From gathering them on Live after the new meta achievement was revealed, I can give the following pointers on things that will be impossible or extremely difficult to do due to the content being outdated or being unnecessarily annoying.
Please ADD TO THIS. If you find another achievement needed for the Meta that’s too outdated, or something that could really see change, ADD TO THIS POST! I’ve only added the ones that I came across, and I had half the meta finished.
Tell Me A Tale. This achievement requires you to collect all of the rare quest drops from Island Expeditions. I farmed my last one, the Wiggling Mass, for months on end back in BFA, with no luck. The RNG on this one is brutal. Suggested change: Require x amount of quest items instead of all.
Notorious: Win 50 PVP Island Expeditions. Calm down folks, a Dev on X already confirmed this one is likely an oversight and will be removed. But just incase… Suggested change: Remove.
The Rajani: Hit exalted with the 8.3 Rajani faction. As someone who played daily in BFA without break, and as someone that maxed out all of their reputations, I did not do Rajani. Why? Because it does not feel good to do dailies for only a handful of rep per day, with no extra sources. Suggested change: Require Revered OR increase rep from dailies OR add more sources for daily rep, like killing rares.
Combating the Corruption: Requires you to kill specific Elites in N’Zoth Invasions. This one is pretty well known for being terrible as these NPCs are extremely hard to find, and if they’re hard to find now, they’ll be impossible to find when this leaves the PTR. Suggested change: Remove.
It’s Not A Tumor!: Destroy 1000 Corruption Tumors in N’Zoth Invasions. This one is okayish, if it weren’t for 2 things. One, it dismounts you. Two, it’s a cast. Suggested change: Turn them into killable NPC’s OR make it instantly destroyed. Quicker respawn wouldn’t be too bad either.
Essence Essentials: Collect every Rank 1 Essence from 8.2 Rise of Azshara. Have we forgotten the original sources of these essences? There’s one for World PVP in Nazjatar, and another for regular PVP, of which the Rank 1 quest requires you to do a PVP Island. Suggested change: Do not include any of the PVP essences in this, or other essence achievements.
Undersea Usurper & Mecha-Done. Both of these meta achievements have some extremely RNG heavy elements or insane timegating. (I’ve done these in BFA, but I recall getting stuck on Spraypaints, Music Rolls, Recipes and the weekly quest to summon an elemental boss in a cave that required FOURTEEN WEEKS TO COMPLETE.)
Suggested changes for Undersea Usurper:
Remove Periodic Destruction or make it Daily instead of Weekly. Remove Back From the Depths, since that event is rare. Require x amount of rares instead of all.
Suggested changes for Mecha-Done:
Require x amount of guest quests completed instead of all. Same for the Rest in Pistons achievement and the blueprints achievement. Increase the drop chance significantly of cat paints and musical tracks. (And while you’re at it, an increased drop chance on the Azeroth Mini: King Mechagon would be VERY welcome, although outside of this meta.)
Again PLEASE ADD to this topic if you’d like to see change for any achievement not mentioned here that is required for the new BFA meta.
Agree that most of these could use some QoL changes to improve them, however I think the primary focus should probably be Combating the Corruption.
Honorable mention is ‘Tell me a tale’ which definitely also has a heavy RNG factor, but it’s at least not something you’ll be competing over with other players. From the way it sounded on twitter this achievement is meant to be a complete package as to the BFA experience, which was also grindy. So I get why so many grindy achievements are left in and I mostly think that’s fine.
I think the rest of these could be left as is and it would still be a fun, albeit grindy, meta achievement.
Combating the Corruption
Combating the Corruption requires insane RNG, you are mindlessly killing the same mobs over and over to hope one of them respawns as the one you need. Combine this with the now influx of players going for this achievement and I can already see it becoming a complete pain with players killing the mobs before anyone else can get to them - it’s legacy content so they just get 1 shot and there’s nothing you can do about it.
To summarize, most importantly; the issue isn’t necessarily about the RNG/Grind here, it’s the fact the result will be that you’re going to be competing with other players to be able to obtain it in its current state.
I would like to see one of the following changes to the achievement or the way it’s attained:
Limit it to just x amount of Corrupted mobs required (maybe 10?)
Increase corrupted mob spawnrate
Make corrupted mobs rare elites (so they show up on the map), increase their health by a ton and give them immunity for 20-30s after they spawn.
Remove the achievement from the meta altogether
Rajani
Really the only one I disagree with on this post,
You can already get 2000 reputation weekly from the assault quests (1500 from black empire and 500 from mantid) and it already saw the addition of Rajani Insignias in 10.1.5 from the Time Rifts event vendor.
The reputation is boring to get, but it’s not that different from any of the other reps in terms of how much you earn. And it even has insignias to further boost rep gains.
Wouldn’t be opposed to seeing increased rep gains, it’s a nice bonus but definitely not necessary in my opinion.
I’d like to add my opinion to this too. Combating the corruption can be done relatively fast and it is nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be. Every time the zone (Uldum) resets, a number of mobs spawn as corrupted. I had 0 progress on this achievement and using this method got it done in under a week.
Same with the It’s not a tumor. When the Black empire assault is un Uldum, there are enough of the tumors to click on along the banks on the river, I recommend using a druid with the old flying, since you can click on them without breaking flight form, which makes it a very fast grind, doable in a day.
That being said there are 2 achievements that need changes.
First is Tell me a tale. I have heard many, many horror stories about this one, taking up to a year to complete due to the insane rng hoops you need to jump thought to get the quest items you need. Even after so many years of its release, there are a majority of unknow factors surrounding it. For example, can only certain, named NPCs drop the needed quest items, can they drop them on ANY island they show as main/assault faction or it needs to be a specific combo and etc. One notable item is the carapace, that needs the combo of a certain island with a certain enemy type as the major faction on it for the week and then a certain rare npc spawning. Absolute madness. What could be done here, is the achievement to ask for 50% of the quests completed, not 100%.
The other achievement that will be a huge problem is Essence Essentials. I am missing 2 rank 1 essences to do it, which are the one you get from 25 honor kills in Nazjatar and the other one where you need to win 1 pvp island, 1 epic bg and 1 normal bg. If you are removing the pvp part in the Expedition meta, I believe it would be fair to remove pvp from this achievement too. I see 2 possible solutions. Keep the achievement as it is, remove it from the meta and put it as a Feat of strength. Or put the pvp essences on a vendor for a fixed honor price, where you can simply purchase them without the requirement to do anything to unlock them.
Everything else on the meta is doable. As a honorable mention I wouldnt mind if the WQs in Nazmir, that are needed for certain achievements, spawn more often (or are at least available to both factions, 2 of the 3 WQs, tied to achievements, part of the meta, are horde only).
I don’t know which realm you’re on, but it’s already crowded in Uldum, and thats while the achievement is still a month away from release.
It’s only going to get MUCH WORSE from here.
Having them be faction locked is fine, since you need to play both factions for the meta eitherway. But me and some others have been waiting since the 1st on Revenge of Krag’wa & Cancel the Blood Troll Apocalypse, and neither of them have spawned in the last 2 weeks.
They’re the last achievements I need besides the Blood of the Enemy PVP essence you’re missing too that I’m hoping, gets removed.
Warfronts need to be made solo queueable and/or more achievements need to be removed from the meta, specifically ones requiring flag captures where usually only one player benefits in a single run, unless the group is asleep or failing miserably which seems unrealistic at current max level.
It’s an unnecessary logistical nightmare especially with randoms from LFG most of which will not honor an agreed upon clicking rotation and will simply leave early once they’re done with their own clicking, leading to a revolving door type of groups.
A single run already lasts too long considering most of it is afking and waiting for resources. There’s is little to no action in the scenario once you outlevel it so please don’t force us us play through it 20 times or sit in LFG for hours until we find enough warm bodies before even being allowed to queue up.
I’m coming from PTR with information that many more achievements at different criteria levels have been removed from the meta requirement for Jani.
You may have seen the news on wowhead about the nerfs and ever since there have been at least two more adjustments but you won’t be able to see the correct tooltip in the PTR database before the information properly. Try again in a day or two for a precise and accurate list.
Some of the worst achievements are no longer needed;
selfish flag caps in warfront which are usually for once player per run
rng warfront stuff
some other annoyances, unfortunately I don’t remember
Some of the minor annoyances such as RNG world quests which aren’t particularly hard but may be frustrating if other players are around in the zone focusing on the same are still included (such as the Hand quest or Troll Apocalypse).
Overall it is much more accessible an respectful of your time than the first iteration of the achievement.
This should be the golden standard going forward. Keep the horrible achievements but don’t allow them to become a smaller part in working towards something bigger.