Tobold's Blog
Friday, June 12, 2015
 
How to become a Draenor Pathfinder

I think the subject of the new achievement / "attunement" Draenor Pathfinder necessary to get flying in Draenor merits closer examination. How hard is it to do, and who is it for? Previous implementations of attunements, "you have to do this in order to be allowed to do that", have not always been a huge success. So how about Draenor Pathfinding.

From what was announced the Draenor Pathfinding achievement is based on 4 already existing / doable achievements: Exploring Draenor, Draenor Loremaster, Securing Draenor, and finding 100 Draenor treasures. While that might be subject to change, let's have a look at those:

Exploring Draenor and Draenor Loremaster are both very easy. You need to visit every sub-zone on the map of Draenor for the former, and do all the main zone story lines for the latter. Unless you had some very unconventional way to level your character to 100, chances are that you already completed most of the requirements of both of those achievements. There might be some more exotic sub-zones missing on your list, but they tend to be the same exotic sub-zones for everybody, and if you type the name of that sub-zone into the YouTube search interface, you'll certainly find a video showing you how to get there. The Draenor Loremaster achievement doesn't count number of quests done, but certain main story quest lines from the different zones. Those are the same main story quest lines you needed to open your garrison outposts in the various zones, which makes it not unlikely that you already did them. If not, you'll have to do some regular questing designed for characters below level 100, which should be trivial enough.

Finding 100 Draenor treasures is a bit more weird. The already existing achievements asks for 200 treasures, so this has been reduced for the Draenor Pathfinding achievement. I call treasures weird because they have been completely optional, and somewhat of a change to how the world previously worked. As a consequence some people might conceivably not have found a single treasure on their way to level 100. In vanilla WoW and all previous expansions a broken down cart on the side of the road was always just a piece of decoration; there was never any interaction with it. In Draenor you are suddenly supposed to check out that broken down cart closely, and find a rather small clickable object in it or under it, which is a treasure. Treasures can be pretty much everywhere, under trees, in small niches in buildings, on top of mountains. A few need a sort of jumping puzzle to get there, but most don't, and you can easily get 100 treasures without jumping once, if you know where they are. For that you either need a treasure map in game, or, far easier, an addon that marks all treasure locations on your map and mini-map. With the addon the 100 treasures are easy enough, even if you haven't done any during leveling.

In my opinion the most work is the Securing Draenor achievement. There are 12 places distributed all over Draenor with level 100 mobs which are part of a series of daily quests from the garrison to get Apexis crystals. If you are one of the three people in WoW who love Apexis crystals and hunted for them daily, you'll already have this achievement. But I'd guess that most of us don't. The problem up to now was that the daily quest was the same for everybody, so the one place of the 12 that was the target of the day was usually overcrowded with players competing for mob spawns, which made these daily quests not really enjoyable. But the good news is that you don't need the daily quests to do the achievement. And if you have a surplus of garrison resources you can even buy the 12 quests from the quartermaster in your garrison. If you do the ones that *aren't* the quest of the day, there should be a lot less competition for spawns. If you have been playing for a while and got a decent iLevel above 640 from whatever you did, even from just doing follower missions, none of the mobs should pose a serious threat. Overall this quest does however require several hours worth of farming mobs in the 12 locations, so it isn't quite as easy as the other requirements.

Beyond those four achievements, in order to get the Draenor Pathfinder achievement you also need to be revered with 3 new factions in the Tanaan Jungle. Right now that is my biggest worry. I'm not a huge fan of reputation grinds, and I'm not sure how many hours it will take to get three factions to revered. I guess we will have to wait and see for that part. But the good news is that the other parts of Draenor Pathfinder are soloable by an average player in a reasonable number of hours. Flying in Draenor will not be an ultra-rare achievement for a tiny elite. Given how much time and money some people spent on collecting flying mounts, that is a good thing.

Comments:
http://www.wowhead.com/flying

Give it your realm/character name and it will help you find what you still miss. The 100 treasures achievement isn't showed as it's not available ingame yet.
 
I guess I'll be back for 6.2 but I am so annoyed the token (gold) price is way over the sky. 43K was the lowest price so far in the last weeks. §Meanwhile US players get the same token for 23K. Paying in EUR, I guess it's better if I keep those 43K and spend real money for the month sub.
 
If you have HandyNotes to see treasures, there is now a white dot that indicates you need to go there to discover an area.

Normal questing will get you many/most of the way there but not all the way to Loremaster. Spires has a quest or two after the outpost, while Nagrand does the outpost first thing. Still, as you said, there are just a few things chains left and they are even easier for 6xx 100s.

http://www.wowhead.com/guides/achievements/draenor-pathfinder-how-to-unlock-flying-in-draenor

is even more specific about the the TJ reps. 19 days seems worst case. And points out a human with a T3 Trading Post near a Standard with a DM buff is getting a 55% buff cause why not optimize everything.
 
Thanks for the link, Rugus!

Tobold, you mentioned that doing the Apexis crystal quests that aren't the quest of the day means there is a lot less competition for spawns. Which is very true. But there is always a pick-up group doing the quest of the day, and that's even better, because you share each other's work. Just check the group finder.

 
The only part of this that has me scratching my head is the 100 "treasures" part. Ok, sure... add hundreds of "treasures" whose only purpose seems to be to appeal to a few aficionados of puzzle games. There seems to be no lore attached, and no purpose other than "Hey! I put jumpy puzzles in the game!"

What the hell? Why do they care so much about these that they're willing to gate flying on them? Or, as appears, cancel flying altogether? What happened? Did the CEO's 12 year old daughter beg for this during a "Bring your daughter to work" day?
 
I don't think treasures are really much related to jumping puzzles, the great majority of them is not a puzzle at all and requires no jumping. Rather it is a game element designed to appeal to the explorer type of player, with bits of treasures hidden in odd corners all over the world.
 
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/17999424949#3
http://www.wowhead.com/news=247820/patch-6-2-reputation-and-treasure-guides-tanaan-vanity-items

It looks like the most it will take if you do the minimum - i.e. only the weekly for the Saberstalkers and not the daily that apparently isn't available every day - and have a level 3 trading post is 5 weeks.

I saw a more thorough breakdown specifically of the timing involved yesterday, but can't recall which blog it was from. It doesn't seem to have been one from my RSS, either, which is silly. I clearly should have added whoever it was.

Short version is (each before modifiers):
Saberstalkers have a weekly for 3500 rep and randomly have a daily for 1500. In addition, there are mobs to grind if you're of a mind. They roam in groups, so take friends and make a day of it.
Order of the Awakened has a single daily for 1500.
Hand of the Prophet/Vol'jin's Headhunters have three to four dailys for up to 1250.

I am almost certain that what I saw in the other breakdown I read yesterday is that it will take a minimum of 19 days to get to revered with all three if you do all the things you can do. Since we have no idea when 6.2.x will be out at this point, I would say those requirements can safely be met much more casually.
 
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