What are evil achievements? They're the soul-killing rep grinds, the raiding milestones that required sacrificing a farm animal to get, and even fun pastimes like battlegrounds into which a sizable dose of misery has been added. Eventually you just want to grab the nearest developer and shake him back and forth, screaming, "What the hell were you thinking?"

This week we return to our series on evil achievements, which -- if you're just joining us -- started off with the two previous articles:

• Evil achievements: Spotlight on Justicar/Conqueror, The Immortal, and Accomplished Angler
• Evil achievements: The 25 most evil achievements, #25-16

This week we'll examine #15 to #6. To be frank, I would hesitate to characterize them as being in any strict order, as many are heavily dependent on RNG, and some will be easier for some classes or players than others. Next week, we'll be featuring what I consider to be the five most truly evil achievements.




15. Firefighter

While Algalon was supposedly the biggest hurdle in Ulduar -- a hard-mode only encounter with attempts strictly limited to an hour per week -- he wasn't actually that bad once your guild got the hang of him. Consequently, it's not Algalon that most guilds remember as the most nightmarish and least-easily-repeated encounter of the raid.

That would be Mimiron -- and, to be more specific, pre-nerf Firefighter. Pressing Mimiron's big red button ushered in a host of additional fight mechanics reminiscent of a Biblical plague. Fire on the floor? You got it. Fire that followed you? Right this way. Given the fight's heavy DPS requirement, the need to keep moving was itself a killer, but the fun didn't stop there. For additional merriment, you had an AoE damage pulse, multiple insta-gib abilities, enormous tank damage, adds that could silence, and sometimes contradictory survival techniques (spread out to reduce Rapid Burst damage, or clump up to control the fire?) that combined for a terrifying encounter.

The proverbial cherry on top -- and arguably the most evil part of the encounter -- was the need to kill all three of V0-L7R-0N's components within 10 seconds of each other, as they'd otherwise just heal up. Surviving the entire encounter just to reach that point destroyed whatever morale your raid had left, and raid leaders usually lost it and started screaming for healers, tanks, noncombat pets, Chuck Norris, or whatever personal deity you worshiped to drop what they were doing and help the DPS kill the last component as the enrage timer ticked down.

"Stop healing?" you ask. "During Firefighter?"

Well, sure. It's not like most of the raid's going to be alive to see Mimiron's nasty little robot finally topple anyway.

If you watch any videos of guilds who managed this achievement early, you'll see an extraordinary degree of raid organization coupled with a whopping dose of sheer desperation. My friends, I salute you.

14. Chef de Cuisine

Finding and learning 160 Cooking recipes is a lengthy process that would be slightly more enjoyable if it weren't for the existence of so many faction-specific recipes and single spawns peddled by vendors in the arse-end of the world. One of the latter is a wandering goblin merchant who's only available for business for short periods in Desolace. If you were ever looking to recapture a bit of the sadistic Horde Onyxia attunement chain's charm, this would be your chance.

Unsurprisingly for Horde, which until recently also had fewer mounts and pets for their respective achievements, Alliance has the lion's share of the faction-specific recipes. Either way, if you have the poor luck to play on a server with sharks controlling the neutral AH, it's not uncommon to pay a 400-800% markup to obtain a faction-specific recipe -- and yes, you will almost certainly need all of them.

13. Earth, Wind, and Fire

This one should be fairly self-explanatory. I can't even think of any legitimate reason for it to exist other than as a developer prank, because they have to be aware that putting something like this in the game is a siren call to idiots like myself. There's no reward associated with it apart from the 10 achievement points for both the 10- and 25-man versions, it concerns what are now the three least-useful bosses in Vault of Archavon, and you can't do it without a specific raid composition, a highly-developed sense of masochism, and a bit of luck.

So why do it?

Because it's THERE, dammit!

 

12. Bloody Rare/Frostbitten

Rare-spawn mobs would be delightful to hunt down if it weren't for the unfortunate fact that they're ... rare. While many of the rare mobs are actually pretty easy to get these days (the higher-level Outland zones are usually deserted), you can spend months trying to track down the last few you need from more highly trafficked areas.

My picks for the most troublesome of each:

• One of the Outland rares in Terokkar Forest, Doomsayer Jurim, is often killed within minutes of his spawn time because he paths within range of the Shattrath guards. Running around Terokkar trying to find this guy only to discover his corpse at the feet of the ever-helpful guards is agonizing.
• You'll have to fight legions of hunters to get a kill on Loque'nahak, as he's arguably the most beautiful, and certainly the most unique, pet skin in the game. On the very few occasions I've seen Loque'nahak up, there was always at least one hunter running around Sholazar desperately trying to find and tame him before someone killed him for the achievement, and I always felt bad when they got there just in time to see someone looting the body. I'm not sure I have it in me to kill Loque'nahak for this reason, and will probably not get Frostbitten until Cataclysm empties out Northrend.
• One of High Thane Jorfus' three spawn points is directly outside the Argent Tournament in an area commonly used by players doing tournament dailies and anyone on the Battered Hilt quest line. Good luck with that!

11. Justicar/Conqueror

From our earlier article spotlighting three of the most evil achievements:

The Sentinels and the Outriders, the silliest and least pragmatic of all three BG factions, only cough up reputation for each successful flag dip. Not only does that mean that each reputation gain is zero sum -- the enemy teams can't dip a flag at the same time -- but it also means that your ability to farm rep is entirely dependent on how well your faction tends to play WSG. If you have the bad luck to play on a battlegroup where your faction consistently loses -- or, much worse, when your opponents have mastered the art of the turtle -- it's going to be a long, horrible slog toward exalted.

10. Alone in the Darkness

I've previously described the Yogg + 0 encounter as "a screaming, gibbering nightmare," and I stand by that comment proudly.

Yogg with no keepers up simply does not permit mistakes. Even if you do it with the benefit of heroic ICC gear, your raid has to play perfectly to avoid the seemingly endless array of ways to get yourself killed -- or worse, driven mad. Yogg can easily RNG even amazing players into a sliver of Sanity entering phase 3, and there is literally nothing you can do about it. The only way to survive is -- again -- to play perfectly, because there's no way to make up for whatever you've lost. You giveth yourself a margin for error, and Yogg? He shall taketh away.

The Sanity mechanic alone guarantees that this encounter is never going to be a cakewalk for the length of Wrath, and I'm curious to see if it even gets easier in Cataclysm. While a few guildies have floated the idea of doing Yogg + 0 at 85 to farm Mimiron's Heads (for people who, for some inexplicable reason, want a reminder of the nightmare that was Firefighter), not everyone's on board. I guess there are only so many times you can watch your raid disappear under a murderous pack of completely unkillable adds before you break out in a cold sweat at the thought of getting within 50 miles of Ulduar again. If you watch Stars' world-first kill, and more particularly the final few seconds where they sacrifice most of the raid for one or two more seconds' worth of damage, you'll get a sense of just how desperate phase 3 can get.

More than a year after Ulduar's release, a lot of servers still don't have a Yogg + 0 kill (and of those that do, most have just one) -- and it took the world's best guilds the better part of three months to manage it. Many raiders think the only encounter in Wrath that equals the difficulty of Alone in the Darkness is ... well, you'll see later on in our list.

9. Higher Learning

While this is a great achievement for lore nerds, it's an RNG-infested pain in the ass to complete. Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to find a series of eight disappearing and reappearing books all over the city of Dalaran, with the eventual goal of reading the complete Schools of Arcane Magic series. For your troubles, you'll get this achievement and a neat little arcane pet. Of course, you're also likely to get an ordeal that may span months unless you're willing to arrange your schedule around the books' 3-4 hour respawns, or be online as soon as the servers come up after maintenance. While this is certainly the easiest way to guarantee that you'll find a book in the spawn area, occasionally things like gainful employment stand in the way of logging on Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon.

Easily the most frustrating thing about this achievement is the high chance of getting a "dummy" book that's not part of the series. From a lore perspective, it's fantastic and wonderfully appropriate that you never know what book you'll get in a city steeped in magic, and many of them are actually interesting to read.

From a game mechanics perspective -- and especially if it's that one last Arcane Magic book you need that resolutely refuses to spawn -- it's wait after wait after boring and usually disappointing wait.

8. Hero of Shattrath

The Aldor and the Scryers hate each other. How do you know? Every time the Aldor decide to like you just a little bit more, the Scryers decide the opposite, and vice versa. The only way to get this achievement is to reach exalted with one faction, then turn around and start the long, painful, horrible grind to from hated to exalted with the other. Because their respective hand-ins are no longer very common on the auction house, you'll probably have to get most of them yourself.

7. Accomplished Angler

From our earlier article spotlighting three of the most evil achievements:

Accomplished Angler is so stuffed with RNG that you could theoretically get the whole meta-achievement in the space of a single day -- or, like me, you could be slogging away at it more than a year into Wrath.

I debated whether to split up all the horrifying RNG achievements required for the fishing meta, but there are so damn many of them that it just feels more efficient to group them here. A lot of Accomplished Angler is really, really fun, especially for people who genuinely liked fishing even when the more reasonable among us would admit there wasn't much point to it. But for all those of us still chasing the "Salty" title, there's a depressing amount of luck involved in getting the meta. At this point, I've caught tens of thousands of fish without once seeing a rare needed for One That Didn't Get Away or getting a Sea Turtle during the year I've fished up countless pools' worth of Fish Feasts.

As an aside, I rather enjoyed our commenter Grovinofdarkhour's description of One That Didn't Get Away: If achievements were people, that one would be a dirty rotten son of a bitch that kicks cats and pushes old ladies. Testify!