by Mathew McCurley

The Midsummer Fire Festival is pretty decent for a WoW holiday — good experience and gold from extinguishing and honoring fires, fun cosmetic rewards and occasionally mind-numbing achievements. Wait, what was that last one?

Torch Juggler has become notorious this year, as the achievement is not only difficult for people who are unable to click their mouses and buttons fast enough, but it is also part of the meta-achievement for completing the Midsummer Fire Festival and gaining the title “Flame Keeper.” So, here’s how to get Torch Juggler in three easy steps.
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by Allison Robert

This year, the Midsummer Fire Festival will go live at 3:00 am server time , June 21st and will run through 3:00 am Sunday, July 4th. While it doesn’t outwardly appear to be a very time-intensive holiday — the meta, awarding the Flame Warden title to Alliance players and Flame Keeper title to Horde players, consists of only six achievements — three of them will have you trekking all over the world.

We don’t believe that the holiday has changed significantly from its 2009 incarnation (if it has, the information hasn’t become available yet), but there have been a few changes to how you’ll do some of the achievements, and the holiday’s boss, Lord Ahune, also has an updated loot table. Consequently, I’ve updated and expanded our 2009 guide to reflect the changes we’re aware of.

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by Allison Robert

The Violet Hold

Violet Hold is arguably the easiest heroic in Wrath. It’s considerably less punishing than the Burning Crusade heroic on which it was patterned (Black Morass) and the achievements are all pretty easy as well. There’s one that’ll require you to return to VH until you get all of its bosses, but that shouldn’t be an issue if you’re using the dungeon finder, given its propensity for landing one there every other day. The other days, naturally, are all Halls of Stone runs.

Defenseless

Much like Make It Count, this is the kind of achievement you’ll probably get without expending any real effort. There were plenty of fresh ’80s who got it in the weeks after Wrath shipped without even knowing what the defense crystals were, and it’s only gotten easier since.

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by Allison Robert

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.

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by Allison Robert

I’d like to spend some time on achievements that are nothing but an absolute joy from beginning to end.

The following is an entirely arbitrary set of five achievements that I personally believe are a hoot.

Into the Wild Blue Yonder

I try to play WoW responsibly, which precludes having it around while I’m working on something else, getting some reading done or when I have an editor breathing down my neck about a deadline (this last one has been somewhat more troublesome since the advent of time stamps on the Armory, but that’s why God invented alts).

But I’ll admit to being possessed of an unhealthy obsession when my main hit 67 in Outland. Back in Burning Crusade, you could only train the expert riding skill (aka the ability to use a flying mount) at level 70 — unless you were a druid. Druids trained Flight Form at level 68 back then, and I wanted to fly more than anything else. Epics? Who cared? Raiding? Feh. Patch day? What’s that?

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by Allison Robert

With Cataclysm news ramping up lately, one of the things I’ve been thinking about is the possibility of certain achievements going bye-bye. While achievements have only been in the game since patch 3.0.2, we’ve already seen a few of them (and/or their rewards) go to that big MMORPG in the sky. Blizzard’s tended to do this when an achievement would simply have been too easy past a certain point, or — as with Timear Foresees — when game changes rendered them obsolete.

Below are four achievements that I think might be facing the firing squad as we ramp up to Cataclysm. (I’m sure there are more, but these were just the ones that occurred to me first.) I’ll be revisiting this article later to see if I was correct about any of them.

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by Allison Robert

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?

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by Allison Robert

The Children’s Week achievements and the meta For The Children are part of the year-long What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been, so you will want to get these done if you’re working toward a violet proto-drake.

Home Alone

This achievement was a little buggy last year; it reset after players logged off or to other characters. Fortunately, Blizzard was able to fix it, and it went back to being quite an easy achievement, albeit one with a slightly sadistic feel. Simply use your hearthstone while you have an orphan out, and you’ll have the achievement. For added fun, you can get them stranded in such pleasant locales as the Eastern Plaguelands, Wintergrasp mid-battle or the top of a frozen mountain in Storm Peaks.

Bad Example

I’ve listed where and how you can find the necessary sweets below; just don’t forget to have your orphan out before you sit down to what might be expensive treats:
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by Allison Robert

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.

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