Upon hitting level 90, you will find that a veritable christmas tree of quests lights up. At 90, the major reputations are unlocked, and you are encouraged to get to work on them.
Reputations are increased through daily quests almost exclusively (apart from the Lorewalkers,) so if you want access to the reputation rewards, you've got to get to work on those reps.
All Valor gear is now Rep gear, so in order to spend those Valor points, you must first attain certain reputation levels with various factions. For instance, I am one day away from hitting revered with the Klaxxi on my main, and thus opening up the Valor pants (though I will also need to get some more valor points, as I spent some on a cloak already.)
The point is: if you want access to Valor gear, you will need to attain certain reputation levels out in the world.
The Goal:
They want us getting out of the cities and doing stuff out in the world that is meaningful to our progression. This is a noble goal, and I do think that overall Pandaria seems like more of a living, breathing world than previous areas have been (though places like Icecrown I can forgive, as there's nothing living or breathing about it.)
The Problems:
If one is to accept that dailies should be the gateway to gearing up (other than through boss drops, which is of course what Blizzard has always thought should be the main way in which to gear up, despite the dangers of RNG,) then I have one major gripe: In order to even begin working on Shado-Pan or August Celestial reputation, you must first get all the way to Revered with Golden Lotus. There is no choice here, and so you not only create a burdensome barrier, you also bottleneck everyone in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, killing the same twelve mogu on the Golden Stair every day.
The Golden Lotus is also a bit frustrating because at each reputation level, you have more quests to do. By the time you hit honored, you go through three quest hubs to finish your dailies, which accounts for probably an hour of work every day. While more dailies means more reputation gains per day, thus making the grind from neutral to friendly and friendly to honored and honored to revered balanced out, you eventually wind up spending a huge amount of time on those dailies.
Currently, I feel disinclined to even worry about Shado-Pan or August Celestials because I'm already burned out on dailies (mind you, I like questing. My Death Knight, Oterro, is halfway through 89 at the moment, which will make my third level 90 toon. But dailies are, by their nature, repetitive on a daily basis.) Had I been able to start off with some kind of rotation, or focusing only on the factions that had gear I needed most, there might not have been such a problem.
While the Rogue is level 90, I dare not start the daily grind on him. It is too recent in memory and he's on a very high population server (in retrospect, transferring the Horde toons to an alphabetically early server was a terrible idea.) Perhaps when they implement the reputation boost for alts I'll be willing to wade in there again, but even still, that means at least a week's worth of dailies just to open up Shado-Pan and August Celestials. As someone who fully intends to have every class get to level 90 (and possibly duplicates for certain classes,) I'm not sure I'm going to be able to handle doing this grind on every single one of those characters.
Possible Solutions:
One of the new features in Mists that I love, despite the fact that they fit in a weird place in terms of character progression, is Scenarios. The quick and dirty version of the dungeon that works (and is most fun) with just three dps, Scenarios are actually one of the most original and coolest things they've brought to the game.
In fact, I wouldn't mind seeing more dungeons and raids that were more objective-based, and less "clear the trash to the next boss" kind of affairs.
Anyway, I'd love to see them implement some faction-based Scenarios. Now, I realize that this goes against the goal of getting people out into the world, but I think there needs to be an alternative to daily quests for gaining reputation.
Another, possibly radical solution would be to take the "alt boost" that they're planning for a future patch (hopefully 5.1) and run with it. Instead of just hitting revered on one character and then everyone gains rep at twice the rate, make it cumulative. If one toon hits revered, you'll get a 2x multiplier. If a second toon hits revered, make it a 3x multiplier. Three toons? 4x. I realize that eventually, if you're an altoholic like me, you'll be getting exalted in a day - or at least very quickly (at first I was going to suggest doing it exponentially, doubling the bonus for each toon, but then it occurred to me that on toon eight or so, you'd be hitting exalted after a single, 150 reputation quest.)
Perhaps the less radical solution would be to finally make reputations account-wide. I realize they don't really want to do this for immersion purposes - it would be weird to arrive in Dread Wastes to find that the Klaxxi already had the red carpet out and were offering you champagne and caviar (I assume this is what happens when you're exalted with a faction,) but there are plenty of ways for a character to have to work hard on getting an alt up (leveling, obviously, as well as professions and JP/VP, not to mention getting the right gear drops.) One would also have to make things like the Scryers/Aldor or Oracles/Frenzyheart exceptions, but it would probably make people feel better about playing their alts (and Blizzard does want us playing alts, right?)
Reflecting on Daily Quests:
The daily quest was introduced in Burning Crusade. One could do a (rather long) quest chain in Blade's Edge Mountains to start one's grind with O'grila, or one could do dailies with the Sha'tari Skyguard in order to attain a Nether Ray mount. This was further expanded with the Netherwing and eventually the Shattered Sun Offensive. While the rewards for the latter were quite nice (I remember the great Paladin tanking shield, back when we still needed spellpower on our gear, was a goal of mine,) another major motivator was gold. Back then, gold came from far fewer avenues, and daily quests were the only really reliable way to increase your net worth.
These were the days when the 5k gold price tag on epic flight was something you'd have to work for a long time to attain.
Anyway, the major daily hubs of the past two expansions, namely Argent Tournament and Molten Front (ok, and Tol Barad, but I never really pursued that one all that voraciously) had their own gating mechanisms, and the Golden Lotus feels more like their descendant than the BC grinds. In a way, the daily grind has become more sophisticated, but I do think it's best left as an optional thing. I was perfectly willing to do both on Jarsus (and I'm revered with Golden Lotus on him as well,) but other than getting just far enough to get the blacksmithing patterns for Ardten in Molten Front, I never pursued those dailies very much with the other characters.
And One Last Note on Reputations:
The way I see it, Reputations should be influenced by helping out the faction in any number of ways. What you do in the daily quests certainly helps, but I think that in general, any faction should have multiple avenues to advancement. WoW is a huge, enormous, gigantic game, with a very diverse playerbase with just as many diverse tastes (I for one, love Hour of Twilight-difficulty heroics, Wrath-difficulty 10-man raids, and leveling up alts. Oh, and engineering!) and I think that if reputations are going to be so core to the game, they should let people contribute how they wish.
Also, part of the goal of getting rid of head enchants and making shoulder enchants all scribe-produced was to make sure there were no "required" reputations. By making VP gear tied to reputations, haven't they just made them all "required?"
For all this griping, I should point out that I do really like the expansion. The farming mechanic with the Tillers is both fun and useful (and gives you something easier and less time-consuming than old-style farming to get the mats you need) and I love the work they've done in exposing us to the lore of the world. I can't wait to see this level of detail when we get to Argus (I can only assume we're eventually going to go to Argus, and I can tell you Oterro's going to be having one hell of a homecoming,) or any of the other environments we'll be exploring in future expansions.
We whine and gripe because we love, Blizzard.
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