A Big Pile of Shit

Today I had a most excruciating experience when questing in the Badlands. I was following a quest called Unearthing the Truth and the story behind it told me that the lore guys was working overtime since it wasn’t very epic. Basically it said that there was a treasure in Badlands, and you should go find it. Talk to this guy, find a key from an Orc, and then find a chest.

The quest objective was exactly this:

From the Orc’s corpse, travel south to the Tomb of Kali’Amon. Search for the chest. When found, open it to reveal its secrets.

Sounds easy right? Travel south to this cave and find the chest in there. Well, the problem is that the cave was a PQ area. Like anyone who has played WAR knows, normal quests in PQ areas are a world of pain because mob’s respawn timers are set to what a group or warband would clear the place in. Enter solo and the mobs behind you will respawn before you kill the next. I don’t know how long time I spent searching that bloody cave, it felt like 2 hours but it could have been 20 minutes. A lot of space to search and with mobs respawning you didn’t have much time to look carefully.

After a time I just couldn’t take it anymore, the chest was not there for all I knew. The experience reminded me of a blog post I read a while ago at Bad Language where the profit : pain ratio was discussed. Basically how much crap can you take to get that reward? More crap usually means bigger reward but there is always a limit to what you can take.

This quest was at my limit. I was about to abandon it but I just couldn’t let it go so easily, I had spend so much time looking for it that I would forever wonder where that bloody chest actually was. So I went to WARDB and looked up the quest (something I normally never do) and scrolled down to the comments to see if anyone had the solution.

Chest is just outside of the cave

…

I ran outside, looked to my left and there it was. Imagine a sunbeam shining through the tree and illuminating the chest in a glow.

I carefully read the original quest objective again while silently grinding my teeth. It actually didn’t say that the chest was inside the cave, it just said I was to travel to the cave.

But seriously how many quest have we got up to this point that directed us to a location where a cave entrance was the area marked in red on the map. We go down the cave and find the stuff we are looking for, normally at the end of it. It has always been that way and now they threw this shit at me?

Quest designers are one bloody bunch of sadistic assholes.

I want their job.