And starting again :)

Despite the fact that my previous post was four years ago, I still think this thing is doable. I've spent the last few weeks playing around two hours a day and slowly picking up a whole bunch of the easier stuff that I'd missed in the past. Given the way the wow expansions work, my plan has always been: 0. Priority zero is to grab any achievement (or part thereof) that is time-limited and will likely never re-occur. 1. Complete almost all of the soloable/small group content that I possibly can, including almost all of the old raid achievements. 2. When the new xpac hits (8.0), try to get every PVP achievement finished fairly early (season one or two) 3. Complete the solo/ small group content when not doing PVP. 4. Finally, at the very end of the xpac, right before 9.0, finish the very hardest Mythic raid achievements. It's worth noting that I consider anything in-game to be valid. I have no problem paying gold for power-levelling or quick runs or even specific help (hiring someone to play 2v2 arena with me). I DO draw the line at using external cash for bribes or buying gold from farmers or anything like that. That being said, there are some things (like mounts and pets) that are only obtainable through the in-game shop. I think buying these things if they are on sale is okay, and so would a (very) occasional purchase of a wow token. I've decided that no more than $25/month (other than my main subscription) should be spent in the Blizzard store. This means that I can do occasional things like buy a second account for a month or two to get a Recruit a Friend mount or whatever if I think I need to, without making the whole thing trivial (buying $1000 worth of gold and having someone else farm everything for me). Anyway, given this rough plan, I needed a sub-goal to keep me focused. I decided to go for the "300 Mounts" achievement and plan on getting there in the next 30 days. Since starting, I've gone from roughly 120/300 to 226/300. All of the "easy" mounts have been picked up and it's now slower and slower to get everything. I made heavy use of the list here: http://www.wowhead.com/guide=3822/lord-of-the-reins-the-complete-mount-collecting-guide Right now, there are 410 possible mounts. The guide recommends getting an alliance paladin, but I already have the horde Dreadwheel, so I can skip that and stay horde. Apparently Paladins get six more mounts than any other class. Since I need to get five different classes to 110 anyway, I'll level a Paladin as one of the six. Anyway, since my goal is every achievement, after going through all of the "free" mounts (i.e. ones that can be bought from vendors), I made a list of every mount that came from an achievement or as the side effect for an achievement. For example, if "get exalted with faction X" is an achievement and this unlocks a mount, I'm going to have to do this task anyway. The same thing applies to directly-awarded mounts (say, from "Glory of the Ulduar Raider") as well as from indirectly-awarded mounts (say, from "Gonna need a bigger bag..." which requires a mount as one of the items). One of the achievements that awards a mount is "Collect 300 Toys" and that's what I've been busy with this last week. This has a cascading effect where now I realize that to minimize the amount of time I spend collecting toys, I need to work out every possible toy that is rewarded from an achievement. All of this leads to: Winter Fucking Veil. It turns out that one of the toys that I don't have (the Flamer), only has a 1% drop rate from the daily quest on Winter Veil. This is especially annoying since I know I had a valid subscription at the time this toy was released and so I should already have it. Anyway, I've been running the same 15-minute daily quest on a bunch of alts every single day without luck so far. Speaking of alts - why did I never think to get my alts doing Timewalking dungeons earlier? I could have picked up an enormous number of smaller toys and even a couple of mounts from all the badges... Next up: A post with pictures to break up all the text! And some information on the best damn addon ever made - "All The Things!"