So after years of working on and off for the loremaster meta-achievement, and having gotten tantalizingly close just before cataclysm completely revamped it and wiped out a good chunk of my progress on it. the meta achievement is finally within my grasp. (edit… just double checked, shadowlands questing HAS been added to the meta-achievement, which means its STILL just that little bit further away. ah well, at least the longest part is out of the way now.)
Having gone through the rather long trip to get the title, it struck me, that this is (afaik) the ONLY meta achievement in the game that gets objectively harder to complete with each expansion that comes out.
Someone who started in wrath only had to do 3 expansions worth of quests in order to get the title, and thats it, they now have it for life even if they skipped every other expansion since then. while someone starting today would need to go through 9 expansions worth of questing, most of it irrelevant to get it completed. and since we’ve now had a lvl squish AND a complete redesign of how lvling on the whole works, I think now is the perfect time to take a look at the achievement as well.
my suggestion is 2 fold, break the meta-achievement up into multiple parts, similar to the pathfinder achievement. and add some additional rewards to the later steps.
for example.
loremaster pt 1 would be the “classic content” so Eastern kingdoms, Kalimdor, TBC and WotlK. (yes EK and kalim got updated in cataclysm, but even the achievement as it is now has them seperated) have part 1 grant still grant the loremaster title, and have that tier be the one automatically grandfathered in for anyone who has it currently. so no one who currently has the title/achievement would be loosing anything even if they got it way back in the day.
loremaster pt 2 would be the more “modern” content, Cata, Mop, Warlords, Legion, BFA. rewards for this could be a mount, maybe a re-skin of the ensorcelled wyrm from the shadowlands pre-purchase or something (I personally don’t mind if my “exclusive” mount gets reskinned for something like this, especially knowing first hand how long the process to get it is these days)
loremaster pt 3 would be the “cosmic” level content, being shadowlands + whatever comes after. since with shadowlands it seems we are starting to deal with the greater cosmology of the game, it seems a decent enough starting point for a new tier of the achievement… reward could be an updated title, or a mount, or whatever they decide.
(these are just examples, it could be broken up in other ways, this is just what made the most sense to me)
this way, the meta-achievement gets broken up into slightly more manageable chunks esp for anyone who’s starting the game more recently. no one who already has it would end up loosing anything, and it would give people who already got it previously a reason to periodically keep it “up to date” to get the extra rewards.
Thank you for coming to my tedtalk.