Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, time is of the essence. Where have we heard that before?
I recently talked to a player who managed to solo most, though not all, of the Glory of the Hero achievements from Wrath. He mentioned ones like Share the Love that been impossible to complete without putting a group together, and as you can imagine, getting four more players for heroic Wrath achievements isn't the easiest thing in the world at 85. People who want the achievement for their alts are rarely interested in doing a meta piecemeal, and this is probably going to get worse, rather than better, once account-wide achievements go active. Once someone's got a red proto-drake on one character, they almost certainly won't repeat the process on one of their alts.
The vast majority of achievements get easier as you level up, but the canny achievement hunter will pay attention to the ones that don't. As the game changes, players' priorities and interests change, and older content has a tendency to fall by the wayside. It's best to strike while the iron is hot.
This isn't the first time I've written a column like this, and we'll revisit the topic once we have a firm handle on any achievements going bye-bye in Mists of Pandaria. In the meantime, let's tackle the Cataclysm achievements you want to get done before the next expansion hits.
General
General achievements aren't that bad. You won't lose anything other than a little convenience if you decide to put these off until later.
Cataclysmically Delicious and Drown Your Sorrows You can actually afford to ignore these until later, but they're both marginally easier to do right now when so many of the ingredients or even the finished dishes themselves are on the Auction House.
To All the Squirrels Who Cared for Me As above. You might as well knock this one off while you have a reason to be in the Cataclysm zones in which they're located.
Quests
Two words: Molten Front. Expect this to empty out quickly when Mists arrives, and that will make several of the related achievements more difficult to get done.
The First Rule of Ring of Blood is You Don't Talk About Ring of Blood Blizzard is very likely to reduce the amount of experience needed to level from 80 to 85, as it's done with previous expansions. This had the effect of turning later zones from The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King into ghost towns, because players outlevel the expansion's content before they need to do zones like Shadowmoon Valley or Icecrown. The Twilight Highlands are likely to suffer the same fate. However, if you play a class that can solo the Crucible of Carnage, disregard.
Round Three, Fight! Same deal as the above.
Have ... Have We Met? It'll be tough to find a lot of people doing the Molten Front dailies after Mists hits, and some of the NPCs needed for this (Thassarian is the major sore point) are already rare catches. Even if it means hanging around Sethria's Roost for a bit, I would really try to get this done now.
Gang War This will still be relatively easy if you can convince a friend or guildie to come with you in order to lose a duel, just more inconvenient.
Master of the Molten Flow You need another person in the party with you in order to complete the Flamewaker Sentinel requirement. Unless you want to make a special trip back with a guildie or friend who's already phased in that particular leg of the Molten Front dailies, do it now.
Exploration
No real problems here. However, if you're one of the few people who doesn't have this yet, go knock off Stood In the Fire. Reportedly you can still get this on the Spine of Deathwing encounter (I haven't personally observed this, but commenters have written in about it before), so try to get it done while Dragon Soul PuGs are still common and you haven't outleveled the Raid Finder version.
Player vs. player
Oh, this one's easy. As any Wrath player could tell you, Wintergrasp achievements got a lot tougher when Cataclysm made the zone less compelling to max-level players. The same thing's likely to happen to Tol Barad. The problem's less acute than it was for Wintergrasp, which had more achievements that were reliant on having a zone with lots of players around, but you'll still want to get Master of Tol Barad (which encompasses most of the stuff you need to worry about) done before players set sail for Pandaria.
By contrast, the daily quests and reputation associated with the zone shouldn't be a problem.
Dungeons and raids
This is the big one, and it's actually what prompted this article after that conversation I had with the Glory of the Hero soloer. It got me to thinking about a few scattered Cataclysm dungeon achievements that I never got around to doing, and I started to wonder how many of them I could realistically put off if I weren't getting them out of the way now.