A Week in an MMO Life: Professional grinds

Kantrina visits Behsten to stop experience (briefly)

I still have no desire to participate in LFR so I am continuing to work on professions.  Kanter is excavating 2-4 Pandarian Archaeology sites so that he can eventually get his Vial of the Sands from converting Pandarian finds to Tol'vir ones.  He has searched four Canopic jars so far without finding the recipe.  I believe it is about a 10% chance, so if he gets to 10 without finding it, I'll be disappointed.  I had also been doing the Lorewalker dailies at the same time, but I realized that the one that uses 20 mogul shards was slowing progress, so now I'm only doing the one to that provides valor when you complete an artifact.

Since Kantro is safely harvesting ore on his farm that gives me time to work on something else.  I enjoyed getting Jeeves, so I thought I'd start working on more of the Engineering toys.  The Mekgineer's Chopper was my first goal since I knew the recipe was in Icecrown.  Kantrina, my mage Engineer, was already at level 77 and I happily and quickly leveled her to 80 in Storm Peaks.  I made what I thought would be a quick trip to Howling Fjord to pick up the recipe but she couldn't buy it.  It turns out that it requires Exalted status with the Alliance Vanguard.

My first thought was to try to get it by doing 5-man groups with my reputation going to Aliance Vanguard.  I tried to get both regular and heroic groups, but since people are generally switching to Cataclysm 5-mans at 80, only the regular groups would ever form and the experience from them was small.  I visited Behsten (see picture above) to stop my experience just before I hit 81 so I could continue to do the normal 5-mans, but I eventually decided it wasn't worth it.  He is more difficult to find than I expected.  He is described as being in the 'War room' but the room isn't labeled (it is the room to the King's left in Stormwind castle).  He is stealthed at a table in the back to the left as you enter the room.

Reading up on the reputation, it looks like the quests are spread in different areas, so it didn't really make sense to do a bunch of old quests I've already out leveled.  I saw two suggestions, either three dailies spread around Icecrown or the Argent tournament dailies.  I am already exalted with the Silver Covenant on Kanter so I don't have a lot to gain with having another character, but at least I thought I could build up some tokens for pets and mounts that I don't have.

So this is my grind now.  It seems I spend most of the time on the farm.  Kantra is farming cloth and doing the two cloth dailies. Kanter and Kantro are farming ore and Kanter is using the trillium to produce the daily Living Steel.  I have a lot of ghost iron so I was able to build the Jade Panther on Kantra.  The Jeweled Onyx Panther that requires building the other three panthers is so expensive, I'm not sure it is worth doing but if I earn enough gold, I might.  I will see if I can stick with the Argent Tournament grind on Kantrina or if I'll have to move on to something else.  In worst case, I could come back at 90 and solo the heroics, but that doesn't sound like much fun either.