Hi!
I recently started doing some exploration achievements and toy collecting. Made me want to get more achievements on my down-time when there’s nothing else to do.
But of course there’s so much to do that I don’t know what to start with and I’d like to ask seasoned achievement hunters with what they recommend I start with and what the roadmap could look like. I’d appreciate any input. The order doesn’t really matter for me since I like achievement points.
Thank you!
P.S. Up front:
I went overboard on the collection of pets and mounts, but forgot the most general achievement advice:
JOIN THE ACHIEVEMENTS DISCORD
The Achievements Discord Server has thousands of people looking to do achievemts. You will get lots of ideas and help and groups there!
Something you can start working on is to
Well, I won’t prescribe a path, but I know that you need to have this bookmarked:
Having a bunch of alts helps A LOT. A aignificant number of mounts and pets drop from old raid bosses and Rares, so being able to farm them on multiple characters each week.
Also, rep. I think almost every faction in the game rewards a mount at Exalted, maybe Revered sometimes. So start planning how to get rep with all of them.
Other mounts are rewards from achievements, which works nicely.
So you will be looking at a list of mounts and asking: what do I need to do to get THAT one? An awful lot of it is raid farming and rep farming.
https://warcraftmounts.com/ is a great starting point for a list.
I suggest that you make a schedule or spreadsheet or get an addon reminder weekly activities, and schedule characters and raids and rares for the drop mounts and pets.
Then assign characters to earning rep with the factions that sell mounts you want. Wowhead has guides for earning rep with each faction.5.
Pets are a lot more complicated. Pets are their own minigame.
Pets can be roughly divided into wild pets, and cageable pets. Cageables can be divided by source into Drops, Profession, Vendor, and Achievement.
But unlike mounts, pets are used to get more pets.
Wild pets are captured in the world using other pets. And other pets are earned by using other pets in pet battles.
So unlike mounts, where an Invincible is an Invincible is an Invincible, a Qiraji Guardling comes in 10 Breeds, and you absolutely and specifically need an S/S Breed for use in battle.
A lot of cageable pets are basically too cheap and plentiful to auction, so they appear in droves at very cheap prices. Look at what is available on Silvermoon:
https://undermine.exchange/#eu-silvermoon/search/cat=17
You can also use Magpie
to list only the pets you don’t already have, which is handy when you start to have a lot.
You can easily buy pets on any EU realm now - find cheapest realm, put gold in Warbank. make an alt, withdraw gold, buy pet, learn it, delete alt. Since the pet market is very irrational, you should keep checking it a few times a week, since people often do sell of accidental drops very cheap.
Cageable pets are typically drops from rares and old raid bosses, so very much like mounts. With there, you might start with the Raiding with Leashes achievements https://www.wowhead.com/search?q=raiding+with+leashes#
Raiding with Leashes will ofc crossover with your mount farms, but the RWL drops are typically much faster to get. You can also buy a lot of the drop pets caged at the Auction House, and a lot of them are very cheap.
For pets, you really, really want to get at least one pet to 25 ASAP. Some pets you find on the AH will be level 25 already, and you can’t uncage a pet unless you already have a pet at that level, so having a pet at 25 means you can uncage anything.
Fastest way to do that isto pick up the quest https://www.wowhead.com/quest=70647/oh-where-oh-where-can-he-be in Valdrakken. Gets you 2 25s and a 23 in an hour or so.
So, dividing pets by source:
Same as mounts, plus using the AH as a resource.
You will want to have got all your Taming team pets to 25 before you start, in theinterest of efficiency. Nothing worse than losing a capture battle because your pets weren’t strong enough. You already have Grumpy, who is an ideal capturer with Howl + Superbark.
Mostly, you follow the Safari achievements.
I have a whole post about this here:
While some pets come with rep, so you can double up on your Mount rep work, most of them come from buying with currency, called Polished Pet Charms. You earn Charms by doing Pet Battle World Quests in Legion and later. So this is another farming job for your alts. You can earn 100-150 Charms per day per character, so it adds up.
There is a lot in this.
My four part guide to getting started with battling is here:
Oof. Enough for now. Ask ifyou have any specific questions.
This is the best reply I could’ve gotten. Thank you so much.
I’ve already joined the discord. And yes, starting with exploration, loremaster and instance achievements make perfect sense!
I copied this over to my docs if this post ever disappears.
For raid/rare farming, what do you think might be a healthy amount of alts to have but not really overdo it?
Regarding the same alts, do you have any tips on how to effectively manage them?
Do you recommend saving gold to perhaps try the black market auction house not yet dropped mounts.
It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
It will vary over the course of the next couple of years, which is what you are looking at. And ofc it depends on what time you can afford, and how you are feeling about it - and you WILL feel differently over time.
Ashes of A’lar and Ji-Kun took me something like 300 kills each. I got Invincible pretty much on schedule, at about 100. Each alt can do 50 kills per year. Personally, I think 4-6 alts is about right. I knew one guy who deleted 8 max-level alts just because he couldn’t face feeling obliged to run them through ICC every week.
It also helps to vary your targets. There was a time I was SOOOO sick of ToT. So I just dropped it from my weekly runs for a few months, and concentrated on other runs.
You can’t do ALL the runs EVERY week. Change it up a bit - do Pandaria and Legion for a while, then Wrath and BfA, and so on. If you can keep more than 5-6 alts doing the same runs for months, you’re stronger than I am! 
Most drops from Rares are account-wide for the day, so if you have some you’re not using, you could park them beside the annoying rares to get to, like in Maldraxxus. I think Rares annoy me more than instances, because of all the travelling - especially within Shadowlands, where you have to hop around all of the zones with those loooong nothing-flights. 
You don’t really need to manage the alts themselves - any alt will do for anything, and this is even more true now that mogs are learned regardless of armour type. (You are also collecting Tier Sets, and the Achievements for them, as your un these raids.)
You do need to manage your targets. Make your list of mounts and pets you want to acquire, and the mob that drops them. And just make sure you are hitting a suitable number of them regularly, while varying them to stave off burnout.
You also do need to manage yourself. Marathon, not sprint. When you are feeling bad about a partticular raid farm, go /love some Squirrels or sample the food or drinks of an expansion, and all of those off beat Explorer achievements. And it’s OK to take a week or two off farming when it’s too much of a chore. Do some Pets, or Expansion Features, or Argent Tournament or something.
You could pick up the addon Rarity to track your kills on each. Also AllTheThings - though maybe AllTheThings should come with a Mental health warning! 
I also found Instance Achievement Tracker handy. It reminds you at teh start of each instance and each boss which achievemnts you don’t have forit. If you’re running through anyhow, why not pick up a few of them on the way?
Well, I always recommend saving gold. It’s more likely to come in for practical use buying low-drop-rate pets and profession mounts like Vial of the Sands and the Pandaria Panthers and the Engineering Mounts at the AH when they’re listed at bargain prices than at the BMAH, though. Actually rare mounts, the ones that are unobtainable or very low drop rates, will be bid way over your head at the BMAH before you even get to them.
Also, don’t neglect the price of buying all the Reputation mounts. Those were cheap by today’s standards up until … Draenor? Then they went nuts. The Lightforged Warframe alone costs 500,000 gold, and those Runestriders are 10K each. 500K here, 200K there, soon you’re talking about real money!
Blizzard have turned off the gold tap this expansion. For the past 3 or 4 expansions, they pumped gold into the game for passive or low-effort activities, from the Mission Tables of Draenor to the generous gold of WQ in DF. They have turned down the inflow, I assume, because they became concerned about inflation … but they might turn it on again next expansion. It’s a thing to consider if you are tempted to go nuts earning gold now, which would not be fun when you are also taking on some long-term darms.
Hey!
You’ve made this super clear for me. I did not expect such lengthy answers from anyone. <3
I started yesterday with some achievements I have not done in wotlk, tbc, will continue today 
Any way I can thank you for writing all of this up?
I appreciate the offer, but no thanks are necessary. I quite enjoy helping out where I can.
Ask again if you have any more questions, but I imagine YouTube and Wowhead will provide videos for how to complete the tricky achievements, and the Achievements Discord crowd are also very helpful for specifics. 