WoW: A Tale of Timbermaw

I’m going to start this article with a question: what is the most work — yes, WORK — you’ve ever put into a MMORPG task to gain a single coveted reward?

For me, one example stands out above all else: the long, long reputation grind for World of Warcraft’s Timbermaw Hold faction to reach exalted, which netted me one “Defender of Timbermaw Hold” trinket.

Now, this was back in Vanilla WoW, pre-Burning Crusade, so you have to adjust backwards a bit to understand the weight of this quest.  Pre-TBC was about as hardcore as WoW ever will be, with horrid rep grinds, a PvP honor system that required you to not sleep for a week and play constantly (and I am NOT kidding) to get the best gear, and 40-man raids that took a quarter of the day to run through.  Most of the best gear required the help of 39 of your best friends, which meant that I was out of luck, being in a smallish guild of casual players.

So when patch 1.9 landed and they released a new set of reputation rewards for Timbermaw Hold, a spiffy purple trinket caught my eye — a summons that both healed you and fought for you, on a 10-minute timer.  And I realized that I didn’t need 39 friends to get it, just a bit of elbow grease and determination on my own.

It turns out that a “bit” of determination would test the boundaries of my very sanity.

This rep grind has been severely nerfed over the past couple years, so if you were to run through it today — and there really is no reason to do so, except for a couple of recipes — you’d probably laugh me off when I tell you that it took the better part of two.  Freaking.  Months.  to get up to exalted.  I had no idea it would be that long until I was about halfway through, and at that point, why would I quit?  It would make all the work I’d put in meaningless.  So I dug in, and killed Furbolg after Furbolg until I hated these Ewok wannabes more than anyone has ever hated a video character.

The difficulty didn’t hit you at first — at first, you could gain rep by just killing the little furballs, and doing a few quests that had reputation rewards.  But after a certain point on my reputation journey, kills stopped giving rep points.  From that point on, I had to turn in trinkets that they sporatically dropped, which means that I had to kill even more of these guys for the same amount of reputation than ever before, and each new level of rep status meant an even longer stretch until the next.

I began to do this full-time in WoW when Syp was level 48, and I didn’t hit revered until I was 59 — again, this is back before Blizzard handed out level 60′s whenever you sneezed.  It wasn’t an unprofitable grind, however, with at least two blues, a crapload of greens, and tons of cash netted along the way.  By the end, my guild kept asking for updates every day, as I ran the same pattern around the camps in Winterspring, lusting after this trinket and the godly powers it would embue.

Nevertheless to say, when the game announced that I achieved revered, I was ecstatic, elated, and very, very sick of grinding.  Blizzard did something neat for the ending of this, asking me to make a trek from Timbermaw Hold to the king of Ironforge, announcing that I had single-handedly forged a friendship between the two races.  The game sent out an announcement across the city (I don’t know if it hit other cities as well), and that was a special day.

Again, this sounds pretty pathetic considering that WoW now sounds the buzzer every time you kill 10 fish to your entire guild, but it was cool back then.

The kicker, the heartbreaking kicker to this saga was that the purple trinket… really wasn’t all that great.  The summoned guy only threw out a handful of meager heals or lightning bolts before disappearing for 10 more minutes, and when TBC released, the trinket never scaled up with your level, making it completely worthless.  But am I bitter about that, after all the hardships I put in for that guy?

Well, yeah, yeah, I guess I am.  Go eat a lemon, Blizzard.  But I’ll join you, because I like lemonade.