And Twilight Vanquisher / 6 Min Malygos isn't barrier enough?

I'd have to say my guild worked hard on Sarth3D. It was a fun fight and people worked hard as a team and were pleased as we progressed.

We don't even try Immortal anymore. It just makes Naxx even less fun than it is, because people are stressed out the entire time.

IMO Sarth3D, 6 Min Malygos and Immortal are really the only challenging achievements for the meta. Dropping Immortal from the list won't really make or break the difficultly of the meta, though it removes a lot of the drama and chance from it.

I was just thinking this lasts night - I think a personal immortal achievement would be much more fun. I don't care if they leave the existing raid-wide ones in, but a personal one for me is more interesting. You'd probably have to change it though - make it so that you have to actually participate on every boss kill as well as extend it to the entire zone (not just bosses).

Thankfully they listened to community feedback about Immortal and it seems about 20/8-mans too - I haven't seen any of those in Ulduar achievements. I noticed quite a lot of Shocking-like achievements - those will make up for the lack of Immortal while being less RNG based.

I would like this idea, however, it would put rogues/hunters/mages at a distinct advantage over classes that can't leave combat in case of a wipe. I could also see this causing drama between healers and a player who happens to die during an encounter, as they might take it personally.

I'm a much bigger fan of the suggestion to split up the immortal achievement into subsections, like clear all bosses in a wing without dying in a given lockout period. As the achievements for Ulduar indicate that they're grouping the bosses by "wing", this would make sense to me.

And tanks have an advantage to get Gotta Go while dps have an advantage in Denyin' the Scion.

If the achievement is to 'not die', would it really matter if rogues/hunters/mages had a slight advantage? Full disclosure, I am a rogue. Even with vanish, it's risky whether I will survive a wipe or not (especially when some a-hole mage runs right alongside of me trying to invis and pulls the boss over). I would expand it to the entire run if it was personal though (trash included).

As for the whole healer getting blamed for death thing, I can accept that, but that happens now as well. Either way (winged, personal), both are a lot better suggestions than the way it is now.

Actually, I think the way they apparently chose to implement Ulduar is better than either suggestion or live. They simply took it out of the meta, so that if you want it you have to actually achieve the difficult achievement, but it's not required to get your 310% mount. Moving the achievement to either winged or personal would be a huge loss in difficulty, and achievements are supposed to be optional and sometimes, difficult. Some are funny, some are to do fights against the proper strategy(Spore Loser), and some are to do things really, really well. Immortal is of the last sort, and removed from the meta, it is fine.

No, they aren't. Immortal is significantly harder than those two achievements, and it's the right level of difficulty to restrict access to the best mounts in game--they just went about it wrong. I have to say I love the idea of a speed run that was suggested earlier. It has the same 'feel' as an Immortal without the crushing heartbreak and could be tuned tightly enough to be the achievement that finally 'unlocks' the meta, so to speak.

Let's talk about the numbers here.

According to guildox, 1.53% of the players worldwide have completed The Immortal. 3.79% have completed Heroic: You Don't Have An Eternity. And 17.09% have completed Heroic: The Twilight Zone.

For 10 mans, it's 18.19% for The Undying, 7.31% for You Don't Have An Eternity, and 7.53% for The Twilight Zone.

Overall, Glory of the Raider is at 5.7%, and Heroic: Glory of the Raider is at 1.38%.

Assuming zero overlap between normal and heroic achievements, we'd get 7.08% of the people in guilds listed on guildox with a 310% mount from pve achievements.

Still assuming zero overlap, cutting out The Immortal and The Undying would bring us to something on the order of 10%. (Handwavy numbers, because I don't want to spell out a huge list of assumptions here.)

Realistically, there's going to be a lot of overlap. If you've got 25 (or more) people on your roster capable and geared enough to get Heroic: Glory of the Raider, you shouldn't have too much trouble with Glory of the Raider.

I don't feel like it's a problem to give the top 10% of PvE guilds access to special mounts.

Especially because they're removing these mounts before players can too significantly overgear them. (ie, no players in Ulduar-25 gear brute forcing Naxx-10 for The Undying to get their mount).

Even more especially when you consider the guilds that aren't even listed on guildox, and how that shrinks the availability.

Agreed fully on the timed run being a much more fun and tunable achievement for the meta. Despite all the "Kill Boss Y in X minutes" achievements in WotLK, there haven't been very many speed run achievements in the game. Personally I've loved them for years--I don't remember which came first, 5 hour Nef for the Red Scepter Shard or 45 min Baron runs in Strath dead, but I've been hooked ever since. Since then we've had, what, ZA bear runs, Make it Count, and Arachnophobia? Five examples (maybe 1-2 more I've missed) in the game, yet one of the most common themes I've seen on these forums and elsewhere about how raid leaders keep their raiders interested is setting artificial timers for a full clear. Even when the content is still fairly new, it can be a matter of pride--I know my guild was happy that by our 3rd Naxx clear, we had it down to 2:15. I've actually been fairly surprised that Blizzard hasn't capitalized more on such an obvious and commonly liked way of challenging its players and keeping them interested when that's one of the stated goals of raid-related achievements.

On this note, there is at least one achievement that is a "speed run" type achievement in Ulduar. It involves killing Freya X minutes after having first killed a mob in her conservatory. These ones are always interesting to me simply because it makes trash more interesting (at the very least it makes it relevant). It's something that is incredibly lacking in Naxx, but hopefully Ulduar trash at least requires some semblance of brain activity.

Assuming the hard modes are indeed difficult, an immortal style achievement that simply asked that you defeat every boss "that is capable" in hard mode without wiping/resetting would be a fair compromise.

Speed runs are far more enjoyable and really show your mastery of an instance. The pace is far quicker and it still requires your raiders to being paying full attention, unlike the Immortal where the instance seemingly takes an eternity to finish (even if it really only takes ~10% longer). Deaths would still be frowned upon as they would slow down your pace, but wouldn't be nearly as devastating as disconnect or bad RNG for Immortal.

I doubt anyone will speak against speedruns, they are really great. Especially when they are constrained to a certain gearlevel. I mean Arachnophobia is hardly going to be even worth considering in T9, likely it will just happen as part of any Naxx clear then.

But what I really like are achievements that are challenging regardless of gearlevel. Like Shocking, the 4 Horsemen achievement or The Safety Dance... While the latter is somwhat eased with gear, it is still going to be pretty easy to die if you are not capable of handling the dance. I'm not saying it is hard, only that the idea is great. And Shocking can be a challenge with 25 people, you need absolute perfection. I thought I would get it last time I fought Thad... only to see two crossed charges... Meaning effectively once. Frustrating, yet very positive in a sense that it requires more than a good plan and good gear, in fact gear is almost comepletely irrelevant in this case (you need good enough gear to kill him of course), it requires personal skill of everyone involved.

More of those please. And speedruns too. The Freya version is actually a very good speedrun idea, like Denic noted it gives thought to perfectly executed trashkills. And thrash being more than thrash can only be considered good.

And lets get rid of RNG achievements like Gonna Go. Heck I got it without trying or even knowing it existed. I couldn't even figure out what I had done. Haven't been able to replicate it afterwards.

Consider that the equivalent PvP mounts are restricted to the top 0.5% of each Arena bracket, for a total of 1.5% of the Arena-playing population (assuming no overlap between brackets). Given that something like 6-7% of the population now have 310-speed PvP mounts, that implies that PvE has given out proportionally more mounts in one "season" than the arena did in all seasons to date.

To be fair, having 310% mounts now is little different than having 280% mount + riding crop at 70 for the masses.

Perhaps the comparisons are not fair because everything is different. Riding crop on a 280% mount at 70 put those mount at 308% or so. However, the .5% who had 310% mounts at 70 were definitely much faster. Maybe too fast.

Standard epic flying mounts actually flew at 418% speed (or +318%) with a riding crop, not +308%. The difference in speed between a +280% mount and a +310% mount with crusader aura at 80 is quite significant at 456% speed compared to 492%, for an almost 8% overall speed advantage.

What on Earth does the last decimal digit of the relative speed have to do with it?

310% mounts are a reward for the best of the best in PvP and PvE. Currently they are much more accessible via PvE. This is likely to continue to be the case unless they find a solution to people steamrolling the 10-man version of the content with 25-man gear. However, even the 25-man mount is currently more accessible than the arena mount, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this change depending on how hard they tune the Ulduar achievements and how many of them there are. I certainly don't believe their design goal is for ~1% of arena players to get a mount and ~7% of raiders to get a mount.

It actually drops percentages.

If we assume that all guilds are equally sizes, 1% of all guilds is going to be 1% of all players. It's fairly safe to assume that guilds that kill Sarth 3D are actually smaller than the average guilds, in which case the 1% guilds that did it, are less players than the 99% that didn't, making it less than 1% of all players.

Then add in that not all members of that 1% of all guilds actually did the fights (because they're alts or a social member) and it'll drop even lower than that.

Top end guilds tend to have a lot fewer members due to consistency among them. But of course there are more than top end guilds that have killed Sarth3D. But they still account for a considerable portion of the guilds that have.

Arena does not give mounts to 0.5% of people who participate, it gives mounts to characters in 0.5% of all teams that participate (in each bracket). Teams can fit up twice the number of characters that is required to play a bracket while even teams with just one character left in them count against the limit as long as enough games have been played at some point in history.

Between those factors and the crossover between different brackets it's very difficult to actually estimate which fraction of WoW population (or even active PvP'ers) really got PvP mounts. I'd (gu)estimate that in each bracket significantly more than 0.5% of characters got the mount and that possibly even close to 1% of all participating players got one.

From a purely subjective perspective the PvP mounts in TBC did not feel very difficult to get, but that's largely a matter of class and spec.

Our guild have 35 active raider, 115 accounts and over 300 characters. Wow rankings site mark that our guild have done glory of the raider. Only three character have that achivement. We can get maximum of 15 achivement before 3.1. I mean you can't just look that 5% of guild have done it so 5% players must have 310% mount. On the other hand most people have least one if not more arena characters.

While Twilight Vanquisher is pretty easy, Of the Nightfall isn't. I really like 10man 3 Drakes. It's really well designed and tuned. A series of easy tasks combined that make one hard task.

If you think about it, doesn't "Of the Nightfall" essentially have Undying 'built in?' I seriously challenge somebody to 9 man this fight. One healer or tank death is obviously a wipe. One less DPS and you're infinitely more susceptible to getting overwhelmed by Twilight Torment damage.


Naxxramas was an instance already designed to be hard. Blizzard wanted to make it an entry level instance, so they tweaked the numbers and released it for level 80 without really changing too much. The hard mode achievements for Naxxramas don't really change the encounters too much, if any. They're just "kill this boss faster" or "ignore this (formerly) important mechanic" or "do this fight better."

Sartharion on the other hand is a new boss and the achievement really does change the fight significantly. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic but I like to think Blizzard is capable of designing more Hard Mode achievements like 3 Drakes. Encounters that when done on hard mode don't feel like gimmicks and really do entertain more serious raiding guilds. Encounters that are well tuned enough that if you added an "Undying" or "Immortal" tagged onto it, you may ask yourself "Was that really necessary to track? We couldn't have beaten the fight with a death anyway."

This simply isn't true at all. You have Soulstones, Battle Resses, and frankly, we 9 manned Shadron onwards on our first kill.