Achievements and Harvest Festival?

Last night, I quickly logged in looking to do the Harvest Festival achievements, only to realize that the Harvest Festival has no achievements and the achievements that were classified as "Harvest Festival" have now been properly updated to read "Pilgrim's Bounty." So that was a let down. However, the one Harvest Festival quest, to honor Uther was pretty cool, I just don't know why it's a week-long event and why no achievement or feat of strength is associated with it. Similarly, why no feat of strength for acquiring the Green Brewfest Stein? I have one for my yellow and blue steins...

Last night, after a quick run of Halls of Stone for a couple of Triumph badges (which also got me to 36 emblems which in turn bought me a new ring - Band of the Invoker), we thought, let's give this damn Less-Rabi achievement another try. In the past, we had spent hours trying to get the interrupts down correctly, and after two tries last night, we finally got it. Basically, it just took a lot of DPS and a little luck.

For our team, we had our warrior tank interrupt the first transformation - but not right away! The first cast time of transformation takes about 3.5 seconds, so we had our tank wait until the last possible moment to interrupt him. By this time, he was already under 50% so we didn't have the usual 50% transformation. Also, right after the interrupt went off, he knocked us all down, stunning us for a second or two. Immediatly after the stun, we used our interrupts and we got lucky because at that very moment, he attempted to transform. He was at about 20% by this time, so we quickly burned him before another 3 or 4 seconds passed and he had no time to do another transformation. So just two interrupts got us what is probably the most difficult part of Glory of the Hero these days.

After that, Aenador had just one achievement left for her Red Drake, so we hit up Ahn'kahet really quick hoping to get Volazj's Quick Demise for her. When I originally got it, we had a perfectly reflected Mind Flay which helped us get him under 33% while he was casting his first insanity, so we only had one insanity to deal with and we killed him in about 1.5 minutes. This time, I'm not sure what exactly happened, or how exactly it happened, but we killed him in 21 seconds. We had some sick DPS, a nice heroism, and in the end, he didn't get any insanity casts off. It's always fun to put out 7,000 DPS in a 5-man. Congrats Aenador on the new mount!

So now all I have left is Split Personality and Zombiefest. Both should be relatively easy to complete, but we just need to get a group together. Hopefully this weekend I'll finish them off and finally get my red proto drake.

As a follow up to yesterday's post, our 25 man cleared the Trial of the Crusader, then we quickly went and cleared VOA for some more T9 gear and then we went to Onyxia. To my surprise, we one shot her (after wiping earlier in the week in a 25 man PUG). We had just a couple people left up at the end, but she went down and we all rejoiced! So here's the most recent achievements:

I think next week, we'll try for Upper Back Pain or Three Sixty Pain Spike. Should be fun.

The Push for 7,000

Last week, we accidentally got a couple achievements while doing heroic Ulduar, so my push towards 7,000 achievement points is going strong. It started on Ignis - I was on construct duty, so it was my job to blow up the constructs when they became brittle. However, one of them got out of my line of sight behind a fire pillar (I just lost track of it), so when the call was made, it was too late for me to go shatter it. Our awesome offtanks quickly picked it up again, made it brittle, and before you knew it, when I shattered one construct, the other one that had been awoken by Ignis was shattered as well. So there we had Heroic: Shattered.

We continued on and we reached Kologarn who refused to let us pass. Normally, we focus all DPS on the right arm and down him that way, but recently we've found that just as he's about to die, his left arm has been DPS'ed enough via incidental damage (swipes, consecrates, death and decays, etc.) that if we just add a bit of DPS to kill the arm, all that damage is transferred to Kologarn and he goes down quicker. So when I saw we were close to killing Kolo and I saw that his left arm was getting low, even when the right arm popped up, I focused DPS on the left arm, knowing the call to kill the left arm would come when the right arm went down. With the extra damage I was able to provide to the left arm before the right arm went down, we were able to get Heroic: Disarmed.

Then, last night, while fighting for control of Wintergrasp, I realized after all was said and done that I was just 8 honorable kills away from 5,000. So this morning, I headed out a little early to the Strand of the Ancients and quickly dispatched of 8 hordies to pick up 5,000 Honorable Kills

Of course, while striving for achievements, I'm still doing my Crusader dailies each and every day (actually, Saturday was the first time since the patch that I didn't get my dailies done - ale comes first). A day before though, while out there, I found my evil twin! Finneal (achievement comparison) was there and he looked almost exactly like me! Just with more achievement points! I can't let that stand. But we did have some fun and we both popped our mirror images just to confuse some people and seeing eight little dopplegangers running around was a sight to be seen.

Lastly, last night, I went into a quick VOA since I really didn't have anything else to do and even though I don't need any items from there, it was fun to do single target DPS. Usually in Ulduar, I have to do crowd control, DPS some bomb bots, or just do things that don't allow me to go all out. Well, on both Emalon and Archavon I was pretty much free to do as much DPS as I could and it showed. I easily topped the damage meters and was quite happy with my performance. And all of this was done without an enchant on my purty new Runescribed Blade.

Emalon:

Archavon:

Sometimes, It's Deserved

Yesterday, after finishing up a Wintergrasp victory, I saw a team forming for 25-man Vault of Archavon. I had done the 10-man earlier in the week, so I figured I could easily do 25-man if we got a good team together. I joined in, waited about 20-30 minutes while they put the rest of the team together, and we took off.

On the single-target trash leading up to Archavon, I averaged 3300 DPS - it's amazing what a full raid group will do for your DPS. Then we got to the boss. It took a bit for the fight to be explained (which I mostly ignored since I knew my job - DPS). And we took off. We had a wipe due to lack of DPS (we were 2 men down) and some other people just couldn't be bothered to watch out for the dust clouds. So we quickly regrouped and tried again. This time, success. On both attempts, I led the DPS charts and was always in the right position and never needed emergency heals.

So when the Valorous Frostfire Leggings dropped, I felt I deserved them. I contributed the most in the way of DPS and felt I should be rewarded even though it was a PUG. However, you know the other 4 mages there didn't share my thoughts on the matter, so it was down to the luck of the dice. And the dice gods smiled upon me with an acceptable roll of 78. None of the other four mages could beat that, and here they are:



And here's the overall DPS chart for our final attempt at the boss (names removed to protect the innocent):



And finally, a breakdown of my damage on the fight. Note: I missed 2 Frostfire Bolts. Luckily the new pants have 43 hit rating on them, so that should help. I'm also carrying around some old shoes with extra hit that I should use on bosses, but I usually forget to do so.

Click image to enlarge.