WoW Reputation

You can gain or lose favor, otherwise known as reputation, with many of the several different factions in Azeroth by completing certain quests or killing certain creatures (mostly bosses and mobs). Doing so will usually unlock special rewards or new quests to accomplish.

You can also increase your reputation by doing repeatable reputation quests.

Reputation levels and points

Reputation is very similar to experience. Reputation is divided into a number of different levels for which players must earn reputation points to progress through. Higher reputation levels generally require more points than the previous level to progress. The exception is hated, which spans a very large number of reputation points. Reputation points, just like experience points, are gained through quests and killing various mobs. Unlike experience, it is possible to lose reputation points with some factions, either by killing members of the faction or by assisting rival factions. For rival factions, gaining reputation with one will normally decrease reputation with the other, but at a greater rate. For instance, if you kill a magram centaur, you will gain 20 points of reputation from the gelkis, but will lose 100 points from the magram. Currently there are 3 of these rival-faction pairs: Gelkis vs. Magram (both Centaur), Steamwheedle Cartel (Goblins) vs. Bloodsail Buccaneers (pirates), and Ravenholdt (rogues) vs. Syndicate (Thugs).

Various quests and faction-specific rewards are available across the levels, but the player must be able to interact with the faction NPCs to gain access to these rewards. This usually requires Neutral or better standing.

Reputation sheet

You can check your reputation with all factions by pressing the "u" hotkey or by going to the Character window ("c" hotkey) and clicking on the Reputation tab along the bottom. You can also enable or disable various options:

• Show as experience bar: Allows you to display one reputation bar as a experience bar on your main display.
• At War: If checked, you can initiate combat with NPCs of that faction, and your AoE spells will affect the mobs of that faction. It's always checked if you are Hated or Hostile; it can't be checked for races within your faction (Alliance/Horde).
• Inactive: Moves the selected faction to the bottom of the reputation pane.

Gaining and losing reputation

Completing non-repeatable quests will usually increase your reputation with the quest giver's faction(s) by a fixed number of points. Most of the factions also have special repeatable quests that give reputation when completed, or special mobs that give reputation when killed.

Full reputation is still gained by questing at a higher level. For example, completing low level quests with a level 80 character now gives full reputation. This makes it easier to get to exalted and buy another faction's mount.

Grey mobs used to give 20% of the normal reputation until the release of Patch 3.0.8. Now any mob will give full reputation. See the mob difficulty colors chart for when mobs transition from green to grey.

Mobs and quests sometimes both increase your reputation with a faction but decrease it with another. For example, killing Gelkis centaurs will increase your reputation with the Magram, but it will also decrease your reputation with the Gelkis. Thus there is no way to be Friendly with the Gelkis and the Magram at the same time (though if you kill neither you can remain neutral).

For higher-end factions, a general strategy exists to make a reputation grind as painless as possible. Take the Argent Dawn for example. There are several ways in which to earn reputation for them: doing standard quests, killing mobs in and around Scholomance and Stratholme, killing bosses, and doing repeatable quests. The problem is that each of these methods will only work to a certain extent. Killing standard mobs will usually only get you to Revered or so. After that, only quests and bosses will give reputation and these are of course harder to do. Therefore, it is in a player's best interest to go as far as possible on mob kills alone and then use repeatable quests and standard quests to get through revered. Example: for Argent Dawn reputation, run Scholomance and Stratholme to get reputation from kills until you reach Revered status. At this point, reputation gained from killing mobs will stop, but you should have built up quite a collection of Scourgestones and such to turn in in rapid succession to further boost your reputation. Similar tactics can be applied to other factions, simply varying the instances you run.

Reputation Modifiers

There are some buffs that increase the rate at which one gains reputation. Human characters have a racial passive spell called Diplomacy which increases all reputation gains by 10%. Reputation modifiers are added together, not multiplied.

Gaining reputation with the Horde or Alliance factions

Every playable race has a home faction, for example Darnassus for night elves, Orgrimmar for orcs, etc.

Gaining reputation with your home faction provides access to discounted prices at their vendors. However, gaining reputation with other factions may provide additional benefits, such as specific items, patterns, etc which can be purchased from vendors of that faction at certain reputation levels. In addition, if you want a mount of a faction that is not your own, you must be Exalted with them. For example, if you are a troll and you want to buy a wolf mount, you must be Exalted with Orgrimmar. Note that among the alliance only Dwarves and Gnomes may ride the Gnomish Chicken Strider mount.

Most quests for an Alliance or Horde faction will give full reputation gain for that faction, and one quarter of that reputation gain for the other factions on that side. For example, a quest completed for a Stormwind NPC will give 250 Stormwind reputation and 62.5 reputation for the other Alliance factions.

There is no way to increase or even view your reputation with factions of the opposite team (ex: You cannot increase your Undercity reputation while playing an Alliance character).

List of factions and rewards