Sapphire Jenkins

Everyone knows about Leeroy Jenkins. He is notorious enough that there is now an achievement in World of Warcraft based on his fifteen minutes of total party killing fame. Being the optimistic types, rather than having the achievement require pulling the whole room of whelps in Upper Blackrock Spire and killing your raid group you instead only need to kill fifty whelps within fifteen seconds. Let's remember the glory of Leeroy Jenkins, not the aftermath.

Melmoth and I tried to get the achievement shortly after the 3.02 patch, as part of running as a warrior/paladin duo through the level 60 dungeons and beyond. Our first problem was getting in to the whelp room, as the altar holding the fiery boss in place and keeping the door locked needed at least three people to activate it. Luckily I was able to call upon an old raiding friend who helpfully popped in to the spire just to activate the altar. After that, it was just the two of us and all of the whelps. Despite our best efforts of hatching the eggs, gathering and controlling the whelps, and then slaughtering them all as quickly as possible we didn't manage to get fifty in fifteen seconds. The most we achieved was fourty nine kills in the allotted time. So close, yet so far.

With that experience under my belt, and so many people running around with the Jenkins surname, when my US guild were looking for some adventure I suggest heading to UBRS to kill some whelps. As they like visiting places they haven't been before and we all like earning the achievements our small group was happy to team up and fly to Blackrock Mountain. I am more positive about this current attempt. Even though the group lacks a certain amount of experience we certainly have enthusiasm. More importantly, we have five people instead of two and all of us are above 70th level.

This time the altar is unlocked without a fuss and the egg room is opened. I explain quickly about how the eggs hatch on a character's proximity with them as a warning to be careful where people tread, if only so that we don't need to wait for respawns if whelps are hatched accidentally as they will pose little threat individually. We clear the room of the larger dragonkin and then make our way to a central point. We have two warriors, myself and another, and I suggest that our priest and druid throw whatever protection spells they have on the two of us and then we'll pop as many eggs as we can on separate paths before coming back so that everyone can use area-of-effect abilities to kill the whelps quickly as a group.

With shields and heals-over-time on us the other warrior and I run across all the eggs we can see, collecting the whelps as we go with demoralising shouts and thunder claps. Although the whelps are quite puny individually they can become quite a force in numbers, so before they overwhelm our defences and put too great a burden on the healers we run back to the group and start our attack. With AoE spells flying all over the place and whelps attacking and squealing there is a huge amount of confusion, cleared only by five Leeroy Jenkins achievements all being announced at once. We had killed fifty whelps within fifteen seconds!

There are a few whelps still flapping around attacking us, so we get rid of them and let everything return to a calm, out-of-combat state. As the dust settles my fellow warrior and I see the results of our work: three dead party members lying in the middle of the room. We had pulled so many whelps that we simply couldn't control them all and our party was obliterated as a result. Blizzard may have sanitised the achievement, but the spirit of Leeroy Jenkins lives on.

Posted in Gaming |
Tags: achievements, mmorpg, sapphire, world of warcraft