From what I've done in Howling Fjord and Dragonblight so far as alliance, it's been about 45% kill quests, 25% collection quests, 20% Go harpoon surfing/Ride a siege tank/Ride a dragon and blow up ghouls, and 10% holy crap this is just awesome quests.

As you get higher up in levels it seems that a much larger proportion of quests are not your standard kill quests (a lot of vehicle quests especially). I'm thinking of dual boxing to level up my gather char on my husband's account, and I'm wondering how well that's going to work with those types of quests.

For those in the beta, how many quests involve killing 'named mob X'? Also, if there are, have they improved the respawn rate of these mobs?

My biggest frustration in TBC was the slew of quests where you had to kill a named mob, everyone was out to get him, and even if grouped you'd still end up just waiting around because the respawn timers were so long.

Can you define what a "vehicle" quest is? Is it just a quest where you ride something and throw bombs/shoot stuff/look at stuff/etc?

I know that if you do the Sunwell bombing daily grouped up, the entire party gets credited for 1 person's kills. But I don't know if the same thing applies for WotLK quests. Anyone in beta want to chime in?

About the only time party members do not get credit for stuff is involving quest loot drops (and even then most items will drop in duplicate for all members of your party). So as long as it doesn't involve picking up loot, everyone in your party will receive credit.

It's pretty much self explanatory. You hop in a vehicle (from Frost Wyrms to Flight Machines to Cannons) and use unique abilities (Frost Breath, Machine Guns, Reckoning Bombs (lol)) to fulfill an objective (blowing up stuff usually). They're quite fun and usually pretty easy to learn.

So you can think of it as a "free reign bombing quest".

Also, some of them drop clickie-to-everyone items, a la the Ogri'la prereqs.

If you are on a PVP server, a greater challenge than doing the quests will be getting them; at least in borean tundra, the lions share of your quests are in neutral quest hubs, none of which have guards. The opposite faction can jump you the moment your gryphon drops you off and camp you with complete impunity.

This doesn't sound like a great design decision for those of us who are on PvP realms with large population imbalances. Obviously they've tried to design Wintergrasp to counteract this, so it strikes me as a little strange that they would allow the imbalance to have such a great effect in the open world.

As I recall, this was also the subject of much angst and pre-TBC wailing and gnashing of teeth because Hellfire Peninsula was a single quest zone for both factions. Most PVP realms reported that people were too busy doing quests and levelling when TBC came out to bother griefing one another. It wasn't until the first 70s got their flying mounts and dive bombing became available that you saw reports that the ambushes had begun.

With the exception of the Blasted Lands Dark Portal, quests designed to provoke combat (burn the seige equipment >_<) and disputes over Zeth'Gor ownership and mining nodes, there was a pretty amazing spontanious "silent" agreement that starting a war in Hellfire wasn't worthwhile.

Even after the initial "rush" of new content, no zone in TBC ever developed a quarter of the reputation for mandatory brutality that Stranglethorn Vale had. Ring of Blood is probably the worst, but, again, it's of a structure (and in a zone) that is designed to produce conflict.

Old school Stranglethorn really is unchallenged to this date. Nothing really compares to an area where people bringing their alts through often made a conscious decision to level elsewhere, and that you swam down the rivers underwater and down the coast because you were almost certainly going to be killed and camped if you were on land, That may sound like a bit of "We had to walk ten miles uphill both ways through six feet of snow" but it was actually some of the more intense, oddly enjoyable parts of WoW. Unlike Nagrand/Halaa It wasn't hard at all to start one hell of a fight in Stranglethorn.

I think that part of the issue is that for Stranglethorn leveling (perhaps L30-42 or so?) there are other zone options to level in, namely Dustwallow, Desolace, Badlands, Arathi Highlands, etc. But for BC zones, there really is no choice. You pretty much have to take the zones in the order they are in to maximize your questing.

For instance, a toon pretty much has to go through Hellfire and grab the quest reward gear, or they're going to get slaughtered by Zangarmarsh mobs (unless you already had T1-2 equivalent gear). This process repeats itself until the end of BEM, where you have a choice of going to the Netherstorm or Shadowmoon.

Also, Nagrand is just a retarded design. Nobody cares about PvPing in Halaa just because there's nothing of real worth. Some blue PvP gear and a minor buff? Very underwhelming.


I think that a lot of these issues are addressed in Lake Wintergrasp, although time will tell. There seems to be multiple ways to benefit your team, even for tanks. Although, I hope Blizzard is open to modifying Wintergrasp pvp if it turns out to be a failure - Warhammer's big-scale pvp is quite appealing to a lot of people, especially after the AV nerfs that turned it from a 4-day game to a 15 minute game.

On the topic of leveling, is it worthwhile to just dungeon-grind to 80? How is the time to exp ratio compared to questing, assumming there is many players after the limited amount of mobs + ganking.

It will be slower then just questing, however, your gonna be better off in the rep department, and you can go back and do the quests for a big cash advantage @80.

The few group quests I've done (kill named elites) respawn pretty quick, prob in a minute or two. The non-elites respawn crazy fast. At least in Dragonblight. I had to kill one of them twice to get back out the door of the hut he was in. A few also have "items" to summon a mob.

At 75, I still haven't done an instance that gives any rep. The purchasable tabards (at Friendly with the main rep factions) give you rep with your chosen faction in any level 80 instance. As I understood it, the rep grinds were supposed to be at 80 with level 80 dungeons, plus daily quests. Some of the dailies are accessible earlier, though-- you come across them through normal questing.

Please correct me if I'm wrong on this, but questing seems faster, it's where the only rep I've seen so far is, and besides that, they're worth doing for a number of other reasons. I finished Dragonblight today, and, yeah. Do those quests.

Talking about the linearity of BC zones, how do the new 'parallel starting zones' work out? Specifically, I've been wondering about two things:

- Are Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord really 2 distinct, alternative choices for levelling to ~72? In other words, do you really have to make that choice, or are quests actually sending you back and forth.

- If the zones really are parallel, how does that work with any potential instance-related questlines? Say I'm levelling in Borean Tundra, and I want to run Utgarde Keep. Do I have to go there without any background story or quests?

Yes. You can go between them via boat (technically a turtle) which goes via Dragonblight, but it's a pain.

Some instances have no direct questlines - you just get the Utgarde Keep quests outside the place for instance, while the Nexus has a couple of chain quests leading up to it. (not entirely sure - I haven't been in BT aside from running Nexus, but someone in a group had some quests from chains).

Quests do not send you back and forth between Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord. You don't get sent between just about any other two zones, for that matter - there's the occasional "go introduce yourself to XY in Z" quest to tell you where to level next, but that's the extent of the overlap. The higher level zones do build on the storylines from previous zones, they just don't have explicit quest requirements from earlier on.

All of Nexus' quests are in Coldarra, which is a small subzone inside Borean Tundra. Horde-side, there is one Utgarde Keep quest that you don't get from inside the instance and two from literally inside. If you're in Howling Fjord, though, you're mostly dealing with Vyrkul - Borean Tundra seems to be more "classic Scourge" along with the DEHTA chain and Coldarra, but I haven't leveled there, so take that with a grain of salt.

Coldarra is a bit frustrating lore/timeline-wise for gameplay reasons.

You get the Coldarra flight path automatically so when the dragon at Amber Ledge finally offers you a flight to Coldarra after briefing you thoroughly on the situation there, you can have finished all the place's quests already.

The Nexus instance itself reveals the conclusion to one of the main Coldarra quest lines, which leads there.

Also, Horde side there's one quest to Utgarde Keep that requires a Howling Fjords quest line - the rest can just be picked up inside the instance.

I was wondering if anyone knew how the developers have handled "no high armor leather" items for beartanks. I've heard some talk back&forth but not really seen anything solid.

How they handled it.