22/07/2011

Random Firelands Dailies Thoughts

So how is everyone doing with the new Firelands dailies? I have a couple of guildies who've been doing them religiously and have by now unlocked the second vendor or so; I'm not sure as I haven't quite been keeping up myself. I was trying to originally, but I prefer to team up with my boyfriend who doesn't feel like doing them every day, and once I realised that acquiring more marks of the world tree on my own would only cause us to get out of sync I gave up on it.

I quite like the dailies in Mount Hyjal, they are fun and reasonably varied. Sethria's Roost is becoming a bit of a social hangout as people like to team up and take out the mobs there together, seeing how the credit gets shared automatically and everyone gets their quests done more quickly that way. I found that with all the helpful NPCs that you get, you can actually solo the elites quite easily even as a healer, but it's slow and certain abilities can get quite annoying if your class/spec doesn't have any good means of countering them (for example an interrupt to prevent the Seething Pyrelords from putting their reflective shields up).

I do kind of wonder where all those NPC druids come from. Weren't druids supposed to be semi-rare once upon a time? Now there seem to be four of them for every player regardless of class... Also, I can't decide whether the random named NPCs that show up to help you are simply funny or bordering on ridiculous. They make funny quips while fighting, but I can't help but find it slightly weird that Mog'dorg the Wizened for example has come all the way from Blade's Edge Mountains just to help me with my dailies. People like Budd or the paladins from Eastern Plaguelands make sense to me, but... Chromie? I thought you'd be better than having to do dailies like some random schmuck!

I'm a bit undecided about the Molten Front itself. I've enjoyed watching the tree grow (the "personal phasing" works quite well as far as I'm concerned), and I like that the initial set of dailies are all very forgiving towards people who may not be very well-geared or questing in a non-dps spec. There are so many NPCs around and fighting that it's easy to pick and choose your battles even when it's busy. I think Burn Victims is also the first daily in the history of ever where being a healer actually gives you a slight advantage! On the other hand, the quests are fairly repetitive, with every day consisting of the same round of mob-killing and clicking on some sparklies on the ground. I don't mind plain old kill quests at all if I can construct my own story around them, but if they are supposed to be part of an epic pre-made story of how I single-handedly conquer the Firelands by doing daily quests (or something) then I expect a bit more.

The quests for the Shadow Wardens and the Druids of the Talon are a bit more challenging in terms of mob density and respawns; I wouldn't want to be caught out there on my own or I'd get mauled pretty quickly. I also find it a bit annoying that you have to do the first round of Molten Front dailies every day to be able to access the other two factions; it would be nice if you could simply pick and choose once you've unlocked them the first time.

How does the Forlorn Spire keep getting rebuilt every day anyway? This really strikes me as one of the worse quests to make a daily out of. I can't help but picture a bunch of Sons of Ragnaros or imps slaving away, doing nothing but rebuild that spire, day after day, and sighing in exasperation when those bloody druids tear it down yet again.

Druids of the Flame possibly have the most annoying mob sound effects ever. Every time I kill one, it feels as if I'm facing off against a miniature Sindragosa, and there are quite a lot of them... /twitch.

Enduring the Heat seriously traumatised me the first time I did it. Now that I know how to do it it's stupidly easy, but the first time I just kept wondering WTF was going on since I could hardly see anything for all the fire elementals piling on my head, fell into the lava and then struggled for ages to climb back out again.

Falling off Fireplume Peak and getting rescued by a druid who dumps you in a random place is fun exactly... once. Then you just want to be able to get on with it.

I've only had a brief look at what I'm working towards next, but talking to the lady standing next to the empty moonwell really made me thoughtful. From the way she talks about it, filling up the moonwell would have been a perfect excuse for a daily quest, transporting a bit of water through the portal every day, and maybe working some kind of enchantment to prevent it from evaporating. Instead, we are tasked with gathering some arbitrary currency, and once we pay her the right amount of marks, it'll all happen on its own. Somehow this doesn't feel very adventurer-like. Instead of actually doing the thing I want to do (fill up the moonwell), I "work" by killing mobs to earn enough currency to let someone else do it. Reminds me a lot of the "running heroics to get raid gear" debate.

Looking at the big picture, I'm also still undecided on how I feel about the system of daily tokens slowly unlocking new vendors that sell things for gold, instead of the vendors opening up fairly quickly and the player having to grind out tokens to buy their wares, as it was done at pretty much all previous daily quest hubs. I don't like that the current method encourages reading up outside the game quite so heavily. In-game you have no way of knowing which future vendor will actually sell something that you'll want, so if you just play and pick whatever you like the sound of, you may end up getting very disappointed and feeling like you wasted a lot of hours of token-grinding. (EDIT: As commenters have pointed out, you can in fact see the vendors' wares before unlocking them. Hooray!) On the other hand it feels less demanding, as there is a clear end in sight - unlocking all the vendors - whereas acquiring tokens as currency often left you feeling like you always needed more because there were just so many things to buy.

9 comments:

  1. I think you are mistaken about being able to see the vendors wares. I can see what all 3 have for sale and have been able to since I unlocked the first one.

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  2. I like the dailies so far. I don't do them every day, but I do them when I have time to play. I haven't unlocked the second tier of vendors yet and I'm not really sure how it works. Do you need to choose between the Druids of the Talon and the Shadow Wardens?

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  3. I really like the guest NPCs that help you on the Sethria's Roost quest. When I first noticed them, bringing back memorable NPCs made me think of how Cataclysm in general seems like its trying to be a love letter to Vanilla. Hopefully expac 5 will be a love letter to Burning Crusade. /em crosses fingers

    @Ando

    Yes, you have to choose between the two, but the choice is only which one you unlock first, as you will have to unlock the other one as well to continue "growing" the quest hub. I suggest unlocking Shadow Wardens first as their quests don't involve jumping puzzles and a bombing run that can potentially take up to 10-15 minutes to complete if you get really unlucky.

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  4. @Anonymous 1: Thanks for pointing that out! I don't know how I managed to miss it, considering that I made an effort to talk to all the new NPCs to check whether they had anything interesting to say. That makes things somewhat better.

    @Anonymous 2: I do wonder what a "love letter to Burning Crusade" expansion would look like, hmm...

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  5. Did the firelands dailies for about a week and a half, have now lost interest. Its just so "Same ole grindy-treadmill".

    Isle of Quel'Danas Mk II + Fire.

    Ellifain @ Khaz'Goroth.

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  6. I'm quite okay with the initial grind for marks and then being able to buy everything for gold - mainly because I know that in TB I actually gave up after I got my trinket. I could never be bothered to grind out the marks for the mounts I want. (Eventually I guess I will.)

    You make a good point about the moonwell; having a daily quest to fill it would definitely have made more sense.

    The one thing that really annoys me actually, is the fact that if you haven't completed Hyjal (like if you chose Vashjir instead) you can't do the daily quests without first doing almost all of the Hyjal quests. That sure put a damper on my interest.

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  7. I vastly prefer the Molten Front vendor system to the Tol Barad one. In Tol Barad it felt like I ground out a bunch of rep and tokens, reached my goal, got my mount...and had to start all over again for anything different. I really don't like the feel.

    Molten Front is much friendlier I think. You do the "work" and then the rewards open. You're done, you don't have to start all over after buying one thing.

    The Molten Front is definitely my favorite daily area so far...but it could use a Booterang.

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  8. having not unlocked any of the vendors yet, I can vouch for being able to browse their wares at any point after you get your second faction.
    Also, Into the Fire was making me regret picking Druids of the Talon until I figured out yesterday that you don't need to help the farty druid at all, just walk nearby and don't get in the fire. Now that's awkward quest design.

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  9. @Skarn: You're done, you don't have to start all over after buying one thing.

    Unless you have alts... ;)

    @Sven: Yep, an anonymouse already pointed that out in the first comment. I guess I should edit the post for acknowledgement.

    And I do think that the druid dailies are a lot more annoying than the warden ones.

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