Project Lore: Five dudes. Four cameras. One World of Warcraft.

Azeroth’s newest holiday is now over with, but how does it measure up to the rest? Join me as I take a quick look back on the past week of shooting things and sneaking into enemy cities to stuff your face!

Right of the bat, I can tell you the best thing about Pilgrim’s Bounty: no Random Number Generator. The RNG has been the bane of several world events, including last month’s Hallow’s End where earning all of the achievements involves getting lucky with drops from several different sources. As some people have pointed out, this honestly calls into question the whole idea of an “achievement” in the first place, which ideally should be something earned from skill and not purely by chance.

And unlike some other achievements out there that literally rely on a roll of the dice, those associated with the holidays can prevent someone from earning their rewards for an entire year. So it was a welcome surprise when Pilgrim’s Bounty ditched the randomness altogether, even though it’s not part of the greater meta-achievement for the Violet Proto-Drake. All in all, it’s probably for the better. Aside from, perhaps, Winter’s Veil, few other Azerothian holidays fall on parts of the year when people in real life are off visiting family the entire time. As Pilgrim’s Bounty only lasts six days, that drastically reduces the amount of time players have to spend completing it.

That doesn’t mean it was all simple, though. Two accomplishments presented particular problems of their own. The first of these was The Turkinator, which asked players to kill forty wild turkeys in a row, with a maximum of thirty seconds between each death. I was lucky to finish it off the morning the event started, when few people were online, and even that took me a few attempts. One of the main issues was that there were only two places in the world to find the gobblers, and even if they were spread out over a fairly large area, you’d be competing with the rest of your faction for kills during prime time. To make matters worse, classes with speed boosts or instant ranged attacks had a distinct advantage at picking turkeys off before others could. And woe befall the player that strayed too far to the edge of a designated area only to find that they had completely run out of turkeys and turning around wouldn’t be quick enough to find the next one necessary to keep up your chain.

I thought the whole idea of hunting turkeys was fun, but the concept could use a little tweaking, which would include bringing down the total kills needed for the achievement.

The second was Turkey Lurkey. As a Rogue, I spent a lot of time both dodging my fellow players (when I was in a bad mood) and giving them free hits (when I was feeling a bit more generous). While I derived a great deal of amusement from riding my Darkspear Raptor or casting Fan of Knives in fowl form, it just became plain old annoying after awhile and I vowed to only log-on as my Shaman for the duration of the holiday when my achievements were done.

That aside, it was still tough to find Rogues of certain races, but I managed to get all of them done by scouting Dalaran during peak hours. If you still have trouble with this next year, I might advocate going into Battlegrounds and looking for them that way. Since some servers have low racial populations (and Rogues themselves are a relative rarity compared to the olden days), it doesn’t hurt to open your prospective pool up to your entire Battlegroup.

Of course, being a Rogue does have its advantages when faced with achievements like Pilgrim’s Peril, which involves getting yourself seated at Bountiful Tables located outside the enemy faction’s capital cities. Being able to sneak into position proved to be a great boon and I never once got killed or caught doing so. Darnassus was the most difficult if only because (as required by similar objectives during other holidays) you have to go through a guarded portal and most of the city to reach the tables. It’s going to be much easier to perform tasks like that in Cataclysm where you’ll probably be able to fly right to the place you need to reach.

On the flip side, I greatly enjoyed ganking Alliance players attempting to breach Undercity’s courtyard. I spent some time there racking up the Honor Kills for the non-holiday achievement City Defender.

And that wasn’t the end of Pilgrim’s Bounty’s wonderful side-effects. Perhaps it was charity on Blizzard’s part, but utilizing the recipes you need to complete the dailies can get you from 1 to roughly 366 Cooking in no time flat. As a player who has only dabbled in the secondary profession over the years, this was a welcome alternative to raising the skill by farming the kinds of meat that only rarely appear on the auction house these days (and almost never in the desired quantities).

Everything else about Pilgrim’s Bounty I found to be refreshingly easy to accomplish. City-hopping to complete the food-related dailies was a little irritating, but hardly the worst of things to complain about. When all was said and done, it only took me three days to complete the event and even that was only because I mis-fired a Turkey Shooter once and had to wait until the next day for quests to reset.

How did the rest of you fare? Do you have any concerns or complaints about the holiday? Was it one of your favorite or was its relative simplicity not engaging enough to hold your attention?

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Related Posts: Protip 3.1: Pilgrim’s Bounty, Protip 3.3: Pilgrim’s Bounty Cooking Finale, Protip 3.2: Moar Pilgrim’s Bounty, Pilgrim’s Bounty: Selling Your Body & Annoying The Horde, Protip 3.4: Turkinator,

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