The Argent Tournament

So, I have been doing the Argent Tournament daily's on and off for the last week, and I am glad and discouraged at the same time at the approach the developers have taken with it. I went into it thinking these would be simple kill ten rats and fed ex quests that would be quick (see SSO dailys from sunwell) and net some nice coin. I was half right.

There are three levels of dailys: Aspirant, Valiant, and Champion. You start out as an aspirant, and you do some basic combat quests, fetching swords from princesses and killing some scourge. Pretty simple. These quests give some nice coin, as well as Aspirant tokens. After you collect so many aspirant tokens you can turn them in to become a Valiant and the whole process starts over. Valiant quests are slightly harder, more to kill, harder combat training, and you collect your tokens to be a champion. You net more gold but it just takes more time.

Champion quests are retarded. In comparison to the time it takes with regard to aspirant quests, it probably takes double the time per quest, and there are about double the quests. In essence it takes you four times as long to do double the quests for double the aspirant gold, but you get Champion seals to excange for gear, mounts and pets.

I have two reasons for doing these quests: getting some easy gold, and getting the robot chicken mount from championing Gnomeregon. I am not a mount or achievement whore but I have always wanted to ride around on a mechanostrider as it seemed fitting because I will never drop engineering until you pry it from my cold dead hand; Bliz lifting the mount restrictions made me pee a little. Being that I never got to roll a gnome paladin, I have to become a champion of Stormwind first, then start the Gnome Valiant chain, and become a champion of Gnomeregon before I can get the red robot mount. I am also getting rep with some faction I could give 2 craps about, which is better than nothing. If these quests did not give me any gold I probably wouldn't do them solely for the mount, but hey it is something to do between Ulduar raids.

Pros: Good rewards for the non raiders, gold for your troubles, more achievements and mounts.

Cons: More time sucked out of your day depending on your tournament rank, achievements and mounts.

My biggest complaint is how much time you spend doing the mounted dueling, and mounted scourge killing at the champion level. I like a challenge, but the horse dueling is fighting with a computer for about 2-3 minuets in order to kill it. 4 duels can take up to 15 minutes depending on how stingy the NPC. This seems a little backwards in terms of effort/reward.

Mounted scourge killing is this exact situation, but with limited number of mobs to kill. This is frustrating as well, as you are fighting the scourge as well as other players for tagged mobs.

For the OCD completionists, I can see 2 hours of grinding a day for the next 3 months in order to get all their acheivements, mounts, and pets. Eff that. This is good for Blizzard cause it keeps people in the game and paying subscriptions. This is copy paste from the Sunwell dailys but worse. This might be Activision handing down shovelware to keep subscription numbers up, and the sad thing is that it will do exactly that as people will keep playing the game to do this new "content."

Just label me bitter old disgruntled if you want. I know I am. I am just clinging to the glory days of raiding T5 and T6 as a ret paladin =P

I will post more on Ulduar later. So far I am liking the direction that raids have taken (more challenging) but I don't see any less skilled guilds getting very far. We will see when we have done the hard modes.