Abstract

I have been doing a lot of factioning on Burnberry in anticipation of the day he peels back his human skin to reveal his true, lizardman self. In case this is of interest to any of you, I thought I would make a faction primer.

What is faction?
The first thing you need to understand is STANDING and how STANDING relates to FACTION.

STANDING:  Your standing is a score from -2000 to +2000 that represents the influence (good or bad) your in-game actions have had. Standing defaults to 0 for all groups you come in contact with until you do something for (or to) them. Standing is easily misunderstood because it is the critical element of Faction. When we talk about “faction hits,” we are actually talking about changes to our STANDING. However, since STANDING is a 1-to-1 aspect of Faction, the literal meaning of what we said ends up being true as well. However, once your STANDING with a group drops to -2000 or hits +2000, you can no longer progress in that direction (but can reverse course).

FACTION:  Faction is the result of Standing plus an adjustment for race and another adjustment for religion. (There is also an adjustment for Alliance and +faction gear, but those are one-off situations and are typically quite intuitive.) Finally, it is unclear if your class also has an inherent adjustment value. I doubt it. I suspect that any adjustment for class is actually handled by the +/- adjustment for religion since your class already restricts your religious choices in EQ. With that said, if you try to buy from Dubious NPC merchants, they will often call out your class when telling you that they will not sell to you.

So what are my race and religion adjustments?
I would love to get my hands on those tables, but have not found one yet. If you do, please share in comments.

You can calculate the net of your character's adjustments by subtracting your standing from 2000 and then adding your current faction with any of the groups. For example, I have 1,030 faction with Karana Residents after increasing my standing to +2,000. That means that my Erudite Necro started the game off with -970 Faction and 0 standing. My net adjustments with Karana residents were -970. Enough to make me Kill On Site (KOS). 

How do I find out my scores?
Type /faction in game.

What do these numbers mean? What do I have to increase my score to in order to get to x?
The way mobs treat you is a simple lookup of your Faction score on the table below. (I have added tier divisions based on being attacked, being able to use merchants, and access to quests.)

 1100 to 9999  Ally:  This is as good as it gets. All quests are now open to you.
---------------
  750 to 1099  Warmly:  A positive filler faction. Most quests were already available when you hit Amiable.
  500 to 749   Kindly:  A positive filler faction. Most quests were already available when you hit Amiable.
  100 to 499   Amiable:  the NPC is starting to like you. MANY quests open up at Amiable
---------------
    0 to 99    Indifferent:  the NPC will tolerate and sell to you, but certain quests may still be out of reach
 -100 to 0     Apprehensive:  the NPC will tolerate and even sell to you, but prices will be bad
---------------
 -500 to -101  Dubious:  the NPC will tolerate you, but merchants will not sell to you
---------------
 -750 to -501  Threatening:  the NPC may attack you if you look at them funny
-9999 to -749  KOS

Some faction nuances:
1. There are factions that are literally impossible for certain people to improve. I cannot move my Peacekeepers faction. No method exists for me to do so.
2. Some factions are easier than others. 
3. In many cases the best faction quests are only available to people who *already* have Amiable faction. (This is why I am spending so much time on this now before I become an Iksar.)
4. It is all incredibly complicated and specific to your character. Raising one thing often lowers another. No one can easily tell you what to do. You are going to have to do a lot of research on your own if you want to faction. That said, I will put together a list of the faction quests I have used to fix Burnberry's faction with various groups and post that as a comment on this thread as a way to get you started.