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?"

Welcome back to our series on evil achievements, which has encompassed the following articles:

• Evil achievements: Spotlight on Justicar/Conqueror, The Immortal, and Accomplished Angler
• Evil achievements: The 25 most evil achievements, #25-16
• Evil achievements: The 25 most evil achievements, #15-5

This week we'll examine the five most evil achievements in the game. Gird your loins and gulp your antacids, my brethren. You will find nothing but tears ahead.

 5. Bane of the Fallen King/The Light of Dawn

This would be the other Wrath encounter we've referenced that raiders think equals the Yogg + 0 level of difficulty. I'll admit to debating whether to switch the position of this achievement with Yogg + 0 on the list. The Icecrown Citadel raid buff will make heroic Arthas easier in a way that Yogg will never see, because so much of the latter's difficulty lies in mechanics unaffected by gear. But then I thought -- there are a few other achievements on our top 25 list that are going to get the hell of a lot easier in future expansions, and the list is really nothing more than a record of its time anyway. Why not include what's undeniably the hardest fight in the game as of May 2010?

And it's a very hard fight indeed. I'm not sure how to put this apart from stating it as baldly as possible: heroic Arthas is a fight of unmatched brutality. Apart from his ability to two-shot a tank in full heroic Icecrown gear, he's got a whopping 103 million health on the heroic 25-man version. To give you some perspective on just how jaw-dropping that number is, heroic Blood Queen Lana'thel -- a largely stationary encounter with huge damage buffs -- has 71 million health.

Granted, you "only" have to DPS through 90% of Arthas' health, but you'll spend most of the fight trying to survive some of the ugliest boss abilities known to man. The Shamblers from phase 1? They gain an enormous damage buff once their health hits 20%. Those pesky val'kyr? They've got 3 million health each this time around, and even though they'll drop players once they hit 50%, it still means you have to do 1.5 million damage to them in a matter of seconds. Afterwards, they'll just hang around up top, blithely casting Drain Life on whoever's got the most threat on them. Infest? Any healer will do for that damage, as long as that healer's a disc priest. And you shoved as many paladins into the raid as you could to Aura Mastery your butts through the worst AoE, right? Right?

Heroic Arthas feels like the result of a threesome between the fabled guild-killers M'uru, Illidan and Felmyst. Your raid, as with Yogg + 0, must play perfectly. You can't afford bad latency, framerates, disconnects or players with suboptimal anything. You can't afford to have a single player botch positioning or their rotation. Even assuming you manage to survive all of Arthas' little tricks both inside and out of Frostmourne, there's still the specter of that nightmarishly huge pile of HP, taunting you with just how slowly it drops.

Paragon first made the kill with only five healers (all of them, I imagine, miserable), because they simply could not lose the damage brought by an additional DPS -- and that was with the 5% zone buff. We're now at 15%, and only 25 guilds worldwide have managed even a single kill. Keep that in mind, all you future players reading this aged historical web page and snickering to yourselves over the thought of a "difficult" heroic Arthas.

4. All raiding "realm-first" achievements

Many of the "Realm First!" titles for raid content are amazingly cool, but I've never been entirely comfortable with them. They're restricted to 25-man raiders and restricted still further to the 25 people you have in raid at the time. It's a problem to which I suspect most raiders who've worked for these achievements can relate; the people who are in the raid when you get the kill aren't necessarily the people who've put the most work into the encounter, or even a fair representation of the players who are normally on your roster.

How so? Realm-first kills on truly difficult content usually meant you customized the raid to the demands of the fight. That's great if you were a warlock for Yogg + 0. It wasn't so great if you were, say, an enhancement shaman. It's great if you were a shield tank on heroic Anub'arak or Algalon. It wasn't so great if you were a death knight or a bear. Did you drop everything you were doing to level as fast as you could for things like Conqueror of Naxxramas or Obsidian Slayer? Or did you -- crazy person that you were -- actually want to enjoy Northrend rather than speeding through the content at a breakneck pace?

No malice was intended by the existence of these achievements -- I don't think there's any way to code for an achievement to go to a player who put a ton of work into an encounter, only to lose out if they couldn't be there the night the raid finally managed it -- but frankly, it sucks. Having to pick and choose who got into a raid for things like Celestial Defender or Grand Crusader was a terrible, demoralizing and potentially guild-breaking thing to do, and I have yet to meet a raid leader who didn't feel unhappy and guilty about the people who were left out.

No matter the achievement, someone in the guild probably got screwed.

3. Alterac Valley All-Star/Arathi Basin All-Star/Not Even a Scratch/Isle of Conquest All-Star/Save The Day

Rather than clog up the top 25 list with nothing but horrific battleground achievements (of which there appears to be a disturbing parade), I decided to plug a sample of the worst into the top five and knock We Had It All Along down a few pegs.

Now, I'll freely admit to resenting these achievements perhaps a bit more because I'm a healer, and if the opposing team has half a brain in their collective head, they will target and annihilate me first. But even beyond that, most battleground achievements just aren't suited to healers anyway, and particularly not the following:

• Alterac Valley All-Star This is the kind of achievement that would have been perfectly suited to the time when AV matches could stretch on for days. Right now, it's a teamwork-phobic joke. Regardless of whatever offensive or defensive push your faction's scrambling to make in order to win the match, you're going to be off doing whatever objective you've got left for the achievement, which not infrequently involves capping or defending graveyards that your team prefers not to have.
• Arathi Basin All-Star I would rank this one as slightly more forgiving than its AV cousin, but the principle is still the same: "Would you guys mind if I absented myself from whatever fight you're involved in, so I can sneak in here and cap or defend a flag? My achievement is more important than whatever I might have contributed to your survival. Thanks, you're a pal!"
• Not Even a Scratch Anyone who has played a single PUG Strand of the Ancients game will instantly understand the difficulty of not losing a single siege vehicle. When the strategies being bandied about for this include: a.) driving the vehicles into the sea and leaving them there for the duration of the match, and b.) praying the opposing team is AFK, something is very wrong.
• Isle of Conquest All-Star At first, this may seem somewhat easier than its AV and AB cousins, but what the achievement doesn't tell you is that you need the killing blow in order to get credit for destroying a vehicle. Oh, and that that portion of the achievement is not infrequently bugged. Have fun struggling through the other three objectives only to reach that point!
• Save the Day This has happened to me exactly twice in three years of playing. Unhappily for yours truly, both occurred before the achievement system went live.

These may suck, and there's a healthy dose of luck attached to each of them, but they're nothing compared to our top two:


2. School of Hard Knocks

The hatred for this achievement is well-known and, in my opinion, well-deserved.

I try to take a measured approach to everything on this blog. Even if I don't agree with Blizzard, I'll make the effort to understand how and why they arrived at a decision. Sometimes I've gotten it right, and sometimes (perhaps more often) I haven't. Any reasonable player will admit that their love of a character is ultimately a very small part of a very big game, and developers have the unenviable task of reconciling player desires with the necessary limitations imposed by game balance. Whenever I look at the forums, I wonder if people like Nethaera and Ancilorn go to work every day expecting themselves to be the sole voice of unhappy sanity in a thread, and I fully expect Ghostcrawler to snap before Cataclysm, disappear and turn up six months later adopted into a pod of Monterey Bay seals.

So I don't say this insultingly, but boy, do I mean it: there's no defensible reason for this achievement to exist.

None.

It makes PvE players miserable. It makes PvP players miserable. It's a perverse incentive against teamwork, it turns battlegrounds into a mess for the length of Children's Week and it's the worst possible way to encourage any tentative or frightened player to try PvP. Anyone trying to do it might as well have a giant bull's-eye painted on them, for all the griefing and bullying it tends to attract, and I have a very serious problem with players being forced into such a vulnerable position in pursuit of What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been. For many players, that's the only way they're ever going to get a 310% mount without having to shell out for it at 85, and having to wade into an ocean of malicious "teammates" and opportunistic enemies to get it frankly sucks.

I am at a loss to understand how this achievement was supposed to be fun, or what it was intended to accomplish other than being an amazingly cruel barrier to completion of the year-long meta. Over the past week, I've seen the following:

• Paladins casting Hand of Protection on their own teammates to force them into dropping a flag.
• Arena gods grabbing the EotS flag, parking themselves in a distant corner of the battlefield and enjoying the eruption of pleading in /bg chat.
• Healers refusing to heal their teammates in the hopes that they'd die and the healer could then cap a tower or node.
• Rogues Sapping players at the last moment before they could cap or defend a node (orphans clearly visible at the sides of the players in question) and doing it over and over and over ...
• Players hanging back while others rushed into AV towers to cap, then capping while the others were being damaged by the archers and unable to get a full cast off.
• ICC-geared DPS two- or three-shotting enemy players in blues who were /pointing at their orphans and emoting /beg.

Unlike inter-faction griefing, there's no "PvP solution" to your own teammates' screwing you over, and the achievement does nothing to encourage PvP-phobic players to get more experience. As Cynwise observed in the article linked above, the battlegrounds during Children's Week are full of people who do not want to be there, and there's no shortage of players on either side feasting on their misery.

Enough already. Remove School of Hard Knocks from the meta, or remove it from the game entirely.

1. Insane in the Membrane

This is it.

Insane in the Membrane is the granddaddy, prime mover, and ne plus ultra of all truly evil achievements.

These are the worst, most soul-destroying reputation grinds in the game, and the developers even admitted it. They're all factions that Blizzard never really intended anyone to grind in the first place, and then -- post-drunken board meeting, I can only assume -- they decided to add a Feat of Strength to it for anyone crazy enough to do it. It comes with the additional evil touch of Steamwheedle and Bloodsail rep being zero-sum; anybody who manages the long slog to Honored with the pirates is then obliged to work from the bottom of the Hated barrel with the goblins, and vice versa. Each and every single one of these grinds is painful, expensive, annoying, time-consuming and guaranteed to have you in shivering in the corner of a mental institution within the space of a few days:

• Everlook, Ratchet, Gadgetzan and Booty Bay Once you've exhausted their quest offerings, you've got two choices and neither is attractive: grind low-level mobs for days on end, or grind Dire Maul north for an equally long time hoping you get a dropped key each run to free Knot Thimblejack.
• Darkmoon Faire You'll run out of relatively easy turn-ins for the Faire pretty quickly, and after that? Better hope you (or your server's scribes) feel up to the task of providing more than a hundred Darkmoon decks. Oh, and the Darkmoon Faire isn't actually available most of the time, either. If you can't manage to get your hands on enough decks while they're around for the first part of every month, congratulations! You get to wait another month!
• Shendralar This reclusive sect of the Highborne has had, until recently, no desire to make contact with the outside world, and it shows. You get one non-repeatable class quest and one dungeon quest, and that's it. Afterwards, it's nothing but painful, expensive libram turn-ins and -- this gets better -- you can't hold more than one of the same libram simultaneously. Did one Libram of Focus drop for you? You can't pick up another one until you've somehow dumped the first. Get the librams and turn-in items, run to Dire Maul, hand them in, run to the nearest mailbox if you're not an engineer (bonus points if you're Alliance and have to wait for the ferry to Feathermoon Stronghold each time!), get more librams and items off an alt, run back to Dire Maul, lather, rinse, repeat and go completely off your nut.
• Ravenholdt There's no way to increase Ravenholdt reputation unless you can get a steady supply of lockboxes. How do you get lockboxes, you ask? Pickpocketing. Hey, wait -- aren't rogues the only class that can pickpocket? Bingo. Legions of players have leveled a rogue to do nothing other than farm lockboxes for their mains, which means the added frustration of leveling an extra character on top of the long and boring slog through high 50s mobs for the boxes themselves.
• Bloodsail Buccaneers I'm not sure this one requires elaboration. Farming Bloodsail reputation requires tanking your rep with the Steamwheedle goblins, who -- as you may have noticed -- run an awful lot of towns and flight paths around the world. In return for you inability to travel to any goblin town without being attacked on sight, the pirates will give you ... a costume? Seriously? SERIOUSLY? That's it? What the hell made that horrible grind worth it? Nothing, that's what. That's why they call you The Insane.