Firing up for another daily grind

A look at the new shape of Firelands dailies 

Once again I’ve been struggling to find much time to play WOW over the past few weeks, when I’ve managed to get on, even if it’s just been for 10 minutes my first priority has been to carry on with my auction house experiment; my second task, time allowing, has been to work through the new Firelands dailies. I wrote a brief post just before the Firelands patch asking what the casual could expect from the new content, in particular looking at the more ‘personalised’ dailies.

Firstly, the way the new dailies works is a little different to that of other ‘rep’ type dailies, you don’t directly gain rep by doing x, y and z, instead you collect tokens. Mark of the World Tree to be precise; in order to get anything from these dailies you need to collect 150 of the little buggers, at which point an NPC will become available from whom you can buy goodies from. Further NPCs turn up varying number more, according to Wowhead a total of 695 will currently unlock all of the available NPCs.  Now I like this idea, in some respects, and hate it in others, as a casual you are at no more of a disadvantage than raiders (other than perhaps they have more time to play), as you can only get the marks from dailies, you can get a maximum of around 12 per day (it varies according to how many NPCs you’ve unlocked) after the initial introductory quests which give a few extra, so you’re going to be grinding for 33 days completing each quest to unlock everything (again according to Wowhead). There is no tabard so it’s not like you can hit a few instances over the course of a weekend to max your rep out like the others.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, it’s not all about the gear; gear is a means to and ends, my primary goal is enjoyment, so what about the quests? I’m not a big quester if I’m honest, they’ve been a means to getting to the top level over the years, and nothing more, yes there's been the occasional chain to get an item, or that really are fun, like the crucible type chains, and then the horrible Onyxia and molten core type key chains which are occasionally fun at first but a complete pain in the proverbial when you come to run alts. On the main part, I’m not one of the people who’ll just churn through them for the fun of it. I’m not interested in the lore, or the ‘story’ (I know it floats some peoples boats, just not mine.) in fact the second I discovered the macro to speed up quest text in Vanilla it was a permanent resident in my macro book; click the NPC, hammer accept, and jog on, that’s me. I’m not a fan of the cut scene for the same reason, but that’s a different story (pun intended).


On the face of it the Firelands quests are a bit different from the norm; rather than, say, the Jewel crafting dailies, where if you need to inflict stardust on ten different people, every other jewel crafter on the server will be doing the same, the Firelands quests are randomised for you, there are a pool of quests from which you get a random selection to do each day (the numbers vary again depending on how many NPCs you’ve unlocked). One of the reasons I’ve never been so interested in the MMO story element is that they never felt that, well, epic. “you young Troll! Go kill MEGADRAGON the undefeatable beast that’s been stealing our carrots and has slayed every Troll before” only if you don’t mind waiting in line for the seventeen other peeps who got there first to finish killing him it’d be appreciated, ok, thanks, bye…. Not for me thanks. With the randomised aspect, you AND ONLY YOU, are on that particular quest chain. RIGHT! Wrong. Whilst the quests are essentially randomised from a pool of possible quests, there's so many people wading into the new content at the same time, that you’re still competing for the same mobs as everyone else. Yes there’s improvements, all of the big mobs are killable by the same people concurrently; they can’t be tapped, so you only have to hit it once before it dies to get credit, so there’s not as much of the listless hammering of the /target megadragon /cast <instant spell> macro to tap monster before that nasty Paladin gets there first. When it comes to punting bears onto trampolines, or reviving exhausted allies (who look shocked for a few seconds, before stumbling round a bit and then falling over again) you’re still essentially grinding stuff and competing with everyone else on the server.

It’s a step in the right direction, don’t get me wrong, but so much more could be done. I’d like to see more in the ways of phasing being used so that when you kill MEGADRAGON, you and you alone are fighting it, you’re already zoning into Firelands for half the quests, which would suggest it could be on a different instance server, so why not ensure there’s only one character in each ‘instance’ on each particular quest, or at least only a few. I like the combination quests, the ones that aren’t party quests, but several people can kill the same hard mob. I like the ‘different’ quests of punting things into the water, although the stupid bear-up-a-tree quest is already doing my nut. Actually it would probably require far more quests to choose from in the random pool to make it viable, that and enough server power to accommodate the extra phases and instances. All of which means cost, and cost means less profit, so I doubt we’ll see anything like. For the moment I’ll continue grinding coins, at least until I get to 250, just so I can say I gave it a fair crack, doubt I’ll go much further though as chances are I’ll be ready to strangle the developers by then.

LFD

How do you find yours?

Since the 4.1 Patch hit, and before, there’s been a lot of consternation in the blogging community about LFD.  Has the new reward system made any difference to the queue? has the quality of tanking gone down as a result? are groups failing more?  As it’s been done to death by the rest of the community, I’m not going to even talk about the Call to Arms reward system, instead I’m going to take a look at group makeups a little more generally since ZG and ZA hit.

I’ve got two characters of the required level for the new dungeons, my priest and my mage, I’ve been concentrating on running these two primarily, but I’ve done a couple of the ‘old’ heroics on my DK and druid.  Lets take the new heroics first, the first thing I noticed is that players, on the whole, seem to be far better geared; yes I know the ilvl requirement is higher, but actually a lot of the players I see in the new heroics are wearing primarily 10-man epics, where as your average LFD player pre 4.1 would be somewhere between the basic 328 and being kitted out in blues with the occasional rep and / or valour point item.  I guess this is because the raider types were either bored of the old 5 man heroics, or were running less well geared alts through them; the new instances are new content and they’re there either purely to experience it, or to top the occasional bit of gear up that they haven’t gained from raiding.  Secondly, and probably as a result of seeing more raider types, I’ve noticed the skill level has gone up significantly, players on the whole, and in the face of new unfamiliar content, perform far better than I’ve seen over the past three months in LFD.  Take for example a guild tank who came along to a ZA run with me this week, he’d never even set foot in the instance before, let alone tanked it.  We were able to clear it, almost managing a timed run, just by giving him a quick run down of what each bosses abilities were over vent.  I’ve absolutely no doubt that a lesser skilled player would have had all sorts of trouble tanking ZA in such a scenario.  On the negative side, I’ve noticed people are far less forgiving in the new instances, probably as a result of being used to higher performance in raids, the most pertinent example I’ve seen being “5k DPS in here? REALLY?” kick…. (to be fair the guy was abysmal, but I’d usually expect to see him asked why his DPS was so poor and have suggested he needed to improve it before being kicked).  Chatting to people both from guild and randoms, I’ve seen a few comments along the lines of, “if you don’t know the strategies in here by now, you deserve to be kicked” which is a little elitist for my liking.

The old heroics are a complete different kettle of fish to what they used to be, I’ve been running a couple of specific dungeons on my DK to get the items I need to unlock ZA & ZG, one of which being Stonecore, on the first three trash packs, where a little crowd control and DPS focus is essential for all but the best geared groups, I’ve seen DPS pulling before the tanks ready or in one case before the healer was even in the instance!  The impatience of players that you typically see in the low end instances to level up and get ma gearz is creeping into the heroics where you really can’t afford to be so gung-ho.  Added to this, the queue’s do seem to be shorter, so I’ve seen a lot of people simply leaving the group if the random instance turns out not to be one of their liking, or one pull doesn’t quite go to plan. 

Come on people! do it right first time, take a little bit of time to do stuff, with some consideration for the other four in your group, and you’ll get it done quicker in the long run and you might even have a bit of fun (ya know, the reason you play the game) in the process.