Herp’durp. My mind doesn’t differentiate the two right now. Someday, this will lead to me trying to tame Putridus. Don’t deny it, you’d try it too!
I’m still sad you can’t tame that one Worgen anymore. Come to think of it, I’m also sad that the playable Worgen race didn’t end up looking more like the WotLK models.
I have 3 toons going through the Firelands dailies at the moment, so I’m able to see both the Shadow Wardens content and the Druid of the Talons content right now. On the PTR, the Wardens gave one more mark per day than the Talons, but this is no longer the case – they both award equal marks now. So, who to choose?
If you haven’t already chosen, I would recommend going with the Wardens. When you unlock the Talons, you’ll want to do one day’s worth over there to do the one-time “Need Water Badly” quest and then go back to the Wardens on subsequent days unless you’re achievement hunting or just simply enjoy pain.
Talons are:
-buggy
-poorly designed
-annoying
-take 3x longer
BUGGY: The escort often will fail to spawn. You’ll have to abandon/reacquire the quest several times and hope one time it works. You can also ride through the left edge of the fire and hope you don’t die. Even when the escort mission does work, it’s still quicker to just ride through the left edge of the fire and ignore your escort. Unlike the Wardens escort, this guy doesn’t help you fight.
ANNOYING: It involves platforming in an engine that was never designed for platforming (think super mario bros in 1st person/over-the-shoulder 3D with a fail camera).
ANNOYING: It also involves killing a crap ton of 155k HP elementals that aren’t involved with your dailies; imagine having to take a narrow spiral path up a mountain because your quest objective was at the top, but every 15 feet along the path you have to break a rock wall with your face. These elementals respawn again on the way down. This is also one reason why they take 3x longer to complete than the Wardens quests.
POORLY DESIGNED: I’d estimate the Talons quest hub (which is actually 2 disparate areas) is about 3 times larger than the Wardens area and a bigger pain to navigate (heavily guarded, maze-like, involves platforming). The bombing mission alone takes as long as all the Warden quests combined. Also, if you’re a skinner, you can at least skin stuff on the Wardens side. I think if you’re a miner you can mine the rock corpses but that’s kind of a pathetic reward anyways.
BUGGY: Oh, if you fail at the platforming, a druid comes to rescue you. Except when they don’t. Then you just die. Good luck!
TLDR: Fuck the Talons.
Everything you said is 100% correct. FML. I got the flying one over Beth’tilac yesterday and it took forever. (I assume that’s what you’re talking about with ANNOYING 2) Wish I could take back my offer to help those druids.
Thank you, this is actually immensely helpful. I’m at just over 120 marks now, so I’ll be picking my next path soon.
Thanks from this quarter, as well. I ended last night with 99 marks, so I have a decision to make soon, too!
Maybe I’m misreading the material, but ultimately, don’t you have to do both? Certainly, for the achievement, you have to.
Let me step back and say: I don’t think I’ve seen a clear description of what each faction gives you, and the progression beyond them. Why did blizz give a choice? Is there a difference, other than the bugginess of one versus the other? What does the choice signify? Is there a meaningful advantage to doing both, in post-phase progression?
I haven’t gotten very far in this, so I haven’t thought about it much. (Frankly, life’s been to busy lately to even log in.) I would appreciate it if someone could explain what’s at stake.
ETA: I understand that “choice” in this context is “Which subfaction to I give my hard-earned coins to FIRST”. Clearly, you can recruit with both factions, once you accumulate 2x the needed coins. Is there a point to doing so? The only payoff I know of is the achievement.
My plan was to go with the Shadow Wardens first on my mage, and with the Talon Druids on my druid, then pick whichever I like best for the tankadin when he gets there (now 83!). After reading the above, I think I’ll reconsider doing the Talons anytime soon. Maybe they’ll get fixed eventually…
Yes, the question is primarily which do you do first. However, my understanding is that after you have both factions unlocked you must choose one each day to do daily quests with (decided by which escort quest you select). So, like Headrush was saying, you can unlock the druids (2nd) but continue to do only warden quests. This should not reduce the rate at which you earn marks at all.
This is exactly the case. You don’t unlock any new vendors until after both factions are unlocked anyways, and regardless of which faction you choose, you will be earning the same amount of marks per day (after unlocking both, as mentioned upthread, choosing one locks you out of the other for that day). Right now, the only advantage Talons gives is doing the bombing quest (if it’s available) for the bombing achievement, which will take a long while, since the target for the bombing run is random and it’s not a quest that’s always offered every day. Since I’m in no hurry to get the achievement, I’ll wait until I no longer need to earn max marks every day and just do that one quest (plus its prereqs) only when it is available, after I’m done with everything else.
Missed the edit window.
The choice does two things:
Allows players to decide to vary the quests in their daily grind. Were the quests of similar design, it would have been successful. In its current form, though, there’s really no reason to choose the Talons over the Wardens as the W dailies are much quicker and easier.
The second thing it does is disperses the population a bit. The initial molten front quests are a madhouse since everyone needs to do them. However, as word gets out about the Talons I’m thinking the Wardens will end up being more populated eventually.
With any luck, they’ll just fix the Talons quests by the time we get there.
And has platforming in a 3D environment ever *not *been obnoxious? At least with WoW we have total camera control.
Heroic Deadmines MUST DIE. I have never, ever made it through the spinning flaming Mario sticks of death. And the boulders in Zul’Gurub…ARGH.
To be fair, I do like the freedom of control we have over WoW’s camera. My only gripe about it is the way the environment interferes when it comes between your toon and the camera’s position. Other games that handle this properly will force those objects into transparency, but I suspect it may be a limitation of WoW’s 6-year-old engine.
Oh, yeah, the “OH SHIT I CAN’T SEE THE GROUND, THE TREES ARE IN THE WAY!” thing. Heh. It’s a serious liability, and in some settings it’s impossible to find a good compromise between sufficient situational awareness (wide angle, zoomed out) and freedom from visual obstructions overhead or behind. (Backing into a wall is just that kind of pain in the butt in an instance, ferinstance.)
Almost as painful, and more nauseating, is the unintended changes of camera perspective because of the sudden presence of that kind of field-of-camera-view obstruction (like a wall) that makes me seasick. Swoop in, zoom out, back in, out again, start in and then WHOOPS right back out… I can’t focus on ANYTHING let alone click on anything in the field of view. For myself, that’s usually why I don’t click on a lightwell: it keeps moving around!
I’ve positioned toons in imminent danger of standing in [fire, poison, shadow, void, etc] just to avoid that migraine.
I wish Blizz would do SOMETHING.
That’s mostly just a timing issue, versus being able to see where they are. Not that it can’t be obnoxious, just from the perspective of “let’s put a weird restriction on your progression that has nothing to do with the character you’ve played for 85 levels.”
Speaking as a tank, this is a chronic problem. The hardest part of Heroic Maloriak for me in the previous tier of content wasn’t the encounter–it was figuring out how the fuck not to get my camera hung up on the decor while I was kiting him around the outside of the room. And that’s just retarded.
Shadow or Talon? Yes, I remember…I picked lasagna.
Yep, thanks for the info, Headrush. I just pulled the trigger on the Shadow Wardens because of what you said re: the Talons. D: Especially since soon I’ll be dragging three other 85s through the dailies for gear. /cry
I’m contemplating pugging Cata normals to learn tanking + the layouts, but the RDF as a tank still makes me go all queasy. I know, bring a friend, etc, but still.
Quick questions: At what point do warrior tanks switch to studding themselves with pure mastery, if they do? Atm I’m using parry/stam in red, mastery/stam in blue, and mastery in yellow. I’m aware that askmrrobot has its issues, but its recommendation has me curious to see what the logic is other than blind following of the ‘mastery is king’.
And where would I go to look up the gear/spec of ranked war tanks? WoL doesn’t seem to have a tank ranking that I can find. I know how to find Sleutel but I do want to see what different folks are doing. 
Finally: Heroic Strike. I get differing advice on whether that + Incite are worth it for tanks. Atm I’m using Cleave to dump rage.
If you have friend who heals, the pugging of normals works fine for learning, especially if you slightly over-level/over-gear them. It’s what Stonebow and I started doing a few weeks ago. When you and friend are the tank/heals pair, you can set the pace (a learning pace) a bit better. He’s got a prot Pally, and I take in my Disc Priest. He watches the tank spot videos beforehand, and I check the Dungeon Journal for him between pulls to make sure we’re remembering everything. We’ve not had any trouble at all!
*knock wood *
I mentioned how much help you and my other buds here on the Dope have been to me with the game, SFG, so I hope that doesn’t get edited out.
Thanks
Q