WoW’s Impressive Influence reputation boost is fantastic… and I hate it

If you don’t know, World of Warcraft is running a special event this month that gives you double the reputation gain when grinding specific Battle for Azeroth and Legion reputations. And I don’t want to sound ungrateful, because it’s fantastic and I’m making use of it now to get my Rustbolt reputation up to Revered so I can finally fly in BFA content.

The problem is that I have two major problems with it.

The first problem is that I hate it. Not the boost itself. I think that’s a fantastic idea, anything to make those Legion and Battle for Azeroth reps go faster so people can get their Allied Race unlocks.

No. I hate the very process of grinding reputation in World of Warcraft and I always have, and I always feel like it’s a process that makes me hate the people I’m doing it for even as it supposedly makes them like me. By the time I’m revered with whoever it is I’m doing this for this time, I’d happily feed their entire faction into a wood chipper and stand there cackling maniacally as they screamed for help… help that would never arrive.

What? Oh, dear, it’s happened again.

So often in WoW getting a group of people to  like me boils down to do the same things over and over again and it started early — the Argent Dawn, back in the original days, was one of the most mindless grinds in the game. Here’s a trinket that will cost you the power of your actual working trinkets, go wear this and kill undead forever. I’m not arguing that it doesn’t make sense that the Argent Dawn wants the Scourge killed, and at least it was something I could do in a dungeon (and eventually they put in the special trinket that actually did something, so that was nice) but ultimately the rep grind was literally kill undead forever with a few quests along the way that — and I’m sure you have this figured out — involved killing more undead.

Modern rep grinds tend to have more variety than this, but look at Rustbolt or the Nazjatar factions — Nazjatar, you’re better off waiting for the Emissary and doing the four world quests in the zone, and Rustbolt is all about a series of daily quests interspersed with non-daily but repeating quests, and one world quest which is either go look for three elites or do stuff, including killing elites and it’s just maddening.

The more I do it, the more I hate these guys. I’m just about ready to just let King Mechagon mechanize the whole lot of them so I can start smashing their robo-behinds without feeling bad about it.

I won’t do that, of course.

But I do think that reputation grinds in general are pretty tedious. This is why I think the second flaw of the bonus event is in the limited scope. The Winds of Wisdom buff works from level 1 to 120. Why shouldn’t the reputation bonus from the Impressive Influence buff extend back to old reputations that aren’t really relevant anymore? If someone wants to use this to grind up that Ravenholt rep, or some other reputation from The Burning Crusade or whatever, let them. Dear sweet Elune, let them.

I mean, come on, we had a chance to minimize one of the most boring things in World of Warcraft and we didn’t take it? Madness! Absolutely madness! Also, where can I find a big woodchipper in Azeroth?