The “Lack of Surplus” and the “Threat from the Sea” quests in Swamp of Sorrows are such amazing examples of quest design I can only explain them by assuming Alex Afrasiabi/Pat Nagle/Jeff Kaplan simply gave up halfway through and said “eh whatever…”
Lack of Surplus I requires you to kill Sawtooth Crocolisks for 8 Unprepared Sawtooth Flanks. Dropchance seems to be around 10-20%.
Lack of Surplus II requires you to collect 6 Sawtooth Snapper Claws from… Sawtooth Crocolisks. Dropchance also seems to be around 10-15%.
Threats from the Sea I requires you to kill 10 Marsh Murlocs, 10 Marsh Inkspewers and 10 Marsh Flesheaters.
Threats from the Sea II requires you to kill 10 Marsh Oracles and… 10 Marsh Inkspewers and 10 Marsh Flesheaters.
Of course those are only two examples, Horde players will more famously remember the amazing quest design of the Battle of Hillsbrad chain in Hillsbrad, requiring you to run across the zone more than 3 times to enter the same area over and over again to kill different mobs.
I just cant understand whatsoever how people can unironically say that the leveling and questing experience of Classic is so utterly superior when 85% of quests are thinly veiled grind invitations while the rest of them are usually cross-zone walking simulators.
I just cant wait to be 60.
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I have a 43 and a 37 and I’m still enjoying myself.
I reached 60 with two characters in 2006, and got four characters to 70 in TBC. I’ve tried multiple times to enjoy retail, from shortly after I quit in 2010, till just before Classic was launched, and I never even once hit 20. Retail levelling is horrendous.
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Eh what’s wrong with grind? I enjoy killing stuff.
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Honestly, for me, grinding is immersion-breaking. I dont play an omnicidal maniac literally slaughtering everything living in sight.
They are dog poo… but on the other hand… MMOs that came 15 years LATER have drastically more interesting quests?
No…
It is one aspect of MMOs that seems to refuse to evolve.
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But you’re an Undead Warlock…
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Quite a few zones got cool interesting stories to go with its quests in Cata. Redridge Mountains Rambo story, Westfall Murder Mystery and Silverpine Forest story of Forsaken vs. Gilneas come to mind.
Those quests are just there to help split your attention from the fact that to level, you need to kill a lot of mobs and at the end you will get a bit of bonus xp on top of what you killed.
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It mostly supostu create sense of the world and immersion. Incovinience enhace it and coviniece kills it. It also makes sense if you are send to zone to get some rageants then npc realize that he will also need few more herbs or something. Becouse npc failed to give you all tasks needed it gives npc more life abd again enhances worls feel more like world. In retail you are pretty much constantly remindes that you just play game.
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But the OP was talking mechanics not story… or at least that’s what I thought… If story he is speaking gazillion MMOs got good stories… for example SWTOR ( star wars old republic) is considered by most gold standard in that department.
But mechanic wise didn’t evolve much beyond what was found in vanilla wow (kill; deliver; escort etc…).
Which is mind boggling how premitive still MMOs are in that.
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I hate classic quests
Keep grinding mobs to level
Yeah the quest design is fantastic.
Just because there are a few quests like that in Swamp of Sorrows doesn’t change anything to that.
I believe the balance is healthy. Some quests to pick up and bring around stuff, some quests where you have to search for something (ofc Questie ruins this) and yes, some killing quests too. Because after a lot of searching and travelling you want to use those dark spells again!
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It’s not so much the quests themselves in my opinion, but rather the way you can quest in Classic that I find to be better than retail.
In Classic, you more free to do the quests you want to, as opposed to retail. In Classic, it’s you level that decides if you can start a quest / quest chain, where as in retail, it is more a matter of “have you done this block of quests, you can do the next”.
The worst example by far, was Mount Hyjal in Cataclysm. It is not that bad anymore, but that’s for me the difference. I can pick and choose far more freely in Classic.
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WoW is not an immersive game. It has so many immersion breaking things going for it. Neither Classic nor Retail is anything I would consider close to an immersive game.
Bad, montonous animations, stale, 1 dimensional NPCs with repetitive voice lines, simplistic inventory management are just a few examples of things that dont make this game immersive at all.
WoW is many things, but immersive is not one of them.
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Well you’re just wrong.
Lack of surplus asks you to kill two different kinds of crocolisks, weaker then stronger.
You repeated threat from the sea for no reward. You can do it over and over.
Nope, its not a repeatable quest. And yes, the meat is dropped by 2 croc types, the claws only by one. Still idiotic.
Yeah it is, you’re only rewarded once
If it were repeatable I could go there right now and do it again. I cant.