How to prepare for WoW Classic Zul’Gurub patch 1.7 (phase 4)

UPDATE: ZUL’GURUB OPENS APRIL 15 AT 3PM PDT you can read more info in this blue post here.

Zul’Gurub will always have a place in my heart. It was were I experienced raiding for the first time and where I got my first purple item. It is my most anticipated patch of WoW Classic and I can’t wait!

I felt a little bit under prepared when BWL was released a couple months ago. So for this patch I’m getting my research down on paper to help those who are interested prepare for an exciting time of killing trolls in the jungle.

Zul’Gurub is scheduled to release sometime in April 2020. So the time to prepare is NOW.

In this post I’ll go over a few things from a planning perspective and a little bit of a guild leadership perspective. I will be covering:

1. What materials do I need before the patch goes live?
2. How a guild leader should handle those first bijous and coins
3. Zandalar Tribe Reputation Grind Calculations
4. Where is Zul’Gurub the related quests NPCs

Unlike Blackwing Lair, there will be a lot more crafted items introduced in this patch as well as a new reputation with a complex turn in system. I get a little bit deep into the numbers here so feel free to skip ahead if you don’t care about my super fancy napkin math.

1. What materials do I need before the patch goes live?

First you will need to prepare IRL for the upcoming patch. Get plenty of rest the days leading up to the new raid content and be sure to keep your drink fridge well stocked and your poop socks ready.

But seriously folks! We need to talk about getting prepared IN GAME!

If you are a damage focused caster the Bloodvine Garb will be a huge progressive increase for your character. These three pieces give you a total of 35 intellect, 83 spell power, 4% chance to hit with spells and 2% critical strike chance.

This set is an easy way to gear up a caster that is currently under-geared and serves as a good catch up set for moving on to the harder raids. It is arguably many casters best in slot pieces for some time.

Be aware that while anyone can wear this set, you must be a level 300 tailor to get the set bonus. Make sure you level your tailor profession before you get these pieces made to take advantage of the set bonus.

Bloodvine Garb Total Materials

Item	Total	Bloodvine Boots	Bloodvine Leggings	Bloodvine Vest
Mooncloth	10	3	4	3
Ironweb Spider Silk	8	4	2	2
Bolt of Runecloth	12	4	4	4
Powerful Mojo	8		4	4
Bloodvine	12	3	4	5
Enchanted Leather	4	4

Total materials needed for your full Bloodvine Garb set

Herbs to stock pile before ZG comes out

Anytime there are new alchemy items introduced in a patch those first few that can craft the items make a killing in the Auction House. Here are the new recipes set to release. I would recommend grabbing these herbs when you can.

• Living Action Potion: 2 Icecap, 2 Mountain Silversage, 2 Heart of the Wild
• Mageblood Potion: 1 Dreamfoil, 2 Plaguebloom
• Greater Dreamless Sleep: 2 Dreamfoil, 1 Golden Sansam
• Major Troll’s Blood: 1 Gromsblood, 2 Plaguebloom

2. How a guild leader should handle those first bijous and coins

You will want to focus your efforts for Zandalar Tribe reputation so that you can quickly get some of the new crafted items. Be sure to prioritize these reputation items to your guild officers or other loyal guild members.

Zandalar Tribe Reputation Priorities:

1. Tailor – Revered
   • Bloodvine Vest – Revered
   • Bloodvine Leggings – Honored
   • Bloodvine Boots – Friendly
2. Alchemist – Exalted
   • Living Action Potion – Exalted
   • Mageblood Potion – Revered
   • Major Troll’s Blood Potion – Honored
   • Greater Dreamless Sleep – Friendly

Why wouldn’t I prioritize those first few weeks of reputation turn in to the other crafters?

• Blacksmith – The darksoul set offers some +hit heavy items if you need a crafted set as a melee dps you would be better off using the Devilsaur armor
• Engineer – While the helm they can make would be a good upgrade for some, this is only one item slot and only engineers can use it.
• Leatherworker – The Primal Batskin set is a promising set. The reason this profession didn’t get priority is how the materials are obtained. Primal Bat Leather has a 54% drop rate from the bat boss. Each crafted item takes between 8 and 14 leather to make. So there is no need to rush to make this set because you’ll be farming the bat boss for a while.
• Enchanter – If you thought that weapon oil recipes would go live with ZG because they’re part of the ZG rep vendor, you would be wrong. I know I was. Enchanters get nothing of substance in this patch.

Keep in mind that if you run Zul’Gurub on a regular basis you will eventually get your exalted reputation. If you have the gamer fortitude you can also run additional runs outside your normal raid schedule since the raid resets every 3 days. This will increase your reputation gains even faster.

3. Zandalar Tribe Repuation Grind Calculations

Reputation with the Zandalar Tribe is needed for several items including crafting patterns. Here is some basic napkin math on how to get to your desired reputation level.

First lets look at how many points are needed for each reputation level. All players will start at 0/3000 Neutral.

Neutral to Friendly: 3,000 points 
Friendly to Honored: 6,000 points 
Honored to Revered: 12,000 points 
Revered to Exalted: 21,000 points

A Collection of Heads +200 to +500 reputation

The amount of rep for this quest is not confirmed since there is conflicting information between player submitted comments and wowhead published numbers.

This is the first step on your way to building reputation with the Zandalar Tribe. The quest requires 5 heads off any of the High Priests. The item is not specific to each high priest so you can kill a high priest multiple times over a number of raid resets and complete this quest.

Killing Trash and bosses reputation +2400 to +3000 reputation

Participating in the Zul’Gurub raid will be the primary way for players to gain reputation with the Zandalar Tribe. It will take 7 or 8 completions of the raid to get to Revered reputation which will allow the crafters to pick up all their patterns. All except alchemists who must grind up to exalted for their Living Action Potion recipe.

Luckily (or unluckily for those of us with too much to do and not enough time) Zul’Gurub is on a 3 day reset. This means that you can complete this raid every 3 days. Those 7 or 8 raids could be done in as little as 3 weeks.

You could also get a group together to kill trash and no bosses in order to reset the instance and collect more bijous and coins. Make sure that the leader does not have a saved ID to ZG before attempting this.

Coin and Bijou quests +75 to +125 reputation which is repeatable

If you have the resources to do so, you can turn in coins and Bijou for additional reputation.

• A Bijou for Zanza – first time completing the quest +375 reputation, +125 reputation for subsequent times, this is broken down as +75 destroying the Bijou and +50 for using the token
• Sandfury, Skullsplitter, and Bloodscalp Coins +75 reputation, this is broken down as +25 for the quest completion and +50 for using the token
• Zulian, Razzashi, and Hakkari Coins +75 reputation, this is broken down as +25 for the quest completion and +50 for using the token
• Gurubashi, Vilebranch, and Witherbark Coins +75 reputation, this is broken down as +25 for the quest completion and +50 for using the token

What’s a reasonable expectation for grinding this reputation?

It takes a total of 42,000 reputation to get to exalted with any reputation, which is needed for the shoulder enchants. Keep in mind that you will need 15 Zandalar Honor Tokens to get a shoulder enchant so you would end up turning in coins or bijous to get those.

To add to your reputation grind calculation you will need to do a minimum of 375 rep worth of the coin quest turn ins to get your 15 tokens.

Grinding reputation slow and steady or the cheap way

Lets say you plan on doing ZG once a week and were able to clear the raid reliably. If you were able to gain 3,000 reputation per run this means it would take you 14 weeks or a little over 3 months to get to exalted.

Grinding reputation as fast as you can!

If you were to complete ZG every possible time that your lockout is available you could take your 14 runs and get them done in 6 weeks or 1.5 months.

Getting reputation with the full force of a guild or if you are really stinking rich

A general rule for comparing bijou and coin prices: a coin is worth 20% of the value of a bijou. So if a coin cost 10g you should expect a bijou to cost 50g. Of course the prices will fluctuate but keep this math in mind when amassing large number of rep turn in items.

Some quick numbers if you want to get someone to exalted within the first week that ZG is open. Running ZG twice will get you to roughly 3300/6000 friendly reputation, which means you would need to turn in 176 Bijous and 180 coin quest completions (540 coins total).

If you want to get to revered within the first week that ZG is open. Running ZG twice will get you to roughly 3300/6000 friendly reputation, which means you would need to turn in 64 Bijous and 90 coin quest completions (270 coins total).

Here is a google sheet that I created to help you calculate how many rep items to buy. Open this up and create a copy, you will need to have a google or gmail account to save this.

Of course a lot of this speculation depends on the supply of your realm. If you have very few groups running ZG you may have a hard time getting all of these items, even if you have unlimited gold.

Check out these other guides for some more information on the Zandalari Tribe reputation

• Zandalar Tribe Reputation Farming Guide – Icy-veins
• WoW Classic: Zandalar Tribe Reputation Guide – Mellenium.us.org

4. Where is Zul’Gurub and where do I do all of these quests you’ve been talking about?

Before you raid, go get the quest A Collection of Heads. This is also the island that you will do all of the subsequent quests related to ZG

Here is where the entrance to Zul’Gurub is located.

This raid is scheduled to open up for WoW Classic sometime in April 2020.

If you’ve made it this far I want to say thanks! This is what I wanted to do with this Saturday instead of farm Black Lotus XD If there is anything else you want to know more about, please let me know in the comments.