Going Insane

For me, there are two modes for Warcraft: Goal, and No Goal.

If I have no goal, I wander aimlessly and jump through hoops mindlessly hoping that something will spark my interest or feel slightly fulfilling. I use it somewhat as therapy for a frustrating work environment, so when my day isn't productive I want my play to be, to cancel it out. Sometimes it works, most times it doesn't.

If I have a goal then I can track my progress and strive for an accomplishment. It creates its own storyline as I progress towards my goal, and the little things that I do in between add meaning to the larger story. Even fishing or mob farming becomes interesting when I attach a progress bar to it. I get the feeling that I am building something, a feeling I don't get from work.

So, I have taken on the largest goal I know of: The Insane title for my rogue.

If you aren't familiar with this achievement, it is the single hardest set of reputation grinds in the entire game. It requires you to be:

• Honored with the Bloodsail Buccaneers
• Exalted with Everlook
• Exalted with Ratchet
• Exalted with Ravenholdt
• Exalted with Booty Bay
• Exalted with Gadgetzan
• Exalted with Darkmoon Faire
• Exalted with Shen'dralar

It's possible you can look at that list and say to yourself, how hard can that be? Well, some pieces of it aren't hard, and some are. And some are very, very hard. I started working on it this Friday and ground on it in one way or another all Memorial Day weekend.

The part that I was not looking forward to was the Bloodsail Buccaneer reputation, which ended up being incredibly easy. Just kill a bunch of Booty Bay guards over and over, and you're there. When you get to friendly you do the quest to get the Bloodsail Admiral's hat and get your title with the Buccaneers, and then grind the rest of the way to honored.

After that, you need to work your reputation back to exalted with the four goblin factions, which takes much longer. Currently I'm still hated with all four, although I've made some decent progress by turning in linen and silk at Ratchet and Booty Bay. You can see my reputations here.

The Bloodsail I got done on Friday, and then knowing how useful it would be to have a MOLL-E (portable mailbox) I dropped herbalism, leveled mining to gather materials, dropped mining, and leveled engineering to 435. I love engineering on my rogue anyway, it's a lot of fun. I've ended up already using the rocket boots a lot, for the little things mostly like running through those long tunnels in Dire Maul (grinding goblin rep) or running back to the beginning of Ragefire Chasm (farming linen there). That ate about a day and a half, just leveling that.

Now that the preliminary professions are done I'm going to be doing a lot of Dire Maul runs for both the goblin and Shen'dralar reputations, so I'll want to do two things before I begin. First, I need to take my druid fishing for lots of rugged leather and bolts of runecloth. The rugged leather simply can't be bought at any reasonable price on the auction house. If I get desperate for cash I can probably fish up a few extra stacks from the mithril trunks I find, because the market is crazy.

Second, I need to take my rogue through Scholomance, Stratholme, and Eastern Plaguelands to find Skin of Shadow, Abomination Stitchings, and Blood of Heroes to turn the librams with the Shen'dralar faction in Dire Maul. The rugged leather and bolts of runecloth are used to build the ogre suit for Knot Thimblejack in Dire Maul, and I get 75 rep every time I do that.

Thankfully other people have done this grind before and posted their tips on how to do it, so all I need to do is buckle down and spend the hundreds of hours farming to get it done. But when it is done it will be an achievement that few have ever gotten and no one can argue with the value of.