Jesus, the lesser charm change is insane... I now have enough lesser charms to last me until September.
Yeah, it's pretty clear that whoever designed 5.1's dailies wasn't behind Isle of Thunder, which is just terrible. Shieldwall and Dominance Offensive were fantastically short and simple and the one-time world quests were much better than the solo scenarios.
Ok, rant mode about the different hubs.
I like the one time quest structure more simply because they can drag you along for a while. Yeah some of the quests were just simply walking to a NPC and watching a cutscene, but, each few days for the month or so it took to complete the rep you always had something to look forward to.
I think the big problem with the isle is despite the fact that you are supposedly making progress through the isle, weakening the armies, the dailies don't reflect that change. Once we broke down the wall leading into Stage 2 the Mogu/Troll/Saurok hubs should have vanished into dust. There should have been phasing to make it look like we had gone through there and cleaned up, leave only a few straggler NPCs, make the buildings look tattered and destroyed, etc. Each stage should have shifted the focus to the next area with new rotating quests. When we broke into the Zandalari shipyard the quests for that day should have been 5 or 6 quests focusing on purely just stopping the trolls from bringing in new soldiers/supplies.
As for the Scenarios themselves, I thought they were fine on their own there just wasn't enough of them. From a gameplay perspective I actually found them more entertaining than the 5.1 quests. My only problem with them, and this is a fucking huge problem, is the fact that the Alliance and Horde versions are literally
exactly the fucking same. Both factions bomb the same wall to break into the stage 2 area, the dialogue between Lor'themar/Taoshi and Jaina/Taoshi is exactly the same in the stage 3 scenario (They say something about being allies with the Shado-pan then Taoshi says they only have a common goal), every little detail is the same. It just feels extremely lazy when you look at the 5.1 stuff where the quests are entirely different and only intersect with one another when they make logical sense.
And with that, I am actually a bit worried about the 5.3 questing stuff. From what we seem to know so far it looks like the "quest campaign" in 5.3 is just a simple quest chain you can knock out in a couple of hours, and, based on the reward list for the Darkspear vendor the only two things I want personally is the Brawler's Guild item and the Pet. I can't see myself going past 2 weeks of doing the weekly quest when there doesn't appear to be an ongoing story line, a rep to max out, a long term item to grind for (like the 5.1 vendor pet or Skyshards for Lotus), or any real hook at all to keep someone going. I hope I am wrong and there is something there on 5.3 live, but from the ptr it looks like a very disappointing questing experience past day 1.
