The View From Down Here

Cutting down the largest tree in the forest with a herring

The more astute readers of this site will have realised that a second armory profile has appeared in the sidebar. Druziraa was the very first character I created to tank, long before Namthe was even considered, let alone created, and before even the Burning Crusade was launched. It was the heady days of patch 2.0, it looked like druids might actually be excellent tanks (Dead Code Elimination even ran Zul’Gurub with a druid main tank). Of course, eventually the Burning Crusade arrived, and I went back to my main, leaving the poor druid at level 34, forgotten and gathering dust. By the time I came to level a tank, it was becoming increasingly obvious that bear tanks would cut it for a lot of content, but warriors just had it easier.

And now? Once I reach 80, it’s my intention to play a healing character, to see how the other side lives. In the meantime, though, having played through much of the levelling and questing content of the original World of Warcraft, Burning Crusade and now Lich King, I can see some differences in how quests are implemented but in many ways they’re fundamentally the same.

In the Burning Crusade, quests were very much a continuation of the tradition started in classic WoW – go out and kill a certain number of mobs. Unfortunately, inflation kicks in and eventually you get to requirements to kill silly numbers of creatures, like fifty ogres (The Twin Clefts of Nagrand, I’m looking at you). Things have changed in Lich King. The most I’ve had to kill for any single quest is twenty creatures, something of a step down. So, Lich King has significantly improved the quest to killing ratio. Or has it?

Sure, there are lots less of the “Kill everything stone dead” type quests, but what of it? We’re killing nearly as many things, but instead we’re fetching items that have a 100% drop rate, or finding things that are strewn across the area. Sure, there are many more interesting quests, like the vehicle quests but it just feels like a bit of a distraction from the exact same grind we had before. Borean Tundra in particular felt like this, though I can’t really explain why. Superficial differences are all that seperate the new quests from the old, with the exception of the vehicle “gimmick” quests.

In an effort to make the levelling process interesting again I’ve turned to something else. By speccing resto and running dungeons, I’m seeing a different way to level that may or may not be what I’m looking for. I’ll report back on my experiences in a few days.