This post was penned over the course of the last few months. Most of these achievements were done before the Tomb of Sargeras raid came out, which trivialized a lot of these. But we just completed the Krosus and Gul’dan ones this week, so I decided to finish this post, in case there’s anyone out there who still hasn’t done it.
While we were waiting for Tomb to come out, my WoW guild (Knights of the Night, US Duskwood/Bloodhoof – Alliance), began trying for the Glory of the Legion Raider achievement, which involves doing several finicky things during various boss fights in the Emerald Nightmare and Nighthold raids.
For some background, this was largely done by KoTN’s heroic raiding group, which raids Mon/Tues and usually fields 10-15 raiders. We’re not terrible at this (there’s a guild name, right there), but we’re also not hardcore progression, either — we only just downed heroic Kil’jaeden last week, and we spend more time making terrible puns than we do reading strategy guides. We did this over several sessions, with a varying group each time; speaking for myself, most achievements were done pre-Tomb, and the final two (Krosus and Gul’dan in NH) were done post-Tomb.
Emerald Nightmare
Most of these were done over the course of one Monday raid night. We skipped some parts because we already had them; i.e. everyone had the Ursoc achievement, and a lot of people had the Cenarius one or most of it.
Nythendra, “Buggy Fight.” Here you have squish fifteen of these glowing gold bugs that pop up only during the Heart of the Swarm phase (where she sucks up all the poison she’s thrown down). There are only four bugs per phase, which means you need there to be four Heart of the Swarmp phases — possibly five, if you happen to miss one of the bugs. (Which we did).
The hardest part, for a heroic NH-geared guild, was keeping her alive long enough to get five phases, without hitting her enrage timer. We literally had twenty seconds after the fifth Heart of the Swarm to kill her before she enraged. Fun!
Ironically, the other afflic lock and I were like, “Wait, we need to do less damage? Okay, I’m switching to destro for this fight.” I dunno about my pal Malefic, but I haven’t been Destro since just after 7.1.5, and at that point I hadn’t even upgraded my Destro artifact for 7.2, so it was… entertaining.
Ursoc, “Scare Bear.” We’d all done the achievement before, so we skipped it this time. It involves rescuing an NPC and keeping him alive for the whole Ursoc fight.
Dragons of Nightmare, “Imagined Dragons World Tour.” This one is kind of fussy, but in a fun way. Every member of your raid needs to go through EVERY one of the four portals to different parts of the world and pick up a buff from glowing green wisps. You then have to kill the dragons while everyone has all four buffs.
It really helps to have three tanks here — two do the normal tank-swap mechanic, and one to run through the portals with everyone else. The runner then swaps in as the first two tanks need to pick up the buff. Unfortunately, one of our usual tanks was away for this, so we had one main tank (my husband Matt’s pally, Marrais), a druid who usually heals but at least had her Guardian artifact (Bree), and a frost DK with a taunt (Anieros). It was super messy. Mar ended up asleep due to the stacking debuffs. But we overgear it enough it didn’t matter, and we got the achiev.
Next up, everyone’s favorite spiderbird, Elerethe Renferal, with “Webbing Crashers.” This one was a PAIN in the ASS — but at least a pain in the ass that we resolved in two tries. Basically you need to break seven “pulsating egg sacs” during the fight.
Easy enough, right? Except most of the eggs are in hard to get to places; at least two are on platforms you can only get to with the feathers Spiderbird drops in her bird form — and that there’s no safe return from.
Oh, and if you accidentally break an egg before the fight? You have to pull, wipe, and reset.
We would have loved a demon hunter here, for Glide; instead we had feathers, failed Demonic Circles, and suicidal DKs who saved the day. (How thematically appropriate).
At the end, only two people were up — Matt, and the other afflic lock. “Don’t worry,” someone pointed out. “Malefic does more dps alone than we did when we first took down this boss.”
And indeed, we managed.
Il’gynoth, aka spooky tentacle tree, was up next, with “Took the Red Eye Down.” You have to kill twenty slimes within a small period of time on top of the eye. I was concerned about afflic lock cleave from Soulflame killing the slimes before we’d gathered twenty, but it didn’t turn out to be much of a problem. The hardest part was counting them!
Cenarius, “Use the Force(s).” The achievement can’t be done in one go; you have to NOT cleanse each potential group of adds. We all looked at our achievement progress and it seemed like the only group we hadn’t gotten already was the wisps. (Because fuck those Twisted Sisters).
So we pulled Cenarius to the back of the room, where there was NO CHANCE of anyone accidentally voting to cleanse the wisps, and then fought whatever else came out. (I think we got cleansed dragons). It went super fast. There wasn’t even time for a tank swap in the second phase.
Xavius, “I Attack the Darkness.” Ahahahaha. This achievement. It was a mess. Remember how I said we didn’t have any DHs in the group? Yeah. That was relevant.
So what you basically have to do is: in every one of Xavius’ three phases, someone has to wander off into the darkness, find an invisible add, pull it back to the group, and kill it. The video we watched ahead of time joked that the way you do this achievement is, you start on your main, wander around in the darkness finding nothing, then give up. Then you pop on your demon hunter, use Spectral Sight to find it, attack it with Throw Glaive, and pull it back to the group.
Literally. You need a demon hunter for this. A hunter’s Flare doesn’t work, or any of the other abilities you think might. As our druid healer Tyrwll (my pal Mel) said, “Well… I guess this is the demon hunter expansion.”
Luckily Matt has a demon hunter tank, too — though massively undergeared, never having seen the inside of a raid or M+ dungeon. So he logged on Syladia, his DH.
First problem. Throw Glaive no longer works to grab the add. You have to use your taunt. Which is on a cooldown. It took us a good long time to figure that out, all the while our other tank going insane.
That got us through the first two phases. Then… the third phase. It should work the same, but see, phase three is when those Nightmare Tentacles come out, spewing poison throughout the room. The DoT kept breaking him out of Spectral Sight.
Yeah, we wiped a lot there, because it was basically impossible for him to grab the add, and everyone else was going insane…
So then we decided that if one demon hunter wasn’t enough, two was better. Our other afflic lock logged on with his, and about that time, our other main tank — who happens to main a demon hunter! — showed up. Three! Three demon hunters, did the trick.
(Though really, Matt claims, finding the add before the Nightmare Tentacles spawned was the trick).
So yeah, that was a trash fire, but we got it done.
One thing I will say is: I learned a lot about the mechanics of the various fights, doing these crazy Emerald Nightmare achievements. I came to Legion late, and only saw a bit of EN before Nighthold came out, so there were a lot of fights where I only had the vaguest idea of what was going on. I don’t think I’d fully understood, say, how voting for the cleansed adds on Cenarius worked before, or what spawned Il’gynoth’s slimes, or what you were supposed to do with killing the adds in Xavius phase two (apparently you have to soak the nightmare goo when they die, or they respawn?)
Nighthold
Then we moved on to Nighthold achievements! (Because Mel/Tyrwll, who was leading the achievements run, decided she would rather punch herself in the face repeatedly than do the ToV achievements, especially the Guarm one, and they’re not needed for Glory of the Legion Raider anyway). Here’s how these went.
Skorpyron, “Cage Match.” You have to kill him while staying within the ring at the center of the room. (Not the tiny inner one; the larger outer one). This means no one can fuck up Shockwave and get thrown back into the adds. Also you have to be careful which crystals you stand behind for Shockwave, because some spawn outside this area. But other than that, it was not too hard, and we got it on the first try.
Chronomatic Anomaly, “Grand Opening.” This one is, oddly enough, an achievement that you probably want to do in heroic. Remember those Time Bombs that you don’t want to explode in melee?
Yeah. Now you want to explode them in melee.
Specifically, you want to explode a Time Bomb on every one of the blue circles along the boss’ path. When you successfully do this, it gets a little hard-to-see spotlight effect to show that it’s done.
The reason for doing this in heroic is because you just get more Time Bombs to work with before you hit his enrage timer. We weren’t able to complete this until we tried it on heroic.
Trilliax, “Gluten Free.” I would wager everyone has this already. It involves not eating the Toxic Slices he throws around the room, so pretty much every group probably has this already from their first derpy try at the boss. I know we did.
Spellblade Aluriel, “A Change in Scenery.” This one requires three kills, at least. Being one of the few bosses that can be kited out of her usual spot in the instance, this achievement involves killing Aluriel in different remote places in the dungeon — specifically Star Augur Etraeus’ tower, Krosus’ bridge, and Botanist Telarn’s garden.
The first part is easy — as soon as you step into the building where Star Augur is (next to Aluriel’s patrol path), you’re considered to be in Astromancer’s Rise. So you can just clear the trash and pull her a short distance. That one is only difficult because it’s an enclosed area, and finding a spot to stand that is not detonating arcane orbs and not in front of Annihilate can be tough.
Killing her on Krosus’ bridge is tough for a different reason. It’s distant, which is a pain — part of the achievement is you have to kill Aluriel within two minutes of engaging her. Also when you drop down to Krosus’ bridge, you can’t get back up without killing him. But after you’ve killed him, there won’t be much bridge left to fight Aluriel on.
The way we solved this is to have everybody but the locks (we have two) and one other person jump down, kill the summoner trash before Krosus, and then have the locks summon a tank and a healer back up. The tank and the healer go grab the boss — we picked our most mobile tank (DH) and healer (druid). (Or post-Tomb, just let a healer and a tank hang around upstairs while trash is cleared).
Of course the annoying bit was that it’s very possible for the healer to get Mark of Frost and die to umpteen stacks of Frostbitten right before reaching the bridge. Buuut aside from that hurried battle rez, it went pretty smoothly.
Oh, also, be careful with Searing Brand, lest it kick you back into Krosus’ toxic pee.
Next you have to kill Aluriel in Botanist’s arboretum. Distance is the biggest obstacle here, too, as well as the LOADS AND LOADS of trash to clear along the way. (We joked that many of the Nighthold achievements came down to KILL ALL THE TRASH). You can just kill Botanist normally and then pull Aluriel back to his doom-tree-under-glass. Again our healer got Marked, but this time we were ready for it, and avoided any premature deaths.
Star Augur Etraeus, “Elementalry!” This perhaps one of the most entertaining ones. Remember how at the back of Aluriel’s courtyard, there’s an imprisoned nether elemental? (That you probably killed once, and then never bothered with again, because why would you?) You have to free that guy, drag him up to Astromancer’s Rise (yes, all the way, this time), and then have him survive to the third phase of the Star Augur fight. When the elemental’s nameplate turns to “Well-Traveled Nether Elemental,” then it’s safe to kill him.
The hard part here is cleave: warlocks do cleave that they can’t turn off (Soulflame), DH tanking has a lot of cleave, and our DK cries when he can’t use Breath of Sindragosa. Basically we ended up having to keep the elemental banished throughout the whole fight.
In the process we learned: I suck at banish rotations.
(The second time we did this — on our way to do the Krosus and Gul’dan achievs — I just let Malefic handle the banishing. And our DK is now a fire mage, so 😉 )
But! We finished, and got the achievement.
Krosus, “Burning Bridges.” We didn’t get this one on our first trip — it involves letting fifteen of the Burning Pitch elementals die by dropping off the edge of the bridge when Krosus does his Slam. We only had eight raiders on achievement night, and since the number of Burning Pitch is dependent on the size of the raid, there just weren’t enough elementals to get that.
Also keeping those things alive hurts, even on normal. Tyr’s comment, trying to heal through that, was “Well, that was bracing.”
When we finally did this, we had 15 or so raiders, and we did it on heroic (where a minimum of six Burning Pitch will spawn each time). We also kept a couple of folks at the back killing the elementals that would never get dropped off the bridge. We also had like five healers, and were heroic Tomb-geared.
Tichondrius, “Not For You.” This is a personal achievement — it involves not taking any damage from Echoes of the Void, i.e. actually standing behind the pillars during this ability. During our initial run, everyone already had the achievement; when we went back there post-Tomb, we attempted to get it for the one person who didn’t have it (my husband on Mar), but we forgot that whole thing where each pillar only takes so much damage before it’s destroyed, and he ended up failing it. Womp womp. But another simple run through should be enough…
Elisande, “Infinitesimal.” This achievement is trivially easy — assuming someone in your raid has the Infinite Whelpling pet from Caverns of Time. You summon it during the fight, and eventually Elisande turns it against you (being the mistress of all things time-magic-related, I guess) and you have to kill it. As it turns out, two of our raiders had the pet, so we had two infinite whelplings betraying us!
Botanist Tel’arn, “The Fruit of All Evil.” This one was done as part of a separate alt run. It involves every member of the raid eating one of the “mysterious fruits” lying on the ground in his arboretum. (Continuing the trend for NH achievements, you have to clear a lot of trash in order to get to enough fruit to feed your raid). You then have to keep the debuff from the fruit on you through the end of the encounter, i.e. no one can die during the encounter.
These fruits do one of three weird effects every so often — a stun, a knockback, or summoning a hallucinatory beast that only you can see and attack. So yeah, imagine the craziness of the Botanist fight, only with 100% more wackiness.
The hardest part was surviving the fight with everyone alive, especially given that we were carrying a lot of undergeared toons for this run. We had a few wipes to reset it, but eventually succeeded.
Gul’dan, “I’ve Got My Eyes on You.” Kill sixteen Eyes of Gul’Dan within three seconds? HAHAHAHA NOPE.
Or at least that was what we said until we were sufficiently Tomb-geared, i.e. last week. We tried it first on heroic — because you get four eyes per phase on heroic instead of two, so you need to hold out for fewer replications — but the healing was too intense there, even with our shiny 920-ish gear. Also having dreadlords occasionally dropping from the sky makes things a bit tougher.
Finally we did it on normal, letting it replicate WAY MORE TIMES than we actually needed before saying “go!” Then we annihilated them.
As a note, we found we didn’t need to weaken the eyes beforehand, as there was enough unavoidable cleave going out in our party. Your mileage may vary, based on your raid team.
And that’s it! I now have the Grove Defiler pet, which is an evil moose that disappointingly does not fly:
Well, lack of flying makes some sense given the context of ‘flying wasn’t available in Legion yet.’
And everyone knows the squirrel was the flying one.