It’s a given that most people hate the dailies. Blizzard obviously will not be changing course at this point in time with dailies so you might as well get used to them. However, you can do things to make dailies less painful and even fun to a degree. The key is organization and psychology.
What I mean by organization and psychology is that you need to structure your dailies in such a way that you find more pleasant in terms of ordering, priority and perception. The first thing to realize is that any recurring type of situation is going to feel horrible after a certain point. When you get to that point, you can do one of two things: 1) quit cold turkey; or 2) change the way you think about the situation.
In my case, I did both. I decided to stop playing World of Warcraft in a dedicated fashion for over two months. Instead, I moved towards Diablo 3, which refreshed my enthusiasm once I returned to World of Warcraft. Just because you pay $15/month does not mean you’re obligated to log in every day. That’s part of the mental trap you can get into with a game like this.
Second, I decided that once my time freed up I would go back and hit World of Warcraft hard again. I’m not playing 24/7 but I am focused on progressing my Paladin. My carrot on the stick at the moment is getting enough gear and preparing for patch 5.2, most notably the upcoming ilvl 486 gear requirements. Part of that involves using dailies as a stepping stone to get reputation gear.
Another thing I did was stopped worrying about the grindiness of these quests and just head straight in whenever I can. I am going to make a point for myself to do no more than the weekly Valor Point cap as I see little (outside of reputation and some gold) to gain by doing it every day. In this manner, I’m not forcing myself to do every single daily every day.
Next, I’m combining my strategy of using dailies for Valor Point capping along with doing LFR for Valor Points as I gear up. Currently, I can access all of LFR and just doing dailies and 3 LFRs up to this point, I’m pretty close to capping for this week. If I finished both remaining LFRs, I would hit the weekly Valor Point cap. In the case of the Vaults part 2, since I really don’t need anything from there, it’s just better for me to skip it entirely. I can do Heart of Fear part 2 and make an attempt to get a little more gear, but just in terms of Valor Points, I feel that there’s no reason to use that for that purpose.
So now, I have roughly 55 points needed to cap for the week. What can I do? If you look at the daily quest structure, there’s quite a bit of options. I’m mostly likely going to choose the Dominance Offensive as they’re new and have the best gear potentially. Since I won’t completely cap with them, I’ll still have some freedom to choose another hub or two. So I’ll probably go with the Klaxxi. Either way, I have some nice freedom in selecting my dailies.
The point in all of this is that I’m pre-planning how I will approach dailies and valor point capping. The good thing is that I realize that I’m almost completely capped and that it’s Thursday morning (my server is Oceanic so the reset time is much later). So that still leaves me most of Thursday, Friday and the weekend for other things. In short, this is simply time management that I’m doing with regards to dailies.
I did invest all my time up front in attempting to maximize as many dailies as I could towards the beginning of the week. However, at times I was selective with certain dailies. For instance, I find quite a few of the Shado Pan dailies to be horrid. The gear really isn’t great so I can ignore the days in which I choose to do dailies with them. I’m sure if I didn’t, I would cap even earlier with regards to Valor Points.
Also, I started structuring my dailies in a certain manner for a given day. This to me is the key in making dailies a lot more fun. The way I’m doing them is starting off with a fun one (say the Order of the Serpent Cloud) then moving into a necessary one (Dominance Offensive). I’ll go and check Townlonge Steppes to see what Shado Pan dailies are available. If they aren’t too bad, I’ll give them a go. But if they’re annoying, I’ll skip them and move onto the August Celestials, which can be reasonable. After that, I switch to the Tillers as I find them to be generally fun and then back to The Klaxxi, Golden Lotus and I’ll finish up with the Anglers.
So if you see the pattern I’m using here, I’m going from fun to necessary/grindy back to semi-interesting/fun, back to grindy and end on relaxing/fun. In the past, I would start with the Golden Lotus and I started to realize that it’s the worst faction to start with just because it can be long and at times frustrating. However, if I get into a mental grove with my routine, I’ll tolerate doing them. I use the valor point weekly cap as a way to motivate myself. Also, I’ll look at my gold to see how much I’ve made. You’ll realize quickly that your gold will skyrocket fairly quickly as you continue to plow through dailies.
Again, the thing you need to take away from this aspect of the game is that this is a mental battle and the way you overcome it is by changing your perception of the situation.
One other key that I have not mentioned is that you really should find a group in doing dailies. I firmly believe that any game that is repetitive will have that sense mitigated in a group setting. After all, this game is an MMORPG so you might as well take advantage of that aspect.