Mists of Pandaria and Daily Quests

Today I want to talk a little bit about a topic that has been on my mind a lot of late. See, I'm a big player of World of Warcraft. Or at least, I used to be. Before I got bust with school and such, I was a pretty hardcore player. I was never in a serious raiding guild or anything, but I was always online and always doing whatever I could to be the best in my area. These days however my play is a lot less frequent, closer matching the average player. I still want to play hard when I'm online, but the issue is that I feel like Mists of Pandaria won't let me.


So the issue I feel comes down to MoP's approach to daily quests, reputations and valor points. Before I begin however it's worth noting that the situation is likely going to be very different once the next tier of raid content comes out. Anyways, the way things currently work in Mists is that you earn Valor Points by doing raids, heroics and daily quests (which is pretty neat, actually). You earn reputation by doing daily quests. How do you spend the valor points you've earned? Well you spend them at reputation vendors. Are we starting to see where the issue is here?

Daily quests and reputations have had a few different approaches to them in the past. I won't go into them in detail, but the point is the game supported different play styles. If all you wanted to do was dungeons and raids, you could get your rep. Or you could not get your rep. You would miss out on some cool toys, but the gear from raids was probably going to be better than rep rewards anyways. Same goes for PvP. If you weren't all about raids, you could power through the dailies and look forward to some pretty neat rewards at the end of the day. It was up to you what rewards were worth your time.

One of the big things Mists of Pandaria has touted is having a lot of stuff for level 90 players to do. This is true. The thing is with a couple hours each day to play, I can't do it all, and I feel like I'm being punished because of that, but I'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment. There are so many slow daily quest rep grinds that I only have time for a handful each day, and I don't even have time to work on my professions or do some pet battles. Perhaps the biggest issue though is that I don't think you can really count daily quests as "things for people to do". I mean sure, in the literal sense of the word it applies. If a player is looking for something fun to do, it's probably not going to be dailies though. They have rewards, they kill time, but for the most part they aren't fun. They are simply a means to an end. once you reach exalted I'm sure most people never do those dailies ever again.

Now let's go back to talking about why I feel I'm being punished for not being able to do my dailies. As someone who cares about my gear, and even with limited play time strives to cap my valor points each week, I'm floundering. Reason being, I need rep to even spend my points, and there are just too many dailies to do every day for me to be able to do them all. Huh? What is this nonsense? Do I really have to grind out daily quests I don't want to do just to spend my valor points? Without access to non-LFR raiding valor gear is the best stuff I can get access to. Even the most hardcore raiders are probably going to want access to valor gear. The overlap between people who seriously care about valor gear and people who do all of their dailies every day can't be that big. Perhaps more importantly, if you don't have those valor points then getting exalted with these factions doesn't even do much for you.

I think the idea behind the daily quest system in MoP is to try and link different play styles together. Blizzard wants to encourage raiders to do daily quests, they want to encourage people who do daily quests to do raids. That's fine, awesome even. Things like getting a moderate amount of valor for dailies or charms of good fortune for a chance at more raid gear are great. You don't have to do them if you don't want, and you will probably be fine, but if you have the time and inclination to do both dailies and raids then you will benefit from it. The problem with the valor rewards is it makes it feel like you have to do daily quests, especially if you are in my position.

I don't mind caring about reputations. I have "The Insane" title, I kind of like reps. But I want to do them at my pace. When I was farming steamwheedle reputation, I could sit and farm pirates for hours on end if I wanted, and then go weeks without doing anything. Same goes for tabard reps. I don't want to feel like an inability to do 30 dailies every day is holding me back from getting the gear I need, if I'm also taking the time to run LFR and ~10 heroics every week. Similarly if I am taking the time to get the reputation, I want to feel like I am being rewarded for it beyond the simple ability to spend my valor points. That's not a reward. That should be available to everyone. While we're at it, don't lock rep grinds behind other rep grinds. I definitely don't want to grind rep A because it unlocks rep B, which I have to grind to get valor point helmets.