That One Quest

So, That One Quest.

Your quest chain flows smoothly, and suddenly – for no particular reason – you are stuck and experience enormous difficulties. It’s not the last scenario which is supposed to be challenging. It’s just this quest in the middle.

In Good Suramaritan campaign, it’s Ephemeral Manastorm Projector quest available at 20k rep.

Here you have to kill 4 very fat elite mobs which hit very hard, have lots of hit points and aren’t easy to pull without extra guards (these are elite guards which aggro easily, have half as much hit points and also hit very hard).

I mean: why on earth would you put those super-hard to kill mobs in the middle of a normal quest chain? And which is worse, you need four kills?

If you’re DPS guy, you are in trouble. You use all the burst spells, and what would swipe out a normal elite still leaves those guys with 40-50% of hit points to go. DPS are not intended to survive a marathon by themselves. Their challenge is positioning, counterspells, burst damage. Those guys are just too fat: your glorious opening and bursting damage gets you exhausted very quick, longing for self-heals and spells to proc. You’re easily finishing every fight on the verge of survival (if not dead). And then there’s three more.

I can’t tell anything about healers dealing with those mobs. But I can tell that it’s freaking unfair to DPS compared to tanks. A tank pulls this very same mob, all by himself, and may watch a movie while slowly picking at this mob. And nothing happens to the tank! It’s just a plain boring routine. I may not even watch at the screen while lazily pressing the keys, and the mob will be dead.

I don’t know why Blizzard suddenly thought of: let’s make the players “bring some friends” to do a mundane task. Ironically tanks (and probably healers) may not even care to do so because they’re good on their own. Warlocks as a “fat pet” class don’t even notice how the mob dies. But it’s a hell for others.

Of course I win – eventually :) I’ve got priest, hunter, shaman and druid to do this quest yet. Not the hardest classes here, although I expect some troubles with shaman. And still, it’s not how you design the tasks. You shouldn’t be destroying keyboards, fingers and nerves if you’re unlucky to play the wrong class or the wrong spec. It’s just an extremity quest for no reason.

On the bright side, I’ve learned how to play tank with all the tank classes now :)