... when I really couldn't afford it. I'm a cunning bastard sometimes, not often, but sometimes. Take my current goal in Guild Wars: maxing my reputation with the Ebon Vanguard. I realized that turning in a partially completed hero's handbook and farming a bit to bring my rep as close to 80k as possible without going over and then turning in another book would allow me to skip out on farming a lot of rep in hard mode. So I filled one handbook, partially filled another, turned it in and went hunting for some rep.

While out rep farming I had the most spectacular luck. First a black dye drops. Then three of the first four kill benefits (25 kills and you get a boost) were hunt ranks up! Great I'm getting a tonne of rep stupidly fast. But... now I have to watch my rep gain like a hawk. Then I get a boss bounty while I'm within spitting distance of a boss, but doing it would push my rep gain over 80k. Gah! So I let almsot 400 rep go.

In the end... I finished it out with exactly 79,999. I shouldn't have farmed it so close but I was feeling arrogant. I could have gotten so much more out of that farming run but... alas... it wasn't to be.