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Comment by defektunge

Only encountered during certain rare treasure missions, some of which reward unique heirlooms. Countered by Ghostly Spyglass.

Comment by Yewfire

Ghostly Spyglass counters the naval threat Cursed Crew. Its blueprint is dropped by Captain Ironbeard.

Ghostly Spyglass can be acquired 3 ways:

Automatically, as the native trait of a new or upgraded rare or epic ship,
Looted, from a mission that has a ship with the Gnomish Crew / Troll Crew buff, or
Purchased, from Salty Jorren / Kronk Rustspark after it has been unlocked by learning the blueprint.

Additional traits: There are 7 Tanaan Jungle bosses who are guaranteed to drop specific Equipment Blueprints needed for the achievement Naval Mechanics.

Macro code for Tomtom users:
/way Tanaan Jungle 35.4 46.8 Belgork - Bilge Pump (Counters: Stormy Weather)
/way Tanaan Jungle 37.5 76.0 Captain Ironbeard (cave entrance) - Ghostly Spyglass (Counters: Cursed Crew)
/way Tanaan Jungle 44.6 37.8 Cindral the Wildfire - Ice Cutter (Counters: Icy Water)
/way Tanaan Jungle 45.8 47.0 Felsmith Damorka - Felsmoke Launcher (Counters: First Strike)
/way Tanaan Jungle 38.0 30.0 Savage Whale Shark - Trained Shark Tank (Counters: Minelayer)
/way Tanaan Jungle 60.2 21.0 Xanzith the Everlasting - High Intensity Fog Lights (Counters: Dense Fog)
/way Tanaan Jungle 37.0 33.0 Zoug the Heavy - True Iron Rudder (Counters: Evasive)
Additionally:

All rare creatures and NPCs in Tanaan now have a chance to drop a number of equipment blueprints for ships.
Source: Patch 6.2 Hotfixes: July 27

Protip 1: I use Macro Toolkit to avoid having to split macros into smaller parts. There are other addons that also allow this.

Protip 2: Want an easy way to reset your Tomtom arrow to the nearest boss on the list? Just type
/cway and voila! *

Note: An 8th boss, Iron Reaver, (second boss in Hellfire Citadel) drops Equipment Blueprint: Gyroscopic Internal Stabilizer which counters Chaotic Whirlpools. The blueprint drops on all levels of raid difficulty.

Note 2: What about the rest of them? Only 3 other blueprints are available in 6.2.0. They come from various sources. Equipment Blueprint: Blast Furnace (Blast Furnace for Swift), is a quest item. Equipment Blueprint: Unsinkable (Unsinkable) and Equipment Blueprint: Tuskarr Fishing Net (Tuskarr Fishing Net) are vendor rep items.

The blueprints for Ammo Reserves, Automated Sky Scanner, Sonic Amplification Field, Q-43 Noisemaker Mines, & Extra Quarters are not obtainable and are no longer required for the achievement.
*Source: Patch 6.2 Hotfixes: July 27 - July 29

However, each of these 5 pieces of equipment has a chance to be provided automatically when upgrading or building new ships.

* Credit to Skeeve2010 for this improved Tomtom code suggestion.

Comment by yzq85

This threat almost always come in pairs, and since it already costs 1000 GRs to get 1 Ghostly Spyglass, you need to seriously ask yourself if the reward is worth the heavy investment.

Comment by kendallzemp

Since the Ghostly Spyglass costs 1000 Garrison Resources, I wanted to find out which type of ship would most often need to have it. There are eight possible missions that pose the threat of Cursed Crew. All are 2 ship missions and reward some amount of XP. Further, all these missions require that you counter TWO cursed crews. Only three of the eight have an heirloom ring reward; the rest reward between 250-450 gold. I am most interested in the ring rewards, so I focused on those missions.

The missions with heirloom ring reward are: "For Hate's Sake" (rewards Capt. Sander's Returned Band), "The House Always Wins" (rewards Admiral Taylor's Loyalty Ring) and "The Wave Mistress" (rewards Signet of the Third Fleet). Each of these three missions is 2 days in duration, and each requires that you COUNTER a Submarine and a Battleship (with a Destroyer and a Carrier respectively). Therefore, ideally, you will keep one Destroyer and one Carrier with the Ghostly Spyglass equipment in your fleet to use for these missions.

Each of these three missions with ring rewards also poses a total of three other threats that must be countered. In every case, two of the threats are Evasive and First Strike. The third threat for each mission (in the order they are listed above) is Dense Fog, Chaotic Whirlpools and Stormy Weather. Dense Fog can be countered by a Draenic Crew (the Horde equivalent is Orc crew, which counters Icy Water). Since you only have a total of 4 equipment slots between the two required vessels, you will in most cases not be able to cover all of the threats in the mission. It would likely be helpful to have Human/Undead or Pandaren crews on these ships for an extra success boost.

Addendum: On "The House Always Wins", I used one Ghostly Spyglass, covered all three of the other threats posed, and had one Pandaren crew. This resulted in a 97% success probability. I chose to do this because I already had the third threat covered by chance and did not have to switch out equipment to cover that third threat.

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Cursed Crew

Crewed by cursed sailors.

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Warlords of Draenor Shipyard Guide

Cursed Crew

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