Minipost: A Bloody, Frostbitten, Timeless few weeks


I think we're officially in the end-of-expansion lull. I've spent the last few weeks kind of bored in-game, looking for things to keep me occupied. For a while, Challenge Modes were a great diversion. But now that I'm done those, I've turned to tidying up some unfinished business - rare spawns!

At the beginning of the month, Fabulor killed Golganarr on the Timeless Isle, who is an extremely rare sight. That put me at just one short of Timeless Champion. However, the one rare spawn I was missing was Monstrous Spineclaw, another rare infamous for its, well, rarity. I didn't really feel like slaughtering crabs for hours until it spawned, so I moved on.

However, it got me to thinking, and I realized I was only 7 away from Bloody Rare, for killing all the Outlands rares. Now, Drenden's been slated to merge with Arathor for a while now, and even though I keep bribing Blizzard and getting the merge postponed, it's going to happen sooner or later. So I figured, I may as well try to get Bloody Rare done before there's another server's population out there as competition!

I took Fabulor to Outlands and had him parked at various spots, periodically checking for rares or searching around while waiting in Battleground or LFR queues (I'm still trying to get Kovok). I really came to loathe the Outlands rare spawn setup, where they can spawn in not just one or two places, but all over the freaking map. Look at where that asshole Kraator can spawn:


You can't just park in one place and wait for NPC Scan to go off, you've gotta keep flying all over the place and checking all the spawn points. And it was even worse when I needed two rares in a single zone! So much so that I actually combined spawn points in Photoshop and made a little cheat sheet for every zone.


I didn't have any luck for about a week, and then suddenly one night the stars aligned, and I got all 7 rares I still needed in a single day. Which is all sorts of ridiculous.


With Bloody Rare out of the way, naturally I decided to turn to Frostbitten, for all the Northrend rares! I had been working on this about a year ago, and had gotten the list down to 4.

This time (and I really should have done this for Bloody Rare) I just moved 4 different characters to Northrend to camp in each zone I needed, and periodically logged in on them, did a quick circuit, then logged off.

After two weeks of this, I finally nabbed one. Then, something bizarre happened. I was on the Isle as Fab killing the Celestials, and Golganarr spawned again. Since he takes forever to kill (he has a ton of health), I figured I'd have time to switch characters and kill him as Rades on the off-chance that Rades happened to be my first character to spot & kill a Monstrous Spineclaw.

So I switched to Rades, started flying out to the Isle, and then realized...he already had a Golganarr kill. AND a Monstrous Spineclaw kill. In fact, of the 9 Isle rares Rades still needed, none of them were super rare ones.

Bewildered, I spent the next few hours roaming around the Isle, and it wasn't long until...


I celebrated this accomplishment by logging back over to my Northrend-parked characters, and finding two more of the rares I still needed! (One of which was Aotona, who I had never seen - or tamed - before. Part of me wants to tame it...part of me never wants to go back to Sholazar again.)


The next morning, guess who showed up? Yep, the last two rares I needed. I got the final kill (Grocklar, in Grizzly Hills) on Rades, which felt appropriate, seeing as how he's the character who started Frostbitten, back in Wrath.


And just for good measure, I hopped back to Fabulor and parked him on the Isle, just in case. And what do you know - a Monstrous Spineclaw spawned.


Yeah, that's Timeless Champion, the annoying achievement for killing every Isle rare on a single character, AGAIN. Too bad duplicate achievements don't count.

Bloody Rare, Frostbitten, and Timeless Champion...twice. Not a bad month for long-term achievements!