Marieth

Just got Gotta Go! yesterday (1m 56s, when dots killed him underground). Stars really have to align on that achievment. 5 DPS made the difference to us.
When he died I was more excited and relived than on all other wotlk kills together and I am glad we got it before the 3.0.8 patch.

Make it count does not rely on some odd drake setup. As one said, efficiency in killing the trash is all.
We did it with prowarr/rogue(me)/retri/BM/restoshami. Drake setup was normal 1r/2g/2b. Sure we all have some naxx pieces, but who hasn't by now.

Now I have to do all the "easy" achievments for my drake.

"...gone missing."

 

Mem

As my preposters said: Make it count relies simply on having a group that will kill Eregos in the first pull. Standard drake setup (5 greens might take a little bit too long). Clearing up till Eregos requires chainpulling, but thats not really difficult to do, it just takes some concentration.

 

Vaccine

Our Gotta Go! kill from Friday night was very strange. After an hour or two of tries we just decided to kill him normally. He burrowed at about 60%, came back up and burrowed for a second time at aronud 30%. Upon coming up from his second burrow we had about 10 seconds left and somehow dropped him 30-> dead after two burrows with 1:58 on the clock. Very odd, I checked logs but no bugged hits or anything.

Now the trick is to continue coming up with excuses why I can't help anyone else do it till post nerf!

 

Russta

We spent a few hours on Gotta Go! a few days ago and saying that the stars need to align is pretty darn accurate. One time we got good luck and managed to get push him hard but he burrowed and disappeared with 5% of his HP left. It's frustrating to have to spend five minutes running back and setting up only to know you have failed within ten seconds of pulling.

Aside from the tooltip remaining unchanged, is there actually any reason they couldn't just hot fix the change in?

 

Minifridge

I don't see why not. The achievement is annoyingly luck-based; if they don't hot-fix it I'd at least like to see a change come 3.0.8.

 

Ashaera

On the other hand its nice that some of the achievements are actually achievements.

Its hard yes - But with right setup (hunter, rogue/warlock, dps-capeable healer, tank, random) its very doable once you get into the rythm & have some luck on his casts.

Another useless dragon for bothering to do 40x easy things would be worse - Surely blizzard is nerfing it to keep people happy, but the current state atleast makes Glory of the Hero an accomplishment.

Right setup + right execution + good players = Done within 10 attempts.

 

SikYi

My group setup was protection paladin ,hunter, rogue, fury warrior, shadow priest. We managed to pull it off with 3 - 4 seconds left on the timer. The fight was intense and required a lot of luck factor for the poisons to stack up especially the hunter's snake trap mind numbing poison.

I was wondering, is it possible for lock curse to stack together with hunter's snake trap mind numbing poison to increase the cast time effect? As far as i know that now lock's COT and rogue's mind numbing doesn't stack together anymore

 

• Intermission

I have never witnessed any stacking. 5.1 second Pound casts and 4.8 second Locust Swarm casts are what we used to do it (maybe 5.2? I forget). There was a bug with Heart Strike that stacked with other cast time slowing debuffs, but that was hotfixed some time ago.

I have heard rumors that snake trap poison might stack with some effects, but I never noticed it. Mind Numbing or CoT are far more reliable anyway.

 

Bohemienne

What I can't understand about Gotta Go! is that they've gone out of their way to hotfix all the different cheats/exploits/'creative uses of game mechanics" that people have posted about using for it in the past (eg, having a mage spellsteal the Metanoia buff from the valkyries--this is now removed on zoning into an instance) but haven't hotfixed the actual achievement. All the more frustrating for me to have it as my final achievement, but in order for my partners in achievements to get it before the patch, I'll have to sit because I'm a healer and don't bring enough damage to the table as shadow. Given that they've made those tweaks without changing the achievement itself, I'm guessing we're going to have to wait till 3.0.8.

I really enjoy a lot of the creative achievements, like all the Void ones, that require a lot of thought and creativity to pull off. The luck-based ones, considerably less so. I can't remember the name, but the Gun'drak Impalement one was a lot of fun because what at first seemed like a luck factor we were actually able to boil down into him Impaling whoever was NOT his primary target but was standing next-closest to him when he made the call. Had to have our moonkin tank him at first to get the bear tank impaled, then the bear taunted, and we just took turns from there.

 

katholas

I finished this achievement just fine as shadow. Took a lot of wiping till he cast at the right times but when he did we were easily able to push him to 40% on his first cast and killed him with about 6 seconds to spare on the second.

Group was Spriest, Hunter(core hound), hunter, Ele shaman(healer respec), prot war.

While i think this achievement DOES need to be fixed I also think there should be a happy medium between so stupid hard it requires 4 DPS and a lot of luck and so easy you can hit the timer w/o really trying. I would say around 3 minutes would be about right. It requires you to skip ONE burrow phase but not 2, takes out a lot of the luck factor while maintaining some difficulty.

 

Ja7us

Really, though, from a design standpoint it seems to make more sense for the achievement to be "handle the burrow phases and boss DPS phases as efficiently as possible, waste no time, bring three excellent DPS" than for it to be "exploit the way that the abilities of a few classes stack, bring no healer and overgear the encounter by two tiers in order to skip the intended phases of this fight." I'm curious how Blizzard originally intended Gotta Go! to be done - my guess is it's not the latter strategy, but it would be interesting to know for sure.

The other major gripe I have with many of the DPS-oriented achievements is what an unbalancing factor Bloodlust is. The DPS differential between a group with a shaman and a group without in a fight that takes a minute or even less is so absurd that it renders many DPS check achievements almost meaningless (or if they're tuned for it, renders them unreachable for groups with no shaman).

 

Sydane

By T8 or later, people will be able to do 5-6k+ dps in an heroic even without a stacked group. At that point, the Gotta Go! achievement at two minutes will probably seem trivial, even at 2 minutes (much less 4). I think the problem is that all the other achievements are manageable at current gear levels. If half of them were clearly intended to not be doable for a while, people wouldn't be pushing on this one. As is it, it needed to be re-tuned to bring it in line with the others. Hopefully we will see another batch of Heroic achievements because in a way it seems a shame for them all to be cleared so quickly.

Empathy does not imply approval.

 

Masaren

You wont see another batch of heroic achievements. If they add new heroics, then they will most likely add in achievements for them as they are implemented. These were not designed specifically for people clearing Naxx 25. The Glory of the Hero achievements were designed for people clearing Naxx 10 and heroics.

By T8 and higher, if you do that content, youll have achievements specifically designed for you then.

"Tough...Don't blame us. Blame yourself or God." Delita Heiral

 

◊ zeidrich

Wasn't anub'rekhan's burrow time based at some point? So instead of burrowing at % health, he would burrow on a timer? However the adds he spawned gave normal experience, so people were just holding him and killing waves of spawns. (Which is why the first player to level 80 was rolled back to 79 and suspended).

If the burrow was originally time based, it's entirely feasable to kill him in a 2 minute timeframe. If they changed it to a percent based thing to avoid an exploit, it's entirely understandable that they could forget about the achievement.

 

bbartlog

Using the data from one of the toplists on Blizzard's site (deadliest creatures) along with data from wowhead on the number of times various bosses have been looted, I've put together some statistics on how difficult various instances and bosses are. Methods and caveats at the bottom, interesting lists first:

Heroics in ascending order of difficulty (declining completion percentage):

Utgarde Keep (96% of players entering loot final boss)
Drak'Tharon (95%)
Violet Hold (92% est.)
The Nexus (91%)
Halls of Stone (86%)
Utgarde Pinnacle (85%)
Gundrak (84% est.)
Azjol-Nerub (81%)
Old Kingdom (81%)
Old Stratholme (79%)
Halls of Lightning (76%)
Oculus (71%)

Ten toughest bosses and sections (by % of completion blocked, descending):

Loken (18%)
Eregos (16%)
Stratholme Gauntlet before Mal'Ganis (15%)
Slad'ran (about 13%)
back end of Old Kingdom (after Taldaram) (about 13%)
Anub'arak (11%)
Skadi the Ruthless (10%)
Xevozz and Zuramat (tied at 9%)
Elder Nadox (7%)
Tribunal of Ages (7%)

Biggest freebies (2% or less completion reduction, 25K or less deaths),
roughly in ascending order of difficulty:

Lavanthor
Dalronn/Skarvald
Novos the Summoner
Svala Sorrowgrave
Moragg
Krystallus
Drakos
Volkhan
Ymiron
Prophet Tharon'ja

Most likely to be lethal yet fall to repeated attempts (high death count, but low completion reduction):

Ingvar the Plunderer
Keristrasza
Prince Taldaram
Anomalus

Encounters that constitute a disproportionate amount of the difficulty of the entire instance:

Slad'ran (76%)
Loken (75%)
Xevozz and Zuramat (75% on occurrence)
Skadi (66%)

Methods and data used:

Most of the information comes from wowhead's totals for the number of times a boss has been looted in Heroic mode. Since heroic bosses drop badges, all players normally loot each boss, making these loot count numbers proportional to the number of kills (the same relation does not hold for normal-mode bosses). Thus, if the first boss of an instance has been looted 4051 times and the last one 3876 times, we can draw conclusions about how many attempts at clearing the instance were abandoned between those points.

By itself, this is lacking for a number of reasons. Some of the data is dirty (e.g. wowhead's data for Maexxna kills is off). Second, just knowing whether someone failed to kill a boss doesn't tell us whether this is because the boss is tough, or the section of trash before the boss is tough. Third, it doesn't give us any way to estimate the difficulty of the first boss, because we don't know how many players entered the instance in the first place.

Using the data from Blizzard's toplists, however, we can make some extrapolations that allow us to estimate the lethality of many bosses. If we take a boss, like Loken, where the number of player deaths and the approximate reduction in completion percentage are known, we can estimate the number of players that are stopped (for other bosses) based on the number of player deaths.

Some care has to be taken to add in all the adds and damage sources for a boss; for example, Slad'ran's total must include the player deaths caused by his snake adds, and so on. In some cases (Volazj, Krystallus) the death is attributed to other players, making these bosses not amenable to this method of estimation.

If 'D' is the number of player deaths shown in toplists and 'L' is the number of times a boss has been looted in heroic mode (via wowhead), a reasonable extrapolation of the 'block percentage' is

D/(300*L + D)

For most 'first bosses' in the instances this gives a plausibly low result (1-3%); the exceptions (Slad'ran, Nadox, Bjarngrim and so on) are consistent with what we know.

In addition, having this percentage allows us to interpret another situation, where a boss seems to be looted much less than the preceding one, but kills few players. Mal'Ganis is the most striking example. In this case we have good evidence that it's the instance or preceding event that is hard, and not the boss itself.

One caveat about all of this: people that step into an instance are a self-selected group. This makes the apparent difficulties seem closer together than they really are, since the average group that attempts Heroic Oculus is stronger than the average one attempting Heroic Nexus.
This selection effect is also felt within instances. The bosses in Gundrak (after Slad'ran) may appear easier than they really are simply because the weakest tenth of groups entering the instance have already been stopped. The most dramatic example of this appears when you apply these methods to Naxxramas: Anub'rekhan appears implausibly deadly simply by virtue of being (effectively) the gatekeeper, weeding out weak groups.

Finally, this is not an invitation to tell everyone how totally easy Loken (or any other boss) is for you. Yes, in case you didn't notice, four out of five people beat him even though he is the toughest individual (5-man) boss in the game. This might tell us something about how easy Blizzard has made things, or it might tell us something about how much tolerance people have for encounters that have a chance to wipe them, but it doesn't really tell us much about the abilities of those who can complete the instance.

 

• Chicken

This effect also applies to the Azjol-Nerub instance I believe, the trash to Krik'thir the Gatewatcher is, in my eyes, much harder then the rest of the instance is. A lot of groups fail to even kill Krik'thir as they do not properly deal with the Skirmishers, or their tank positions badly and gets big backstabs from the warriors. This is further compounded by the fact that people tend to have it set in their brains that the casters are the dangerous part in pulls usually, while the opposite applies here.

Anub'arak himself is also fairly complex for a heroic fight, as your statistics show. If my feeling is correct it's actually very possible that Anub'arak is harder than the statistics imply: If the first part of the instance is already causing only better groups to get past it, then Anub'arak still blocking such a significant amount of people implies that.

I'm kind of surprised Eregos doesn't top the list though.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Douglas

I think that's due to the filtering effect you and he were already talking about. Loken makes a disproportionate amount of the difficulty of his entire instance. Eregos really doesn't as much -- the totality of Occulus is harder than the totality of HoL, as shown in the first list. More people have been culled before Eregos than before Loken.

 

bbartlog

Krik'thir as an encounter almost makes the top ten. If you look at the toplist for death and add together him, his three minibosses, and the Anub'ar Skirmishers, it's a big number (I don't have the stats on this computer), and using the extrapolation I proposed puts him somewhere around 6-7% which is quite high.

 

Isin

The "deadliest creatures" section for eregos will probably not be accurate, as often times when your drake is killed you fall through the instance and survive, even though your group will still effectively wipe.

 

Ambril

True enough. As a mage, the options for survival are immediate and varied once you're simply rid of the dragon (which is the real burn on that fight). I've survived roughly two thirds of failed attempts on Eregos. Of course, a mage (or rogue or hunter) will cheat death on other bosses as well, but certainly it is easier to pull off on certain fights than others.

 

Nemantopia

Speaking as someone in between casual and hardcore [I like raiding and hitting heroics, I just am not always available when I wish I could be], the dungeon and raid achievements are interesting. Some are pretty clearly luck based...or luck with a small element of odds stacking. Others are skill/co-ordination all the way. Some are gear checks. Seeing ones that are pretty squarely in one category, I don't get too annoyed when my group isn't geared to to a gear-check timer, or the RNG says 'you lose' when it's a pure luck achievement. What is more aggravating are the ones that are really somewhere in between two categories, like a luck achievement that is ALSO a L2P achievement. It's pretty aggravating to have the RNG screw you. Just as an example, I didn't get 'What the Eck?' when the rest of my group did the first time...why? Pretty lame reason. I intentionally set myself into where his spit should be going to get the debuff every time...but each time, I was perhaps 1 degree outside, or he did a 90-180 for no reason to 'better hit the tank' that he apprantly wasn't properly aligned with while pummeling him. So two guys get splattered by luck, and I happen NOT to, despite intentionally trying to be. Ugh! Other examples include ones that are simply completely unforgiving for lag...a group that should have had 'Gotta Go!' didn't even deafeat him until try six [at fifteen seconds over time] (and for the record, we blame Comcast and Direct-Cable), because the 'I spike you from the ground' ability requires you to be on the ball anyway...but a 500ms lag spike for a group of comps that gets between 50-150 regularly managed to kill a variety of us the first few times [once even the tank, talk about malicious hit stacking], and we went 15s over because of this situation causing enough near deaths that our recovery time to not risk insta-gib was too high. I have no worries we will get this achievement and the rest in due time and diligence because of our schedules and dedication, but having something you have no control over, sometimes not even the RNG, screw you up when you're stacked to win gets old pretty fast.

For the most part, however, I really do like the design setup of these achievements. As an example, we were originally going to get Dehydration the hard way...making sure me and the other frost mage got our freezes down. Then our DK mentioned 'hey, what about the defense system?' and we all went 'd'oh, that's probably the easy way, huh?'. For the most part, they're creative and fun and only the most obsessive completionist that must have everything the very first nano-second it's available has much room to gripe. But then there are those few that make just about everyone growl in frustration.

 

Tunch

Violet Hold has me annoyed right now. I've done it 20+ times and have yet to see Erekem. Not sure what they could do about that though, due to the design of the zone. Maybe they could have you actually able to choose which bosses you got in that particular instance, through some actions of the players. Dunno.

 

Ja7us

If you're down to just Lockdown! for your achievement, you can buy instances with the bosses you need still up in them.

This is an example of not understanding how the mechanic works. Eck picks a random target to cast his spit at, and everyone in front of him once he turns toward that target gets hit. All you have to do is have your entire group stack on top of the tank and all five will be hit by the spit at once. (it also helps to pull him back into the previous room and fight him on a flat surface).

 

◊ Repeek

Any tips for Volazj's Quick Demise since they fixed the LoS bug? I was thinking about bringing a cleave heavy group (dps war x2, enh shammy, dk tank, pally healer) and just have everyone stand on each other for the Insanity(s). This is really my last hurdle for the drake.

 

Gofa

Don't bring a healer (a class, who can toss a heal around once in a while is enough for this fight) and try to bring a warrior tank for this fight. Mind flay can be reflected for some pretty nice extra damage.