World of Warcraft players have another few days left on the Impressive Influence event, which gives 100% bonus reputation with most Battle for Azeroth and Legion factions. It’s a great time to get your last few rep grinds done. Here’s how to get Exalted with the Rustbolt Resistance in Battle for Azeroth, to get a playable mechagnome of your very own.

World of Warcraft: Rustbolt Resistance Rep Guide

The neutral Rustbolt Resistance faction is exclusive to the Mechagon zone, found on an island off the western coast of Stormsong Valley in Kul Tiras. While there are a lot of rewards for Rustbolt rep, including a particularly useful major azerite essence, the main reason to grind it out is the Battle for Azeroth Pathfinder meta-achievement. You need Revered with Rustbolt to complete the second part of Pathfinder and unlock the ability to use flying mounts in all BfA zones.

To get access to Mechagon, you have to unlock Nazjatar first. As of patch 8.3, any character should automatically receive a breadcrumb quest (“The Wolf’s Offensive”/”The Warchief’s Order”) upon reaching level 120. This will start you on a short but eventful trip to Nazjatar, where you’ll meet your faction’s local allies and gain access to their settlement in the zone.

After you open a portal back to your faction capital in “A Way Home,” you’ll be contacted by Magni Bronzebeard (“Essential Empowerment”), who sends you back to Highmountain in search of a way to strengthen the Heart of Azeroth. This short quest series ends with “Back Out to Sea,” where you return to your faction’s town in Nazjatar. You’ll subsequently be approached by Gila Crosswires or a Disgruntled Laborer, which starts the quests (“Fame Waits for Gnome One”/”Rumors of Mechagon”) that will eventually lead you to Mechagon.

Gaining Rustbolt Resistance Reputation

Both the Alliance and Horde’s introductory quests take you to Mechagon and a meeting with Prince Erazmin, head of the Resistance. You’ll subsequently agree to join his revolutionary movement, as his father has a bad case of cyber-psychosis; his forces are trying to convert everyone they see into either robots or corpses.

If you’re trying to be as efficient as possible here, it’s a good idea to hold off on the Mechagon introduction quests until you can get some kind of reputation buff, such as the one you get for riding the Darkmoon Faire’s carousel. The big burst of rep you get for the introductory quests from Erazmin is the most you’ll ever get at once outside of a specific weekly event (see below), so it’s worth milking it.

At this point, you’re free to explore Mechagon, but the zone’s primary questline won’t continue until you reach Revered standing with the Rustbolt Resistance. While there are much more painful reputations in Battle for Azeroth than Rustbolt, particularly the Rajani/Uldum Accord, Rustbolt is effectively time-gated. If you do absolutely everything that Mechagon has to offer every day, assuming you’re not playing a human character and have no other rep bonuses, you can expect it to take about a week to get from Neutral to Revered, and between two and three weeks to get to Exalted.

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Setting foot on the island at all gives you access to a single easy world quest, which you can complete once a day for 850 rep. It’s worth noting here that if it’s the world quest bonus week, the +50% reputation hike also applies to Mechagon, which spikes its rep gain to 1275 a day.

You should complete two other series of quests while you’re on Mechagon, from Recycler Kerchunk and Christy Punchcog in Rustbolt proper. The latter’s quest is a big leg up for characters that just hit level 120, as the reward is a customizable ilevel 404 trinket, the Pocket-Sized Computation Device. Kerchunk’s line takes 12 days to complete, with 1 quest each day, but rewards you with a total of 1800 rep and a new mount, the Scrapforged Mechanospider.

Mechagon also features an assortment of daily quests, which are handed out by both mechagnomes in the field (i.e. “Aim High,” “Chopped Bots”) and visitors to the island (i.e. “Aid from Nordrassil,” “Cogfrenzy’s Construction Frenzy”). Every day brings a couple of members of a rotating cast of NPCs to Mechagon, where they’ll offer a particular daily quest to you from the Rustbolt Resistance’s hideout. If you complete all of those NPCs’ quests at least once, you get the Outside Influences achievement.

Pet battlers can complete a second world quest on Mechagon every day, where you must defeat one of the legendary mechanical pets found throughout the zone. The world quest is worth 75 Rustbolt rep. The first time you beat any one of the legendary Mechagon pets, it also drops a quest item that can be turned in to Vera Lonelycog for another 75 rep and some useful components.

There are two more sources of reputation that are locked behind your standing with Rustbolt. At Honored, you can farm specific pieces of scrap from mechanical enemies in Junkwatt Depot, a fortress in southern Mechagon, to complete the “Recyclable Parts” daily quest from the recycling machines there for an extra 150 rep per day. While the farming can take a while, the parts you need aren’t soulbound and are reasonably common. You can buy some of what you need off the auction house, and/or take a couple of hours and farm up enough of them for the next week. You can also farm the robots in Junkwatt Depot for long enough to make the rare mob Gear Checker Cogstar appear, who can drop the blueprints for a consumable device, the Ultrasafe Transporter: Mechagon. This lets you teleport directly to Rustbolt from anywhere else in the game world, which is a huge time-saver, especially for Horde characters.

Once you hit Revered standing with Rustbolt, Erazmin will offer the final quest in the Mechagon chain, “The Mechoriginator,” which requires you to defeat King Mechagon in the Operation: Mechagon instance. This was a lot harder before patch 8.3 came out, when Operation: Mechagon was an hour-long mythic dungeon, but now, you can queue specifically for the second half of Operation: Mechagon on heroic in the dungeon finder and knock it out in 20 minutes. You get 500 rep for completing “Mechoriginator,” as well as the Mechagonian Threat achievement.

Check the following table for all the activities you can pursue on Mechagon that are worth Rustbolt rep, and how much you get for them:

Rustbolt Resistance Rewards

In addition to Pathfinder, there are other useful rewards for grinding out Rustbolt rep. At Revered with Rustbolt, you can purchase a red punchcard, the Cyclotronic Blast, from the the Stolen Royal Vendorbot in Rustbolt for 256 gold. This can be installed in your Pocket-Sized Computation Device’s red slot to give it a powerful on-use effect, where it emits a channeled beam of fire at your target that inflicts 23923 damage every half-second for 2.5 seconds. This is a powerful single-target nuke that can outright murder a normal enemy, and can be a big help for a character who’s still gearing up. It’s also a fun PVP toy as the Blast’s beam can be interrupted mid-channel, which can trick an enemy player into wasting their Kick/Pummel/Rebuke/etc. on your trinket rather than your actual abilities.

If you’re planning to take on the Horrible Visions of N’Zoth, the alternate-reality instances that are available from Wrathion in the Chamber of Heart, the Rustbolt reputation vendor sells the first, second, and third ranks of an azerite essence called Purification Protocol. Don’t sleep on this; the major version of this DPS essence calls down a powerful pillar of fire, wrath-of-God-styles, that deals heavy damage over time in a set location for several seconds. If an enemy struck by the Protocol blast is an Aberration, they’re also stunned for 3 seconds. At Rank 2, the blast deals 50% additional damage against Aberrations, and at Rank 3, there’s a slim chance that any non-player enemy hit by the Protocol beam will be instantly killed. It appears to work off a slim percentage chance per target and can even kill elites.

This is already useful in normal content, but in the Visions of N’Zoth, a lot of the enemies you run into are Aberrations, such as faceless ones and fleshbeasts. Even at Rank 1, Purification Protocol is a powerful weapon against trash packs in the Visions; by Rank 3, it’s basically an extermination beam on a 1-minute cooldown. If you’re looking to full-clear the Visions of N’Zoth, especially if you’re running solo, a rank 3 or better Purification Protocol is one hell of an edge, and it’s worth all the time it takes to get it. Patch 8.3 lowered the required reputation and costs for all azerite essences from Mechagon to a much more affordable level, so you should be able to get them with relative ease now.

If you achieve Exalted status with the Rustbolt Resistance and complete “Operation: Mechagon – The Mechaoriginator,” you can also unlock mechagnomes as an allied race for the Alliance. This requires a relatively short quest series that starts with “Waning Energy,” from Kelsey Steelspark directly outside the inn in Boralus. You’ll need an Alliance character at level 120 to complete the quest series, which grants the Allied Race: Mechagnomes achievement and the Mechagon Mechanostrider mount.

Congratulations on your new friends, who are legally distinct from tinker gnomes in many important ways. We’ve got more tips and guides to help you through your adventures in Azeroth, including:

• Here’s a guide to helping you grind out enough gold for “Longboi,” the Mighty Caravan Brutosaur
• Get the most you can out of the Impressive Influence buff before it goes away on Monday
• Check out our owl bros, a new race coming in the Shadowlands expansion

World of Warcraft did the Alliance dirty with the mechagnomes, honestly. They’re a cool idea on paper and have some neat racial abilities, but they just look kind of stupid in play. I’ll admit I had my hopes up for the clockwork gnomes from Ulduar. Share your idea for a cooler allied race than this with us via our official Twitter, @PrimaGames.