Posts with tag rep

Each week, WoW Insider brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your addons folder will never be the same. This week: Shackleford.

It's Addon Spotlight time, ladies and gentlemen. As I sit here at death's door from the terrible PAX pox with which I have so unceremoniously been bestowed, I try to eek out words and phrases, maybe a quip or two, before death's cold embrace takes me. I feel as though my short time on this earth and in this existence was worth it, however, because I got to tell you about Auto Tabard.

This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the AOL guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages.

I'm going to admit it: I miss the old style of rep grinds. Okay, just put down the torch while I clarify, please. My fond reminiscences do not extend to the Hydraxian Waterlords or the Wintersaber Trainers. Simply being time-consuming does not make a rep grind good. Also, reputation shouldn't impede progress. Locking people out of heroics until hitting revered -- or even honored -- is a silly and artificial barrier.

What I would like to see return to rep grinds, however, is a little heart. In the past, there was often some planning involved in finding the best route to pleasing your favorite factions. The Cenarion Expedition is a good example. Pro rep fiends started out with wide-scale slaughter in Zangermarsh. They turned in Unidentified Plant Parts through friendly but saved all their Uncatalogued Species to give them a quick burst of rep once they hit honored. Only then did they start doing quests and running Underbog. There was a definite strategy involved, and it made your rise through the ranks seem meaningful.

Ever since the introduction of championing tabards in Wrath, rep grinding feels less like a metagame and more like a series of bars that slowly and inevitably fill up automatically. All that's required of you is to wear the proper gang colors, and eventually you'll be well regarded by all. As popular as it is, I wouldn't suggest getting rid of championing -- but perhaps we could compromise by adding additional, more engaging methods of gaining rep? I'd love to do more than two daily tasks for our riparian friends in Uldum, for example.

So tell me if I'm crazy. Do you think championing tabards are the best thing since spiced bread, or like me, do you feel that they currently lack something?

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This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages.

I recently finished my Shatar Skyguard reputation grind. I'd previously done my share of rep grinding, including repeatedly decimating the populations of Felwood Timbermaw and Nagrand ogres, but I was, um, not prepared for Skettis.

We tend to be a friendly group on my server, and my previous experience rep grinding involved everyone giving each other a respectful distance, taking turns and sharing a friendly wave here or there. It is quite a bit different in the cutthroat world of the Skethyl Mountains, where more than once I detected stealthed Alliance lying in wait trying to grab my summoned mobs. When it came to summoning Terokk, I quickly learned to save that for early mornings and to scope the area beforehand just to be safe from Allies, but quite regularly, someone of either faction would swoop down into a camp where I was merrily grinding away and kill the very next mob in my sights, regardless of the fact that the next camp over was completely unoccupied. I had no idea Skyguard Rep was such serious business!

I eventually finished my grind and earned my Purple Riding Nether Ray and matching Nether Ray Fry, but I am still surprised by the experience. Ever enter into a WoW endeavor to find it unexpectedly competitive? Did you stick with it, or did you decide it was more trouble than it was worth?

Dear Alex,

l2preamble.

Yours,

Modern Writing.

Peacebone asked...

"Why can't we wear tabards to get rep gains from raids? Is there any specific reason?"

Most of you are excited for 3.1 so you can start raiding Ulduar, or take advantage of the new class changes. But I know what some of you are on pins and needles for. It's the new title The Insane.

Insane In The Membrane is exactly what it sounds like -- an achievement for people who are completely nuts. To earn this title you must be willing to spend a lot of time destroying and raising obscure factions in Azeroth. I mean a lot of time. It requires that attain the following:

Honored with Bloodsail Buccaneers
Exalted with Everlook
Exalted with Ratchet
Exalted with Booty Bay
Exalted with Gadgetzan
Exalted with Ravenholdt
Exalted with Darkmoon Faire
Exalted with Shen'dralar

Yep.

If you want to get started on this brain-breaking journey, just follow the jump.

Good afternoon all. I want to give a shout out to everyone in Fargo, North Dakota who is dealing with the flood that's going on, in particular everyone who is busy sandbagging. It's big, bad, and full of water. But on the plus side there are now ducks outside of my apartment, and I live two and a half miles from the Red River. But ducks are cool. It's made me want to go fire up Duck Hunt. I may be pawning off The Queue this week to Alex, depending on how bad things get in my area. He's anxious to talk about Mountain Dew I hear.

Palatel asked...

"Any idea on how the leader of a Battleground is determined?"

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

Be warned that the very end of today's edition of The Queue contains minor spoilers for the upcoming Ulduar raid zone. Everything is perfectly safe until the very last question, and even then the spoilers are very minor. Minor as in it describes a couple of the bosses found within the zone. It doesn't give away any story or plot. If you want your experience to remain pure, stop at the last question. If you don't care so much about knowing who you'll see in Ulduar, it's perfectly safe.

I warn because I love.

mindor asked...

What is the deal with the Greymane wall in Silverpine forest? Is there an old raid set in there? What is on the other side of that monstrous wall?

MMO Champion has posted some of what are believed to be rewards from the Argent Dawn Tournament coming to the servers, and they are pretty awesome. All of the rewards will apparently be purchased with a new currency called Champion's Seals, and those will be earned from doing dailies, some instanced activity (likely a type of mounted combat -- think PvP-esque, but against mobs), and all of the other various tasks the Argent Dawn is lining up for us. The Tournament itself will appear in 3.1 (and Alex has already posted a great gallery of what it looks like on the PTR), but other activities won't appear until a later content patch.

There are epic weapons for everyone (right now priced at 25 seals, though that may change -- the weapons seem to be a little higher 5-man Heroic level), as well as blue boots, belts, gloves, and neckpieces for most classes and specs (all just 10 seals -- about equivalent to the Revered options the endgame reputations). Additionally, you can get tabards for each faction city (at 50 seals, that seems expensive, but they could have a special proc or ability granted with them), you can buy specially colored faction mounts for 100 seals, and at the top of the heap is an Argent Hippogryph for a whopping 250 seals. Seals, it seems, will also be able to be exchanged for reputation commendations, so if you just want to rep up with a certain old faction rep, you can do that, too.

Pretty enticing. We have yet to see how exactly seals will be earned or how easy they'll be to come by, but it seems like Blizzard is planning to make this a catch-all option for endgame in terms of picking up rep, mounts, or gear. Just like the champion tabards let us choose just how we could earn rep for the endgame factions, the Argent Tournament appears to be a chance for folks at level 80 to pick up whatever rep or options they like by doing whatever the Tourney offers.

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.

Good afternoon, everyone! I'll waste no time trying desperately to be funny today, we'll just jump into this thing.

Carda asked...

Which heroic dungeon provides the most rep? Of course, this will probably vary depending on the amount of trash pulled (full clear vs. "just the pats, ma'am"), but accounting for bosses and essential trash pulls, where can I farm to max out my rep as quickly as I can?

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.

Good news, everyone! We have a guest star today on The Queue! Yes, that's right, a very special guest! Well, sort of. I guess she's not that special after all, but our resident Feral Druid guru chimed in to answer a Bear question yesterday, and she answered it better than I ever could. Our first question of the day is hers to handle, then it's back to me. Because you all love me, right?

thon asked...

I've had a lot of heated debate on the current def cap of Druid Bear Tanks. Is there one if specced into Survival of the Fittest? Is it lower than a normal tank class? I'd love to be able to tell them for certain to pipe down!

3.0.8 just keeps giving us more surprises. The newest patch note update tosses us this fun number: Reputation gained from mobs no longer deprecates based on your level! This means that even if you're level 80 and killing mobs in Stratholme for rep, you'll still gain the full amount of Argent Dawn rep you would've gotten if you were level 60 (or the mobs were 80). Good news for those of you trying to get Argent Champion, Guardian of Cenarius, or Diplomat, although the folks that already ground those reps without this change might feel it trivializes those titles. For those of who you haven't started the grinds yet, maybe you should consider waiting a little bit and taking advantage of this change to save your sanity a bit. This isn't the first time a change like this has been made, but it's a welcome one.

WI reader Ray actually notified us of this change on the PTR a few days ago, but apparently I'm so slow that the change managed to make the updated 3.0.8 notes before I posted it. This is me hanging my head in shame. I'LL MAKE IT UP TO YOU, RAY.

(Pictured: A grey [kangaroo] mob)

A poster in the general forums today outlined his, and many others, money making strategy they'll do when patch 3.0.8 goes live:

• Save up bank-tabs-full of Relics of Ulduar
• Sell Relics of Ulduar when they are no longer soulbound in patch 3.0.8
  

This is a solid scheme, it seemed, to make a metric ton of gold. In 3.0.8 Relics will be able to be turned in for Sons of Hodir reputation. Everyone and their mother are going to want them.

However a response by Bornakk, a Blizzard Community Manager, reads "Is there a problem? Yes sir, the data on the relics is inaccurate. While things can still change, they may remain souldbound."

So in the typical Blizzard fashion of not confirming anything outright, they have more or less strongly hinted that relics will remain soulbound in 3.0.8. So much for the money making scheme.

Crygil posted early this morning that the Armory will be going down at 6 a.m. PST / 9 a.m. EST to prepare it for Wrath of the Lich King. The Armory will be down for approximately eight hours.

He doesn't go into specifics about what will be updated, but we have some good guesses at what we could see included:

• Achievement listings
• Wrath of the Lich King items
• New reputations
• Faster character data updates

Crygil also mentions that all the character data will be reset. This
means that you have to log into your character to repopulate the Armory information on it. This is important if you have seldom played alts yet still refer to the armory data, or if you are currently applying to a guild that requires armory information.

We'll have more concrete information on what this update brings after it's complete, sometime around 2 p.m. PST.

Here's a good question from our email (it's ask at wow.com, if you've got a question for Ask WoW Insider). It's about PvP gear, and what to do about it in the few weeks left until the Wrath launch. We know now that Honor and marks are not getting wiped for sure, so Treecow wants to know what to do:

My question is this, now that Wrath will be out in 6 weeks or so, does it really pay to get the S2 gear? Is it worth getting, even if it's going to be replaced within the first couple levels in Northrend, just to make those couple of levels easier? Or should I keep running quests and dailies? Or is there something else I should be doing that I haven't even thought about?

Thanks,
Treecow
70 Druid on Thrall

If you ask me, dailies are the way to go at this point (and if you haven't gotten your rep up in some factions, dailies should help there, too), simply because gear will get quickly replaced and gold will always be useful. Not to mention that there are battleground dailies to do every day if BGs are what you'd rather play.

But on the other hand, I'm mostly a PvE-er, and who knows -- doing the PvP to buy PvP gear could be worth it in the long run. You might even get more gold out of selling items you'd normally be equipping in Wrath. Readers, what do you say to Treecow?

Previously on Ask WoW Insider...