Once upon a time, when the World of Warcraft was all shiny and new, things were simple: the Horde hated the Alliance and they, in turn, despised the Horde. It was a simpler time, but this wasn’t just some game mechanic to facilitate PvP and hours of ganking, oh no, it was integral to the lore of Azeroth.
Now, it’s also worth remembering that there’s no black and white in Azeroth either. The Horde aren’t evil for just being the Horde, neither are the Alliance all pure as newly fallen snow. Each faction has done its fair share of pure and evil acts depending on the actions of individual heroes and the motivations of their leaders.
But now we’re post patch 3.1, it’s time to rexamine the state of relations between the two factions. Times have changed quite drastically since we first entered Azeroth and the addition of The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King have only made things much more complicated. The Wrath Gate cinematic gave us some glimpse of how the two factions are getting on in the continually evolving lore of Azeroth. While the recent trailer for the Secrets of Ulduar offered an even more promising glimpse at the deterioration of that tenuous peace.
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gmaxwell World of Warcraft alliance-versus-horde, thrall, wow-patch-3.1
The folks over at GuildOx, a guild progress and achievement ranking site, were kind enough to email us some interesting new statistics about Ulduar’s achievements. As it stands a large portion of the raids are, of course, not getting encounter specific achievements the first time they go into the zone. However there are some that are getting them nonetheless.
People may wonder if guilds are getting the achievements this quickly because Ulduar is too easy. My opinion on the matter is that Ulduar itself sans hard modes won’t be abnormally challenging, however when you put in the hard modes and various twists to the encounter in order to earn the achievements, Ulduar is going to become quite challenging.
The achievements that have made the list so far, like A Quick Shave where you have to kill Razorscale with her only flying into the air once, just requires a lot of DPS. That’s not too hard for most geared out groups to muster.
Take a look after the break for GuildOx’s list of the top five Ulduar 10 and 25 man achievements, and head over there to take a look at things overall.
Top 25-Man Achievements
Heroic: Shutout – 1.89% achievement rate
Heroic: A Quick Shave – 1.27% achievement rate
Heroic: Nerf Gravity Bombs – 0.88% achievement rate
Heroic: I choose You, Stormcaller Brundir – 0.48% achievement rate
Heroic: Nerf Engineering – 0.27% achievement rate
Top 10-Man Achievements
Shutout – 2.81% achievement rate
A Quick Shave – 1.31% achievement rate
Nerf Gravity Bombs – 0.63% achievement rate
Nerf Engineering – 0.51% achievement rate
Orbital Bombardment – 0.39% achievement rate
Catelet World of Warcraft 10-man-raiding, achievements, wow-patch-3.1
It was inevitable that someone would down Yogg-Saron pretty quickly, and less than twenty four hours after the patch went live European guild Ensidia have claimed World First on the Death God. Given the non-linear progression into Ulduar, a lot of other guilds were able to pull off world firsts on other bosses. It also seems that Ensidia was focusing on clearing Ulduar in normal mode, as none of their kills were done on hard mode. This means we’re unlikely to see Algalon downed this week (not by Ensidia, anyway).
While it came as no surprise that someone killed him, what surprised me was that it was Ensidia. I was betting on Vodka (can I get a ‘for the Alliance!’ from anyone?) and that they managed to do it while many of the EU realms were having stability issues. Of course, it should be noted that Ensidia was the same guild that cleared all Wrath content three days after its release (they hadn’t decided on a name yet).
Boubouille over at MMO Champion has a full raid list and info on some of the loot that dropped, including a rather nice cloak and a piece of that legendary healer mace.
Castiglione World of Warcraft wow-live, wow-patch, wow-patch-3.1, yogg-saron
