Drysc weighs in on questing
Player Tychlona of Kul Tiras made a fair point in a forum post when she noted that it sometimes gets a little annoying doing "collection" quests where it seems to take hours to collect what you need, Be it Gray Bear Tongues or Helboar Meat. I'd say that most of us can likely feel her pain on that measure. Drysc answered her later in the thread with some of his own insight into the process of questing and dealing with various types of quests. His point that sometimes seeing that "5/30 Windroc" notice in your quest log can make a quest feel like a bit of grind is very understandable, but I have to counter that seeing that "8/10 Monstrous Crawler Leg" in your quest log and knowing you've already killed 30 mobs without those last 2 legs appearing can feel just as grinding.
He says a few more interesting things that may shine some light on Blizzard's questing philosophy, which I'll discuss after the jump.
For example, He also points out that variety in quest types is needed to keep things from getting too boring, and it's a fair point too. Most of us, after finishing up Nesingwary's quests in Stranglethorn or Nagrand, probably feel like we never want to see a quest to kill massive amounts of wildlife again, so we'd likely get to feeling a bit drained if every single quest involved killing massive amounts of the same thing over and over again. He also mentions that if they did remove random drop style quests, they'd probably have to start bumping up the required number of kills for "Kill X amount of mobs" quests, which might suggest various internal metrics at Blizzard that must decide how much a person should have to quest or kill to jump up a level, or how long a quest hub should keep a person in an area.
He ends by stating that he believes the WoW team is getting better at implementing new quests and making new mechanics to build off of for future quests. The game really does seem to hold him out on this, as we've had plenty of new and exciting things do in Outland, from stealing the souls of gronn and going on bombing runs, to jump-starting the hearts of Fel Reavers. If nothing else, the philosophy Drysc expounds bodes well for players as we head into 2.4 and the expansion, since if Blizzard continues to build quests off those ideals, it means we should get some good, quality game play out of them.
Of course, we'll probably still have to kill 30 Shovel Tusks for good old Hemet.
So what's your take? Is variety the spice of life? Or would you rather not waste time waiting for one last Forest Troll Tusk to drop?
