The most mind-numbing grind ever

Do you know what this is?

This is a Frostaber Mount, purchasable by those who are Exalted with the Wintersaber Trainers in Winterspring.

I just know Dizzie would look so cool on a mount like this, the pink and lavender stripes of the tiger matching her pink pigtails just beautifully.

As the avid readers know Dizzie went through the portal to Outland at the tender level of 58. She picked up some quests, set out to do them and died. And she died. And she died again. And again. Her aggro range seemed to cover all of Hellfire Peninsula and she could hardly take down one mob on her own, let alone two or more.

On closer inspection, her gear was perhaps not all that up to date, her pretty blue Knight's Cloak of the Bear was for lvl 29, her cool Herod’s Shoulder for lvl 37, and so on.

I called out for help and my husband came to the rescue. With his help Dizzie managed to finish the quests, get some new green imba gear, double her HP and AP and ding 59 in about an hour and a half.

She headed back to the old world then, figuring she could do some easy questing there now that she was a little better equipped. She had a lot of unfinished quests in Winterspring, so she set course to the snowy north.

And there, surrounded by pink-purple hostile tigers, on a huge cliff shaped like an inverted fang, she found Rivern Frostwind, Wintersaber Trainer, and the Wintersaber Mounts. And she knew she just had to have one of those.

What can I say? A pink-haired girl’s gotta have a pink-furred mount, right? (Yeye I know it's lavender, but it's still pink-ish)

The only way to get rep with this small faction is to do the quests they offer. You start at 0/3000 Neutral and there is one quest available – Frostsaber Provisions. You have to kill Shardtooth bears for 5 Shardtooth Meat and Chillwind chimaeras for 5 Chillwind Meat. The droprate is horrendous, it must be something like 20%. The meats don’t drop unless you have the quest, and once you have the 5 meats required they don’t drop no more until you turn the q in and take it again. The mobs rarely drop anything useful but a lot of Big Bear Bones that won’t stack and thus takes a lot of space in your bags, and Dizzie is a miner/engineer and can’t skin the damn dead carcasses.

Anyways, this quest gives 250 rep per turn-in.

After having done the Frostsaber Provisions 6 times and reached 1500/3000 Neutral another quest opens up – Winterfall Intrusion. This quests asks you to kill 5 Shamans and 5 Ursas in the Winterfall village east of Everlook, it’s repeatable and gives 250 rep per turn-in.

If you have done the quest Winterfall Activity killing the Winterfall mobs will also give you rep with Timbermaw Hold.

By this time Dizzie had dinged 60 as well and flown off to Dun Morogh to get her a Swift Yellow Mechanostrider. The epic rider made the trips between Frostsaber Rock and Winterfall Village a little faster, and she was not as often thrown of her mount while trying to avoid the numerous mobs littering the area.

She skipped doing the Frostsaber Provisions q because of the bad droprate and concentrated on killing furbolgs. A completion of the Winterfall Intrusion quest can be done in about ten minutes if there are no other distractions or obstacles, like a thorium node that needs to be mined, bag space that needs to be freed, or having to wait around for respawns because someone else has killed the mobs you need.

Dizzie is currently at 1000/6000 Friendly and research shows that another quest that gives 350 rep will open up at Honored. However, that quest requires riding down to the south part of Winterspring to kill some elite giants there, and I think the rep grind it will be faster if I skip this. Will probably do it once in a while, just to alleviate the possible boredom of doing what was referred to as the most mind-numbingly grind ever found in WoW.

So, if I only do the furbolg-killing quest, ECT (estimated completion time) of the rep grind will be about 42 hours in total, 3 of which I have done, 38 of which I have left to do. If you think this is insane, consider that before TBC these quests only gave 50 rep per turn-in, making the ECT to something like 5 times longer, or about 200 hours.

Dizzie will also have the benefit of the better Outland gear she’s wearing and the increasing level difference between her and the mobs will make them easier to kill or avoid, so it won’t be too bad I think. I hope.



I don’t have to worry about gearing her up either since a sweet friend gave her a surprise gift consisting of the full Fel Iron set, complete with two Fel Iron Hatchets, enchanted with Fiery Weapon, for her Dual Wield.

This is a grind best done while watching Lost or some other TV-show (laptop ftw!) to avoid death by acute boredom or broken windows from the computer-hurled-through-it-syndrome and I will definitely try to do it while rested so she at least gets some xp out of it.

These 152 quest turn-ins I have left to do will give about 760 k xp (1 520 mobs x ~500 xp/mob rested bonus) which will mean that Dizzie will get her pretty pink tiger at about level 62.

And then she will be as ready for Outland as she can be!

(As a curiosity, the Winterspring Frostsaber seems to be the only epic land mount that only requires 70 riding skill.)