Race Reputation at High (or Any!) Levels
This is not a hunter-specific tip, but since I just spent several hours researching it, testing it, getting confused, and researching it some more, I thought I’d be nice and share what I learned.
As you get significantly higher level than a quest, the experience that you receive for completing that quest starts to drop off. So it makes sense to do quests as early as you can so you get the maximum rewards for them. Now it used to be that reputation worked the same way — once you got more than five or so levels above a quest, the reputation reward would start to drop off. Get high enough level and the reward was so pitiful it didn’t make any sense to do the quest (at least not for the reputation). But that’s not true anymore!
I was thinking about this recently because I wanted to get my Draenei a cat mount — and I wasn’t looking forward to the grind. But I kept seeing other players mentioning going back to very low level areas to do quests for reputation. And lo and behold! Somewhere along the line I missed a major change. Although experience still falls off after a certain number of levels., you now you earn full reputation rewards for any level quest regardless of your level! Yay! That will makes things a lot easier.
Except … while that will help my Draenei get a cat mount, it won’t help my Orc get a hawkstrider. It seems that pre-expansion races have a much harder time gaining reputation with the expansion races – the reputation is still subject to diminishing returns after five or so levels. Compare the following rewards when four of my characters completed a simple level 5 Blood Elf delivery quest:
- Level 10 Bloodelf: 75 rep
- Level 10 Undead: 75 rep
- Level 11 Orc: 60 rep
- Level 70 Orc: 8 rep
And just to verify, I also tried a level 5 Undead quest with my level 70 Orc. Result: 75 rep.
(Aside: Those of you who know me might be curious as to why I have an undead character when undead can’t be hunters. She’s a priest. Suffice it to say that I was proving a point to my husband about WoW vs. EQII low-level play with healers.)
So there you are! If you want a hawkstrider or an elekk mount, you might want to start your rep grind early — or stick to the appropriate race. But for any of the others, it’s significantly easier than it used to be to get in their good graces!
[Edit: Whoops! I forgot the link to the fascinating thread I found when I was researching this, in which a Blizzard GM confirms that the behavior is by design. I've also added it to the text above.]
8 Comments
You know what? That really sounds like a bug to me. But there’s another way around getting rep (esp at high levels). Alterac Valley repeat turnins. Player corpses will give a ton of the stuff to turn in, and in turn you can get good rep back.
Interesting news about the comparative difficulty in developing rep for the expansion races. I can see this hurting Alliance players who want an elephant, but for Horde, who wants a dumb Chocobo anyway?
It does look like a bug — but the bit I forgot to add (which I’ve edited in now) is a link to a post on the WoW forums in which a GM eventually confirms that the behavior is by design. Sorry about missing that at first.
The oh so secret mechanic is very simple if you think about what happened the first few weeks after TBC came out. Everyone started a Blood Elf and/or Draenei toon and began levelling in the starting zones, making these zones very busy and the mobs in them were often dead within 30 seconds after spawning. A few L60s went there too hoping for some quick rep and a new mount and noticed this “rep bug” and left, telling everyone that the rep was next to nothing over there for them and that pvp-rep or cloth turn-ins would be faster.
End result: newbies could level in relative quiet and safety and higher levels left them and the mobs alone.
Now imagine if this mechanic hadn’t been there. Then every toon on the server would have been in those 4 areas (Azuremyst/Bloodmyst for Alliance, Eversong/Ghostlands for Horde) if under L60 and all 60s would be in Outlands.
End result: overloading of the servers, new players clamoring about the high levels one-shotting mobs left and right, camping of quest mobs, and general griefing which is bound to happen after 10 minutes of having to deal with the first 3 situations. Technical staff and GM staff working overtime to deal with it all and calling in sick after a few days due to stress.
The “bug” itself is intentional, but it’s stupid that Blizzard considers it some kind of game-mechanic secret. I hope Blizzard will put the same grey xp/full rep mechanic in those zones sometime in the near future, but I’m not going to hold my breath for it.
I agree. But there may be hope for a change in the nearish future. The patch notes for PTR Patch 2.2.0 mention that “The following old-world factions have had their acquisition rate significantly increased: Cenarion Circle, Argent Dawn, Timbermaw Hold.” — so we know Blizzard is still thinking about rep gain, anyway.
It has nothing do with post/pre expansion. It has to do with starting reputation.
Since Silvermoon are a new faction, I doubt you have much rep with them. Orcs, Trolls, and tauren start with neutral to undercity and silvermoon.
To Siusaidhna:
Yes, Horde toons have work a little harder getting enough rep for that Hawkstrider because they start at neutral with Silvermoon. That’s nothing new since the same is true for Forsaken rep.
You need 39k rep to get that nice raptor as an orc, but if it was just the starting faction rep then I doubt that the extra 3k rep to get to friendly with Silvermoon would be that much of a problem. This “bug” is about the rep per quest and it only happens in the Blood Elf and Draenei zones and not anywhere else, including the Forsaken zones.
I tested it out myself with a few L20-something alts (Troll Shaman and Human Mage) and got the same effect: Grey quests in BE zones give much less rep than those in Orc/Tauren/Forsaken areas and next to none of you are 60. Same story for Alliance zones.
Two additional notes about this bug that I noticed:
- It doesn’t matter if the toon was made pre or post Portal Opening.
- The “bug” seems to hit the Draenei and Blood Elves themselves too. I’ve heard several people complain that they get less rep for grey quests in Bloodmyst after they went to the Elf/Human/Dwarf starter zones to level a bit before coming back to the Draenei zones.
I can confirm what the last poster said. I am a BE and I mistakenly went out and leveled without getting my quests done early. I came back at lvl 33 and I’m only getting 1/10th of the rep that I would have gotten when the quest was >green. I’m very disappointed because I was sort of counting on the discount for skills and such. I’m not sure what I should do at this point, it will take forever to get Silvermoon rep even to honored at this rate.
Leave a Reply