In 2009 I had started an OverAchiever series on completing Glory of the Hero that I wound up abandoning due to an influx of new holiday material. Because things are a little slow now while we're waiting for more information on Cataclysm and the final content patch, I thought it might be a good (albeit somewhat belated) time to revisit the series, especially because it's easy to get many of these achievements even in PUGs now.

This is the Glory of the Hero series thus far, organized by dungeon:

• Part I: Ahn'kahet
• Part II: Azjol-Nerub and Culling of Stratholme
• Part III: Drak'Tharon Keep
• Part IV: Gun'drak
• Part V: Halls of Lightning
• Part VI: Halls of Stone
• Part VII: The Nexus

And today we do everybody's favorite instance -- The Oculus!

Get back here! You know perfectly well they're bribing us to stay with a goody bag these days.

Experienced Drake Rider

This one's very straightforward; you just need to convince your group to let you ride one of the dragons you wouldn't normally take. While you don't have to use it for the entire dungeon (you only have to be riding it during the final boss encounter), you're best off taking it at the beginning anyway to familiarize yourself with the controls. All three drakes are pretty simple.

A warning (and I learned this the hard way): you will not get credit for this achievement if you die during the fight. Don't get brave on any Eregos kill when you're trying to get this done.

Amber Void

Both this and the Ruby Void achievements were once sinfully easy to get; you ran a five-emerald drake group and simply kited Eregos all over the dungeon. You could outrange the whelps, you could outrange the void phase, and the group would just keep whittling Eregos' health down with Leeching Poison. While it took ages, it was an easy way to snag two achievements in one go, and regrettably it was nerfed. While it's still possible to pull off a five-emerald or a five-ruby strat, I'm not sure I'd be willing to try either with a PUG; the former requires a lot of target switching on everyone's part to keep the whelps from overrunning the group, and the latter requires a fairly precise Martyr rotation.

 

However, Amber Void can be done very easily with a combination of ruby and emerald drakes. The most conservative method is generally two rubies and three emeralds, with at least one of the rubies using Martyr on cooldown to reduce AoE damage.

The strategy is really very simple:

• Pull Eregos as you normally would.
• One of the ruby drakes (Ruby A) should immediately start using Searing Wrath on him to build aggro and Evasive Charges for Evasive Maneuvers (the latter should be up as much as possible). The other ruby (Ruby B) can start Searing after a few seconds.
• All three emerald drakes should put full stacks (three) of Leeching Poison on Eregos and healing the group as required.
• Once whelps appear, Ruby B should start Searing them and building Evasive Charges. Once they're dead, he should pop Evasive Maneuvers.
• When Eregos enrages, Ruby B pops Martyr and one of the emeralds pops Touch the Nightmare to reduce Eregos' damage. Ruby A can also Martyr if Ruby B doesn't have enough charges. Touch the Nightmare isn't absolutely necessary here, but it does cut down on damage if the emerald drakes have the health to spare.
• All three emeralds continue to maintain Leeching Poison on Eregos, healing as necessary, and -- with high HP -- the Nightmare attack.
• Run away from Eregos during Planar Shift as you normally would.
• Lather, rinse and repeat. Both rubies should be using Martyr on cooldown, or at very least through the enrages.

You probably won't need flawless coordination to pull this off, given that the drake vehicles now scale with gear, but this strategy's close to foolproof even in greens. You can also play around with the group composition -- lots of people use four emeralds and one ruby, or three rubies and two emeralds -- and as long as your tanks are good about protecting the group during the enrages and your healers aren't off on cloud 9 somewhere, you should be fine.




Emerald Void and Ruby Void

Why do I lump both achievements together? Because the easiest way to get both is to do them at the same time with an all-amber drake group.

This sounds risky -- and with a PUG, it generally is. I'm not sure I'd recommend doing this with the random set of people you get through the dungeon finder, but to be perfectly honest, I have managed it that way when people are truly interested in the achievement. The odds of success are obviously much higher with a geared group, as the health buffer on the drakes with higher ilevels gives you a very comfy margin for error.

Here's the deal:

• All five drakes must be ambers. We'll call them by the unimaginative names Drake A, B, C, D and E.
• Pull Eregos as you normally would. Drakes A, B, C and D should clump up together. Drake E should be slightly off to the side.
• Drake A casts Stop Time. After this wears off, Drake B casts Stop Time, and so on and so forth.
• A, B, C and D all spam Shock Lance while Drake E channels Temporal Rift. The idea behind E being off to the side here is to make it easier to see what this player is doing at any given time.
• When Drake E reaches 10 Shock Charges (which should happen quickly), he casts Shock Lance. Drakes A, B, C and D all stop Shock Lancing and channel Temporal Rift to 10 Shock Charges each.
• Drake E goes back to channeling Temporal Rift. Drakes A, B, C and D go back to spamming Shock Lance until Drake E reaches 10 Shock Charges again.
• For this entire period, you should be rotating Stop Time among all five drakes. If you pull off the damage rotation described above, Eregos should hit Planar Shift or be pretty close to it after three Stop Times.
• Run away from Eregos during Planar Shift as you normally would.
• Lather, rinse and repeat.
• If this all sounds like I'm reciting instructions on how to build a nuclear reactor as translated from Sumerian to Tagalog and then back again, this is a way to keep it simple: When Drake E is channeling Temporal Rift, you should be casting Shock Lance. When Drake E is Shock Lancing, you should be channeling Temporal Rift.

This is actually the fastest possible way to kill Eregos, period; if you execute it properly, he will lose huge chunks of health at regular intervals, be unable to spawn a single whelp and never pose much of a threat to the group. With a PUG, you're pretty likely to lose a drake or two on your way to the kill, but it's still very doable. The group leader (and/or most experienced player) should be drake E just to simplify matters, as it's really his/her Shock Charges that will determine what the group is doing at any given moment.

Make It Count

This was once among the more difficult achievements required for the Glory of the Hero meta, but with so many people running around in tier 9 these days, a competent group can get it even without trying.

My one real suggestion is not to combine any of the drake achievements with Make It Count, because there's an increased risk of wiping to mistakes. You can wipe on Eregos and still get Make It Count, but it leaves people snappish and needlessly stressed over the rush.

Apart from that, Make It Count is pretty much the same it always was:

• Hope your tank is an impatient little ferret on a caffeine drip.
• Agree in advance on who's taking which drake.
• Kill as little trash as possible. If it doesn't aggro or isn't likely to, leave it alone.
• The pull order should be one of the platforms above and to your right/left after getting drakes, then the inner ring, then the other platform. Fly back through the now-cleared ring (avoiding trash outside of it) to reach Varos Cloudstrider on the central platform.
• Hotkey your drake so you don't have to open your bags and look for it.
• No unnecessary AFKs (which unfortunately you can't guarantee in a PUG).