My Frostsaber Grind Begins

I got up in the middle of the night and just couldn't go back to sleep. Logging on I thought I'd finish off a few dailies until I was tired enough again to go back to bed, but then I got this idea. I was bored of doing the dailies, didn't feel like doing an instance or PvP, so I thought I'd work on my reputation with one of the factions. Looking through my reputation list, there was definitely a lot I could work on getting Exalted with, but which one? The Consortium would be nice and wouldn't take too long, and then the Cenarion Expedition has a Hippogryph mount that I wouldn't mind having, but then something caught my eye a little ways down the list. Frostsaber Trainers. I was Neutral with them and had only 75 points.

I remember when I was leveling in Winterspring encountering an NPC atop of Frostsaber Rock named Rivern Frostwind. He's the one that will sell you a Winterspring Frostsaber mount if you are Exalted with the Wintersaber Trainers. I remember turning in one of the reputation quests and got only 50 reputation for it. I was 56 or 57 at the time and remember thinking that there was no way I'd get to Exalted because it would take me weeks if not months of actual play time just doing the repeatable quests. That was just too much for me to justify. So I left Rivern Winterspring up there on the rock and my Frostsaber Trainers reputation at 75. Checking it today it was still at 75.

The Winterspring Frostsaber is a beautiful mount that you don't see around much just because most people don't have the patience for the reputation grind. When Ziv hit 60 I just barely had enough gold for the Journeyman riding skill, let alone any gold for my epic mount. So instead I went the PvP epic mount route. I ground out honor points in all the battlegrounds until I had enough to get my Black War Tiger. I've had this same epic ground mount ever since. Perhaps it's time I get a nice new one and retire the Black War Tiger.

Checking Wowiki I found out that the reputation grind for getting this mount has gotten easier over several patches, and with Patch 2.3 got significantly easier. Instead of 50 reputation points for each quest turn in, it was now 250 reputation points. So instead of grinding out 840 quests, it is now only 168 quests. That is a much more reasonable reputation grind. So maybe I will get a Frostsaber mount afterall.

I headed over to Winterspring and found Rivern still up there on Frostsaber Rock. I got the Frostsaber Provisions quest. I had to get five Shardtooth Meat and five Chillwind Meat. I wanted to know how long of reputation grind I was in for so I did the quest five times just to get an average time and the average number of Shardtooh and Chillwinds I'd have to kill for each quest. The average was about 17.5 minutes roundtrip inculding getting all the required meat. On average I would have to kill 15 Shardtooth and 14 Chillwind.

I kill pretty fast, only a few seconds per mob, but with the drop rate and the travel time, 17.5 minutes per quest is not that fast a grind. At this rate I'd be looking to finishing the remaining 163 quests in about 47.5 hours of actual played time. That's still quite a grind. But I've decided that I'm going to get me this mount. Noting down the /played time for reference, I begin.