What the achievement asks
Complete the Nazmir world quest Cancel the Blood Troll Apocalypse in under thirty seconds, alone.
You board a flying machine called the A.F.M.O.D by speaking to Patch on top of it, and from there you have exactly one job: aim and fire. You cannot steer. The machine flies its own route over the blood troll army below while you drop bombs on whatever passes underneath, until the counter reaches eighty.
Horde only, and worth five points. Ten percent of players have it, which for a five point achievement tells you most of what you need to know.
It belongs to the chain that ends in A Farewell to Arms, which is why it has a reputation out of all proportion to its size: for a lot of people it is the last thing standing between them and the mount.
Finding the world quest
The hardest part of this achievement is not the run, it is waiting for the quest to exist. It can go weeks, sometimes over a month, without appearing.
South of the Heart of Darkness. When the quest is not active there is nothing at that spot, and no prerequisite you have missed. It simply is not up.
When it does appear it stays for around twenty-two hours, so a single check per day is not enough to be safe. Rather than opening the map every hour, watch the Battle for Azeroth world quest listing for your region (EU, NA). A page monitoring extension pointed at that listing will tell you the moment it returns, which beats checking by hand for a month.
Before you board
Track the achievement first: achievement window, Quests, Battle for Azeroth, then tick Track on A Most Efficient Apocalypse. It puts the thirty second countdown on your screen, and without it you cannot tell a three second miss from a fifteen second one.
Reports differ on whether tracking is actually required for the achievement to fire. It costs nothing and it gives you the timer, so track it either way.
Two more things before you talk to Patch:
- Turn War Mode on. It puts noticeably more trolls on the road, and the road is where your opening bombs go. Several people who failed repeatedly with it off succeeded on their first attempt with it on.
- Look at your graphics settings. Trees, ruins and ground clutter can swallow your aiming circle and waste a shot. Lowering the settings is what helps most people; if your problem is fog rather than clutter, raising them helps instead.
You must be solo. The quest does not count in a group or a raid.
The run is phased to you alone, so the crowd milling around the quest giver is irrelevant: they all vanish the moment you board, and nobody competes with you for kills.
The run
The timer starts when the Order Blast button becomes usable, not when you board, so the flight in costs you nothing.
Fire by spamming the keyboard key and the left mouse button at the same time. The cooldown is very short, and raw firing rate is what wins this. The one thing that wastes a shot outright is bombing a spot you have already bombed, so keep the cursor moving.
Three phases, in order:
- The road first. As soon as it is in reach, bomb along the road, starting from the left and working across. This is where the moving trolls and devilsaurs are, and it is the most reliable part of the run.
- Then the Warmothers. As they come into range, switch to the Blood Troll Warmothers, the large stationary elites. They look like they are standing alone. They are not: each one has ten to fifteen small trolls packed around it, frequently with no nameplate at all, so a single bomb there is worth several on the road.
- Back to the road for the last seconds if you run out of Warmothers.
A high, nearly top-down camera angle helps, and so does swinging the camera towards the stone archway as you approach it: the default angle puts scenery between your bombs and the trolls walking underneath.
Leave the blood orbs alone
Do not spend bombs on the red blood orbs or the trolls channelling around them. They have a long history of absorbing a hit without dying, and chasing them is the single most common way this achievement is lost.
The symptom is precise. You drop a bomb on a group around an orb, it lands, and nothing dies. Bomb the same spot again and the projectile simply disappears. People have watched their counter freeze at seventy-something with the road already cleared behind them.
It is not permanently broken. There are stretches where the orb groups count normally, and the most recent runs report them behaving. But you only find out which stretch you are in by losing an attempt, and attempts are expensive. The road and the Warmothers on their own are enough to reach eighty with seconds to spare, so there is nothing to gain by risking it.
If you do bomb them, bomb each group once and move on. Those trolls sometimes register as killed without ever visibly dying, so a second bomb on the same spot is always wasted.
Getting more attempts
You get one attempt per character while the quest is up. It cannot be abandoned, and once the world quest is completed that character is done until it comes round again.
There is a trick in circulation that says you can stop attacking, log out, and get a fresh attempt. Do not rely on it: it fails for most people, the kill count carries over even when the timer resets, and at least one person lost the quest entirely by trying.
The reliable answer is Horde alts, and unlocking world quests on one is faster than it sounds. You do not need reputation, and you do not need the Heart of Azeroth chain:
- Take the portal to Zandalar from Orgrimmar, or start at the warboard in Orgrimmar
- Accept Mission Statement from Nathanos, and skip the introduction when offered
- Accept Welcome to Zuldazar from Talanji, and escort her up the steps
- Return to the docks and finish Uniting Zandalar on the ship
That is enough to make world quests appear. Levelling a character for this is not wasted effort either, because the Order Blast one-shots everything it hits regardless of your level: a low alt is no worse at this than your main.
Finished in time and got nothing
This achievement has broken after several major patches: a clean run in twenty-something seconds, and no achievement. When that happens it affects everybody at once and there is nothing to do but wait for the fix.
Before assuming that is what happened, rule out the two things that produce the same feeling:
- You were in a group or raid, which silently disqualifies the run.
- You were over the limit and had no timer to tell you. Thirty seconds is much shorter than it feels, and people who finally tracked the achievement routinely discovered they had been missing by two or three seconds all along.