songster

So be social - join the party. When you rock up at the end of the line, talk to people. By and large you'll get an invite. It's amazing how fast queues clear when five people get quest credit for every kill.


You, and others like you, are the reason for the queues you despise. Berk.

 

Arakan

I didn't state that I never partied. Just stated the situations. Whenever there were horde around I tried to group of course. I was merely stating the queues. My server appeared to have primarily Alliance waiting at those spots.

Those spots will be crowded no matter what at this time. If I can help out other hordies by grouping, I do. It's the 3-4 minute wait each spawn that makes it a irritating thing for me.

 

Tel

So go do a different quest and check again on the way back? From experience (having levelled a DK I was right in the middle of the zerg at times in Northrend, rather than ahead of it like most here) I'd suggest that you're overstating the issue.

I play on probably the most overpopulated realm in Europe, and can count on one hand the number of times that I was forced to wait for spawns of named mobs. On the other hand, as a 'exciting new DK' I probably got invited alot more than 'generic hunter x' so maybe I have a biased view on it.

Personally I levelled in...

55-61 Azeroth (epl/wpl)
61-64 Hellfire
64-66 Zangarmarsh
66-68 Terrokar
68-70 Nagrand
70-72 Tundra
72-74 Fjord
74-75 Various instances (I'd forgotten they existed)
75-77 Grizzly Hills
77-78 Dragonblight (I saved it for when I knew my motivation would be waning, as it's such a lore filled zone it got me raring to go again)
78-79 Basin
79-80 Icecrown

The difference between quests in Azeroth, Outlands and Northrend is frankly breath taking.

Azeroth has a large number of 'go here do x' 'run back to hand in' 'go back to same place, do y' style quests. These are generally laid out in chains, so you end up doing 'circuits' to do a number of them at once.

Outlands modifies this somewhat, and has lots of quests from a central hub that send you too a specific area to complete, then you come back to the hub, hand in and get another 4 or 5 that send you to another area to do them all.

Northrend takes this a step further and has the quest hubs located in these specific areas. So you'll go to one of fjords quest hubs, and instead of getting 5 quests that send you to the gnome encapment area to complete, then coming back and getting some more, you'll get one quest that sends you there, then 10-15 quests from there that direct you around that area, then one that sends you back to the central hub or another 'side hub' to continue.

Overall I like the way Northrend Q's have been laid out, and feel Blizzard have done a good job of spreading out the population to avoid overcrowding.

 

Kaelem

Just about every group quest I've tried, except for The Assassination of Harold Lane, was simple to solo (and Harold required a health potion and a pop back to regular caster form to throw a few heals at myself). Each had just below 10K health, and I could have simply left my treants to do the job if I didn't need to do a little damage to claim the loot and/or kill. Harold had something in the area of 56k health, but the quest item knocked off about 1.3 of that before I went nuts with Force of Nature, Strarfall, FF, and the usual Moonkin spam. I spent the first few days in Howling Fjord asking for groups before I finally got it through my head that they weren't elite, and they had MAYBE 10% more health than a standard spawn. I seriously just pop Force of Nature and Starfall, and deal with the resulting aggro with Barkskin and Hurricane.

I don't know if Blizzard will change this eventually, having perhaps left these quests easy to facilitate easier leveling early in Wrath's release, or if they seriously intended these quests to be a challenge.

 

Akka

If you're trying to maximize the amount of XP gained by doing and finishing as many quests in one time, I can understand why you would find the quest design irritating.
But honestly, on a RP/narrative point of view, it's much better this way. You're much more involved in the situation, you feel like it takes enough time, travel and hero-work to be a credible "adventure", and events happens at a more believable rate.
Huge quests hubs are efficient, but they detract from immersion (and clearly feel much more "gamey"/"min-maxing"), because everything is done in one swoop, not giving time/pace to feel the events developping.

So far, I found the quests quite interesting (except for the boring Gnome stuff in the Tundra that felt a bit out of place, but then I never liked gnomes), there is only two black points.

- I'm a bit worried about the easiness, as many. I know that Naxx is supposed to be easy and entry-level, and I totally agree with this vision. But considering there is already one guild on my server which has cleared Naxx 10, and two others that are close to have done it (none of them having killed KJ pre-3.0), I'm a bit worried that the difficulty level is a bit too low even for an entry-raid. As a consequence, I'm a bit afraid that the next raid instance will be, on the contrary, too difficult (especially in comparison to Naxx). I'm a bit wary of Blizzard's habits of overcompensating.

- Instances are REALLY, REALLY too short. Azjol is stunningly so. I've a hard time immersing myself into a dungeon-dwelling adventure when it takes only 20 minutes, 5 of them being a dragged-on boss fight. And I'm not exagerrating.
There is huge potential in the LK instances, especially in terms of lore, design (as disgustingly short as Azjol is, the design is phenomenal and original) graphics. But it's really wasted when a supposed whole subterrean kingdom/intricate dungeon/whatever, is barely two rooms, five trashes and three bosses. Definitely lacks an epic feeling, and feels more like a simple group quest.
Blizzard said they were aiming for the 30-mn format instance, but I fail to see how it's a good design in any way, except if you only want to maximize badges.


Kaelem : actually, all elite from the Fjord and Tundra have roughly 25-28 k for "2-men groups", and 55 k for "three-men groups", and all are easily solotable for a TBC-epic-geared character.
But the elite in Dragonblight and beyond are quite a step up from this, and really require a group (or at least a partner).

If violence doesn't solve your problem...
... you simply haven't been violent enough !

 

Kaelem

Sorry, you're right, Harold was listed as recommend for a 3-man group. I still managed to solo him in TBC greens, being unguilded for almost all of TBC (due to inactivity, and a server change), I haven't done anything more than perhaps six instances, including 5 while leveling and mag's lair when I was bored one day, and I heard a PUG go out.

I haven't gotten into Dragonblight yet, and I thank you for the heads-up, you just saved me countless decimations. I've been taking my time on the leveling and enjoying the content. It's been very fun so far.

I was just making the point that it seemed like an oversight. Reading a little further into Blizzard's plans for the entry level instances, it feels like it makes sense now.

 

dukes

This is entirely dependent on class/spec. I've soloed pretty much every elite quest up to Storm Peaks, with the exceptions of two in Grizzly Hills, the Grizzly Hills arena, Zul Drak Arena, and the Dragonblight end parts of things like the Mammoth chain (although I didn't try the dragonblight end parts, a group happened to be waiting there as I showed up). It's certainly worth noting that virtually every elite other than named ones isn't immune to roots - I've actually soloed some of the Icecrown elite (group) quests through extensive Roots abuse.

I'm really not sure what class/spec other than a resto or balance druid would be able to manage this though, except possibly the other hybrids.

 

Proudmoore

I'm sorry, but WHAT THE HELL has killing Kil'Jaeden got to do with (being able to) level to 80 fast and poke the first, easiest raid instance of the expansion? I really hope I'm misunderstanding you.

I was really surprised at the difference between elites in the Tundra and Dragonblight. Both were easily soloable as both Protection and Holy, but there are level 80 elites wandering around with similar or less health than some of the small-group elite questmobs.

 

Taja

Frostmages have no problems either with rootable mobs. The first group quests that got me in trouble was the dragon in that emerald area, and warlord wanton or something like that.

 

◊ Melbuframa

It's Wanton Warlord. It was the first group elite quest i could not solo as an Aff lock, all the rest are soloable with use of SL/Dl/Haunt and maybe a potion/Hstone.

Personally I really like the way the quest and quest hubs are setup currently. I recently went back and did most of the old world quests for Loremaster and with the exception of the quests in Dustswallow marsh the old system was crap. TBC was not as bad some areas better then others.

What I really like about wrath is that the zones themselves are really big but efficient because of the many hubs. Most zones have 3-4 Flight point/hubs with plenty of quests at each. As well as the random smaller hubs in the zone. Each hub is almost self contained and normally involves a quest that sends you to the next Hub. If you happen to use a mod like Questhelper or Carbonite the quests from a hub really do overlap each other, often times 3-4 can be done by killing the same mobs for drops/kills along with looting scraps from the ground.

Camping of Named mobs is an issue, however on my server simply doing a /s Invite? solves the issue 90% of the time as people will gladly invite you, kill the mob and then go their separate ways. However the respawn time on them is great at ~5 min compared to the hours it took old world mobs to repop. I was lvl 70 in Kara before I got to kill Boglash in zanger...

 

bbartlog

Towards the end of TBC (and especially after 3.0.2), I noticed that the trend in instance runs was to just ignore mob CC, use AOE threat, and heal through the mob damage without trying to incapacitate any of them. At the time I assumed this was only possible because most of the people who I was running instances with had had a long time to gear up and thus the tank mitigation was more than what the instances were tuned for.

Having done about 20 instance runs now in Northrend (though only up through Violet Hold), I see that it's not just a gear thing. On maybe two of these runs I've seen some limited use of Polymorph - the rest it's been the same AOE tank and kill everything.
I personally don't like this. I realize this may be a deliberate design decision by Blizzard, either to make tanking easier and thus more accessible to more people, or else to make group composition less relevant. But if CC is really unnecessary it removes an interesting element of execution that was previously present in instance runs.
My question is whether those who have run the higher level instances (Halls of Lightning and Stone, Utgarde Pinnacle, Oculus) see any increase in difficulty or pull size to the point where CC is once again needed, or in a similar vein whether the mobs in the Heroic instances are buffed to the point where we will again see a greater use of Poly/Sap/Shackle/Trap and so on.

 

• Emolate

This may be an artifact from Blizzard wanting tanking to be easier and more approachable off-spec. They said they wanted to allow people to tank things even if they weren't spec'ed for outright tanking (re: Retribution Paladins, Arms/Fury Warriors with a shield), which I think would probably require more CC.

If you have a Prot Warrior, Prot Paladin, Feral Tank, you're not going to need much CC. But if you have someone tossing on a Shield for a 5-man, it is more important.

 

◊ Melbuframa

Heroics are harder to zerg/AOE at the moment. However if we were in T9 im sure it could be done. Gear imbalance plays a lot into it, they instances are tuned for those with ONLY quests rewards/greens. It’s much harder to Zerg/AOE instances in a group of people who don’t have any T6 gear for example.

 

mmartinx

I think the only dud layout quest I've had so far is the ley lines one in Dragonblight. It brings back memories of the horde quest in Arathi running back and forth in between Hammerfell and Stormgarde 4-5 times for a single quest.

 

Soul

Venomspite was the most poorly laid out quest hub I've found with the need to run back and forth several times to complete the quests. And yes, what mmartinx about the memories of Arathi Highlands. Those horses the Onslaught Knights ride... they aren't even epic mounts!

 

Mideci

Well, I think Fjord is a disaster to be honest. The body of water with the sheer cliff walls and the single bridge too far north? Bad bad memories of Azshara for navigability. The only saving graces in that zone are the fort and the islands in the southwest, which offered hub-like gains. The rest of the time, I was getting ready to gouge my eyes out. I should've left and moved on, but I got caught up in finishing the zone.

Tundra has nothing so remarkably flawed, other than the "if you get summoned to Nexus you can't leave Coldarra unless you opened the Amber Ledge fp" problem.

Dragonblight was much better in hub design, altho, again, the in-out to Wintergarde Keep is an unnecessary zig-zag that is a game-designer indulgence. In fact, too much of Wrath is terrain that is downright unpleasant to navigate, even if it's pretty to look at. And, um, whoever decided to make the zones gigantic when one of the great features of TBC was the relatively compact zones should be asked to clean out their desk and go work for Warhammer.

I join the chorus of hating the "do one quest and illogically several others become available." It's one thing when the first one connects to others in a story. In many cases, it simply causes random NPCs to suddenly make quests available. Again, I prefer TBC.

Bottom line, leveling in Wrath appears to be a tad faster than TBC -- either than or we'll all much more sophisticated about it. But it's a lot more tedious.

And above i remarked, mockingly, about the removal of the cold-weather flying stuff. Well having done the Sons of Hodir stuff now. Sorry, but, without some kind of help from friends or indication you needed to do it, no one would ever find that stuff or care about it. Yes, jumping between flying dragons was cool. Between that and the battle for Undercity, we have two early winners in the quest sweepstakes. But the Sons questline is convoluted and about as logical as trying to build a house on a tropical island out of ice blocks. How you'd ever know that advancing the multiple quest lines would crack open a series of dailies that would phase the world so it would look entirely different so you could get shoulder enchants is beyond me at least.

Can we jump on the flying dragons again, though?

 

Ktharsis

There is an NPC at the base in Coldarra that will teleport you back to Amber Ledge whether or not you have the flight path. There is, of course, no obvious way for people to figure this out without clicking on the NPCs, but it's there. I'm pretty sure I ran across this on day 1 of release.

 

Darian_TruBlade

Personally, I found the Fjord breathtaking, but perhaps that's due in part to being Horde rather than Alliance. On that note, having an Alliance hub situated directly on the most obvious path into Utgarde Keep is mildly annoying. The Fjord is a slower leveling experience. The presence of the Keep in the center of the zone forces travel to move around rather than straight through, and there are 30% fewer quests available. While the slightly greater distances and less direct travel routes slow leveling, it also makes the zone feel much bigger.

The Tundra is, in comparison, a lot less interesting geographically until you get far away from Warsong Hold. The quest hubs are definitely more compact than the Fjord's. The Tundra also feels less unified in theme. Whereas in the Fjord almost everything was closely related to the presence of the Vrykul, with a smattering of side quests, the Tundra is much more varied. While more clearly showcasing the new style of quest hubs, it feels a lot more like the BC zones for how unrelated everything is.

The new style of hubs is, I think, a big improvement on BC questing. With how Blizzard has placed the hubs and their scope I really feel I get a better chance to explore and familiarize myself with the zone. It's nearly impossible to avoid the exploring achievements because of the ground the quests cover. Then again, I haven't started questing outside of the starting zones yet, so that may change.

"A man's IQ, yearly income, sexual prowess, ingenuity, physical appearance and generally every other aspect of his character can be condensed down to four digits: his Arena rating." - Zechsy [70 Rogue - Skullcrusher (EU) - 10/23/2007]

 

Kumar

I and most of my guild mates have had the exact opposite experience. Howling Fjord was found to be the best starting area, the Tanuka lore starts best in this zone for Horde and the quest lines surrounding that are awesome.

I personally liked Tundra, but many guild mates did not like questing there after HF. As such I think its an important route to take to 80.

I don't know how it works for Alliance, but Dragonblight was once again a favorite amongst the guild. Horde has two main hubs, one on either side of the "zig-zag". I found myself levelling the fastest in Dragonblight (get the quest that allows you to summon a drake and don't turn it in). The zone sizes are good, even through it increases flying time, I would much rather have bigger lands that helps Blizzard identify sub-areas of the maps properly and designate questing and lore expereinces properly.

I don't think its illogical. Usually, the one quest involves helping out the quest hub people in some way, and then it is sort of a recognition of the "help" that more people assign you tasks to do. Many times they are also designed so the new quests you get are paired together for an area, which is fine by me.

I found questing in Wrath enjoyable, questing in TBC was not enjoyable most of the times. As per the Storm Peaks storyline, it flows through normally when you do the quests. I don't know how the quest line for Sons of Hadir is convuluted. I thought it was fanstastic, yes lots of flying, but it helps build the story up much better. The big complaint in TBC was that Blizzard didn't concentrate on lore enough especially through the quests and dungeons. They have made a drastic improvement in that regards for Wrath. I would much rather enjoy questing even if it means more travel than not enjoy it.

 

crimsonsentinel

If you dont care about lore, then getting a quest guide (one with a script) pretty much guarantees that you'll only be visiting an area once unless absolutely necessary.

 

Rangifer

I didn't have any issues with Venomspite. The way I did the quests in New Hearthglen was to do all the quests I had, then ride a warhorse back. Grab the follow ups, do them, then ride another horse back. Do it again, and I think I made one more trip. Each trip, I completed several quests, which is the same that I could do in one area from any other quest hub. If you were to make trips specifically for the horses, then I can imagine that it would seem tedious.

I liked the Tundra more, possibly because I did it first. I found the ride from Winterhoof to Giants' Run rather long, even with a quest hub in the middle. Also, I didn't get a breadcrumb quest to The Ancient Lift/Kamagua (may have somehow missed it).

 

Fqubed

You missed it, at least for alliance there is a pointer

For horde at least HF is quite well done in my opinion, just work around it counterclockwise. While this is the stupid leveling on autopilot there are some dents in the world, or in instances where you get stuck/ have to suicide out.

 

• Nisu

What item is this? Aside from the Wyrmrest daily that despawns if you get too far and can't be resummoned, I don't recall any other rideable drakes in the area from playing through it on beta. WoWhead offers no clues either, thought it's entirely possible my searching was bad (I'm not even entirely sure what to look for).

 

Docjowles

Having just done it last night, I'd guess he means On Ruby Wings - Quest - World of Warcraft. I didn't try flying all over the zone, though.

 

pope master

Here's why I hate the Fjord: way too many clicking quests. It seems like a good 75% of the quests don't actually involve killing stuff. And when you are killing stuff, its because you had to click something first. Mob XP is a huge contribution to the leveling process and HF seems to be lacking in that severly. Granted, I am a prot pally trying to AOE grind/quest, but even in a group situation there is just a ton of stuff you can't really do yourself and instead have to click individually.

In summary: I don't like clicking stuff. Let me kill it instead.