Kulldam

As expected, there is a great deal of information coming out about Cataclysm from the typical sources, such as MMO-Champion & Wow.com, but it is all very broad-stroke-type stuff, such as ability or talent changes, zone changes, item updates, etc. However, I find it very difficult to get any quality feedback about the minutiae of the Cataclysm experience, so boredom has led me to throw up this post to give some insight into what current WoW players with similar tendencies/backgrounds can expect when Cataclysm releases and they begin their adventure in a post-Deathwing apocalypse.

Now that a maximum level cap of 85 was opened up during the last big patch, and having just finished leveling my Warrior and Druid up to 85, I decided it might be interesting to use this post to focus on the 80+ Questing experience and also talk a little bit about how the Guild Perks system is shaping up.

Choose Your Own Adventure

So it is day one of your Cataclysm adventure and after getting your hands on a copy, be it midnight release, download, next-day shipping, or something you grabbed at Walmart sometime in February 2011 while picking up a 36-pack of Charmin Toilet Paper and two cans of Eazy Cheese, you're finally sitting down to login for the first time and start pushing for level 81.

But halt young traveler! You must choose your path wisely, for many perils and pitfalls await should you misjudge the importance of self-reflection!

Put plainly: What kind of player are you going to be when pushing up to level 85?

• Option A: Will you be playing daily for at least 4 hours each day on one single character to try to level up as quickly as possible?
• Option B: Or will you be more likely to play every couple of days, ensuring your logout at an Inn every night when you're done, and perhaps even hopping around between your Dwarf Hunter and your Tauren Shaman?

The reason it is important to make this distinction for yourself is simple: Cataclysm offers five brand new 80+ leveling zones, which include:

• Vashj'ir -- An entirely underwater sunken-city-esque environment designed for levels 80-82.
• Mount Hyjal -- A completely redesigned and repopulated version of the old Hyjal for designed for levels 80-82.
• Deepholm -- An earthly, underground realm which can be accessed only by entering The Maelstrom, designed for levels 82-83.
• Uldum -- An egyptian-themed desert south of Un'goro Crater, designed for levels 83-84.
• Twilight Highlands -- A Dragonmaw-infested hills and coastline environment designed for levels 84-85.

Each of these zones are great and unique in their own way, but similar to leveling from 70-80 in Wrath of the Lich King, if rested experience (or other experience bonuses) come into play, players will quickly find themselves out leveling their current zone and therefore skipping one of these cool zones entirely on the way to 85, which can be a real bummer for someone like me who likes to see everything at least once.

When I leveled up to 85 the first time, on my Warrior, the level cap was 82 for a long while, with only Vashj'ir and Mount Hyjal released. Still, I played a few hours every day, so my rested bonus was fairly minor, and once I hit level 82, I had completed all of Vashj'ir and about half of Mount Hyjal. However, knowing future patches would up the level cap and not wanting to quest without getting experience, I stopped doing any quests as soon as I hit 82.

Fast forward a few weeks and Deepholm was released and the cap was raised to 83, so I finished the quests in Mount Hyjal, but since I had built a bunch of rested by then, I was still not done with Deepholm questlines prior to hitting 83, so again I stopped once I dinged and waited.

Finally, the cap was raised all the way to 85 and the last two zones were released, so I finished up Deepholm, went through Uldum, and was about 80% of the way through Twilight Highlands questlines before hitting 85. The only exp bonus I had this entire time, outside of rested, was a 10% boost from Fast Track (Rank 2) for most of level 84.

However, I then tried out my Druid and began all over, consciously deciding I would quest in this order, completing every questline in the zone before moving on: Vashj'ir > Mount Hyjal > Deepholm > Uldum > Twilight Highlands. I also had the 10% experience boost from Fast Track (Rank 2) as soon as I started leveling from 80, and I had full rested experience when I began at 80 as well.

First, as planned, I went through all of Vashj'ir which, since the time I had done it on my Warrior, had an additional ~20 quests added to the end of the questlines. From there, moving onto Mount Hyjal, about half way through the zone, I ran into a known Beta Bug in the zone that prevents picking up a vital questline due to phasing issues, which meant I could either wait for a patch to fix it or skip the second half of the zone entirely. Having already done all of Mount Hyjal on my Warrior the first time, I opted to skip it and went to Deepholm instead, where I fully completed all questlines.

At this point, however, due to my max rested bonus when I started (which was of course gone by this point, yet still gave a huge boost early on) and the 10% Guild Perk bonus, I was about 5% of the way into level 84 by the time I finished Deepholm, which meant I knew I wasn't going to be able to finish both Uldum and Twilight Highlands, so I decided to skip Uldum entirely and go straight to Twilight Highlands. Upon finishing Twilight Highlands, I was at about 98% into level 84, and had to spend just a few more minutes grinding mobs to finish and ding 85.

Blah blah... what's the lesson?

I can safely say that, considering I played 5+ hours a day on my Druid once I began leveling past 80, that anyone who finds they are an "Option A"-type player come Cataclysm, should be perfect by doing all 5 zones "in order" (Vashj'ir > Hyjal > Deepholm > Uldum > Twilight Highlands) and they should ding 85 while questing somewhere in Twilight Highlands without much issue.

However, if you are an "Option B"-type player and think you'll go a day or two without playing or will not burn through your rested exp on the days you do play, you'll easily be able to skip one level zone entirely, and in that manner, you have two choices:

First, you can simply go in order, which has a few pros and cons. The pros are that you'll have a very easy time leveling up, as the zones are very much designed to ramp up in difficulty as they get higher in level, so with a great deal of rested experience, you'll find you hit level 85 in Uldum somewhere and never have to deal with the rape mobs that inhabit Twilight Highlands.

The downside to this "in order" option is that quest rewards per-zone, similar to the difficulty, also scale up quite quickly. Experience rewards for quest turn-ins for Vashj'ir/Hyjal quests are around 27,000 each, whereas the experience reward for most Twilight Highlands quests are upwards of 55,000 (while experience needed to level is fairly stationary between 80-84, around 6 million). More importantly, perhaps, is that the equipment rewards from quests follow similar insane scaling patterns. As a 264-geared player going into Cataclysm, most players will not replace any gear at all from Mount Hyjal or Vashj'ir quest rewards, and will only start finding minor upgrades in Deepholm quests (outside of the occasional blue quest reward from questline-ending events). However, once you get into Uldum and especially Twilight Highlands, everything will be a massive upgrade, even for classes with very strong T10 set bonuses.

The reason I bring up the quest rewards is simple: You'll absolutely want (and in some cases, need) the high item-level rewards from Uldum/Twilight Highlands if you want to jump into 5-man dungeons once you hit 85. Currently, the "level 85" Normal 5-man dungeons, such as Grim Batol, require a minimum average gear level of 305 to even enter. As I recall, you don't even start seeing 305 quality green items until late Deepholm quests, so at the bare minimum, unless you can somehow replace every slot from Deepholm, you'll need some pieces from Uldum/Twilight Highlands to even get into 5-mans.

The second option, of course, is to skip a low level zone, in which case I suggest Vashj'ir or Mount Hyjal. They both are cool zones, and you should definitely play through them at some point once you hit 85, but based on playability and enjoyment, I'd have to suggest skipping Mount Hyjal. Hyjal is a neat zone and has some cool "lol lore" stuff in it if you're into that sort of thing, but overall it just feels like a bunch of "environments" tacked onto each other than you fly between with no real cohesion. "Here is the fire area, here is the mountain area, here is the serenity area, here is the village area" etc.

Vashj'ir, on the other hand, is an entirely new experience within WoW since it is completely underwater, which at first, like many WoW or even previously EverQuest players, totally turned me off, but Blizzard has gone out of its way to make many quality of life changes to Vashj'ir questing so you aren't focused on the water aspect. For example, not to spoil too much, but early on in the zone you capture a seahorse which you can then use as an underwater mount for the rest of your time in the zone.

Early on in the Beta, this mount was not exceptionally fast (I want to guess 280% Swimming Speed) and thus you still felt that sluggishness of being underwater when moving around, especially since all other Cataclysm questing zones now allow flying. However, they have since updated the seahorse and, not only do you get the quest to access said seahorse almost immediately upon zoning in, but it moves at a lightning-fast rate of 450% Swim Speed. This simple alteration completely changed my opinion of questing in Vashj'ir entirely the second time around and allowed me to focus solely on the quest objectives and (very beautiful) environment around me. If you play through Vashj'ir, I highly suggest cranking your graphic settings up -- it looks amazing.

The one caveat to going through Vashj'ir over Mount Hyjal is this: Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe characters are currently unable to eat or drink while swimming/underwater. If this is still the case, this might sway mana-heavy users toward Mount Hyjal, though I suspect most players will not need to eat/drink while questing.

How fast??!!!1!!?

The answer to this question of course depends entirely on your choice in your play frequency (and thus rested or other exp bonuses) and of course your play style when questing. I am personally a very efficiency-obsessed player when I am questing -- I am constantly thinking about what will be the fastest path to do or turn-in these handful of quests, or which order should I do certain objectives, or when should I hearth versus fly back to camp, or when can I kill faster by gathering and AEing versus single-targeting, or when do I need to go back to town to train versus skipping training the skill(s) I won't use and staying on the field another level or two, etc. Even minor things like ensuring I'm flying toward an objective or turn-in area with auto-run on before I briefly go afk to get a drink or whatever. I never read quest text beyond the bare minimum and can often ignore it entirely now that the base UI shows where on the map a quest should be done and often tooltips for a mob will indicate if it must be killed or used for a particular objective.

Yes, it's quite sick to some, but that's what I enjoy, so keep that in mind when I illustrate the numbers below.

First thing is first: Regardless of your obsession with efficiency, level-time in Cataclysm is quite fast. With absolutely no rested experience and only a 10% Guild Perk bonus, I breezed through all of level 84 in just under 4.5 hours /played on my first play through and was able to knock that down to 3.5 hours /played by my third play through. Moreover, this was done in Twilight Highlands, the hardest quest zone, where you can barely take on two mobs at once and survive. Therefore, without the 10% bonus, I'd be looking at another 30 minutes, which would mean total played time of about 4 hours without any rested or experience bonuses of any kind. So even a casual player would likely only spend 5 hours of /played on level 84, and certainly no more than 6.

Overall, on my Warrior, during my first play through and with a bit more downtime than most classes due to not very efficient self-healing, it took me 25 hours of actual leveling/questing time to go from 80 to 85. On the Druid playing as Feral, during my second play through, I spent 18 hours of total level/questing time, but again that was starting with full rested bonus at level 80 and a 10% Guild Perk bonus all the time. On my Mage playing as Frost, I didn't track my actual time per level that I was questing, but I remembered to check my total /played time the moment I dinged 85, and it was 21 hours 6 minutes. That includes of course all time online, originally logging in and settings up talents/specs/hotkeys, messing with addons when I could finally use them, and even an hour or two spent idling while I was creating/testing my little guild rep addon. Therefore, I'd estimate probably 17 hours of actual leveling/questing time for the Mage to ding 85 (like the Druid, he had full Rested when I started leveling at 80 and 10% Guild Perk full-time).

While the lower levels are slightly faster than the higher levels (mostly due to mob difficulty), I'd estimate most people will take about 5 hours played per level, or 25 hours total, to reach level 85, assuming no experience bonuses, during their first play through. For each hour spent questing with rested bonus, you can probably safely knock off ~20% of the time (so 5 hours per level becomes 4 hours per level, or 20 hours total played if always rested).

dr00d iz 4 hax?

One quick pro-tip for Druids who are leveling up come Cataclysm: Remember how people got upset when Druids were always flying around in Flight Form picking herbs and shit? Well that haxiness is amplified 100-fold in Cataclysm questing. Nearly 95% of quests in Cata that require something to be interacted with/picked up via an object, can be interacted with/picked up while in Flight Form. This means, a number of quests where any other class would have to pickup a dozen eggs, all guarded by 1 or 2 mobs, would have to spend 30+ seconds to kill each mob before looting/interacting with the egg, but a Druid can simply fly down, grab it, and if the mob interrupts the interaction bar, simply keep spamming on the object to "cast" between melee swings. In 99% of cases, you can ninja the object between attacks, then take flight again, which will instantly drop agro since you're now an invalid target.

Now this isn't a new technique and I've done it for a long time, especially with the aforementioned herb farming and not wanting to fight a mob to get a particular plant. However, in the past, most quests didn't allow interaction like this in forms and forced the Druid into caster form (or the object was somewhere that didn't allow flying, of course). But as mentioned, almost every object interaction in Cata questing allows Flight Form, which saves a ton of time!

Moreover, some of the object collection quests don't even require the player to actually be touching the ground to interact with the object! I ran into it a few times, and it made the quest exceptionally easy compared to doing it on another character that obviously must land on the ground and demount to get the item.

In one particular example, there's a quest in Twilight Highlands that is a real bitch and takes forever. It requires you to run around between 3 or 4 small "villages" in the hillside and collect a dozen or so pieces of food and also light the fuse and blow up maybe ten barrels of gunpowder or some such. It doesn't much matter, but the key is each of these villages is constantly under attack by waves of 5-6 NPCs, which are all level 84, fairly tough mobs and are a mix of melee and healers. Friendly NPCs will regularly come into the villages to battle the enemy waves, but in most cases, the friendly NPCs will not win the battle unless you help out.

Now, the food pickup portion of this quest is fine, you can freely roam around and pick shit up while battle rages nearby, but as soon as you are in combat, you cannot interact with the food at all. To make matters worse, blowing up a barrel does an "AE effect" that doesn't really hurt anything, but it will hit any hostile NPCs nearby and immediately put you in combat. To top it all off, the barrels, unlike the food, are quite rare and you may find 1 or even zero barrels within each village you visit, so you're spending a couple minutes between each barrel, even if you never have to fight anything.

What inevitably happens when doing this quest on any non-Druid character, is you get all your food pickups done quickly, then hit a barrel, which puts you in combat, and then you have to spend 3-4 minutes fighting off the wave of enemy NPCs that are in the current village before you can drop combat and collect your food -- only to repeat the process again.

You can also drop combat some other way I imagine (FD, Vanish, Invis, etc.), or what I eventually started doing on the Warrior was just running really, really far away to eventually drop combat due to leashing and then fly back and hope someone else hadn't grabbed my barrel in the meantime or that the NPCs wouldn't agro me as soon as I demounted.

Yet, in stark contrast, due to Flight Form hax, doing this entire quest on the Druid, I never once had to engage an enemy or even get in combat (and if I did accidentally, I flew up slightly and dropped immediately).

It's a pretty ridiculous "perk" for just a single class and I expect it will be fixed, though I doubt it will be for many, many months.

Or, they could just not make gay fucking barrel quests...

Guild Experience & Guild Reputation

Obviously I don't need to list Guild Perks as there are plenty of resources out there to see exactly what is coming, for those that haven't read them already. What I was more interested in, and is why I joined some massive, random Guild on the beta server to see how it worked, is the Guild Experience and Guild Reputation systems.

How long will Guild Leveling take?

After surveying a number of Guilds as well as tracking the progress of my own temporary Guild on the beta realm, I was able to come up with the following chart showing the Current Guild Level and the Guild Experience required to reach the next level (Note: All Guild Experience values are represented by fractions of one-thousand in-game, so I will be using the same convention below for simplicity. To get actual values, multiple any number below by one-thousand):


With that info, we can come up with a fairly accurate formula (correlation coefficient of 0.9999) to find out all the values of Guild Experience required to level:

XP to Level = 1655.7143 * Level + 14949.048

I also know that the Daily Guild Experience Cap (the maximum Guild Experience that can be earned within a 24-hour period) is a constant of 6240k. Combining the two, we get the following progression chart from 1 through level 25:


What is interesting is the # of capped exp days required to level increases at a near-constant of ~0.265 days per level and obviously the system is setup such that early levels come much faster while later levels take longer and longer to reach when capping Guild Exp daily. From all this, we can safely state the following:

With zero applied bonus experience, if capped every day, it will take 137 days for a Guild to reach Max Level 25.

How do I contribute to the Daily Guild Experience Cap?

According to the most recent post on the subject by Blizzard, contributions to the Guild Experience pool (and thus the Daily Guild Experience Cap) will come from the following sources:

• Quest Experience -- Any experience earned by completing a solo quest (normal or daily & solo or group)
• Rated Battleground Participation -- It is unclear at this time whether a victory is required to earn Guild Experience from a Rated Battleground, but I suspect it highly unlikely and instead that mere participation will earn some amount of Guild Experience.
• Guild Achievements -- Completion of any Guild Achievement.
• Guild Boss Kills -- Any 5-man, 10-man, or 25-man Boss that is killed by a majority Guild Group (detailed below):

Originally Posted by Mumper

In general we require 80% of the group to be comprised of guild members. There are exceptions to this case though like 40 man raids and arenas. All the gritty details below are below.

4/5 - dungeons
8/10 - 10 player raid, 10 player BG
20/25 - 25 player raid, 25 player BG
10/40 - 40 player raid
12/15 - 15 player BG
2/2, 3/3, 5/5 - Arenas

What immediately jumps out as an issue for 10-man Guilds is the requirement of 20 Guild Members for 25-man raids. This will seemingly cause issues for smaller guilds that are trying to complete older 25-man Achievements, such as TBC or WotLK 25-man Raid Zones.

When asked about it directly, Mumper's reply indicates the system is not capable of simply checking that at least 80% of the raid force is comprised of Guild Members, regardless of raid size, and instead the numbers above are also indicative of not only the required number of players in a raid that must be Guild Members, but also the required numbers of players in the raid, total.

Originally Posted by Mumper

20/25 - 25 player raid will be kind of hard to accomplish for the small guilds out there.
If they can bring up 20 pple for OLD content, they surely can take 25 pple for NEW content.

For what I understand, you said you wanted to give both type of guild an even start.

10 players raid guild will not have that kind of recources.

the guild xp from old content is scaled appropriately to balance this.

Therefore, based on the current design, any Guild without the ability to gather 20+ players at once will be unable to acquire any of the old-world, trivial 25-man Guild Achievements! The Blizzard response, as seen above, seems quite dismissive of the issue, which is a shame, so the only hope for smaller Guilds is simply that the value of Guild Experience earned from old-world achievements will be so minuscule as to not stop Guild Leveling beyond a day or two. Even then, that's a pretty retarded "solution" when the 40-player raids are setup to only require 10 Guild Members for Achievement credit. It would be much more logical to require 20/25 for all Cataclysm 25-man Raids and drop the requirement down to 10/25 or 9/25 for all WotLK and prior 25-man Raids.

Another interesting thing to note about the Daily Guild Experience Cap is that, at least for Quest Experience contributions (which is the only active form of Guild Experience contribution in the beta at present), the ratio of earned Personal Experience to Guild Experience is 1:1 before bonus experience modifiers, meaning every point of base Quest Experience an individual earns goes directly toward the Daily Guild Experience Cap. If I do a quest worth 30,000 Experience, while wearing 10% Exp Bonus of Heirloom gear and am in a Guild with a 10% Exp Bonus Perk, I will gain 36,000 Personal Experience, and the Guild will gain 30,000 (the base quest value) experience toward the Daily Cap.

The daily cap is a constant value of 6,240,000 experience, which is about the same experience as a single 80+ level (Total Experience for level 83 is 6,526,480). Therefore, at least early on after Cataclysm's release, a Guild Member leveling up will be able to single-handedly cap out the Guild Experience for any given day.

What if I'm already 85?

Luckily, Blizzard thought ahead and planned all Guild Experience and Guild Reputation earnings to work off of potential earnings, rather than actual earnings. Simply put: If you complete a bunch of Daily Quests at 85 and don't earn any actual experience, you will still contribute all that potentially earned experience toward the Daily Guild Experience Cap. Similarly, Guild Reputation will still be earned based on the fraction of potentially earned experience, rather than actual earned.

What is bonus experience?

According to Mumper from Blizzard, Guild Achievements will be bonus chunks of experience that ignore the Daily Guild Experience Cap:

Originally Posted by Mumper

Note that guild achievements give large amounts of XP at a time and for this reason, they will not respect the daily cap.

Unfortunately, in the current Beta build, Guild Experience from Guild Achievements is not implemented, thus we have no idea how much the "large amount" mentioned above actually consists of. No doubt the value will be based on the difficult of the Achievement, but suffice to say it seems highly unlikely that any fairly active guild will actually take the full 137 days to reach level 25.

Guild Reputation

Shortly after addons were enabled within beta, I created a tiny addon to automatically track the experience I gained from quest-turnins only and also track the amount of Guild Reputation I earned overall. The reason for this is simple: Guild Reputation (like most numbers in WoW) is not displayed fractionally, but instead only as a whole number. Therefore, depending on how much Guild Experience a player earns from a particular Quest, it was often possible to see differing Guild Reputation gains from two different quests worth exactly the same experience. This is because of the aforementioned lack of decimal places, thus gains in Guild Reputation will only occur to the player when the next whole number is met or exceeded.

I made the little addon to help determine exactly what conversion rate players will see between earned Guild Experience and personal Guild Reputation, so after keeping the addon going from mid level 81 until dinging level 85, I came up with the following numbers:

Guild Experience Earned: 13,324,000
Guild Reputation Earned: 885
Approximate Exp per Reputation: ~15,055

Now, it's important to note that the tracking addon has a slight bug, in that it can only track quest experience earned the moment the "Complete Quest" button is clicked, so if there is lag or the button is accidentally clicked twice, the Quest Experience earned for that particular quest is added to the total twice. I did my very best to prevent this from happening, but if we take the above number of total Guild Experience Earned of 13,324,000 and subtract about 40-60,000, that would approximate the extra experience being added for one or two accidental Complete Quest clicks during my leveling process, and drop the total down such that dividing the Total Quest Experience by the Total Guild Reptutation earned comes out to a very nice, clean looking 14,998.

Therefore, it is fairly safe for me to assume the following:

15,000 Guild Experience = 1 Guild Reputation

How much Guild Reputation do I need?

At present, Guild Reputation seems to behave just like any other Reputation in the game, such that is has the same basic levels: Neutral > Friendly > Honored > Revered > Exalted. Similarly, each level requires a specific amount of reputation in order to move to the next level, so like other reputations, in order to reach Exalted with Guild Reputation, a player must earn 42,000 total reputation (3000+6000+12000+21000).

Therefore, this means a player must earn the equivalent of 630,000,000 Guild Experience to reach Exalted with his or her Guild!

Unfortunately, as mentioned above, it is currently unknown what sort of Guild Experience gains players will see from things like Guild Dungeons, Guild Raids, Guild Battlegrounds, & Guild Achievements, but suffice to say unless those provide huge chunks of Guild Experience beyond what we're used to seeing from questing, it could take an individual an exceptionally long time to reach Exalted with his or her Guild.

First come, first served -- Fuck the rest?

For a moment, let us just put the above issue aside and assume that yes, in fact a difficult Guild Achievement will reward 25,000,000 Guild Experience or whatever monstrous number, this still raises one major concern about Guild Achievements and the Guild Experience they will inherently earn:

What happens to the individual Guild Members not involved in the completion of and/or not online during the completion of a given Guild Achievement?

In other words, if earning a Guild Achievement earns a great deal of Guild Experience, does that Guild Experience apply to the individual Guild Member, and therefore provide a big chunk of Guild Reputation from said earned Guild Experience?

The way I see it, there are a few possibilities regarding how Guild Experience earnings work from Guild Achievements:

• Option A - No personal Guild Experience is rewarded for acquiring Guild Achievements and instead the Guild Experience is only applied to the Guild as a whole through the Guild Level system.
• Option B - Personal Guild Experience (and thus Guild Reputation) is rewarded to players involved in the Achievement (for dungeon/raid achievements, this would be a possibility, such as http://cata.wowhead.com/achievement=5011, http://cata.wowhead.com/achievement=4950, or http://cata.wowhead.com/achievement=5015).
• Option C - Personal Guild Experience/Reputation is rewarded to all Guild Members online at the time of the Achievement.
• Option D - Personal Guild Experience/Reputation is rewarded to all Guild Members, regardless of online status.

Unfortunately, every single option poses a potential issue either at present or down the road:

• Option A - No personal gains from Guild Achievements makes the most sense balance-wise, but this would mean limiting the methods in which a Guild Member can earn Guild Reputation to only Guild Dungeons, Raids, Rated BGs, & Quests, which seems unlikely to me unless the Guild Exp rewards from stuff like Guild Dungeon boss kills are astronomically high compared to quest turn-ins. Still, this seems like a highly likely implementation of this system.
• Option B - If Guild Exp is rewarded to only players involved, obviously a great deal of drama and strife could arise when a handful of Guild Members sprint to complete a bunch of the easier Guild Achievements (think old world dungeons/raids/etc.), granting them huge Guild Reputation boosts and leaving the rest of the Guild out in the cold. I think it very unlikely the system will work in this manner.
• Option C - Similar to option B in the gayness of screwing particular members, but in this case, makes it ideal to turn-in/complete achievements at specific, scheduled dates & times to maximize Guild Members online for the completion. Very unlikely implementation.
• Option D - If Guild Exp is rewarded to all Guild Members upon achievement completion, that will certainly be the most fair implementation among the options that involve personal gain from Guild Achievements, however, such a system would have impact down the road when the majority of Guild Achievements have been completed and a new member/alt joins the Guild, and is therefore unable to receive the chunks of Guild Reputation earned from the previously completed Guild Achievements (and in case anyone was going to ask, when you join a Guild, you start at 0 Guild Reputation, regardless of previous Guild Achievement earnings from that Guild in the past).

Based on what (little) is known about Guild Reputation gains at present, I would imagine Option A, awarding no personal Guild Reputation for Guild Achievements, to be the most likely scenario once the system is implemented. Option D is also a strong possibility but again, I imagine a large amount of negative feedback from the player base about missing out if their Guild falls apart, they have to transfer, make an alt, or whatnot. The only way Option D would be viable, in my opinion, is simply if Guild Reputation earnings were boosted a great deal and required far less Guild Experience (or Guild Experience earnings were exceptionally high from Level 85 content).