There was an interesting topic on the Blizzard discussion boards that I could not post to since the limit was reached. However, the original post described dailies as being a poor design to World of Warcraft because “it feels like a job.” While I acknowledge the sentiment, I think that the poster has failed to see what makes the concept of daily quest a great mechanic in WoW.
I think dailies are a great idea for the game. Quite a few RPGs just “end” once you finish all the regular quests and kill the primary opponents. I think the problem with dailies is that there’s not enough of them in terms of current content in order to achieve certain rewards. the Molten Front for the most part is fine, but just takes a while before you can reach your goal. the only downside to the Molten Front is that the gear is limited compared to pure raiding/instancing.
A bigger issue isn’t so much the repetitiveness of dailies but more or less that it becomes one of the only things to do if you’re not a raider (if you want to obtain gear) upon hitting level 85. Also, the rewards really don’t scale after hitting a certain point. lastly, there’s just not that a large enough pool of dailies in these zones so it probably feels boring just doing dailies on 2-3 different areas.
With regards to Cataclysm, I think some of the weaknesses in the daily quest system was a result of the revamping of the pre-Vanilla world. The problem I feel is that so much attention probably was spent focused on streamlining the pre-Vanilla world that not enough time was devoted to the higher level zones. When the Molten Front opened up, it offered some epic quest lines, although grinding to reach towards the end takes a long period (as to compensate for the probable time to get equivalent raid gear).
But I like the idea overall. it’s really a nice, guaranteed method to get money, reputation and eventually more gear. I just wish that each zone had a larger number of quests. For instance, Uldum only provides a measly two quests while Vash’ir has nothing at all.
Second, it would be great not to just have chained quests. I like the idea of quests being loose and optional. Molten Front did a little of both but I wasn’t an entire fan of choosing one line or the other then making it all phased. I liked the Vanilla method of questing where most quests were kill, item loot, find item, etc. I think if the dailies just stick with that it should be fine.