Insane in the Membrane

[Matti06]

got to revered with the goblins when I finished shen'dralar.

You bring up an interesting point. It's actually relatively easy to grind DM for goblin rep and acquire your 52 librams well before you are exalted with the goblins. Therefore, it may actually be beneficial to grind through some of your SWC rep with pirates, and then switch to DM, purely from an efficiency point of view

[Zao]

/script AddTrackedAchievement(2336)

If that's what you mean.

exactly, tyvm

[Googolplex]

Farming pirates you get mageweave which is typically the most expensive cloth

Wool Cloth says hi!

[FatMF]

exactly, tyvm

Oh, by the way, don't try to click on already tracked FoS in game. Or did you already?

[JohnSmithC3PO]

I am pretty sure it is a song not an achievement..

[Rayzan]

Pristine black diamonds are usually super expensive and rare so the DM way isn't a bad choice but pirates are the way to go. My friend went as far as to buy PBD's on a server that was selling them for 20-50g and then transfer him to the server where he was getting the achievement (our zerver you won't see one less than 500g a pop).

But honestly, don't even bother with the title if you don't know what you're doing becaus you'll waste so much more time. I lost my best friend for 3 months due to thisdamn achievement. Lol

[Longview]

Instead of making a new thread I'd rather post in this one.
I'm planning to the Insane in the membrane. (obviously) And quite a while back I already farmed BSB to the Bloodsail Admiral title.

Since you no longer need to have BSB at honored and SWC at exalted at the same time, I'm wondering if there is some way of checking if I already pushed BSB up to honored or if I stopped after friendly and simply upped my SWC rep.

If I already was honored at one point, it would save me quite some grinding time, and if not I'd have to grind the whole stuff all over again.

tl;dr: Is there any way to check if I already was honored with BSB?

You still do.

[Y2J]

I personally grinded the steamwheedle rep in diremaul, purely cuz of the amount of ogres you have to kill, you'll have all the librams, and a few Pristine black diamonds towards the shen'dralar repby the time you're exalted with the goblins.
it might feel like it takes longer, but think of it as doing 2 of the reps at once (technically 5), you rarely reach the raid lock out, and also the arena boss just outside can drop the orb of deception, which sells nicely still. I'm almost certain you can get the rep faster grinding the pirates. You just get so much more done towards the achievement in dire maul. That is unless your server always has cheap librams on the AH and you also have a massive amount of gold

[Xaos]

Key runs are better unless...
you already have all the librams, PBD's and cards banked

Key runs = goblin rep + librams/PBD's for Shen rep + random DMF cards
Pirate farming = goblin rep.

and the goblin rep is one of the easy parts.

My personal order was
- Bloodsail grind
- Dire maul runs till goblin exalted
- Scholo/strat runs for libram mats + more PBD's
- Lockbox grind
- Watch AH for cards/ last few PBD's over 2 months (did this from the start)

[Malladin]

http://files.spectralcoding.com/file...#section_2.2.5

This site has everything you need and likely more to complete this achievement. The link is the section most relevant to your question.
Basically, grinding pirates is faster, and if you swap between Tanaris and Ratchet appropriately, you will never have to step inside DM to do key runs. The advantage of DM is that you have the chance to find Libram and Pristine Black Diamonds that are needed for Shen'dralar rep, which can save you thousands of gold. You also make a bit of money this way. Keep an enchanter in your group, and you can DE everything for the shards you need, and other mats to AH and it can fund your whole achievement.

Its slower, but a bit more diverse an experience than grinding pirates, though by the time you are done either, you never want to see the places again. If money is not an issue, and you just want to get this done, pirates is the way to go. If you arent in a great hurry and would like the financial benefits, DM is the way to go.

[Nirron]

Hint - Farm the pirates with a group arround 4 people they get "forced" spawned and you pretty much get to kill a pirate every sec!
Dont get too many people in tho since the rep that you gain is reduced with more then 5 people or something arround that number.

[Underbottom]

You can cause force spawn solo. I should know I was just doing it.

[tilgare]

For this achievement, i would highly suggest visiting www.Saate.net. It has the best and most in-depth Insane grind guide on the net. Go to it, the guides are on the right hand side. Also, whilst you are there, go ahead and complete his WoW related Word Jumbles!

http://www.saate.net
First of all, I absolutely endorse this statement. I never could have done this grind without Saate.

My Methods
I'll give you a look in to what I did myself. First of all, I found that libram farming was much easier on my prot paladin. Also, he is an enchanter, which allowed me to get WAY more than enough Large Brilliant Shards on my own (saving me a bit of gold - you spend SO much gold on this grind that if the gold spending WASN'T mandatory, I chose to do it myself. I pick pocketed my own lockboxes, I farmed more than half of my own librams, I farmed my own shards. Of course, I had to shell out for Pristine Black Diamonds. I also chose to purchase Adder's Tongue, Lichbloom, and Icethorn when the prices were down and made my own decks. It was a huge time investment, but I think I actually came out ahead gold wise... I was able to turn 300-400% profit on the gold invested on herbs in the beginning, although the prices of all the trinkets have come down and I was not making as much towards the end.)

Dire Maul - West
I pulled the first boss in DM west (pulling all the big trees as a result) and killed all of them. Then, I went up and rounded up all the little trees upstairs with taunts and shield tosses. I pulled the entire lower level of undead next, LoSing around the corner of the ramp upstairs. Lastly, I ran the undead loop upstairs. I was basically able to clear most of the instance in 4 pulls. (I found that the demon room was not worth my time. Most of the mobs beyond the door are casters and I could not find a very effective method to LoS them making the time investment seem too much.) By the second pull I'd occasionally see a libram drop, by the third I'd often see a libram drop, and by the fourth I nearly always saw a libram drop. Many runs I'd get 2-4 before I reset. (Occasionally I'd get lucky and get one of each, but sometimes I'd leave my hand inside a body and my wife would fly down and grab a duplicate for me.) You never run into the reset lockout this way since you spend plenty of time looting bodies.

Of course, I'd hit the AH up multiple times a day when I could. In all of my Stratholme, Scholomance, and Dire Maul farming, I looted 2 Pristine Black Diamonds in total. You're just going to have to buy em off the AH, no way around it.

Now I'll explain why I did this.

Dire Maul - North
First off, DM North Ogres, even if you keep them way out of melee range, tend to knock you in the air repeatedly (and once they catch up to you you can go flying all over the place). This REALLY slowed down my progress. The Insane grind was for my druid. I tried libram farming on my paladin, and the time investment didn't seem worth it. I also tried it out with librams and keys in mind on my druid, but as a caster, getting sent up in to the air or stunned greatly increased the amount of time the mobs stayed alive and thus my risk of dying. Screwing up and dying is a huge waste of time. All of this seemed to make it clear to me that libram farming was not nearly fast enough in DM North. Of course, you can be freeing Knot and getting rep for SWC and Shen'dralar at the same time, but I don't believe that it is near as fast as the alternative.

I don't have the math at hand, but I'll draw up a rough estimate of numbers I've seen in my research.

DM - North Reputation Gains
At most (assuming you free Knot and turn in the ogre suit every instance) you can get 425 rep per lockout. The fastest method is to run into a fresh instance, run to the very end with a key in hand, and free Knot. Then, you clear your way down looking for a key. As soon as you get one, you reset immediately free Knot and repeat. With PHENOMENAL luck, let us assume you are able to reset every 12 minutes for a perfect 5 keys/hr. (Keep in mind, to keep up these rep gains, you must come prepared with 4 Bolts of Runecloth, 8 Rugged Leather, 2 Rune Thread, and 1 Ogre Tannin every run for an ogre suit netting you an additional 75 rep per reset.)

425*5=2125 rep/hr

Also keep in mind, this method means relatively low libram yield as your main goal is one key, then reset. If you were in it to farm librams, you'd likely clear all of DM North before you reset.

The Alternative - Pirate Farming
The alternative (which I used) is to kill pirates. I found ballpark numbers floating around SWC Wowhead pages, but I found that while farming Ratchet rep up to 11,999/12,000 honored, I was able to get anywhere from 6,000 to 8,000 rep/hr. This would spill over to 3,000-4,000 rep/hr for Everlook, Booty Bay, and Gadgetzan. (Yes, that is a large disparity. I never netted less than 6,000 rep/hr, commonly worked at the rate of 7,000 rep/hr, and occasionally when I was really pounding the ground I'd pull 8,000 rep/hr. Sorry I can't be more specific - as I describe later, I often stayed distracted.) Of course, this assumes you are not looting bodies. I used a mouse-over macro tied to my middle click mouse button to cast Insect Swarm (a low mana cost dot, first tick kills every time, can be cast behind me) and just kept running, occasionally hitting travel form or mounting up for longer runs.

Ratchet - Southsea Pirates
Just South of Ratchet (following the path out of town), is a coastal area full of pirates. I went up to the upper level and cleared all the pirates up there, jumped back down to the coast, cleared the coast, and ran back up top again. (Additionally, I would use Starfall as I ran into the final upper level camp sometimes killing the same mob 2-3 times as they respawned between star hits. I would also use it 60 sec later on one of the densely populated camps down below allowing for it to come back up by the time I was upstairs again.) This allows you to make a full circle with absolutely no backtracking through dead mobs.

Once I hit max honored with Ratchet, I checked out all the other potential farming areas. They all suck, but the coastal area in Tanaris seemed to have the highest rep/hr yield. In STV, you decimate one camp and have to trek a good distance to the next one, just to wipe them out and return to the last camp, sometimes not even having full respawns when you get back. You spend more time on your mount than you spend killing, so that was definitely out. The other option was the Wastewander mobs in the Tanaris desert. Again, they were very spread out, so I felt like I was spending a lot more time running than actually killing. That leaves Lost Rigger Cove.

Gadgetzan - More Southsea Pirates
This area has a higher concentration of mobs than the others, although you do have to run inside of buildings and ships to clear them out. Right out of the cave, I would clear the coast, run into the camp, clear the buildings, clear the boat they are building, and finally clear the floating vessels. Next, I'd run straight to the back of the area, jump the fence, clear to the coast, clear the coast again, and loop back into the main encampment. (Note: I did not even consider Grizzly Hills - the Venture Co. mobs up there actually have a decent amount of health, so a dot or two won't quite cut it. Additionally, you would be inclined to loot them for the cloth and greens they can drop which slow your rep gains and give you nothing useful on your grind other than gold which can be acquired in higher quantity in less time by just about any other means. I didn't deem it even worth trying.)

I hated every moment of Gadgetzan farming, and I never got a solid rep/hr number. I just kept pushing on knowing that the worst was almost over. Unfortunately, the spawn times are not as good here as they are south of Ratchet, so if you have low level questers, high level questers, or any unfriendly rep farming competition, it can slow you down quite a bit. You hit 11,999/12,000 honored with Gadgetzan before you hit Exalted with Ratchet, so just farm until you hit Exalted. Once Exalted with Ratchet, return to the same coast, South of Ratchet and finish up Gadgetzan, Everlook, and Booty Bay farming Southsea Pirates. At that point, you are still gaining 3,000-4,000 rep with the three remaining SWC factions.

The Benefits
There are benefits to both methods. DM nets libram drops, possible (though highly unlikely) PBDiamonds, and gear/vendor/ah drops worth decent amounts of gold, while allowing you to slowly gain reputation with all four Goblin factions at an equivalent rate. In order to do this, you have to farm DM North which will knock you around and hinder your progress. I can not venture a guess as to how long this method takes.

With my methods, you still get the gear/vendor/ah drops, PBDs, and librams (I would argue that you get them faster), and separately, you gain at least 3 to 4 times the goblin reputation/hr. (3 to 4 times the goblin rep as compared to the MAXIMUM amount of goblin rep you can get with good luck - you can potentially go a lockout or two without any shackle keys.) The pirate farming can be tedious and boring, but if you have another screen/computer, a tv, a portable dvd player, etc, you can distract yourself with, you can keep yourself entertained pretty well. In DM north, I found that if I stopped paying attention to what I was doing, I could get myself killed, accidentally not pull mobs, or other small mistakes that would mean wasting time. Of course, you still have to pay just as much attention in DM West, but if you are getting 4-6 librams an hour in West, I wager that you spend at least half the time in there farming librams as you would if you were in DM North farming keys too, and then your goblin farming can be more laid back and distracting whereas you could spend at least as much time paying your fullest attention in order to do both reputations at the same time.

In the end...
There are great arguments on both sides, but short of precisely timing all the various methods on different characters, I cannot tell you the absolute best method to use. Hell, someone somewhere might be zapping giants repeatedly and laughing at all the silly players causing ogre and pirate genocide.

An additional consideration...
A last (I hope) note I'd like to make that crossed my mind. The reputation gains from DM North are also reduced even further for every libram you find. Every libram (or perhaps if you are lucky, 2 - ie, 1 prot and 1 focus) you find requires you to hearth/run to Camp Mojache/Feathermoon, then to run back to Dire Maul. This is no different from my West farming method, or even straight North/East libram farming, but it has the added penalty of reduced Goblin rep/hr. I have no doubt that many people ended up at, say, the bottom end of Revered with all 4 goblin factions once they had all 82 librams. At that point, they can either farm DM North ONLY for shackle keys at a maximum of 2125 rep/hr, or they can turn to the Southsea pirates in Tanaris and the Barrens. They are only getting spillover rep no matter where they farm, and once they get three factions to Exalted in one place, they still have to farm the last to Exalted in the other zone. Overall, I believe if they turn to pirate farming at this point, the grind from Revered to Exalted will actually end up taking longer than if they had been doing it from the beginning. Without the desire to prove this with math, you'll have to either disprove it with your own or mentally analyze it yourself.

Before you start...
I read a tip part way through my Goblin grind that was too late for me to make use of, but for those who have not started yet, I suggest it strongly. By the time you are honored with Bloodsail, you are probably thoroughly bored with them. Naturally, you may not want to do any more than you absolutely have to do, so you get 1/12000 honored and call it good. You can actually potentially save yourself some time by grinding it all the way up to 11,999/12,000 honored. By doing so, you give yourself a buffer that allows you to turn in stacks of linen cloth for 500 Ratchet rep and 250 spillover. Of course, this hurts your Bloodsail, so you don't want to push it into friendly.

Trash Bloodsail Buccaneers Reputation?
Now, I've heard reports that it is possible to reach honored, trash your Bloodsail, and grind Steamwheedle to hit Exalted. I've also heard the exact opposite. (It is certainly possible to, say, complete the achievement, trash your Bloodsail, and grief other players by linking your Armory and saying, "See? You can do it.") GM reports are conflicting. It appears to me that, while moderately challenging separately, the intended challenge of the achievement is to have both Honored BB and Exalted SWC at the same time. As such, I would suggest that anyone who might have trashed their Bloodsail and gotten the achievement has been on the winning side of an unintended bug. I had the intention killing one mob to dip into friendly BB to test this to see if it works today, but by the end of my grind, I was all out of patience. I would suggest doing this as it would appear to have been intended to be done - if it turns out it was a bug and instead of putting a tick on the achievement, it was intended to check if all criteria were met at the same time, it very well may be fixed and I would NOT want to be you if they fixed it before I finished.

Many Edits: Tried to make my Wall-o-text a little prettier, added additional comments, clarified some areas, expanded on my thoughts a bit.

[AngelExodus]

You still do.

No you don't. There is another thread on these forums where several people have confirmed this, but I am too lazy to use the search function so you can.