For Glory!

Last week our guild (myself included) got the "Glory of the Firelands Raider" achievement. With it came a shiny new firebird mount and some bragging rights.

It's "kind of" a big deal in the sense that we're maybe like the 10th guild on the server to get this. There are other guilds who have the same boss kill progression who haven't done the Glory meta achievement yet

This is also the first Glory meta mount I've earned in a relevant tier of raiding. In fact, the only other meta mount I have from raiding is the ICC frostbrood drake, which I didn't get until a couple weeks into cataclysm.

The thing about these metas is that it's possible to get about half of them just by sheer luck. The other half require you to do something outrageous that you would never think to do in a normal raid.

For instance the Baleroc meta achievement requires that no one gets the Tormented debuff more than 3 times. This is very easily doable with high DPS without even trying for it. The Rhyolith achievement requires that you only turn in one direction, which is also possible to do without trying (although random volcano placement makes it unlikely).

But then you have things like Bucket List, which requires you to drag Shannox to all corners of the map before killing him. Why on earth would you intentionally do that?

The achievement that we really had a hard time with was Alysrazor's: Do a Barrel Roll. It required that no one in the raid group gets hit with 4 different abilities. Of them 3 are very easily avoidable if people are focused and getting interrupts out correctly, but the last fire attack, the tornado, is what had us banging our heads against the wall for two nights.

It really should've been an individual achievement and not a raid-wide one. Do you know how hard it is to get 10 people to execute this perfectly at the SAME TIME? I admit there were a few people who did it time after time and never got hit once, but inevitably the other half of the raid kept messing up (myself included). It doesn't matter that I did it perfectly 4 times in a row - if I'm the only one who messes up the 5th time, BAM there goes the achievement.

Finally, though, after all the practice we were able to manage it somehow. I pray that I never ever have to do that again.

My guild and I have done some ridiculous things in the name of achievements. Iron Dwarf, medium rare is probably one of the most ridiculous in that it forced us to all gimp our DPS severely, taking care to get the adds' HP down low but not too low, then sit around for 10 minutes doing nothing. Usually after that we had to force a wipe and do it a couple more times so we could get the 25 required kills (you could only do 10-15 before she enrages).

Full House in ICC was also a total clusterF. Normally you want to KILL the adds, not let them run around like crazy going apeshit. The problem was actually that the adds would keep dying from the tanks' autoattack. Finally we had to resort to making the tanks drag the adds far enough away and just sitting there, getting beat on but not attacking.

The most insane one was probably the LK achievement which required you to stack the debuff up to 30 before phase 2. The difficulty of it was the sheer RNG and quick reaction time required. Basically all the DPS had to sit around for about 20 minutes (literally) twiddling their thumbs, unless they got the plague in which case they had to make a mad dash to go stack it on the ghouls. The toughest part was not zoning out and staying alert enough to do this simple action. Not a very difficult achievement in terms of skill, but man, it was ridiculous how hard it was to get that to 30. It would keep falling off at 20, 25 and people would just want to rip out their hair.

The achievement that will forever elude me, I think, is the Safety Dance. I've tried that in multiple PuGs that were wayyyyy overgeared for Naxx, and people still get hit by that stupid poison. There's probably a way to cheese it so that nobody gets hit but to do it the proper way requires way more focus than a typical PuG can provide.

I still have a bunch of 10 man Naxx/Ulduar ones I'd like to do at some point. I haven't even touched the majority of ToC. The content is just difficult enough that I'd need at least a 5 man group or something to try it, and it's not easy getting people to come help you out for no significant reason other than nerd points...

Maybe I can solo all of it when I'm level 90. Maybe.

Nostalgia

Patch 4.3 is due to hit soon, and it's got me thinking more and more about gear. Up until now I don't think I've really given a thought to the overall appearance of my character because it was largely out of my control. The only elements of my character's appearance I had any say over was the shirt, tabard, and hair color. And I always did my best to make sure they coordinated my outfit. But as for the rest of my character, stats > appearances. I wore whatever had the best stats.

Well, with the new transmog feature becoming available, there is just no excuse for anyone to be strutting about Orgrimmar in some sort of weirdly put-together clown suit. I predict that once 4.3 is here, you will be considered a scrub if your gear doesn't match.

Anyways, my mind's been on my character appearances a lot lately (so shallow, I know). It got me to thinking, what did I look like prior to...now? You see your character daily and you kind of tend to forget that they actually look like in their raiding outfit. Sure, you know your gear inside and out, but what do you look like?

For that matter, I have an extremely hard time remembering what I was wearing mere months ago. I recall tier11 being pretty damn ugly, and I know it had hideous shoulders and a pretty decent looking helmet. But what weapons was I using? What tabard? What about everything else?

So in a fit of nostalgia, I dug up as many old screenshots as I could of my character. And I think I've put together a pretty accurate representation of how my character looked in the past 2 years. Oh, it all brings back so many memories...

Let's go back in time to mid-wrath...

This is right around when I hit 80. I believe ToC had already been released and people were still working their way through Ulduar. I can't recall what I was wearing the day I dinged 80, but I know that within a couple weeks I had grinded enough badges to buy some of the tier9 pieces. I know that the first thing I bought were shoulderpads, but as for the rest I can't recall. I'm guessing it was more or less a clownsuit. But anyways, this is what I must have looked like when I first began raiding - a mix of dungeon/tier 9 gear.



Not bad, even though I can't recall for the life of me what tabard I was wearing at that point. Later I think I had some Naxx/ulduar gear thrown in as well as my guild was raiding those. I remember when the ICC heroic dungeons came out, trying to grind those for hours in an attempt to replace the last few remaining blue items I had.

Soon after ICC was released, my guild broke up and I moved on as well. ICC definitely had the most fond memories for me because I spent almost a whole year clearing ICC, going through 3 different guilds in the process. It was this repeating cycle where I'd leave one guild for more progression, hit a wall there and move onto another. I'm not proud of the guild-hopping, but hey, it got me to my current guild whom I adore.

So this is what I looked like towards the end of Wrath. My guild had heroic ICC on farm (all except Sindy and Lich king) and I was rocking almost full sanctified shadowblade battlegear. I initially hated the tattered geist look, but it kind of grew on me after a while. The one thing I absolutely hated was the helmet, and I don't think I ever had my helmet displayed throughout all of ICC.



Now fast forward to the release of Cata...

Just as I was getting used to strutting around, showing off my heroic epics, cata hit. BAM - everyone was back to wearing crappy quest greens. It took at least a couple levels before I could replace all the purples with greens, and by the time I reached 85 this is what I looked like:



Not the worst I've seen, although that brown color is about as dull as dishwater. I liked the helmet, which was a nice change from the ICC set. By this point I had grinded dungeons and badges to replace all the greens with blue items at least. I had just switched guilds again and had just started to dip my toes into the tier11 raiding pool. Gear was harder to come by due to EVERYONE needing new gear, so I spent quite a bit of time in this boring starter gear.

And then as we got to the point where most of tier11 was on farm (all except the end bosses), I slowly replaced the blues with epics. I can't remember what the last thing I replaced was, but I think it may have been a trinket? At any rate, it wasn't that remarkable because there was a lot of BoE gear for rogues floating about. I had to replace my offhand, thrown, chest, belt, and helmet all through BoEs. Sure, they're nice, but they just don't give the same satisfaction as when you've earned that gear from raiding.



I hated, hated, hated those shoulders. They looked even more ridiculous in-game and the animation was all messed up due to them being so oversized. Paired with the skintight tier legs and feet, they just looked horrendous.

Now, I loved the helm though, actually thought it was the best looking helm I've seen to date. It wasn't the tier piece (which I got later and begrudgingly switched for stat reasons) but it was far better looking than the mummified bandage face look.

And now, this is what I look like at present:



I have to say, this is one of my favorite rogue tiers. The heroic version has a much nicer color, but I like this one too. I would make the shoulders a little less prominent, but the design is beautiful. And I love this helm. While I liked my tier11 helm because it was pretty, this one actually looks like it fits a rogue. I love that sinister raven look it's got going on...

So, in a matter of a few weeks, if not sooner, I will look like one of the following:

1. Golden robot
2. Midnight blue ninja
3. Fuzzy polarbear

I'm personally leaning towards the fuzzy bear...