Every now and then I look on Steam for the absolute cheapest game. If it has Steam cards and looks vaguely interesting I tend to pick it up in the hopes I'll eventually play it. Frankenstein: Master of Death is a game that was on sale for 16 cents a couple weeks ago and said it was a 'hidden object' game. I enjoyed playing a 'hidden object' game on Facebook but eventually got put off by the free to play business model... So I thought putting up 16 cents for a game without those annoying paywalls was a worthy risk.
It ended up being more of a point and click adventure game in the sense that you had to find keys that fight the right doors to progress through the plot. Finding the keys was pretty trivial; remembering where the lock was happened to be a little annoying. Only occasionally did you get into a 'hidden object' minigame and those only ever had a fixed 12 things to find. Not the best offering for someone who just wanted to click on a bunch of hidden objects.
Ultimately I beat the game in a little under 3 hours. I wouldn't say it was the most fun I ever had playing a game, but it was reasonably fun. I had to leave the game running in order to collect up the Steam cards that came with it (they added in a refund option to return a game with under 2 hours played so now cards won't drop until you've clocked at least 2 hours in a game) and ended up selling the cards off for 26 cents after Steam fees.
All told I made 10 cents and got to play a decent enough game. I'm not sure it was actually an optimal use of my time, so maybe buying the cheapest game on Steam is actually not a very good idea...
On the plus side, it is now the second game in which I've earned 100% of the achievements. Huzzah!
Showing posts with label achievements. Show all posts
Showing posts with label achievements. Show all posts
Friday, October 02, 2015
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Path of Exile: Challenges
What are these 8 challenges? Some of them seem like just play the game a lot. Kill a rare monster of each of 188 different types. Touch all 17 shrine types. Hit level 65 with all 7 classes. Kill a rare monster with each of the 22 new mods added in the hardcore league. Use all 23 crafting items.
Then there are the three that seem pretty insane... The first one is to own 65 specific unique items. You need to actual own them all when the event ends so our initial plan of find them across the guild and get everyone the achievement is out the window. There is a trade market so it's possible buying all 65 of them will be the way to go? I don't know that I like the idea of figuring out the trade economy...
The second one is to make something out of 33 cube recipes. Some of these recipes require spending a large amount of time managing a large inventory of end game rare items. Doable, but probably time consuming?
The last one is to kill all 116 unique bosses. I've done the 47 that go with the main plot but that leaves 69 more that seem to come from end game stuff. There are 67 different 'maps' that can drop from super high level monsters. These maps open up extra dungeons and it's in these dungeons that most if not all of the remaining bosses reside. It sounds like most of the maps can only be found in other maps which means an awful lot of time grinding in end game dungeons trying to get all of the maps. It sounds like a pretty neat system for generating end game stuff to do, actually. But I don't know how plausible it is to kill every last one of them. Presumably these can also be bought on the trade market so filling in the last couple might be expensive but not hard?
On the weekend I was all gung-ho about doing these because I like achievements and I like free. But actually looking at what they entail seems a little crazy. I guess I should probably see if I like the end game map system before getting too involved in planning to work on this? Oh, who am I kidding... A couple of them seem easy, I'll go do those anyway because I like achievements! There was no t-shirt waiting at the end of the insane in the membrane achievement in World of Warcraft and I did that one...
Thursday, September 06, 2012
Mists of Pandaria Realm Firsts
It's time for me to ramble on for a while about the potential realm first achievements for the coming World of Warcraft expansion. I got a lot of my information this time around from an awesome blog I've just recently discovered: Kaliope's Crafting Blog. She's gone through all the professions on the beta and given rough ideas for what it will take to max them out quickly. I'm going to throw my own thoughts in there so you're probably better off just going to read her stuff. Now, I did get three realm firsts in Cataclysm (cooking, blacksmithing, inscription) so my thoughts hopefully aren't worthless but they should definitely be taken with a grain of salt since I have no hands on experience with the beta and haven't even really played the game at all in a year and a half. So... What do we have?
Level 90
- Uh... Play a lot more than anyone else?
- I believe Sky had 25 pre-completed quests before Cataclysm launch but I don't know how big of a boost it gave him. Maybe having one quest hub's worth of dailies would be a good idea? I doubt spending a lot of time flying around makes sense but you could cash in a bunch of Molten Front dailies, hearth to Stormwind, and take the airship to Pandaria?
- I thought storing up archaeology fragments would help but it sounds like the old stuff isn't worth any experience at 85. I did it before I looked that up so I'll try and see I guess?
- I guess it makes sense to stock up on things like flasks/food/enchanting scrolls/gems so you can buff up any upgrades you get as you go?
- My gut feeling is doing every dungeon once for the quest experience will help but that spending all your time in dungeons will hurt.
- Herbalism and mining nodes are worth 2/3rds of a monster kill. That's probably good enough to make it optimal to have those two tradeskills? I wouldn't go out of my way to mine or herb but if you run by a node while doing a quest it can only help to pick it up I would think.
- A lot of caffeine or a friend to tag in on your account are pretty much mandatory I think?
Level 90 Death Knight, Druid, Hunter, Mage, Paladin, Priest, Rogue, Shaman, Warlock, Warrior
- All the same as the above except you might be on less of a clock. Maybe a nice consolation prize if you fail at first 90.
Level 90 Monk
- Has to start at level 1 so will take even longer.
- Recruit a friend works, so you can get triple experience until level 80.
- Thinking about it more... The recruitee can actually give free levels to the recruiter. So theoretically if Robb got two characters up to level 80 he could instantly level my monk up to level 80. I'd still have 10 levels to go, of course, but that's a lead that likely can't be beat. It probably takes 20ish hours to get those levels with triple experience and 60ish normally... That's a stupid lead.
- There isn't a level 80 or 85 version. Just the 90.
Challenge Conqueror: Gold
- Be the first person to beat the gold standard time in every challenge dungeon.
- Really not something you can plan on getting quickly since you'd need a group of 5 people to hit max level, get enough gear to do the challenge dungeons, and then practice enough to beat them all in really fast times.
- Since we're focusing on challenge dungeons I really want this (on maybe 5 people at once) but it won't require doing anything differently I don't think.
Pandaren Ambassador
- Get exalted with all 9 of the Panda factions.
- Rep gains from dungeons have been taken out for this expansion so you need to earn all this reputation through quests/daily quests/Farmville.
- I guess the key here is to do every single daily for all the factions every day? They removed the 25 daily quest per day cap so this seems feasible?
- There may or may not be an item (Hozen Peace Pipe) which gives 1000 rep with every faction. You may be able to buy these?
- When I saw this achievement and saw that they took dungeon rep out I immediately thought that this achievement is Sthenno's for the taking if he came back to play.
Alchemist
- Apparently alchemy is going to a random learning system. When you make something you might learn a new recipe. Some recipes are better than others for leveling... So you need to get lucky and randomly learn those ones?
- The last few points either need a bunch of mining bars or a couple SoH.
- You may be able to do this with only like 8 stacks of herbs total if you get the right recipes? And 5 stacks of ghost iron or 3 hours worth of SoH...
Angler
- Fishing can be done anywhere. Average 5.5 casts per level the whole way up. So fish for a couple hours and hope you're the luckiest!
- Can potentially store up a quest worth 2 fishing skill.
- Optimal speed is to fish right beside the trainer in a major city. Taking a few minutes to get to Pandaria will let you get some fish for cooking.
Archaeologist
- All pre-MoP stuff is worth nothing in terms of leveling.
- As you gain skill the dig sites start spawning in harder zones.
- Rogues probably have an advantage because of vanish as a result?
- Feels like you should store up 200 of each token before you start making things in the hopes that you can spawn more things in low level zones?
- Apparently it only took 2.5 hours for Kaliope to get this done on the beta.
Blacksmith
- Requires a SoH to get a recipe to finish it off.
- Can be done entirely with the base ore. 25 stacks of ore. And one Cata shield spike!
- Seems a _ton_ easier than in Cata where you had to hit level 84 to get it done thanks to phasing. Here you just need ore and to farm for a couple hours for a SoH.
Cook
- Wow, did cooking change a ton!
- There are 6 different cooking skills. Your main cooking skill is the highest of these ways.
- Recipes require a ton of ingredients. Especially vegetables. Which you can eventually grow on your farm but will be very tricky for realm first.
- To finish it off you need vendor spices that you get via cooking dailies. You can do one per way, apparently. The spices are not BoP. So whoever gets realm first here will almost certainly be borrowing spices from friends or buying them on the AH should people be selling them.
- Kaliope said it took 20 hours of solid farming to get this... Seems extreme and I bet it goes to someone with cash instead.
Enchanter
- You can convert dust and essences back and forth to streamline things a little.
- Rods are gone.
- It seems like you just need to gather a bunch of mats and then make things. Nothing tricky going on at all.
- Looks like you need a little more than 3 stacks each of dust and essences? I don't know how this compares to Cata but it sounds pretty cheap.
Engineer
- Requires either 2 SoH or a couple rare gems.
- It sounds like engineers get lots of cool things but the leveling is a huge pain.
- Sounds like it needs close to 40 stacks of ore, so a lot more than blacksmithing.
Herbalist
- Just pick a bunch of flowers.
- Make sure you get a +10 skill item (like a gnomish army knife) so you can herb things ASAP.
- Probably involves trying to survive in a high level zone?
Jewelcrafter
- Rare cuts are learned randomly this time, one per day, instead of needing 3 dailies to get one of your choice.
- Jewelcrafter only gems are found when prospecting which is a huge buff compared to needing to spend daily tokens on them!
- You probably need 10 of the same rare gem to hit max. So you need to either get lucky and buy some or prospect enough ore to get them. Maybe this takes 30 stacks of ore. Maybe it takes 50. Who knows!
- Certainly it sounds like you can get this in a short period of time if you buy enough ore.
Leatherworker
- Like blacksmithing it'll take a SoH to buy the last recipe you use.
- Will take like 17 stacks of leather to go with that SoH. Presumably you can skin that up while farming the SoH?
Medic
- Make a lot of bandages.
- Sounds like the trainer teaches everything you need. So you just need your 6 stacks of cloth and a trainer. Sounds pretty easy.
Miner
- Mine a bunch of rocks.
- Same as herbalist. Just jump off the boat, run to a hopefully player-light area and mine a ton.
Scribe
- Also runs on a discovery system. Hopefully the one glyph you learn is orange until near the cap!
- Inscription makes all of the shoulder enchants now (no more rep grind!) so presumably you can level up a bit making stuff that people will actually use.
- Of course, the new glyphs will probably be worth a fortune as well.
- Sounds like you need less than 3 stacks of ink to cap. Which is what, 15 stacks of herbs? So more than alchemy, but you don't need a SoH.
Skinner
- Uh, kill some beasts. Skin them.
Tailor
- Also needs a single SoH to buy a recipe.
- Sounds like it takes 22 stacks of cloth.
- Again has a daily cooldown that requires you to stand in a certain zone. I haven't done tailoring ever so I don't know how annoying that is, but at least it sounds like you don't need that cloth to max out.
There are also a few guild realm first's...
Grand Empress Shek'Zeer, Sha of Fear, Will of the Emperor
- Kill the end boss on heroic of a 10/25 man raid.
- Nothing to prepare for beforehand, really. Just be the best raiding guild on your server.
Guild Level 30
- Recruit every idiot you can find and convince them to do quests?
Working as a Better Team
- Get all the professions maxed out by people in the guild.
- The Cata version of this sucked because it took 3 weeks to get the reputation to get credit. That's gone now, so this should just be a race to who can get all the things first. I feel like we would have had the Cata one if the rep restriction wasn't there (we did get like 5 of the crafting realm firsts, after all).
- Someone is claiming any given character could only count once? So despite having blacksmithing and cooking on Recolada I would only satisfy one of those requirements? I don't know what to think about that.
Some of these sound interesting. I can probably stick with blacksmithing and jewelcrafting if I'm willing to buy 60 stacks of ore. How much is a stack of ore going to go for? I could realistically afford to spend almost 4k a stack, but if it's anywhere near that price I'd rather switch to mining like I did last time. But if we're talking 200g per stack? I'll just be a buyer. I don't remember the prices at Cata launch but I don't think it was much more than 100g?
That said, I do enjoy mining and with no jewelcrafting tokens to start farming immediately I don't know that I want to hold onto jewelcrafting either...
Fishing into cooking is always interesting.
Heck, it's tempting to just play my rogue for a few hours to get inscription up. Getting the daily discovery process started there could be big money! (Though I guess the same is true of jewelcrafting...)
I would like Working as a Better Team but I don't know that enough people are coming back to get that one. Especially if we need 15 distinct people to cover every profession.
And then the daily quest rep grind is intriguing as well... Options, options...
Level 90
- Uh... Play a lot more than anyone else?
- I believe Sky had 25 pre-completed quests before Cataclysm launch but I don't know how big of a boost it gave him. Maybe having one quest hub's worth of dailies would be a good idea? I doubt spending a lot of time flying around makes sense but you could cash in a bunch of Molten Front dailies, hearth to Stormwind, and take the airship to Pandaria?
- I thought storing up archaeology fragments would help but it sounds like the old stuff isn't worth any experience at 85. I did it before I looked that up so I'll try and see I guess?
- I guess it makes sense to stock up on things like flasks/food/enchanting scrolls/gems so you can buff up any upgrades you get as you go?
- My gut feeling is doing every dungeon once for the quest experience will help but that spending all your time in dungeons will hurt.
- Herbalism and mining nodes are worth 2/3rds of a monster kill. That's probably good enough to make it optimal to have those two tradeskills? I wouldn't go out of my way to mine or herb but if you run by a node while doing a quest it can only help to pick it up I would think.
- A lot of caffeine or a friend to tag in on your account are pretty much mandatory I think?
Level 90 Death Knight, Druid, Hunter, Mage, Paladin, Priest, Rogue, Shaman, Warlock, Warrior
- All the same as the above except you might be on less of a clock. Maybe a nice consolation prize if you fail at first 90.
Level 90 Monk
- Has to start at level 1 so will take even longer.
- Recruit a friend works, so you can get triple experience until level 80.
- Thinking about it more... The recruitee can actually give free levels to the recruiter. So theoretically if Robb got two characters up to level 80 he could instantly level my monk up to level 80. I'd still have 10 levels to go, of course, but that's a lead that likely can't be beat. It probably takes 20ish hours to get those levels with triple experience and 60ish normally... That's a stupid lead.
- There isn't a level 80 or 85 version. Just the 90.
Challenge Conqueror: Gold
- Be the first person to beat the gold standard time in every challenge dungeon.
- Really not something you can plan on getting quickly since you'd need a group of 5 people to hit max level, get enough gear to do the challenge dungeons, and then practice enough to beat them all in really fast times.
- Since we're focusing on challenge dungeons I really want this (on maybe 5 people at once) but it won't require doing anything differently I don't think.
Pandaren Ambassador
- Get exalted with all 9 of the Panda factions.
- Rep gains from dungeons have been taken out for this expansion so you need to earn all this reputation through quests/daily quests/Farmville.
- I guess the key here is to do every single daily for all the factions every day? They removed the 25 daily quest per day cap so this seems feasible?
- There may or may not be an item (Hozen Peace Pipe) which gives 1000 rep with every faction. You may be able to buy these?
- When I saw this achievement and saw that they took dungeon rep out I immediately thought that this achievement is Sthenno's for the taking if he came back to play.
Alchemist
- Apparently alchemy is going to a random learning system. When you make something you might learn a new recipe. Some recipes are better than others for leveling... So you need to get lucky and randomly learn those ones?
- The last few points either need a bunch of mining bars or a couple SoH.
- You may be able to do this with only like 8 stacks of herbs total if you get the right recipes? And 5 stacks of ghost iron or 3 hours worth of SoH...
Angler
- Fishing can be done anywhere. Average 5.5 casts per level the whole way up. So fish for a couple hours and hope you're the luckiest!
- Can potentially store up a quest worth 2 fishing skill.
- Optimal speed is to fish right beside the trainer in a major city. Taking a few minutes to get to Pandaria will let you get some fish for cooking.
Archaeologist
- All pre-MoP stuff is worth nothing in terms of leveling.
- As you gain skill the dig sites start spawning in harder zones.
- Rogues probably have an advantage because of vanish as a result?
- Feels like you should store up 200 of each token before you start making things in the hopes that you can spawn more things in low level zones?
- Apparently it only took 2.5 hours for Kaliope to get this done on the beta.
Blacksmith
- Requires a SoH to get a recipe to finish it off.
- Can be done entirely with the base ore. 25 stacks of ore. And one Cata shield spike!
- Seems a _ton_ easier than in Cata where you had to hit level 84 to get it done thanks to phasing. Here you just need ore and to farm for a couple hours for a SoH.
Cook
- Wow, did cooking change a ton!
- There are 6 different cooking skills. Your main cooking skill is the highest of these ways.
- Recipes require a ton of ingredients. Especially vegetables. Which you can eventually grow on your farm but will be very tricky for realm first.
- To finish it off you need vendor spices that you get via cooking dailies. You can do one per way, apparently. The spices are not BoP. So whoever gets realm first here will almost certainly be borrowing spices from friends or buying them on the AH should people be selling them.
- Kaliope said it took 20 hours of solid farming to get this... Seems extreme and I bet it goes to someone with cash instead.
Enchanter
- You can convert dust and essences back and forth to streamline things a little.
- Rods are gone.
- It seems like you just need to gather a bunch of mats and then make things. Nothing tricky going on at all.
- Looks like you need a little more than 3 stacks each of dust and essences? I don't know how this compares to Cata but it sounds pretty cheap.
Engineer
- Requires either 2 SoH or a couple rare gems.
- It sounds like engineers get lots of cool things but the leveling is a huge pain.
- Sounds like it needs close to 40 stacks of ore, so a lot more than blacksmithing.
Herbalist
- Just pick a bunch of flowers.
- Make sure you get a +10 skill item (like a gnomish army knife) so you can herb things ASAP.
- Probably involves trying to survive in a high level zone?
Jewelcrafter
- Rare cuts are learned randomly this time, one per day, instead of needing 3 dailies to get one of your choice.
- Jewelcrafter only gems are found when prospecting which is a huge buff compared to needing to spend daily tokens on them!
- You probably need 10 of the same rare gem to hit max. So you need to either get lucky and buy some or prospect enough ore to get them. Maybe this takes 30 stacks of ore. Maybe it takes 50. Who knows!
- Certainly it sounds like you can get this in a short period of time if you buy enough ore.
Leatherworker
- Like blacksmithing it'll take a SoH to buy the last recipe you use.
- Will take like 17 stacks of leather to go with that SoH. Presumably you can skin that up while farming the SoH?
Medic
- Make a lot of bandages.
- Sounds like the trainer teaches everything you need. So you just need your 6 stacks of cloth and a trainer. Sounds pretty easy.
Miner
- Mine a bunch of rocks.
- Same as herbalist. Just jump off the boat, run to a hopefully player-light area and mine a ton.
Scribe
- Also runs on a discovery system. Hopefully the one glyph you learn is orange until near the cap!
- Inscription makes all of the shoulder enchants now (no more rep grind!) so presumably you can level up a bit making stuff that people will actually use.
- Of course, the new glyphs will probably be worth a fortune as well.
- Sounds like you need less than 3 stacks of ink to cap. Which is what, 15 stacks of herbs? So more than alchemy, but you don't need a SoH.
Skinner
- Uh, kill some beasts. Skin them.
Tailor
- Also needs a single SoH to buy a recipe.
- Sounds like it takes 22 stacks of cloth.
- Again has a daily cooldown that requires you to stand in a certain zone. I haven't done tailoring ever so I don't know how annoying that is, but at least it sounds like you don't need that cloth to max out.
There are also a few guild realm first's...
Grand Empress Shek'Zeer, Sha of Fear, Will of the Emperor
- Kill the end boss on heroic of a 10/25 man raid.
- Nothing to prepare for beforehand, really. Just be the best raiding guild on your server.
Guild Level 30
- Recruit every idiot you can find and convince them to do quests?
Working as a Better Team
- Get all the professions maxed out by people in the guild.
- The Cata version of this sucked because it took 3 weeks to get the reputation to get credit. That's gone now, so this should just be a race to who can get all the things first. I feel like we would have had the Cata one if the rep restriction wasn't there (we did get like 5 of the crafting realm firsts, after all).
- Someone is claiming any given character could only count once? So despite having blacksmithing and cooking on Recolada I would only satisfy one of those requirements? I don't know what to think about that.
Some of these sound interesting. I can probably stick with blacksmithing and jewelcrafting if I'm willing to buy 60 stacks of ore. How much is a stack of ore going to go for? I could realistically afford to spend almost 4k a stack, but if it's anywhere near that price I'd rather switch to mining like I did last time. But if we're talking 200g per stack? I'll just be a buyer. I don't remember the prices at Cata launch but I don't think it was much more than 100g?
That said, I do enjoy mining and with no jewelcrafting tokens to start farming immediately I don't know that I want to hold onto jewelcrafting either...
Fishing into cooking is always interesting.
Heck, it's tempting to just play my rogue for a few hours to get inscription up. Getting the daily discovery process started there could be big money! (Though I guess the same is true of jewelcrafting...)
I would like Working as a Better Team but I don't know that enough people are coming back to get that one. Especially if we need 15 distinct people to cover every profession.
And then the daily quest rep grind is intriguing as well... Options, options...
Monday, October 10, 2011
Glitch Achievements
Glitch has a lot of good things going for it, but it does not have a good achievement interface. I can get a list of achievements I've earned in a pretty random order. I can get a list of all achievements in the game in alphabetical order. But I can't get a list of achievements I haven't earned. I can't get a list of achievements by type. World of Warcraft probably spoiled me in this regard but I really find what they have lacking.
So, I did what I'm want to do and built an achievement spreadsheet. I had to build my own categories for the achievements but I have the list in a sortable format. I can paste the list of earned achievements into the first sheet (paste as text into cell A1) and then it will populate the rest. The second sheet has #N/A in column C for an achievement I have yet to earn. The third sheet summarizes all achievements by type and what percentage of those I have.
The sheet is hopefully available at the following link: Excel File
The biggest category, other than miscellaneous, is cooking. One of the bigger ones is eating (which pretty much chains from cooking). As such it seems pretty clear that if I'm going to really challenge for the achievement leaderboard I'm going to have to get a lot of the cooking skills. But the problem is I have a lot of skills already so my learning penalty is starting to rack up. I'm thinking it might make sense to actually grab Better Learning V now. I'm just about to finish learning Animal Kinship VII and am strongly considering spending the next 5 and a half days on BLV. I could sink a ton of junk into the Lem shrines and power learn it... Hmm...
So, I did what I'm want to do and built an achievement spreadsheet. I had to build my own categories for the achievements but I have the list in a sortable format. I can paste the list of earned achievements into the first sheet (paste as text into cell A1) and then it will populate the rest. The second sheet has #N/A in column C for an achievement I have yet to earn. The third sheet summarizes all achievements by type and what percentage of those I have.
The sheet is hopefully available at the following link: Excel File
The biggest category, other than miscellaneous, is cooking. One of the bigger ones is eating (which pretty much chains from cooking). As such it seems pretty clear that if I'm going to really challenge for the achievement leaderboard I'm going to have to get a lot of the cooking skills. But the problem is I have a lot of skills already so my learning penalty is starting to rack up. I'm thinking it might make sense to actually grab Better Learning V now. I'm just about to finish learning Animal Kinship VII and am strongly considering spending the next 5 and a half days on BLV. I could sink a ton of junk into the Lem shrines and power learn it... Hmm...
Sunday, October 09, 2011
Glitch: Game of Crowns
There's a mini-game in Glitch that you can buy tickets to play in a few different spots. The mini-game is a pretty simple 'king of the hill' style game where someone starts with a crown and if another player runs into them they steal the crown. First to keep the crown for a cumulative 60 seconds wins the game. It's cute and short but not terribly interesting.
The name was a little interesting though. It sounds very similar to Game of Thrones, the fantasy book series by George R R Martin. I thought that was a nice coincidence... Until earlier today when I went through the list of achievements in Glitch (if I want to get to the top of that leaderboard I need to know what I should be doing) and found the achievements related to holding the crown in the game of crowns...
The Imp - 101 seconds
Ranger of the Night's Watch - 1001 seconds
Knight of the Kingsguard - 5003 seconds
Kingslayer - 12007 seconds
Hand of the King - 25013 seconds
Monarch of the Seven Kingdoms - 100003 seconds
Yeah, guess it wasn't much of a coincidence after all, huh? Of course, to get that last achievement would require holding onto the crown for almost 28 hours! You'd have to really like playing keep-away or collecting achievements to get that one!
The name was a little interesting though. It sounds very similar to Game of Thrones, the fantasy book series by George R R Martin. I thought that was a nice coincidence... Until earlier today when I went through the list of achievements in Glitch (if I want to get to the top of that leaderboard I need to know what I should be doing) and found the achievements related to holding the crown in the game of crowns...
The Imp - 101 seconds
Ranger of the Night's Watch - 1001 seconds
Knight of the Kingsguard - 5003 seconds
Kingslayer - 12007 seconds
Hand of the King - 25013 seconds
Monarch of the Seven Kingdoms - 100003 seconds
Yeah, guess it wasn't much of a coincidence after all, huh? Of course, to get that last achievement would require holding onto the crown for almost 28 hours! You'd have to really like playing keep-away or collecting achievements to get that one!
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Achievements
I've been playing Dance Dance Revolution Universe 2 on the xBox 360 lately. The 360 is designed with an achievement system built into it and I've been trying to get the achievements in the game. Some of them are for just doing normal things like unlocking songs or passing them on any difficulty but a few of them are incredibly hard and annoying. Now, hard isn't something I normally shy at. I got plenty of hard achievements in World of Warcraft and was quite happy to do them.
No, the problem here, I think, is that they aren't for playing DDR. They're for doing a bunch of obscure challenges that use the songs and the dance pad but are actually detrimental to playing the game. Silly things like play a song at triple speed, with no top bar, and the arrows appearing halfway up the screen, without missing a single step. Except for the up arrows. Hit an up and you lose. So if you're actually good enough to pass the song with a speed increase and not seeing all the arrows properly you're probably screwed because you're going to instinctively hit the ups and lose. So in order to actually do it you'd need to practice the song with those weird conditions over and over and over until you did it perfectly. And then do it for 48 other different weird sets of conditions. Sorry, but I'm just not willing or able to do that. I haven't gotten all of the achievements in any xBox 360 game yet and DDRU2 won't be the first one.
No, the problem here, I think, is that they aren't for playing DDR. They're for doing a bunch of obscure challenges that use the songs and the dance pad but are actually detrimental to playing the game. Silly things like play a song at triple speed, with no top bar, and the arrows appearing halfway up the screen, without missing a single step. Except for the up arrows. Hit an up and you lose. So if you're actually good enough to pass the song with a speed increase and not seeing all the arrows properly you're probably screwed because you're going to instinctively hit the ups and lose. So in order to actually do it you'd need to practice the song with those weird conditions over and over and over until you did it perfectly. And then do it for 48 other different weird sets of conditions. Sorry, but I'm just not willing or able to do that. I haven't gotten all of the achievements in any xBox 360 game yet and DDRU2 won't be the first one.
BMI: 22.01 (+0.03)
Wii Fit Age: 28 (-3)
Saturday, December 11, 2010
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...
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...
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
Realm First! Illustrious Cooking
The log-in servers died so this was more a matter of getting lucky and being the first competitor to log in than it was skill, but I got it done anyway! Woo!
Sunday, December 05, 2010
Profession Skill Up Chance
I've acquired 50+ of each of my chosen meats for the upcoming push for realm first: illustrious cooking. Do I need more? Do I want more? How safe am I, really?
Those are the questions I was asking today and turned to google to see if anyone actually knew the answer. I couldn't find any links to data from any actual studies but I did find in a few spots the same formula which makes some intuitive sense. If the formula is right then it also explains the weirdness in terms of when the different cooking recipes turned green according to tier.
Orange is always 100% to skill-up (other than skinning which Blizzard intentionally changed a long time ago). Each recipe now has two relevant numbers. The last skill level which is 100% to skill-up and the first skill level with is 0% to skill-up. Every level between those two has a chance of providing a skill-up which is linearly related to those two numbers. The formula is (grey skill - current skill) / (grey skill - yellow skill + 1). The green level is artificial and represents a less than 50% chance to skill-up, and hence lies halfway between the grey skill and the yellow skill. (This is why I can get 10 yellow ticks out of a tier 1 food and only 5 from a tier 3 food. They have a wider range before they go grey.)
Anyone who bothered to read my two part series on Markov chains should see where I'm headed here. Skilling up is strictly increasing and I now have quantified probabilities for advancing from state to state. How much food do I need? I can build a matrix and find out! (Well, I can build 3 matrices and find out since they all have different ranges between yellow and grey.) Each of the three tiers has 15 points in orange, so for each tier I need 15 meat plus 10 skill-ups.
Building up my matrix and running it on the online tool I found shows that for tier 1 I expect to need 12.941 meat to get those final 10 points, for a total of 28 meat. The 64 snake eyes I have should be more than sufficient. In fact, it's a practical guarantee. The odds of not getting 25 skill points with 64 meat is 0. Experimenting a bit, the 95% threshold is 32 pieces of meat.
For tier 2 we're looking at needing 16.5583 extra pieces of meat. The 95% threshold (including the orange 15) is 38. I have 57 blood shrimp which is 99.9988% likely to get me to 500.
For tier 3 we're looking at needing 32.2187 extra pieces of meat. The 95% threshold (again including the orange 15) is 71. I have 59 crocolisk tails which is 85.55% likely to get me to 525.
I'm happy with my practical guarantee to get through tier 1. Missing 1 of every 100000 tries at passing tier 2 is acceptable. But failing 1 in 7 at getting through tier 3 is not something I'm happy with. Fortunately for me I have an easy out. Vek has had enough double token days that I can afford to buy a 4th recipe. I was hoping I wouldn't need to but if I do then I have 114 combined tier 3 meats which would give me a 99.92% to make it. I was thinking I should save the tokens in case I needed to buy a tier 2 recipe but this shows me that's wrong. Even with 2 recipes I'm still more likely to fail at tier 3 than at tier 2. I should be good and I will absolutely make sure to have that bonus skill from a daily sitting around in case disaster strikes. (And beg for more food!)
On the plus side, I doubt other people are thinking they need to stock up hundreds of the tier 3 meat so if I need to make that run other people might have to as well. Better make sure to log out in frost spec for the extra mounted run speed!
Those are the questions I was asking today and turned to google to see if anyone actually knew the answer. I couldn't find any links to data from any actual studies but I did find in a few spots the same formula which makes some intuitive sense. If the formula is right then it also explains the weirdness in terms of when the different cooking recipes turned green according to tier.
Orange is always 100% to skill-up (other than skinning which Blizzard intentionally changed a long time ago). Each recipe now has two relevant numbers. The last skill level which is 100% to skill-up and the first skill level with is 0% to skill-up. Every level between those two has a chance of providing a skill-up which is linearly related to those two numbers. The formula is (grey skill - current skill) / (grey skill - yellow skill + 1). The green level is artificial and represents a less than 50% chance to skill-up, and hence lies halfway between the grey skill and the yellow skill. (This is why I can get 10 yellow ticks out of a tier 1 food and only 5 from a tier 3 food. They have a wider range before they go grey.)
Anyone who bothered to read my two part series on Markov chains should see where I'm headed here. Skilling up is strictly increasing and I now have quantified probabilities for advancing from state to state. How much food do I need? I can build a matrix and find out! (Well, I can build 3 matrices and find out since they all have different ranges between yellow and grey.) Each of the three tiers has 15 points in orange, so for each tier I need 15 meat plus 10 skill-ups.
Building up my matrix and running it on the online tool I found shows that for tier 1 I expect to need 12.941 meat to get those final 10 points, for a total of 28 meat. The 64 snake eyes I have should be more than sufficient. In fact, it's a practical guarantee. The odds of not getting 25 skill points with 64 meat is 0. Experimenting a bit, the 95% threshold is 32 pieces of meat.
For tier 2 we're looking at needing 16.5583 extra pieces of meat. The 95% threshold (including the orange 15) is 38. I have 57 blood shrimp which is 99.9988% likely to get me to 500.
For tier 3 we're looking at needing 32.2187 extra pieces of meat. The 95% threshold (again including the orange 15) is 71. I have 59 crocolisk tails which is 85.55% likely to get me to 525.
I'm happy with my practical guarantee to get through tier 1. Missing 1 of every 100000 tries at passing tier 2 is acceptable. But failing 1 in 7 at getting through tier 3 is not something I'm happy with. Fortunately for me I have an easy out. Vek has had enough double token days that I can afford to buy a 4th recipe. I was hoping I wouldn't need to but if I do then I have 114 combined tier 3 meats which would give me a 99.92% to make it. I was thinking I should save the tokens in case I needed to buy a tier 2 recipe but this shows me that's wrong. Even with 2 recipes I'm still more likely to fail at tier 3 than at tier 2. I should be good and I will absolutely make sure to have that bonus skill from a daily sitting around in case disaster strikes. (And beg for more food!)
On the plus side, I doubt other people are thinking they need to stock up hundreds of the tier 3 meat so if I need to make that run other people might have to as well. Better make sure to log out in frost spec for the extra mounted run speed!
Monday, November 29, 2010
Realm First! Illustrious Cooking
My all-time most viewed post is this one where I detailed possible plans for getting one of the realm first feats of strength for the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion. Some of those hits were from the same few people who read the rest of my posts, but some people actually got here from the outside world likely expecting help and instead were treated to a bunch of drivel about what I might want to do and not a lot about how I would do it.
Well, if any of those people end up back here I have a "treat" for them. I got tipped onto the fact that you can likely do cooking in less than an hour and decided to look into it further. I'll detail the steps needed here, but the window to get on board is steadily closing.
Why is that? Well, it turns out they actually enabled the Cataclysm cooking and fishing dailies in the shattering patch. The fishing dailies don't matter at all but the cooking ones sure do. The new dailies award new cooking tokens which are used to buy recipes or meat and can be stockpiled before the Cataclysm launch. (They also award one cooking skill so you can save one up in advance.) Most of the dailies award one token, but one of them gives two (currently the active one on Vek!)
Now, for the most part the new recipes fall into one of 3 categories for our purposes.
Assuming you're going whole hog you need to buy 3 recipes, one from each category above. They each cost 3 tokens, and the tokens are soulbound, so you need to have 9 tokens on your main when Cataclysm launches. Counting today there are exactly 8 days left before Cataclysm launches, so you need just one doubler to get there. (If you're going the Wrath to 475 plan then you only need 6 tokens which will be good enough if no one else on your realm caught on in time.) Note this does include the day you log in (dailies reset at 4am, game comes up at 3am) but if your realm has a favourable timezone you may be able to get around this. I don't. As an aside, you want to save that last daily for after you've trained to go above 450 so you get the free skill point, and probably want to save it for skill #500 or #525.
You also need to have the cooking hat from the Dalaran dailies. Someone with the hat will beat someone without the hat guaranteed since it pretty much triples to quadruples your cooking time.
Ok, so we have our hat and our recipes and our free bonus skill... How are we getting the mats to get the rest of the skills? Well, for 2 of the new cooking awards you can also buy a box of meat. Each box of meat contains between 2 and 5 of a random Cataclysm meat. There are 9 such possible meats that can be pulled out of the box, of varying uses. Yes, I know, you need all your awards to buy the recipes. Your alts don't, though. Your guildies don't. People willing to make a quick buck certainly don't. The recipes are BoP, the tokens are BoP, but the meat can be traded. Anyone who is both level 10 and has at least 1 cooking skill can do the dailies, buy the boxes, and mail you the meat. What are the kinds of meat and what can they do?
But what is the needed amount? Well, to get from 450 to 465 is 15 and then I need another 10 skill from a yellow recipe. Probably that's only 12 or so, but to be safe I'd want at least 20, so I need 35 of the first tier meat.
To get from 475 to 490 is 15. Another 7 at yellow and another 3 at green is going to be in the 25 range to be safe I'd think, so 40 of the second tier meat.
To get from 500 to 515 is 15. Another 5 at yellow and 5 at green is even rougher, probably in the 30 range.
Plus, if you're going all out to get something you really want to safety the contract, so I'd really want to add on an extra 10 in each category. Nothing would suck more than to do all this prep and end up stuck at 499 skill desperately begging people for turtle tongues. You'd still be fine if you're the only one going for it, but if someone else planned better you're sunk. (Note this would be a good time to cash your saved up daily quest for +1 skill!)
So, ideally, I would want...
All told I think I can hit max cooking in about 5 minutes assuming I have the meat in my inventory in advance. This seems totally worth going for and like it won't really hurt going for realm first fishing either. Time to beg for meat I guess!
Well, if any of those people end up back here I have a "treat" for them. I got tipped onto the fact that you can likely do cooking in less than an hour and decided to look into it further. I'll detail the steps needed here, but the window to get on board is steadily closing.
Why is that? Well, it turns out they actually enabled the Cataclysm cooking and fishing dailies in the shattering patch. The fishing dailies don't matter at all but the cooking ones sure do. The new dailies award new cooking tokens which are used to buy recipes or meat and can be stockpiled before the Cataclysm launch. (They also award one cooking skill so you can save one up in advance.) Most of the dailies award one token, but one of them gives two (currently the active one on Vek!)
Now, for the most part the new recipes fall into one of 3 categories for our purposes.
- They require skill 450, go yellow at 465, green at 477, and grey at 490.
- They require skill 475, go yellow at 490, green at 497, and grey at 505.
- They require skill 500, go yellow at 515, green at 520, and grey at 525.
Assuming you're going whole hog you need to buy 3 recipes, one from each category above. They each cost 3 tokens, and the tokens are soulbound, so you need to have 9 tokens on your main when Cataclysm launches. Counting today there are exactly 8 days left before Cataclysm launches, so you need just one doubler to get there. (If you're going the Wrath to 475 plan then you only need 6 tokens which will be good enough if no one else on your realm caught on in time.) Note this does include the day you log in (dailies reset at 4am, game comes up at 3am) but if your realm has a favourable timezone you may be able to get around this. I don't. As an aside, you want to save that last daily for after you've trained to go above 450 so you get the free skill point, and probably want to save it for skill #500 or #525.
You also need to have the cooking hat from the Dalaran dailies. Someone with the hat will beat someone without the hat guaranteed since it pretty much triples to quadruples your cooking time.
Ok, so we have our hat and our recipes and our free bonus skill... How are we getting the mats to get the rest of the skills? Well, for 2 of the new cooking awards you can also buy a box of meat. Each box of meat contains between 2 and 5 of a random Cataclysm meat. There are 9 such possible meats that can be pulled out of the box, of varying uses. Yes, I know, you need all your awards to buy the recipes. Your alts don't, though. Your guildies don't. People willing to make a quick buck certainly don't. The recipes are BoP, the tokens are BoP, but the meat can be traded. Anyone who is both level 10 and has at least 1 cooking skill can do the dailies, buy the boxes, and mail you the meat. What are the kinds of meat and what can they do?
- Basilisk "Liver" - min skill 500
- Blood Shrimp - min skill 450, min skill 475
- Giant Turtle Tongue - min skill 475
- Crocolisk Tail - min skill 500, min skill 500 (thanks Blizzard)
- Delicate Wing - worthless for our purposes
- Toughened Flesh - worthless for our purposes
- Dragon Flank - min skill 500
- Snake Eye - min skill 450
- Monstrous Claw - min skill 450
But what is the needed amount? Well, to get from 450 to 465 is 15 and then I need another 10 skill from a yellow recipe. Probably that's only 12 or so, but to be safe I'd want at least 20, so I need 35 of the first tier meat.
To get from 475 to 490 is 15. Another 7 at yellow and another 3 at green is going to be in the 25 range to be safe I'd think, so 40 of the second tier meat.
To get from 500 to 515 is 15. Another 5 at yellow and 5 at green is even rougher, probably in the 30 range.
Plus, if you're going all out to get something you really want to safety the contract, so I'd really want to add on an extra 10 in each category. Nothing would suck more than to do all this prep and end up stuck at 499 skill desperately begging people for turtle tongues. You'd still be fine if you're the only one going for it, but if someone else planned better you're sunk. (Note this would be a good time to cash your saved up daily quest for +1 skill!)
So, ideally, I would want...
- 45 Blood Shrimp OR Snake Eye OR Monstrous Claw
- 50 Blood Shrimp OR Giant Turtle Tongue
- 55 Basilisk "Liver" OR Crocolisk Tail OR Dragon Flank
All told I think I can hit max cooking in about 5 minutes assuming I have the meat in my inventory in advance. This seems totally worth going for and like it won't really hurt going for realm first fishing either. Time to beg for meat I guess!
Monday, September 20, 2010
Cataclysm Realm Firsts
World of Warcraft has had an achievement system built into the game for the last couple years. The vast majority of these achievements are things everyone theoretically can do if they play enough or are good enough. These achievements are worth points (that do nothing tangible, it's just a number you can make bigger) and sometimes also grant extra things like titles, pets, or mounts. The rest of the achievements are what they call "Feats of Strength". These tend to be things you could have done in the past but can't do anymore due to changes in the game over the last 6 years. Things you may want to have a record of, but which other people can't do so it wouldn't be fair to have them be worth points. Others are things people theoretically _can_ do but it would be unreasonable to do so. (Such as Insane in the Membrane which took me the better part of 6 months to get done.)
Interestingly, it looks like there's a new one added in not for players, but for guilds...
A few of the Feats of Strength are for doing something first. The first to clear a dungeon on hard mode, or the first to hit max level. With the next WoW expansion due to come out any month now it's time to think about the impending Realm First Feats of Strength. I didn't get one of these last expansion (starting at level 55 with no trade skills meant a lot were out of reach) but really want to get at least one this time around. The first two WoW expansions I was starting over with a new main; this one I'll be sticking with my current character so I have a big gear advantage for the first couple levels.
Sky made a post recently about how he intends to turn a massive amount of gold into realm firsts for his two crafting professions. I have a less massive amount of gold but still a pretty substantial amount and could try to do the same... Only problem there is we're both Jewelcrafters. There's no Realm First Loser achievement, so getting second place is right out. Sky has more than four times my gold, but I think the amount needed to get to max is less than what I have. I definitely think I could get it over him, but I also think if I try for it that he could get it anyway. There are many different achievements I could go for, so I figured I should take a look at all of them and see if there isn't a better way to spend my time and money than going for the same thing as my friend.
Now, for historical data I could look at worldwide or just at Vek'Nilash. Vek is pretty widely regarded as a terrible server with not a lot of players so getting these things 'should' be easier here than on an average server I would think. Unfortunately there's no easy way to get worldwide data but I can easily get "Americas" server data, so we'll go with that.
Level 85.
- Took 1 day Americas, 2 days Vek.
- Involves just playing a lot for a couple days and focusing on questing and maybe running each dungeon once to do the quests.
- Can be 'cheesed' by having an out of group healer or body-puller to just drag mobs to you. I believe a guy from France did this last expansion and got it done in less than a day.
- Or by having someone else play for you when you sleep.
- Should probably stock up on flasks and food beforehand.
- Low downside to trying and failing. Even without achievements I'd be playing a lot on expansion release.
- Assuming comparable leveling speeds may come down to who has the better sleep schedule timing.
Level 85 Death Knight
- Took 2 days Americas, 4 days Vek, took me 10 days. (I was actually closer than it looks, but once it was clear I wasn't going to win I got other stuff done and went back to work.)
- Nothing special compared to the above. Is a potential consolation prize if I lose out on 85 in general.
Level 85 Night Elf
- 1 day Americas, 3 days Vek.
- Same as above. Note that all three of these achievements can be 'tracked' in real time. I can get updates on what level everyone is and can push harder or abort as needed.
Max Level Herbalism, Skinning, Mining
- All done same day both Americas and Vek.
- I don't have any of these tradeskills right now and don't want them longterm. (They give worse raiding bonuses than jewelcrafting/blacksmithing.)
- Could be used in conjunction with another trade skill to alleviate the gold cost of powerleveling it.
- Americas the guy who got first miner also got first blacksmith. The same is true on Vek. (Different guys.)
- Has the big upside that if people are paying through the nose to get these achievements (hi Sky!) then by being a gatherer you can make a mint. I'm not sure what I'd do with a mint, though...
Max Level Fishing
- All done the same day. Presumably by people who went to a midnight release, went to a trainer, bought the skill, hearthed to Ironforge, and fished until they hit max.
- I do still need to catch Old Ironjaw, so fishing for a few hours in Ironforge isn't the end of the world for me. It does make it extra unlikely to get the level 85 ones if I spend 6 hours not leveling.
- I do like fishing, and I'm pretty sure I was the world first DK to get the Salty title for fishing. The internet isn't being a lot of help here but it took me barely a month to get it. Certainly one of the first, anyway, and it would be nice to have a realm first related to fishing.
- If I spend the first 6 hours of the expansion fishing in Ironforge and don't get Old Ironjaw or the realm first it will really, really suck.
- Or I could find a nice expansion fishing hole and get new fish to cook with while striving for the achievement...
Max Level Cooking
- 1 day Americas, 6 days Vek.
- No one cared enough about cooking to power level it last expansion on Vek.
- Not even sure how you'd try. Kill lots of beasts? Focus on fishing pools? Get everyone in your guild to mail you meat? If they did the same mechanic with the spices then you probably would want to get people in your guild to loan/sell you spices to start.
- Being a cook really has no benefit.
- On the plus side, I do have the faster cooking hat!
Max Level Firstaid
- Same day Americas, 1 day Vek.
- I'm sure this goes to someone who buys/borrows all the cloth early on.
- Being a tailor undoubtedly helps for scooping up the bonus cloth.
Max Level Archaeology
- The level 80 version of this achievement hasn't been handed out yet and apparently does exist. So there are two up for grabs here: first to skill 450 and first to skill 525.
- Archaeology looks awesome. You can get epic weapons and armor for level 85, along with pets and mounts. It looks like something that someone into optimizing their routes will be able to level faster than other people. I expect someone with time and skill will beat someone with time. (As opposed to fishing, for example...)
- I want to level it eventually since apparently it will grant a minor raiding bonus. In order to level the skill as I level in game I'd need to go back and power level it anyway. If there were no achievements I'd probably go back and do this right away, or level in dungeons when my guild had a group together and otherwise do excavating.
Max Level Blacksmithing, Jewelcrafting, Engineering
- The tradeskills which require mining mats to level.
- Americas they were all done same day. On Vek it took 2 days for blacksmithing and 4 for the other two.
- Unless the raiding benefits change I'll want to level blacksmithing and jewelcrafting eventually anyway.
- I expect it will be substantially cheaper to do so a couple weeks after launch, but there's no guarantee that will actually hold. It really depends a lot on how much inflation exists in new quest rewards and in how many exploiting farmers we have.
- Getting high level jewelcrafting early means making a fortune prospecting ore and cutting gems.
Max Level Tailoring
- Took 3 days in Americas, 7 days on Vek.
- Would help get first aid.
- There's no way I'd keep it longterm, so I'd be picking it up solely for the achievement.
- I know next to nothing about it. Did it take that long because of cooldown issues? Or would it just be buying massive amounts of cloth?
Max Level Enchanting
- Took 2 days in Americas, 12 days on Vek.
- Wow, Vek was really bad at getting this done last expansion.
- You can turn massive amounts of cash into greens into enchanting mats fairly easily.
- You can enchant scrolls now (though you could last expansion too) so it wouldn't even be a huge waste of money to do so.
- Being in a guild that runs a lot of dungeons and will want to enchant their blues for heroics provides lots of opportunity to get 'free' skill-ups.
- I suspect someone else in my guild will already be going for this, so I'd be in the same boat I'm in for jewelcrafting.
Max Level Leatherworking
- Took 3 days Americas, 12 on Vek.
- Uh... Double wow. Vek was really, really bad at getting this done.
- I don't really want to be a leatherworker.
Max Level Alchemy, Inscription
- Alchemy was same day/4 days. Inscription was 2/10.
- My rogue alt is currently max inscription and I have no intention on leveling it again. Sky wants to do alchemy and if I'm going to challenge him on something it'll be the one I already have, thanks.
- I could try to hit max on my rogue, but I'd really rather have these achievements on my main. If no one gets it in 7 days though maybe I'll double back and scoop it up...
Interestingly, it looks like there's a new one added in not for players, but for guilds...
Realm First! Working As A Team
- First guild on the realm to obtain 525 skill points in all professions and secondary professions.
- I think more than anything else I want this one.
So, what should I do? There's lots I want, which may be the biggest danger. If I go 85% at a bunch of different things will I get any of them? (If it was last xpack and I was going for cooking or inscription the answer is yes, otherwise no.)
I like the idea of picking up mining and angling towards first miner/blacksmith/85 DK. I also like the idea of just doing archaeology. And then I like just fishing and turning those fish into potential cooking. Tailoring into first aid has a certain appeal as well. And part of me still wants to take Sky head on and charge for jewelcrafting. Or if it turns out my guild has everything covered but something specific I could dive into that and aim for the guild achievement...
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