Welcome, you've stumbled upon DK diaries; looking at raiding through the eyes of a casual raider.
About me:
I'm a 25 year old guy from London who hasn't really found a neat way to transition from a Student into a real person. My main character is a Adriaria a blood Death Knight but also have a warlock and a priest at 85 who have both been my main at some point. Since my guild has started raiding it has become the main reason I play WoW; I don't hunt achievement and titles, 5 mans have become a means of capping VP and I don't really PvP. Before I raided I never thought I was missing out but
now that i've tried it i'm loving the experience.
About my Guild:
I am chief lackey in Discombobulated (I like to think of the GM and his girlfriend as similar to Cho'Gal one entity that squabbles a lot and passes on the conclusions to the rest of us)an Alliance guild on Hellfire EU. We're a social guild that also has a raiding team (sort off, the team members aren't set in stone) that are raiding twice a week. Our raiding can only be described as casual as we aren't incredibly strict with our members and are willing to take our time with the content. We also have a mix of raid experience within the team, from those who are raiding for the first time in Cataclysm to those with loads of experience who want a more relaxed atmosphere. This does not mean we are unsuccessful though! We started raiding about a month before the big 4.2 nerfs and managed to get 7/12 in that time (and Argoloth obviously) which isn't bad for 6 hours raiding a week without a set team! Since the nerfs we have finished up the last remaining bosses and earned our 'Defender of a shattered world' titles (late, but yay!). We have had a couple of cracks at Beth'tilak in the Firelands but haven't been able to get her down yet.
Speaking of my guild it would be really lame of me not to plug the Discombobulated website and Achievements Ahoy the blog of fellow guildie Aralosseien.
Why a Blog?
I like to write, mostly because it helps me to organise my thoughts far better then leaving them in my brain does. This post is a perfect example my opinion with my opinion on the Fireland dailies changing about 3 times while this was being written ^^
Well that's all the introduction stuff finished if you come back next week then...........whoa whoa whoa. I can't just give you an introduction and no actual content, that's totally lame and exactly what blizzard did with the Fireland dailies! Have a review of them instead:
Fireland dailies:
As I mentioned before we are casual raiders and we hadn't had a chance to finish up tier 11 before 4.2 hit. We are not yet downing tier 12 bosses every week, thus there are 3 things that I am doing to help me gear:
1) Capping VP every week or coming very close to it.
2) Buying the VP bracers with an alt.
2) Firelands trash runs for Avengers of Hyjal rep.
3) Doing the Fireland dailies every day.
Now I haven't been 100% on these I missed VP cap one week, missed a day of dailies and I'm not quite honoured with the avengers yet but this is the beginnings of my gearing for this tier. The opinion presented here is from someone who has been doing dailies a lot.
Overall I like the quests themselves, there's a good mix of killing stuff, collecting stuff and crazy stuff. Best of all it doesn't have the stupid numbers that the Tol Barad dailies did (yep killing 14 ghosts with an only moderate re spawn rate in an area where everyone was doing the quests in was great fun for a daily...) in fact you don't 'tag' mobs in the usual way at all so there isn't any competition over mobs which makes them alot easier considering the sheer number of peiple running them. The dailies in Hyjal itself from Mylune are great fun, punting turtles is a particular highlight for me. Have to say I really don't care about the condition of Hammul though, just let him die and rez him already!
The rotating ones in the molten front are a bit lacklustre since they all just amount to killing slightly different stuff, but I have to say that I love the mini Magmaws, next tamale hunter pet please Blizzard! Again Mylune has the most entertaining quest making your mini fire lasher have to drink from pools of magma. When 4.2 hit the quest 'Burn Victims' was a nightmare thanks to the sheer number of people who were doing the dailies but the hotfix affecting the re spawn rate of the wounded defenders seems to be spot on.
At 150 marks of the world tree I chose to unlock the shadow warden quests because they look cool, turns out that was definitely the right choice. The quests are OK but they are nothing special, kill some stuff, break some spider eggs etc. I have only done the Druid of the Talon quests once (as you can only do 1 faction a day, more on that later) and while running around jumping on air vents was fun the quests take far longer then then Shadow Warden ones which I can knock out in a few minutes.
My big issues with these dailies are:
1) The way they were implemented was awful.
I for one was very excited about the new dailies (considering I was so broke I was doing the Tol Barad dailies for the money new dailies with decent rewards was a godsend) and the first thing I did after the game had finished patching was rush to Hyjal to start them. So what did we get on patch day? 4 dailies and the promise of some advancement in 2 days. Wow, exciting! I know they have patched this so that you get access to the molten front on the first day (which is how it should of been) but I was genuinely shocked by the decision to put a buzz kill on one of the main features of the patch.
2) Too much time doing the same thing.
We were told that it would take roughly a month to unlock everything, that's fine, but from a phased questing area you really don't expect it to be a month of doing the same things over and over. My biggest issues here are that you can only do 1 faction a day and that the Shadow Warden quests are significantly less of a time sink then the Druid of the Talon ones. This has just led to me doing the same dailies I had to do to unlock the second faction to gain access to the first vendor leaving any excitement I may have had at unlocking the Druids of the Talon quests at zero. While it is my choice to actively do the quicker ones the last thing I really want is for these dailies to eat up more of my time then really necessary.
Collect marks; unlock faction, collect more marks; unlock second faction, realise this isn't enough to actually unlock the vendors; collect more marks by doing the exact same quests.
/Sigh
It's getting boring and I am dreading doing it on my alts who I might want to bring into Firelands, which leads me neatly into my next point:
3) It doesn't act as the raid stepping stone it feels like it's trying to be.
It appears to me that these dailies are designed to be a sort of fast track into tier 12 raiding. If we look at who needs to do them (not including broke people or those who just like dailies) it's pretty much only people in 359's or below. Anyone who was downing heroics doesn't need them and anyone currently downing Firelands bosses doesn't need them either as they have superior gear.
However it takes a month to get your gear out of it (comparatively you could get the Tol Barad trinket in 10 days if you really wanted to and you could grind rep with the cataclysm factions as much as you like) which is all well and good now (and I feel it's a good thing that those of us who need the stepping stone are delayed behind those equipped to jump right in, they worked hard to get that better gear after all) but what about when Guilds are trying to gear up new raiders or raiding alts? This is where the rewards of the dailies are most valuable since anyone not raiding doesn't actually need the gear and anyone who is raiding will be replcing them pretty quickly once they actually start downing bosses (unlike the pre raid tier 11 gear which was the same i-level as the raid gear was) but do people want to spend a month to get an alt/new raider some gear that's a half step below the current tier gear? Probably not.
I would love tier 11 raids to still be relevant to gear up for Firelands, it was a fantastic tier, but I don't think the 5 bits of gear you get from these dailies would make them irrelevant if it took 2 weeks to get them instead of 4. It certainly isn't going to do more to make them irrelevant then the JP you get from heroics which you are running for the VP you need anyway.
But who knows, maybe Blizzard are planning to slowly nerf the amount of time it takes to get through the dailies as we progress through tier 12, I certainly hope so.
Adriaria
The blogged exploits of a casually raiding Blood Death Knight.
