I think Blizzard really struck gold with the achievement system in general, regardless of whether they copied Warhammer’s Tome of Knowledge. I don’t really care who copied whom as long as it results in a better game, obviously good ideas will be used by other people.

Personally, I’m the sort of person who likes to complete objectives, hence why I’ve always tended to try to complete all quests in an area or why I like to level alts (another level 80, check!) So it’s not exactly a surprise that I find myself running around some zones just to discover a few remaining unexplored regions just to get the exploration achievement for that zone, or I’ll actually pop into Ragefire Chasm during the Wrathgate event in Orgrimmar just to get the achievement.

However, one thing I never felt was the urge to get the heroic achievements done, which has a proto-drake mount as an achievement. It took me a while to realise why this is the case, even though I’m a fan of achievements in general.

When I play the game and do instances in particular, I approach it as a problem to be solved. “How do I defeat this boss with this particular group?” The best part of raiding in TBC was helping devise strategies to beat difficult bosses. I don’t think I am exaggerating when I say that me and my wife were one of the very few people in the guild capable of devising or adapting strategies for difficult bosses. Most players have no clue about gameplay mechanics and their idea of raiding is throwing themselves at a boss until it dies. There is no discussion about what went wrong and no attempt to improve things. Many good players are terribad at explaining what to do. “Don’t stand in fire” is only a simplified criticism and sometimes giving bad players tips and tricks does help.

However, most heroic achievements actually go counter to this approach of problem solving. As an example, there is an achievement in Heroic Utgarde Keep for not shattering the frost tombs on the first boss, Prince Keleseth. The frost tomb does damage and stuns the afflicted player. What’s the best way to counter this ability? Hmm…. shatter it quickly? Hence, doing the achievement basically means “handicap yourself by doing the wrong thing”. Another example is the Watcher achievement for the first boss of Azjol-Nerub, which requires the party to keep all 3 watchers alive until the boss is killed. If the goal is to defeat the boss… then it makes sense that you would kill the guards off quickly rather than purposely tank all 4 mobs.

Does that sound familiar? Hmm… Sartharion will call his drakes to him if they are still alive, buffing fire damage, shadow damage, and reducing the raid’s max hp. What’s the best way to deal with this?

Kill the drakes first…

This is why I feel absolutely no drive to do most heroic achievements. I’ve mentioned before that I can’t pretend to lose. I find it very difficult to purposely play in a manner that does not make sense, hence why I can’t afk in battlegrounds and I can’t play while watching TV etc etc. There is no incentive for me to do the achievements, since I do not care about the proto-drake mount and I do not care about the improved loot. I’m all for achievements like “kill malygos in 6 minutes” because those will come naturally in the course of executing a good clean boss kill. But most of the heroic achievements are in the vein of “This boss has a gimmick. To get the achievement, ignore the gimmick and pretend you’re retarded”. This isn’t really Blizzard’s fault, because how else do you get an achievement besides just killing the boss.

Some people (probably the more competitive in nature) look on it as a challenge. I don’t feel like I accomplished anything by tanking without a weapon. Or not using mangle. Or eating smash. But that’s what the heroic achievements basically are. Admittedly there are some creative strategies used to overcome them, but it all boils down to going really out of the way to do something, which doesn’t appeal to a practical person like me.

Hmm… Tobold has a post about how silly pugs are getting nowadays. Players trying to form groups in our server have also started putting requirements like 2k dps or “must be full epicced” when trying to fill spots for heroics.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to avoid a pug from hell with mages that do 800 dps and afk death knights. But some of these “requirements” are nothing short of pure idiocy. The point of the run is to do the heroic smoothly and quickly. Unless you are going for the heroic achievements, whether or not you kill a boss in 1 min or 45 seconds isn’t a big deal. Requiring someone to be in full epic gear in order to do heroic Nexus is as laughable as only doing deadmines with 4 level 80s to escort you.

The justification used by these players is often that they don’t want to carry along weak players. However, what constitutes carrying someone along? I take that as meaning that player can’t perform their role in the instance. Just because a player does not satisfy purely arbitrary “requirements” does not mean they are being carried along. As long as a tank can hold aggro and not get 1-shot, he has done his job. As long as a healer doesn’t let someone die on every pull, he has done his job. As long as dps can kill a boss before he enrages or the healer runs out of mana, they have done their job.

I can only think of two possible reasons for these players only accepting overgeared group members.

Firstly, these people have no clue what’s going on. They genuinely believe that a healer/dps/tank’s ability to perform their job and complete the instance is directly correlated to how much spellpower or hp they have. This is especially funny given that different classes and specs can have completely different stats. I’ve once had some healer ask me how much defense I had on my feral druid when I offered to tank a easy heroic. For your information, druid tanks require 0 defense. If they have no clue what they are asking about, why are they asking?

As a healer, I prefer tanks who have 25k hp and actually move out of smash and pound rather than 35k hp sacks of shit that sit there and eat everything. As a tank, I prefer 1500 dps players who let me get at least one attack in before starting aoe rather than 2000 dps dumbkin who pull mobs using typhoon and hurricane. As a dps… ok as dps I just nuke everything, who cares what the rest are doing…

The second possibility is that they want overgeared players so that they can brainlessly zerg the instance. They are lazy players and want to watch tv or chat on the phone while pressing frostfire bolt over and over. They also want to feel that they have powerful characters. They want to laugh as they pull 3 packs of mobs at the same time and aoe them down. They want to kill bosses in 20 seconds before they have time to even use their abilities. All this contributes to their feeling like “pro” and elite skilled players, although again I have to say that taking damage from obvious avoidable abilities doesn’t make you elite. How dare the healer not be able to heal them while they tank the boss along with 2 packs of patrolling mobs, they are obviously being held back by his undergeared ass and standing in the way of their feeling like invincible superheroes.

There’s nothing stopping them from continuing to only take overgeared players, it is their choice after all. It’s not against the ToS that they would rather spam in /lfg for 1 hour rather than take a normally geared player and complete the instance in 30 minutes rather than 25 (oh the horror). But make no mistake, its obvious to all who are the ones looking for a free ride. Who works harder during a heroic run, the overgeared tank and dps spamming random buttons or the poor “undergeared and lazy” healer with ONLY 1800 spellpower frantically spamming heals on their dumb asses as they stand in AOEs and cleaves?

My personal conclusion is that it isn’t a big loss that they are setting such requirements, it allows me to pick out the idiots and young kids from the normal people.

Wow ok I was gone a long time… I had to go back to the army for 2 weeks, during which I slept all over the place in the sun and came back with a amazing tan. While I was gone, little Rethreth scampered all over the place topping dps meters and getting lots of loot.

When I came back, the first thing I did was get my Ruffruf up to level 80. She was 77 when I left, so this took about 2 days. Upon hitting 80, I immediately equipped Zom’s Crackling Bulwark which we had bought for about 1.5k gold. A couple of days later, I also bought Titan-forged Sabatons of Salvation and Titan-forged Ringmail Helm of Salvation, bought for 15 and 40 wintergrasp marks of honor respectively. With the honor we got from getting those marks, I got a Hateful Gladiator’s Band of Dominance.

While I was still elemental specced, I did a couple of heroic pugs which went well. I easily did 1600+ dps in those groups, some of which included death knights with 1000 dps (melee attack was his highest percentage of damage, followed by death and decay) and mages which did 800 dps. Nothing new here…

The more interesting news is that our guild has now cleared everything in 10-man naxx except Kel’Thuzad. With my 3 80′s (one tank, one dps, one healer/dps) I’ve now seen every boss fight albeit with different characters

Spider Wing
Off-tanked with druid, healed/dpsed with shaman

Plague Wing
Cleared Noth, Heigan, Loatheb with pally, dancing was quite easy once you understand it’s just running left -> right -> left -> right…

Construct Wing
Ate hatefuls with druid, dpsed/off-healed with pally
Failed Grobbulus with druid, killed Grobbulus, Gluth and Thaddius with pally

Military Wing
Healed everything with shaman, but only managed to clear 4-horsemen after speccing resto (it was very stressful having 4-horsemen as the first raid after speccing resto for the first time ever… and being asked to heal both Zeliek and Blaumex >.< my brain exploded a few times)

Sapphiron
Took quite a few tries but got him down with only a shaman’s frost resist totem for resists. Helped that we had 3 resto shamans and 1 prot pally in healing gear to heal the people soaking in Chills and Cleaves…

By the time we got Sapphiron down we were pretty tired since we hadn’t really intended on raiding that night and we were getting kinda irritated at a few people (does it make sense to not explain fights properly because you’re lazy, only to wipe a few times because no one even knows which way Sapphiron is supposed to face? “Turn him left” isn’t really hard to explain instead of “east-west” “north-south” “no I meant on minimap”) so we called it at that point.

Once we can clear the rest of Naxx quickly as we get more experienced, we’ll have plenty of time to try KZ rather than pushing on him over and over past midnight on a work day.