Does anyone pay attention to guild achievement points?

One of the commonly used guild progression tracker sites is GuildOx.  A quick look at the GuildOx main page shows the world rankings in raid progression.  As I write this, Paragon (Lightning’s Blade – EU) is #1, having killed 3/12 heroic raid bosses.

Raking guilds by raid progression is a long-time tradition in WoW.  For guilds like mine, its never been a concern since we are not a progression guild.  When I have checked sites like GuildOx, out of curiosity, my guild has ranked around 35-50 on raid progression on my server.  Are there actually 35-50 guilds on my server that are “better” than mine?  Not hardly.  But guilds have different areas of emphasis and some are not measurable in a simple ranking system.

Now take a peek at GuildOx again.  Down on the left side there is a menu, and one of the options is Guild Achievement Ranks.  Now that is interesting to me.

Will anyone who visits GuildOx even click on that?  Does anyone care?  Guild achievements are just for fun.  You don’t get anything from most of them except the satisfaction of cooperative guild activities.

But isn’t that one of the points of a guild?  Cooperation?  When we saw that we could get a lot of guild achievements, our membership was really motivated.  Despite all of the heroics and questing and gearing and other stuff that is going on, we had dozens of guildmates who volunteered to fly around the old world and work on guild achievements.  There was rapid-fire achievement spam in the chat pane.  It was an absolute blast.  No one earned any gold or fluff items from it, but we had fun and did stuff together that helped build guild camaraderie.

As of right now my guild, which rarely ranks in the top 40 in raid progression on my server, is in the top 50 in the world in guild achievement points.  More than likely, very few people will even look at that list.  But we know, and we’re a better, more cohesive group for having done it.

Getting There, Slowly

Its hard to believe it, with as much time as I spend in game, but I haven’t even reached level 84 yet.

Real Life has conspired to thwart me here.  I made a commitment to level with my wife when the expansion came out.  In an unfortunate bit of timing, she started a new job just days before Cataclysm, which has severely curtailed her game time.  As a result, I have spent many hours in game without her, and I’ve had to pursue activities that would not lead me to level up in her absence.

In our short snippets of play time we’ve worked through all of Mount Hyjal and Deepholm, putting us more than halfway through level 83.  Next up is Uldum.

What am I doing to keep busy if I can’t level?

• Every day I do the cooking and fishing dailies on multiple characters.
• I spend a lot of time crafting glyphs and netherweave bags and playing around in the auction house
• I’ve been buying up cooking mats to get my guild to the Set the Oven to Cataclysmic achievement and unlock the first cooking feast.
• I have tried to level my tradeskills, but I have not been able to completely level up all of them because I cannot access the vendors in Twilight Highlands yet.  I’ve gotten the easy ones – fishing, cooking, and first aid – done.  Also skinning.  Still working on leatherworking, inscription, tailoring, enchanting, mining, and engineering.
• I have not gotten very far in archaeology.  For one, it was giving me XP and I was going to level ahead of my wife by doing it.  I even tried turning off XP gains to do it.  But – and I hate to say this because I know some people love it – its pretty dull.  I can only do it for a short while before I feel like I am wasting my time.  I’m not into pets and mounts so there is little draw for me.
• I’ve worked on my paladin, getting him to 82 in Vashj’ir.  I don’t want him to be my first toon to the level cap, though.  Also, He is specced only into Prot and I’ve not had the guts to try tanking with him yet.  Leveling as prot has not been bad at all.

I do feel a little bothered in my current situation. Back in the Wrath release I also leveled slowly due to time constraints at the holidays.  However, leveling took longer in Wrath.  Despite my slow start, I was not that far behind my guildmates when I reached the level cap.

In Cataclysm, leveling was over in the blink of an eye, even for many casual players.  As I have plodded toward the level cap at a glacial pace, I know that I am falling behind.  Its an uncomfortable feeling, and another reason why I wish the leveling part of the game was a bit more robust.

Fortunately for me, I know that I’ll catch up quickly.  Thanks to having a large supply of gold, I’ll be able to buy up BoE items from the auction house and speed up the gearing process once I reach 85.

So, fair warning to any who come here looking for rogue advice.  Most of you will probably be raiding and doing heroics before me.  In previous expansions, I wrote raid guides for rogues that were pretty well-received.  I hope to get to that as soon as I can, but it may be a little while longer.  I won’t write a guide until I have done the fight myself, and that’s not going to happen for a couple of weeks yet.