/cry

[sturat]

Wow.

Now I understand that people view this board differently but in my case let me explain my view of things.

I view this board kind of like a family, and the subset of that is that I view my posts like children. My children.

I create them, I nurture them, and I want to watch them blossom into the fullness of maturity and adulthood.

Then you guys come along and hijack the thread, or to continue the metaphor, you kidnap my children.

You grab them, in the dead of night while I'm not watching. You take them somewhere they were never meant to go and you do unspeakable things to them and when I realize what's happened it's too late and I barely recognize them any more.

Bastards.

Lol.

[Frosty]

You grab them, in the dead of night while I'm not watching. You take them somewhere they were never meant to go and you do unspeakable things to them and when I realize what's happened it's too late and I barely recognize them any more.

Why does this sound like a Lifetime movie to me???

OH, and if you want a real /cry... try leveling WITHOUT RAF!
Don't make me get out in the snow and start walking uphill both ways....barefoot...

[larifari]

@hachoo how u managed to be quick through Zul´drak, i mean the questline where u meet arthas at the end - it took hours for some xp...

[Hachoo]

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.

I want to update my response to this. When I responded before I had done just over half the Zul'drak quests. Now that I have finished the zone...the first half is GREAT. Very few collection quests and the ones that are there are super fast. The last half of the zone is almost nothing BUT collection quests, so in the end it evens out to a very slow zone. Though I will say the last 15 quests or so even though there were some collections still went by very fast. I now have the Zul'drak achievement and just have 3 quests to go to Gun'drak which should put me at 79 and then I will be off to Sholazar which will hopefully level me to 80

[HPB]

(Continuing on the Hi-jacked topic)

As a mere dual-boxer in Northrend (my nearest 5-group is only 65), I can say this about Zul'Drak. F@#& it. It almost killed me. I hated it so much. As soon as I gave up on that place and moved to Sholozar Basin, things got better. There's so many quests (I hardly touched Icecrown before I hit 80), why spend your time in a misserable little hole like Dul'Drak? The quests are terrible, the costumes/necklace are a pain, and dying is a regular occurance there (at least it was for me). Leveling there took forever, the xp was horrible. I had no fun there. Once I left, it was as if I were a dying bulb and suddenly spring arrived to renew me. Yeah. I'll NEVER go there again on any of my toons, not for a single, solitary quest.

[Hachoo]

LOL wow you really hated it. Aside from the fact that there were a lot of collection quests on the second half I actually liked the zone. It also had the arena which was super cake and tons of XP/great weapon reward. I don't remember any specific quests that were "REALLY bad", just that there were a lot of collections. Obviously with 5 characters I didn't die at all.

I had 0 issues with the costume/necklace quest(s). I have 3 keys that are bound on all 5 windows that I can drop quest items to and use them on all 5 characters at once, so I simply hit the key to re-wear the costume every 20 seconds or so and never had an issue.