Daily Quest Burnout Sets In

Apparently, the three months or so that I spent farming the Outland daily cooking quest for the chocolate cake recipe earned me some rep with the random number generator, because I got the [Reins of the White Polar Bear] on my second day with access to the dailies. I am, of course, happy to have a nifty mount that was near the top of my shopping list for the expansion. Unfortunately, at the moment I might appreciate the fact that I get to cross two daily quests off my list almost as much as the mount.

I'm typically doing at least 10 daily quests per day these days, and I will usually end my day in the high teens. This is, in some ways, my own fault - I could chose to spend the time in game doing other things. Then again, the way that daily quest progress limits work, the system really encourages you to get your dailies (the ones you actually need, not the random ones for cash) in first, because there's no way to make up for lost/skipped time.

In the short term, I've made the executive decision to ignore the Sons of Hodir. I'm still sitting on some banked Arcane Runes, so I can get some of the old shoulder enchants from the Scryers, and I'm replacing gear (including shoulder pads) pretty frequently in any case. Next patch will supposedly let you buy your way out of part or all of this grind - even advancing to honored would help, because I would have access to more options. The three dailies available at friendly are very popular and thus annoying to complete. Dropping Hodir and the Hyldnir Spoils quests leaves me with a more manageable number of dailies. I'll be doing the Patrol, the three for Wyrmrest, and the 3 for the Oracles, plus Wintergrasp if the battle happens at a time I can participate.

That said, I also have to find an alternative use of my time. This can be hard because I play a mage - players debate whether the tank shortage is more severe than the healer shortage, but it's absolutely clear that there is no DPS shortage. What I really wanted to do last night was go get a winter hat for the Winter's Veil achievement, but there just weren't any groups to any of the three possible dungeons that needed a mage in either my guild or the LFG channel during the part of the evening I would have been able to do an instance. I did some PVP, including the new Strands of the Ancients battleground, but I'm still not the hugest fan of WoW's battlegrounds - SotA is similar to Wintergrasp, but I prefer Wintergrasp, so it suffers in my view by the comparison.

So, that just leaves the dwindling number of non-repeatable quests in Northrend, and going back to mop up some achievements. It's disappointing because there is stuff to do in Northrend at 80, it just feels like I'm hitting the wall where I finish my dailies and then have to play LFG lottery for the rest of the evening to see if anything interesting turns up.


Gnome-sized bear + not so gnome-sized disguise = an analogy for me struggling under the weight of daily quests.