Questing

[Theotherone]

So this weekend I made an effort to get my Horde DK to level 80 - she's (yes a female orc) been an on going work in progress for just short of 2 years. In the interim, I leveled at least 5 Alliance alts on my Alliance server. Anyway in grinding through Northend this weekend going from 74-80, I got to thinking about questing and what could improve it in MoP.

I think the number one thing Blizz could do is bring back variety. The linear quest model is great for ease, but it makes for shallow stories. Through Northend, I alternate between dungeons and questing (6 times for Halls of Stone yesterday, I wanted to gouge my eye out with a pencil at the end) and I realized that the variety of the story lines was much better in TBC and WoLK than Cata.

It seems in Northend, you had choices of story lines to pursue; in fact you could get to 80 without even pursuing some story lines; of if you didn't quest to the end of the story line, you could miss some great events - Wrathgate comes to mind. In taking my other 8 85s through Northend, I never seemed to fail to find some quest line I never knew existed; or never realized how it ended.

Bringing the 8 through Cata, it's all the same story line. For example in Uldum you do the main quest line and you can branch off to Harrison Jones, if you' like but after that - not much going on. I forget which story line Gnomeaggedon comes off of, maybe it's a tanget. But still compared to WoLK and TBC, Cata was very sterile. Deepholm, I've never done the Explorer's League quest line, but that's the only tangent to the main quest line; and frankly, after running the complete story to get the Therazine rep, I just wanted to get the hell out of Dodge by that point.

I'm hoping in MoP they keep the questing from being too much of run here, then run to the other end of the world, then run back (I'm looking at you Thorim in the Temple of Storms); but also that they give us more questing variety.

It really is fun to find a new story line when you're running, like the 5th alt through.

[Martie]

I think they did an awesome job at quest design in Cataclysm. At least the first time I levelled an 85.

The second 85 was less enjoyable, too much the same, and I noticed how hard it is to quest with a friend unless you started the zone together.

After doing a few more 85's, I decided that the whole "one long quest line per zone" thing is nice and allows for good story telling, but that it's also restricting - you have little choice in what you are going to do, and that's a shame. The quests themselves had deliciously few long pointless travels, though. I hope they'll transfer to a system where there's more branching in the quest lines, but keep a large overarcing story for each zone - I really liked the dwarf wedding story, for example, but I would have liked to have seen some branching off at certain points in the story. Perhaps they could have let each branch lead up to a daily quest as a reward.

[Granbr]

Yes, I'm still gettin impress when doing quests, just did the 1k needles and it's awesome!

[Airowird]

Having just (re-)done the entire Loremaster achievement (only STV left), I can agree that the Cataclysm zones and thus most of the revamped 1-60 areas are really a giant quest line with small branches. It's pretty nice for doing them as 'normal' character but with heirlooms/rested you'll probably be wanting to skip every 3rd zone unless you wish to never see the fruits of your labor in the area.
It's even worse with RAF, I did several chars with a friend to 15 and we simply decided to do dungeons, boring as it might be, because we simply outlevel quests by the time we're halfway through a zone. (Only bonus was probably that our DKs were 62 by the time we finished the starting area, so directly into tBC instances!)

tBC had a lot of hubs, but you could easily skip one, making it easier and if you have heirlooms, you could have a change of scenery once in a while.
Northrend basicly had one or a few quest chains per hub, Cataclysm has made it a few chains per zone. I sincerely hope that in MoP they will make a large quest chain that takes you through the zone, but with enough 'indepenant' smaller hub-related chains so you can still skip the main line and not be completely screwed on leveling. Say 50/50 on main/sidetrack quests.

[Theotherone]

I think I got the most from questing with my first three toons; that's not to say I didn't discover new quest lines in Northend on some of the later ones; but the first three was where I looking at the story more. The later ones it was a matter of get them done. However, the revamped world added a bit of novelty to the questing; I especially enjoyed the undead quest line (I took a priest to 44, then deleted her in favor of my dwarf shammy) and look forward to doing it again on my Horde server.

I think MoP having its own continent will be a good thing, like Northend and Outland; one issue may be it's only 5 levels so how many quests can you have? Hopefully the story will be more immersive; that helps a lot with questing.

No quest beats "The Day Deathwing Came" that may be the greatest quest ever - then again "Welcome to the Machine" is Awesome: "Twinkles NOOOOOOOO".

[Tipton]

They've already said in MoP their going to improve Questing in a couple of ways:

* No flying mounts till max level
* More Quest Choices (I think they mentioned about going either North or South to start questing in one of the Zones)
* Contiguous quest zones

Hopefully this should fix it for me. I much preferred the TBC style of multiple quest hubs. In Wrath they streamlined this to make it easy to pick-up all the quests and in Cataclysm they streamlined it far far to much. Yup, Cataclysm went a bit to much into the streamlining mode.

The other issue was the questing phase was far to short, lasting about 1/3 the time of TBC and Wrath. OK, 5 less levels, but this is no excuse for less content - after all the x-pacs costs the same.

[CarrieWeir]

I think they did an awesome job at quest design in Cataclysm.

Totally agree! I even get excited now when I recall my first questing. They are so impressing.

[Uskdray]

They've already said in MoP their going to improve Questing in a couple of ways:

* No flying mounts till max level

This sounds good for me.