Thursday, February 15, 2007

Selecting quests

I'm slowly approaching level 69, and I still haven't done all the quests in Terokkar Forest, and haven't even started yet with the quests in Nagrand, Blade's Edge, Shadowmoon Valley and Netherstorm. From that experience I can say that there are more than enough quests in the Burning Crusade. Even if you did nothing but quests and never had a rest xp bonus, doing all the quests would get you from 60 to 70. Add the rest bonus and the xp you gain from other activities, like going to instances, and there are basically too many quests. While I'm not dissatisfied with my systematic approach of trying to do them all, the better approach if you just want to level and have fun is to be more selective.

I am thinking about that, because I still would like to level up my warrior, currently level 61, once I reached level 70 with my priest. And for him, of course, I don't want to do all the quests again. I'd rather do a "best of" selection, doing enough quests to get me to 70, but selecting those which are the most fun, or where I can use the quest reward. Unfortunately doing that selection is hard.

In game I can only rely on my memory to remember which quests were boring or annoying, and abandon them. But my memory isn't good enough to remember all quest rewards, especially since with my priest I obviously would consider plate armor a "bad" quest reward, while the warrior might see it as good reward. And not all quest rewards are obvious in the game, sometimes you first have to do a series of low-paying prerequisite quests before being allowed to access the final quest in the series which gives a very good reward.

So I have to rely on places like Thottbot or Allakhazam to check quest series and rewards. And even there it isn't easy, because you'll have to click through all the quests in one zone to find those where the reward is good for your class and level. What I would need is a quest search engine where I could search for e.g. all quests giving plate armor rewards, or all quests giving items with a +str bonus. And I haven't found a good way to do that yet. Goblin Workshop has an equipment list, where you can list for example all plate gloves in order of quality, and see if there is one which is better than what you are wearing which happens to be a quest reward. But in that case you need to return to the other sites to trace back all the prerequisite quests.

The other alternative would be to just start playing. If I come across a quest that seems annoying, I could just check the web for what the final rewards of that quest are, and skip it if the rewards aren't to my liking. I guess most people don't do a systematic quest selection, but just do the quests they come across, and miss the quests that happen to be not on their path. I just wonder if there is a better way.

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