I did the Turkinator achievement today. From my experience, I have a few tips.
- Use your mood-calming substance of choice. You’re probably going to be yelling at the computer screen, pulling out your hair, chewing your nails, and throwing things at your dog.
- Warn your family that you might be in a foul (or fowl) mood until you finish this.
I hated this achievement. It took me hours of running around Elwynn Forest before I got it. Hours. So frustrating – its not based on any kind of skill or technique. Its sheer perseverence and a bit of luck.
While I won’t go as far as to say the achievement is bad, it certainly has some issues. There are clearly some turkey-free zones in Elwynn, and you don’t realize it until you get there and can’t find any. That shouldn’t happen. If turkeys are in Elwynn, they should be everywhere in Elwynn. Also, there are high and low concentrations. Worst is that the turkeys are spread out enough that there are not enough to support more than one person at a time. You need to be the only one going for the achievement, or you have little chance.
In seriousness, here’s what I did to help myself succeed.
First, they say that you have 30 seconds between each turkey kill. Really, you might have a bit less, depending on your class. For rogues, our only ranged attack is our gun/bow/thrown weapon. That is not an instant cast. If you have a gun with a 3 second speed, then you really only have 27 seconds to get in range of a turkey, allowing for the time it takes to shoot. (a lot of casters have an advantage here due to their instant cast spells)
Rogues and warriors, you can help yourself by using a fast ranged weapon. I put away my 2.9 speed gun and dug a thrown weapon out of the depths of my bank with a 1.7 speed, and that 1.2 seconds actually saved me once.
Second – location, location, location. For Alliance, the best spot is the far east side of Elwynn Forest. My route was to circle around the Eastvale Logging Camp. The highest concentration of turkeys was along the mountains east of the logging camp, but there weren’t enough their to support the achievement.
My secret on my successful run… there are about 8 turkeys on the island in Stonecairn Lake. No one goes there. I got to 32 turkeys, then used Sprint with the Glyph of Blurred Speed to run across the water to the island and finish up the achievement without worrying about competition.
Third, time of day. All it takes is one other person in your route to mess it up for you. If possible, do this early in the morning or late, late at night.
Fourth, I used a macro to help me find and target turkeys. I got it from the comments for this achievement on Wowhead.
/cleartarget
/target Wild Turkey
/script SetRaidTarget(“target”,5)
What that does is it targets the nearest turkey and puts a blue square over its head. The blue square can be seen even through trees or terrain. Without that macro, I would have missed a lot of turkeys that were ust out of my line of sight. Note: to use this you have to be in a group and be the group leader so that you have marking ability.
Even with these tools, it took many, many failures before I was able to finish it. Good luck, PIlgrim!
Forever a Noob - A WoW Rogue Blog 
Tracker Snacks work as well
(Use: Restores 22500 health over 30 sec. If you spend at least 10 seconds eating you will become well fed and can track beasts for 1 hour.)
Planning ahead next turkey kill helped me with this achievement. Sometimes you can easily kill one turkey after another. What I recommend is to kill the first one, and then try look for third one before you kill the second. Or in other words, look for the next turkey while you are going for current one.
Another thing – ranged weapon felt annoyingly slow and unreliable (sometimes I waited those 3 seconds to not fire at all due to LoS issues or something), so I used mostly FoK to kill the turkeys. Fok has some range and is instant.
Completely agree with you – it took me ages too. I was even up at 3am trying it. In the end I got help from a “spotter” Paladin, mounted who I found easier to see than even the marked up turkeys. Having completed the Long, Strange Trip I thought I had escaped from hideous parts of holiday events, but as a pet collector I had to do this one. The emote on the Turkey reward makes it all worth it though – that alone kept me amused and giggling for 15 minutes 😀
I thought about using Tracker Snacks. My brother, who plays a hunter, used his tracking, and he said that there were so many yellow dots on his map that it wasn’t that useful. So I passed on the best tracking.
Bringing a spotter is a nice idea.
My wife had an easier time on her druid. She has instant cast into travel form, and instant cast moonfire. Very easy, rather than my long cast to mount and long cast to throw if I was out of FoK range.
As a warrior, use your Taunt to get them to come to you, it’ll save you some time. If you are feeling like spending some money enchant some cheap boots with +running speed.
Best time to do it is early morning (5-6am).
If you are Horde like me, the area southeast of Scarlet Monastery and the area near the undead starting area are both really good. Sometime you kill one and another respawns straight after.
If you see one person in your area, try to move away from them
If you see more than one, stop and save yourself some hassle and wait until later…
I just ran a large circle around the southeast corner of Elwynn, south of the road and east of the river. There wasn’t anyone else over there at the time, and there are enough turkeys that by the time you complete a loop, the first ones will have respawned. Perhaps I was just lucky, but it only took me one try once I found that area. I’d tried the areas nearer to Goldshire a few times, but they were overfarmed and not worth it.
Another tip, which for some reason the other players seemed to wilfully ignore:
If you see another player, go in the OTHER direction. Running towards them and competing for kills just means you both lose. Even if you beat them to the next turkey, they’ll beat you to the one after that since you’ll have to dismount.
Also, I didn’t use any ranged attacks, I just rode up and mutilated and moved on. If the turkey was right next to a prowler or something, I’d FoK instead so I wouldn’t have to worry about an annoying level 8 mob keeping me from mounting.
And don’t loot the turkeys if you’re really going for the achievement. Every second counts.
I couldn’t do it without ranged attacks. At least once every attempt, I wound up 30 yards from the nearest turkey with 3 seconds left.
I did it late night orbitting the logging camp, similar to you.
I have both the rocket gloves and the gnomish lightning rod for instant ranged attacks.
But I didn’t need to do anything ranged.
I just paced myself, kept an eye open for the target after next and had a lucky break with nobody camping the same site.
Heading away from other achievers (instead of racing them for kills) is a good tip from my guild website.
Now that we’re a couple days into the holiday it should be pretty easy to finish – MUCH less competition.
Definitely agree with FoKing the turkeys, ranged attack takes too long. I found that by mounting and running to the next, I was never short of energy, and it’s instant.
Location-wise, I found Elwynn awful. Since you have to head out to Undercity to sit at their table, I’d recommend hunting turkeys out there.
Just east of UC, run along the south side of the road towards the Bulwark, plenty of turkeys every 20 yards or so. FoK, mount, run, FoK, repeat. The macro you posted looks awesome too, Dinaer.
Once you reach the Bulwark, cross the road and head west along it, repeating as above. I guess your mileage may vary depending on your server, Alliance:Horde ratio, PvP or PvE (I’m carebear myself), but I found zero competition and got this far more easily than the struggles in Elwynn. The spawn points are pretty messed up there, imo.
Struggled at first and had that “aaaaaaaaaaaargh” got to 37, 33 and 31 before giving it a rest.
Then what?
I used Tracker Snacks!
They definitely helped. First time I used this food buff I cleared it in one easy go.
I didn’t even mount… Occassionally used Sprint and Rocket Boots. Just ran in and FoK. Yes… There are quite a few beasts but its simply a matter of running your mouse cursor over the yellow dots to see where the turkeys are.
While running towards the first turkey I’m already checking my minimap for the next one.
If you do it later on at night (I did at 12am) the turkeys are in clusters… Once you go to one you’d easily see another 1 or 2 on your mini-map and while on your way to the next one another 1 or 2 will pop up.
Of course, this is assuming you don’t do this at peak hours and with those damn pesky droooooooods running around.
Why is it us Rogues are getting shot by turkey feathers? The DROODS are the biggest pain in this one!!!!
Yeah, the Tracker Snacks help a lot.
Sure, there are other beasts in Elwynn as well, but the further you go from Goldshire, there is less neutral beasts and more aggresive ones – and that makes it much easier to find a yellow dot between all the red ones.
I personally didn’t have any problem with this event. I got the first achievement, without even knowing what it was on my rogue. I was just killing them for the cooking quest. Did it later with my DK. Haven’t yet tried on my hunter. But as long as you are level 30 or above, it should be fairly easy, with less aggro. I just ignored the attacks at level 80, unless something knocked me down.
For the record, it’s 40 turkeys in 20 minutes.
Compiled and added my own tips here – http://rpg-exploiters.com/guides-strategies/world-of-warcraft-turkinator-tips/
I found the best way was to take it slow and let time run down to 7-8 seconds left even if I could get the next one right away. This gives the zone time to repopulate and you don’t run out.
Probably a little late to let you know, but maybe will help for next year. On our server, horde is less populous than alliance. The turkeys are much easier to spot and plan your run in Trisfal Glades than in Elwynn Forest and you get credit just the same. They even cook up and taste like real Elwynn turkeys!
I got mine in Tirisfal Glades between the Bulwark and UC. LOTS of turkeys and noone around to compete against.