Having micro-factions that you could dig into and befriend out in the open world just felt so organic. I was one of the few people who actually decided to grind out Bloodsail Admiral back in the day.
The concept was organic, but the execution was not very interesting. Just wasting subscription time killing the same simplistic enemies a thousand times. It'd be cool to see a modern take on it where you can do more than just grind mobs for 20 hours to gain rep.
@bombkirby It had some potentially interesting implications for open world navigation, having certain sections of the map go hostile or friendly. I think that Timbermaw Hold was probably the best execution of this.
Same, I grinded it out all the way then slowly started the process of increasing the booty bay group by killing the pirates since they wouldn’t affect my blood sail rep 😂
You look at the original WoW cinematics it felt epic. Like you were just a small part of a huge world. Now it feels like you're playing a Saturday morning cartoon.
I got to Neutral with the Syndicate back in TBC, whilst I was bored waiting for WoTLK. I looked on the internet at the time, and could not find any account of somebody doing this (I'm sure I wasn't the first...but there was no public documentation of it). I was hoping it would be like the Bloodsail Buccaneers, where an NPC might have a secret quest to give you a cosmetic orange mask or something. But nope. They don't interact at all. Although it was kinda cool being able to walk in Syndicate bases without being stabbed. Then in Cataclysm, I began the quest for the Rogue legendary daggers...and discovered you need to talk to Ravenholdt NPCs. Who were now Hostile to me... 😬
Theres one more faction in the game thats impossible to get exalted with and thats Shang Xi's Academy, the Pandaren starting zone reputation. You get rep by doing the starter zone quests on the Wandering Isle, but theres not enough quests to reach Exalted, and on the last quest, youre forced off the isle when you pick a faction. A normal playthrough of the starting zone gets you to Honored, while passive reputation buffs can, at best, get you to Revered.
I used to collect 'Mark of the Syndicate' items, (random grey junk item) and mail them to strangers who I knew enjoyed RPing , with some cryptic messages added...
I was in an Alterac RP guild and grinding the Syndicate to Unfriendly was a requirement to stay in the guild (the GM and officers were all Neutral). Fun nights were spent grinding Ravenholdt with people I'm still friends with online long after the guild the guild had dissolved.
This makes me think of what an opportunity is lost on not having a limited, but still functional "anti-faction". Imagine being able to shed Alliance or Horde, and all of the associated story content with it, through some lengthy, annoying quest chain that strips you of your reputation with them, but gives you rep with a hostile faction. Completing it making the hostile faction neutral and sociable. Then for every hostile faction, giving you an opportunity to build up rep with them somehow as long as you were hostile to Alliance and Horde. I'm not saying build a long, intricate story for non-faction characters, that would be expensive, but you have to admit having the *option* to create a character exclusively to mess with the other factions in each new expansion and become friendly with enemies would be a lot of fun. On top of that it would expand PvP, as well, being that you'd be hostile to both factions. It'd be one of those things where you'd be able to get small quests, repeatables and basic stuff, for the faction and maybe earn some alternate rewards to those you would have gotten with a normal character. On top of that, enable dungeons and raiding with Horde or Alliance faction players so that you don't kill the already dwindling playerbase by fracturing it further. Enabling World PvP with them, but disabling it in dungeons when in a team through the dungeon finder tools.
It kinda sounds like private server stuff, but imagine if you could use something like that to switch factions. The neutral faction would obviously need a way to build your reputation back up with the main faction reps (just in case the player regretted going neutral on a high level character), but what if getting to hated with every main faction rep allowed you to undergo a quest that switches which main faction reps you build up. Like you get a Tauren that is so hated with the Horde that there's some Alliance defector that says "hey, I know we're enemies, but I still have contacts in Stormwind. Bring me 25 Rune Cloth and I can put in a good word for you". Obviously this wouldn't work in actual vanilla, given how restrictive factions are, but it would really put the war in warcraft if you were able to switch factions by defecting and murdering your fellow faction members.
One of my hopes is that with them reintroducing missing recipes and the like that were removed from old dungeons they’ll also add ways to increase your reputation with old factions. I started playing in *very late* Vanilla, just before TBC launched, and it infuriates me to see the Zandalar Tribe and Shen’dralar reputation bars unfinished on my main. I don’t mind if they give a Feat of Strength achievement to anyone that completed it back in the day, but it’d just be nice to be able to finish those grinds. I’m too much of a completionist not to.
Fun fact. With some careful planning and balancing with quests, it was possible to get to Neutral (or maybe Unfriendly) with both the Gelkis and Magram centaurs at the same time, making traversing Desolace a lot less of a headache since neither side would attack you.
But both factions were secluded to their own little area, even if it were possible. There's no benefit to befriending them except to get their quests to kill one another, which would make it impossible to befriend both for any benefit. They don't patrol anywhere outside their little corners of desolace.
I was thinking that the Wildhammer rep from vanilla was a dead end after the quests dried up, but some quick searching says I was mistaken. Killing some mobs in the zones as well as a repeatable turn-in seems to be the way to get to Exalted. (The faction was removed in BC, and a different Wildhammer rep was added in Cata.)
That explains why I don't remember any of this at all - I played TBC and Wrath, apart from that, retail from BfA. Naturally I'd never see this pop on retail and TBC/Wrath doesn't even have this... and I barely ever played Vanilla because it's not to my taste apart from the zones themselves. Anyway, thanks 😅
I remember there was a guy who raised his rep with the Bloodsail up to Exalted. While most people will grind guards and get to Friendly this guy kept killing a Badlands NPC that for some reason was whiteflagged to grant rep up to Revered; it was some ridiculous grind around 5 rep each kill with a 10 min respawn, but the man kept going until he was capped just below reaching Exalted. He turned in the quest you get your pirate hat from and that pushed him past Revered. His character was just insane, all reps all at Exalted.
The Syndicate, one of the many loose ends the Blizz team has left to tie up, hopefully they'll get their act together and give the faction some layers and not simply leave it as a generic band of robbers and highwaymen.
The Syndicate are alterac nobles, it makes sense that they can only get to neutral, because alterac betrayed the alliance in the second war. They have no loyalties.
@@strider8662 No, because the horde they allied themselves with was the Old Horde, during the second war. The New Horde formed by Thrall (amongst others) have little interest in allying themselves with the remnants of the Alteraci people.
In classic wow you can have honored and revered with magram and Gelkis clans at the same time. You can kill either or to gain positive rep and then get a friend to group up and let him kill the opposite faction you will not lose rep. I cant remember if you had to be out of the 40 yard range. This method was removed with tbc. This method could also be done with booty bay rep for blood sail buccaneers .
Man, I really miss the vanilla days. I was obsessed and addicted, but had loads of fun for 6 years or so. I played a couple of months from release through WotLK.
Making videos like this is UNBELIEVABLY time-consuming. You can make 10 videos about the latest patch notes or whatever in the same amount of time. Please support the creator by liking subscribing blah if you value unique content on youtube.
I really enjoyed a couple of the factions, like the Timbermaw and centaur clans (and later sporeggar). It was fun to get closer with those minor factions and I wished they fleshed that out a little more at the time.
well you can still get neutral to Zandalar Tribe in retail since there are NPC from that faction you can talk to and get the neutral reputation standing, but you are unable to get the rep obviously
I've been playing WoW since patch 1.8 and I never knew this, what a great video! I remember grinding Bloodsail Buccaneers rep for a couple weeks thinking that I could become a pirate class or join a pirate faction, but I just made Booty Bay impossible to enter and gave up 🤣 I love modern WoW too, but the vanilla experience when I was a kid was something truly unique in all of gaming history.
You do become a pirate when you get exalted with the bloodsail buccaneers. You get a pirate hat and a title and can summon a parrot. It does make using the boat in booty bay awkward though.
I was always disappointed, back in vanilla, that I couldn't join the Venture Company. Even moreso when they made goblins a playable race and they still weren't a joinable faction.
I grinded every possible faction to Hated on my shadow priest in WotLK out of sheer boredom, with the exception of Revered with Bloodsail & Neutral with Syndicate. It was a pretty cozy grind because I'd work it alongside Argent Dawn hated by just running a loop from Ravenholdt to Chillwind Camp to the Bulwark and back. Light's Hope Chapel was completely impossible even at level 80 because of how insanely powerful the guards there were. I got to 0/36000 with both centaur clans because I learned that if my shadowfiend killed a centaur, I'd lose rep with his clan without gaining rep with the other. Getting hated with both Aldor and Scryers also took some doing. Timbermaw felt like it was the longest grind, even though I don't think it was, it was just horribly tedious, but my least favorite was Sporeggar.
My Mage has been a Bloodsail Admiral and Neutral with the Syndicate since Wrath. I thought when the battlefront ended up in Arathi back in BFA there might be something for people who were Neutral with the Syndicate, but nope.
I would have farmed Syndicate to Exalted if it was possible, however since it's not I went with Ravenloft. Maybe I'll do Syndicate someday on another character. But yeah, Shang-Xi was possible to hit revered recently when there was a rep buff going on, otherwise Honored is the max.
"Winterpelt Gnolls" used to be impossible when you first met them (could not get higher than unfriendly) but that changed in 10.1. The two factions of dracthyr were also impossible to get to exalted with, until the release of Forbidden reach. But there is one still impossible to complete faction you missed: Shang Xi's Academy. Only pandaren characters can gain rep with them at all (and only if they do the original starting zone; death knights or those that choose exile's reach to start in will not). Normally you could at best get honored to them before the starting zone was finished. However at times when there's an across the board reputation buff, it may be possible to get to revered. But once the starting zone is complete, you can no longer gain rep with them. (Edit: I see you caught that in the notes on the video.)
I grinded this rep on retail, it was fun walking around the syndicate mobs without being attacked, and at one point I even managed to get ravenholdt to friendly and syndicate to neutral through some shenanigans with killing the syndicate members in north arathi highlands, but alas, I wanted to complete the insane in the membrane achievement and started grinding ravenholdt. Maybe one day once I get it I’ll go back and try and do it again.
Hmm, I remember managing to get them to revered back when I played on a private wrath server (was a blizzlike server), I spent months just killing ravenholdt members to gain their rep...
I'm not completely sure, since I'm only lvl 42 atm, but it seems like you can complete these factions on Turtle Wow. There are, for example, stuff to do for the Syndicate, more than killing Ravenholdt guards. Might be worth checking inyo, if you feel the need for some grind 🙂
You forgot the 4th NPC hostility stance: Unfriendly, which is marked by an inability to interact with the NPC(s) in question at all (unless the 'at war' option is toggled) and showing their name in orange.
@@hoodiegal Yes, it is - as a level of the reputation system, NOT, as I pointed out, a hostility setting. You can come across mobs that have orange names that you can neither attack nor interact with in any way other than clicking on them. That is unfriendly, the fourth hostility stance for an NPC to have in WoW.
No idea how it happened but I got Cataclysm/Legion/The Burning Crusade/Warlords of Draenor as factions under reputation/others. Each on neutral 0/3000. Cataclysm is the only one I can declare war on but until now I haven't found any mobs aligned to it xD
@@TurbotarzanWoWI've also had this periodically happen on alts. It seems to be a bug with either chromie time / new characters. It seems to fix itself as soon as you 'discover' a faction related to that expansion.
I remember reading somewhere that Blizz plans to do something with the faction eventually. Personally I find it okay that there is a faction in WoW that you cannot get to exalted.
This reminds me that I managed to get the Bloodsail Admiral achievment back in the day, so now I'm more or less hated by all the Goblin for all eternity because of it since Im to lazy to grind back reputation with them. But the title is nice and the pirate gear you can get :D
I remember getting bored of the grind, some time before I left mid-Cataclysm, so I decided to work on achievements as a way to to something more varied and interesting than just a cycle of daily quests. Many of those achievements involved faction status, but I'm not sure how far along I got with getting them all to exalted, so I don't remember if I personally got to the point where I ever found myself up against the wall with the Syndicate.
I think you can retain more viewers by having a better hook of the video (building more intrigue in the first 20 seconds), and then shortening the common knowledge stuff you talk about for the next couple of minutes significantly. Just some constructive criticism from someone who could tell it was a relatively new channel based on these first few minutes alone. Great video though :)
Thanks a lot :) while the content is fairly niche, i would like for it to be viewable for someone who is unfamiliar with the game. After vieweing again, i completely agree that it is too long. I will try and see if there is a way to explain things like these shortly and without dedicating a long section of the video solely to this
Ravenholdt was horribly underutilized for most of the early game. Made it seem like there was a cool rogues-only cross-faction action around the corner, then nothing
Practically they couldn’t, as rep stopped at honoured 11999, but there was one npc that gave 1 rep per kill until revered 20999, at which point players could get exalted if they had saved one of the faction’s 3 quests for turnin Players being players, this was actually done, with a guy killing the named mob thousands of times before finally reaching exalted! I have a video about the faction if you’re interested :) it’s called: World of Warcraft’s Grindiest Faction
Killing 10k mobs for Ravenhold/syndicate rep is the bestest waste of time imaginable... That's coming from someone who has wasted his entire life thus far lol
Revantusk Trolls reputation should be added back for Horde to get to Exalted with in the Hinterlands. Make it a requirement for unlocking Forest Troll customization on Trolls
I got to exalted with syndicate. You go to war with ravenholt and kill them endlessly. This was on a private server where rep gains were higher so that might have something to do with it being possible on my end. But nonetheless that’s how I did it
1 mistake in the video though: the centaur did have reputation and quests in vannilla. i would also like too point out, back when i played retail, that the syndicate lost a ton of territory in cataclysm. including durnholde keep, its nearby watchtower and the camps above tarrenmill. this got even worse in BFA where they lost the farm in arathi, aswell as any controll of stromgard, with some syndicate raids still being a thing when the warfront launched. at the time of writing, the only territory i remember them having where the uplands. BUT in vannilla you could still get rep with these guys and have them defend you in world pvp, which was very nice when you where near the elites of stromgard i know becouse i compleeted this grind, twice ^^
This reminds me of a funny story back in the vanilla days i was playing on horde on burning blade a gm walked into org and turned me and 12 others by ah hostile to org we died then ressed us and said he wanted to see if it would work. I wont give his name but he was known for this kinda stuff he turned visable and started dancing during a raid once. He would also open a trade to show you gm gear them quickly close it
Though in BfA you could actually lock yourself out of some quests by having reputation with the syndicate as this quests require to kill some members which you are neutral with.
my hunter got neutral with syndicate during wrath i think and i remember during BFA syndicate faction mobs would control areas of the arathi highlands warfront zone. Sadly nothing came from me being buddies with them
Wasted potential and underuse or lack of use of mechanics in WoW by blizzard is most annoying. Especially rigid main (and part nonsensical*)faction setup, which should work exactly how goblin and other neutral factions like the syndicate, bloodsails and desolace centaur do, allowing friendly or hostile operation and reputation gain depending on player choice and actions. They had all those reputation systems and ir was not used outside of few cases. Combined with promoting toxicity and awful behaviour with world PvP and "honor" system it ruined what wow couldve been. Which in turn ruined story left in place by warcraft 3. Its just sad. And makes be love and hate this game at the very same time. *night elves ans forsaken should never be part of neither horde or alliance. They should be their own separate factios with unique reputation levels and relations.
And people wonder why WoW is the biggest MMO and nobody can top it. It's stuff like this. Beside the colorful art style, beautiful world and different races. This is the stuff that gives it life. In literally every single mmo except WoW. Anything that isn't an NPC town is nothing but exp fodder or pawns to fight for a quest. Here you can actually make relations and shake things up. Besides the great art style. Why isn't any "WoW clones" copying what is actually fun like this?! This would've been an amazing thing to expand upon. Take the faction system. At friendly you can't reach higher on your own. Instead regular quests might take you to further planes. Then you can request some faction NPC you befriended to assist you. Completing this quest not only further increases your relation but also gives the faction further foothold and influence. So by actually helping and expanding some lowly goblin village faction. You become more and more close to them. As well as getting reputation within the whole of the unified factions, here it would the either the alliance or the horde. The further up you befriend them, the more assistance they'll give. From maybe one or three goblins, to 5 mages and a catapult or more depending on how high up you've expanded the faction and the level of your mission/quest. Also each faction specialize in something. So befriending one faction means they'll deploy typical army rush tactics. One might approach the quest to more of a stealth as they sneak inside instead. Another might prefer deploying artillery or curse the entire field into their magical domain. Would be fun if instead of individual world influence, this was global. So actual conflicts could arise from one group of players might try to expand some holy knights over the area while a rival group wants to expand a cursed mob faction. And some silly guys messing around just tries to expand some lowly long tongue swamp creature with no artillery or just average support.
I think you could avoid the whole explanation on the reputation man. It's just filler. And id be willing to guess most people watching a niche video like this have already played wow before. Also you need to sound engaged with your content. Not bored, get the viewer interested in the first 20s, i was tempted to click away but just skipped the massive intro. Just my 2c
