Grinding (for rep)

Many people prefer grinding to music (for rep). Grinding, for those of you who do not know, is the act of killing absurd numbers of mobs look for items to turn in for rep, for quests, or for rep-per-kill.

The Feat of Strength, Insane in the Membrane, which awards the title "The Insane" is essentially pure grinding. The goal of the achievement is to become Honored with the Bloodsail Buccaneers (which destroys you're reputation with the Steamwheedle Cartel*). Additionally, you need to be Exalted with the Shen'dralar, Darkmoon Faire, Ravenholdt, and the Steamwheedle Cartel.

For Bloodsail rep you need to kill many guards who become very hostile and eventually get very difficult to kill. They are level 75, have a melee with net or a ranged attack that bounces you back. Anyways, you only need to kill a few hundred of them because they each give you about 75 rep.

To get your rep back up, you can either repeat a quest in Dire Maul, many, many times or kill pirates near Gadgetzan or Ratchet. When you get to Neuteral you can do various quests for them to also bring your rep up.

There are other goals while grinding, such as looking for specific objects (for Shen'dralar and Ravenholdt and Darkmoon) but the question I wanted to look at here was what to do while grinding.

Grinding in and of itself is very boring because you are generally doing a very simple task repetitively. Many people listen to music while they do so as it does take some attention away from the boredom, but there is still not much consciousness going on. Others watch TV, but I feel that takes too much consciousness. If you do not consistently attend to the TV, you will lose your place in the story, but if you DO attend to the TV, you will lose your pace while grinding, making it ineffective.

While it has been noted that talking to someone, either next to you or on a cell phone while driving does take a significant portion of your attention, when playing a video game and completing a simple task over and over, talking may be the proper amount of attention to put to the side.

However, perhaps even better than talking to someone is listening to an audio book. It engages you as much as a person talking to you or a TV show, but does not need you to either attend to a different visual area or to worry about conversing, therefore taking less of your consciousness, but still a significant amount.

*Steamwheedle Cartel: A group of four neutral goblin factions: Booty Bay, Everlook, Gadgetzan and Ratchet.

**Also please note that I am currently enrolled in a class "Attention: A Window to Consciousness" thus causing some of my discussion.