My least favourite vehicle quest

I'm kind of ambivalent about vehicle quests in general, but I think after last night's round of questing I've found at least one that I definitely don't like. The Golden Raspberry for worst vehicle quest of WOTLK goes to... The Storm King's Vengeance.

I actually liked it on my first playthrough and thought that the way your character sits on Gymer's head was cute, but I was teamed up with my boyfriend then, and with two storm giants at our disposal we could simply steamroll our opponents and bypass a lot of issues that way. Re-doing it on my own I ended up facing a lot of frustrations however.

First off, it seems buggy. It's not the buggiest quest I've seen in WOTLK (that honour goes to Changing the Wind's Course, which bugged out on me in at least four different ways), but unlike the latter, The Storm King's Vengeance is messed up in ways where I can't even tell whether they are actual bugs or simply bad design.

It immediately starts when you mount the giant and get teleported into a phased version of the zone where the mob density is about ten times higher than normal and you have an aggro radius of several miles. I'm not kidding. With my view distance set to high, all the mobs as far as I could see immediately began to make a beeline for my giant. You have an AoE attack, but it's relatively ineffective and I often found myself surrounded by enemies in such a way that they were just far enough apart that there was no way to get rid of them other than to precision-punch each of them individually.

Trying to shake them off and make them reset doesn't work so well either. According to the comments on Wowhead there's a golden spot where you can make a lot of them turn around, but if you don't know where it is, running away will just lead to a larger and larger horde of scourge minions trailing behind you, until they finally catch up and you get to enjoy the in-game equivalent of being gnawed to death by ants.

So, just to make sure this is clear, you have to spend the entirety of this quest running around with about hundred scourge chewing on your feet and whittling away at your health as you try to complete the actual quest objectives. Sure, you can try to kill them, but they'll respawn faster than you can finish them off anyway. So much fun! Except not.

Fighting the boss mobs is an exercise in tedium as well. If you're lucky you'll notice that auto-attacks stop every time you use a special attack, so you have to spam the attack command constantly or take off their health really, really slowly with nothing but specials. And all this while several dozen ghouls and banshees are gnawing on your toes at the same time, just in case you forgot.

You also get to kill Thrym. Oh yeah, that huge dude walking up and down the road! Except... during the one quest where he's actually relevant he's not there. He only spawns after you kill another one of the mini bosses (something there was no prior indication of), and even then it's possible to miss him since he's in a different place than usual. Way to be confusing, Blizzard.

Then there are the storm clouds. You're being told that they'll heal your storm giant friend, but nothing more. The problem is, it's not that easy. First off, they aren't hugely common and can be somewhat hard to spot in the sea of ghouls, which is obviously a problem. Just walking through them doesn't do anything, you have to grab them. Except, that doesn't always work either. In the Wowhead comments there's some discussion about how only a special kind of storm cloud heals you and how to recognise it... but why is that mentioned nowhere in the quest? Is this a bug or intentional? It sucks either way. Also, to get full use out of a storm cloud you apparently also have to attack something right after grabbing it to get the full effect of the HoT it gives you or something. I wonder how many times the people who found out about that had to die on this quest just to figure this out. Again, there is not even the slightest hint in-game that this is how things are supposed to work. Personally I just gave up on the storm clouds eventually and simply let Gymer die repeatedly, completing only a small portion of the quest on each new try. Hint: having to resort to zerg tactics is usually a sign that something's wrong.

I was rather surprised that so many people in the Wowhead comments actually talked about how much they loved this quest. I just can't share their enthusiasm. What about my readers? Did you find Gymer tiresome too or was there another vehicle quest that really got on your nerves?