World of Warcraft: Questing Self-Help Comments by Oli Welsh

Oh come on...Desolace isn't that bad... ;)

Sooooooooo Tempted to pick up my 46 Dwarf and carry him on, loved it while I was playing but just didn't have the free time to justify it.

Don't go to Desolace and...
- miss out on Expert Cooking if you're Horde
- miss out on Mauradon - although these days you'd be lucky to find a group for it
- miss out on Argent Dawn reputation and lore

Don't go to Desolace unless...
... you're on a PVP server and want to do 30-45 without hitting Stranglethorn Vale.

pointless

dropped back in after the recent patch to speed up leveling

since TBC, azeroth is a ghost land. You'll spend all your time getting to 58 ASAP, and you need not even bother going to more than 6 or 7 zones

wow is like an ever growing tower, as it gets higher and higher, theres less and less at the bottom levels, and all you're doing is climbing up empty and barren stairs, only to get to the top, and find theres another tower there, but this one requires you to walk in circles every day for 5 weeks

Mauradon is actually worth doing...and when I was playing I got some good items from that area...especially from the dyrad outside the horde village - one quest she gives you for The Underbog I think gets you a pretty swanky choice of items (for around that level at least).

Don't go to Desolace and...
- miss out on Expert Cooking if you're Horde (you only really need cooking on one character anyway)
- miss out on Mauradon - although these days you'd be lucky to find a group for it (it's not a very good dungeon and the loot/rewards aren't worth the hassle unless you're a rogue and want the thrash blade)
- miss out on Argent Dawn reputation and lore (who needs the rep? read wow wiki for the lore if you care)

-miss out on a huge, nigh-featureless zone full of mobs who love to aggro on you
-miss out on a huge, ugly zone with the flight point and inn in one corner, most of the horde quests a long run away from the inn and flight point, and most of the quests requiring you to spend ages travelling
-miss out on those bloody centaur quests.

Choose life! Not desolace.

I really do agree with what's written here.

The desire to game the system and level your characters as fast as possible really does defeat the point of the game.

Try to forget that you're slowly working your way up a massive skill spreadsheet and loot table, and you might just enjoy yourself!

The best thing about WoW really isn't the gameplay - it's the world in which the gameplay exists. Enjoy that, and you're really getting the most from WoW.

Did I miss something? What Argent Dawn lore and rep is in Desolace?

Been a long time since I was ther but i think Desolace is your first quest interaction with AD. Top left corner by a tower iirc?

i downloaded the quest helper addon, it takes the grind out of grinding and the fun out of the game. Seriously it tells you the route u need to go for all quests and you end up not reading the quest info just kill 10 of these retrieve this guys head. Turns you into a WOW zombie.

"Been a long time since I was ther but i think Desolace is your first quest interaction with AD. Top left corner by a tower iirc?"

Yes thats correct :)

If you want to level up in world of warcraft fast then download questhelper from

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/details/9...

Heh, got to agree with some people here - i'd much rather do Desolace than Fucking Stranglethorn Vale! I've had some of my best memories in Desolace - I do concede its probably more fun as Horde than Alliance though.

You know... rumour has it, Desolace is getter a Duskwallow style make over in the near future along with a couple of other areas that can fill entire level brackets.

But then how many times have Blizzard hinted at something which never comes true...

Well, thats just the way I used to play anyway. But a good read. I am just lucky I am not playing that game anymore for more then 2 years now. Don't bother asking me, why I even read that article. I am bored, that's why...

Funny. I have trialed 3 MMOs (SWG, WOW and EVE for the record) and never really found them fun. They were good for 2 days but then I found the repetition incredibly boring. I always wondered whether I was doing something wrong!

...So I read this article to see if I could work out what it was...

Aside for trying to do every quest, I did actually follow all of your other advice. I guess MMOs just are not for me. I will probably never understand how people can spend months playing them without getting bored.

I like point number 9. I tried so hard to do most of the quests there but I felt that it was too big to do without a mount and that the place was just dull.

-miss out on a huge, nigh-featureless zone full of mobs who love to aggro on you

Lol, have you played the rest of the game? Blizzard has made about 5 beautiful zones... and saturated the rest of the game with barren wastelands. Lets do a checklist (from the perspective of someone who has never played Alliance):

Durotar
The Barrens
Thousand Needles (ok, this one has some features, at least)
Tanaris
Silithus
Desolace
Badlands
Searing Gorge
Burning Steppes
Blasted Lands
Hellfire Peninsula
Netherstorm (so its a PURPLE barren wasteland)
Shadowmoon Valley

Blizzard are good at featureless... its a shame that it makes for some boring goddamn zones :(

For reference, my favourite zones are: Winterspring, Nagrand, Stranglethorn Vale (aesthetically!) and Ferelas.

How can you say Searing Gorge and Burning Steppes are featureless. Unless maybe you never played at 60 and never did any of the raids in brm and surrounding lorelol. There is plenty going on there though.

I didnt say "questless" or "loreless" though... my point was simply that they are aesthetically exactly the same as 80% of the rest of the zones, which gets kind of old... Shadowmoon Valley is just Burning Steppes at level 70.

"A long walk isn't a waste of time if you like the sights on the way..."

Are we talking about a real long walk or clicking on a screen?

I actually stopped playing WOW because of Desolace...if I'd only known then what I know now.

You've been warned - don't go there...

Good subtitle man :). Peter Sellers, classic. Now to read the article...

OK, super nice article :). Here is my take (expansion) on some of the points:

Point 3): There are certain chains that are worth it, and certain ones which aren't. Off the top of my head, the best chains are:

Westfall: the defias quest chains. Well written, not too difficult to complete, and end up with you running deadmines and killing van cleef. Good rewards, good XP, and basically a staple of levelling alliance side. Everyone you meet has probably done this at least once.

Darkshire: Every quest here is absolute gold. Well balanced, good stories, and some dark ghostly goodness! Make especially sure to do the embalmers quest, the Morbent Fel quest (the boss of Darkshire), Mor'Ladim, The story of jitters (the back story of darkshire), and especially The Legend of Stalvan. Stalvan has a lot of walking, but it's dark, and the pacing and writing is superb as you uncover the clues of who stalvan is, and the crime that he committed that haunts his restless soul. The rewards and the end are also good :)

Very little else made an impression on me until the level cap. Give em a shot.

Point 5): When monsters are 1-2 levels lower than you (i.e. still yellow, but you outlevel them) these quests are an xp goldmine. Do them. You can kill 50-60 of the buggers in 20 minutes or less. The more drops you need to get, the more regular the drop rate, and the less frustrating the quest is. 10 drops or more is ideal.

Point 6): http://wow.curse.com/downloads/details/9...
Probably the best mod i've ever had for WoW. It just points you in the direction you need to go, and off you trot. It even adjusts itself for when to go back to town, when to take a griff, and what to do when you get there. When you're questing with friends, you can see everyone's objectives together on your map so you know exactly what everyone is doing where. Super good.

Point 9): Never go to desolace.

Desolace is actually one of my favourite zones. It has a beautiful bleakness about it, and an all-pervasive sense of death/decay, plus everyone should visit the Kodo graveyard.

Ride through Desolace at night and it's one of the most silent, eerie places in the game.

The thing about Desolace is that unless you go via Feralas, not only is it hell to do on foot, you have to do one of the most boring walks in Azeroth via Stonetalon to get to it.

Having said that if you want to get the Scarlet Monastery quests then Desolace it is...

Don't tempt me back, devils.

And don't spend your entire WOW sessions with Thottbot open in a number window telling you how to do the quests before you've actually read the quest yourself

Write about something interesting like, I don't know, ANYTHING BUT WOW.

LightHeaded. Best addon ever.

Too true. I always hated the obsessive way of playing WoW, or any MMORPG for that matter. Instead, I'd use my rogue to do seriously hard red quests, often sneaking through an entire area without fighting once. It was very inefficient, but the sense of accomplishment was huge. And it was cool to be have Quest-reward daggers way WAY above my paygrade. I highly recommend the rogue for fun Questing in WoW.

Similarly, I never got above level 18 in EverQuest. I figured out I could make a whole lot of money buying bone-chips cheap in the newbie-areas and sell them at ridiculous prices to lazy hilh-level necromancers... So I became a full-time bonechip-dealer. It was silly, stupid...and fun!

Alot of the zones are just as bad as Desolace, anything west or south of the Barrens really.

This guide is aimed at people who have already played WoW once. Nobody who was new to the game would need to be told to take things slowly and enjoy the journey. When I first played WoW, the month it was released in Europe, I played it slowly because it was a new game and that's what you did with new videogames - enjoyed them.

Only the people who get obsessed with the game and its mechanics, or long-time players need to be told to take things slowly. But they can't. You only get to lose your WoW virginity once. You only get to watch a classic movie once for the first time. Everything after that is a faded glory.

My advice for new WoW players is this: Don't read forums. No matter how often people tell you to get this or that mod, or to play like this or that, ignore them. Resist. Because the instant you start playing like them you're not playing like you. You're playing a system, not you.

Be yourself.

Everytime I read one of these articles I'm tempted to whip out the credit card and resubscribe. Then I force myself to turn off the computer instead and walk away. I now have the credit card in hand and the mouse pointer hovering over the start button.

When I click that mouse will I hit Turn Off Computer or All Programs\World of Warcraft...?

Should I play or should I go? :)

Anyone having trouble questing, grinding or leveling in WoW needs to immediately kill themselves in the most painful way possible.