returning to boxing...quest vs instancing question

[TheBigBB]

In my honest opinion.

Questing wins.

For two reasons.

Reason one is that you can get kick arse xp if you hit it hard over a few sessions. look up your quests on say wowhead, or use addons such as questhelper so you dont waste time. Big chains are big...and juicy xp runs that are usually easy as all hell.

Reason two is that you will make an absolute crapload of cash without even trying. It adds up crazy fast. If you are dirt poor and need to gear your crew in crafted items as soon as you hit 80 then this is the way.

Of course, @ 80 you can run through the same zones if you dont clear them. And make a crazy amount. If questing is your thing.

I found instancing somewhat slower, and became very repetitive quite quickly.

I quested my shaman from 72-80 without touching an instance. Very, very quickly.
My lock crew are almost at 80 and ran from 75-78 in about two evenings of effort. Plus each made 1k gold in that time just off quest rewards. And that was just doing the 100 or so quests in Dragonblight.

I agree. Also, you get more reputations, advance the areas (phasing), get a better feel for the world, and earn more gold and items. You definitely get richer from doing quests, even as a boxer. In an instance you need 5 drops to equal one quest reward, and you split the gold. Quests can give 50G-150G per turn in when you add it up times five. Just avoid some of the collection quests, or check the followups online to see if it's worth it. Even if you do a collection, though, you still get 5x the reward from it. Do instances to break up the monotony of quests, and quests to break up the monotony of instances.

[Tonuss]

Also, some instance quests are easy to complete. The quest to bring back weapons from Utgarde Keep can be completed without facing a single boss, just clearing the trash (which provides very nice exp, itself). The quest reward is pretty big (more than 40,000 exp, ~4 gold, and a blue neck item), and should not take very long to complete, though you may need to reset the instance in order to avoid the first boss. Or you can kill the first boss and complete another quest with similar rewards. There is a similar quest in the Nexus, where you clear some trash and grab a book or some item on the ground.

[sqeaky4100]

Questing:

1) It's more fun. You meet people, environments change, you're not doing the same thing over and over.

2) It's more easy.

3) It's faster ( in my opinion. )... If you've gone through the game a few times, you get used to quests and what not. I've gone through it like 3-4 times, and rarely have to look anything up on thottbot.

4) With the new update, you can now loot with just a press of a key... So collection quests arnt as tedious.

My advice: Just "aquire" Joana's Guide. By legal means or not. And then follow it to the tee. Skip collection quests that are absurd ( ie: ones that require like 50 items per character ) but other than that, you'll level fast, and won't have to think too much about "where do I go next" type stuff.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

It is worth mentioning that you're going to probably have to do the quests eventually anyway to open up the dailies hubs. Bottom line, though, is what's your tolerance for monotony? If you're OK with farming instances a bajillion times and doing a bunch of quests that are gray to you, you'll make more money instancing to 80 and then doing all the quests for straight cash. If you're like me and have an aversion to having "Killed Prince Keleseth 500 times on normal mode" as an achievement, just quest to 80 and then do whatever feels fun. I hit 80 in Sholazar or Zuldrak on my last two groups to 80, and always end up having enough for epic flying mounts shortly after I get to Icecrown. Then I usually end up making enough from the rest of icecrown to buy everyone their epic crafted weapons and a piece or two of epic crafted gear. Dailies for a week or two usually have me in every epic that's worth getting from crafters and by then I'm well into farming the easy heroics or whatever else catches my fancy.

[Nepida]

I just started up after a long break myself. Pre-wotlk I did some questing but I mostly leveled in instances (especially 62-70). This time I'm probably going to do a mix. I've almost finished borean quests and have run Nexus twice. I need to fix up my healing macros though, because Keri is a bitch. I'll probably do the prereqs for UK then hit that up a few times to see how the XP goes. Its just so annoying to travel from Nexus to UK :/

[Slats]

I'm just starting up again too and so far I've ordered some new hardware for my machine and have setup my 4 RAF Accounts to create some Shaman.

I have a decently geared Protection Paladin as my main so I was wondering if instance boosting through TBC is faster or if questing still wins here? I was thinking in Northrend I might drop down to just the 4 Shaman and do my questing and then throw the Paladin in to run instances to either break things up/getting ganked or to do the dungeon quests.

Sorry if I'm derailing your thread a bit here Zanthor - just seemed an appropriate place.

[Niley]

questing>instances, just the pure factor of "boringness" here.
I have 17 toons between 70-80, i did few teams, almost all grinded through instances, maybe for that reason i don't want to do it again. Right now i'm leveling five locks that are almost level 40(no raf), and I will do instance once or twice for a quest or to try to get that one elusive drop, but no more instance grinding. Quests are actually fun if You read them, i found that out after playing wow from day 2 of release. In fact i have so much fun questing on the locks, I would rather not do anything else in wow than play on them o.O
If you reallllllly want to grind i would suggest getting to 75, starting the arena event in zd, getting to the fish dude(once you get there you will know what i mean), killing him, dropping quest and killing him again, with 5 toons its right around 3-4k exp per kill per toon, takes 45s for each kill, at 77 move to the icecrown arean, and farm the vrykul guy for even better effect, i did that for a friend, he had no rested, and we took him from 78 3/4 to 80 in 3 hours.
I heard of some people grinding the re-spawning mobs in one of the strating zones(vrykul+wolves), I had never done that so someone else would have to chime in.

[Tonuss]

The one thing instances have over outdoors questing is that the experience-per-mob is huge. I'm not sure how this works out on a per-time basis, but my level 73 group gets something like 466-498 experience (rested) per mob of similar levels. When I went to The Nexus, the trash mobs gave 4960-5228 experience (rested) each. That's better than 10 times the amount per mob.

Still, that needs to be balanced against quest experience, since a lot of quests involve 5-15 minutes of killing mobs and then you turn in for 20,000+ experience. With the ability to stack quests you can go from very slow experience gain as you kill mobs while you quest, to a sudden burst of 100,000-150,000 experience as you turn the quests in one after another.

[Catamer]

Pre-WOLK both can be fun, instances and questing.

post WoLK... now you run into the trouble that if you run say UK 50 times to get to level 80 you are going to be so sick if it would won't be able to enter it without throwing up.

I did a nice mixture of questing and instances with my 5x pally team just because the pally team kicked-a so well in instances that could pretty much do any instance first time through.
I seem to be doing a little more questing with my warlock/priest/bear team, they don't quite put out the DPS the pally team did ( too much aoe and the bear looses aggro so I have to tone it back )
I guess it just depends on what's fun for you. I'm personally kind of sick of UK after all of my heroic attempts at it.

[Niley]

50 times

50 times? thats not even close to what you need to grind to get to 80. Instance grinding is very tedious, not fun at all.