1.) Kill 10 bears
2.) Loot 10 bones
3.) Repeat till you reach max level
4.) Jump to 1 if u’re about to start an alt
At first, it was an adventure. 4 expacs later it feels like a chore.
How to fix this? Simple (on paper at least).
1.) Add more puzzle quests (similar to Tortolan Seekers’)
2.) Add more Lore quests (i really liked the ‘burn the witch’ Drustvar questline)
3.) Add more quests that require us to ride griffons or control catapults or ride horses
4.) Add 1-3 man scenarios to exp (just like
the one introducing you to Legion, not Island Expedition bullsh!t)
5.) Add dungeon quests. I remember some Cata/MoP dungs had an NPC near the entrance offering basic tasks you could complete on-the-go.
And BTW no. Looms dont make it better. Exp buffs rn work more as a painkiller. You take them to avoid the painful quest grinding.
I definitely feel that questing – and also leveling – has erred increasingly too much toward grinding. It’s like Blizzard favors quantity over quality when it comes to this area.
It’s like someone has dictated that the leveling experience in an expansion has to take 30-50 hours and there must be a couple hundred World Quests, so the developers just stuff in as many quests as they need to in order to reach that number.
And I don’t like that.
Most quests are forgettable. The gameplay isn’t particularly interesting. And the story is usually wedged in and not detrimental to the main plot.
So personally I would prefer fewer quests that are of a higher quality, rather than many quests of a lower quality.
I don’t take advantage of that high quantity of World Quests that currently exists, so I feel like I’d be better off with fewer but better World Quests.
The same applies to the leveling experience.
Killing 10 bears and looting 10 bones isn’t linear, it’s just repetitive. Linear storytelling is a much better way to convey a narrative than, say, vanilla, when a quest would send you to another continent and then back again for some obscure reason.
I’d prefer to have multiple linear storylines running in zones than what we used to have, like jumping from one storyline to another then back again, on the fly. It was just a mishmash that confused you more than anything.
I’d rather they focused on immersing us in a gripping story, rather than trying to stretch them out as far as they can.
The legeion scenario wa sboring as hell tho and the fact it was 3 players doesnt matter because you never ever saw other players do it at all. The battle for the undercity is more fun but you still never see other people doing it
Also heirlooms are not the painkiller. they are the wound that makes leveling painful
How does something which helps levelling turn it painful? I can see it being painful if you like to level slowly but otherwise I’m a bit confused by what you said.
I would love to see more voiced quests personally especially for main quest line quests. Reading is okay and all but it takes up so much time during the questing process and is impossible to do if questing with a friend as you can’t expect them to stand and wait while you read.
I actually don’t agree that much on this. I think some of the side quests are amazing, often because they have a tiny piece of story that has it’s own charm, and opens up for your own imagination or future story lines. Did you do the one with the little girl in Drustvar? That’s one of the most memorable side quest in the guild by the looks of it. It is continuesly brought up in different situations within my guild.
My all time favourite is actually the one with the Scythe of Elune from vanilla. At the time it was nothing more than a side quest as far as I am aware(I might be wrong), but the Scythe suddenly returned with Legion, and then we got much more story to it. The Scythe was an important part of the lore, but like I said, I think it was nothing more than a side quest ingame originally. I’ve had several of these, where I just enjoy the tiny piece we get, then imagine it further, or acually get more of the story later.
None of this is going to solve the problem. I think Blizzard thinks it does, and they’ve tried to fix it so many times this way. WoW actually does have a fairly large variety of quests.
The reason why questing feels like a grind is because you’re just doing it to get small, insignificant gains to your stats. The sense of adventure has been taken out.
In order for questing to work, there must be an adventure when you go on a quest. That’s where the word “quest” comes from in the first place.
Ideally, quests give you some choice in how to tackle them. They move you into a new area of the map and show you some content, present a problem/challenge, and have you overcome it. This can involve long travels assuming that travel is interesting, and it must involve doing something that expands your horizons in some way. It must teach you about lore or characters or locations.
Questing also needs to be believeable in some sense. Your character should feel like a physical being in the world that goes and solves the problem other physical beings, or oneself of course, somehow.
Unfortunately, quests have turned into “follow the arrow without reading quest text”. And yes, “follow the arrow” is a really, really efficient way of questing, but it also skips everything that makes questing fun. You don’t need to read or listen to NPC’s, maybe you don’t even need to talk to them (how does your character know where the world quests are? How do you hear what the objective is? Yeah, it makes no sense!), and you don’t need to understand the context for action. Just kill 10 bears.
The problem is that Blizzard stopped creatively writing every nook and cranny of the world and instead tell one grand story and fill the world with collect 10 bunny ears without any context as to why the citizenry needs bunnyears. The game actively compels you to skip reading the context, as reading the context slows you down, and then your friends get to brag about the fact that they’re ahead of you or complain that they can’t play with you.
World of Warcraft went from a questing experience in which it wasn’t unreasonable to play for hundreds of hours and still have fun to one almost nobody likes and would rather skip over, and it did that while going from quests that are fundamentally “collect 6 spinarettes” to quests with set pieces and phasing and crazy stuff like that. It’s because our actions have lost their context and believeability.
I think one of the problems is that when you are questing in current content, so levelling 110-120, you are already considered to be a mighty champion. We have defeated the Burning Legion (twice). We have defeated Old Gods, Dragon Aspects, the Lich King… so why am I going to pick 10 flowers or kill 10 bears? If the writers want us to be epic heroes, then we need heroic quests to follow.
I agree with Jito, let’s have fewer quests which are more engaging and take longer to complete, but are more relevant to the world and to the characters. Put the simple kill quests in as side quests or dungeon quests, when we’re going to be doing that anyway.
The world is amazing and there is so much scope for plot lines, so many interesting characters. Give us good quests that feel worthwhile doing and are memorable, rather than steaming through them just to get to the end of ‘storyline’.
well, that’s the way fantasy levelling up games work and most people like it that way.
meh.
definitely meh as it makes everything so very linear, a thing you are dead set against.
meh.
yes because we need more afking and more complaining about being kicked by 2 people who join together.
meh. there are some quests in dungeons but youd get a huge amount of people complaining about being forced to do lalalalala.
for me, bfa is the least linear expansion wow ever released. Ive levelled 30 120s now and am working on the rest for a full roster of 50 max and I can tell you, its very easy to not repeat a questline from the last alt I did. Theres way more ways to level in bfa and a lot of it isn’t repeated.
I’d personally count TBC as least linear. To this day it has the most adventure friendly zones imo. Wotlk had some nice ones too. Except the quests wouldn’t be available if you hadn’t done some other ones first in certain cases.
Legion did a good job in letting you choose the sone to start in. But then had the story completely build into the zone.
MoP had a few fun zones that supported exploration. BFA is to new to comment on. I’d have to play it a few more times.
WoD: took a break during this time
Cata: the father of Wow-linearity
PvP should never be mandatory. You can always do the incursions which is a nice alternative imo, plenty of fighting going on there (depending on the incursion mind you).
I would rather the expac have been about something else but oh well. Still praying for a MoP 2.0 which adds a whole new subset of races/creatures to explore with.
I agree, but I think the whole notion of “mandatory” is where we’re going off the rails - doesn’t matter if it’s PvP or PvE for that matter.
BfA’s quest structure is extremely linear, and the only way that it isn’t is that you can pick one of 3 zones and one of 3 invasion points in any order you choose, but ultimately you have to beat it all to progress the story.
Is it too much to ask that some things are out of the way, hard, maybe a little weird or different, and are viable alternatives?
I honestly think that if I want to level by setting up a basecamp in Zuldazar and then gank the everliving daylights out of the horde, then that should be an option, but it’s not even though Blizzard specifically promised that it would be an option at BlizzCon as part of their reasoning for adding Warmode.
We just wanna explore the world and do stuff in it. Some of it is gonna be easy, some of it is gonna be hard. Some of it is gonna be easy to find and some of it is gonna be hard to find. Any time we go for this idea that there’s a linear path through all of it and it all must be done, we’ve made a mistake in my opinion.
Dungeon levelling my priest post-60 I was picking up 3-4 quests in each one that I don’t remember originally being there. Pretty sure some work has been done to ensure you can easily collect them even when using LFD. Also pretty convinced the finder does its best to give you a dungeon you haven’t done before, since I really didn’t repeat many and pretty much covered all of them up to 80.
That said…
Totally up for more Totolan puzzles. I actually enjoyed those
Vehicular quests are welcome
Solo instances are also good, especially if there are more than you need to level on and can therefore vary them across alts
I would like to see a quest prune, whereby the non-story quests are dumped. Quite often, I’ll pick up 4, and only 1 of them is actually advancing the zone plot, while the other 3 are “kill or collect X”. Those really could just go away, leaving us with the plot quests, and a reason to cover more zones during the levelling process. Far more zones than you need pre-100 at least, possibly later as well.
All of this is part of the problem in my opinion. This is not a good structure.
You’re just pulling up an interface and getting teleported into instances with conveniently placed NPC’s that make no sense as to how they can even be there, so you can pick them up.
Making a dungeon cool is all about the exposition. What is the dungeon, who lives there, why are they a threat, why do we need to stop them, what might be found within. We go around the world and we find characters who need us to do something in the dungeon.
How does it make sense to have a warrior just stand at the entrance of the instance? If that was a proper enemy fortress they’d surely have found him, swarmed him, and killed him long before you arrived.
This structure you describe completely kills the adventure in dungeons. At this point it’s just a bunch of objectives with no context that take place in a somewhat linear corridor. Is this what ever attracted you to delve into dungeons originally? I doubt it, but feel free to correct me. To the extent that you like this, I think you’ve just systematized and gamified the whole experience for yourself in the pursuit of a convenient gaming schedule and completely forgotten about the World of Warcraft.
The thing is i personally loved quests like forging the key to scholomance or getting the mallet of zul farrak both quests sent you around the world and felt like a proper quests.
I know most people like these new boring linear quests where you are the god commander of the universe but me personally i fancied being just a simple adventurer.
![:slight_smile:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")