/cry

[asonimie]

So can I confirm that I need to be doing the collection quests I run across? I'm still mucking around in Howling Fjord with my first 70+ group, so I'm not too far messed up if I need to start them back up.

Not wanting to hijack the thread, but to answer your question here goes.

It was my experience that somewhere around half the quests available were collection quests. Howling Fjord (and so far the Basin) have been exceptions to this, with Zul'Drak being the worst zone (virtually everything was a collection quest).

To give an example, I got a quest in Zul'Drak to collect 5 Drasilisk crystals. Ok, so I need 25 of them. Turns out though that you need to collect 5 rats in order to throw at the Crocs to make 'em well fed, in order to get the crystal, and since each is a player-specific drop rather than a group drop, that means 5 x 5 x 5, or 125 friggin' rats I had to collect, in order to get my 5 crystals. No wonder that while doing that, and collecting 50 mushrooms, I finished a nearly 2 hour session with an xp/hr rate of just 37k and a boredom factor way way higher than that.

I know that sounds like a lot of QQ, but I have really found the Northrend questing to be extremely anti-group, and if you go skipping collection quests, you'll be doing very few quests at all indeed.

This is wrong wrong wrong.

Here are the zones I've been to so far and gotten the quest achievements for:

Howling Fjord
Borean Tundra
Dragonblight
Grizzly Hills
Zul'drak

Zul'drak has by far the least amount of collection quests out of any of those zones - BY FAR. Fastest zone I've been in so far. The few collection quests there actually are in this zone go SUPER fast due to either having a 100% drop rate, or a small number of collections in a tight area. I've only skipped maybe 3 quests in zul'drak on my alts so far and in the other zones I skipped dozens.

Worst zone for collections is DEFINITELY grizzly hills. That zone has half the quests of borean tundra and took almost as long to complete because there were soooo many collections. Its a boring ass zone anyway but the collections make it twice as bad. Howling Fjord had a lot of collections too and wasn't a very fun zone. Borean Tundra and Dragonblight were my favorite "fun" zones so far, but for leveling speed Zul'drak has been the best.

I kinda disagree... as a 5x Shaman team that just finished Zul'Drak I will say that it was HORRIBLE compared to all other content so far. The problem is I needed to ding 76 before heading to Basin... so I ground it out. I found myself numerous times spending almost an hour to finish 1-2 paired collection quests. As for what I saw of Grizzly Hills, I agree with you. I walked around for about an hour talking to NPCs until I gathered there were only a handful of good group quests there - and pretty much skipped it.