20/01/2014

Dailies, Dailies Everywhere

I saw people refer to MoP as "the expansion of dailies" soon after launch, and with several more content patches added since then, it's only become "worse". We've been running (what seems to me like) an absurd amount of dailies ever since we hit ninety, yet it feels like we've barely scratched the surface of all the different rep grinds.

The main one we've focused on so far have been the Tillers. Now, I'll hand it to Blizzard: these guys are fun. Growing your own little farm is fun, and by extension it's fun to work with the Tillers. Many of the tasks they give you are pretty mundane (getting a gift for someone, returning lost chickens, stomping marmots), but with the addition of personal reputation for several NPCs on top of the global faction reputation, you really feel like you're getting to know all these characters and it actually makes you care. Getting to improve and expand your farm as you get more involved with the Tillers community feels like a great reward and you can hardly wait to hit that next reputation level.

Second on our list have been the Anglers dailies, mainly because we like fishing. We ended up finding their quest hub early on as we kept fishing up some of the special fish that you can give to Nat Pagle as a daily and we couldn't wait to unlock the actual daily quests. If you get a good set they are also really quick to do, something like five minutes for three. Of course, then there are also days when you get asked to fish up eels, which can take fifteen minutes on its own, even if it does have the benefit of giving you an excuse to gather up some random fish.

The third hub that we've been trying to visit daily is Lion's Landing, for Operation: Shieldwall. Mostly we were intrigued by the fact that the map showed a flight path there which doesn't actually appear until you get started on the quest chain, so unlocking that was one incentive to have a look at it. The quests themselves aren't particularly inspiring, but they are nicely grouped up and we're keeping at it in hopes of seeing some worthwhile story advancement soon.

The only downside to the Shieldwall dailies that I've seen so far is that they give you a currency that doesn't go into the currency tab for some reason and thus takes up bag space. Oh, and we fell into the trap of spending some of said currency on those animal traps that start quests, and they ended up being horrible. I didn't think Blizzard even made quests with such atrocious drop rates anymore. And these are a daily? I don't know why anyone would bother.

The August Celestial dailies are something we haven't done every day so far, but we have done them occasionally. We have yet to get sent to help out the tiger, but so far our favourite is probably Niuzao's temple, as you basically do one round around the courtyard killing mobs and clicking on things and you're done.

A friend and ex-guildie also recommended that we go to the Isle of Thunder because it was supposed to be fun. Unfortunately unlocking the dailies there requires a whole chain of solo scenarios, which put quite a damper on our duo play. To be honest I don't get the point of solo scenarios, as I didn't see anything in there that would've made it a problem to do it in a group. It just resulted in an off-putting experience, forcing us to play apart instead of together for over an hour. And when we finally unlocked the dailies, they weren't that great either, making us do a lot of running back and forth through densely populated areas. To be honest, that whole island is just a depressing place, what with all the ruins and the perpetually terrible weather. Who'd want to hang out there for any length of time? We haven't been back since that first day.

We haven't even touched the Golden Lotus, the Shado-pan, the Klaxxi or the Order of the Cloud Serpent yet, and there are probably more that I'm forgetting (or haven't encountered yet). It honestly feels a bit overwhelming. The individual daily hubs we've seen so far are mostly very well designed, with just a small handful of quests that are close together and pretty fun to do, but after doing three or four of these hubs I've honestly had enough of them. In fact, I may already be doing too many dailies as it is, as I can kind of see the shadow of burnout looming in the distance. There is only so much daily-running that I can stomach, even if they are good dailies. Unfortunately alternative endgame activities seem to be kind of limited from what I can tell. I can definitely see where some of the criticisms of this expansion came from and I'm glad that I'm not in a position where I actually "need" any of these reputations for anything.

9 comments:

  1. The solo scenarios exist so that you can experience the one time "world" events like the opening of the AQ gate even if you couldn't be online when it actually happened. It shows you what happened in the story so far.

    As to why it's solo and not for a group, it would be a lot more work to get those scenarios to work for both solo players and a group, presumably, with some of the events that happen (like the flying chase -- would be a nightmare to get that to work with a group, I imagine, compared to assuming a solo player).

    And given they only take like 5-10 minutes each, Blizzard probably figured it wasn't worth investing the resources to make them doable in a group.

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    1. I didn't know that the release of the Isle of Thunder was a world event originally. And I figured that they made the scenarios solo for ease of programming, but like I said I don't recall seeing any mechanics in there that I haven't seen in normal quests before. (And yes, that includes things like vehicle chases - Sons of Hodir chain, anyone?)

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    2. Yes, it was a realm wide effort to do the quests and progress, the island unlocked over a matter of a month or two. You started off with a beachhead, then secured the base, then pushed forward into the lower areas of the citadel, and finally breached the main gates.

      Which meant you'd get a solo scenario to do every 1-2 weeks or something.

      The Sons of Hodir quest chain is also less scripted -- there's no mob that knocks you off the mount that you then have to fight at the end, it's completely individual progress. Trying to make sure it worked and made sense for two people would simply be wasted effort.

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  2. Early on the rep gear had more of a feel of being needed. It wasn't a great situation.

    I'm with you on the Isle of Thunder. I didn't even finish my first round of dailies there. It just feels like a giant disorganized mess of a place. The story of the Thunder King never quite caught me, so it's not as if I'm willing to slog through it all for that.

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  3. Oh dear! I think it was me that said Isle of Thunder was fun!

    I only did the dailies once though (*cough* hate dailies *cough*). I think as another commentator said, when you had the war effort going on, the island was packed, and there's quite a lot of lore in there, with the summonable mobs, grouping up to do the weekly summonables, I had a lot of fun with it as it was the "new thing". There were also some fun new pets to capture, and a metric ton of Rares.

    IoT is also the "Mogu" patch / area where you get to see Lei Shen. It being the backdrop to the raid zone also helps the atmosphere, it being the ruined jungle settlement outside the raid instance and all that.

    Finally, I do think the criticism of solo scenarios is a touch harsh. Sure, it's massively inconvenient for a dedicated duo set-up to do them (because you'll do the same scenario in parallel), but for solo players or people who log on at rare times, to be able to do the story with pacing in a solo instance was a nice feature. I've been very disappointed when Blizz has all the "story" in raids or - even worse - in books. I thought the occasional solo scenario was a reasonably good solution to putting "story and lore" into the game. And because it's solo, there's no go-go-go mentality. And it's not like there's much solo instance content in WoW, compared with all the 5 mans and raids and stuff.

    Finally.....
    (1) Please stop doing dailies before you hate them!
    (2) For goodness sake don't do Trove of the Thunder King solo scenario! I can't imagine the rant that would ensue...

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    1. There are probably some fun things to do on the island - we killed a rare for example that was a pretty hard fight for two people and which dropped a pet for both of us. But it feels like there's a lot of unpleasantness to wade through to get anywhere.

      I don't think I would have minded the solo scenarios as much if there hadn't been five or six of them in a row and as a requirement to do pretty much anything else on the island. I don't mind the option of solo content being there, I just don't like being forced through a whole chain of it just to get to the "good stuff".

      And I already did a run of the Trove of the Thunder King actually! :P I didn't really know what was going on for most of it...

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  4. I think at some point we are going to see a blog entry that says....

    * Shintar enjoyed her return to Warcraft
    * Much of the gameplay is still slick and engaging
    * Pandas were not as bad as expected and MoP remedied some of Catas problems
    * But MoP didn't solve all of them, and introduced some new and fresh frustrations
    * As a consequence, although the brief return to WoW was well worthwhile, 2-3 months was more than enough
    * Shintar cannot ever imagine returning to the game in a meaningful or permanent way

    But much better written than that with some snappy phrasing, amusing anecdotes and a hefty dose of common sense. Hurrah for Shintar!

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    1. Shh, I'm not there yet and you're spoiling it for the other readers! :P Maybe I'll just copy and paste your comment now when the time comes.

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  5. I can see the future! Go me!

    But I'll be wildly upset if you just copy-paste it. I come here for wit and charm, not bullet point lists!

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