The Daily Review: My Opinion of the Mist Hubs

There are a lot of daily hubs out there and they all seem to have a personally of their own with the quests, rewards, and amounts they give.  Everyone will have their opinions of which hubs they like and which they hate.  These, are mine.

Tillers:

When it comes to daily hubs this one is my favorite, or at least one of them.  They are usually neatly grouped up so you can do all of them at the same time and even piggy back them, for example getting the stolen goods and killing monkeys.  Just kill the monkeys in front of the stolen goods and you are getting two quests done at the same time.  Does it really get much easier than that?

There are a few fun quests that are like side quests not part of the pack that you get sometimes.  And I would not be surprised if there are some you have not even seen yet.  Just yesterday I got a quest I had never seen before and I have been doing them every day since day one.  Makes me wonder if there are more.  Be it killing weeds, watering crops, jumping on critters or looking for chickens, even the one side quest that is not part of the pack is not a great diversion.

The tiller quests are quick and easy and just as rewarding gold and valor wise as any other quests, plus one will give you an ironpaw token, so what is there not to like?  Nothing.  When it comes to doing dailies, these are the tops.  Well designed and something you will do even after exalted for a few valor, a little gold and an ironpaw cooking token of course.

As for achievements related to questing for the tillers there are none directly but there are some indirectly.  You will get them all just by doing your farming.  No effort really required to get them.  The cooking achievement for getting each cooking skill up are not listed under the quests section but you could consider them part of it if you wanted to and you can use your farm, your tokens or the auction house to get them all done rather easily.  If you are after gear only, you can completely skip this one but I think that would be a mistake as this is one of the most enjoyable quest hubs right now.

Anglers:

This is another nice and easy quest hub.  You only get three quests per day from it and they are not tied as tightly together as the tiller ones are but being there are so few and they are so easy it makes for a quick and painless hub.  Unless of course you get one of the few quests that actually require fishing and you have low level fishing, then it could be a while.  I suggest getting the best lure you can get if you do not have max level skill.  Even with max level skill you will still catch junk from time to time so under that you can expect to catch junk a lot.  Even with that, the angler quests would still be something I consider nice and easy.

If you are an achievement hunter, just do the quests, there is really nothing that you would need to plan to get here, just doing the quests will get you the only related achievement which is for doing all the quests.  Easy enough right?

I can see this being a nice little hub for your characters that are alts with low fishing.  It is low stress, gets you three fishing skill points a day, and 15 valor and some gold.  So it is win all the way around for a rarely played alt.  Like the tiller ones however, if gear is what you are after, you can skip this completely but as easy as it is to do I can't see why you would unless you are really pressed for time.

Cloud Serpents:

Everyone seems to want to ride a cloud serpent and you will need to get them exalted if you want to learn the skill to do so.  Like the anglers and tillers this faction has no gear and is a purely cosmetic faction so to speak.  It is about your riding skill only really.

There are two types of dailies they offer. One is a hub based thing that seems to be nicely batched most of the time and is somewhat easy with the exception of one hub.  If you get the one hub to go into the cave I must warn you that you are going to be fighting, a lot.  Those monkeys scream and bring friends all the time.  Even if as a hunter I can handle them easy I had started to get into the habit of hearthing back when I finished the quest because I just did not want to work my way back out.  Outside of that all the hubs seem super easy.

The other type of quests are secondary professions quests.  If you do not have a high level of that profession you can not get them done and even if you do they do not offer valor and offer a small amount reputation.  So while doing them will get you to exalted a fair bit quicker they are not required and it will not set you further back than just a few days if you do not do them.  You could also try to find some eggs to turn in for reputation to speed it up, but it goes fast enough as it is that there is no real need to.  Even without doing it every day it was the first faction I got to exalted not even finding one egg, outside of the fish and lorewalker factions.

As far as achievements go this faction has a few of them and none are really difficult.  Paying catch with your baby serpent might be the hardest one if a lot of other people are around, but once you realize how the bounces work and can find a time when 25 other people are not bouncing around you will get it with little effort.  The good thing for this is you do not have to be perfect, just close and you will bounce it.

The race achievements are easy and while you might not get first place in the race the first time you do it if you follow the pack and notice all the checkpoints you will win first the second time no problem.  Getting the 10 rings achievement should come without even trying as you should always try to keep 10 rings on you anyway, so that one is a gimme.  You will also get a bag that gives you valor based on where you end the race.

As far as how fun these are to do I will leave it at this, the second I hit exalted I never went back and have no intention to ever go back.  Maybe some day I will do a few just to get 999 of exalted, but I am in no rush.  While they were mostly quick and easy they were not fun in any way.  The profession ones do not offer valor and the gold is less, so that means less rewarding quests.  The only time I might ever consider doing them is if the august celestials send me to the temple of the jade serpent one day and I am bored, just becuase that is close but I have been sent there 3 times and never once had the desire to do the cloud serpents any of those times.  Once exalted there is no need to ever even consider doing the profession ones, like I said, they offer no valor and a smaller amount of gold effectively making them useless.  You will make more gold selling the fish instead of cooking them and selling the cloth instead of making bandages out of them and using them.

Klaxxi:

How do I love thee, let me count the ways.  There are tons of rare items in the area.  There are tons of rare mobs in the area.  There are massive packs of mobs for mass carnage.  They seem to have the highest drop rate of motes I have seen.  I have got more 476 BoEs and 450 equitable at 85 BoEs while questing there than you can count.  My JC gets patterns from there more than any other place.  The quest hubs are tight and there are different ones to keep things mixed up some.  And add to that there are more than a few achievements you can get there.  All that and more.

I love doing the klaxxi area and it is one of the hubs I can see myself doing long after exalted if I have the time and am looking for something to do.  I won't get into the achievements deeply as there are many, I will save that for my quest achievement guide, but there are a few that will require you do to quests a few times making them replayable.

You will get one of four different hubs and one of two different mass kill quests.  All hubs are tightly tied together so it makes it easier for you to get them done.  A few of the quest however have bad drop rates which is the one draw back I would give this as a quest hub but because of the exceptional drop rate of BoEs and motes having to kill a few extra things is not really all that bad even if it does get annoying that you have to kill 20 mobs to get four things sometimes.

This hub is needed for reputation for one of the four gear giving factions but it should not be a problem.  Even having skipped more than a few days after I hit revered it will still be the first of the big four I get to exalted.  They offer a fair deal of quests which in turn gives you a fair amount of reputation, valor, and of course gold.

When it comes to the big four the Klaxxi hubs are the most rewarding in my opinion based on how nicely they are grouped and the area they are in and what it has to offer.

Golden Lotus:

This will be the second of the big four hubs you will work with and like the Klaxxi it has a fair deal of achievements to offer and some are actually very hard to get if you do not plan them out, I will get into them more in depth with my quest achievement guide one day, but you will find yourself doing this often to try and get the random number generator to give you the quests you need to do to get the achievements.

In a way that is one of the reasons I dislike this quest hub a lot.  While they are grouped nicely and they do seem to send you from one to the next in a fluid motion they never seem to send me where I want to go and it is annoying.  There are a few hubs with a lot of achievement based quests that I did not do the first time I got there and they never send me back there.

So one of the best things about the golden lotus quests, the fact there are so many different ones, is one of the worst, because it seems like you rarely get the hubs you like doing.  I seem to always get the one when I need to get the barrels from those sprites and I hate them with a passion.  They are easy enough to kill but they are annoying and you can easily find yourself over whelmed by them and the worst part is it happens to everyone and some people can be real jerks and it seems in that area more than any other people will try to pass their packs on to you if they see you doing AoE.  I have often found myself with 20 of them on my pet and only 3 were mine all because people would run their mobs past my pet seeing as I have a per that does an AoE.

Besides the fact of the random nature of the quest hubs is the fact they feel like you get nothing from them at 100 reputation each, 110 with faction, 120 if human.  Sure, it adds up and there are so many of them so it does go up nicely but it just seems like you are shoveling shit against the tide doing them.  You get more angler rep doing three quests than you do when you do what feels like 100 golden lotus quests each day.

If you are after valor there is no better quest hub than the golden lotus quests.  It is a long quest line that jumps from hub to hub a few times each day and in the end you will get a fair deal of valor and gold for your days work but the fact you do not choose which hubs you do takes some of the fun away from it in my opinion as you might have some hubs you like and you never get to do them because there are so many of them.

Each hub has a few different quests it can offer and there are five different hubs each with at least two sets of dailies, so that is a lot to offer.  Too bad it never offers the ones you want.  It would be nice to have a little more control over the hubs being there are so many different options here for this one.

If there was ever one hub you would use as an example of a bad daily quest hub design that went way to far over board, this is it.  I have not done it since I hit revered and probably won't unless I am really bored and want to go achievement hunting and I hope and pray that I get the hub I need to get the achievements done.

Shado-Pan:

They have a few different quest hubs all in one area basically.  Nice and simple and easy.  The shado-pan quests are a good hub and it is one of the required ones for gear so it is nice to have a good hub when it is something you feel you need to do.

However, the achievements, and there are many for this hub, seem to be what makes this hub horrible.  They are almost all broken.  The achievement to do 15 quests with each companion does not work, I've done more than 15 with 2 of them and neither of them shows up.  So that means you need to do three hubs with each of the players if it worked and it doesn't and basically that means you will still be doing these, just for that one achievement, long after you get to exalted.  Much longer if you are like me and not getting credit for doing them with companions when they are there.

Those helpers being there is what makes the quest hub horrible.  If all you want to do get some reputation, some valor and some gold, do them solo and the shado-pan is one of the best daily hubs in the game right now behind the tillers and anglers and close to the klaxxi.  Take a companion and you would be better off sticking hot needles into your eyes as that would be less painful.

As a fun side note to one of the achievements, to take no damage while doing the quests, I thought of it like my hunter challenge I made before the end of cataclysm.  To level without taking any damage.  Now, as a hunter I thought the achievement was way to easy so I took one of the companions with me, protector yi, and if you have ever traveled with him you would know what I mean when I say it is completely impossible to not take damage with him around, he pulls entire zones.  So it was challenge accepted.  About 30 minutes later of careful dancing and lots of kiting, moving, and planning and yi pulling way more than he or I could handle on multiple occasions and dying on nearly every single pull it was mission accomplished.  I did all the quests, with protector yi, without taking any damage at all.  Top that baby, now that is a challenge.

But seriously, keep the helpers at the camp unless you are going for the achievement, they are not worth it.  The mages are the only ones you should ever take, they even CC things, which is awesome seeing an NPC do that.  Do not take any of the others, they are all horrible and make a good quest hub into a horrible one.

August Celestials:

These are nice and easy dailies.  Always sending you to one of four hubs around the map.  You can always go downstairs in your main city to get the lead in daily that tells you were you need to go today from the august celestial representative down there.

You will be sent to the wilds, the summit, the forest or the steppes.  Always one of those four.  There are some achievements for these guys as well as gear which makes them worth doing.  Add to the fact the hubs are nicely tied together and it makes them quick and easy too.  Two of the four hubs do have minor annoyances with them however.

The ones in the forest, at least for me, seem to always keep me in battle even when I am not fighting.  Even if I feign death I will be in battle the second I pop up even if there is no mob anywhere to be seen.  I always have to run my way back to turn in the quest and once I even needed to force close the game and start back up to get out of battle because it would not let me go, even after doing the trick of killing a critter to get yourself out of battle because that did not work.   The one in the wilds sucks because nothing there drops loot.  No big deal really but I like loot, don't we all?  Having to kill things and get nothing from them sucks.  At lest it is quick and easy and doesn't keep me stuck in battle.

The one in the steppes seems more like a quest line than others do. A standard kill, blow up, or collect type of hub.  The one in the summit is my favorite, perhaps because it is so super easy or perhaps because I am a hunter and challenge quests are what I do best.  You just face a series of challenges and beat some big baddies and collect your gold, valor and reputation.  What is there not to like about that one.  Nice and easy, as a daily quest hub should be.

So in a run down, from best to worst, here are how I see the hubs.

1) Tillers
2) Anglers
3) Klaxxi
4) Shado-Pan (without helpers)
5) August Celestials
6) Cloud Serpents
7) Golden Lotus
8) Shado-Pan (with helpers)

Which hubs do you love or hate?