Rise of Azshara has been out for almost a month now and with it, two new factions (depending on your allegiance) are available to gain reputation with. The main reason this matters to most people is that this is the last barrier to flying in both Zandalar and Kul Tiras. Some of the more dedicate players have had flying unlocked for a few weeks now. More casual players like myself are still working toward hitting revered with the necessary factions. Now that things have settled, I wanted to share a guide for more casual players to unlock flying.

If you haven’t already, check out the faction pages for a complete list of activities you can do to increase your reputation scores for the Nazjatar faction as well as the Rustbolt Resistance. Both of these factions have a few activities in common. Namely, daily quests, rare elites, pet battles, and world quests.

When I first started gathering reputation, my goal was to do all the things just so that I could unlock flying and be done with it. My general play schedule is that I play on my lunch break (one of the perks of working from home), and then for an hour or two when the kids have gone to bed. Initially, I found that most days, I didn’t have enough time to squeeze in each daily activity unless I stayed up too late.

This became increasingly more difficult as mythic season 3 was released. Given my limited play time, I don’t really have time to dedicate to raiding. I do however, enjoy mythic+ dungeon runs and made time on +10 versions of each on my protection paladin in season 2. Given that I have 6 characters that I try to do a mythic dungeon on each week, my time in World of Warcraft became even more limited. So I took a closer look at each of the reputation sources to determine the most efficient, time effective way to gain reputation.

In Nazjatar, I found that the daily quests were somewhat lacking. They either sent me all over Nazjatar, or sent me to a specific part of Nazjatar where many other players were trying to kill the same thing or gather the same thing. It was a lot of effort for not a lot of payout. I remember spending one lunch period trying to finish up two daily quests for a measley 150 reputation points. This coincided with leveling my follower to progress in the Nazjatar storyline. Those particular daily quests award no reputation for some reason. With that in mind, I would recommend visiting Nazjatar when the emissary quest is available. If you are really impatient, you could go after the world quests on a daily basis as they aren’t very time consuming but I would avoid the daily quests altogether.

Mechagon however is a little different, mostly because there aren’t world quests. There is a world quest. Singular. There are about the same number of daily quests with the same payout. However, these daily quests do not feel as time consuming to finish. The world quest rotates between doing activities, finding treasure chests, and killing rares. I recommend completing the world quest each day unless it involves killing rares. I’ve found that given the number of players hunting rares and the fact that rares spawn, well, rarely, it’s usually not worth the time investment. There is no emissary quest for Mechagon but the world quest awards 850 reputation points so you don’t really need one anyway. If you really want to finish up the Rustbolt Resistance reputation, the daily quests aren’t a huge time sink. The payout isn’t great, but you don’t feel like you’ve wasted your time at the end of it either.

Rare elite hunting is not something I’d recommend setting out to do. If you are adventuring and see the yellow star on your map, by all means go for it. But I wouldn’t make it a point to go out looking for them.

TL;DR: If you don’t want to spend a lot of time increasing your reputation score, do the Nazjatar emissary quest when it comes up and do the Rustbolt Resistance world quest every day unless it involves killing rares.