Almost Insane

It looks as though I'm beginning to see the light at the end of that long, long tunnel after all. I am proud to say that I'm THIS close to being Insane in the Membrane.

After a grueling series of Dire Maul runs, daily Auction House perusing, Scholo & Strat farming, herbing, milling, inscribing, skinning, and of course, killing, I am now the following:

Revered with Bloodsail Buccaneers
Exalted with Shendra'lar
Revered with Ravenholdt (5700/21000)
Revered with Steamwheedle Cartel (6100/21000)
Honored with Darkmoon Faire (1100/12000)

I know, I've only met 2 out of the 5 rep requirements so far, but it really feels like I'm getting close. I only have a short grind (I hope to the gods of Azeroth it will be short) away from exalted with the goblins and ravenholdt, and darkmoon faire...well, I've decided that can wait until cata if it has to.

What was really crapp (and still is sort of crappy) is that Blizz first announced that the Insane title will not be removed from the game in cata, so players can take their time. Which was fine. Then about a month before launch (so a couple weeks ago) that in fact, they WERE removing it since DM is getting reworked and shendra'lar is no longer going to be available. So all of a sudden the price of pristine black diamonds (which you need about 80 for exalted with Shen) skyrocketed to where they were being sold for about ~1000g a pop, compared to ~300g before. Ugh. Luckily I had turned in about 60 of them prior to this, and while farming I picked up a couple more, so I only had to buy about 15 at the inflated price (I found some discounts at ~700g!).

What really sucks now is that because so many people complained about Blizz's shitty management, they decided to keep the insane in the memebrane, but remove the requirements for getting exalted with Shen. I mean, What...The...Fuck. For those of you who have worked so hard to get exalted, you get to have a nice shiny feat of strength! Yay, BIG FUCKING WHOOP. I mean, who gives a shit about a feat of strength? Shen is undoubtedly one of the hardest (if not THE hardest) part of that achievement, due to the near-zero drop rate of diamonds. And now those people who spent hours of their lives on working on this rep...now everyone and their moms will be running around with the insane title, and there will be practically no way to distinguish between those who spent an extra month farming the Shen rep, and those who took the pussy way out in cata. Thanks Blizz, thanks with a big capital FUCK YOU.

Sigh. Well, now that rant is over with, I must say that the other rep grinds aren't so bad. Ravenholdt is not giving me too much trouble, I simply go into blackrock spire and pickpocket for a couple hours and I get ~150-180 junxboxes. I just need to rinse and repeat a few more times and I'll get exalted in no time. The goblins are annoying, because I was hoping not to have to run DM anymore after getting my shendralar rep and just farm pirates. But there's just too much competition from level 40's trying to quest...the pirates don't respawn very quickly and they aren't that clustered together either, making that a slow grind. So I might just have to hit up DM some more.

Darkmoon Faire is going rather slowly, due to the sheer amount of decks needed (100+) and the sheer amount of herbalism materials needed to make either a TBC deck (24 primals + about 15 stacks of outland herbs on average) or a WotLK deck (24 eternals + at least 30-40 stacks of northrend herbs). It's really insane. I've been using a combination approach of scanning the auction house daily for cheap cards, cheap low-level decks, cheap herbs & mats, and just farming herbs myself. Outland decks require less materials, but the drop rate for primals and herbs are much lower, so I've just been farming herbs for hours in northrend. I average about 20 stacks of herbs per hour even with heavy competition. That supplemented with whatever cheap mats I can find on the AH means that on average I can produce ~1 deck per day. The bonus is that I'm also levelling up my shaman through the herb-gathering. Each node gives me 5000xp, and already I've levelled up twice just from herbing nonstop.

All in all, the achievement is, in fact, pretty insane. I'm hoping to have everything except DMF wrapped up before the cata launch (which is only a couple weeks away!). Although the title will have less meaning due to every schmuck having one, it will still be nice. At least I will know that mine was more deserved than the other lazy people who skipped Shen.