Cata's release date has long since been announced - December 7th, 2010. Achievement junkies have been concerned, what with so much of the old world being in for changes. Some changes will be large, some will be small, but change should be everywhere.
Loremaster? Might want to finish that by by the 7th, or you'll have to start all over again. Granted, it would be a great excuse to discover all of the new quests, see the changes to existing quests that don't quite go up in flames and disappear in a puff of smoke, but if you've made much of any progress on either continent, it would be painful to realize you now have much further to go to get the deed done. I'm not clear on whether it'll only reset the old world, or whether it'll change Outland and Northrend as well. It makes sense that Vanilla would completely reset, but I've read that there will be some nods to the changes in Outland, although for the most part stepping through that portal will mostly be a time warp for us for some time.
My personal pet project, begun by Vanira, is Insane in the Membrane. She got me started on it nearly two years ago - "Want Bloodsail rep? I'll be killing Booty Bay guards tonight if you'd like to join me," she'd said. And once you start with the killing, you begin to work out a strategy on how to most efficiently kill the suckers.
We're conscientious goblin murderers, though. We're questers, collectors, we like to have fun while mostly making a point to not ruin anyone else's fun. We went out of our way to kill in out of the way places, where quest NPCs and vendors weren't present. A number of players just go with wholesale slaughter, but I've found that such behavior actually slows things down. Vendor A will spawn a guard for you to kill when you run past him. He will continue to spawn guards for you, so long as you leave him alive, unless he bugs out. (And they do bug out occasionally - I think we basically let the passage of time reset the vendors and quest NPCs) Which isn't to say that we never took out quest NPCs and vendors, because we did, usually by accident. Sometimes it was a thoughtless survival mechanism - the Bruisers would net us to lock us in place and we'd have already used the abilities that would either free us or save us from doom (15 Bruisers beating on you, even at 80, becomes rather painful when they're also nailing you to the ground). Sometimes a stray Frost Nova, Arcane Blast or Holy Nova might clip a non-guard, and they'd join us in our little villa of doom on the lowest level of Booty Bay... But mostly, we left the NPCs and Vendors untouched and simply farmed their anxiety by making a loop past them and then back down to the room where we did the deed.
The thing about working on Bloodsail rep is that you lose your rep with the goblins very, very quickly. And then the goblins all over the world want to kick your ass, too. No more goblin flight paths for take off, and if you land at one, you need to be prepared to get the heck away very quickly...without killing more goblins, because the next step is to make the goblins love the ever living shit out of you. Killing one more goblin means a couple more Tannin runs in DM, or one more key. Keys are uncommon enough that you really, really don't want to have to just pray for another key. At this point, killing even one more goblin is fucking stupid.
So after a few months of the inconvenience of being one of Goblin-kind's Most Wanted, I joined Vanira on a Dire Maul run to see how she did things. She invites me along quite often when she knows she's going to be bored. And then she gets me into trouble, like getting the goblins to want to carve me up for Pilgrim's Bounty holiday. The run was interesting, and educational.
I've been through Dire Maul quite a few times, but not very often through Dire Maul North. I was a little more familiar with DM East and DM West, probably due to having quests there. Vanira showed me what I needed to kill, showed the good places to kill them, and mostly showed me, "This is all the stuff you can avoid killing, because it'll just slow you down."
I began working on other pieces of the achievement on and off, but Dire Maul and goblin rep had been my primary focus because of the convenience factor when it came to flight paths. Although, I will admit that it helped quite a bit simply reaching neutral with all of them, because I needed to do a few more of their quests while I worked on Loremaster as well, and doing the goblin quests for that offered additional goblin rep. (huzzah!)
In the last month or so, Blizzard finally responded to questions about how possible Insane in the Membrane would be, post-Cataclysm. What I've heard thus far indicates that Dire Maul will be receiving changes significant enough to make working on goblin and Shen'dralar reps potentially impossible. Two weeks ago, while watching the BlizzCon stream, Vanira mentioned that she was finishing up her Dire Maul runs, and it reminded me that I probably ought to get cracking on it as well - I'd been taking a break from grinding it out because I'd been doing it for quite some time again, and things were just boring and depressing. I don't do well during long hauls, I need my grinding chopped up into chunks I can handle.
So I took a look at my reps. It seemed that I needed about 45 more keys (and/or some combination of keys and Ogre Tannin), and 42 Librams (for Shen'dralar). The keys I was pretty sure I could handle - between keys and Tannin, it seemed quite doable. Boring as all get out, yes, but still quite possible, considering I was accustomed to seeing triple digits for the keys.
The Librams bummed me out. For every Libram, you need one Pristine Black Diamond. Those had generally been selling for between 100g and 500g on my server. Vanira had finished her Shen'dralar rep at some point in the last few months, but she was making runs of Strat (Vanilla Strat, not Caverns of Time Strat) for the Baron's mount, and when she'd get a PBD drop, she was generous enough to send it on to me. I'd been slowly purchasing them up off the AH if I saw them at one of their lower price points. I wound up needing fewer than 20 PBDs... but if you've seen their prices on your AH recently, you understand that anything more than 10 would be pathetically expensive.
Prices have ranged between 400g and 2400g on my server since people began advertising in Trade chat that they wanted the diamonds. Other players didn't quite understand why some of us were so excited about PBDs, but they understood that a profit was to be had once multiple people began wanting to purchase them at the same time. The availability of these gems is pretty small to begin with, which is why they've remained relatively expensive for an old, other wise useless Vanilla item. They're random, rare, and very few people run the instances that usually drop them, which makes them even more rare. Those who do farm those instances are probably pretty aware of what they're used for, and keep the PBDs for themselves... and those who don't might wind up destroying the suckers to make space in their bags (SAD PANDA).
Long story short - I've finished off getting Exalted with the Steamwheedle Cartel, and I've finished getting Exalted with the Shen'dralar (I will not be capping out Shen'dralar exalted because I'm not spending about 1.5k for it; it will remain at about 300 rep points for eternity at this point).
What's next?
...Ravenholdt. I finished off Honored before bed last night, and today I begin farming up lockboxes on my Rogue. After that, or when I need a break from picking pockets, I'll be working on gathering mats for Darkmoon cards. And then I'll be all done. :)
And INSANE.
A HUGE thank you to Vanira, Sniff, Noight, and Siens! You've made the last legs of this particular journey less painful, more fun, and honestly possible. I hadn't anticipated the windfalls and generosity that I've received from all of you, and it's made the last few weeks a highlight, rather than a dark time for me during this experience. Thank you!
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