Nostalgia Shattered
If there is one thing playing these new alts in WoW has done, it is make me want Cataclysm more. I do not play alts often so I often forget how mind-numbing the old content can be. I think fondly back of leveling when I first started playing WoW and since the game was so new and fresh, everything seemed awesome. With each expansion, the questing content has gotten better and better.
Going back and playing the old content really makes me excited for when it is all destroyed. I am glad Blizzard optimized questing with each expansion. So many quests are so spread out with little to no reward. It takes me more time to run to the quest giver to get the quest than it actually takes to do the quest. Having to run from zone to zone just to talk to one person for a single quest is terrible design.
We hit level 23 last night and I was working on my "Call of Water" quest for my shaman. In this quest, you go from Thunderbluff or Orgrimmar to the central Barrens to the southern Barrens to Tarren Mill in the Eastern Kingdoms and back to the southern Barrens in Kalimdor and then to Ashenvale and back to the southern Barrens and then to Silverpine Forest in the Eastern Kingdoms and back to the southern Barrens and lastly back to the central Barrens. This is all for the ability to drop the water totem, a central skill of the class.
Having to take an hour and transition continents five times for one quest is terrible design, especially for a low level quest. I can understand having option epic questlines like this at the level caps. There are many leftover epic quests at 60 and 70 as well as some great ones at 80, but having a quest like this for an essential class ability at level 20 is ludicrous. I am glad they moved mounts to level 20 or else it would have been unbearable. I am hoping Cataclysm rewrites this quest to something along the lines of "go collect water from each Oasis in the Barrens, okay here is your totem". That is something more along the line of what a quest for that level should be.
One thing I have noticed, however, is that while the questing is incredibly boring and monotonous, it is still on par or better than most quests in any other triple-A MMO release recently. Burning Crusade did some great things with quests and Wrath of the Lich King just continued that to make questing more fun and enjoyable. I hope that the changes Cataclysm brings are sweeping and hit all these sore low level areas.
Bring on the beta already!