Fargnbastage
from Misha realm

Pirates vs DM
First off I wanted to tell you that your guide has been my "BIBLE" over the last few months of grinding this title and I wanted to thank you very much for your time and effort in creating this guide. Of course I question any strategy that involves months instead of hours the one thing I do have during this grind is time to scrutinize the strategy.

While I agree that coldheat and ebullana are correct that grinding pirates is MUCH faster for getting your Steemwheedle rep up there are MANY drawbacks to this method. I have found this out the hard way. Your rep grind with Steemwheedle will most likely be 2-1 in terms of rep grinding per hour for Ratchet and Gadgetzan. In fact, just killing the pirates in Ratchet I was getting about 4500 rep per hour for Ratchet. however what ended up happening is that I ended up exalted with Ratchet then Gadgetzan but still had over 20K rep to grind with Everlook and Booty Bay. At this point you will only get 2 rep/kill for Booty bay and Everlook. Killing pirates at this point drops my rep/hour to about 1100 which is still not bad but lower than rep from DM.

here is the major problem

LIBRAMS

In order to get rep with the Shen'dralar you have to turn in librams and to say that there is a shortage of librams in the AH is an understatement. Basically to get librams you require people on your server to be running DM, selling the librams, and having very few people trying to get the Insane title who would compete with you in AH. I have checked across quite a few servers through friends and the Librams simply are not available and when they do drop in AH they are very pricey and sell out almost immediately. Now every server is different so here is a simple test. over the next 5 days see how many librams you can buy for any price. IF you can buy 3 per week for X amount of gold it will still take you 27 weeks to complete that portion of the achievement (thats almost half a year!). Perhaps your lucky and your server has an abundance of librams. no worries, forget everything I just said, but for the other 99% of the players your not getting many librams in AH. This leaves you with the one and only place you can get them.... thats right, our old friend DM!

I realized this AFTER grinding pirates for 3 weeks. I went into DM to finish off the last 2 factions to see if it was as slow a grind as I had read and I was correct. It is slower. Much slower. However, my last week of grinding to get Steemwheedle rep I finished my rep grind and I proclaimed to my friends "I never have to run DM again! I am exalted with all 4 Steemwheedle factions!"

YAY!

One problem

During that week I accumulated about 14 librams. As my week finished I realized that the Librams are going to be very difficult to obtain . So now, 3 weeks later I am still running DM. EVERY day for 3 hours/day, full clearing DM north and west just to grind librams. I am averaging about 1 per hour but most importantly I am throwing away tannin and shackle keys every few minutes thinking to myself "well there was a few weeks wasted on pirates... I'm literally throwing away rep that i already have".

I am also noticing that I am getting about 60G per hr in loot/junk/AH blues and greens plus I am also getting a lot of herbs in DM west. I am averaging about 2 stacks of various herbs per hour (which can be milled for decks for Darkmoon rep) and I am even getting Pristine Black diamonds which are needed for the libram rep turn in. All in all I am kicking myself for spending hours grinding pirates for fast rep in 2/4 Steemwheedle factions in return for throwing away thousands of gold (which could have bought me a bunch of Darkmoon decks), stacks of herbs (again more decks), black diamonds, and most importantly LIBRAMS!

So for the record if you want to speed through the rep grind for half of the Steemwheedle cartel then kill pirates. If you want the "Insane In The Membrane" feat of strength in an efficient manner then buckle down, pop on a movie or audio book and run DM. Alot. It is slower. It is boring. It is frustrating but at the end of your Steemwheedle grind you will find yourself WAY further ahead in Shen'dralar and Darkmoon Faire rep.

Hi Fargnbastage,

I've added your email to the guide and made some changes. I recommended that users read your guide, it provides a great comparison between Pirates vs DM. Sure Pirates are faster for Steamwheedle, but you'll be passing up Librams, which are rare on most servers.

Let me know if you want to add anything else!

Thanks,
Callahan