I’ve written a post about me being a bad hunter and not having raid buff pets. Whilst this is something which should only take me an afternoon to do, its not high on my list of things to do.

Specifically, 9,999 giant dinosaur bones so I can purchase a mount – Reins of the Bone-White Primal Raptor.

Whilst doing this with my hunter – mostly thanks to her being a skinner – I’ll have a good chance of getting Primal Eggs as well. I’m just missing the Black Primal Raptor mount you can get from those!

Ah, this pain of an achievement. The Seat of Knowledge rewards the title “Seeker of Knowledge” – a nice title for a character doing archeology.

However it means you have to find not just normal versions of artifacts. No, you have to find pristine ones!

I’m on the home leg with this one, I only need to find a Pristine Pandaren Tea Set to complete it.

Unfortunately it seems the Pandaren were somewhat clumsy with their tea sets. Or my dwarf fingers aren’t so gentle. So far I’ve found 36 of these tea sets and not one of them is good enough to be considered to be “Pristine”.

I’ve ended up doing all of the “Collector” achievements whilst chasing this – in fact right now the only archeology achievement in the game I’ve not done is The Seat of Knowledge.

The problem here is three fold. First I need a Pandaren digsite – not guarenteed and you can only use a Lorewalker’s Map to randomize your digsites once every half hour if you have no Pandaren digsites up. Oh and there is no guarentee that the ones you get instead will be Pandaren either!

Then you need to actually have a tea set to solve – again, something you don’t control. And if you don’t have a tea set, well, see point 1 – you need lots of Pandaren fragments to complete all of the artifacts not involved in the making of tea.

Finally, you need one of the tea sets to actually be pristine – apparently there is a 10% chance of a tea set being pristine. So I’ll be some time yet!

Oooh look! Another mount! You can buy the Brawler’s Burly Mushan Beast when you reach rank 10.

I’ve started poking at this and already reached rank 3 on my main – him being geared in heroic Seige of Orgrimmar gear kind of helps here! But I know that it’ll get far more complex later and I’m sure a lot of cursing will be done down the road.

I’ve been using the excellent guides at WoWHead to help with this task:

• Wowhead’s Brawler’s Guild Guide
• Brawler’s Guild Guide – Rank 1 to 7 + old rank 8 bosses
• Brawler’s Guild Guide – Rank 8-10

The comments on individual bosses can also be quite useful. It’ll be interesting doing some of the later ones as a shadow priest – I’ve already flipped over to the procy talent build for the initial bosses. I’ll probably tweak talents on each of the later bosses however.

Ah PvP, something I’ll often do in the tailend of an expansion. Currently my frost mage is having lots of fun deep freezing other players and spamming ice lances onto them!

She is also serving Ordos, using Fire-Watcher’s Oath to get Bloody Coins from battlegrounds and world PvP.

These coins will be used to buy another mount – the Ashhide Mushan Beast – using 500 coins.

Unfortunately you need to get killing blows to gain coins – no guarentee given the typical battleground scrum! Plus the item only gives you a 10 minute buff whilst having a 10 minute cooldown – if you die with the buff on, you have to wait to reapply it.

Which is probably why my mage only has 150 of the 500 coins she needs. But she’s getting there, slowly. And she is getting more 550 gear which is really helping.

Yet another mount-related thing to do – getting the 10 Skyshards together to create a Skycrystal so I can remove Alani‘s protective shield so I can kill & loot Reins of the Thundering Ruby Cloud Serpent from it!

I have 5 skyshards already, but I know from experience that it will be a long & hard slog cursing RNG to get the other 5 I need!

The observant will note that a lot of these things are mounts. That there is a 250 mount achievement in Warlords may have something to do with my mount chasing! There is a source of mounts which I’ve not covered yet – dungeons and raids! I’ve got a few of this already, so why not add a few more! It was the Godmother who inspired me to start another instance mount grindfest.

There are some others – like Mimiron’s Head, Invincible and the Pureblood Fire Hawk – which I’ve not included as they’re even more of a pain to get to than the ones above! I should also get around to doing the meta-achievements for mounts at somepoint as well.

The monk is the only class I’ve not leveled to 90 and my dwarfen monk is currently level 86. Soooo close.

No achievements or mounts associated with this one, just for a change!

Most of my characters are alliance. As a result I’ve not really experienced the horde side of the game and there are some nice quest lines there. And there are some stories which start on the alliance side and only finish with the horde – the Worgen starting experience is probably the best example this.

If I do get my horde to 90 then I’ll end up getting the Double Agent achievement.

Another one to file under “Wait, its got a mount? Sign me up!” – the Hearthsteed from winning three Hearthstone games in play or arena mode.

I’ve never really poked the proving grounds – probably since I’ve not really felt the need to do them. Plus being scaled down to 463 gear, understandable given what the proving grounds are for, can make things fun if you’re used to higher gear levels.

I’ll probably do this one on my warlock, taking adventage of the set she built for challenge modes as the same scaling is present there.