“Hey guys, I’M BACK”
What follows isn’t always a fanfare of trumpets for the officers of that guild.
Return of the Mixed Blessing
WQ: Grizzly Hills Stink
I recently wrote some gushing praise on Wrath questing–about how Blizzard finally has it figured out, how it’s great fun, blah blah blah. All that was before my wife and I moved into the Grizzly Hills.
Now, I’m eating my words.
What a massive comedown this zone is after Dragonblight!
Let’s run down really quickly the change in tone and content from the previous zone to this one:
Dragonblight
- ride siege machines
- rescue villagers from an undead-ridden city on a snow gryphon
- fight dragons from dragonback
- subvert the lieutenants of Naxxramas
- pal around with the leader of the Emerald Dream
- invade a horde city alongside your faction leaders
Grizzly Hills
- grind elk meats with a horrible drop rate
- grind bear flanks with a horrible drop rate
- grind wolves
- grind troll mojo with a horrible drop rate, do it five times in a row, with only the location of the troll camp changing each time
- grind some herbs because some random npc stubbed his foot and needs foot balm
- grind the same wolves again for someone else
- travel all over the zone by horseback because there are only two flight points (poorly located)
- double back constantly because different quest hubs target the same areas
Basically, everything I said in my previous post on quest quality was undone in this zone.
Admittedly, I’m not interested at all in the pvp quests, so maybe I’m missing the point. Are those quests any good? More importantly, are they so good that they redeem the rest of the zone?
I’m so glad to be moving on to Zul’Drak. I’m going to skip the Grizzly Hills entirely on my alts.
WQ: Better Questing!
The bread-and-butter of leveling, questing, is better than ever in Wrath. Questing is more fun from both from a narrative and mechanical perspective.
The narratives are stronger. A scourge-ravaged village where many people have been lost, where you ultimately rally the people to flush the zombies out. Some animal activists work against overzealous animal hunters, you start off helping trapped animals, learning about the hunters, and eventually leading an attack to stop their operation. A gnome encampment trying to learn what happened to their lost people and how the missing are connected to the growing pollution. They’re like short stories that you play out in the WoW universe. In original and TBC, you’d have a mix of good story progression with ones that seemed tangential or designed to be filler. A much higher proportion of the quests are tied to these short stories. There’s setup, there’s a cycle of activity and continuation of story, and finally a conclusion with perhaps a leader to the next chapter. And this story usually ties into the overall theme of the zone, or the neighboring quests.
The mechanics of actually doing a quest are the same–there are collection quests, delivery quests, smack enemies quests, and some others. It’s the conditions surrounding these quests that has improved. Most quest hubs have neighboring regions where those quests are performed, and now a quest chain logically progresses within that region with little random leaps to other parts of the world. No more wondering if you’re going to be back in the same location for a different quest. My wife and I used to tour the entire zone upon entry, picking up absolutely every quest in the fear that two seemingly unrelated hubs were going to ask us to perform a task in the same location; it’s not fun when the Smelly Yeti Extinction Society ask you to kill ten smelly yeti and then two sessions later, the Aromatic Leather Craftymakers ask you to collect ten smelly yeti hides. No more of that, from what I’ve seen. Now we just come upon a quest hub and do what we like.
Both of these points are subtle, but clearly Blizzard has put a lot of effort into improving the quality of quests. I’m really enjoying them.
Improving Inscription
My main is a holy priest and has always been a straight gatherer. I liked the gold. When I learned that Scribes made books, my fate was sealed. Inscription Ho!
It’s early in the young life of Inscription, and like Jewelcrafting and every other crafting profession, it has a barebones feel at the outset. There’s one point in particular that’s giving me grief as I work my way up to the highest levels, and I feel like it’s easy to fix.
WQ: Alliance Skinning Tip
If you have an Alliance Skinning alt, park it in Valiance Hold (Borean) and spend 20 minutes a day skinning the flying Scourged Flamespitter just outside your front door. It’s a nearly mandatory quest so there are always people there, and those players nearly always leave their mobs unskinned. Free money, piles of it!
Don’t just lurk nearby while people kill the mobs, though. If you’re not busy skinning, go ahead and help kill some of the mobs that someone else has tagged. You’ll feel good, and the faster the mobs die, the more you have to skin. Good for them, good for you.
What’s more, those mobs also happen to be the best mobs in the zone as far as skinning goes. Before you know it, you’ll have a couple of stacks of Borean Leather. (Don’t be freaked out by the scraps; it comes so fast that they turn into real stacks soon enough).
Enjoy!