Well, I caved and actually went out and leveled Jarsus to 86 via quests (and the experience I had gained from that Temple of the Jade Serpent run.) At this point, the only quests that appear available are two quests that involve talking to people to get them to fight me - which are either just straight-up bugged or are impossible to do because there are a million people there at the same time also trying to do it, and I guess you have to wait your turn/get put in a different phase...? The last is one that I just can't do because there are too many people. Amazingly, I actually think when this goes live it will be less stressful because there will be fewer people on the server.
Actually, my typical new-expansion habits are to play one of my new races/classes alternating with leveling Jarsus (it's a testament to how fun Blood Dps was as a leveling spec that I actually hit 80 on Oterro literally an hour before I did on Jarsus. Cataclysm's actually the first expansion where Jarsus hit the level cap first, even though he's been my main since mid-BC.) I'm still agonizing (maybe that's too strong a word) over how to handle my monk situation. I don't have a single female character among the 20 (before you judge me, about a quarter of those were just made to see Cataclysm revamped zones) I have, and somehow a kick-ass blonde chick (Buffy the Vampire Slayer?) who swills booze and mixes it up with the bad guys toe-to-toe seems pretty cool. This might be madness though, so don't be surprised if you see me doing as everyone else is doing and Brewmastering on a Panda-man.
Jade Forest: While I'll try to write in broad strokes, there are spoilers here in the strictest sense, so be forewarned.
So how is questing in the Jade Forest, you ask? Well, first I should say that this is from an Alliance perspective. Alliance starts on the southern end of the zone and has quite a few quests in that part that I imagine are not available to the Horde (your alliance with the Jinyu, for instance, involved fighting the Hozen, whereas the Horde will be allied with the Hozen and fight the Jinyu.) Anyway, at first there's a fairly straightforward direction for your questing, with a couple of off-shoot questlines that you can take or leave, but eventually you'll find Anduin and the two of you will cleanse a shrine and get your first whisperings of the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, which is the central zone of the continent and where the central "capitals" will be.
From there, you head to Dawn Blossom, a large town relatively close to the Temple of the Jade Serpent and basically in the center of the Jade Forest. From here, the questing really opens up. Now, I don't know if it's because of missing "breadcrumb" quests or just the fact that some of the quests are bugged, thus preventing me from going farther, but there seem to be a few quest chains that you just find if you go exploring, like fighting off a Mogu raid on a Cider orchard, or preventing some seriously bad mojo that a Mogu Assassin-Priest is working. At least where I am with questing, there seem to be entire towns with no quests in them, though this might be because of the quests I can't finish or they may just not have implemented them. All the story about the Jade Serpent Statue getting destroyed is missing as far as I can tell, though the sky above said statue looks awful Sha-like.
Jade Forest is quite cool, actually, and has a nice degree of variation. In the starting areas, it feels a bit more wild and untamed, especially a bog area where you fight Mist-monsters. As you get closer to the middle of the zone, however, you find many Pandaren settlements along with Mogu ruins. Interestingly, the zone's dungeon, Temple of the Jade Serpent, feels very much a part of a stable complex that spans a large portion of the zone. There's not really any hint of what's gone wrong in there, but that could just be some missing quest line that I'm missing for one reason or another.
As far as I know, the only other zone that's open is Valley of the Four Winds, which, along with Krasarang Wilds, is one of the two zones you can go into following Jade Forest. I've just scratched the surface of the Vot4W stuff, but it appears to be a fairly idyllic farmland.
Mechanic-wise, the quests are very nice. While there are of course the occasional "kill 8 of these guys, collect 10 of these things" quests, there are also some really cool ones, like a series of phased flashbacks as an elite SI:7 squad tells you what they've been up to since they crash landed, the highlight of which is a part where you provide sniper support for another member of the group.
Quest rewards are the one area where I'm actually a bit disappointed. You may have heard of this "dynamic reward" system. Even in the older content, quest rewards have now been restricted to stuff your class should be using, which is ok if you're a newbie that doesn't realize your paladin shouldn't be using that agility polearm. However, in Pandaria, any quest that rewards an item (except those that reward blue items) will only reward one option, depending on your spec. If you're a pure dps class or only ever play your soloing spec, that's fine, but as a tank who prefers to solo as Ret (especially since Ret is working out quite nicely if you ask me) so that things don't take forever to kill and I don't automatically aggro every enemy in a 20-yard radius (I don't like to kill-steal) it makes me feel like I have to switch specs every time I finish a quest (especially annoying because your talents get reset every time you switch specs right now on the beta.)
Admittedly, as someone who has almost all raid-finder gear or better, the quest rewards in Jade Forest are unlikely to have me replacing everything just yet. But what happens when I'm level 87, and that stuff is really starting to show its age? The point is that this is, I think, a matter of player choice. While it's sad not to have an incremental improvement (beyond simple stat upgrades) every level like the old talent system, I respect Blizzard's new talent and spec design. The talent choices in Mists are real choices, and not just "new or uninformed player traps." However, this new quest reward scheme is seriously problematic.
The solution, I think, is fairly simple. All they need to do is allow for you to choose any of the rewards your class can take, like they do for blue rewards. If they're still concerned that a level 85 player still can't figure out what kind of gear is good for their spec (and yes, these people do exist) you could just have some kind of indication that the appropriate piece is recommended.
I'll be curious to see how the zone knits together in its final form. You can certainly quest through it, and level up via quests. I believe, and it certainly feels this way, that they're trying to recapture more of the explorative feel you got in Wrath, and even Vanilla (though providing enough guidance to prevent the problem in Vanilla of showing up in a zone with no idea where to go.)
Obviously, a lot of this design is a reaction to the responses to Cataclysm. While the linear approach worked in some zones (Vashj'ir, Twilight Highlands) it could also feel restrictive (Uldum.) The difficulty now is to get over the Cataclysm mindset of "I know I'll do every quest in the zone, because I have to in order to finish the one quest chain," and instead prioritize the quest chains that you want to do, making peace with the fact that you can move on to the next zone without fully clearing every last quest in the last one.
I have no idea how much of the zone I missed due to the unfinished quests, so when I find out I'll try to say something more about it.
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