Dailies on Ruhnuk: Confusion Central

I really liked Ruhnuk's general visuals from the first preview we got of 7.2. The story impressed with intricate cinematics. We also knew from the 7.2 preview that the daily area on Ruhnuk would come with its own planetary story arc again, something that I quite liked on Manaan, and this time the NPCs were going to be voiced too instead of everything being alien gibberish (which had been my main criticism of Manaan).

What could possibly go wrong?

A lot, as it turns out.

You see, I'd initially held off on tackling the dailies since Mr Commando didn't have time to play for a few days, and a new daily zone is one of the few pieces of new content that we can still meaningfully play together, so I wanted to "save" my first experience for a shared play session. But boy, did that turn out to be a shitshow.

We started on Saturday at 3pm, with the caveat that Mr Commando would have something else to do for a bit at 4pm. "It's just dailies! This isn't going to take an hour, don't worry," I mocked. 4pm rolled around and we were nowhere near done, so we took a half-hour break while he did his other thing. Then we logged back in and continued... for another two hours. In total it took us no less than three hours to do the new storyline and a single round of the new dailies.

Now, to be fair, what with it being our first time and both of us going in blind, we were always going to be inefficient in ways that can be avoided once you know everything the new quests entail and where they take place. However, the amount of running back and forth we had to do was utterly comical, and it was made significantly worse by the fact that Ruhnuk's geography is terribly confusing to navigate. Mr Commando soon compared it to Iokath, at which point I felt the need to defend the latter, as I actually quite like Iokath nowadays and I don't think it's ever been nearly as confusing as Ruhnuk has been for us.

The problem is that Ruhnuk consists of a large number of little sub-zones, which are mostly either narrow outdoor canyons or indoor tunnels/corridors, none of which are reflected very well on the large planetary map (which the game helpfully shuffled out of the way onto a new keybind in this update as well), meaning it's really hard to get a grip on how they are all connected and which of the half a dozen exits from any given sub-zone is going to lead where.

Anyone who's played the game for any length of time knows that the helpful little map highlights that are supposed to show you where to go for a quest can also get a bit confused when it comes to things like taxi points or elevation changes, which only amplified our issues. (When I looked up some info about the daily area online afterwards, I found out that Vulkk's guide actually included multiple custom-made maps, which are awesome and contain so much additional information that's hard to impossible to discern in game.)

At first we just snarked about all this a little bit, saying things along the lines of how Bioware clearly took the feedback about 7.0 being quite short to heart by making these dailies take forever to complete. By the second hour we descended into hysterical laughter when we found that a quest marker made us fight our way through the same damn tunnel for the fourth time, but by the third hour we were honestly just kind of sick of it and wanted it to be over.

In hindsight I think we probably could have saved some time by making smarter use of quick travel points, but this is where the issue with the maps comes in again since it was impossible to see where on the planet we were supposed to go in order to plan ahead, meaning we couldn't do anything but follow the confused arrows back and forth through the same tunnels and ravines over and over. Other people seemed to be in a similar predicament, based on the number of characters we encountered that would just barrel through with a massive mob train in tow, trying to get from A to B at a decent pace without having to fight a dozen mob pulls... and often those mobs would then end up aggroing on us, forcing us to fight even more and making our own trip take even longer.

Despite of Mr Commando's initial passionate declaration that he was never going to come back to this horrible planet, we did give it another try today to see how we would do with a bit more knowledge of the lay of the land and with just the dailies and no more story missions left to do. This time it "only" took us a little over an hour, which is much more reasonable I'll admit... though still quite long considering we were playing as a duo in nearly best-in-slot gear and with maxed-out companions. I dread to think what kind of slog some of these mob pulls must be as a solo character with lesser gear (and without stealth).

I just don't quite know what to think. In general this patch has been shaping up to be a pretty good one, and I really like a lot of things about Ruhnuk... but I can't deny that in terms of gameplay, this has been the worst first impression I've had of a daily area in years, if not ever. I'd like to think that with time, it might grow on me the way Iokath has, but at the moment it's hard to imagine myself spending much time there beyond one visit per character and to max out the reputation, because endlessly wading back and forth through tunnels of mobs is just not my idea of fun.