Ok, I have a question about the factioning as well.
The ways that I know of to increase faction are:
1. Collecting crops in West Badlands
2. Bounty tokens from gnoll ears/bandit heads
3. Greater bounty tokens from liodreth heads
4. Everchill orc heads (no where close for me to do yet)
5. Newbie quests for collecting giant beetle legs, rat tails, ratman hoods
6. Scouting for Newport quests
I just hit amiable last night and know that I still have a very long way to go. I had turned in a couple stacks of gnoll ears, at least one bag of crops in the badlands and had run each of the newbie quests once and was still only at indifferent. I started the scouting quests last night and got the corporals insignia - this is what bumped me to amiable. It appears that the scouting quests give sizable faction hits or I was just at the edge of the next level and another stack of bounty tokens would have advanced me to amiable.
Now I am a bit torn as to proceed from here. As Rab said, regular bounty tokens will take you to kindly. I don't really want to go lay waste to Blackburrow for gnoll ears - there is almost always someone hunting there for experience and I don't want to screw them over. However, deep in is usually open so I can always do that. I could turn in more crops, but that is extremely tedious and not a pleasant option. I have cleared the bandit camps every time I ran through West Badlands and have yet to see a single head drop which limits that and the drops for the newbie quests don't drop often enough to make it worthwhile. I could go ahead and start with Liodreth heads for the greater bounty tokens, just making up in volume for the kindly faction that the regular tokens will do, but I have only seen a single head drop out of maybe 50 kills - this looks like it is going to be a long haul, too.
The dilema I am facing now is that the only thing that has given a big boost to faction is the scouting quests. I really do like to quest rather than grind but I am afraid that I will use up the nice faction increases too early - assuming that the quest will still give faction from warmly up to ally - and get stuck trying to drag people to Everchill for orc heads.
I know that getting the gate necklace is not supposed to be easy so I don't want this to come across as a whine. Just "thinking out loud" as what my best options will be.... I know that I will probably end up doing the quests first, 'cause I might as well do what's fun and not work
