Dailies (curiosity question)

DoofusMax · October 22

Background: I was running around this evening trying to burn off a small stack of surveys and idly popped into a delve because I hadn't snagged the skyshard in there for some reason. It was a delve that I had done with different characters, but it had been a while and took a few minutes before I got my bearings, but needing to get my bearings prompted a question.

Expansion zones have dailies which point to all delves in the zones (even if they have to make up three reasons to send you to each of the two delves in order to get six dailies), all World Bosses in expansion zones have dailies (even if they have to make up three reasons each to send you to the two WBs to make six dailies), and all World Events in the zones which have them (Blackwood/Deadlands Oblivion Portals excepted). The base game has dailies which point to all the World Events (except in Cyrodiil) and all the Public Dungeons (except Coldharbour's), but only 15 delves out of the 90 in the alliance zones, no dailies at all pointing to Coldharbour, and DLC zones don't have dailies for their Public Dungeons. Craglorn is a bit odd, but I think everything has a daily, just not a central quest-giver.

In practical terms, this means there are 75 base-game delves which are one-and-done (do the story, beat the boss, snag the skyshard, and never return), 18 Public Dungeons in DLC zones which are also one-and-done (do the stories, beat the boss, snag the skyshard, and never return), plus Coldharbour (the whole zone is one-and-done zone with nothing except mats surveys or Treasure Maps to send you back). There are also 90 World Bosses in base-game zones which get dusted off during a couple of events (Zeal and Witches), but are otherwise one-and-done unless you're farming something in particular.

Did the devs ever comment on the reasoning behind this? That's a lot of development work for a lot of one-and-done stuff.

Rkindaleft · October 22

I’d surmise that writing daily quests for each and every delve is probably redundant when you’re only going to go through the whole list every 3 months, combined with the fact that the base game dailies are more unpopular than the ones that come from DLCs. I don’t know anyone who does Mages or Fighters guild dailies every single day, but I do know people who do Summerset or Elsweyr dailies every day because the drops are (or were) valuable for furnishing crafting. Doing daily quests was nowhere near as big of a thing on release as it is now and I doubt they would go back and release dailies for 2014 content.

AcadianPaladin · October 22

Bolgrul gets his 15 delves from the 15 alliance zones. I'd love to see his pool grow to 30 by simply adding 1 more delve from each zone for him to select from. As someone who does indeed prefer alliance zones and their dailies to DLC zones and their dailies, I can attest that I am never alone when doing one of his delves. There are plenty of folks who do them, whether to level up the Undaunted skill for character/companion or (Ilike me) simply because some of us find them more fun than DLC counterparts and we base our activities on fun vs loot.

Similarly, I prefer alliance zone public dungeons for their simple and clean layout compared to the mess and confusion of their DLC counterparts.

Lastly, dolmens are my favorite of all world events - by a longshot. I quite enjoy them and quite dislike all the DLC world events. And, again, I base my activities on fun, not loot.

LanteanPegasus · October 22

I guess the reason is that back in the base game days, ESO wasn't as MMO-ified as it is now. It had lots of unique content and less need to repeat the same stuff over and over again to inflate play time without adding substance.
The dailies for world event, delve and public dungeon were primarily there for leveling the guilds (fighters, mages, undaunted), not like they are for the later content to grind over and over for things from daily rewards.

The public dungeons in the DLC zones got their collectible fragments, so they are not one-and-done, either. And those went up from 7 to 10 to 50 pieces needed. Welcome to the MMO grind.

So, yes, from the angle of playtime per development the copious amount of dailies is more efficient.
From the point of view of a player who prefers not to be able to run a given delve/public dungeon/way between world events blindfolded, though, I preferred the "older times". (Although they could set up as many dailies as they want if the rest of the content wasn't shrinking while they do it.)

I_killed_Vivec · October 22

Careful what you ask for...

If you ask for more repeatable content then ZoS will say "We listened to your request for more repeatable content, here's IA!".

DinoZavr · October 22

There are many reasons players do delves/WB/incursions

one, is, indeed, daily quests. with scrying you get one script per first Mages Guild/Fighters Guild/Undaunted daily,
also you get motifs and furnishing plans from DLC dailies rewards containers
second are Antiquities leads. i remember i had to kill Alik'r delve boss 34 times to get one of Pale Order ring leads
third are achievements (some of these may have good rewards) or just zone completion
fourth is collecting skyshards on newer characters (same applies to public dungeons group events, most of which are soloable)

public dungeons also drop fragments you can use to assemble the reward, or sell to other players
(also all of three in some zones have a chance to drop a ToT desk fragment, and drop chance is not 100%)

so in some cases it is not just one-and-done, but grind until drop

Juomuuri · October 22

I think it's reasonable that the 15 Alliance zones give us 15 delve dailies in total, but it would be cool if each delve in the base game had some reason to return to it. Not really a priority but one can hope.

However, I've noticed that at least on PC EU, people aren't really doing DLC dailies outside of events. Me and my friend decided to company eachother as we aim to complete all the missing dailies from those "do 30 of these" achievements, and just today at prime time we did two WB and delve quests in Western Skyrim and the WBs were deserted. But in the Reach, both WBs had a couple other people joining us! For some reason, the small DLC zones are much more popular than chapter zones. Probably due to the fact they are indeed, small.

But, every time I've been doing base game dailies, there's a bunch of people doing the delve dailies (and probably FG ones as well). MG dailies are a bit hard to notice if someone is doing them or not, as you can't see the chest picking animation, but you can see the quest effects in the delve dailies if someone has the quest. It could be interesting if they added a new type of base game daily, one where you'd kill a WB in a designated Alliance zone. A group version of the Undaunted daily perhaps?

AlnilamE · October 22

Several delves in the base game also drop leads, so that's a reason to go back there.

AcadianPaladin · October 22

Yes, an additional Undaunted Enclave quest giver who assigns you a daily alliance zone in which to kill a WB would be very welcome!

The reason I think Bolgrul should double his delves is because it is easy to overload a delve and, despite there being 15 currently, they are all too crowded. Rare indeed are the times I can kill the delve boss alone in any of Bolgrul's delves. Usually I arrive at the boss area to join others waiting for a respawn. Then when the boss respawns, you hope to get a light attack in before he dies.