I recently ground out my Sha'tari Defense reputation to Revered and purchased the Sky Fry pet. It was quite a long process but worth it! Although earning rep is straightforward, just kill related mobs - no quests, I figured I'd share my experience since I deviated from the standard path towards the end of my adventure.
The Sha'tari Defense faction is unlocked on the Alliance with a level 2 Trading Post. After building and upgrading, you can immediately start earning reputation by killing level 100 related mobs in Talador.
Initially, I just did the Apexis daily in Shattrath whenever it popped up. Assault on Shattrath Harbor involves non-elite mobs, while the Assault on the Heart of Shattrath involves killing elite mobs. The latter yields more rep but is obviously tougher since the elites hit harder and have more health. Thankfully, my OH was willing to help out which made the daily go by quicker.
Unfortunately, the daily itself doesn't reward reputation upon completion. Why it doesn't, I have no idea. It seems backwards to me that they wouldn't award rep. What am I earning Apexis crystals for if not the reputation items and pets? So Sha'tari Defense rep was slow grinding, since I only went to Shattrath to kill mobs on the days the associated daily was available.
It's totally possible to go out, kill the mobs, and earn reputation when the daily is NOT up, but I didn't felt very motivated. The lesser mobs reward 5 reputation each, and the rest range between that and the bigger mobs which reward 16 reputation. Shattrath is a fairly spread out area as well, which means time spent waiting for things to respawn or moving to another area. It just didn't feel very efficient or inspiring.
Still, I managed to grind my way to Friendly with the Sha'tari Defense just by heading to Shattrath on days the Apexis daily was located there. I was dreading getting to Honored and then to Revered, though. The daily isn't up every single day, and I just couldn't convince myself to travel to Shattrath on my own to kill things.
So I called upon my OH for some ideas. He looked it up and found another spot that awarded reputation per mob kill. North of Fort Wyrn, there's an orc base with normal and elite mobs (The Path of Glory). I vaguely recalled the area from beta, but didn't think it would be any better than Shattrath. How wrong I was!
The mob density is quite nice and the respawn rate is pretty good. There's not a lot of player traffic going through there, so there's almost always something for you to kill.
We started out by killing the normal mobs, following a circular path around the orc compound (as seen above), avoiding the elites because OMG 587K HP tightly packed together in a death ball. Each normal mob was only awarding a smidgen of reputation though, and this was starting to grate on our nerves. At the rate we were killing, it would take a really long time to reach Revered. We managed to get to Honored, though.
But this is when we decided to take a risk and just go for broke. Elite mobs or nothing! We started out killing the group of elites at the entrance of the path. My OH is a prot warrior and I'm a resto druid so he pretty much tanked the damage while I healed him. Eventually we moved on to two packs of elites, always using our garrison ability, Guardian Orb.
After experiencing two packs, we felt adventurous and challenged ourselves to take on even more. Traveling deeper into The Path of Glory, there's an army of elite Grom'kar Siegebreakers along with a few Grom'kar Warbeasts. Uuhhh, why not?!
It took us a few attempts to figure out how much was doable for us. We settled on two to three packs each pull, one pack being a pat in front of the cannon. Pulling more than that almost always resulted in our deaths as the damage was just too much for our current gear levels (650+).
(click to view larger image)
First pull = the pat that walks up to the cannon + the two groups next to the cannon. Second pull = the group directly in front of the warbeast.
The main thing was we had to wait 5 minutes between each pull for the Guardian Orb to come off of CD. This ability was vital to our success since neither of us had the damage to defeat all of the mobs in a timely manner, before our faces got smashed in by 30ish orcs. The downtime wasn't too terrible and it allowed for the groups to respawn in full.
Because these mobs were elite, they awarded 16 reputation each. YAY! In the end, we were earning roughly a bar every pull. Now THAT'S what I call reputation grinding! :D
It still took quite a few hours to finally get to Revered, and any slip-up or mistake was usually fatal. But we did it! We were just a group of two, so I imagine a bigger reputation grinding group could do even better. Either garrison ability would work well here.
It's a long journey if you're going at it alone, but if you can find a rep farming group that's headed to The Path of Glory, it will speed things up immensely. If you can get exalted with another Draenor faction (I recommend Steamwheedle Preservation Society because that's the easiest IMO) and upgrade your Trading Post to level 3 (perK: 20% faster reputation gain in Draenor), that helps too. I did it a bit backwards and upgraded my Trading Post AFTER I reached Revered with Sha'tari Defense. *derp* :P
As a side note, the Sky Fry was only uncommon quality when I added it to my Pet Journal. I wonder if this is a bug. I mean, it was a lot of work so it seems slightly anticlimactic that the pet needs a battlestone.
Is the Bone Wasp for horde the same? If someone who has purchased a Bone Wasp from the Laughing Skull Orcs vendor could let me know, that would be great. :)
