What started out as a simple act of finding ways to gain a competitive advantage in the Shadowlands Beta, quickly morphed into an obsession for the GM of Nerd Crew (of World 3rd Radiance fame), Jab. By utilizing a combination of game mechanics, Jab found a way to put his stamp on The Maw meta. Passing down his wisdom in Discord lectures like a venerable grandmaster monk to his pupils, he was able to get the majority of his guild to Exalted with Velnari before Mythic raid release, to the surprise of even the sweatiest within the raiding community.
Today, two of our raiders, Jabronious-Mal'Ganis and Hunterpat-Mal'Ganis have hit Appreciative reputation with Ve'nari after a long three weeks of grinding out rep, with most of our raiders, Nerd Crew-Mal'Ganis, following in their footsteps tomorrow.
Most of our strategies have already been provided by other members of the wow community but here is are some details on how we got our rep so high with Ve'nari:
- We have been farming the Maw as a raid every night since the expansion launch, with some of our raiders hitting the grind the night of release before the first Tuesday reset.
- We used the beta to find out how much rep all of the different rares gave, in order to maximize what we needed to kill.
- Everyone would prepare their Maw dailies before we went in as a raid, getting the quest down to one mob left to kill or one item remaining to pick up, so that they could easily finish the quest after reaching Eye of the Jailer rank 5 (completing daily quests gives ~half a rank, so finishing them last gave us more time to grind rares for rep).
- All our raiders made sure to take advantage of the Pilgrims rep buff and the Darkmoon Faire rep buff to give big rep boosts, especially with weekly quests and events like Wrath of the Jailer and The Hunts.
- We would kill as many 5 man rare mobs for the +100 rep as we could, and then focused on the 80 rep rares, sometimes camping a few spawn points to get even more rep. Warlocks came in very handy to summon those who were across the map from a spawn point to ensure everyone got as much reputation as possible each day.
- The use of Goblingleiterbausatz quickly became mandatory to make this easier on everyone, especially when going into Perditions Hold - jumping from Eketra and gliding down into the Hold. Killing Exos and waiting for gliders to come back up to then glider off his platform, since taking the portal back out of his area would just die instantly.
After we finished our runs, we would have what we call "The Maw Rescue Squad" consisting of alt Druids and Shamans going to res anyone who died on the way to finish their daily quests (the squad was VERY busy with this task). Another fun bug that we encountered was the Shadehound mount bug, wherein some players would die instantly and have to be rez’d when dismounting from a Shadehound, or when the mount timer ran out. This could turn ugly real quick when we had a hoard of mobs chasing us down, especially with about 30 assassins rushing the group!
