The topic of “mandatory” dailies has had a lot of legs. These discussions go on and on and don’t die.
Personally, I’m tired of dailies. However, I see that in my gaming style they are not mandatory so I simply stopped doing them. My main is Revered with Golden Lotus and Klaxxi and Exalted with Tillers. That’s it. I’ll continue working on rep very gradually on my main over the next few months in between other activities, and that’s good enough for me. I won’t do the dailies at all on my alts.
My raid team is short a healer. In order to fill that gap, I took time off from my rogue to level my resto druid. I hit 90 with him late Monday night. He needs to be geared and ready to go in short order. How do I do that without dailies/VP gear?
In the span of three days I got him from quest greens to raid-ready without doing any dailies. Here’s how:
- First, I did quested out the entire Dread Zones area. That gets me an iLvL 450 shoulder and belt as quest rewards.
- Crafted: Wildblood Vest and Wildblood Gloves (iLvL 476). Expensive if you have to buy them, but cost is minimal to craft them yourself if you have the 11 Spirits of Harmony, as I did on my rogue leatherworker. Note that I had previously done the rep grind on that toon to get that recipe. If I was totally avoiding dailies on all characters, I’d need to find someone else to craft it for me.
- Crafted: Band of Blood x 2 (iLvL 450) and Tiger Opal Pendant. Also somewhat pricey to buy, but cheap to craft yourself.
- Justice Points used to purchase iLvL 458 bracer, cloak, and legs (4750 JP total, so I bought two then grabbed the third after running a few dungeons for more JP)
- Did the Sha of Anger world boss to get iLvL 476 boots
- Purchased Ghost Iron Dragonling (iLvL 450) and cogwheels from the AH for just a few hundred gold
- Ran the Arena of Annihilation scenario to get an iLvL 450 weapon
- My one big ticket purchase was the off-hand Inscribed Red Fan (iLvL 476), which ran me 4500 g.
These items are specific to my healer, but there are equivalent items for every class. All that got me to an overall item level in the 450’s. Then I ran a few heroics to fill in what I was missing and get me to the 460 mark where I can run LFR. I still could get a tier drop from Sha of Anger. I could also buy the Relic of Chi Ji to get that extra iLvL boost, but that’s about 23k gold on my server.
All of this took three days after hitting the level cap, and didn’t even cost much gold except for the off-hand. I haven’t done any dailies or worked on any rep. If I hadn’t been able to craft the Wildblood pieces myself it would have cost a bit more.
Now, if I were aiming to push progression and get into heroic raids quickly, then I might be more concerned about rep rewards and VP gear. However, for a player who is aiming to start in LFR raids and then move into normal mode raids, what I’ve done shows that dailies and rep grinds are not mandatory.
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“However, I see that in my gaming style they are not mandatory so I simply stopped doing them.
….
Now, if I were aiming to push progression and get into heroic raids quickly, then I might be more concerned about rep rewards and VP gear.”
Precisely. And that’s the heart of the discussion.
1st off, well done. Gearing up multiple characters always takes a bit of effort, and planning. Glad to see you found a working strategy for yourself. 🙂
I don’t really mind dailies and grinds, as such. My concern has to do with character progression. Just to be clear about it, not all progression is gear. In this case, I use the word to mean anything that makes you feel like you are moving on in the game, anything that makes you feel like you are achieving something. While raiding is a really big part of the game it would be foolish to think that it’s the most popular part of it. Most players haven’t really raided at all, for various reasons.
Now, with this definition we can see that dailies are a bit problematic. Gaining reputation and getting access to certain items is definitely a way for a player to measure success in game. If you aren’t logging in every day you are missing out on potential progression. For most factions there’s no other way for to gain rep, which means that even if you have 7h of playtime a week, unless you could divide that time equally to each day of the week, you would still be left behind just because of how the system works. Anyone who got Ogri’la to exalted will know how frustration it can be when you’d actually have time to work on progression, but the game won’t allow it.
This is the world’s biggest MMO, it’s a huge theme park of a game. A big part of what Blizz wanted to give us in Mists was choices in how we get to do things. The way reputation works in the game needs a bit of definition, it’s somewhat archaic and I feel this might be part of the problem, but that’s a topic for another day.
This is the fundamental flaw of reputation by only dailies, really. Gating progression is a good thing, as without it we would have no sense of progression. It allows us to set goals. However, when logging in daily is the only way to progress, that can feel penalizing for some people. There needs to be more than one way of getting to your goal. Keep the dailies, make them relevant and even the best ways of gaining rep. But give us additional ways on the side, to allow us to play catch-up when we have the time to.
I think that what is dragging on this discussion is the notion of min/maxing.
The concept that you have to log in every day or you have missed potential progression is only relevant if that progression would make the difference between a boss kill or a wipe. There was once a time when that was true – that without BiS gear you had no chance to progress in your raids.
I haven’t yet raided in this tier, but I know that in Wrath and Cata there have been very few stringent gear checks. Almost every boss has mechanics that are overcome by organization, coordination, and communication. And not standing in colorful stuff on the ground.
Based on recent history, there has not been a need to have the best possible gear in every slot in order to get your kills. If that is the case, then maxing your dailies is a luxury rather than a necessity.
I suspect that a lot of people do it out of habit. We have always done dailies and we have always tried to maximize every progression opportunity in the game. Perhaps that approach is outdated, in the minds of Blizzard’s developers.
Maybe they need to add something more like the Aldor and Scryers rep grinds – a mix of dailies, mob kills for rep, and items that drop. That way you could catch up by grinding to get extra rep item drops. But make them soulbound so that you can’t just buy your rep on the auction house.
“The concept that you have to log in every day or you have missed potential progression is only relevant if that progression would make the difference between a boss kill or a wipe.”
That’s been true in several fights this tier, simply due to how relatively undergeared we are at the start. It’s also why we ground out Conquest each week for 483 gear.
If you’re a serious guild, then past the first three to four weeks of raiding it doesn’t really matter, no, and if you’re not pushing heroic progression undergeared then it never matters at all.
However, it’s mathematically true that Paragon would have been wiping to Heroic Gara’jal, for example, if they were doing 3-4% less DPS. And that’s with six weeks worth of normal loot helping them.