Achievement Cataclysm

With the cataclysmic shattering of Azeroth that occurred in the last patch (4.0.3a) we also got the achievement cataclysm. Most people sort of skipped over the achievement changes and focused more on all the zone changes and all that nonsense. Now it’s time to talk business, important stuff, yes, ACHIEVEMENTS!

I want to touch on some achievements that have been changed, removed, added or have not been changed at all but really should have. If you want a complete list of achievement changes check out this tedious list on wowhead.

General

First of all, a fantastic achievement was removed. The Keymaster is now gone and did not reward anyone a feat of strength and if you had all of these keys, chances are you’ve probably lost some of them. What a sad and undignified end this achievement met.

There were several new uninteresting but appropriate achievements added:

• Breaking the Sound Barrier – A new achievement for that new level of riding skill.
• Got My Mind on My Money – Two new achievements for 50 000 gold looted and for 100 000 gold looted.
• Level 85 – Kinda speaks for itself.
• Cataclysmically Epic and Superior – New versions of the ones from Wrath of the Lich King which required you to obtain a certain item level per item slot. May I say that again… “Cataclysmically”, try saying it. It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue so to speak.
• To All the Squirrels Who Cared for Me – /love some more critters!
• One Hump or Two – The mammoth of Cataclysm is a camel!

Then there are those achievements that should’ve been changed but were strangely left as they were.
The mount achievement Mountain o’ Mounts still requires 100 mounts which should be significantly easier to obtain in Cataclysm than it was when the achievement was originally introduced. I was hoping they’d put in another level of this one for 125 mounts or something similar and move the Dragonhawk reward up to there instead. Or even better, putting in a new reward at the higher threshold.

The exact same thing can be said for the companion pet achievement Lil’ Game Hunter and the tabard achievement Twenty-Five Tabards which also remain unchanged and will be  significantly easier in Cataclysm.

Quests

A random Hambone for your viewing pleasure.

There are 30 new zone-achievements covering almost every zone in Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, each rewarding 10p. Some zones have not been given an achievement because they’re part of the lvl 1-10 experience and have a very limited amount of quests and some of these quests can’t be done unless you actually start with that race (Worgen, Goblin).

Then we got six Cataclysm zone achievements. “Only six?” you might ask, well it’s actually only five to be honest since the one for Tol Barad requires 100 daily quests done – interesting twist there – and as such isn’t a regular questing zone and isn’t required for Loremaster. So compared to the Northrend version of the Loremaster meta, this is gonna be an easy one.

Speaking of which, Loremaster now requires you to get every single zone achievement, including the new Cataclysm zones. This means that you have to get through 3433 quests (if you’re Alliance anyway, I assume the numbers are similar for Horde) to gain that glorious title. If you completed Loremaster before this patch and decide to go through all the revamped zones for the achievements you will be met by at least 1400 new quests and then 600+ more quests in the new Cataclysm zones.

There were also some random fun achievements added for Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor such as Ready, Set, Goat!. The new lvl 81-85 Cataclysm zones have an amazing 15 of these kinds of achievements. Nice!

Exploration

You’re now required to explore the Cataclysm zones as well for the Explorer title. Good change there, nothing to complain about. However, There’s unfortunately no new version of Frostbitten for Cataclysm.

The great new achievement Surveying the Damage was unfortunately awarded to pretty much everyone even though no one should have had it on patch launch day. Hopefully this one will be taken away from people so we can actually go do it.

• From Hell’s Heart I Stab at Thee – Awesome, even though they removed the “Ishmael” title reward from it.
• Stood in Fire – Very random, but fantastic if you actually get to experience it.

Professions

Cooking has gotten appropriate new achievements for the new skill level, new amount of recipes and for the new cooking dailies in Stormwind and Orgrimmar. The difficulty for achieving the 200 recipes achievement should stay roughly the same as the old one which required 160 due to the amount of new recipes. All around good changes but nothing terribly exciting.
And if you haven’t gone to a cooking trainer since the patch, do so. You’ll be granted a free recipe called Venison Jerky which is theorized to be the replacement of Dirge’s Kickin’ Chimaerok Chops which is now unobtainable.

Much like humanoids, the fox does not see the fun in fishing.

Fishing got the standard achievement for the new skill level and the new fishing dailies. Other than that, two fun and interesting achievements called The Limnologist and The Oceanographer were added. These two achievements basically require you to fish up every type of fish in all of Azeroth which will make you travel far and wide and fish in rare and remote places. These achievements are perfect for anyone who likes fishing, well done!

First Aid still exclusively has boring achievements and the new ones for the new skill level and pumping out hundreds of bandages do not help at all.

And lastly for professions, we have the new secondary profession… Archaeology!  This secondary professions brings lots of achievements, pets and other fun toys. I can’t say for sure how this will pan out yet since I haven’t gotten to try it but I can say that I am excited to do try it once I get a chance to!

Reputation

The requirement for ‘The Exalted’ was raised from 40 reputations to 45… which is very disappointing, well, for me that is. For most people it should be a pretty good number. It makes sense because with this expansion while we gained 7 new factions (per faction – horde or alliance), we also lost two factions (Shen’dralar and Zandalar Tribe). So that’s just 5 more in total than before and thus 45 is a reasonable number for this title.

The total amount of reputations you can have at exalted if you were a diligent reputation grinder in Wrath of the Lich King though is much higher than that. If my calculations are correct, I should personally be able to obtain exalted reputation with 60 factions. And 60 is a lot more than 45, feels like we need to have an achievement for 50 reputations at exalted at least.

Ambassador of the Alliance/Horde does not require the new Gilneas or Bilgewater Cartel factions. I hope this was just a mistake because this achievement is basically the only reward for grinding Gilneas to exalted (since there’s no mount to purchase).

I wish they had put Thorium Brotherhood in the classic section by the way. It’s not a hard faction to grind but it’s definitely worthy of an achievement (rather than a feat of strength).

Dungeons and Raids

There have been 80 new achievements added that are in some way related to raiding or doing dungeons in the new cataclysmic content. It all follows the same patterns of Wrath of the Lich King with…

• A meta-achievement awarding a title for completing all the dungeons and raids of the first tier.
• An achievement for earning X amount of points.
• And achievements awarding drakes after completing a number of impossible tasks in dungeons and raids.

These will obviously be a lot of fun and take some time to get through, so nothing negative to say here. However I do think that they messed something completely different while putting this new stuff in… They moved all the Wrath of the Lich King raid achievements which was split up into 8 different sections into ONE section. This one section now holds 269 achievements which is absolutely insane. It is impossible to browse and leaves you terribly annoyed after having tried to browse it. Here’s my suggestion on how to fix it: split it up.

Also, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense to have separate achievements for 10- and 25-man anymore, why not just remove half of those 269 achievements and make it so that if you earned an achievement in 10- or 25-man you have simply earned that achievement. Some of those achievements had different rewards of course, like Lich King heroic which rewards two different titles. In those cases I suggest just making one of the two a feat of strength and keeping the other one in game being awarded for either 10- or 25-man.

Player vs. Player

I don’t PvP… at all. And I probably won’t in Cataclysm either.
But I’m taking a quick look here to see that there are some new achievements for the new battlegrounds following similar patterns to the old ones. Not terribly exciting, but lots of points here for those who are focused on maximizing their points.

More interesting are the Rated Battleground achievements which do list all the possible title rewards. Titles such as Grand Marshal, Commander, Knight, Sergeant and the impossibly awesome “Hero of the Alliance/Horde”.

I also see that the Wintergrasp Veteran achievement remains a requirement for the meta achievement and that it still requires 100 wins. I’m guessing it’ll be quite different trying to achieve that in Cataclysm than it is now since no one will be in Northrend…

Feats of Strength

Here follows a complete list of achievements which turned into feats of strength with the last patch (taken from a previous post):

• Zul’Gurub – Now a feat of strength.
• Hero of the Zandalar Tribe – Now a feat of strength.
• Deadliest Catch – Now a feat of strength.
• 1000 Stone Keeper’s Shards – Are now all feat of strengths.
• 2500 Dungeon & Raid Emblems – Now a feat of strength.
• The Undying – Now a feat of strength.
• The Immortal – Now a feat of strength.
• Champion of Ulduar – Now a feat of strength.
• Conquerer of Ulduar – Now a feat of strength.
• He Feeds On Your Tears (10 & 25) – Now feats of strength.
• Herald of the Titans – Now a feat of strength.
• A Tribute to Skill (10 & 25) – Now feats of strength.
• A Tribute to Mad Skill (10 & 25) – Now feats of strength.
• A Tribute to Insanity (10 & 25) – Now feats of strength.
• A Tribute to Dedicated Insanity – Now a feat of strength.

A lot of great achievements now unobtainable for any new player or anyone who wasn’t able to obtain them before due to lack of… err. Well anyway, now you can’t get them.
Some of the coolest titles in the game are in this list, such as ‘The Immortal’ or ‘Herald of the Titans’ and those tribute to insanity achievements actually rewarded mounts!.. now it’s all gone forever. Which is a bit sad if you have missed out but feels pretty satisfying if you’ve actually obtained some of these achievements.

The feat of strength Insane in the Membrane was also altered to not require Shen’dralar anymore since that faction was removed from the game. Unfortunately this makes this achievement quite a lot easier which made a lot of people upset. To counter this Blizzard has promised to reward a separate feat of strength for being exalted with Shen’dralar at a later date.
I personally think that this will feel absolutely fine if they include a title with that feat of strength but if it’s just a plain feat of strength then it feels a bit like a cop-out.

There’s also another feat of strength which has been promised to us called Veteran of the Shifting Sands. Rewarded for having completed the impossible Scepter of the Shifting Sands quest chain. Even though the feat of strength appears to be done and ready for use, it’s not included in patch 4.0.3a. I’m hoping we’ll see it on December 7th.

Conclusion

This expansion brought a lot of new achievements, some changes to old achievements and removed some. Personally I was hoping for more changes to the old achievements rather than just having them become easier, but there you are.

Cheers,
Gav

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