Huge Nerfs for Reputation Farming, Experience Grinding & Weekly Event Exploits

Hey folks, this is Kelani.

We're into the second week of dragonflight and a lot has happened.

We've got big changes to rep farms, weekly events, bug fixes, and some really weird ways to gear up super quickly.

We have more rewards to look forward to and loot is being changed in Mythic raids.

Alts have more and better skits, experience gains have been slashed in half for some activities, and the Darkmoon Faire is better than ever.

It's been a roller coaster, that's for sure.

We have a lot to talk about, so let's break down what's been happening in WoW for this past week, as well as some very important updates for the game as a whole.

Now, before we jump in, be sure to hit that like button and subscribe so you never miss another video.

Now, first up, the first dragonflight raid, the Vault of the Incarnates, will open up next weekend.

There's an interesting change coming through for how bind-on-equip gear will work for the first few weeks of the new raid on Mythic difficulty only.

Remember that Mythic does open up at the same time as everything else for this expansion, and Mythic difficulty BOPs will not actually be bind-on-equipped.

They will instead be bind-on-pickup, meaning you will not be able to trade or sell them outside of your raid group.

This means that the highest item-level bind-on-equipped gear you can get from the raid in the first few weeks will be from Heroic, not Mythic.

There will be no Mythic item-level gear circulating through the economy, which also means there will not be a part of the race to world first in any capacity.

Usually, guilds spend millions of gold on buying any piece of BOE gear they can find just to get every shred of advantage they can muster, but that won't be a factor this time, which is very interesting in my opinion.

I also think it's healthy for the game overall to delay that big spike of easy-to-acquire max-item-level gear.

After a few weeks of the raid being open, the Devotee will re-address the situation and might re-enable Mythic BOE gear, but at that point, only new drops will be BOE, so you can't hold on to them and sell them at a later date.

I am very interested to see how this plays out, but I do think it's a good change overall.

Now, while we're on the topic of gear, dragonflight has been a bit weird so far in terms of how you can gear up.

We've had the typical dungeon farm – normal, heroic, then Mythic – to get some shiny gear from those Mythic 0 dungeons.

Then we usually kind of wait for the raid to open up in Mythic Plus and all that jazz.

But this time, world content seems to be the king when it comes to getting the best gear.

The weekly world event rewards can be very lucrative, including the weekly quest for aiding the Accord.

Rares also drop some pretty good gear, and world quests are scaling higher than I've ever seen this early in an expansion.

But the real outlier has been the so-called "super rares".

Super rares have loot that scales with your item level and they can drop gear up to item level 385, which is bonkers when you consider that season one hasn't even started yet.

Most of these rares are over by the Obsidian Citadel in the Waking Shores or in Bracken Hyde Hollow over in the Azure Span.

They are being heavily farmed and camped, which also means there are usually a lot of groups active whenever a rare does spawn.

So even if you can't see the rare on your server, be sure to check the looking for group tool for any of the rare names that you're interested in.

When that rare does pop up somewhere, anywhere, you can almost guarantee a group will be made.

There are a few different add-ons and weak auras that help you track which super rares you've killed for the day and what loot they drop.

You can loot these every single day, so a lot of people are just farming them repeatedly as often as they can.

This way, you can see which ones might give you some good upgrades and which ones might not be worth looking for whatsoever.

If you're a cloth wearer and the only items the rare can drop are plate and strength stuff, well, that's not really worth your time now, is it?

I'll give you a link to the weak aura I used in the description below if you're interested.

Now, there is one rather large caveat here.

Because this gear scales with your item level, you are going to need some gear before this gear becomes super valuable.

So, those Mythic 0 dungeons, or crafted gear, or any other more reliable source of higher item-level gear is still going to be very valuable for you because that gear will also increase the value of rare or super rare gear.

So, if you aren't getting the higher item-level drops from these rares just yet, try to increase your item level in other ways as well.

Don't just rely on the supercars because their loot is also kind of random.

Now speaking of gearing up quickly, there was a bit of an exploit that is definitely close to falling into the category of an exploit.

You may know about the various weekly events: the community feast, the grand hunts, and the Siege on Dragonbane Keep.

They reward you with a nice box of goodies and loot the first time you complete them per week.

They have okay rewards if you do it more than that, but oddly enough, those rewards didn't have a lockout on them at all.

This is important because the Siege on Dragonbane Keep is a bit different; you can progress it faster or slower depending on your shard and the group you're running with.

So, you could complete the event on your server or shard and then use the group finder to find a shard that was still in progress.

This meant you could earn rewards from your siege and then from someone else's siege right after, and you could actually keep going until you could no longer find groups in the group finder. Wowhead made a post suggesting that you could get up to six or seven loot boxes per siege, which I think runs every hour.

This led to folks earning up to six to seven times more rewards than was intended for the Siege event.

So, you can bet your dragon-riding Vigor points that everyone was flocking over there to take advantage of it.

I'm kind of surprised at how many of these kinds of oversights we've had so far in dragonflight.

But needless to say, it has been fixed.

You can now only get one box of loot per prestige event, so no more hopping shards or servers or any of that crazy nonsense.

So, if you've been doing the good old shard hop for days now and taking full advantage of this exploit, and you suddenly can only get one box per run, well now you know why.

If everybody suddenly started gearing up super quickly and you had no idea why, well, you probably know that as well.

Another change, or fix, or nerf (depending on which word you prefer to use) came through for the Wrathion and Sirelian reputation farm.

This farm was (and still is) pretty simple: kill as many monsters as you can as quickly as you can, loot them for key fragments, combine them into keys, and turn them in.

It was also incredibly efficient if you had a good group or a nice setup of a 2x4 group, and you could just grind away.

However, Blizzard apparently reduced the respawn rate of monsters in the Obsidian Citadel area, meaning you would have to wait longer for the monsters to respawn, drastically reducing the effectiveness and overall efficiency of the farm.

So, if you start the rep farm now and try to grind monsters, you're going to see far fewer monsters in general, and they will respawn much slower, meaning you have to move around to find monsters a lot more.

This has likely slowed it all down massively, probably because the big ticket items available towards the end of that reputation farm are pretty powerful.

I guess completing this farm in eight hours was a little too fast for Blizzard's liking, so they nerfed it by quite a bit.

You should expect to spend quite a bit longer than those early folks grinding mobs if you really want to push this rep before the raid comes out.

Personally, I don't think the items will make a massive difference, but to each their own.

Blizzard just announced that we will see another round of Twitch drops if you tune in to the WoW streams on Twitch between December 9th and December 13th.

You can grab yourself the Cenarian Hatchling pet and the Swift Winstead Mount by watching four hours to get the pet and an additional four hours after that to get the mount.

You will need to claim the pet before you can start your progress towards the mount, according to the post.

So, all you have to do is watch your favorite WoW streamers on Twitch to get these easy-to-obtain rewards.

In addition to this new round, there are a few changes to the Perpetual purple firework Twitch drop.

When this drop starts on December 13th, when the raid opens up, you'll have to watch very specific channels to earn it. This is markedly different from the other drops, which have been very open.

However, this purple firework toy is to celebrate the race to world first event, so you will need to watch a Twitch stream from one of the five top guilds: Steam Liquid, BDG, Echo, Method, and Aversion.

The watch time is still only two hours, so that should be an easy drop to pick up, especially if you want to watch the race to world first.

I'm excited for this season and want to see how the top guilds handle the Mythic raid opening.

Now, in other news, I guess leveling via crafting professions was a little too powerful or maybe just too easy because it has been nerfed considerably.

Previously, you were able to earn a nice chunk of experience with up to 60 first craft bonuses through any crafting profession. This would net you about 700,000 experience, or about two levels total if you did it towards the end of your leveling adventures.

That number has been slashed in half. You can only obtain experience for 30 first crafts now, which probably means you can only get about a level out of your professional experience gains going forward.

The experience you actually get doesn't seem to have increased at all, at least it hasn't when I tested it on my warrior blacksmith.

So it seems like profession leveling has been nerfed by half, which means it will be significantly less efficient or effective.

Now, the main reason for this nerf was probably to discourage players from picking up a profession and using it only for experience, then dropping it for another profession and repeating the cycle until they capped out their experience gains.

The 30 craft limit is likely to limit players to getting the bonus from just two professions.

So, you can still get this bonus easily if you have two crafting professions, but we're not going to encourage you to cycle professions like you have been.

I think cycling professions is annoying anyway, but I would have liked to see a buff to the experience gains to at least somewhat offset the reduction in first craft bonuses, just to keep professional experience gains valuable while removing the hoops you have to jump through.

Maybe we'll see a buff at a later date, but for now, leveling via professions will only get you half as much as it did before these nerfs.

The Gathering professions like Mining, herbalism, and skinning will all get 10 knowledge points to spend, and the crafting professions will get five knowledge points to spend.

You also get a nice chunk of Artisans metal, which is a nice bonus.

If you're trying to find every knowledge point possible, be sure to seek out your profession Master for a quick boost.

But wait, there's more!

There's another new way to get some extra profession knowledge and skill: the Dark Moon Fair profession quests have been updated for dragonflight and are now more valuable than ever.

Not only do you get two free profession points by completing these simple quests, which can help you work your way towards the 100 skill cap and potentially save you a lot of gold, but they also now reward you with some Artisans metal and knowledge points for your professions.

That's a very nice, neat, and valuable package of rewards for anyone interested in their profession progression.

However, these quests will not be available as often as most of the sources of repeatable knowledge, as the fair only comes around once a month.

But a few extra points once per month will definitely add up over time, and with the Dark Moon Fair back in town, we can also take advantage of the 10% experience and reputation buff.

So if you're still leveling or leveling any alts, or working on any reputation grind in particular, you can use the Dark Moon Fair to give yourself a nice boost.

Now, while we're on the topic of alts, there is a very nice quality of life change for analysts you might want to level up.

Until now, every character had to complete the Brawler's Guild campaign storyline to unlock the Engine of Innovation and get started with their Sparks of Ingenuity, which allows you to craft the big ticket profession items.

That requirement has just been removed, so your alts can hop on over to the Engine and start that quest line and collect their Sparks of Ingenuity right away, no questing required.

You can even start the quest while you're still leveling.

My level 64 Warrior was able to pick it up and work through it, so you can even earn a little bit of experience.

The Sparks of Ingenuity give you access to some of the best crafted gear you can make, so it looks like we can start gathering those on alts way before we can even use them.

But the main takeaway here is that you don't have to go through the Thal'draza campaign on every single character anymore, which is definitely a nice change in my opinion.

Then, one of the last hotfixes that came through recently is to address the lag over in Azurespan.

I guess the Community Feast was the main culprit, even though the Cobalt Assembly probably contributes at least a little bit.

But Blizzard has apparently made some changes on their end to hopefully smooth out the overall experience of the Community Feast itself, and to also try and ensure that the event doesn't completely lag the Azurespan zone while it's active.

If you've been playing a lot over the last few days, you'll know that Azurespan has been in a rough spot.

Upon crossing that zone perimeter, as soon as you enter Azurespan, the five to six second delay kicks in and makes doing anything in that zone quite tedious and frustrating.

I will say that personally, I have had a much better time in that zone, so I guess the hotfix did something, at least.

You should now be able to better enjoy your soup-defending adventures.

But that's all the big updates and WoW news for this past week.

What do you think of all the various reputation grind nerfs and changes?

How do you feel about rares and world events rewarding some of the best gear right now?

Leave all your thoughts in the comment section below.

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