Tol Barad mastered

When I came back in Mists, Tol Barad was one of the things I had to play catch up on. With the help of a couple of my guildies I got almost all of the Master of Tol Barad meta completed. Fortunately, unlike Wintergrasp, the meta only requires 25 wins and not 100 (my GM is still trying to get WG completed). However the Tol Barad Saboteur achievement appeared bugged, as I couldn't get credit for killing siege engines no matter how I did it, and comments on Wowhead confirmed the problem, so I abandoned it for the time.

I've recently headed back to TB by myself to finish it off, and there is basically no-one there now. I've seen the odd horde player but only once encountered any alliance resistance. So to get that last achievement I had to get creative, using my alliance rogue.

Firstly, horde had to be defending. To pilot a siege engine, you need an honorable kill, so I had to get my rogue to kill my shaman. There were a couple of hurdles of course:

1. They are both on the same account so I had to work around timeouts to get the hk.
2. My rogue was fresh and not well geared so couldn't kill my shaman before it timed out.
3. Whenever you enter/relog, you get ported to either the entrance or the centre tower depending on whether you are attacking or defending. And you lose the buff gained to pilot siege engines when you switch over.

So the process went like this:

1. On shaman, run to entrance and take off all gear.
2. Alt F4 and log onto rogue quickly.
3. Kill shaman, pilot and position siege
4. Alt F4 and log onto shaman.
5. Resurrect, put gear back on, run to tower, pop cooldowns and kill siege.
6. Repeat.

The first time I did this I only managed 2 siege kills before TB completed. However on subsequent tries I positioned 2 sieges each time, and allowed a tower to be killed to get an extra 5 minutes. This allowed me to get at least 5 siege kills per TB, and I was done in no time.

I was not done with the dailies however. There are a lot of goodies to buy using the Tol Barad Commendation currency: 2 mounts, 2 pets, a toy, a battle standard and a tabard. 745 commendations if you wanted everything today.

Unfortunately before my guild died in Cata, I'm pretty sure I bought a Stump of Time for 125, which in hindsight was not well spent. But, the battle standard is no longer useful, the tabard isn't really useful given TB's proximity to Orgrimmar via portal, and my good friend gave me a Fox Kit, which eased the burden a lot.

The Fox Kit was originally not available on the vendor, only on an extremely low drop chance from killing foxes around the island. You can still get them as drops, as I got into the habit of killing any foxes I saw and was lucky enough to get a second one recently.

I'm glad to say I've finally finished, getting the last item I needed on Tuesday. It was a bit of a chore, but it's mainly because it is irrelevant and empty - there are things to like about the place when looking at some of the issues Ashran is having, and seeing good old content sit dormant is disappointing. These are topics for another day though.