride around on a huge ugly elekk mount.

- Get Exalted with Darnassus by level 30 and get a tiger mount – Don’t know yet. My draenei hunter is working on it but is still 6 k away at lvl 29,5.

- Tame a lvl 10 bat from Ghostlands with your lvl 10 hunter after having run all the way from Ironforge – Check! (With a little help from my darling husband through WPL and EPL)

- Dressing your bank alt in fancy clothes by doing the Valentine’s Day quest and running her at lvl 1 from Ironforge to Hillsbrad Foothills – Check! My bankalt gained 2 levels and a hot evening dress from that trek.

- Doing a full Karazhan clear in less than 3 hours – Check! (Well, except the animal boss in the servants’ quarters)

- Doing a heroic Steam Vaults run in less than 45 minutes – Check! As we zoned in we were told that “this instance will reset in 45 minutes”. When Kali’thresh lay dead on the floor we still had 10 minutes left on that timer.

- Doing a raid on a Horde capital and kill their leader – Half-check! (Raid part done, on Orgrimmar and Silvermoon City, but sadly the leaders escaped with their lives)

- Getting Exalted with Stormpike Guard without permanent mental damage from the small-minded viciousness floating around in bgchat – Check! (I think, not that I care what you say, l2play f***ing noob!)

- Getting Exalted with the Wintersabre trainers in Winterspring for a pretty lavender mount – Check! My pink-pig-tailed warrior now rides happily around on her precious tiger.

The list can go on and on, the entire WoW way of playing is so much based upon achieving things (rep, honor, items, skills, levels) so I guess that if you want to, you can find an achievement to fulfil and a reason to celebrate every day.

So, what are your achievements?