Red Cricket

[Amgesan]

I'm going for the 600 pet achievement, but I'm also a bit lazy. Motivation can be difficult to find. That said, I thought it was maybe time to start the laborious grind to best friends with Sho from stranger. I started it this morning, and two 30 minute sessions later I have my shiny [pet]Red Cricket[/pet]!

The point of this post is to give motivation to the collectors who share my laziness. There is a lot of dark soil going untilled in the heartland of VotFW, it seems like nobody collects these anymore. Each mound drops an item that hands in for 540 rep with bonuses. The Red Cricket grind is a lot less tedious than you may think so get out there!

Couple of additional pointers:

Once you get halfway through the last 3 stages of rep Sho gives a quest that returns a huge amount of rep (over 3k).
If you run out of soil patches ask a friend on another realm for an invite.
Red Cricket has 370 attack at 25...

[Kel]

There are also dirt mounds elsewhere in Panda-land too. So don't forget to check the other locations as well.

[Beave]

Did you use an addon to locate them? This is a pet I've avoided grinding because I hate repetative daily quest type grinds. The tournament pets and pebble too for the same reason. The guides I saw online suggested it took weeks to get rep with Cho high enough. A little more detail on what you did from start to end would be greatly appreciated.

[Sibi]

You might be able to check Wowhead for soil waypoints them use the Paste addon to add those waypoints to the Tom Tom addon. I say might because I've never looked to see if a dark soil waypoint lists exists anywhere.

[Kel]

Did you use an addon to locate them? . . .

I used [url=http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/dark-soil]Dark Soil[/url]. Works great.

[Jchertudi86]

I too was surprised on how quickly the Red Cricket "grind" went. Didn't use any addons or do anything special really. Glanced at the Wowhead map to see where I might focus my efforts but that was it. Took me less than 2 hours to get it. Great pet too... works as a nice support pet with Screech, aoe heal (at 370 power!), and cocoon. Or you can just try to go for damage!

[Amgesan]

Did you use an addon to locate them? This is a pet I've avoided grinding because I hate repetative daily quest type grinds. The tournament pets and pebble too for the same reason. The guides I saw online suggested it took weeks to get rep with Cho high enough. A little more detail on what you did from start to end would be greatly appreciated.

I used no addons. All I did was fly around any of the areas that look like farmland northwest of Halfhill in the area called the Heartland. The wowhead map for Dark Soil shows where they are. My first session was 09:30 and second at 14:00, both seemed to have the same amount of spawns leading me to the conclusion nobody farms these anymore. The soil is visible from quite far away, if you have trouble spotting it turn graphics detail to low and fly a bit higher than usual so the vegetation does not get in the way. Imagine a netherwing egg hunt on a private server and that's what this grind feels like now.

[Gwenolyn]

If you turn down ground effects you can see the dark soil much easier, fyi.

[Pry]

Thank you so much for this!

I was dreading doing it then I read your post. Just finished after maybe 45 minutes, starting from pretty much 0 rep. For some reason I thought Sho only liked the apples so I was pleased to see she accepts all gifts!

I am now 1 pet closed to 600, and only 49 to go!