What in God's name happened to reputation? Was championing a faction in dungeons too reasonable, economic, and fun, so we have to kill literally thousands of annoying, tightly packed mobs?
Isn't this how you did reputation in vanilla? I thought you hardcore oldtimers would be happy that Blizzard reintroduced all these features that made vanilla so superior to the popamole decline that the game has become
No. You didn't do reps just by mindlessly killing mobs. Let me educate you, plebeian. In other words, let me quote myself from earliel and other forums:
When I look at reputation "grinds" (Which set amount of dailies certainly is not, it's just a chore to be done with) the best example of it all comes from all the way back of vanilla and Argent Dawn. Simply because of it's diversity if nothing else. There were TONS of ways you could gain rep with AD, especially at the end of vanilla. Let me list some of them:
-Farming outdoor mobs up til friendly/honored (Depending on mob type)
-Farming instance mobs up til honored (Bosses gave rep all the way to exalted)
-Scourge Insignias, three types of them based on the strength of the undead mob and the drop rate was quite high. Required a trinket for drops but the AD blue trinket with AP/SP against undeads was extremely powerful for it's time.
-Cauldron runs (Repeteable quests where you go gather mats from undeads to disable cauldrons)
-8 different resource turn-ins that were very farmable due to high drop rates but also came as an extra pretty much regardless of what you did. (These also gave you marks to buy some of the best pre-raid stuff from AD faction, along with biggest bag of the game at the time)
-Crafting work-orders for all professions that could give items doubling your reputation gain
There was plenty of ways to increase rep with AD, none of which required daily commitment to reach certain level within the faction. On the contrary, it was all on the player's hand how fast or slow the progression happened instead of artificial barriers to slow down the process.
What also made a large difference was that you could farm AD rep on two separate zones and in two rather large instances (Strath being almoust half the size of Stormwind) and there was always some lone spot where you didn't have to compete with others if you wanted some peace.
None of them gave particulary much rep, the mobs awarded 5 rep per kill 'til the limit, turn ins 50 and insignia turn ins some more. But it was continuous process on which player could dictate how to spend the time and if he didn't, something always piled up regardless.
This of course is mostly applicaple to the other "high end" reputation of vanilla, Cenarion Circle.
It certainly was more difficult to work with than AD with rather major time requirements, but it also presented hefty amount of options of how to work on it.
-Farming mobs -> Gave rep, dropped pages for turn-ins, dropped Twilight set
-Twilight set -> Summon miniboss that awards rep on kill, that for some classes was soloable, which in turn drops possible reputation turn-in item and item that will let you summon mid-tier boss.
-Kill mid-tier boss that requires a group of 3-5 players and the same occurs but this time it also dropped very good entry level BoE blue gear, get more rep, more rep items for turn-ins and items that let you summon final boss.
-Final boss, all of the above is applicaple, but now there was chance for epics and you needed a small raid group to finish it up. These were quite casual aswell, in a sense that you could gather summoning mats really fast.
-Then there were the Letter quests for Logistics, Military and such. It utilized crafting professions, farming hives and gave badges for which you could buy gear that would be usable all the way to AQ, a worthy time-investment.
