Posts with tag farming

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Sarah Pine (@ilaniel) will be your host today.

Thanks to tumblr for introducing me to the Armenian pop singer Sirusho. I can't get this song out of my head, despite not understanding a word of it. This video in particular has been praised for featuring some wonderful Armenian design, and it's easy to see why!

Ron2 asked:

What's your favorite class and/or race for a gathering alt? Horde or Alliance, Mining, Herbing, and/or Skinning, I leave that up to you.

Patch 5.2 introduced the Isle of Thunder, but it also introduced some other things to explore. One of these things has some players absolutely mystified -- the Isle of Giants. Located in the northernmost reaches of Kun Lai, the island is home to a never ending stream of giant dinosaurs and the Zandalari Dinomancers that seek to capture them for their own purposes.

Why are the Zandalari so concerned with getting dinosaurs? Well, if you've wandered around on the Isle of Thunder or stepped into the Throne of Thunder, you'll see that the Zandalari are pretty keen on enslaving the dinosaurs and using them as mounts, pets, and even raid bosses. The bigger question on the mind of a lot of players, however, is why we should be concerned with the Isle of Giants at all.

With no quests, no portals, no lead-ins and no clear defined purpose besides the world raid boss Oondasta, why would we want to spend any extended amount of time on the island at all?

When we last visited Sunsong Ranch in patch 5.2, it was to news of several improvements of the farming content. This included some changes to the Master Plow, some changes to the way seeds were planted, and to top it all off, the option to purchase your farm and make it your very own. This meant that the farm would turn into a rest point and an area where one could immediately log out of the game -- something that players had been requesting ever since they began helping Yoon and planting their own crops on his farm.

While we knew that the option would eventually be added, it was not available with patch 5.2's first iteration on the PTR. So we had no news on how much it would cost, what kind of reputation you would need to have, or what exactly would happen to Farmer Yoon after you purchased his property. The latest build to hit the PTR has now unlocked the feature, and players can now test out the content to their heart's content.

But uh ... you can't purchase the farm.

Work orders are in in the patch 5.2 PTR, allowing players to gain reputation with other factions by farming. You can see Matticus' character here being offered several work orders from other factions. Wowhead has datamined many of the quests, indicating that, for now at least, they are available purely for factions added in patch 5.0.4 and patch 5.1.

It's no great surprise that the new factions aren't included in these work orders, to be able to earn reputation for the new factions by farming would be rather strange when they have only just appeared. There doesn't, at present, appear to be any prior reputation requirement to get these work order quests, but you do have to have bought your farm in order to receive the work orders, so a considerable dose of Tillers work is required.

Edit: A blue post has clarified that you no longer have to buy the farm to receive and complete work orders, but you will need to be exalted with the Tillers and have all plots unlocked.

Once you've bought the farm You'll need to farm specific vegetables for specific factions, so, for example, the Golden Lotus want White Turnips. There's two quests for each faction, so continuing to look at the Golden Lotus, the first quest is to plant 8 White Turnip Seeds, and the second is to harvest 8 Ripe White Turnips, resulting in 40 White Turnips. Only the second part of the quest awards reputation, 300 at the moment, but both currently award 236,000 XP.

The general consensus seems to be that any way to gain reputation is a bonus, but these don't seem particularly fast. Do they strike a good balance?

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Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.

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There's been plenty of talk over the last couple of months about Sunsong Ranch, the farm that players can adopt and use to grow various crops of their own. A lot of that talk revolved around whether or not Sunsong Ranch was the first step towards player housing, a feature that a lot of players have been wistfully wishing for since the days of vanilla. Earlier this month, we asked Cory Stockton and Dave Kosak if this was indeed the case, and the response was that while the ranch could be interpreted that way, player housing wasn't something intended for the future.

However, both Stockton and Kosak were excited with how well the farming feature had been received, and with how well it integrated with other features in the game. As a new feature, the farm works seamlessly with other professions in the game. Being able to grow your own resources has been a tremendous boon for players, but the question still remained -- how could the farming feature be improved even further?

Well ... how about as an additional means to gather reputation?

I may have taken leave of my sanity. I'm currently in the midst of a massive reputation grind in an effort to get everything to exalted. Part of this is because I like seeing green bars fill up on my screen, but part of it was intense curiosity towards the new daily system. Despite a somewhat compelling story, the daily quests in the Firelands just didn't quite work for me. Partially because the story just didn't seem all that compelling, but mostly due to the fact that the majority of the quests took place in a zone that was red on red.

I hate red zones.

Regardless, as a result of the experience I've seen what these rep grinds look like, and surprisingly, they're all different. You're not going to get the same experience doing each, and the quests aren't really very similar between each, either. Some of the reputation grinds are fantastic, and some ... well let's just say they could use some work. But let's take a look at what was hands-down my favorite rep grind and exactly what made it so fantastic to grind out.

Some may call my desire to reach exalted with the Tillers nonsensical, but I would happily argue that the goat mounts are more than worth it. Regardless, I've been happily tilling away on my farm and doing dailies for Halfhill's assorted residents. There's a pretty cool cycle with the Tiller dailies, a storyline that plays out as you continue helping out poor hapless Yoon. He's trying to become a member of the Tillers, but he'll need five votes to get in. Somewhere in the middle of revered, I got vote number four -- and I resigned myself to nothing particularly interesting until I hit exalted.

But imagine my surprise flying over Halfhill when I stumbled across the little guy pictured above. The poor thing was stranded and alone in the midst of all the verdant fields, hungry and scared. Obviously dogs don't care for vegetables, even if they are monstrously huge. So I took the quest he offered, Lost and Lonely, and fetched some steak for the starving pup. Once fed, he hightailed it for my farm, and now lives there quite happily. He even responds to emotes!

The Tillers are one of several new factions in Pandaria, but they come with a couple of unique twists. First, you get to have your own farm for growing cooking ingredients through some unique phasing and a quest chain with a pandaren who is new to farming. In order to upgrade your farm and get more plots for planting, you have to get the approval of the other farmers around the area, which you can complete by increasing your reputation with the Tillers and completing a series of dailies.

Second, you can improve your farm itself, through befriending the various people you'll meet around the area. You'll start out as strangers to these characters, but over time you can earn reputation and make friends. Once you've reached best friend status, each character will mail you some items, and send an improvement or two for your farm. So what's the best way to a Tillers' heart? Some would say through the stomach, but I'd have to say through the judicious use of gifts.

And those gifts are surprisingly easy to find ... if you know where to look.