Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Early Firelands Daily Quest Impressions

I was out of town for July 4th, and didn't get much gaming in, but I did finally get around to starting off the new Firelands daily quest series that was added in patch 4.2. The initial phase in the campaign, which can be done in a single day, introduces the campaign by the druids of Hyjal against the minions of Ragnaros.  These quests are, like all of the Cataclysm content, well implemented, high production value, and were actually pleasantly a bit more difficult than your average Cataclysm fare, to the point where my partially-dungeon-geared mage was occasionally using cooldowns to survive. 

After completing the introduction - and unlocking a vendor with an epic ilvl 365 neck for a trivial amount of gold - players begin a series of six phases of daily quest token grinding.  Blizzard definitely spent an above average amount of effort on this project - each phase adds a new set of dailies, and each set offers a randomized selection from a pool to ensure that players don't get bored - it also appears that recurring NPC's will turn up during the festivities. 


Firelands Outlook
Unlike the Argent Tournament of the Wrath era, there is a definitive beginning, middle, and end of the event.  Quest tokens are not used to actually purchase the rewards, so players are not obligated to return once they've completed the quests.  (It does appear that the quests stick around, for those who want to revisit them for gold or rep.)  That said, one thing that I'm kind of on the fence about is that the number of quests available ramps up during the successive phases, as the new phase events are added to the previous pool. 

It's theoretically possible to finish the series in a single month, but that means not a lot to do in the initial phases and probably more than I want to do in a single day as more phases unlock.  The good news is that players can be increasingly choosy about the quests they don't like as the campaign advances, at the cost of making this a several month-long project.

Personally, daily quests in WoW tend to be something that I do while waiting for the dungeon queue to pop.  At that rate, it will take forever to complete the campaign, and I will have long since gotten similar or better gear from the dungeon vendors.  I will probably try to work on the thing just so I can see the content, but it remains to be seen whether my patience holds out as it becomes less and less meaningful to actually finish. 

1 comment:

  1. My only issue is the simple start of the series needing only 20 world tokens to get the zone opened up and then you start the daily quests and the next section is (2) quests to open up the next series and it begins with quest text that reads "Obtain 150 tokens" x2! I think Blizzard might have been better served to break this step into maybe a smaller bite sized chunk.

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