Corporate Politics

A while back, I mentioned that one of the achievements I was particularly interested in was Chief Exalted Officer - getting to exalted reputation with the Consortium. I was more or less resigned to grinding the Mana Tombs for Consortium rep, until this past weekend, when I stumbled onto another path entirely: Zaxxis Insignia.

In Area 52, there's a repeatable quest offered by Nether-Stalker Khay'ji - Another Heap of Ethereals. You turn in 10 Zaxxis Insignia (obtainable from mobs just south of Area 52), and bam! That's 250 reputation with the Consortium... all the way up to exalted.

The Zaxxis mobs respawn very quickly; even with AoE grinding on Aetherna, I only had to wait a few minutes between a full clear of all mobs to allow everything to respawn. So you can pretty effectively farm them more or less continuously. Last night, I managed five full clears of the Zaxxis area in about 30 minutes.

Mowing down the mobs like flies is easy, quick, and the drop rate for the insignia is over 50%. In addition, there's a chance that the mobs will drop an Ethereum Prison Key, which you can use to obtain an Ethereum Prisoner I.D. Tag - which is you can turn in to Commander Ameer as part of the repeatable quest Ethereum Prisoner I.D. Catalogue, for another 250 Consortium rep.

As I said, last night, I farmed Zaxxis for 30 minutes. At the end of that time, I had obtained:

• 104 Zazxxis Insignia
• 10 Etherium Prison keys
• 167 Netherweave
• 3 BOE greens (ilvl 102-105)

Using the prison keys resulted in 10 prisoner I.D. tags, and 10 ivll 120 BOE greens. After turning in the insignia and prisoner I.D. tags, Aeth's rep with the Consortium had gone from 1869/21000 to 7369/21000.

That's 5,500 rep in 30 minutes. 11k rep per hour of farming. Yowwza!

On other fronts, The Rokk finally wanted some soup, so she was able to pick up Kickin' It Up a Notch. A friend who was interested in the mount from Magister's Terrace led to a couple of runs there, and the resulting normal and heroic achievements for that instance. We picked up a healer for the run, and as a trio of 80's (tank, dps, healer) we were able to burn through the instance pretty easily, even on heroic. Frankly, Kael'thas was kind of a letdown. I don't think we even got to see his phoenix AoE attack before we burned him down.

On the reputation side, she's continuing to run Shattered Sun Offensive dailies (about 3,500 rep per day), and managed some time farming rep and bijous in Zul'Gurub as well. With regards to ZG, the farming is fun - it's challenging, but not impossible, and the main obstacle is just finding someone willing to be in a raid for the minute or two it takes to get Aeth into the instance. Note to self, though: the bat riders don't seem to drop anything. That was annoying.

Current reputation grind progress:

• Zandalar Tribe : 16172/21000
• Keepers of Time : 873/12000 (stalled)
• Shattered Sun Offensive: 14083/12000
• Consortium: 7369/21000

So, with a little luck, it looks like I should be able to finish banging out Zandalar, SSO and Consortium rep by the end of the week. That will get Aeth to 29 exalted reputations, just one short of the 30 she needs for the 30 Exalted Reputations achievement.