Low Drop Rates Make Dwarves Cry
Belmann is well on the way to finishing the Loremaster achievement, which is really going to feel like an achievement. He’s proudly sporting the Seeker title, and has finished all the Vanilla quests needed, and most of the Outlands zones – the Northrend zones were finished as he levelled, which was an awesome way to experience the new zones fully. I intend to do the same with any new content dropped in Cataclysm, other than end-game stuff.
As I write he has all of Netherstorm to finish, and is on 82/86 quests in Blade’s Edge Mountains. Which is where this rant is going to begin.
Blizzard, for the love of all your player’s sanity, please don’t do another zone like Ogri’la area in Blade’s Edge. Ok, I can understand that building all the stories around the need to gather Apexis Shards is cool, but if you are going to make all the quests dependant on gathering ridiculous numbers of the crystals to be able to finish them, don’t also make the drop rate on the Shards something like 1 in 5, and also make the mobs who drop them have long respawn timers.
I’ve spent maybe 6 hours today running around in that area, and killing everything that moves, and still only looted about 40 of the damned things. Ok, yes, some of the quests award 15 of ’em at a time, which helps, and yes Wowhead lists the drop rate at around 33% rather than 20% but…
Hmm. In a “d’oh” moment I see that the drop rate is higher from mobs in the Bashir’s Landing area, so I’ll go gathering there.
And another thing… the mini-game built in this zone is just annoying, not fun. It’s the worst possible kind of game: it gets increasingly difficult, and stuffing it up has huge repercussions. It’s not epic. And taking 30 days to grind from Neutral to Exalted doing it is not epic. It’s just an annoying grind.
The only thing that makes it bearable is knowing that I won’t be doing the whole grind, just a few more quests, and that all the evidence from Northrend and WoTLK tells us that Blizzard have indeed learned not to make annoying, grinding, dull quests.