New : Dark Tribunal - Gurubashi - WoW - Guild Hosting

necsis · Posted: Sun Nov 28, 2010 11:51 am Post subject: Lots of Dungeon Runs

OK, we officially love the new reputation tabards in WoW. For those who haven't discovered them yet, you'll find faction quartermasters next to the flight paths in all major cities. (Orgrimmar has Bilgewater Cartel, Orgrimmar and Darkspear quartermasters on mounts by the flight master.) There are also a few miscellaneous tabards that can be found in other places. For example, Wyrmrest Accord has a quartermaster on the top level of the temple and Kirin Tor has one at the top of the steps in the Violet Citadel.

These tabards all grant you faction gains with every kill when worn in an Azeroth dungeon. (Sorry; the Outland dungeons do nothing for you.) If the dungeon is trivial to you, the rep gains will also be trivial to the tune of 1-3 points per mob kill and 15 points for bosses. But if the dungeon is appropriate to your level you'll see about 15 points for most mobs and 300 points for bosses. That adds up incredibly fast!

For those of us at the level cap, this means that running Lich King heroic dungeons only requires about 3 runs to hit Honored, 5 more for Revered and another 7 for Exalted. Meanwhile, you'll also be earning Justice Points with bonus points given if you're in a random PUG group found through the dungeon finder. Each run that you do this way gives about 90 JP on average, so it really doesn't take long to earn the points for epic gear. For example, I've earned the three 1,100 point pieces of my level 251 set over the weekend so far and expect to have the last two before the end of the day today. It shouldn't take very long to be able to start running the Ice Crown Citadel raids.

Of course, this is made all the more fun by the fact that a few of us have been running these dungeons together. We spend less time in the queue, socialize and even found a new guild member! Whenever we queue up with a full party there is no wait at all and we can jump from dungeon to dungeon for fast-paced fun and profit. Anyone who wants to join in on this should let us know. Jump in or out as you have time and interest -- you'll be glad you did!

Meanwhile, for those of us with alt-itis the faction tabards are still a wonderful thing to have. Buy them all as soon as you get to each capital city and make a habit of always putting on the one for which you currently have the lowest rep whenever you enter a dungeon. Use the dungeon finder to run dungeons regularly. If you do this, you'll find that several things happen:

You'll get tons of experience. In fact, you'll find that WoW now has so much content that you'll always have at least two places to choose from for questing in between dungeon runs. It won't be uncommon for you to outlevel an area's content before you've even done it all. That means far less tedious leveling for all your alts!
You'll get tons of rep. By around level 30 you should have Exalted rep with all of the Horde factions. This unlocks some nice gear in the form of large bags and blue quality cloaks from the quartermasters. It also enables you to have a slew of mounts for any mood. You'll also get the Ambassador title for reaching Exalted with five of the six racial factions.
You'll be geared to the max! Up to level 70 you'll be getting a random blue with every Dungeon Finder run. Plus you have the drops from the boss kills. On top of that, Blizzard just changed dungeons to "remove the suck" (their words!) by eliminating corpse runs and putting all the dungeon's quest givers inside the dungeon. Although not quite as good as the boss drops, these quests give excellent rewards. Far better items than you get from open world quests! So you should have yourself fully outfitted in blues by the time you're level 20.
You'll be wealthy. Dungeon runs give you a lot of coin because you're blasting through mobs at a very fast pace and each mob carries more loot. You'll also get a lot of trash that you can vendor as well as gear that's useless to you but very nice for people who haven't discovered the joys of the dungeon system.

In short, WoW has really come a long ways. We're discovering that with the Cataclym we're now actually wondering what we want to do next -- not because there's nothing to do but because there's just so darned many options! Meanwhile, Blizzard has also added a lot of great quality-of-life enhancements such as the faction representation tabards and the way quests are now handled in the dungeons.

It's a whole new world!

What is 14 + 2?