Nagrand Revisited

Epic mounts and reputation, are a recurring theme at the moment. As a Dwarf the natural mount is the Ram (or Llama, affectionately known as Flossie). In my opinion they are the least aesthetically pleasing of all the Alliance mounts. Exalted status with the 5 main races is difficult and would mean farming cloth or backtracking looking for quests that were missed out on the ascent to level 70.

I have had my eye on a Frostsaber to go with Bobcat, but the thought of doing any questing in Darnasus fills me with dread. Farming cloth for the Alliance would be so dreary.

My next favourite would be to gain Exalted with those fine fellows the Kurenai - who offer all manner of Talbuks. Slightly more sexy than a sheep in my opinion. http://www.wowwiki.com/Talbuk_(Mount) & http://www.wowwiki.com/War_Talbuk

Reputation with the Kurenai mostly involves killing ogres. So far so good, and they drop Obsidian Warbeads which give 500xp for 10. The problem is the sheer quantity required. BRK did a calculation of the number required to go from Revered to Exalted, a total of 12000 rep.
http://bigredkitty.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-get-pink-war-talbuk.html
The calculation comes to an earth shattering 800 ogres. This may be one for doing over time, much like fishing. Anyway how to get up to Revered in the first place.

The list of quests includes both the Zangarmarsh and Nagrand areas http://www.ampwow.com/wow/viewReputation/Kurenai.php#startContent.

Most of the quests are of the hack/maim/slash variety. My personal favourite was the Corki chain. The useless son of the Kurenai leader Arechron

• HELP!
• Corki is Missing Again
• Corki's Ransom
• Cho'War The Pillager

Corki constantly ends up in a cave awaiting is fate - 3 times you need to rescue him and 3rd time requires the impressive fight with Cho'War. Not so much difficult as quite fun, long and he uses dirty tactics.

So all quests completed and only 10000 rep to go - might be some time yet.

Reputations At Stake

"Grinding for Rep" - a statement guaranteed to drive fear into the heart of most WoW players. For the first 50 levels you play as you like, take a quest don't take a quest, learn a proffesion, sit down for an hour fishing. Then life takes a dramatic twist for the worse.

My first experience of Reputation was for the Timbermaws. I was running a quest series for the Linken Sword, and suddenly discovered the need to spend many hours killing the same beasties for 5 or 15 rep each. Every session would result in a calculation of how many Deadwoods it would take to get from Unfriendly to Neutral with the Timbermaws. As part of the original endgame it was designed to draw out the game interest for a bit longer. The result was parties of people camped out in certain areas killing anything that spawned immediately. After the release of The Burning Crusade, these areas became ghost towns.

The Timbermaws took 2 nights play and then after the jolly trip through Timbermaw Hold to discover that the process starts again in Winterspring there are more Repeatable quests and lots of slaying. I managed to get to 1502/3000 Neutral, and then drifted over to the Outlands.

So it was with a sense of dread that I discovered that I needed to get Reputation everywhere in the Outlands. However, I have started on the road down to getting friendly with the Sporeggor. This proved to be a cakewalk, a few collections, a bit of killing and there was a happy race, willing to talk to me and offer more crazy quests for more reputation. The main driving force was for the Survivalist's Pike http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?witem=27751&locale=enUS;source=live .

Bring on the rep, because this time I am ready for it.