This post is part of the Best of the month Blog Carnival, hosted by Not So Secret Society.
Though I hate to encourage the slaughter of innocent bunnies, squirrels, sheep, cats, and all those other cute little critters scampering about Azeroth, I love pets. Offer me an Armadillo Pup companion, and I’ll slaughter 50,000 critters with a smile on my face! Well, maybe not a smile, but I’ll at least do it.
My guild is currently at 5700/50,000 for the Critter Kill Squad achievement, but there’s only 3 of us actually active in the guild, so this achievement would definitely be easier for a larger, more active guild. I do want that Armadillo Pet though, so whenever I have a few minutes, I head on over to my favorite Critter-Farming spot! The best part about this spot is, I don’t have to kill the cute ones!
My Critter-Farming spot is located in Zul’Gurub, which is no longer an instance, so you don’t have to worry about being in a raid to visit. Instead, it is part of the Northern Stranglethorn Vale zone. If you go to where the Snake Boss was located, or to (83,35) if you never visited the raid version of Zul’Gurub, you will see an abundance of snakes! It’s best of course to bring a character with an AoE to help speed things along, and it seem like the faster you kill the snakes, the faster they spawn, so just go crazy.
The only issue with this farming spot is that you have to watch for people questing in Zul’Gurub. If you see someone else come into the snake room who doesn’t appear to just be there for the critters, get out immediately! Whoever is on the quest will have the option to grab a rope to escape the Zul’ Jin, who shows up for the quest, but you will not get to use the rope if you’re not on the quest, meaning you’ll get one-shotted if you stick around to see what happens. Believe me, I tried it and it never feels good dieing from killing level 1 critters at level 85…
Hopefully this helps some of you get your Armadillo Pup! I haven’t seen anyone with one yet, but I also haven’t heard of many people trying for it and you also need to be Revered with your guild to buy it. Has your guild managed to kill 50k critters?? Are there any great Critter-farming areas that you know of??
Remember, each critter you kill counts for whoever else is from your guild and in your group, so if there are two of you, and you each kill three critters while grouped and standing near each other, that actually counts as 12 critter kills not just 6!
Edit : So I did a bit of research and checked out the alternative farming spots! Two of us visited each spot for 10 minutes total, and I kept track of how many critters we managed to kill in that time.
Webwinder Tunnel (EPL) : 984 critters in 10 minutes (had to wait a while for respawns)
Deeprun Tram (IF Side) : 1210 critters in 10 minutes (this would work best with 5 people, as there are 5 spawn points that seem to be instant)
Zul’Gurub Snake Room : 1284 critters in 10 minutes
I have yet to attempt the penguins in Northrend, but when I do I’ll post about those as well!
Thanks for Reading!
MM <3
January 7th, 2011 - 11:32 am
Hey Miss Mediocre,
We managed to get this achievement. What we did was to gather as many members of the guild as possible and headed to the tram station in Ironforge.
There is a ton of rats down there and they respawn instantly. As long as you have some kind of AoE you can have some fun down there.
I would say it took us around 3 hours to get it, but we were already at 10k or so when we finally decided to go for it.
Also, I am not sure if it still works, but we got everyone in a raid group. And for every rat that we would kill we got the credit for every person in the raid. So a 10 person raid was giving us 10 kill for the guild every time.
Great site BTW
January 7th, 2011 - 12:48 pm
Hey Miss M. My guild got this achievement last night. Unfortunately, I wasnt with them so i dont know the details, but they were in Eastern Plaguelands. There were about 7 guildies and were getting a thousand kills every few minutes. If I find out what they were killing and exactly where, I will let you know.
January 7th, 2011 - 12:54 pm
Opps, almost forgot. I read some good news about the armadillo pet yesterday. The next major patch will reduce the required guild rep to buy the armadillo, once you’ve earn the achievement, from exalted to revered.
January 7th, 2011 - 1:26 pm
The spot in Eastern Plaguelands is the cave between that and Western Plaguelands I’ll run up and find exactly where it is an just a second. Also, do not forget, for however many members of your guild you are group with, you will earn times that per each critter killed. For example, the 16 sheep in Uldum that people farm. If I were in a group with 4 other guildies, we would earn 90 critters for killing them. I do think you all have to be there when it happens though.
January 7th, 2011 - 3:09 pm
There are some spots in Northrend with groups of penguins; one near the tournament, another off the coast of Borean Tundra. Also, killing while grouped with guildmates increases the effect, as every guild member gets credit for the kill; I thought this might be a glitch, but others tell me it’s not — and it IS called Critter Kill SQUAD after all, so I guess Blizzard really is encouraging the group activity.
Oh, the tram between SW and IF has a lot of rats that should count, I’ve heard. My low level could team up with you there, too…
January 7th, 2011 - 4:17 pm
The new mini-pet Lil Ragnaros is a critter killer himself.
Does anyone know if critters killed by Lil Raggy give credit for the guild achievement?
January 7th, 2011 - 5:37 pm
My guild is working on this as well (we’re at about 20k now – did about 8k personally). The Northrend penguin run is pretty good but you do need to fly from iceberg to iceberg. I went to try out the rats and ran down the whole tunnel from SW to IF (I am horde and it was fun flying into SW!) I found one spot that had 3 rats spawning almost every 2 seconds but no large packs anywhere. For me, it was a waste of time there. By far, the tunnel in EPL is the best for me. I run from one end to the other AoE everything and get roughly 150 kills. Run back and do the nooks and crannys for another 50 or so and back out the way I came. The spawn rate is ok so you don’t have to wait long. Now with more folks, like someone mentioned above, more credit. By the way, there is a caravan near the bridge where I believe Fiona is. Talk to the caravan and get her charm. This will give the spider guys a chance to drop a sack which has a pet if you don’t have it already. It’s how I got mine since I was killing everything anyways.
January 7th, 2011 - 7:36 pm
Not the tunnel but one of the terminals… though perhaps they’ve done away with the ‘pied piper’ quest there, and removed most of the rat spawns. I’ll have to go check.
January 7th, 2011 - 11:02 pm
The terminus at Ironforge; the rats respawn fairly immediately after you kill them. In 6 min I got 100 (that’s why the guild is at 6k critters now). Group up and it could be pretty good… especially considering I was really only hitting two of the rat spawns.
January 8th, 2011 - 1:26 am
Satra : Oh wow that’s awesome, I hope the raid trick still works! Thank you and gratz on your Armadillo! hehe
January 8th, 2011 - 1:30 am
QuietKjun : There was Webwinder Tunnel in the EPL that I thought would be an awesome spot to farm, but I found the critters weren’t respawning fast enough. I wonder if that’s where they were? Definitely let me know if you find out! Also, that is awesome that they are lowering the rep required, I’d forgotten it took Exalted, which I am not yet, so Revered is much more manageable!
January 8th, 2011 - 1:32 am
Brouck : I think you are talking about Webwinder Tunnel as well? I’m definitely going to have to try out this guildie group thing! My Armadillo pup is looking so much more attainable now!
January 8th, 2011 - 1:37 am
Indy : Awesome! I guess the tram is good too because it caters to all levels, so everyone can lend a hand. Excellent work on getting us to 6k, I didn’t think we’d reached that when I logged off, and was wondering who was up to some critter killing. We’ll have to get as many of us together as possible, (all 6 of us who log on from time to time, lol) and go nuts in there!
January 8th, 2011 - 1:38 am
Cold : Oh that’s right, I don’t have one to test it out, but that would be cool if he could help out, lol.
January 8th, 2011 - 1:43 am
Nigell : Hehe getting myself a Mr.Grubbs was one of the first things I did! I managed to find him in a sack just outside of the Tunnel too, so for people who don’t have him yet, killing critters in there would definitely be more worth while! Sometime this evening I’ll head to the tunnel, and see how many I can kill in a certain amount of time, and then try out the Penguins and the snake place in ZG and compare!
January 8th, 2011 - 8:59 pm
My guild managed to get it, which was good. I was caught by surprise when the first questing alliance noob came and killed me and another guildy, but I legged it for the second. Unfortunately, not far enough and suffered a painful death. The third time I went so quick I ended up next to Karazan.
We’re around 70/100k now, for the next one.
January 9th, 2011 - 3:35 am
Seth Malacris : My critter farming buddy has been killed twice by low level questing characters too, lol. The next one!? I wasn’t aware there was a next one! What do you get for it?!
January 10th, 2011 - 9:10 am
I have a feeling you miss a critical spot in critter killing:
The team work: If you kill a critter while in group or raid group, the number of critters you kill is multiplied by the number of people in a group. My guild assembled a raid group and finished this pretty quick. Unfortunately I’m only honored so can’t get the pet.
January 10th, 2011 - 3:33 pm
Kangrem : Yes, I had no idea about the kills counting for each party/raid member until reading all the comments, lol. My guild has under 10 active people but I have managed to get out and kill some critters with at least one other person, which is how I got the numbers for the edited bit at the end of my post. I envy the big guilds who finished this in hours, but I’m still determined to get it done for my guild, even if I have to kill 40k of them myself!
January 11th, 2011 - 9:00 am
Thats funny u blogged about this, last week i put an event in our guild calendar to take 30 min to an hour, buddy up, and commit some time to killin critters, figured we do a lil bit every week and we should get it eventually lol. my guild is horrible at guild achieves i think im the only one actively working on them lol. so i can feel ur stress =p
January 11th, 2011 - 2:48 pm
Excellent to see the numbers up there. Thanks for the detective work. I did notice over the past weekend that the EPL tunnel spawn rate was increased from when I was there last (looks like you saw that as well). I’ll have to try the IF terminus again and see if I can find a spot that I can get more than 3 every 2.5 sec (running a mage and literally counted slowly 1,2, arcane blast as soon as I saw 3 spawn; that was about a month ago when I tried). Our guild is at 30k as of last Sat. We make a goal of do it until the next 10k mark so that we don’t get bored to tears and since none of are honored with the guild yet, why kill ourselves to get the achieve in a day.
January 12th, 2011 - 3:28 pm
Actually the best place to farm is to start a brand new character that is a worgen if ur guild is alliace. Cause the quest chain takes u thru the tunnel near the end that is filled with rats. What i did was start a worgen Druid cause u get torns early on. And just put it on and spam heals. i was able to farm about 20k critters in about an hour solo.
January 14th, 2011 - 3:44 pm
this is awesome. I am going to our guild and see if I can rally some troops to start killing critters. I like the numbers you posted as well. If you come across any other critter killing spots let us know
January 14th, 2011 - 6:30 pm
DeMeNtEd : It’s not too bad now working in a group! How many did you manage to do if your guild has attempted it yet??
January 14th, 2011 - 6:32 pm
Nigell : It definitely can get very boring! A few of us went down to the tram for about an hour the other day, but listening to a podcast made it a bit more bearable!
January 14th, 2011 - 6:39 pm
deadfajita : I did run through the tunnel when I was leveling my Worgen, but never checked if they counted. It’s too bad you can’t get back to the tunnel once you leave the starting zone, because I am out of character slots
lol
January 14th, 2011 - 6:42 pm
Wow For Dummies : Best of luck! I’ll be sure to post any other spots I find!
January 17th, 2011 - 7:35 am
lol i used ur lil spot in zul’gurub, found with ease…ran around with my arcane mage spamming explosion and after about 700 or so, my ADD kicked in and i found myself fishing in the lil pond next to it…lol but we had a good turn out…we are at about 8.5k all together, so a few more weeks like that and i should be one step closer to my lil skunk =p.
January 19th, 2011 - 8:06 am
DeMeNtEd : Glad the ZG spot worked for you, even if it wasn’t for long, hehe. Stinker is a great pet, I worked so hard to get him a few years ago now I guess, lol but be sure to introduce him to someone’s Black Tabby when you get him if you can find someone with one!
January 19th, 2011 - 9:15 am
o yea? something super crazy awesome happen? or u think they’ll just end up fallin in love like mr pepe le pew and that sexy sleek black cat he’s always chasin? lol either way im sure its going to be EPIC lol =p