annoying-quests
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Breakfast Topic: What are your quest nightmares?
All in all, I think the World of Warcraft questing experience is easier than ever. Quests can be tracked and shown on the screen, locations are automatically marked on your map, and anything you need to kill -- or anything that drops quest items you need -- is marked clearly when you approach, with more details when you mouse over. While some of the mystery may be gone, a lot of the annoyance has gone with it. However, while the overall experience is much better, you do run in to the occasional quest that seems to be stubbornly holding out to Blizzard's new, streamlined questing philosophy. Quests that require you to kill ten beasts for a single tooth to drop (why don't they all have teeth?) or run around for an hour (or more) waiting on painfully slow respawns. Recently, while leveling through Outland, I ran into the quest Veil Lithic: Preemptive Strike, which asked me to redeem 3 arakkoa hatchlings and slay 3 arakkoa hatchlings who couldn't be redeemed. It seemed simple enough: Veil Lithic had several nests that spawned eggs. When the eggs spawned, all I had to do was click on them to free the hatchling, which would either fly off or become aggressive. Except after freeing 3 hatchlings, no more clickable eggs appeared. Not in 20 minutes, not in an hour, and not in two -- and though I did manage to collect a lot of arakkoa feathers, the whole thing seemed like a big timesink (several days later, I've still only managed to slay 2 out of 3 hatchlings). At this rate, my attention span is certain to run out before the quest does. (In fact, I'm surprised it's lasted this long.) And what about you? Have you run into any quests -- now or in the past -- that are the stuff World of Warcraft nightmares are made of?
The Daily Grind: What quest has frustrated you more than any other?
I have a relatively acrimonious relationship with most of The Secret World's investigation missions for reasons too ornate to detail here. Hell and Bach, however, deserves special mention. It's not that it's one of the game's worse examples, but that the actual mechanics behind clearing the mission are very finnicky. You have to click a series of symbols in just the right way to spell out a phrase, but the symbols are close together, it's easy to miss a click, and to top it off it won't work if you have the reference guide open as you do so. For all-time frustration, that mission ramped up pretty highly, although I enjoyed it once I cleared it. But it's not about what frustrates me, it's about what frustrates you. So what quest has frustrated you more than any other? Was it unclear in its objectives, or were its clearly stated objectives just dizzyingly hard to actually accomplish? Or was it something even more mundane, like a Final Fantasy XI quest that irritated you because you could never find the other people to do it with? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
