Welcome to ZAGGARAT ( Jetsai’s Zone-by-Zone Achievement Guide for Getting Across the Realm with Alliance Toons), a comprehensive zone by zone guide to wrapping up every achievement you need. You can view all instalments by clicking here.
Ok, I’ll admit it. I’m an achievement whore.
I was pretty proud of the some 10,000 achievement points I’d managed to accumulate when I quit playing WoW a month or so into Cata. So when I returned to the game for MoP with a new main, I secretly knew it would only be a few weeks before the stigma of venturing around with a paltry few thousand points got to me and I’d have to farm up my “I’m no noob” points again.
I looked for a guide that could help satisify my addiction efficiently. What I wanted was a guide that could take me zone by zone and get every conceivable achievement while I was there.
The Loremaster and World Explorer are easy to get, but there are a lot of additional achievements in later zones that slip through the cracks: hunting rare spawns, finding lore objects and returning lost treasures to some old codger.
I also want to do my fishing achievements: The Oceanographer, The Limnologist, The Scavenger. Cooking achievements have historically been extremely tedious requiring many trips to the AH, back to the zone and to vendors to purchase recipes I forgot to get. I want to buy and eat everything I’m supposed to for the Delicious series and farm up all the mats so I can cook up the Gourmet achieves in one go at the end.
Then there’s mounts and pets. Pokemon brings a whole new form of torture to pet collecting. It’s no longer a question of doing a continent hop to half a dozen different vendors, spending a suspicious amount of time with the neutral Auction House master in Booty Bay, and camping some rare spawn spots. There are literally hundreds of pets to catch and collect now, so I need to know which pets to battle and catch while I’m in that zone.
Plus I need to buy all my tabards, get my old-school dungeon and raid achievements and those pesky miscellaneous ones Like Archmage Xylem’s trials, reading the entire history of Azeroth, a series of unnatural associations with Squirrels, getting down with the Nesingwarys, getting beaten up in Gladiator rings on every single continent and spending lots and lots and lots of gold on useless things.
There had to be a guide out there that could deliver me all that – Googling “wow Achievement Guides” returned pages of online lists sorted by exactly the same categories Blizzard provides. Googling “wow Achievement Guides by zone” returned me exactly the same list with the Explorer ones at the top. Curse gave me nothing broad or overarching. Zygor looked promising but a trial demonstrated I had to keep switching out new guides and starting the zone over again – I wound up doing the Cape of Stranglethorn six times over and still lots of little things got missed.
With every option exhausted, I decided to compile my own and I present Chapter One to you here – Jetsai’s Zone-by-Zone Achievement Guide for Getting Across the Realm with Alliance Toons. Ok, so the name needs a little work… but ZAGGARAT will do for now. In this guide, I start in Elwynn Forest, move on to Westfall and Deadmines, then Redridge and Duskwood listing everything you need to do to complete ALL the achievements sorted by sub-zone. I’ve included waypoints and some notes as well as a map for each zone with icons to indicate what you’re supposed to do there. The paths roughly follow the questing order throughout the zone, so if you’re not working on your Loremaster achievement you may find it quicker to work from one end of the zone to the other.
I’ll continue to release new chapters each week working through all the zones on all the continents up to and inlcuding Pandaria. Next week, we tackle Stormwind and the Stranglethorns.
I do need to note, this is a pretty old-school guide. There’s nothing fancy about it. I list subzones by their names, not a set of co-ordinates, although those are included where possible and it’s designed to be printed out and placed in a ring binder –landscape fashion. The map goes at the top and the sub-zone list below.
Why? Well I don’t have the programming skill to develop and in-game assistant like Quest Helper or Zygor, but honestly I think old school is good sometimes. For one I hate alt-tabbing – having all the information on my desk next to me to view at a glance is great. Moreover, this game isn’t even close to an exact, step-by-step progression and things don’t happen in the same order for all people.
I find a battle-pet on one side of the zone, you find it in another. Someone just farmed out my entire quest area so I’ll move on and come back later. Plus, as a 90, you have the choice to start pretty much anywhere. I chose to start at the beginning but you could easily do the zones in whatever order you wanted to: start in Outlands, do the zones backwards or alphabetically, do the dungeons as you go or assemble them into a collection of their own and do them with a group – just mix up the pages in your binder.
And finally, I think there’s something really satisifying about actually ticking a box with your own hand. Yellow highlighter pens are pretty good too.
Download the screen-friendly version here
Download the printer-friendly version here
Go here for all the other Zaggarat Guides
(Editor’s note: I just wanted to say what an amazing feat Jemima has pulled off with these Zaggarat guides – if you find them as incredibly useful as I have already, please use the donate link below – proceeds will be forwarded onto Jem for her work)
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