Carrot, Meet Stick

Last night I finally managed to get Laenshield's enchanting up to maximum - 525 skill. Boo-yah! He's still only level 82, so he's got a while to go before he can start shelling out Heavenly Shards for the max-level enchanting recipes.

While having a maxed-out enchanter is a nice convenience - especially since you can now put any enchantment on a scroll and mail it to an alt - that's not why I pushed him to 525. Since Aeth hit 525 in JC, with Laen at 525 in Enchanting, that means that I've contributed twice to our guild's "Working as a Team" achieve...

Wait.

Where's the green? The achievement? Here I am, I just hit 525 skill! Does it take a minute to... oh, crud.

Requires that I be honored with the guild?!?

Augh!

Hence, the title of this post.

I knew that I was eventually going to have to level Laenshield to 85, just to get access to the enchanting vendor in the Twilight Highlands. There'd be some questing along the way, sure - got to get that experience somewhere, after all - but no real need to do more than the minimum to get to level 85, right?

Now I'm thinking maybe not.

Aeth is pushing towards revered with the guild, but it's taken a almost two weeks of dailies to get to that point. I can't recall where she was at the end of questing, but the fact that doing 25 dailies gives around 1000+ guild rep kind of indicates that she was somewhat short of revered, even after doing all the new zones.

Laen is currently still only neutral with the guild. He's halfway to 83, and he's still not even friendly yet. For all the adventure he has ahead of him - Deepholm, Uldum, Twilight Highlands - I'm starting to wonder if he'll actually be able to scrape up enough guild rep to get to revered. There's always Vash'jir, of course - but really, I'm skipping it this time around for a reason, y'know? I don't like the idea of being forced back into questing there just to grind out some rep.

All in all, though, it's a pretty moot point. I'm sure someone else in the guild will contribute the enchanting portion of the guild achievement, and I would have leveled his enchanting skill anyways - so no loss, right? So no, I'm not bitter about it.

What I am, though, is dismayed.

When I first leveled Laen, I did so to have a priest so I could see what healing was like. It was a lot of fun, and for a while there at 80, Laen was effectively my main. I did a few things on Aeth, but swapping over to another level 80 for a couple of weeks wasn't that big of a deal.

Now, though... well, I've already seen one example of the fact that Laen, no matter what his level of skills may be, really doesn't count the same as Aeth, at least in some areas. Whenever I work on something that might be related to a guild achievement, at least, I'm going to have to stop and make sure that I'm doing it on the correct character... at least until time and tides bring Laen up to par with Aeth in terms of guild reputation.

After that, too, there's Aeven and Aeristal and Aretae...

Oh boy.

I have to admit, I'm incredibly impressed with Blizzard right now. I mean... think about it. Anybody can deliver a beating. Just pick up a stick and start flailing away with it. Really not much too it, is there?

Now... consider what guild rep means for folks with multiple alts in Cataclysm.

Anyone can just deliver a beating. It takes a special sort of diabolical mindset to generate a situation where 12 million people pick up a stick and start beating themselves.