Tag Archives: achievement

An Awfully Big Adventure

It’s dangerous to go alone, so for the Warlords of Draenor, we’re being given a brand new companion involved in a lengthy achievement called An Awfully Big Adventure. To complete it, you just need to bring your tailor-crafted Elekk Plushie along on Forty-No-That-Is-Not-A-Typo-Freaking-FOUR different tamer battles. Adding insult to injury, your squishy little friend does absolutely no damage or healing. All its attacks are powered by imagination and stuffing. You essentially have to complete all 44 of these pet battles with just 2 pets.

Here’s the list of all the battles you’ll have to complete for the Awfully Big Adventure in alphabetical order with links to either full entries, or just a video guide for simpler fights. The video-only entries will be denoted with (v). Most normal XP carry strategies will work as an Elekk Carry Strategy, so many of these videos & entries will just outline a standard leveling carry. The one difference from a typical carry is that, in order to get credit for this achievement, you do not have to swap your Elekk Plushie into the fight. Just being on the team is enough. But, it’s occasionally quite preferable to let the Elekk soak a big hit, stun, etc.

A warning: several of the more difficult carries listed here use pets I would never suggest in most normal strategies due to rarity, cost, etc. and many of them are excessively fussy in a style I don’t typically adopt. I apologize for this to a certain extent, but this achievement is by leaps & bounds the most difficult challenge handed to us thus far. These strats use any means necessary.

Aki The Chosen

Ashlei

Beegle Blastfuse

Blingtron 4000

Bloodknight Antari

Bordin Steadyfist

Brok

Burning Pandaren Spirit

Chen Stormstout

Christoph Von Feasel

Courageous Yon

Cymre Brightblade

Dr. Ion Goldbloom (v)

Farmer Nishi

Flowing Pandaren Spirit

Gargra

Goz Banefury

Gutretch

Hyuna

Jeremy Feasel

Lorewalker Cho (v)

Lydia Accoste (v)

Major Payne

Mo’ruk

Morulu

Narrok

Nearly Headless Jacob

Obalis

Las’an

Kiryn

Sully (v)

Taran Zhu

Thundering Pandaren Spirit

Vesharr

Wastewalker Shu

Whispering Pandaren Spirit

Wise Mari

Wrathion

Celestial Dragon

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As you collect more & more battle pets, at specific benchmarks, you’ll get an achievement and a new pet. The first one is the Reeking Pet Carrier at 50 unique pets. This counts, for example, a brown snake and a black snake as 2 different pets even though they’re not exactly special little snowflakes. Who are you trying to fool, snakes? Up until 150 pets and the Littlest Pet Shop achievement, they’re all pretty much duplicates of other pets you can tame or purchase. With that milestone, the Celestial Dragon awarded has both a model vastly unique from any other battle pet in the game and a few unique moves as well.

The unique move is, well. Starfall is similar in nature to Moon Moon’s moon tears, and packs a lot of really cool graphic punch (see above), but as both offense and heal, it just isn’t all that effective, even on 2nd go-around after it’s buffed by its own Moonlight effect. It’s also on a fairly long timer, making it kind of a poor choice unless you’re just grinding wild battles and want to see some stars.

She’s been the recipient of a few nerfs over time. She used to have the much stronger Dragonkin ability Breath instead of the current Elemental Burn in the first slot. Combining this with a strong heal in Ancient Blessing made even stronger with Moonlight in the third slot made for one of my go-to battling grinders. The overall effect was close to a current Spawn of Onyxia with more staying power. But now, she’s not really a first choice. Rounding out her moveset is the offense dampener Roar (though for me this is a poor choice because it deals little damage and that first slot is most of her offense) and the completely bafflingly placed Arcane Storm, which isn’t really a popular choice to begin with.

By now, most WoW players are aware that our favorite scapegoat Greg Street has moved on to Riot Games. As a result, many players were in a tailspin for a while there. Who is going to be at fault for every little aspect of the game that goes awry? Enter Celestalon.

Celestalon’s official title is Technical Games Designer. Though Celestalon’s level of snark isn’t quite what Mr. Street once used, a hashtag (#blamecelestalon) has been circulating, used in the vein of #thanksobama, to blame Celestalon for things that couldn’t possibly have been his fault. So, I’d encourage those of you battlers to #blamecelestalon for the nerf to the Fluxfire Feline, just to make him feel at home.

Or um, because this is supposed to be trying to butter up devs for upcoming information, that’s probably not such a hot idea. Maybe you should just #leavecelestalonalone? I’m kind of bad at this.

(You can follow him on twitter @celestalon).

Plump Turkey

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Between Hallow’s Eve and Winter Veil, there is a less flashy holiday known as Pilgrim’s Bounty.

Well, I guess the flash may depend on where you choose to celebrate.

There are several activities and achievements surrounding Pilgrim’s Bounty. The achievements are the goal here, because in order to gain the Plump Turkey battle pet (also the Pilgrim title) you have to complete the Pilgrim meta-achievement. This means you have to complete the following achievements:

Food Fight! – Sitting at a harvest table outside one of your major cities, target a person sitting at the same table and use your ‘pass food’ button (usually hotkeyed to #1 in your seat-cum-vehicle). This is easiest to do day 1, or with friend dragged along for the occasion. Here’s a map of the sites you’ll need to visit.

You can do this at the same time as…

Sharing Is Caring – Use your vehicle to pass out some food, then leave your seat and get in another and pass out that food. Pass one out to each seat before moving on, because you’ll get a stacking series of buffs. This becomes a meta buff if you cycle through all the chairs. You’re now on your way to…

Pilgrim’s Paunch – Get that meta buff from each of your capital cities (Horde Version). If you have a friend who plays a mage, now is the time to promise that she’s totally getting a ton of pets from you for your birthday, just as long as she ports your lazy butt around from city to city for this. You’ll also really want those ports to do…

Now We’re Cooking – The cooking recipes are relatively low level, and even more attainable as one of the main ingredients in one of the recipes is the 1 skill point cooking recipe Spice Bread. The catch you need that mage friend for is that each capital city has a unique ingredient on sale, as well as a few common ones. This means you ought to buy up a job lot of them when you port around, because you need a lot of the cooked foods to complete…

Pilgrim’s Progress – (Alliance Version) Complete each seasonal cooking daily. Each capital city has a unique ingredient on sale, as well as a few common ones. Of course the lady in Thunder Bluff wants pumpkin pie, when the pumpkins are for sale in Undercity, etc. The one catch is that nobody sells turkey. But there are wild ones in Elwynn Forest and Tirisfal Glades…

The Turkinator – You may want to wait to complete this until quite late in the holiday, at off-hours, because with CRZ you’re going to have a hell of a time shooting enough turkeys with this very short buff. I would definitely recommend doing this on a druid or hunter, as both classes have an instant cast spell or two and speed boosts. Try to do it at off hours if at all possible.

On completing each of the daily quests, you can pick one of several items. The first ones I’d go for is the Turkey Shooter.

Turkey Lurkey – Like every other holiday, the achievement where you have to perform an action on a specific member of the opposite faction is an enormous pain, and easier to complete the earlier you start. You use that Turkey Shooter on every race of rogue. I ended up finishing this one last year on the very last day of the holiday by creating a level 1 of the opposite faction and running /who Worgen Rogue. There were 2 of them, and I guessed that the guy who was level 87 and in Townlong had just started the zone. He had, and I got my pet, after a good amount of emoting that I wasn’t going to kill him. The Dwarf, Troll and Worgen seem to be the most difficult to find.

Turkey Shooters are single-use, so you’ll need at minimum 8 of them to get all the rogues. Your shooters disappear when the holiday is over. The other reward from the daily quests, the Pilgrim’s Attire, does not. One achievement involving the attire is time sensitive, but the other can be completed as your leisure.

Pilgrim’s Peril (Horde Version)– Wear your pilgrim gear, and then go to all the cross-faction capital city and sit at the table. You are going to be ganked, by both guards and players, and wearing the Pilgrim stuff makes you an easy kill. If you can res at a table, you can get your achievement the second you res, and then run away. Use the maps above as a guide. If you have an Alliance character I highly recommend doing these achievements on that character. The Horde sites are far more straightforward to access than the Alliance ones for opposite factions, mostly because of the boat travel involved in getting to both Darnassus and The Exodar. This can also be quite a frustrating achievement if you’re trying during peak hours.

Terokkar Turkey Time – The last of the bunch. Wear your quest reward Pilgrim stuff and kill the final boss in Sethekk Halls. If you’re fed up after the PVP and all that, you can put this one on the back burner. You can do this in March or something as long as you kept your Pilgrim clothes.

When you complete them all, you gain that stunning title but more importantly, the Plump Turkey battle pet is now yours!

The Plump Turkey is similar to other battle pets, namely the Highlands Turkey and Turkey. The latter 2 have far better breeds, as the Plump Turkey is only available in H/P, but those are both tamed so will require a bit of legwork. Here speed is important, as one of the main points of strategy to using a Turkey is in the unique stun ability Food Coma. It’s unique in that, not only is a delicious pun (additional pun also intended), but it lasts 2 rounds. In days of yore, people used to go with 3 turkeys and stunlock their pvp opponents until they ragequit. In fact, this is a large part of why the Resilience buff is now a part of the pet battle game. Also punny, Gobble Strike deals small damage but increases your speed by half for several turns.

Sharing a slot with Food Coma is the super popular for PVE debuffer, Flock. It’s quite the gamble in PVP, but the Shattered Defenses debuff is a really important one. Squawk shares a slot with Gobble Strike, dealing small damage and decreasing your opponent’s damage by 25% for several turns. The first slot is a choice between direct damage spells, either Peck or Slicing Wind. Between the decent damage and stun utility it’s an all-around really solid choice as a starter flying pet. It does start off with Uncommon rarity, so eventually you will want to use an upgrade stone on it.

One of the best reasons to nab one of your own is because it’s always nice to have a snack close at hand.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Perky Pug

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The Perky Pug was my very first must-have pet in the battle system. He was my mage’s puppy familiar before pet battles hit, so it made sense that he, along with my old-school raiding mascot Mr. Wiggles (“let’s do this, Wiggles.”), and the novel Terrible Turnip, made up my very first battle team.

There were 2 big issues with using the pug, though. The first, largely cosmetic one, was that WoW wouldn’t let me give him his original proper name, Mr. Rochester. Even removing the honorific, Rochester just wasn’t allowed. I’m guessing because of the ‘chest’ in the middle. So, he became she. Bertha, the sublimated passionate side of the dichotomy of the nature of Victorian women. What? Oh come on, pick up a book once in a while dude.

The second issue was that Bertha, like her namesake, was both ferocious and yet impotent. All perky pugs start off as Uncommon quality. So, although she was really good at fighting pretty much anything out in the world with a choice between 2 strong self-heals and an avoidance ability, she didn’t do so hot in tamer battles once I got past the initial string of quests.

At this point I started building my second team, featuring the Clockwork Gnome, Celestial Dragon and Chuck. I didn’t give up on Bertha because she was still awesome in world battles, but I needed the extra oomph to get past the tamers. it’s smart while you’re starting off to have a stable of 5-6 varied pets & pet types anyway, because there’s always that one ‘up yours buddy’ battle where you have to all but start from scratch.

At long last I found a Critter Upgrade stone, and of course, Bertha was the very first critter on my list to upgrade. She was my first level 25 too, and now she’s very key in my strategy for beating the Thundering Pandaren trainer. Being a critter, she shakes off the stuns no problem, and then she uses her burrow ability and heal to avoid pretty much everything else. She’s still very strong for taming and a favorite to bring out while adventuring in the world.

This is also one of the easier pets to obtain. Right now, it ranks #2 on Guildox on the list of most popular pets. Most people get it almost by mistake. You run LFD, and then after you’ve grouped with 100 people found through LFD, you get an achievement and a pug in the mail. Unfortunately you’re only allowed 1 pug per account, so you can’t have a Bertha and a St. John Rivers and a Grace Poole. Oh come on, it’s classic literature. God. The achievement only counts random people, so if you queue with your tank buddy that run only counts as 3/100.

The only pet which shares the pug’s moveset is the MoP CE pet, the Lucky Quilen Cub. That pet also starts out rare, so if you have one and don’t necessarily want the cutest pet ever, you may want to go with the Cub instead.

But uh, if you should decide to go with the pug, you may want to set aside the cash you’d spend on a CE. Just in case you need your carpets steamed, or something. Just sayin.