Tobold's Blog
Monday, July 06, 2015
 
An esoteric question on WoW missions

Warlords of Draenor introduced a new offline element into World of Warcraft: Missions, where you send out your followers or since recently ships for hours. You need to select the right mix of skills of your followers (or equipment of your ships) for the challenges of the mission, and on success you are rewarded. Many missions only give experience for your followers/ships, but some give rewards to the player, like gold, apexis crystals, or even raid gear.

And here lies my problem: The missions that only give experience become useless after your followers / ships reach epic status. So I don't know if I should still do those missions that only give experience. What I don't know is whether doing experience missions alters the spawn time of the treasure missions. If I "clear" all experience missions, do I get new missions faster? If I stop doing experience missions, will I get stuck at some point with having only unfinished missions of that type and never get new treasure missions any more? As sending out followers / ships on missions costs resources, can I safely save those resources and ignore those missions?

Anybody know?

Comments:
I heard somewhere (I think wow insider) that out doesn't matter of you do them because eventually they will "expire" essentially and disappear from your mission list of you don't do them. No idea how accurate that is as I'm not playing WoW at the moment.
 
Completing missions has no effect on mission spawning, so you can ignore them.
However doing them provides salvage which is a good income source.
 
I don't bother with them. They became useless once the salvage Yard stopped dropping anything useful. The missions I care most about are the raid missions that drop 685 gear, and they still appear like clockwork.

So, I don't think it matters. I think the exp missions are just fillers that are the first to be kicked when a "real mission" appears.

The Shipyard, however, I think is slightly different. The "base mission list" is static and then some are replaced with the Shipyard's primary purpose, the legendary ring mission chain. There are a few bonus missions to give it a "minigame" feel, but I think it's primary purpose is to act as a resource and time sink for the legendary ring.
 
Follower missions expire, but ship missions doesn't. I wonder if ship missions affect respawns?
 
I did know that missions expire. But would I get a "replacement" quicker if I did the mission instead of waiting for the expiration, which is one or more days away?
 
XP rewards are useless once your followers/ships reach epic status, except they still reward salvage crates.

Up to you if you want to bother. I have hundreds of crates on each of my characters. It feels like having your DVR's storage 100% full of shows you really need to watch, but never get around to watching. I know I should sit down and spend 10 hours opening them, it would reward over 100k gold, but I just can't bring myself to do it. And THEY KEEP COMING! Terrible.

As far as I can tell, and I've done tens of thousands of follower missions across all my characters, they don't replenish faster when used.
 
For missions, this has only been an issue with 6.2. Prior to that, every 100+ mission was guaranteed a salvage box. Those paid about 15g each plus 1g for vendored enhancements and another 10-20g for rare epics. While not great gold per hour, at least I got paid for being impelled to send them all.

https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/34051a/latest_salvage_crate_analysis_sample_size_15000/

Salvage is no longer guaranteed and pays less. I am not sure the 6.2 current numbers, but assume not worth doing.
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The shipyard is the question - whether doing a useless mission will it free up a slot sooner. I have seen nothing credible on that. A Dev (in what I thought were some dumb comments) talked about being surprised people were going for 100% on ship missions. (Cause not wanting a ship sunk is surprising?) He said that if you failed the treasure mission, you could just retry. Which is different than missions where if you missed your cache chance it was 2 weeks until the next. So there is definitely a difference in paradigm between missions and SY.
 
I don't do any exp missions since the reduced drop rate of crates, this does not seem to have any influence on getting other types of missions.

Gold missions are pretty much spread about my characters and I do all of them. I can't see any hint about one char getting more or better ones, just now got the 1000g mission on a lv93 toon with 5 followers.
 
The missions for the followers yielding XP are useless unless you need to do X missions for an achievement or can give the XP to a follower. Note that perfecting your follower team will sometimes cause you to gear and level up a new follower. Even in 6.2 some very powerful, new followers were added.

The missions for the ships yielding XP will remain useful because you will not easily get 100% success missions. This adds suspense to the game, while if you fail the mission you can redo the mission. If you fail a mission, you may lose one or more ships which means you need to rebuild and -most likely- need to get it to rare and/or epic via XP gains.

The lesson is that under the hood there may be opportunities to use a seemingly useless feature. The game isn't there to tell you to use a feature which gains you nothing, the game allows you the freedom to make such a mistake.
 
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