Posts with tag Daily-quests

In case you hadn't heard the news, patch 5.3 is set to hit live servers tomorrow. While 5.3 doesn't include a new raid, there are a host of different new activities, including four new scenarios, heroic scenarios, a ton of pet battle changes, and of course the advancement of Mists of Pandaria's storyline as the heat ramps up between Alliance, Horde, and an outlier faction of Horde rebels. It's back to the Barrens again -- and this time, Crossroads isn't the area of contention.

But on top of all of the new content comes a ton of different class and content changes as well. We sat down to chat with Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street about patch 5.3's changes, as well as some upcoming changes for patch 5.4, response to subscription losses, Vengeance changes, that big unannounced feature we've all been dying to hear more about, and much more.

If the words 'casual' and 'hardcore' ever had a useful role in determining the differences between players in World of Warcraft, and I am not convinced they ever did, they no longer do. A player who wants to have an alt of every single class at max level and makes that happen is not playing the game casually even if she never raids. A player who collects several hundred pets and levels many of them through pet battles, or has a similarly high number of mounts, or determines to go out and get every cooking recipe in the game (including Dirge's Kickin' Chimeraok Chops which you can't even get anymore but somehow he finds a way) is playing the game very seriously indeed.

Quite frankly, despite the fact that I raid a set schedule, I often feel like I'm significantly more 'casual' than many players who never raid at all. I know I play a lot less - I definitely do not log on every day, I don't run LFR unless I missed a boss in normal (because I want a shot at my Secrets of the Empire off of that boss) and I don't do pet battles, farm, or even do daily quests anymore. So with my roughly fifteen hours of WoW a week, 12 of it spent inside a raid and the other three futzing about older raids for transmog gear, am I casual or hardcore? And does it matter?

Ordinarily I'd explore the answer in the paragraphs to come. But frankly, the answer is no. It doesn't matter. It is so far from mattering that the light from it mattering won't reach us for fifty thousand years. What matters is finding out what players want to do with their time and letting them do it.

Today is "Friday Dailies" for my guild, all ... day ... long. We're pushing for Daily Anticipation, the guild achievement for 150,000 dailies done. Sure, your guild may already have this achievement -- but it's not so easy to snag for a guild without a deep member roster.

We're close: 140,608 as of last night. And there's no way we do 10,000 dailies in one day, so a single, mind-numbing night of grinding is out of the question. Still, wondering when we might notch the achievement gets one ticking off one's fingers and wondering ...

Assuming you haven't stopped dailying around, how many dailies do you do every day? How many do you think you could complete in a normal-length (for you) play session if you really put the pedal to the metal? Which dailies would you line up first? If you were trying to do as many dailies as possible, is there somewhere you'd head outside of Pandaria to crank them out?

[Thanks for the topic go to Gimmlette, who I suspect is merely trying to remind me to log in tonight and, er, do my dailies!]

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There are a few things I do in World of Warcraft. I raid. I do dungeons and scenarios for valor points and also to test out specs and gear optimization for use later in raids. I run LFR for gear to use as a stopgap in later raids, or to supplement my bad luck (for instance, I really really need a trinket). And I do a lot of older content, because I am a transmogrification junkie and I always have a hankering for a new look. Every few months, I get the urge to PvP because I remember the six months I spent PvPing at the end of Vanilla and the on and off arena days of The Burning Crusade with equal parts fondness and loathing, and when fondness overwhelms loathing I go give it another shot.

These are the things I do in World of Warcraft. Everything else, I either don't do, or I do haphazardly. I don't do cooking anymore at all -- I used to, but one look at the current state of cooking and how intertwined it seems to be with the Tillers completely soured me on it. I don't do the Tillers. I only do dailies until I no longer need the rep to buy something and then I never do them again. I have two professions that I like to keep maxed, but I rarely do anything with them for profit, I just have them for the raiding benefits. In short, I play World of Warcraft to kill things and to look good while I do it. And that's enough for me.

But I know it's not enough for everyone. Mists of Pandaria will be six months old this April 21st, and for a lot of people, it's the expansion that increased choices -- the expansion that expanded their options. And in fact, it did so for me, as well. Because one of the great things about options is that they are optional, and you can choose not to do them. So for me some of the greatest aspects of Mists of Pandaria have been all the things I haven't bothered to do.

As a (fairly) new monk, I have to say I love the fact that monks have their very own daily quest. Every day -- and an extra time every ten levels -- we can head out to the Peak of Serenity in Pandaria, where we train with our fellow monks.

If you aren't aware that this quest was daily, and only visited the Peak of Serenity for class quests every ten levels, you should get on board! It's easy to do -- just cast Zen Pilgrimage every day and spend a couple of minutes sparring with one of the monk trainers -- and the reward is very much worth it, not only giving you great XP, but also the Enlightenment buff that provides +50% experience from questing and killing. If you're leveling, I don't have to tell you how invaluable that kind of XP buff is. In fact, it's so invaluable, that whenever I've switched to another alt I really miss it. Leveling any other class, no matter how efficient you are with heirlooms and rested bonuses, is slower than leveling a monk.

And all I have to say is... where are the other class quests? Why don't hunters have daily target practice quests? Why don't mages have daily drills in fire, frost, and arcane magics? Why don't warlocks have daily demon duels? And what do you think, dear readers? Do other classes need their own daily quests, or would it just add to the frankly overwhelming pile of dailies we already have?

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Valor points, a once-elegant solution to gearing woes that arose in prior expansions, has become something of a thorn in players' sides in Mists of Pandaria. Considering how far this expansion has gone to advance the elements of player choice and freedom, it's strange that a something that was once so simple is more of a grind than ever. Why is that, exactly? In my opinion, it's an issue of double-dipping. Valor isn't a currency with a simple acquire-and-spend flow anymore. Instead, there are additional barriers that stand in your way, effectively doubling (at least) how much work must be done to spend what you put in the time to earn.

Looking back on the launch of Cataclysm, the barrier to entry for high-end content was fairly high. Heroics, as they were released at launch, were fairly difficult for groups assembled via the dungeon finder. The launch raid zones were also considered quite difficult for players that were new to raiding, and the raid finder tool hadn't yet launched. What wasn't difficult, however, was acquiring the gear to participate in that content. Justice points were used to bring you up to the current tier of content, and valor points were a supplement to your boss drops within the current tier. As soon as you earned enough points to purchase your gear, you could go and do it. No reputation barriers, no requirement to participate in content that didn't interest you, nothing like that. So why, in Mists of Pandaria, has that changed?

I think I've firmly established that I really love doing quests, and that I'm fine with daily quests as a whole. Sure, some of them may have had their moments of extreme frustration, but by and large the daily quest system in Mists of Pandaria is pretty entertaining. But while it's entertaining to me, and it's fine with some players, there are others who cannot stand the system. They hate daily quests. The sight of a blue exclamation point is a source of constant irritation.

And it doesn't really matter how you wrap up that package, it's still going to be annoying content that players feel they must complete in order to be competitive. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to matter what is tied to the system, or if it offers rewards of value, like Lesser Charms or valor points. Adding the value to the daily quest system doesn't make completing the quests any more compelling, it just makes them another chore that must be completed.

Which is why daily quests need to go away.

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

In part one of our look back at 2012's best lore developments, we looked at the various aspects introduced to better introduce lore to those that had only a passing interest in it. While the Lorewalkers, print media and instance developments were also tremendously appealing to those that already have a handle on Warcraft lore, they also served as a method of getting the lore out to those that weren't really interested in the minutiae of mogu and mantid.

And that's honestly pretty important. There are plenty of players that play the game simply to play it, not paying attention to why they are playing at all. By implementing subtle elements that introduce the lore in an unobtrusive fashion, the developers have quietly found a way to make sure that regardless of how or why you play the game, you still have some sort of basic understanding of what is going on. Cataclysm had a story, but it was so complex that it was difficult even for those with a strong grasp of lore to puzzle out exactly what was going on and why we were doing what we were doing.

But the fun doesn't stop there -- and today's picks are those that are slightly less unobtrusive in regards to lore and story.

I'm bored of Northrend. It is beautiful and has lovely music and is full of lore and I'm bored. It's the new Outland for me and my alts. Other ways to level abound, of course, but they all have their drawbacks and are various levels of "Been there; done that." as well. So I took Tizzi, the bored goblin mage, to a place where my aged druid spent many grindful days: the Isle of Quel'Danas.

We complain about dailies now, but Quel'Danas (also known as the Sunwell Isle) was the land of too many dailies for our quest log. Grind, grind, grind we ancient Burning Crusade players did, so we could be of the Shattered Sun and get some lovely loot besides. When Quel'Danas was the in-thing, everyone was max-level, so there was no XP -- just the cash, gear, and camping. Oh, so very much camping.

The Isle of Quel'Danas is vacant of players now, but is otherwise unchanged. It resides in a bubble in time, much like Outland, and the NPCs are still there to give quests or be slaughtered.

WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold?

Blizzard ruined my intro. I was going to talk about how appropriate it was that patch 5.1 included a scenario for warlocks that took them to the Black Temple. Then they pushed it to 5.2. So fine. I'll just fall back to something generic.

In terms of sheer content and changes, patch 2.1 was truly massive -- one of WoW's biggest patches of all time. It arrived in May 2007, five months into The Burning Crusade. Let's dive in!

Illidan shouts at us in person

We were ready, if not perhaps entirely prepared. After an ad campaign and a trailer that prominently featured Illidan, many players expressed disappointment that WoW's first expansion didn't launch with the Black Temple raid. In retrospect, those concerns seem silly today. If anything, the Black Temple released too early in the expansion, forcing Blizzard to add the ultradifficult Sunwell Plateau raid to fill the gap between expansions.

The Black Temple was an enormous raid, and one of the game's most beloved. No matter where you went, everything was big and scary. In some areas, even clearing the trash felt epic. Nine bosses populated a vast indoor/outdoor instance. Many of them are still remembered fondly. Supremus and Reliquary of Souls were highly memorable encounters, the latter partly due its unforgiving awareness checks. Teron Gorefiend and Illidan were major lore figures able to be vanquished in WoW for the first time.

BT wasn't the only raid that 2.1 introduced, however.