If you want to do the faction quickly, I reccommend repeating the Freeport to Eruds Crossing gem turn in. This will not yield sow boots or shield of falsehood though

This.

While I was ding the quest someone had corpses a bunch of gems and did it in an hour. Apparently there really is no limit to the number of gems you can get from the spirit in NFP, just that the gem itself is lore and needs to be corpsed.

Never.

Here was my path:

Freeport/Bondil: 1
Test of Patience: 1
Woe/Envy: 15
EJ Spirit(from woe/envy turn in): 6
Dire Wolf: 1
CoM Reports: 5 or 6 can't remember if it ws 5th or 6th one that was the obligatory your faction cannot go any higher turn in but pretty sure 5th said maxxed.

This isn't the fastest necessarily, but it is what I did. When I camped specs as per my guide I would bind in Rathe and gate/kill them ever couple hours. Doing CoM books would probably be faster. Side note I was Amiable when I did Dire turn in. Was 2 woe/envy turn ins deep.

I did the quest legit up through black dire in my high 30s. Then I did book page turnins while leveling in CoM. It worked out very well.

Wow, way more responses than I expected :D

First off, as Velerin understood, I was just trying to provide data to anyone interested, not trying to advocate for doing what I did.

On the question of "why not just do the quest the right way?": I already did it that way on live, so I didn't feel bad about "cheating" here, and the Hole is annoying. But mostly I just don't like bothering people. As it is I still need guild help for Black Dire and Lord Rak, but at least I don't have to bug them for the Hole and Ghiosk.

As for the elephant in the room, there were two reasons I didn't do CoM:

1. I'm genuinely curious about how much faction each step provides. If I report back the Bondl + shield turn-ins approach and Yumyum reports the Bondl-only approach, and someone else reports the ... well at the end of the day with enough of those reports and some multi-variable algebra we can actually determine the relative faction each step gives. And if we had that info, everyone could make a well-informed decision for themselves which steps make the most sense.
2. To be honest though, at first I was going to do CoM (laziness > curiosity). On live (where I had the same shaman), I spent a LOT of time in CoM, and I was really looking forward to going back to that nice empty shaman play ground.
   However P99 CoM is very different from live CoM: its completely packed. Most times I went I literally couldn't find a single mob to kill. Real life concerns kept me from trying to join a group, and there was just no room for a soloing shaman there (sadly).

That just leaves the question of running around, which really wasn't that bad. I was bound in Feerrott (killing spectres and guards), and I'd frequently check Rathe to see if Glaron/Tabien were up. If they were I killed them and did a quick WK run and then gated back. So while I did have 25 trips from Feerot to WK, they were one-way at Scale of Wolf speed, and so weren't too rough (and they were cheaper than hiring a cleric or other helper to do Bondl turn-ins).

I don't understand how this is fast; as you can see I did do that step 4 times, but only because I was doing Bondl a bunch, and then I happened to be in Qeynos with a gem after. Even if you could reliably port between FP and Toxx, you'd still have to wait for the boat, and you'd still have go kill in some other zone to get the gem to give to Bondl.

You don't port, you corpse.

1) bind in FP at gem giver
2) get a gem and die
3) repeat a bunch of times
4) go to Eruds crossing
5) turn in gem and die
6) loot gem off corpse in FP
7) get res
8) repeat steps 5-7 until you have max faction
9) you're welcome

Ah, so it's basically the same deal as the million Bondl turn-ins, only you do it in two rounds (and in the second round you go to Erud's instead). Thanks.

Hopefully someone will do it that way and report back their results so we can figure out the relative faction of Ooglyn vs. Bondl vs. Wandering Spirit vs. ...

I forget the exact number, I think it was around 70. The only real time consuming part was traveling from FP to Eruds. I think it took 1.5 hours tops to get max faction

`The only real time consuming part was traveling from FP to Eruds.`

surely this includes a boat journey? your timescales seem delusional.