There’s a great addon called Auto Item Start Quest which will automagically start most quests that result from picking up an item from a corpse. I highly recommend it.
I continue to maintain that old school WoW quest design was fundamentally based around funneling you from quest hub to quest hub, it just wasn’t very good at it due to unnecessary backtracking and quests that sent you randomly haring off across multiple zones long before you got anything to make travel faster, among other things. The new version is substantially more streamlined, and yes, that streamlining can remove some of the feel of an actual functioning world rather than a storyline. Which is unfortunate, but it’s a logical progression of the design. The only place where I really resent the tendency towards streamlining is in the dungeons. And I can absolutely appreciate -why- they’ve done what they did there, but where WoW’s zones more or less still feel like places, the dungeons feel like straight up theme park rides these days. I don’t think a single Burning Crusade or Wrath 5-man or raid dungeon feels like anything remotely like an actual structure, camp, dungeon, or other location where people would live, work, or plot the destruction of Azeroth. Just a bunch of rooms with a loose thematic connection with the boss that’s in them and maybe a few speedbump mobs along the way.
And I do miss the class-specific quests but I can see why they were pulled. Making you do lengthy quest chains for core class abilities was just not something most people were prepared to accept, much less making them too hard in places to solo - for guilded players, I suppose not as big a deal, but who’s going to want to help J. Random Warlock get their succubus? I suspect it’s also part of the steady homogenizing of class roles that’s been a natural consequence of trying to make raid class requirements less rigid.
I like it because I don’t get lost as easily (as opposed to, say, Scholomance or BRD). But at the same time…yeah, they might as well put giant arrows saying, “This way!”
I have mixed feelings about those. I loved crafting my paladin hammer (my first blue!), but then I hit that Cyclonian quest on my warrior and really had no idea how I was going to complete it, since it’s way too hard for the level where you get it. But I used to look forward to the class-specific quests whenever I would try a new class.
My absolute favorite class-specific quest was the rogue quest to learn Poisons. (I’d drop in a spoiler alert, but the quest chain is gone now, so…) You got a quest to sneak in an loot an item from a chest (which by itself was great because the guy who owned the chest was a much higher level than you, which forced you to really use your stealth abilities). You would end up getting the item, but getting caught by a slow-acting poison trap which would kill you in like…eight hours? 24 hours? I don’t remember.
So when you turn the item in to your class trainer, he notices the poison, and tells you who can cure it. Then that guy sends you on a quest to gather the items for the cure. And once you finally find the items and cure yourself, you get the Poisons ability. Genius!
Mordrak
3604
Escape from Durnehold or Swamp of Sorrows one are both more than just thematic hallway crawls. I wish they modeled more instances off the Caverns of Time model… not necessarily time travel, but have your characters participating in an event with a goal beyond kill X boss.
Karazhan felt like a pretty well designed place to me. Probably the best raid instance I’ve been in as far as atmosphere and layout. However, I haven’t really been in that many raid instances overall.
Edit: As a side note, they really need to do a touch up pass on the models/textures of the original races. They now pale in comparison (for the most part) to the ones added in TBC and Cataclysm.
Ah, good point, the Caverns of Time instances (Culling of Stratholme, also) mostly do have a pretty good sense of place. And Karazhan…is kind of borderline. It feels -sort- of like it could once have been Medivh’s tower, but it’s also functionally pretty linear in a way a real tower wouldn’t be.
An Earthern Ring Shaman NPC just said, “I fail to understand why they banned totemic cleansing. No one was ever in range, anyways”
So true. So true.
sinnick
3607
My favourite quest text so far:
[I]Keeper Taldros:
My concern at present is for the welfare of the bear cubs.
The fires drove the little once up the trees, where they’ve
gotten stuck. We’ve got to get those bears safely to the
ground!
Flying creatures frighten them, so you’ll have to climb the
trees yourself. Look for footholds at the trunks. Climb the
trees, grab the bear cubs and toss them - GENTLY - onto
the target here.
Nothing can go wrong with this plan.[/I]
I’ve played through most of the goblin quests and they are superior to the old starting zone quests. I’ve had to fight a couple of elite boss mobs, got a mount (race car) to ride for awhile, had a bunch of gimmick quests that were fun, and got transported from one quest hub to another via rockets and other methods. Yeah, it’s on rails but I had plenty of opportunities to stop and wander and grind mobs if that was what I was in the mood to do. I just chose not to.
It’s not really new. It’s similar to what Blizz did with the Death Knight starting experience. It’s their design philosophy now. They want to provide a guided, varied questing experience.
Twilight Highlands is … well, I think it just didn’t get the QA it needed.
Crucible of Carnage is bugging out constantly, two key quests in the zone (Aiming High and Something Stolen) are bugged, and there aren’t any flight paths contiguous to the zone?
This just makes me heave an exasperated sigh.
On the bright side, I’m “only” 1.15million exp to 85, and I have a guildie healer queueing for random dungeons with me, so the 40-minute wait should be reduced to around 10.
I’m honestly looking forward to seeing the Heroics / raids; I can tell you for sure that the Heroics are much, much harder than the Wrath ones were, because my guildies have thus far been foundering on them.
Ha, Cataclysm queuing highlights the role imbalances even worse than end-of-Wrath did.
Examples from last night:
1.)
DPS: 33 minutes.
Healer: 12 minutes.
Tank: 27 seconds (actually only took 5).
2.)
DPS: 30 minutes.
Healer: 6 minutes.
Tank: Instant.
Mordrak
3611
As DPS, I can live with a half hour. It’s better than waits I’ve had in the past. It’d be nice if we could all have 10 min queues… but I don’t think that’s going to happen unless tanking becomes super easy.
Blizzard really, really should have changed quest credit to be area-wide for a bunch of quests, like Samuelson and the CoC quests.
Imagine if CoC (a Ring of Blood style arena) allowed for everyone to get credit, regardless of what group or who tagged it… suddenly, instead of everyone fighting over it for hours while it bugs out, people work together and clear through it in no time.
Guild Wars 2 says they’re going to do something like this.
And there were public quests in Warhammer, of course.
Athryn
3614
The weird part is, this is something that Lich King actually did really well.
*** Worgen Story Spoilers ***
Really? All that work in that cool area just to be dumped in my least favorite area of Azeroth hanging out with my least favorite race? I kind of expected the story to take me out of Gilneas and into Silverpine and Hillsbarad. I’ve vowed to stick to the “real” progression intended no matter what but is the fate of Worgen really to be grafted on to the Night Elf story from about level 13 on? Ugh.
Well the new linearity has drawbacks too. Near the end (at the end?) of the Vash’Jir quest line and I can’t do any more of it, because the quest “Defending the Rift” is broken. This includes, as it turns out, finding the entrance to Throne of the Tides.
If things are going to be linearly gated through phased entry points, it becomes far more important to catch the bugs in those quests. Which, apparently, hasn’t happened here.
I’m not sure you need any quest to find ToT. I went dungeon locating the other day and just ran to the big whirlpool and got sucked down to find the entrance just fine. Of course, I had to look up where it was exactly using wowhead or the like… but I didn’t need a quest to enable me finding it.
Uh, how would a tower not be linear? I guess you could put in more than one stairway but that would just be such a giant waste of space.
Karazhan was almost a TARDISS.
After completing all the quests in the zone, my impression of Hyjal was that it was mostly just more of the same with only a small number of unique, interesting quests and cool environments. On the other hand, Vashj’ir is a completely new experience. I’m about 60-some quests into the zone (just finished the section inside the giant turtle…thing), and I’ve been repeatedly amazed at how much fun it is. Aside from possibly being the best looking zone Blizzard has created, the underwater motif provides new gameplay possibilities because of three usable dimensions and eliminating the breath mechanic and movement speed reduction while swimming. I also like that (thus far) there’s been a consistent narrative to the quests: get shipwrecked, rescue survivors, investigate why the naga are abducting people, figure out the relationship between the naga and the Twilight Cultists, etc. Hyjal had something similar going on where players have to re-awaken three ancients to fight back the forces of Ragnaros, but it didn’t come together for me like the story in Vashj’ir is.
Apparently my opinion about the two starting 80-82 zones isn’t shared by everyone, though. I mentioned in guild chat last night how much better I thought Vashj’ir was than Hyjal, and almost everyone online at the time disagreed. For those of you here who have done both zones, which do you think is better?
