Raiding and Achievements

With the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, much noise has been made about the comparatively “easy” state of available PvE content. Especially because of the accomplishments of Ensidia, forums community-wide have been abuzz with the concern that our favorite aspect of the World of Warcraft—endgame raiding—has become an unfortunate casualty of Blizzard’s recent push to make all aspects of the game accessible to a larger player base. I will not spend time or space here delving into arguments about that guild’s gear level or previous experience with the majority of the content, nor the enormous differences in gear progression between The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King. Instead, I will here focus on one aspect of the game that many members of the community seem to have forgotten about in this new era of WoW: Achievements.

Since the release of patch 3.0, players have accepted the arrival of the new Achievement system in various ways. Some have gone practically insane attempting to acquire every achievement possible, while others have written off the system as a gimmick and have chosen to disregard it entirely. There can be little argument, however, that the system did fundamentally change how players experience the game, and that includes players primarily interested in the raiding aspect. To me, the most interesting portion of the Achievement pane is the “Dungeons & Raids” section. On one hand, this section provides exciting impetus for guilds to venture back into older instances. Whether raiders have conquered those older zones time and again in the past and merely want to rack up more achievement points or are experiencing the encounters for the first time, the new system brings players back to fun and interesting content that they would otherwise have little or no reason to experience at this stage of game evolution. This can only be looked at positively; not only do World of Warcraft players again have reason to vanquish the likes of Ragnaros, Nefarian and C’Thun, but Blizzard has found a way to revive—at least temporarily—quality content that is now vastly underused, a significant victory in the realm of achieving “replayability,” which is arguably the ultimate goal of a MMO.

Nonetheless, between 3.0 and the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, this was as far as I thought Achievements would really impact the raid environment. Now, however, having looked more closely at the Achievements available for Northrend raid zones (and having begun to attempt them), it has become clear to me that this new mechanic is deeply affecting how raiders experience the game in Wrath of the Lich King. In the Burning Crusade, when a player wanted to boast about his raiding prowess, he or she would simply say that he had managed to defeat Kael’thas, Illidan or Kil’jaeden. The claim could be backed up with a piece of gear or by the simple reputation of the player’s guild, but the novelty of that accomplishment was decidedly fleeting. Especially for guilds on very high-population servers, the fame of being the only guild on the server to have vanquished The Betrayer or The Deceiver lasted merely days or even hours. Thereafter that player and guild was then simply in the company of five to ten (and in some cases more) other guilds on the server that had achieved the same thing.

Wrath of the Lich King raid Achievements, however, have added substantially more layers to the process. While it is one thing for a guild to have progressed through and completed Naxxramas on Heroic difficulty or to have defeated Sartharion the Onyx Guardian in his lair, it is quite another to do so without letting a single raid member die or without first sacrificing a single drake. Indeed, the most difficult of these Achievements reward the player with a title recognizing his or her accomplishment. Therefore, while there may be ten or twenty guilds on the server that have defeated Kel’Thuzad, even on Heroic difficulty, it is likely that only a smaller portion of those guilds have the honor to wear the title “The Immortal.”

Though hardcore players may or may not like it, it is both reasonable and likely that Blizzard developers have intended the Achievement system to play such an integral part in the difficulty of endgame raiding. While in both original WoW and The Burning Crusade, the most prominent “achievement” of high-end raiding guilds was simply the successful completion of the most difficult raiding instances in existence, the Achievement system has allowed, and perhaps forced, the focus of high-end raiders to shift. Now, Blizzard has designed their game in a way that allows a greater percentage of the player base to experience the content they have spent so much time creating while still allowing opportunities for and providing challenges to the most skilled of players (and guilds) as well as the means to display those accomplishments when achieved. I fully expect to see these types of difficulty layers to continue and even improve as the game progresses to Ulduar and wherever else we are to be taken in the future, and I welcome the idea that content can be accessible but still challenging through the Achievement system.

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