Raid Achievements Are How Encounters Were Intended

The more Heroic Achievement Encounters I do, the more I am convinced that they are how designers originally meant them to be done.

Lets look at Patchwerk. The achievement "Make Quick Werk Of Him" wants you to kill him in less then three min. Without the achievement, you have an incredibly generous six minutes - something that makes him accessible to entry level raiders who may be carrying 1000 DPS players. The achievement, however, is only doable by strong groups with somewhat-optimal setups and a high level of play by all involved - something that is close to how the original encounter was.

The difficulty of the achievement fight feels about right for an entry level raid for a "hardcore" guild. LOKI hasn't gotten Make Quick Werk Of Him, but we also run a little healer (7) /tank (3) heavy for most stuff. If we were to buckle down for it and tailor the raid to the fight (like we use to have to for all progression content), we'd have it down (and soon will, I imagine).

This also ties into the "bring the player, not the class" idea. With just about any setup, I'm confident we could clear a no-achievement Naxx. As I said, we usually run the same number of tanks and healers for everything, making swaps only on a per wing basis, if at all. However, to do optional achievements, we may need to insure we have certain numbers of certain classes. Class stacking exists, its now just not a necessity / barrier to killing bosses.

Lets look at some other Raid Achievements...
And They Would All Go Down Together: Removes the option to zerg single horsemen down, which was not possible in the original because of shield walls at 50% and 20%.
Just Can't Get Enough: Adds a higher DPS/Healing/Tanking requirement to P1
Saftey Dance: Everyone needs to succeed at the dance.
100 Club: Its like opting for the aura to hit harder.

Really, non-achievement fights are the optional easy mode. You can skip out on a significant potion of the difficulty, still get loot, and still move on to see the next set of trash/boss models. Also, you can kill everything in an instance while gearing up towards an achievement, instead of clearing bosses one two and three, while gearing up for boss four, and not touching five and six.

What's my take on this? I'm pretty happy, though I'd change two things.

Incentive to repeat achievements - If all bosses typically dropped three pieces of loot, and a fourth with the achievement (of perhaps a slightly higher iLevel), I don't think anyone would complain. It's how OS works, and I get the feeling this is how Uludar will function - Blizzard has indicated that all Uludar bosses are going to have "hard modes". As it stands, there is nothing but personal drive to get guilds to keep getting most achievements they have credit for.

Better Guild Rating based on Raid Achievements - WoWProgress rates guilds based on Naxx, Malygos, OS, and OS+Drake Achievements. While this is a step up from WoWJutsu, I think that it some attention / credit does need to be given to other difficult achievements.

I'd also love an ingame PvE "guild achievement" score - just like you have separate personal and team rating for arenas, have separate personal and guild achievement ratings. Give points to a guild where its 20+ of its members have heroic achievements (or 8+ have non-heroic, in another score), and all of a sudden you can tell how good a guild is by looking at their rating.

So there - I now am completely at peace with this new system, and I would suggest that you be too. Don't complain that content is easy, when your opting to take the easy road - and start cranking up your achievement points - it will be an increasingly important score for how others view you.

Where Does Your Guild Stand?

In Vanilla WoW, if you wanted to know where a guild stood, you went to their realm forums, and hoped there was some dedicated person keeping a huge thread up to date with boss kills.

Throughout BC, if you wanted to know where a guild was at in progression, you went to WoWJutsu. Hands down, this was the place.

And now where do you go for Wrath, if your competitive spirit demands a logical ordering of guilds - ?

...I'm finding WoWProgress to be the site of choice.

Achievements are the clincher. Base clears of Naxx, OS, and Malygos have probably all been done on your server by many, many guilds. What sets guilds apart now are Achievements - Noteably Twilight Assist, Duo, and Twilight Zone, though there are some others (The Immortal) that certainly convay a level of mastery over the content.

Date of, and Order in which a guild got a kill/achievement on not only World and US/EU level, but as specific as Realm - are all pretty sweet. Like, LOKI was the 14th to Clear Naxx, but the 4th to get Arachnophobia, and the 6th to Just Can't Get Enough.

You can also tack on Recruitment and guild information, in the likely event that someone is checking you out when considering placing an App. You can see how often people leave/are removed from the guild, RSS boss kills, and see who's getting loot.

All in all, its the best I've found so far. But tell me, am I missing something anywhere else?

Words For Pictures

Ok - Here we go. Pictures and words, together!

Yakra the Paladin! (Yakradin?). After much necropolis hunting, and taking out a few invasions with a three-man group, I got the two rare pieces (but not before getting four cloth legs, and 3 leather legs). With my trinket-granted Consecrate and (soon to be) Hallowed title, I'll be dancing in the light!

I was out for the weekend, and ended up making the call to not rush home on Sunday for the raid - opting rather to spend some time with friends I only get to see once a month. Its hard to not be there (ontime) for a progression night, but I have bags full of confidence in my officers and raiders. I got home around the time of the first pull, but decided to just let them ride things out with the tanks that were in. Aertimus hoped in about mid way though (for lack of healers), and I got to watch the kill on her computer. It was pretty sweet.

Mu'ru! I don't know how people did sides without Shockwave (or rather, I just know that it was done with extreme difficulty, the likes of which I sadly was not able to encounter). We didn't have a ton of time to work on him, but we got entropus to 46% the one time we got to p2. I was kiting him faster then I should, and feel like the erratically placed black holes probably were a factor in the wipe, but I'm confident we'll rock him next night we're in there.

At one point between fighting waves, I looked off to the side and realized I was looking at the Sunwell. The spot that I floated by in the MGT cinematic, and figured I'd never get to. I had a similar moment fighting Felmyst, and realizing that I was in the spot that I'd flown by during bombing runs. It's a little surreal.

Oh, and as a last min note (and a rare, PvP one at that), I got the achievement for running/capping the flag all three times (Ironman), and the 3-0 victory, in WSG last night. Do Darkspear/Cyclone Horde run premade losing WSG now, or did I get stupid lucky? (going to need Vene's insight here). Ally usually get roflstomped on Cyclone WSG.

Glitch King

Well - Limited Success with my plans for last night.

The patching went allright, but Darkspear was one of the later servers to go up - and when it did, it was hardly functioning. I sat on the loading screen for ten min, but it did load!

Spec'ing went fine. I then learned all my non-combat pets, and was one of the hojillion people getting the "Can I keep it?" Achievement. I went off in search of a combat dummy to try my new attacks on, but couldn't get through any of the Shat Portals, and was hit with a server crash. Sigh.

20 Min getting back in, but we're here. Talents are unspent. Go to check pets - GASP - only 5 of the 15 some I learned are in my pet tab, but the item is still missing from my bank/inventory. This will not be an OK thing. Not even the stable master could return them to me. Grr.

EDIT: This is being addressed.

A portal finally kicked in, 5 min after I had clicked it, and rocketed me to Stormwind. The barbershop was AWESOME looking, and the interface was alot of fun. I tried twice to get my haircut, gave up, and left. In the spirit of patch day, I was teleported BACK to the barbershop after I had made it to old town, and was trying new attacks, and the haircut went through.

Oh - Achievements! Those were working, even when none of the NPCs would spawn. I'm at 1200 atm, counting the haircut I got. I'm going to get really into them - I can tell already. There just look like there are so many fun ones - and it helps that I have one main, have never switched mains, and can't imagine myself doing so in the future.

And of course, due to this magnificent chaos, raiding was a complete impossibility, so I called it off. Hopefully - tonight things will be on the mend, and I'll have some meaty reporting to do. Until then!