Thursday, July 15, 2010

Cataclysm Beta: New fishing and cooking dailies

I have done one set of the new cooking and fishing dailies on the Alliance side.  The quest givers are, for the moment, standing outside in the western half of Stormwind (they may be in each capital, I haven't checked).

I like them.  The ones I did are much along the lines of the ones in Dalaran.  Go catch me a fish, or go do something simple in the city itself (in my case, flying around and right-clicking on barrels to steal NPC fisherpeople's catfish).

Each quest gives you a token AND a single skill point in that profession.  The closest I've ever seen to the latter reward is in the Death Knight starting area where you get talent points as quest rewards.

What do I like about these?

  1. It's easy, mindless, and internally consistent.  All quests shouldn't be easy and mindless, but having a couple each day that are quick and fun is a good thing.  Stealing ingredients and recipes from other NPC foodies in the capital cities is a cute prank that spices up the quest a bit.  It's a simple but believable story.  
  2. You don't need to go farm random monsters in random areas to get meat (at least, I haven't had to yet).  That's good.  It's fine when you're leveling or need to actually make food for yourself, but it's frustrating when you're at the level cap and suddenly need to run off halfway around the world to kill a tuskarr.  
  3. I am strongly in favor of handing out a skill point upon completion.  I realize that the serious anglers out there will probably complain, and rightly so, that this devalues the vast amount of time they put into leveling their fishing skills.  At the same time, it would still take me the better part of a year to get my fishing maxed out if I started doing the quest every day right now.  Therefore, I think the anglers' concerns would be a bit overblown.  For everyone who would otherwise never put in the time to get the secondary professions (fishing especially) up to max, this is a nice crutch that allows you to do it slowly over the course of each expansion.  It fits with Blizzard's WotLK policy of eventually letting all players experience all content.  I like it.  

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