Herald of Titans

Since 3.1 information began leaking out (way back when), one of the most appealing challenges (and title rewards) was the Herald of Titans achievement. It was something specifically for 10 man groups and it was designed only for 10 man groups. Being as I am a huge fan of 10 man vs 25 man, I was drooling all over this. The text on this achievement state:

Defeat Algalon the Observer in 10-player mode without anyone in the raid wearing any equipment with an item level higher than is available in 10-player Ulduar.

Unfortunately is very poor is pretty vague as it leaves a lot of open loopholes and a lot of doubt as to what qualifies. The last thing you want to do is kill Algalon and then realize that a specific peice of gear didn’t qualify and you don’t get the achievement. Bornakk later on did provide some further insight on this and added this additional information:

Quote: Bornakk (Source)

To try and clear up any confusion, the planned item level for the achievement in Ulduar 10 is item level 226. This level gear drops from both hard mode Ulduar 10 and regular boss kills in Ulduar 25. So yes, while players who clear Ulduar 25 will get more 226 gear at a faster pace and possibly get this achievement first, it’s an achievement anybody can do, so when a guild that only runs normal Ulduar 10 progresses through the instance and gets the hard modes done, they will be ready to take on this achievement.

Reward: Herald of the Titans (title)

If you primarily run 25 player instances and want to get this achievement/title, just hang on to your Kel’thuzad weapons and regular Ulduar 25 boss kills and you should be good to go.

Still somewhat vague if you ask me, we did our best to try and interpret the text based on that and on any other information we could find. In the end we managed to get the kill and based on our experience I think I can provide a more clearcut answer as to what qualifies.

1. Any items from Ulduar 10 easy or hard mode are eligible (gear or weapons)
2. Any items from Ulduar 25 easy are eligible (gear or weapons & hard mode items are not eligible)
3. Any post 3.1 content gear (Trial of the Champion, Onyxia, Trial of the Crusader etc) is not eligible
4. Any gear of ilv 226 or weapon of ilv 232 or lower are eligible if they meet criteria 3
5. Any PVP gear that meets criteria 4 are eligible
6. Badge gear that meets criteria 4 is eligible

The neat thing about this achievement is, this is still a challenging fight. Doing this in 3.2 gear does trivialize it but seeing as this fight has yet to be nerfed and you are using gear from 3.1 it is essentially like you are doing it back in 3.1 days. For those who are interested in trying to accomplish this achievement, hopefully you (and your group) have saved a lot of your gear from pre 3.2. If you haven’t there are ways to fill those gaps:

• Run Ulduar 10/25 and pickup gear! (duh)
• If your guild no longer runs Uld, if you have achievement whores try and run an uld 10 achievement run and fill your slots
• Look at crafted gear/badge gear, the huge bonus here is after you are done using it you can return it! (within a 2 hr window)
• Check the AH and look for some blue items (I’m not joking, our priest picked up a blue wand)
• Heirloom items? Unfortunately I didn’t get to test this but I would assume it would work? (Can anyone confirm?)

It was actually a little tough to find 10 suitable people to make a composition that would work for us. However we did manage to get a pretty solid group but I was forced to (get ready for this…) heal as resto for the fight (*cry*). We couldn’t find a 3rd healer and I almost had a full resto set so I brushed off my resto skills and gave it a whirl. I will say this, the fight is much harder as resto than as a kitty kat. A nice change of pace but not something I would want to do on a regular basis 🙂

At first we wiped a few times as it took a little bit of time in terms of getting used to the dmg taken by the tanks. The rate of dmg is significantly different in 3.1 gear vs 3.2 gear, as well stars took a bit of timing adjustment as well as the rate at which they went down was slower than they do with 3.2 gear. We ran into situations where they would die to dots slower than expected and a star would blow up just as a cosmic smash went off which resulted in a few bad wipes. In the end it took us about 5 tries and we got our fancy new titles.

As a suggestion to Blizzard (wonder if anyone from Blizzard reads this blog…) going forward, it would be awesome if you could put some sort of check in the achievement. For example if you click on the achievement it gives you a “OK YOU QUALIFY!” type answer or if you don’t qualify it will tell you “GO FIX YOUR SET!”. That way at least you know ahead of time whether your gearset works and you don’t have to suffer through running through the whole fight (or instance if you’re going for dedicated insanity) and realize that 1 peice of gear didn’t qualify. I think that would make it a lot easier for players that are going for these type of achievements.

If anyone has any questions about gear restrictions feel free to drop me a comment and I’ll try and help.

Blog Update: I’m working on a pretty neat feat of strength right now which I will share once I obtain it, hopefully within the next 2 weeks or so. Can anyone guess what it might be? 🙂 Stay tuned!