The Weekly Marmot - What's Wrong With Rep?

[Lore]

[Theliana]

One big beef of mine is how the dailies are gated...at least for the Golden Lotus. If you don't want to do one quest in the first batch because it's so time consuming, stupid, etc. you can't get the quest to go to the second batch at the village or fishing dudes. Many will say just suck it up and do the quest but there's a limit to how much BS I'll put up with and I'm sure that applies to many others.

The biggest though is what Lore has touched on already...having no place to spend Valour Points. I'm going to end up Valour capped and not have the rep to spend it. Yes, you might say that's my fault but I'm just not willing to spend every minute in the game grinding rep. If the game is going to seem like work, or worse, I may as well stay at work and earn some overtime pay.

[Bythedar]

I like your breakfast table analogy. The thing is, no one is sitting there telling you that you HAVE to eat all of it today. You are the one, as a consumer, doing this. You could moderate, eat a few things and put the rest away for later. It isn't Blizzard's fault that people seem compelled to sit 20 hours a day until it is all done. I have pretty much only touched Tillers (because it is so much fun) and Klaxxi.

There is no need to burn through it all so fast.

As for the Valor issue, I understand that point. But all systems cannot be perfect. Give me this over Cataclysm any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

[ChampStanley]

I agree whole heartedly that we should not have to spend hours each and every day doing dailies. 20-30 minutes is how long an entire day's worth of dailies should take, but there is no way I will go along with the notion that flying around Outland looking for Terocone or Khorium is preferable to the current situation. I'm sorry that you can't check out and concentrate on other things while doing your dailies, but that you *had* to check out to endure the tedium of farming back in the day is not something I miss in the least.

[Knighterrant81]

I like your breakfast table analogy. The thing is, no one is sitting there telling you that you HAVE to eat all of it today. You are the one, as a consumer, doing this. You could moderate, eat a few things and put the rest away for later. It isn't Blizzard's fault that people seem compelled to sit 20 hours a day until it is all done. I have pretty much only touched Tillers (because it is so much fun) and Klaxxi.

No, you don't get that choice. If there's valor gear on the rep vendor, it is required for raiding, period, the end. Putting valor gear on the vendor basically says "you must do this to raid". If you aren't doing the Golden Lotus OR the Klaxxi OR the Shado-Pan OR the August Celestials every day, you are doing it wrong and holding your raid back. As Lore pointed out, you can do just one of those factions and be okay, but you have to be working on at least one. You don't get to skip this breakfast.

Now, Lore, I do think a bit of your personal bias against dailies gets in the way a bit. Personally, I'm of the opinion that I'm not going to actively seek out dailies, and I won't do them if they're not required, but if they are required I don't mind doing a few of them. And you've said the same thing, essentially. I don't think giving us alternatives to dailies or removing the valor gear will be a good move. It would just make MoP for people like me just like Cataclysm: sit in town and queue for things because, although there's all this stuff to do, I'd rather not do it because it isn't required for raiding. It would remove the going out in the world part. I would not do dailies if all there were for rewards was stuff like the Anglers or Cloud Serpents. I just don't care all that much about that stuff.

I will agree that dailies are a bit too front-loaded. The first zone of dailies you do with the Golden Lotus is fine - but THREE hubs at honored? That's a bit much. And there's 3 other required factions to do as well? Yeah, that's a bit much. They could have spread it out or dialed it back just a bit and it would have been a lot better.

I also agree that there should be a system similar to the VP system they adjusted in Cata so that you don't have to do a heroic every day. That way, if you don't have time to do a heroic today, that's ok, because you can do all 7 on say, Saturday, if you really want to, as long as you do 7/week you won't fall behind. The only problem I see with that is that while the queue system *rewards* you for there being a whole bunch of people doing heroics at the same time (shorter queues), dailies are actually *harder* to do if everyone tries to do them at the same time. If everyone put off their dailies until Saturday, and then tried to do a whole bunch all at once, can you imagine how crowded it would get?!? We need some sort of solution for this before we make dailies into "weeklies". The PVP dailies in 5.1 at least will reward you for having extra players around (easier to find players to kill/team up with). It would be really great to actually log in and do what I *want* to do instead of do what I *have* to do though.

[Darksend]

One big beef of mine is how the dailies are gated...at least for the Golden Lotus. If you don't want to do one quest in the first batch because it's so time consuming, stupid, etc. you can't get the quest to go to the second batch at the village or fishing dudes. Many will say just suck it up and do the quest but there's a limit to how much BS I'll put up with and I'm sure that applies to many others.

or, blizzard forbid, the quest that unlocks the next area is ... BUGGED! this happened to me the day I was going to hit revered and open up shado pan and august celestials, the chick in the cage you had to rescue was bugged, I could target her, I could see her, but neither me nor the 20 other people around the cage waiting could click on it. That bugged quest cost me an entire day of rep with those 2 factions

I have no problem with needing revered to open up august and shado pan because honestly I would never have had to time to hit revered with them in addition to tillers, klaxxi, and goldlen lotus, and I have not even started the serpent riders yet because I have no time as is. So that decision probably kept me from hitting 90 and quiting right away once I saw the new content because the type of player I am, mentally I feel I MUST complete all the dailies every day or I physically cannot sleep at night (mild OCD FTL)

[The_Pancake]

No, you don't get that choice. If there's valor gear on the rep vendor, it is required for raiding, period, the end. Putting valor gear on the vendor basically says "you must do this to raid". If you aren't doing the Golden Lotus OR the Klaxxi OR the Shado-Pan OR the August Celestials every day, you are doing it wrong and holding your raid back. As Lore pointed out, you can do just one of those factions and be okay, but you have to be working on at least one. You don't get to skip this breakfast.

You're wrong on that. As even Lore has pointed out before you actually do not need to do them all every day. If you do then you will earn reputation FAR faster than you can possibly earn valor. You can actually do only a small handful of dailies per day and still earn enough reputation to spend all of your valor. Aside from a little frontloading, you only need an average of about 3~4k rep per week total across all 4 valor-related factions to spend your valor as fast as you get it. You may need to frontload a little rep a couple times (ie maybe earn 5~6k rep one or 2 weeks) to avoid the 3k valor cap, but that'll be offset by a few weeks where you can get away with only 2~3k rep.

Earning your 90 lesser tokens per week will actually require more dailies than keeping up with your reputation.

So what Bythedar said is actually true. The system does not actually force us to do all of the dailies every day, we're doing that to ourselves just because they're there and we *think* we need to get as much rep as we can as fast as we can.

The problem isn't so much with the system (though I'll agree some other option than just dailies would be nice for those that hate them so much), the real problem is in how it's presented: No cap on the dailies and the ability to get so much more rep than we actually need to creates the illusion that we should be doing all of them when we don't have to. I agree with Lore's comparison to what they did with valor from running heroics in Cata, they moved from something we needed to run daily to a weekly cap that we had the flexibility to decide how we wanted to distribute it, while still limiting our overall progress. If they made it so that we could only earn X amount of reputation per week (either per faction, or a single total across all factions) then we wouldn't burn ourselves out on it so much, and instead we'd just be able to decide between doing a little each day or setting aside a few days to just grind all our rep for the week.

On a semi-related note, I also think that all 4 of the valor factions should have been available from the start. It just seems dumb that you can't even start on Shado-Pan or August Celestials until after you're finished with Golden Lotus, especially since the rewards are set up with a parallel design. It seems almost as if Blizzard said "whoa if they're all available people will just have too many reps and dailies to do, we have to limit this somehow" and so they just decided to put a gate on those 2 factions. But if there was some sort of other pacing mechanism so that we wouldn't force ourselves to do all of them every day or maybe let us choose which faction to do before doing others (sort of like a argent tournament thing, where we pick one and can't do the others until we finish it, but we still get to pick), it would have seemed a lot more consistent.

[Marco]

If you aren't doing the Golden Lotus OR the Klaxxi OR the Shado-Pan OR the August Celestials every day, you are doing it wrong and holding your raid back.

How much are you holding your raid back? How long are 489 items going to be relevant to raid progression, and how many valor items can you buy during that window of time? I feel like there is a pretty narrow range of groups for which this stuff rationally matters: the really progressive groups are going to be done with normal gearing before they can buy more than a couple valor items (and they don't need those items anyway), and the more casual groups can progress without the benefit of valor items because they don't have the "all possible homework is mandatory" mindset. Unfortunately, perception draws more players into the vortex than are really affected.

That said, there should definitely be something to spend valor on without daily grinds. It could be food and flasks (maybe), or the upgrade system could have been available at launch, or maybe a few slots of valor gear could have been ungated (so raiders can spend their valor without doing dailies, but someone who wants to build a full set of 489 gear without raiding has to get rep). Having a valor sink without a rep requirement would have gone a long way towards relieving players of the feeling that they're being "forced" into doing dailies at the maximum rate.

[eald]

I like your breakfast table analogy. The thing is, no one is sitting there telling you that you HAVE to eat all of it today. You are the one, as a consumer, doing this. You could moderate, eat a few things and put the rest away for later. It isn't Blizzard's fault that people seem compelled to sit 20 hours a day until it is all done. I have pretty much only touched Tillers (because it is so much fun) and Klaxxi.

I think you missed the point, the problem is not the bunch of food for today the problem is: if today I have a bunch of food to eat but the next day I'll starve, we haven't accomplish anything in the long term.

Tillers hub doesn't have this problem because they give you mats in the long term, you have an incentive to do dailies even after exalted. They did a great job with this hub.

No, you don't get that choice. If there's valor gear on the rep vendor, it is required for raiding, period, the end. Putting valor gear on the vendor basically says "you must do this to raid".

I think that Blizzard think of this as: Raiders want opportunities to make their character more powerful and they want to do more things other than raiding when they friends aren't around so if they want to farm for gear to help their progression, good for them, we now provide a way to do this BUT this gear really this gear is an upgrade for the non-raider. He can get it whenever he want 2 factions at the time, 1 faction only, doesn't need to be the first month or the second.

When we think of this kind of things we forget a lot the crowd that hasn't even buy mop, other that will do dailies 3 days a week for months and they have something else to aim for.

Now, Lore, I do think a bit of your personal bias against dailies gets in the way a bit. Personally, I'm of the opinion that I'm not going to actively seek out dailies, and I won't do them if they're not required, but if they are required I don't mind doing a few of them. And you've said the same thing, essentially. I don't think giving us alternatives to dailies or removing the valor gear will be a good move. It would just make MoP for people like me just like Cataclysm: sit in town and queue for things because, although there's all this stuff to do, I'd rather not do it because it isn't required for raiding. It would remove the going out in the world part. I would not do dailies if all there were for rewards was stuff like the Anglers or Cloud Serpents. I just don't care all that much about that stuff.

Yes, people should be playing the world zones and not in the lobby that should be the premise whatever Blizzard do, maybe phased for everybody if necessary, world bosses, dynamic random or timed event, elite farming for rep, whatever. And the reason to go outside is power character, there is no other option.

Giving alternatives if those alternatives aren't that convenient could work though.

One thing that came to my mind watching this episode was: Asking don't make do dailies because I hate them is the same argument that: don't make raid to get heroic purples, I just want the gear, not to play with a bunch of people. In this position we can't even argue that "you don't need this gear for anything if don't plan to raid" because the answer is "you don't need the rep either, you want it because it helps you, but the instance is tuned for 463 gear".

The only problem I see with that is that while the queue system *rewards* you for there being a whole bunch of people doing heroics at the same time (shorter queues), dailies are actually *harder* to do if everyone tries to do them at the same time. If everyone put off their dailies until Saturday, and then tried to do a whole bunch all at once, can you imagine how crowded it would get?!? We need some sort of solution for this before we make dailies into "weeklies". The PVP dailies in 5.1 at least will reward you for having extra players around (easier to find players to kill/team up with). It would be really great to actually log in and do what I *want* to do instead of do what I *have* to do though.

So true, but there are somethings that Blizzard have to handle if want to continue providing content when a bunch of people is gathering to do things.

The looting from mobs when in party: why if we are in party a mob only drops the questing loot for one? I understand why the non-questing loot is replicated for everybody but the questing loot is meh. Rare spawns yeah I get but come on, pay a dude a couple of hours to have alternative ways to generate loot and your questing dudes choose the appropriate method depending on the mob

The respawn for item quest to pick, they just need to tune it completely different that it is right now.

Questing design in general, those quest where the mob is so big that you could use help but it doesn't hit so hard that given enough time you kill it by yourself and you don't tag it exclusively with first hit so anybody could help you. Why is that this kind of mob and quests are the minority? They even feel more attractive to do than the kill this bunch of dudes so dull that I want to aoe but all of them are tagged already, I will get free aggro and no loot or register kill if I do that.

[Yantzee]

Weekly rep cap equal to 5 days worth of dailies. Add a tabard for each faction and let you do your rep grind how you want and put a weekly limit on it so that way you can't grind them out instantly (aka feel obligated to do so). The dungeons can give you valor also to make up for the loss of not doing the dailies for valor. Hell they can give you charms too.

With enough time to do the math they can make the dungeon run = to the dailies in rep and valor return and just call it a day.


Edit-

Hell put a weekly cap on the amount of tokens you can gather so you cant run dungeons for charms and also do dailies for tokens and get mass amounts of Elder charms.

[Syltraul]

Nice "Doctor Who" reference at the beginning!

[Yggdrasil]

This is just my personal feeling but the way it feels is that you quest your way up to 90. Now this isn't that terrible or revolutionary we have all done it in past expansions. But with MoP it feels like that questing just never stops when you hit max level but with one big difference than the leveling experience. Instead of going to exploring new zones, fighting new mobs, progressing though new adventures you get stuck with a rerun of the same X amount of quests everyday. Almost as if leveling was stuck in one zone and when you leveled the zone started over and you started on your next level doing the same quests with the same sights all over again. It would be horrible leveling design so it also has to be horrible reputation design. I wish they would put in a combo system. Use the tabard system to get you to honored and have your raid gear bought at that level. Then use the dailies to progress beyond honored to get the mounts at exalted and recipes and fun stuff at revered. It gives you the best of both worlds and not to mention keeps 5-mans relevant beyond just drops (got to love the tank that leaves after the first boss if item X doesn't drop). Not to mention the gated dailies where you have to do weeks of dailies to get to open a lock to weeks or months more of dailies. Very frustrating to someone that for sure wants people in the world but doesn't want to have to actually live my life in the world to provide my best for my friends in endgame.

[Ged]

Most whiny TWM I have heard so far

To me it sounds like Lore's biggest problem with rep is that it proves to him that he is a semi-hardcore hardcore raider and not a hardcore raider. I have been guild master of a semi-hardcore raiding guild since Molten Core, and have seen this debate many times in my guild. Personally I hate farming the 5 man dungeons as much as Lore hate the dailies. But come on - grinding the factions to revered doesn't take long and you hardly need to repeat any of the quests to get there, due to the quest rotations.

In my eyes every raider in MoP can get their gear from raiding, Non-raiders or people only doing LFR can get nice gear from the rep factions - they will not get it from normal mode raiding and certainly not heroic raiding. The real hardcore raiders going for server first kills will do anything to get an edge over everyone else - they will focus on the dailies too - at least for the first weeks, until they get better gear through raids.

My point is - if you don't like doing the dailies don't do them. Noone in your guild need them to defeat the raid encounters. For the huge player base that doesn't raid the alternative to gear is dailies. If you just want to raid -then raid. If you just want to do solo content - do so. If you just want to do dungeons - go ahead. If you just want to PvP - go ahead. For none of those things you need to grind yourselves to death in any of the other alternatives if you don't want to. It is not needed.

One point that Lore makes that I can agree on is how almost all the dailies are presented to the player all at once. They removed the 25 dailies cap, saying that players can control it themselves. Players like Lore and many others can't. What I think they should have done instead was to either add a weekly cap on dailies and/or have like a Pandaria daily quest central hub where you each day could pick only 2-3 factions to do daily quests for. The problem is people grinding 7 factions at the same time every day with high risk of burning out - and then in a month got no factions to grind.

[Banzhe]

Out of I don't know how many Weekly Marmots, this was an utter waste of time tbh!

Listening to you Lore asking developers to give more of the "everyone is a winner" made me crinche! What's next?- someone not being able to raid for 1 day and then he automatically gets the achievement and loot from X boss he missed anyway *facepalms*

Why not completely remove factions while their at it, or even better to fit yours and everyone else with "no time".., let normal vendors sell valor gear for gold, all of which is BoE.

Hell, lets also scrap raiding while we're at it.., let it all be LFR junk mode so everyone can win and feel like a champion of retards, lets also introduce the option for pre.made lvl 90 characters with BiS hc dungeon gear, and if they choose to enter LFR, let their gear scale to max capacity to ensure a crashing victory.., everything you've rambled on about in this episode is Cataclysm all over!

Then it really becomes the age of log on, do squat, log off.. Loss of customers to other games. Get some sense of reality back into yourself man, this episode was an embarrassment..!

What they should do, is this: ..|.. to all you kids asking for fastfood game content, go play some facebook, pacman, tetris.., w/e

[Sharku]

If you aren't doing the Golden Lotus OR the Klaxxi OR the Shado-Pan OR the August Celestials every day, you are doing it wrong and holding your raid back.

Correct.

I don't know what all the fuss is about really, I hate daillies even the JC dailly was to much for me to bother with certainly after I got the tokens I needed for my own gems. These daillies serve a completely different purpose however, I can buy gems if I need them but I can't buy gear without the rep. Its required, mandatory, get over it and do it. You should already have Golden Lotus and Klaxxi at revered and be working your way towards Shado-pan and August Celestials revered. Then it will be over in two weeks or possibly less.

Unless you want to do it wrong and be bad? The rep grind in MoP is the new "old" talent system, if you chose to do anything different than the cookie cutter, it was wrong and you were bad. I'm treating it like a necessary evil that goes away once it is done. If anything, the rep gear is there to fill gaps in gear that you cant get/wont drop and you shouldn't be limiting yourself by doing one at a time, after all, that will take even longer and you may not require the gear you unlock by the time you unlock it.

At least after the rep grinds are all done, I know that I have done everything I possibly could to maximise my potential in the raid and, hopefully, I wont have to do it again this expansion. If a new faction does appear in 5.1/5.2, I will be very glad that I unlocked 4 of them already.

[Yantzee]

The thing that makes this that much worse is to even get to the shadopan, and the august celestials you have to get revered with the golden lotus first. Unless Im doing it wrong?

[Kagitaar]

While I agree there are way too many dailies right now, only one actively annoys me (Burn in Hell Golden Lotus and your 15 quests), the rest are at least mildly entertaining and compact. I could be doing only my Shado-pan and August Celestials and still be okay at this point; even as a person who took nearly a week to hit 90, I've been revered with Klaxxi for nearly a week and GL for days. If I don't have time, I can skip those two with no repercussions at all and just work on SP and AC.

I have purchased one Valor item, and will be able to purchase another on Tuesday, with seven items total available. You said it yourself last week, we do not have near enough Valor to even spend on this stuff; it is not a huge deal. As has been said above, by the time you get enough Valor to make having all your reps at revered a meaningful choice, every half-decent raider should have filled most of those slots.

[Ngonde]

I think one way to give more options for the rep grind would be to use a system similar to the tokens of good fortune. Create a thing to collect that you earn by doing dailies or dungeons or scenarios etc. and then have a weekly quest to turn them in for a few thousand rep. If that weekly quest was the only thing that granted rep it allow people to do whatever they wanted to earn rep (they could even have the profession vendors exchange them for mats in the same way they sold patterns in cata). It would have the same effect of slowing down rep gains that dailies do but would remove some of the grind of it.

I think Lore made a great point when he said we have so many ways to earn valor but only one way to spend it. If you aren't doing dailies then it doesn't matter how you earn valor because valor will be useless to you. If you are doing dailies then you will almost cap valor and there will be no reason to gain much valor in any other way. It's a true catch-22 that ends with you doing dailies either way.

[Kromus_]

A really key issue related to the rep is that your professions are attached at the hip with these reps, example: Tailoring you need honored with the Golden Lotus to make anything useful in PVE (chest and hand recipes and your proper caster leg enchant from Tailoring). Your 28 slot bag comes from the August Celestials at revered. Enchanting you can't trade in enchanting mats like the previous 2 expansions for your recipes, instead they are locked to the Shadow-Pan rep (Revered for your weapon enchant) and the August Celestials (Revered for your +170 main stat bracer enchant) This forces raiders to actually do 3-4 sets of dailies so that they can make use of their professions. Klaxxi has the Blacksmithing patterns hostage till revered, and I am positive there are others... To people saying that it is not mandatory for raiders you are wrong.

[Knighterrant81]

[h=2]Professions attached to rep.[/h]

A really key issue related to the rep is that your professions are attached at the hip with these reps, example: Tailoring you need honored with the Golden Lotus to make anything useful in PVE (chest and hand recipes and your proper caster leg enchant from Tailoring). Your 28 slot bag comes from the August Celestials at revered. Enchanting you can't trade in enchanting mats like the previous 2 expansions for your recipes, instead they are locked to the Shadow-Pan rep (Revered for your weapon enchant) and the August Celestials (Revered for your +170 main stat bracer enchant) This forces raiders to actually do 3-4 sets of dailies so that they can make use of their professions. Klaxxi has the Blacksmithing patterns hostage till revered, and I am positive there are others... To people saying that it is not mandatory for raiders you are wrong.

Leatherworking is Golden Lotus - Honored.
Blacksmithing is Klaxxi - Honored.
Tailoring is Golden Lotus - Honored (except for the bag pattern).
Enchanting is August Celestials and Shado-Pan - BOTH Revered.
Jewelcrafting isn't tied to a reputation at all.
Alchemy isn't tied to a reputation at all.
Inscription isn't tied to a reputation at all.
Engineering isn't tied to a reputation at all.

So really, LW, BS, and Tailoring have to only do about a week's worth of either the Golden Lotus or the Klaxxi (the bag pattern is NOT going to make your raid kill bosses faster), and every other profession isn't concerned with reputation at all.

There's only ONE profession that's severely required to do reputation grinds - enchanting. So really, the problem here is really that Enchanting is an outlier, not that profession items are on the reputation vendors. You don't even necessarily have to have someone in your guild be an Enchanter or grind to get these patterns - you can just wait until someone else on your server does it. So really, all an enchanter is ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED to do is get to 90 and 600 skill. You can buy the weapon/bracer enchants from the poor sap in some other guild who ground out the reputation :P