Sunday, August 07, 2011

Molten Front Daily Quests

Warning: Contains spoilers for the first part of the Molten Front.

I'm way behind on my Molten Front dailies. I generally like the quests, but I haven't been doing them diligently. I've unlocked the Shadow Wardens and the Druids of the Talon, but haven't unlocked any of the next three.

I really like the Leyara storyline so far. When she killed Hamuul Runetotem, it was a genuine shock, and Leyara jumped quite rapidly to the top of the villain list. Even though my guild is Alliance, there were outcries in guild chat as people hit that part. As I posted back in Wrath, villains need victories. In some ways, it's sort of unfortunate that Blizzard copped out and let Hamuul survive, though badly wounded.

For the quests themselves, they're quite good for the most part. I like how a lot of the group quests share tagging. The Mylune quests are awesome.

I also really like the quest that gives you a small group with a named character to help out. It's really nice to see old favorites like Mankrik, Chromie, etc. The one thing I would like for this is if these friendly NPCs would show up on your group bars. It would make it a lot easier for a healer character.

However, in one respect the Molten Front dailies feel weird to me. The zone really feels like it was designed to "progressively phase". It really feels like when you first unlock the Shadow Wardens/Druids of the Talon that the first area is supposed to permanently phase to a "finished" state. And then you only do the tearing down of the tower and walking through the flames once. Instead of going through the entire process every day.

One point of evidence is that there are no Achievements for those first quests in the Molten Front, though there are Achievements for every other section.

I think this would have lead to slightly fewer daily quests, and not so many bottlenecks in questing progress. You would unlock entire sections of the Molten Front once, and they would stay unlocked from that point on.

What I think happened is that Blizzard originally designed the Molten Front to work like this. But a lot of people complained that extensive phasing made it hard for grouping, so Blizzard cut back on the phasing that actually affected questing, leaving in the cosmetic phasing like the tree, and then "resetting" the phasing of the zone every day, so you always start fresh.

In some respects, I think that was a mistake, and a progressive phasing design for the entire zone would have been better and smoother. But it would definitely have caused issues for people at different stages of progression trying to group together.

7 comments:

  1. Technically could have been solved by optional phasing. While you are grouped, you are phased based on the earliest player in the group.

    Either that or have the 'out of phase' party member icon being a toggle to put you into the same phase as another player.

    There was talk about this when Cata was released, but I have not seen it implemented. I assume it was not a priority.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I've thought the exact same as Foo; it would be nice if there was a "lowest common phase" button that stuck everyone in the part in the "least progressed" person's phase...allowing them to continue normally.

    I suspect the reason Blizz hasn't done this is because of exploit worries...rare mobs, uncompetitive mining or something but that is just speculation.

    ReplyDelete
  3. its my opinion that your opinion is spot on. I now have to be in the mood to do the dailies and my progress beyond Druids and Shadow Wardens is very low right now.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I REALLY wish "Into the Fire"/"The Forlorn Spire" wasn't a daily. That, so far, is my current complaint right now about Molten Front.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I never like to sound like a whiner but these dailies were the last nail in the coffin for my current (so far) break from WoW. When i hit the second phase and realized i would have to do new and old dailies instead of progressing, i lost the will to gear up. Not too excited with Firelands bosses, tired of heroic grinding. Maybe after so many years i wish i had something different.

    TL, DR: It would be smarter to actually progress instead of leeching your game time doing more and more dailies, felt cheap. Go into next phase, forget old dailies.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I actually like that Hamuul doesn't die, and then comes back to help you kill Leyara. I love imagining her face when Hamuul shows up in that cave and beats her down, it's just funny to me, lol.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I was not going to ruin it for you like Sean.. boo.. But you can see Runetotem is alive (but injured) in the tent.. your daily quests are to get him soothing bandages.

    I totally HATE that the spire gets destroyed every day.. The fire quests are not as bad.. I wouldn't mind so much fighting that elemental every day... but why does it keep destroying the same tower. Ug. Stupid.

    Oh wait I know. Activiszzard or is it Blizzardvision lacks the desire to add the little touches that the old company was so good at.

    ReplyDelete