So how are people out there dealing with the possibility of getting the Glory of the Firelands Raider achievement?
Back in Wrath, the guild I was in hit 11/12 25-man HM and then immediately did a full reset of achievement stuff. We did Neck-Deep in Vile that week and then the next week, did Been Waiting a Long Time for This, which resulted in getting Glory of the Icecrown Raider.
In Tier 11, we got to 7/13 HM before Firelands came out (Halfus, V&T, Magmaw, Maloriak, Chimaeron, Atramedes, Conclave), so Glory of the Cataclysm Raider wasn’t even a possibility for us, as we were missing, you know, 5 heroic kills.
Due to the nerfs, we will likely hit 5/7 HM tonight or Sunday (Majordomo) and after a break for BlizzCon, we’ll tackle heroic Baleroc. (I think we would have hit 6/7 HM without the nerfs, but it would have taken longer.)
Since six of the achievements required for the meta will be already done (the six heroic bosses) and since we regularly do Share the Pain and Only the Penitent… is really easy to do and isn’t even part of the boss encounter… that leaves four achievements:
Bucket List – Shannox
Not an Ambi-Turner – Rhyolith
Death from Above – Beth’tilac
Do a Barrel Roll – Alysrazor
To me, it’s a no-brainer to take a reset or two (to get everyone covered) and get these guys down on normal to get the achievements. However, the fact remains that Shannox and Alysrazor drop heroic tier tokens and the other bosses drop valuable heroic loot (oh god, I want a heroic Ward of the Red Widow!).
Given that we don’t know when 4.3 will drop (although I’d be surprised if it’s before American Thanksgiving, in late November), we don’t know how many resets we have before the new raid opens up. It’s safe to say that we’ll move on to the new raid once it opens.
Obviously, there is a finite amount of resets left between now and 4.3. Will using two (because, with a roster of ~34, we’ll NEED two) resets to get the meta achievement be worth two resets of heroic loot off those bosses? Better question: do we need to do all of them on normal? Shannox isn’t so hard on heroic, maybe we could get away with kiting him forever, but I know we could do it on normal.
I’m not even going to talk about time spent on that versus heroic Ragnaros. That’s a whole other question in and of itself.
So how are you fine people handling this in your guilds? Are you? Do you even care? I’ve got a poll up on the Apotheosis forums, asking the raiders what they think of the meta, but I’m curious to know how others are dealing with it.
Share the Pain becomes more difficult on Heroic because of the way Tormented gets passed around. I’m not sure we’ll be purposely trying for this on Heroic in the future, though we did pick it up during a Normal kill pre-nerf.
Not an Ambi-Turner – Rhyolith – Picked up US 90th for this achievement with our first kill in week 1. Not seen since, though our driver is aiming for it every week now on Heroic.
Death from Above – Beth’tilac – Working on this now, and it should be doable on Heroic.
Do a Barrel Roll – Alysrazor – Larger Lava Spew zones are the only real difference between Normal and Heroic. The primary benefit of Normal mode is that you just might be able to kill her before a Tornado phase.
Bucket List – Shannox – Got this on our list and we’ll probably give it a go in the next few resets. Heroic mode doesn’t complicate it much, as long as you time your migration to happen after you’ve used a local crystal trap.
TL;DR: We’re giving some of these a shot, but not at the expense of Heroic kills.
We actually started a number of these early when we were dong a combination of normals and new heroic kills. Although not everyone has their drake, I think about half the raid does. It really depends on what is more important for your raid team: drakes or kills at this point. Alysrazor, Beth, Rhyolith and Shannox are all do-able on heroic. We haven’t gotten Bael’s on heroic yet. Hope that helps :)
The large majority of the raid got our FL Glory during last week’s reset. The one that most people were waiting on–Do a Barrel Roll. The difference between normal and hard mode is negligible for the encounter, since you can now lock down the Brushfire spawns, but the real problem for us was not being sloppy on the Tornadoes. we did switch it to NM to try and kill before a tornado phase, but were short by ~20% IIRC. In the end, it took 3 hours, but we finally nabbed it by saying “forget it, we’re not going for it”.
All of the others can be accomplished in HM. Ambi-turner was actually easier to get before the change in his navigation but is still possible with good HM driving, Death from Above requires you to OT any drones during phase 2 that you top team couldn’t kill, and Bucket List is simply a long walk.
Hmm I think it all depends on how long until the next patch. At least in ICC we had the time to get the meta done before the big nerf at the end of Wrath, but at the rate Blizz are pushing things at the moment, I suspect we night not get a chance before 4.3 drops.
Getting the legendary staff is more important to us, and that’s probably going to take us another 4 weeks.
Not an Ambi-Turner we got very early on without even going for it. Pure luck.
The Alysrazor achievement should be very hard. It’s the Heigan dance all over again. My raid finds it difficult for having all 10 people dodge the tornadoes… I’m sure it will be a lot tougher to get all 25 to dodge every single tornado/other things.
It would probably be a good idea to get that achievement out of the way before considering working on others
My guild is working on Ragnaros heroic and completely ignoring the achievements. We clear every heroic boss asap every week so we have more time for Rag. I don’t know what we’ll do after he’s dead…
Honestly, I did all the ICC achievements because the mount looked absolutely badass. The Glory mounts in Cataclysm were all kinda meh, so I can’t say I care very much if I get one or not. (Plus, I’m a druid and flight form beats all.)
The ambi-turner achievement is hilariously easy (on normal mode, at least). We do it by default every week, as while we were learning the fight we decided it would be considerably easier to just trundle him round in a circle, stopping DPS occasionally if we need him to go somewhere in particular.