Questing in Mists

I've been in the beta now for a fairly long time. I don't really play it every day (in fact, I haven't played real-WoW in over a week - it's that end-of-expansion lull) because, after all, it's Beta, and all the progress I make is going to be erased once it ends. I've been leveling Jarsus (he's 88, half a level short of the current beta level cap.) The annoying thing is that it seems like either the Dungeon Finder isn't working or no one is testing the dungeons, because I don't even get a time estimate when I queue as a tank.

And of course, dungeons are where it's easiest to get a feel for a tanking spec.

So I've been confined to soloing (in Ret, because soloing in Prot remains kind of painful unless all you round up all 8 dudes you want to kill at once.) So, here's the interesting thing about questing in Mists of Pandaria: there are a lot of options. Like, I mean a LOT.

Wrath of the Lich King remains my favorite expansion, not just because I loved the setting and I thought the difficulty curve was just right (which puts me, at least among the more loudspoken members of the internet, in the minority. But then, I'm pretty sure Wrath was where WoW had its highest number of subscriptions, so they must have been doing something right...) but also because the questing (notably with the then-revolutionary implementation of phasing) felt very epic and personal. Wrath introduced the idea of building an entire zone around a single massive quest chain. Now, it didn't actually do that in any of the zones, but you had things like Upper Zul'drak, the pre-Wrathgate quest chain, or, of course, the massive Sons of Hodir chain, that were clearly the centerpieces of their respective zones.

Cataclysm took this concept to its logical extreme. All the top-level zones and many of the redesigned zones are composed of a single quest chain (ok, granted, Uldum is two, while Twilight Highlands and Deepholm give you a choice of the order in which you might do some of those quests.) The first time through, this is quite amazing, but what it leads to is having every single character go through basically all the same content. Being familiar with it will maybe make it easier, but it takes a lot of the fun and excitement out of leveling your alts.

So it's interesting to see what Mists is doing. To me, it kind of feels like a reconstruction of the original questing design: specifically, that it's all about being a wandering adventurer, exploring the world and helping out where you can. The new zones have overall feels, but not really defining stories. However, Mists improves on the formula quite a bit: In Vanilla, you'd find yourself getting really arbitrary quests that didn't feel motivated by much of a story (one of the most enraging quests I remember from that era was one you got from a guy in Stormwind's Mage Quarter that sent you all the way to the Charred Vale in Stonetalon Mountains. You go there, collect basilisk livers or something, go all the way back to Stormwind, and he gives you a wand. End of quest, no follow-up. You just went literally all the way across the world for a crappy green-quality wand.) In Mists, despite the lack of a single, monolithic chain that defines the entirety of a zone, there are many different quest chains, and many different hubs dotted around.

The point is, you don't have to do all of the quests in a zone to level through it. There is choice.

Now, I think this is primarily a positive. There are some very cool questing experiences (I had one involving an attempt to steal into the crypt of the Mogu emperor, which had lots of traps and eventually gets flooded with Zandalari soldiers) but you won't necessarily get sick of them because you can have your alts do different ones.

However, there are potential downsides: the other side of that coin is that you will miss things unless you're a total questing completionist. For example, the epic destruction of the Serpent Statue in Jade Forest, which is a major plot point, is something I have not experienced (admittedly, I was trying to clear every quest I could in Jade Forest back when it was the only zone open, but I was stuck on a few quests that were bugged - and in fact, some of the quests were probably not implemented either.)

The other thing is that you can easily get a full quest log. Cataclysm trained us to pick up every quest we saw - and usually that wouldn't be a problem, because you'd rarely have more than four quests to do at a time, given the linear nature of Cataclysm's quest flow. In Mists, however, you might get sent to, say, a Wise Man in the mountains, and along the path, you'll run into some Grummles (adorable Gophers/Sherpas) who give you a bunch of quests. Your instinct is probably to go do the Grummles' quests, but then you'll realize that they're sending you off on a totally different quest chain, and by the time you're done with it, you'll have probably run into some Shado-Pan people who will then have their own quest chain and if you keep doing everything everyone asks of you, you'll never meet the Wise Man at the top of the mountain.

Obviously, this is one of those things that will get easier as we get used to the quests there. If you're taking your fourth or fifth alt up through there, it'll be obvious which chains lead to what, but I know that on Jarsus, I'm going to really try to make sure I hit the important plot points, and that's going to be a bit tough.