Burning Crusade Daily Quests

One of Burning Crusade's big new features back in the day was the introduction of daily quests in patch 2.1. Before that, infinitely repeatable quests hadn't really been a thing... there were a couple in vanilla WoW, such as from that goblin on the coast of Feralas, but they didn't reward anything other than a bit of rep and were definitely edge cases more than anything else. 99.9% of the time, quests were a one-and-done thing.

It's hard to recall my own feelings about the first daily quests so many years later since I wasn't blogging regularly about WoW back then, but I think overall I liked them? I didn't do them religiously (I wrote about how I never even bothered with the Netherwing for example) but the Ogri'la dailies played a bit part in me being able to afford epic flying the first time around. I also remember that I actually liked how many of them didn't require much or even any combat, which was a godsend on my holy priest in particular, who sucked at solo grinding.

Classic approached things slightly differently in that it had four daily quests in Shattrath available from launch, which originally weren't actually added until later: the cooking daily, the fishing daily, the daily dungeon quest and the daily heroic quest. I can't say that I minded as I definitely found all four of these very valuable.

The fishing daily is a great incentive to finally level up your fishing skill in small, discrete chunks. It randomly rotates among five different quests and only two of them require a fairly high skill - two of them can be done at medium skill and one already at really low skill, so you can just pick it up whenever it works for you. My hunter maxed out her skill a long time ago but I still keep checking back every day to see whether Crocolisks in the City is up, which also has a rare chance of rewarding you with one of four baby crocolisk pets.

The cooking daily is a good way of keeping yourself supplied with meat and fish for buff foods without having to go out and farm them, and also has a chance of rewarding a selection of rare recipes. I stopped doing it once I had all the recipes on my main and also didn't need to keep myself supplied with buff food anymore, but I'll likely pick it up again whenever I get an alt to level 70.

The two dungeon dailies were the very first iteration of what would later become the daily random dungeon reward - every day you'd be incentivised to do a different dungeon for a little extra gold, rep and currency. I don't think anyone ever did these religiously, but their rotating nature did help provide a bit of variety, discouraging players from simply spamming whichever dungeon they found easiest and making it easier for people to get groups for a less popular dungeon whenever it was also one of the dailies.

Still, these were all small fries really. When Classic Burning Crusade opened the doors to Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep, it also unleashed the first "real" daily factions onto the player base: the ogres of Ogri'la and the Skyguard.

I didn't check them out immediately because I wasn't playing much anyway, but I have to say when I finally went I was decidedly underwhelmed. I remember them being these bustling hubs where there were always people, but I've only seen very few players around whenever I've gone this time around. I guess the rewards are mostly inferior even to Karazhan gear, and with how easy it is to get into a Kara run in Classic, why bother grinding the rep? Lack of gold also seems to be much less of an issue for modern players than it was for us back in the day. Even I've got my epic flying already.

But the quests themselves also left me feeling slightly bewildered. First off there was the bombing run, which I hardly remembered at all, until I placed the bomb clicky on my action bar and something stirred in the back of my brain to remind me that I used to have that on there pretty permanently back in the day too. I think I didn't like the quest as much back then because without epic flying it's a bit awkward and back then I didn't get that speed increase until later.

Nether ray wrangling was still decent fun, but the Simon Says game was a nightmare. I even died once! I don't know if I just don't remember this or if it's a bug in Classic, but often when I click I'll get the visual effect for when you made a mistake even though I'm clicking the correct sequence, which just throws me off. Also, my short-term memory seems to be much worse than it used to be as I just couldn't make it to the end of a sequence unassisted for the life of me. Eventually I gave up and started taking notes from the fifth round onwards, but I still felt vaguely ashamed for needing them.

Ultimately it seems to be just another thing that's not as good as I remember. We'll see whether it'll be more interesting to potentially have a look at the Netherwing at level whenever those get added.