Underachiever: Every WoW Achievement

With the release date of 8.3 announced, I've decided to be a bit more aggressive about finishing up my 8.2 achievements. Honestly, I think I just want All The Things to stop nagging me :) I've already picked up the Crimson Tidestallion and I've been slowly working on leveling up my bodyguards in Nazjatar to level 30 (I have a long, long way to go). I've also FINALLY started on the 13-week nonsense achievement to summon all the various elementals. I really dislike weekly gated achievements like this one as it means I need to carefully read every achievement when they come out in order to ensure I find the gated ones early enough to not waste time. On top of this, I picked up Feline Figurines Found and Trove Tracker - much simpler to do with flying. I've also made sure to take part in a bunch of PVP in Nazjatar as it looks like several of the achievements there require it. This is my current "exploration" achievement status for BFA:

I have all but three of the Secret Fish - I'm just missing a common one and the two that only spawn at night and only during the day. I tried farming this on a  floating island for a while but eventually got bored and decided I'll get it eventually just by grabbing them doing other stuff. I did get Mrrl's Secret Stash after getting lucky with my Benthic cloak (first try!) and him having the mount in stock (first try again!). Trove Tracker is finally complete as well, with the notorious "Arcane Chest #5" finally opening up after about ten attempts. I took it upon myself to try to get the crafted engineering helmet as it's the best one for PVP, having the top Azerite powers. I then learned I needed to go farm 20, then 200 items from the Eternal Palace and so finally went and did LFR. I'm happy I finally got the "you killed all the bosses" achievements but I'm less happy that I only received ONE of the 220 items for each wing cleared. A...

I'm trying to make more of an effort to clean up the quests and achievements that have been sitting around for what seems like forever on the right hand side of my screen. To that end, I spent an hour before bed and an hour before the weekly reset working on Secret Fish and Where to Find Them  - my wife already has this achievement which she described as "a pain" and I'm both jealous of her awesome ball of the ocean toy and tired of seeing the achievement listed under the ones I've been tracking as a reminder. Anyway, I picked up a dozen or so of the fish I'm currently missing and I only have nine left. I got a nice surprise right before the server reset, fishing up a Mimic Octopus for the Pandaren Angler achievement (and a few Nat Pagle rep). I also managed to get another Tol Barad win randomly - now at 23/25 wins for the last achievement I need for that meta. Plans for the next week: It's Timewalking this week, so I want to do at least ...

I've played about twenty five matches of Comp Stomp and I'm now Exalted with The Defilers (thanks to the DMF buff and the 15% bonus from the current event). I honestly thought this would take forever to get so now I have hope for the WSG version. Super Squirt Day was a bit of a bust. I didn't have a lot of time and I HATED the repetitive grind so I only got ten pets to level 25. All that winning of Arathi Basin got me something in the region of 120 Mark of Honor though - I picked up around ten different sets of PVP armor, which gave me 100 achievement points, plus a further ten from the meta-achievement. Before: After: As I'm looking at this, it's clear that I have a lot of old dungeons to farm. My current plan is to do this with a RAF friend or three to maximize the number of rolls I can get for the tier gear. Speaking of RAF - I really want to do it for the rewards soon. More importantly, I just recently learned that things like pets and (most imp...

Interesting mix of achievements today. First, I worked on Paku'al which was simply bugging me in All The Things. I then paid 115k for a mythic 10 run because I've realized having better gear helps me do just about everything - I'm now at 433 iLevel and I don't even do LFR normally. Today I did the Deadmines pet battle to both finally clear it from my quest list (it had been there for what seemed like months) and to start the work on three bottlecaps for the Pocket Cannon pet that I need for Argus/ Broken isles. It's pet battle week so I quickly did fifteen pet battles for the stone and the weekly (I know I only need ten, but I was winning and they count towards Deadly Pet Brawler). I'd honestly do more, until I found out today is Comp Stomp day. Holy shit the rep! I'm now revered with the Defilers and I expect to get exalted. The 15% bonus rep from the event is just icing. Two minute queues and five minute matches mean that I'll hit exalted with...

Short update. I just found out that I was missing five pets from Deepholme and grabbed them all today. The reason I found this out was because I'd heard (on the achievements discord group) that there was a Super Squirt Day coming on Thursday, where pets could be leveled from level 1 to level 25 in about 75 seconds per pet. I've been working on the Argus and Broken Isles pet achievements sporadically but was frequently stymied by the fact I was missing a particular pet for the strategies I could find. Fortunately, today I also found that absolutely fantastic https://www.wow-petguide.com/index.php?m=LegionChecker Xu Fu Legion Checker which gives a list of all the pets I need to level to 25 in order to use all the Xu Fu pet strategies. It's a long list - almost 120 pets that I currently own but are not level 25. I also found a few that I didn't own, mostly Deepholme ones that I've now picked up. Anyway, on Thursday I'm going to be leveling pets like a mani...

I found a group of two others to farm the pirates with in Tanaris. Total time to get the final two Steamwheedle Cartel reps was just over an hour of killing as quickly as possible. The 15% bonus rep from the event coupled with the 15% from the guild standard definitely helped here. I now need to finish up Emperor Shaohao (currently 7,174/21,000), Shado-Pan Assault (13,158/21,000), Avengers of Hyjal (2,930/21,000) and one other out of The Defilers, Warsong Gulch and Hydraxian Waterlords, all of which are terrible grinds. I'm going to work on The Defilers for now since it's AB weekend and the bonus rep is pretty good. Apparently the best time to go it is when the AB Brawl weekend is up where you fight against computerized opponents but this is still a pretty good time. Hydraxian waterlords is one of these things that I just have to do every week and I'll get there in about ten more weeks. One other small thing: I finally got my PVP essence after I paid someone 30g to ge...

I picked up The Unshackled exalted this morning. I'd been slacking on it as I don't really like the zone - the multi-level nature of it makes it hard to find things even with a flying mount and I keep accidentally aggroing mobs that are a real pain in the ass to kill. The screenshot above is my current Steamwheedle Cartel rep. I did every quest in Winterspring and Stranglethron Vale (three new achievements there) and then I've mostly been grinding the pirates in Tanaris to get exalted. It's very slow going but a combination of the 15% bonus rep and the guild banner that also gives 15% rep makes now the best time to grind it. I'll try to have this completely finished in a week or so. One small thing that I noticed: you can't actually hit exalted with Gadgetzan while grinding these mobs - they stop at 20,999 revered. You'll need to kill pirates in Ratchet for the final point. Other notable reps I picked up: The Oracles, The Ogri'la and The Scale of ...

Blizzcon was fun. Like last year, I spent most of the time watching the arena finals - some *extremely* close games and skillful play all around. The new expansion looks good and I played the demo for a bit - it reminds me of Argus in the way the quests and things are laid out. I'm particularly looking forward to the new "tower" dungeon that is randomly generated like a roguuelike game. I'm still running Molten Core each week - looks like another 14 weeks to hit Exalted though. I plan on doing Firelands some time soon to finish off that rep and I need to grind out the four goblin reps more at some point. I hate grinding but perhaps I can find a way to make it enjoyable. Looking for some more easy wins, I spotted the following: It looks like a mythic run of Siege of Orgrimmar is in the cards. Speaking of older raids, I also have a huge gap in collecting all the set armors for each of them. I'm fairly confident that within fourteen weeks or so I'll ev...

I'm finally done with Ogri'la and The Oracles! I really disliked both sets of dailies - they both felt like a grind because of the annoying mechanics for each of them as well as the lack of variety. The fact that there was NO reward at all for Oracles Exalted and only a tabbard for Ogri'la was kind of lame as well. As for the remaining ten reputations that I need to do: I've been keeping up with Hydraxian Waterlords each week and I'm at about 6.5K into revered. Using the guild banner and occasional 10% rep bonuses helps speed that along a little but it's still going to be many, many weeks before I hit exalted with them. Being able to teleport close to the entrance with Direbrew's Remote helps a lot with this one. For PVP, The Defilers and Warsong Gulch factions are going to take forever with normal BG queues. I've read the best way to deal with these is to wait for the appropriate "Brawl" to happen since the brawls allow for (say) ten fl...

I've been working on Oracles and Ogri'la rep every day and have about four days to go. One thing I've noticed about these older daily quests is that there is little provision for high-level players that one-shot everything. Two quests in particular stand out as being annoying until you learn the high-level trick. The first is Banish More Demons in Blade's Edge. This involves placing a portal on the ground then killing demons within a few feet of the portal. The portal has a one-minute cooldown and you need fifteen demons. It was a slow exercise in frustration because kiting further-away demons was difficult sue to all my abilities one-shotting them before they got near. In the end, I learned to use the Shaman's "Purge" ability to aggro mobs without killing them and pull them close to the portal. The second, and more annoying, quest that isn't scaled for high-level players is the Ogri-la's Song of Wind and Water .  This involves weakening ...

I've been playing WoW since the initial public beta of vanilla. I had a Tauren shaman and Plainsrunning was still a thing, although I neve hit a high enough level to use it before it was removed. In all that time, I've "known" that Gelkis and Magram clan centaur rep could never both reach exalted. It turns out I was completely wrong here and since 8.0, doing the Desolace quests gives exalted with BOTH factions! As a result, I have a plan to hit over 100 reputations without having to go for something like Bloodsail rep or something equally difficult. I'm currently working on things like Ogri'la rep that I failed to finish in the past, as well as Brood of Nozdormu, Scale of the sands and the four goblin factions (Booty Bay, Everlook etc.). I expect most of these to be finished in a week or two with the exception of Hydraxian Waterlords and the WSG and AB reps, all of which take an enormous amount of time to complete. Going back to the old content is...

I went through quite a few runs yesterday, including hitting exalted with the Ashtongue Deathsworn. I did Molten Core for the Hydraxian Waterlords rep (still a long way to go here) as well as AQ40 where I'm very close to hitting exalted. I also picked up five pieces of the class armor set from AQ40, useful for the transmog achievements. I paid 300,000g for a carry run to complete Mechagon hard mode (the one that rewards the mount). I normally don't pay for runs but it had been sitting there as uncomplete for a long time and was bothering me. The gear from the run took me all the way from 406 ilvl to 417 so it was worth it in terms of increased speed I'll have at killing mobs in the future. I forced myself to do Ogri'la dailies again. Being able to teleport to their zone helps, as did the "OgriLazy" addon to help with memorizing the order of red/green/blue/yellow flashes from one of the quests. I remember why I quit doing this rep in the past - I really dis...

With the advent of flying, I've managed to pick up a lot of the smaller exploration achievements. My personal favorite was the "sand surfing" one where I got to surf down sand dunes. Cool little minigame. As for what is next - I sometimes feel overwhelmed by everything still do do and so spend twenty minutes just dawdling instead of doing something more productive. As a result, I asked for suggestions in the achievements discord channel on what to work on next. The consensus was "400 Mounts". This is an interesting one because of all of the sub-tasks that it contains. To do it efficiently, I really need to also work on all of the achievements that reward a mount for completion, as well as things like exalted reputations that unlock mounts for purchase. Here is a breakdown of the mounts I have so far (from https://simplearmory.com/#/us/area%2052/deathspiral/collectable/mounts ) Lots missing, right? One thing to note is that there are MAJOR achievement...

I've been working on a lot of small stuff lately, as and when I am near it. A lot of the exploration quests in particular, since flying has made these infinitely simpler to do as well as some battlegrounds ones - there are a LOT of PVP achievements that I'm missing, the biggest of which is the 500 honor level which realistically looks like it could take years to complete. I've also continued working on getting all the brewfest toys to help with the achievement Toybox Tycoon (400 toys). Finally, a strong shout out to Simple Armory - this has made finding achievements to work on FAR simpler than it has been in the past. My achievemnt progress can be found here:  https://simplearmory.com/#/us/area-52/deathspiral

Not much to say here. I already have all the achievements, but Brewfest is a fantastic place to load up on toys for the meta-achievement.

I'll finally have the last of the Celestial Tournament pets on Tuesday. It's been quite a grind. The Celestial Tournament is the original pet instance. You need to defeat three random pet battlers, followed by a "final four", all without healing a single pet. This requires extensive planning and careful preparation - you need to have the exact counters to each of the battles and many of the strategies require specific breed IDs of pets to win. I have been using two guides: https://www.wowhead.com/guides/defeating-the-celestial-tournament-pet-battles#chen-stormstout-original-strategy and https://wow-petguide.com/index.php?m=CelestialTournament  The guides were written quite some time ago and don't take into account new behavior. For example, pet battles now have a lot more randomness to them in terms of the moves used, so it's difficult to follow the guides exactly. I found this happened the most with Taran Zhu and Chen Stormsnout - the strategies I co...

Not much to say here. I've been away for quite some time and missed a lot of the initial 8.2 rush. I finally got flying yesterday after grinding rep for much too long. There wasn't much to it - just log in, do as many of the quests in both zones as possible, then log out. It definitely felt like a grind, especially seeing other people flying right next to me. Most hated quest was the "Get six chests in Mechagon" one - this seems easy with flying but without it, it's possible to never see all six of them even after spending hours searching.  Next up: I'm not sure actually. I'll need to get exalted with the two new factions eventually but I want to make sure I do it efficiently. Right now I'm leveling up my cooking and fishing - I want to get the new Compressed Ocean toy from Secret Fish and Where to Find Them so I'll mostly likely do that plus some more work on pets this week.

Finally. Also, it's fitting that the Magic-type pets were the last ones I picked up - that was by far the worst PVP Pet achievement to get. Not really a lot to say here - I used the same teams every time, the same ones as I used for the PVP pet achievements. Being able to switch teams quickly was a big help. It was a slowish grind but I'm glad it's over. Now for the (much worse) grind to get the Legion version of this achievement...

I'm still working on the BFA meta-achievement Family Battler which involves beating 15 (of 19) different BFA pet trainers with a family of all undead, all mechanical etc. In total I need to win 150 different battles. I started doing this in a completely incorrect way, focusing first on getting "Hobbyist Aquarist" then on "Beast Mode" and so on. Don't do that. Instead, just fly to a trainer and do all ten pet families on that trainer, then fly to the next one. You don't need the world quest to be up either. I recommend skipping any fights that are especially difficult with a particular family and revisiting them at the very end if you absolutely need one more win from a trainer. Originally, I read wowhead for every boss and tried to find the correct comp listed in the suggestions. I no longer do that - the ten PVP teams I built for Family Brawler earlier in the month work fine for almost all of the NPC trainers as well so there is little need to creat...

Well, that was easy. This was actually from a few days ago. In the end I got FIVE concessions in a row and so got the No Time To Heal achievement at the same time. Easiest family of pets to win ten of, by far, was Undead - I used the composition suggested on Wowhead and it worked very well - 10 wins in 11 matches. The comp was: Blightbreath: Breath - Gas - Rain Scourged Whelpling: Sweep - Darkness - Breath Widget the Departed: Pounce - Spectral - Darkness Just AOE down the whole team the use the very fast Widget to kill off each one before they get a turn. Astute readers will also not the presence of the Murkalot Feat of Strength that grants a pet. Yeah, I bought that one for (quite a lot of) real money. Please don't judge me. It's the only pet with the Righteous Inspiration ability and the combination of that with a Bombling works fantastically well. I have to win 1000 PVP battles with a team of 25 and that seems a lot simpler with a good team. It's definitely not ...

The Family Brawler PVP Pet achievements can be fairly easy (mechanical and beast) or damn near impossible. I was on the latter. Getting ten wins with a set of magical pets took me easily seventy matches and the last one seemed to be a pity flee after I renamed my team "Please concede. Need achieve. Many thanks." I have a feeling that these achievements were much simpler to get before the PVP pet balancing/ matchmaking was put in place. Still, I'm getting along well with a variety of other things. I'm using All The Things to display uncompleted achievements in each area and it continues to be a truly fantastic addon. Achievement hunting is often so much about grinding that it's easy to forget how much fun the game still is. I want to complete all of the achievements in WoW because I want to experience the entire game and achievements are an excellent guide to the parts I've yet to explore. Finding hidden storylines and cool toys, new pets and mounts and ob...

Slow going with PVP pet battles right now. I'm grinding through all of the Family Brawler achievements in order to get the meta. This is much more difficult than it used to be because of the new matchmaking system where similarly-experienced players tend to get matched against each other more frequently than before. I'm only winning one in every 3-4 battles right now with my Magic-type team and it's pretty frustrating, especially because I usually get matched up against the same opponents repeatedly. Assuming I get all of these finished this week, I still need to win another 300 battles with a level 25 team for the 1000 match wins achievement. I'll post when I find a comp that I particularly like for that one. Once those are done, I then need to continue work on the other "Family" achievements for the various trainers, then, to round things out, I'll need to get a couple more celestial tournament pets, finish Deadmines and then grind roughly 4000 PVE ...

Quick break from grinding PVP Pet battles to turn in some medallions in Area 52 for the first four transmog sets. I'm doing this because I recently realized I'd need to have war mode turned on in order to get 1000 honor in each zone and do the other war mode achievements. It's been a long time since I did any meaningful PVP and I'd love to do more but the BG queue times are horrible - 15 minutes per BG, and half the time you zone in to one that we are losing.

A lot of achievements simply take a ton of time to complete. As a result I (like most achievement hunters) work on them slowly over time. I just use the stock WOW achievement tracker to do this. I recently finished the Venomhide Ravasaur mount dailies (20 days in Ungoro Crater) and I'm working on finishing up Free For All, More For Me which mostly involves hearthing to Dalaran and checking which PVP quest is up, then flying out there to complete it. The sticking point is The Darkbrul-oh which involves completing Darkbrul Arena twenty times. The main issue is that I'm seldom online when the quest is up, as it usually only appears late at night/ very early in the morning. The other long-term quest I'm working on is Wingmen which involves getting to max rep ("Personal Wingman") with all of the bodyguards for your faction. I just have one more to do - Aeda Brightdawn. This one is farmable but I still need a bunch of Garrison Invasion-related achievements so I...

Sadly, the new pet battling matchmaking means that I only get paired against experienced players (for the most part anyway). Still, it's pet week and there are almost instant queues on PVP pet battles. I think I'll get through about half of the achievements for Family Brawler this time around and hope to complete the rest as soon as I can (likely just by doing a set of ten per week). Note that alts work very well when the "pet week" is up since they can collect a new Ultimate Battle Stone for every alt that completes the quest this week. One big help with these achievements has been a set of addons that I'd ignored right now. Rematch and Pet Tracker especially. Being able to see the moveset and cooldowns of opposing teams before they get used has helped enormously. An example of what I mean is below: Current status:

I'm now exalted with all BFA factions, meaning I can scale back on my world quest grind. I also picked up a new mount - the Venomhide Ravasaur from Ungoro Crater - it takes 20 days of flying out there to pick it up. Finally, as you can see, I finished one of the four Legion PVP objectives I've been working on twice a day. The others are close to 20 completions as well and it will be nice to finally get rid of these since it takes a lot of time travelling to different places in Legion twice a day... Oh, one last note on pet trainers - the BFA pet trainers are much easier to complete than I realized. It turns out that you don't need to do their quests to do the "Family" achievements related to them, and you can fight them as many times as you want. Therefore the best strategy is simply to fly to one and battle them once with a family of each type, then fly to the next. That's still 15 trainers times 12 family types, so 180 pet battles minimum, but the fact ...

It's slowly getting there! I mostly ignore achievement points in and of themselves because there are a whole bunch of "easy" points that are ultimately not worth getting until it's time to focus on them. As an example, I have a bunch of unused Mark of Honor that I can trade in for several season's worth of PVP transmog sets but I've yet to do so becauseit's not something I am focused on right now, as well as because I may already have purchased the majority of the items in the set (and so it would be wasteful to buy a full set). Right now, I'm slowly grinding out all the pet achievements as well as doing the Tortollan and Talanji's Expedition emissary quests when they pop up to finish off my rep. I'm also nearly finished the twenty-day grind to get the Venomhide Ravasaur mount, which involves going to Un'goro Crater every day. The other grind that I'm getting close to finishing up are the four Legion PVP achievements for Free F...

This is the status of my Pet Battle achievements from simplearmory.com As you can see, while I have pretty much all of the "collections" achievements, I've almost none of the "Battle X trainers with Y type of pet only" ones, as well as only a few PVP achievements. My goal is to hit 100% completion of this section by April 15th. It's possible that I'll still be short a few due to RNG on trainer world quests but I don't mind finishing those up later. At a minimum, I need six weeks to obtain the two celestial tournament pets I'm still missing, so this can't be done any faster than that. General strategy is simple: 1. Once per week, do the Celestial Tournament as well as the "Win 10 PVP battles" quests. (The PVP quest rewards a Chain Pet Leash that I still don't have). 2. Daily, complete all pet world quests on the Broken Isles, Argus and in BFA. I work in order, starting with all Aquatic pets, then all Beast pets, the all C...

I've been working on the various pet achievements lately and came across Leana Darkwind. Trying to do this train drove me nuts until I bit the bullet and spent 120 pet charms to upgrade two of my level 1 pets to level 25 for the Hobbyist Aquarist achievement. This is what finally worked for me (from a wowhead strat): Also, I only now discovered that all my old Shiny Pet Charms are now mostly useless as you can no longer buy training stones with them. :(

This turned out to be easier than expected. I used the addon PetTracker to view the locations of all pets that I had yet to collect. In addition, I already had a stupid amount of pets from earlier raiding and playing and from the SH. I confess that I simply bought all of the new Mists of Pandaria pets from the AH because most of them were 4000g each and it was far simpler to do that than to grind those older raids. I've also started working on the huge number of "Battle all X trainers in zone Y with a team of entirely Z type of pet." achievements. This is pretty simple, if somewhat time consuming - wowhead has a strategy for all the different trainers and types of pet so it's really just a case of flying to whichever trainer has a world quest up that day, checking which achievements I've completed with them, then moving on to the next one after winning. One difficult part is ensuring that I have enough level 25 rare pets to use as some of the strategies are ...

Progress is slow but steady. I've been slowly grinding out emissary quests to hit exalted with all factions. My main achievements I'm shooting for right now are 1000 unique pets as well as the (super tough) 400 mounts achievements. Man there are a LOT of pet achievements out there that I've missed - killing every trainer with a whole family of pets is definitely the biggest set of them. The good thing is that I'm at 957/1000 unique pets and I think hitting 1000 won't be too tough - there are a LOT of pets still to get from other achievements and from pet charms, as well as the fact that I apparently skipped all the Argus pets (that's seven right there). Having good addons helps enormous with pet finding and management. I'll post a followup to this post to go through all the addons that I use at the moment.