Pumping Irony

Actually that’s not entirely true. It isn’t the first if I want to be absolutely honest and technical about it. After my two RvR scenarios last night, I stumbled into my first PQ area around 2am but it was empty and I had no interest in having my very first Public Quest lacking the public part so I logged out for the night.

Today I was running back and forth doing more soulless PvE questing and wandered into a new Public Quest called “Destruction of the Weak.” As luck would have it, there was even a “public” participating. Joy!

I’ll admit, PQ’s are not exactly — actually, not at all — set up how I had imagined. Most of the PvE quests I’ve done so far are of the Kill Five Foozles variety. Step across the PQ line and it’s Kill Fifty Foozles, which while not being terribly exciting, makes sense since it’s “public” and there could very well be multiple groups contributing to its completion.

Draevus achieved Rank 6 during the PQ and also was #1 on the contribution list and received +500 to his loot roll. Whatever that means. No idea how that actually worked out, but hey… at least I managed to do something well.

With Public Quests, I was hoping Mythic had a new take or even solved some of the issues with normal maximum group size and group panels. Nope! When I first wandered into the PQ, I just ran in and started hacking at mobs the other players were hacking on. The X/50 counter still increases, but I immediately started wondering how a healer would actually heal anyone in this situation when there’s no group panel whatsoever? One really great feature WAR’s UI has is that when you look at a character’s name if he’s not at 100% health you’ll see a green health bar whereas at 100% there’s no health bar. By contrast, in LOTRO I have to actually mouseover a character I’m not grouped with to see their health level. So in WAR, with but a quick scan of the battle a healer can quickly determine healing priorities. The problem at that point would be actually managing to click or otherwise select the character to heal from the gang of other characters or mobs.

Turns out, while I was participating in the PQ itself, I was solo. Hence no group panel. Every so often when crossing into a new area, a tooltip pops up informing me there are Open Groups available to join. I had assumed (there I go again!) Open Groups were one thing, a nice way to find groups easily, and Public Quests were something else entirely. Bzzt! Wrong answer. Open Groups can be setup for PvE, RvR or PQ’s. Doh! Lesson learned. I joined the open group of players I was hacking mobs with and filled their group, which brings up a standard (albeit rather large) group UI panel. I saw a second group in the earlier phases but they left before the final phase which my group completed ourselves. The final phase was simply pulling three Hero level bosses and killing them. I’d call it a standard tank and spank but I still don’t have any type of taunting yet so whomever is dpsing the most becomes the tank until someone else gets the aggro. So it was mostly just “dps them!” and hoping players were able to manage their own aggro since I’m unable to force aggro on me yet.

Oh, and for aggro management, a UI option to show my target’s target would be nice. Maybe it’s less important in PvP, I don’t know, but c’mon… Again, every other MMO in recent years has had this feature. Does this also mean there is no skill forwarding? Can healers target an enemy player or mob and their heal gets cast on the tank automatically because that’s who the enemy is focused on? If not, that’s even more reason for me to not play a healer. I’m looking for games to push UI’s and the presentation of information forward so I can play the game more than I’m playing the UI.

All in all, the PQ is probably the closest I’ve come to being entertained so far. Not because of the content itself, but simply because I was in a group that was cooperating with each other. I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say it was “fun” but I’ll give it a solid “entertaining” at least. I said in a previous post that I’ve really heard no glowing comments regarding the PvE in WAR and in my few session and six ranks so far, I’m in complete agreement. Normally I consider soloing to be at least a bare minimum of “entertaining” while I wait to get grouped for the “fun” content. In WAR the solo PvE content is outright boring and uninteresting. In less than 6 ranks I’ve already lost any interest whatsoever in actually reading the quest text telling me the back story of why these particular five foozles need to be killed or why I need to bring an NPC back five decapitated foozles heads.

WAR is also the first MMO I can remember playing where the generic vendors offer better gear than quest rewards. Maybe that’s intentional? It was just disappointing and made me feel like I’m completely wasting my time bothering with these boring quests at all if I can just buy what I want from the nearest vendor. Even the couple of PQ rewards I saw people get, including myself, were useless. I chose the cash reward since I would have sold the items to the nearest vendor anyway. If the rewards are not worth the effort, why bother? That goes for the repeatable Public Quests too. It was neat the first time, but if there’s no point to it and — just like an instance — it’s going to reset in a few minutes anyway, that seems like it greatly diminishes any aspect of replayability these PQ’s might have. I can say I’ve completed “Destruction of the Weak” but I have no interest in doing it again, and that’s the real shame.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 5:34 pm and is filed under WAR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.