Realm First! Working As A Team

All of the individual realm first achievements have come and gone. Several people in my guild were trying for one or another of them with varying degrees of success and we ended up walking away with none of the first to 85 achievements but with 5 of the max profession achievements. Sky got Jewelcrafting, Tmiv got Leatherworking, and I brought in Cooking, Blacksmithing, and (on an alt) Inscription. I didn't even try very hard for the last two, I just wanted to not be the person holding us back from the guild achievement so I put a small focus on maxing my professions and it seems no one else on my realm really cared a lot about blacksmithing or inscription. (They were 2 of the last 4 done, with Jewelcrafting forced to take 4 days by game mechanics and Archaeology taking forever because it takes forever.)

It turns out, however, that maxing your professions is actually not the concern with Working As A Team. That may seem a little odd since that's all the achievement says. Be the first guild on the realm to get max skill in every profession. Seems pretty straightforward, no? It turns out they didn't want people guild hopping to earn achievements (probably a decision made back when guild achievements did something relevant instead of doing nothing at all like they were hot-fixed to do) so in order to count towards this achievement you need honoured rep with the guild. Ok, sucks for me because my professions are split across two characters but I don't need to sleep. I can grind two reps before another guild can max all their professions. Nope, it's even worse. You can't just spend a day or two grinding because they put in a weekly cap on guild rep. So it takes three weeks worth of grinding to get up to honoured. Three weeks!

This achievement is no longer about what guild can work together to max their professions fastest. Pooling resources? Planning to make sure all professions are covered? Worthless. All that matters is getting your max profession people to log in and play a whole bunch on December 21st. On the plus side in the time it takes waiting to get the rep someone else in my guild will max inscription so I won't need to grind rep on the 21st on two characters to try for the achievement, just on one. And I need to hope the other people in my guild also feel like grinding out quests two weeks after they need the experience. It really makes me wonder why they bothered making this a realm first achievement...