MMOs, Console Games and anything else with buttons
Gotta love a new expansion with all its glitches. When you pick up the quest to bribe Akazamzarak the map shows you need to go to the Hall of Shadows in Dalaran. Trouble is, that’s the class hall for Rogues only and there’s also the issue that Akazamzarak isn’t there anyway for this quest.
He’s in fact located in the main streets of Dalaran here:
Hope that helps!
This quest had me stumped as far as where to turn it in. After some trawling of the forums it appears there are two issues at play:
1. Sometimes NPCs may not be in the same location if you don’t turn it in right away and server rolls over to a new day.
2. Oralius is in the basement of your garrison’s inn.
So for me, I checked the basement and he wasn’t there, but I waited a day and he then was.
So just be patient and you’ll be able to hand that damn quest in!
Ahh Ulduar, you’re one of those iconic raids that I’ve spent more time in than most. Now that I’m getting a little sick of doing Garrison quests I thought I’d go back and knock over some of the Ulduar quests I haven’t got yet.
As a Mage (ilvl 670) there’s still some fun challenges to be had. One of which is the Iron Dwarf, Medium Rare achievement. It requires you to have 25 Dark Rune Guardian Dwarves killed by Razorscale’s flame breath. I found as a mage the only tricky part was keeping the Guardians alive whilst preventing them killing your NPC allies who fixed the turrets.
After a few tries (I just hit invisibility when I wanted to try again), I worked out the quickest strategy, This was done for the 10-player version of the achievement:
1. Start the encounter.
2. Let all the Guardians, Sentinels and Watchers spawn and kill the NPCs. The first two turrents will be up before they are all killed, but don’t use the turrets yet.
3. Run around picking up all the adds as they keep spawning. The Watchers and Sentinels can be killed with any non-AOE effects of you want to thin the herd a little. You can safely run around for 3-4 minutes or more and still be at 100% health if you use stuff like Ice Barrier.
4. Once you’ve got a whole bunch of Guardians pounding on you, you need to get their health down so that Razorscale’s breath kills them on the first go (because remember all the friendly NPCs are dead so you get one go with the turrets only). After some trial and error I found using Frost Nova on the group twice got the Guardians down to around 8-10%.
5. Hit the turrets and wait for Razorscale to be grounded.
6. Position you and the mob of adds pounding on you in from of Razorscale and wait for Flame Breath.
7. Hit Invisibility and rinse and repeat if you didn’t get all 25 on the first go.
Frost and Arcane Mages may have different abilities than Frost Nova to achieve the reduction in health to under 10%, plus it’ll also depend on gear level. Obviously other classes could take this approach as well though a class with a decent taunt can probably do it more simply than described above.
Hope this helps you do what can be a bit of a frustrating achievement.
This is in relation to the Facing Demons quest on Socrethar’s Rise. I spent ages looking through my bags for the damn arcane bomb mentioned in the quest description.
Except you’re not given an Arcane Bomb. All you need to do is walk into the dead centre of the Demon Gate and you can click on it to destroy it. If you’re off centre it won’t let you.
Hope that helps!
If like me you weren’t able to aim the turret at the Apexis Excavation in the Hot Seat quest, here’s how to get it to work.
Just hold down the right mouse button to aim, or if like me you’re on a Mac with trackpad, hold down the command key and you can aim and use the two weapons buttons. Hopefully the poor interface is fixed in future patches.
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. The printer and screen friendly guides can be downloaded at the bottom of this post.
Catching the Bogpaddle Bullet from Sharon Boomgetter in Burning Steppes will land you smack in the Swamp of Sorrows – the zone where Goblins go Keanu surf-style and the Alliance v Horde clash over Stonard has been raging relentlessly for at least 2 years now.
The Swamp is home to a huge variety of the very sought-after flying and aquatic pets so prepare for battle and snatch yourself some Level 15 rares. It also marks the beginning of the next level of fish for The Oceanographer and The Limnologist. Sunken Temple isn’t the maze it used to be and I highly recommend doing this when the quest chain takes you there. It’s a quick, fun zone that Loremasters should be able to knock over in an hour or two.
Blasted Lands, however, is without doubt the worst questing zone in any MMO …ever.
The mobs are spread far enough apart to make aoe impossible, the story is plain lame given how much lore there is to work with this side of the Dark Portal and I don’t know about Horde but Alliance spend the entire zone running one errand at a time for a myriad of NPCs at the end of overly-circuitous caves, caverns, towers and keeps.
If I wasn’t so annoyed at being a substitute telephone for Quartermaster Lungertz in the Keep and Watcher Mahar Ba at the top of the Mage Tower, I would have nominated Blizzard as the World Record holder for Longest Possible Path Required to Travel the Shortest Distance. As it stands, I just stabbed myself in the eye with a rusty screwdriver instead.
By contrast, Deadwind Pass – the home of Karazhan – is in my opinion the best raid instance I’ve ever experienced in a game.
It has everything – a great backdrop with a compelling story and some of the most interesting raid encounters you’ll experience. I’d go so far as to say the raid mechanics introduced in Karazhan laid the foundation for everything that was to come after and established WoW’s reputation as the gurus of raid content they are known for today.
If you’re going for Rep achievements, getting exalted with the Violet Hold will take 2-3 weeks if you do all the quests and full clears of Karazhan. Alternatively, you can fast track a rep grind by clearing to Opera, leaving bosses alive, and resetting.
Violet Hold’s two quest chains require you to run most of the Outland Heroics, as do many other quests out there, so efficiency nuts may want to save these until you’ve fully completed questing in all Outland zones.
Deadwind Pass is also home to two zone-exclusive pets, the Restless Shadeling (only found between 12 midnight and 9 am) and the Arcane Eye, as well as Eastern Kingdoms’ Grand Master Pet Tamer.
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(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)
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. The printer and screen friendly guides can be downloaded at the bottom of this post.
Chapter 7 is all about the Dwarfs … and lizards… and beetles … and snakes. Ok, so basically anything that scuttles, skitters, crawls or slithers can be found in Badlands, Searing Gorge, Burning Steppes and Blackrock Mountain.So strap on your Ultra-Advanced Proto-Typical Girly-Scream Diffuser coz we’re going in!
I highly recommend completing all the quests in these three zones, especially Searing Gorge, before entering Blackrock Mountain if you’re concerned at all about reputation achievements. The Mountain offers both the shortest and the longest reputation grinds in the game. You can easily get to exalted with Thorium Brotherhood in less than a day but Hydaxian Waterlords will take a minimum of 15 weeks even with all the guild perks, banners and a human racial at your disposal. Plus, two of its three raids, Molten Core and Blackwing Lair, offer the new Battle Pets for Raiding with Leashes. Beware though- contrary to popular belief, these raids still require attunement as of 5.1. Details about how to do this are included in the guide.
You’ll also need to gather a possee of mates to easily do Cata’s Blackrock Caverns achievements as some of the mechanics are going to stymie solo players.
And remember as you travel, Female Dwarf Hate is wrong, mmmkay. Ironforge girls rock! (pardon the pun).
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(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)
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. The printer and screen friendly guides can be downloaded at the bottom of this post.
Ghostlands, Eversong Woods and Tirisfal Glades move us deep into Horde Territory.
Scarlet Monastery, Scarlet Halls and Zul’Aman will provide some challenging content but if you’re on a PvE server then there’s little to do in these zones other than exploration and pet battles.
If you’re on a PvP server it’s a great opportunity to practice your Orcish. ‘Kagh! Grombolar’ (Deploy the yak!) and ‘Bin mog g’thazag cha thrAkk gezzno’ (It looks like your face caught on fire and someone tried to put it out with a fork) are some of my personal favourites. Just kidding, Blizzard has made it pretty difficult to communicate cross-faction and are constantly updating their algorithms to prevent it, so most of your time here will probably be spent avoiding guards, getting the spacing right in D a p Ee bb (Y o u Lo se) and reminding yourself that killing lowbies is mean and no yard stick of your PvP prowess.
Other things that may happen while you’re completing your achievements in these three zones:
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(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)
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. The printer and screen friendly guides can be downloaded at the bottom of this post.
This week’s ZAGGARAT takes us to the Plaguelands where we first meet the Argent Dawn and Argent Crusade. This region also presents the first at-level dungeon with achievements – Scholomance.
I have to admit I used to hate both the Plaguelands. Apart from being drab and in desperate need of Zap Beezlerocket’s Interdimensional Cobweb Cleaner, they were awfully grindy and extremely difficult to move about in unaccosted. Install a beach, equip each of the mobs with a selection of bead jewellery or teach them how to braid hair and you’d have yourself a tropical holiday but Blizzard chose a different path when revamping these zones and they did a pretty good job.
Both Plaguelands are now cut-scene central. Lore-buffs will appreciate a personal introduction to Highlord Tirion Fordring and the story around Andorhol in Western Plaguelands has been condensed, tarted up with some cut-scenes and is much easier to follow. Those of you who are just after Blighted Plaguehawk will have to /popcorn while you quest as these zone-excusive battle pets aren’t available until after Andorhal is phased.
Eastern Plaguelands is tied together through the story of Fiona’s Caravan, with Gidwin and Tarenar providing all the quintessential elements of an epic Dwarf meets Blood Elf tale – friendship, paladin humour, tragedy, betrayal, ultimate reunion and a serious amount of rep with Argent Dawn.
In fact, you get Revered about half-way through the zone. A few repeatable quests later, one of which can be done in Heroic Scholomance and you’re Exalted.
Stratholme, surprisingly, still has a lot to offer achievement hunters. You need to do both live and dead sides to get Stratholme and credit toward Classic Dungeonmaster but the live side offers four books for Well Read and a repeatable quest for 2000 Argent Dawn Rep. Aurius Riverdare, on the dead side, has a chance to drop his gorgeous… er, I mean… very manly, Deathcharger.
Scholomance is where it’s all at, though, with some of the easiest and one of the hardest achievements to get your Reins of the Crimson Cloud Serpent. Shouts go to lancore89 of wowhead who developed some macros that have made Attention to Detail very much easier as well as any healer that has managed to retain their sanity after completing School’s Out Forever. Also don’t forget to grab a full supply of disguises for Polyformic Acid Science completed throughout the rest of Panda’s dungeons and The Invasion of Draenor from Lilian Voss’ room in either Heroic or Normal for Well Read as this is the only place you’ll find this book in the game now.
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(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)
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. The printer and screen friendly guides can be downloaded at the bottom of this post.
This week’s ZAGGARAT covers Arathi Highlands, Hillsbrad Foothills, Silverpine Forest & Shadowfang Keep and The Hinterlands.
Shadowfang Keep presents some of the easier Cataclysm dungeon achievements to be had at level and they’ll be cake at 90 if you take a friend or two with you. I’m sure there are some Hunters and DKs that have already soloed these, but for most of us mere mortals Cataclysm Heroics are still cause to cash in a few favours with your guildies.
Pet Battle achievements are also starting to mount up now. If you’ve been monitoring some of the meta achievements along the way, you’ve probably already collected: An Uncommon Find, A Rare Catch and High Quality for capturing uncommon and rare quality pets; That was Close for capturing a battle pet at less than 5% health; Master Pet Battler for winning 250 pet battles and Win Streak for winning 25 in a row.
I’ve taken to capturing a pet as soon as I see it and then continuing to battle as I quest throughout the zone until I get a rare. I’ve added a new note to the guide [zone exclusive!] if you won’t come across this pet in any other zone. So if you’re going for Quality & Quantity catch your rares while you’re there!
Arathi Highlands features the Tiny Twister, Silverpine is home to the Blighted Squirrel and The Hinterlands gives you Jade Oozelings. Hillsbrad Foothills, however, is one of the meccas of battle pets. Where Red-Tailed Chipmunks frolick with Infested Bear Cubs, Lofty Librams float through the crater of Dalaran and where Plants vs Zombies meets WoW in Lawn of the Dead at the Brazie Farmstead. It’s a fun quest and mini-game all rolled in one with Brazie the Singing Sunflower as your final reward. Best news is, it’s repeatable – worst news is you can’t play it on the train on your way to work.
Next week we visit The Plaguelands and the first of our Pandaria Dungeons in Scholomance, Ghostlands, Eversong Woods, Silvermoon City and the first of our Rep Guides with the Agent Dawn & Argent Crusade.
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(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)
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. The printer and screen friendly guides can be downloaded at the bottom of this post.
This week’s ZAGGARAT features Stormwind, the Stranglethorns and Zul’Gurub.
For the last two expansions, Stormwind City has been the Alliance mecca and, without question, now serves as the most significant hub for Achievement hunters in the entire realm. In fact, compiling everything to be achieved in Stormwind required four pages of listings.
Mounts and cooking recipes feature prominently but Stormwind also houses much of Azeroth’s history for the Well Read achievements. It’s the fashion capital of the Alliance, if you call getting a haircut and donning a new tabard fashion and there’s also a disturbing amount of the realm’s cheese available in this one cosmopolitan hub.
Northern Stranglethorn started our four-expansion adventure with those crazy Nesingwarys and was most people’s first experience with open world PvP. Has anyone else ever thought that the goblins in Booty Bay look a little too much like BDSM Leather Men for comfort? Fitting, I suppose, since many of my first PvP encounters occurred outside the Gurubashi Arena and felt like I’d paid for such services.
The Stranglethorns now are a treasure-trove for Pet Battlers. The schism that divided Stranglethorn Vale into the North and Cape also gave rise to lots of interesting new quests, so if you haven’t completed the zones since, they’re worth a look.
The return of Zul’Gurub heralds the return of the prized Razzashi Raptor and Zulian Panther mounts at a staggering 1% drop rate. And I, for one, can assure you how much I missed farming Zul’Gurub every week during those few months of reprieve to help my husband maintain his car… er mount… status. /end sarcasm.
Despite everything there is to be accomplished here, it’s a good time to talk about what’s not included in these Zaggarat Guides.
Reputations and factions: I’ve included how to procure the windfalls of gaining reputation that help earn other achievements like Mountain-o-Mounts and Thirty Tabards but not the achievements associated with earning reputation themselves or any notes on how to.
Daily Quests: achievements associated with daily quests haven’t been included here. Daily quests tend to be associated with a faction or a secondary profession. So while the Twilight Highlands ZAGGARAT may indicate you need to fish up a Striped Lurker for The Catalcylsmic Gourmet, it won’t tell you that you need to complete three cooking dailies to earn the tokens to buy the recipe in Stormwind.
Those sorts of achievements will be covered in a separate guide.
Low-level dungeons: ones like Stormwind Stockades, that don’t have a heroic mode, any boss-by-boss achievements and can easily be soloed by a 90 are included as a breakout section in their relevant city or zone and don’t have an entire page devoted to them.
PvP: this is a world of achievements unto itself. I have included some of the open world and city PvP achievements like For the Alliance! and Gurubashi Arena Master, but PvP achievements will, on the whole, be covered in another series.
World Events will also be covered separately, although by the time I’ve finished every other guide I’ve an idea for, it may be a Level 100 guide.
Next week: Ironforge, Dun Morough, Loch Modan and the Wetlands.
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(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)
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.
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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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