I had no intention of ever repeating the holiday achievement grind again after the pain of going through it the first year, but the Tauren ended up with all of the hard achievements by the time he was done beating the horseman into submission. At that point, it was just a question of doing the world tour for candy (I'd never even set foot in the zone of Shadowmoon Valley before) and looking for people to wand-zap me in Dalaran for the second leg of the dreaded meta achievement.
Pre-Cataclysm Bucket List
As long as I'm rambling about my characters, it seems like a good time to update the pre-cataclysm bucket list. Time permitting, the things I'm working on are:
- Finishing exalted with the Frostborn Dwarves on the mage (probably 3-4 random 5-man runs to add another +1 to my rep counter, will be harder to complete once I'm no longer 80)
- Dungeon runs on the warrior for access to heirloom rep-based head and shoulder enchants. Cataclysm will probably add updated ones, but it could be a while before I get them. The old ones will be better than nothing in the mean time. Also, this will provide the occasion to try and beat each Wrath-era heroic once.
- Soloing old level 70 heroics on the mage. I've beaten half of them so far, and I think the Black Morass is beyond my current level of dedication. We'll see how many I get to.
Finally, there is the Thanksgiving event that I pointedly skipped last year due to holiday burnout. I guess there's no harm in taking a look next month to see how that goes. The next stage of the Cataclysm launch event will also kick off sometime around then. That said, none of this is completely irreplaceable, and I won't cry if I ultimately fail to complete most or all of it. There's something to be said for the nostalgia tour, but there are plenty of other things to do while I wait for the End of the World (of Warcraft).