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.