Dailies, what are they good for?

I finished unlocking the last part of the Molten Front dailies the other day and got my Flameward Hippogryph in the mail, but I have to say, it felt rather unsatisfying. Malfurion sent me a letter to tell me how awesome I was, how I had helped to really strike fear into the hearts of Ragnaros's minions or something like that... but nothing looked different.

I talked about really liking the much-touted "personal phasing" before, but I have to admit I really expected a little more to happen until the end. Okay, the tree grows - great. More NPCs appear - fine. But that's it? It's hard to believe that we really made that much progress into the Firelands when the base still looks like it's on the verge of being overrun every day. And we keep helping the Druids of the Talon and the Shadow Wardens to push forward, yet every day they need to start over from scratch. I feel like Sisyphus, watching my boulder roll back down the hill every night. This is worse than not seeing the environment change at all: seeing it change for only a day and then it resets again, forcing me to start over from scratch. Rohan observes that it looks like the zone was designed for "proper" phasing, and I can't help but agree. The personal progression idea was neat, but I don't think that the way they implemented it here works very well.

Aside from the constant resets, it also doesn't really seem to go anywhere. I thought that there would be some sort of big showdown quest at the end, but the Leyara chain ends about halfway through the whole ordeal and then... nothing.

The linearity of the questing is also really starting to tick me off. I've got a couple of the achievements left to do that require you to do the Druid of the Talon side, but to access those quests you always have to go through the whole intro sequence of killing X fire elementals, saving Y wounded Hyjal defenders, going Into The Fire and so on and so forth, every damn day. Feels like a lot of busywork just to keep you away from the dailies that you really want to do. Whoever thought that making daily quests a long linear sequence instead of a big pool you can pick and choose from was a good idea deserves a smack over the head in my opinion. I don't know if I'll have the stamina to continue for much longer, seeing how there is nothing of interest to buy with the spare marks I'd get.

I kind of miss the times when dailies were just a convenient way to make money. There was little pressure to do any of them because there were always other and more efficient ways of making gold; it just depended on how you liked to play. Personally I was happy to work for the ogres of Ogri'la while I saved up for epic flying back in the day, because the alternative was trying to farm elementals as a healer with no dual spec, and playing Simon Says was a lot less stressful.

To be fair, Blizzard has shown that they can use dailies to tell exciting stories, whether it's a whole server slowly taking over the Isle of Quel'Danas through combined effort or one of your characters raising their very own mount in the jungles of Un'goro. The whole thing has to come to some sort of conclusion though, which the Molten Front dailies didn't, not really.

I wonder if the item rewards at least worked out for some people. The Argent Tournament never really told much of a story either, but it had so many reputations, titles, pets and mounts that everyone could find something to work towards there. (In fact, I know some people who still go back to do the dailies there even now.) The Molten Front had no gear to offer me as a holy priest, and while I bought a couple of pets and trinkets, I only really did that "because I could", basically. The vendor was already unlocked and the reward was right there. It wasn't something I specifically worked for though, so it felt quite meaningless.

In a nutshell, I thought that the Molten Front started out quite fun and promising, but the further I progressed, the more annoying and less rewarding it got. I guess if you've got a non-raiding alt for whom you'd like to buy a specific piece of gear from one of the vendors it might be worth working towards that, but other than that I see little reason to go back to the place.

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.