Levelling and Loremaster Nagrand.

[littlewierdo]

I know, I normally do those quests too while leveling. But very often they are a bit off the leveling path, you get them when you are nearly done with a zone or sub zone and therefore not worth the extra XP and items.
And when they are not even necessary for the loremaster title they are not included in the guides.

Though I also think it would be nice to have the guides cover all quests. But it's a minor issue, while leveling you normally see those quests and can pick them up. And with the quest markers on the map it's easy to figure out what to do where.

I would debate both points, Blizzard removed the elite mobs but kept the old rewards those elite quests used to offer, ie. a blue piece of gear and generally 50% more XP than quests of that level.

The real reason is that its a legacy issue, Blizzard removed elite mobs in Cataclysm and the Zygor crew never went back and added the group quests, which is a big shame really because these quests, as I mentioned above, generally offer a significant reward thats worth the time to do them.

There is generally minimal running around required and in fact, many of these elite quests require a single mob to be killed, something you can do usually much faster than the kill x number of mobs quests.

Ive compiled a list of all the quests covered by Zygor in a database (thank you Python) and cross referenced that with a list of all the quests in the game, this gives me a list of whatever is left, I then wrote several custom Zygor guides and added them to my custom guide list, as a personal solution. Of course, I had to review these quests as there are more than a few that exist in the game but have requirements that make said quests inappropriate for a guide (the legendary quest for example doesnt belong in a loremaster.leveling guide, or, quests that have alternatives...ie. one quest or the other but not both - youd be surprised just how many quests are not viable for a guide once youve researched this as extensively as I have). Its not ideal but it works for me as I, as stated previously, enjoy the lore immensely (its the primary reason I play WoW and one of the reasons I currently have over 30 level 90 toons).

I am very familiar with the alliance as 31 of my toons currently are alliance (I have 3 90 horde toons) but I am beginning to play a bit more horde to learn their side of the game so unfortunately, all my 'custom guides' dont exist for the horde (yet).

[ZG Support 1]

The real reason is that its a legacy issue, Blizzard removed elite mobs in Cataclysm and the Zygor crew never went back and added the group quests, which is a big shame really because these quests, as I mentioned above, generally offer a significant reward thats worth the time to do them.

While we didn't go back and add them in, this is simply because they are not needed in the Leveling or Loremaster guides. By the time you would be doing these quests you're already in the mid-60s and it won't be too long before you head to Northrend, at which point any gear you've managed to get in Outlands is useless. The guides are all about leveling as fast as possible and taking the time out of leveling just to go get some pretty blue gear (assuming that is the reward item) that you won't be wearing in a few hours of play time is not what we do. Now I haven't personally ran thru Nagrand in a while, but the last time I did I never finished off the zone guide because I was done and ready to move to the next zone before I would have even gotten these elite quests.

I do appreciate your wanting a completionist type of guide, but that doesn't really fit in with what we're selling. We are selling guides for leveling quickly and for obtaining the Loremaster title. Trying to put in every quest in the game has nothing to do with leveling fast or obtaining the Loremaster title. We only add extra when it's needed due to reputation requirements and we have to make sure you get to a certain rep level to have quests unlocked for fast leveling and the Loremaster title. Anything extra is just more possible bugs.

[littlewierdo]

While we didn't go back and add them in, this is simply because they are not needed in the Leveling or Loremaster guides. By the time you would be doing these quests you're already in the mid-60s and it won't be too long before you head to Northrend, at which point any gear you've managed to get in Outlands is useless. The guides are all about leveling as fast as possible and taking the time out of leveling just to go get some pretty blue gear (assuming that is the reward item) that you won't be wearing in a few hours of play time is not what we do. Now I haven't personally ran thru Nagrand in a while, but the last time I did I never finished off the zone guide because I was done and ready to move to the next zone before I would have even gotten these elite quests.

I do appreciate your wanting a completionist type of guide, but that doesn't really fit in with what we're selling. We are selling guides for leveling quickly and for obtaining the Loremaster title. Trying to put in every quest in the game has nothing to do with leveling fast or obtaining the Loremaster title. We only add extra when it's needed due to reputation requirements and we have to make sure you get to a certain rep level to have quests unlocked for fast leveling and the Loremaster title. Anything extra is just more possible bugs.

Well, again, there are many very fast quests you guys miss that are worth the couple of minutes to do them (and are certainly faster than many of the kill 20x of this mob quests picked up at the Nessingway check point) and have the ADDED benefit of blue gear. Keep in mind, blue gear is better than green and means killing things faster. This may be trivial, but its an ADDED benefit, not the exclusive benefit. In the case of the followup Nessingway quests that cap the chain off, this is FOUR quests that can be completed in about 8 minutes for ALL of them, offer 50% more XP than normal quests, and offer blues on top of all that. Id say the benefit is worth the 8 minutes, especially considering a typical quest will take longer than 2 minutes to complete anyway (the pre-cursor quests that require killing 20 of 3 different mob types take 10 minutes A PIECE to complete assuming 30 seconds to kill each mob and you have 20 mobs all lined up without having to search for them). And by the way, there are a TON of quests like this.

As I said, I completely understand what you guys are doing, although, I dont think its near to as efficient as it could be.

What do I mean?

Well, ideally, if everything were about leveling as quickly as possibly, you would intentionally skip quests that arent important to unlocking future quests, youd be much more picky about which quests are selected for the process and push people through multiple zones in order to level as quickly as possible.

The way the guides are laid out right now, you include nearly every single quest in the leveling guide for the purposes of nearly completing the zone, rather than choosing the important quests that unlock the next quest hub and cherry picking the quests that can be completed with less time.

If you truly were looking for efficiency, you might have 30-50 quests from each zone (specifically in the case of the Outlands where there are around 100-150 available quests total in each zone, it might be different depending on content) and push the player through each zone only completing about a third of that zones total quests before moving them on to another completely different zone, eventually having covered most if not all the zones using very cherry picked quests (more on this in the next paragraph, you might think you are already doing this but you in fact are not). This might entail specifically skipping quests that are poor XP vs time, which would mean that you are literally skipping available quests (ie. the player completely ignores 3 of the ! marks because those three quests are poor XP vs time invested).

As a side note, the system that suggests a new zone once you are at the appropriate level is not the same thing as I mentioned above. What your guides are doing is literally taking every quest the player will likely see and instructing the player to pick up that quest, regardless of how good it is for XP vs time. The only quests skipped are elite / group quests, quests that used to be elite / group quests, dungeon quests, or quests your developers happened to miss, some of these are obvious but somehow missed by the developers, some of them are a bit off the beaten path.

And unfortunately, with respect to Nagrand specifically, Blizzard has made the loremaster achievement for this zone very tight with very little margin for error with respect to how many quests you can miss in order to successfully obtain the achievement.

As I said above, alot of this is legacy. Blizzard has made alot of adjustments to the required amount of XP to level such that it really is only necessary to complete 2 or 3 zones (or complete about 1/3 of ALL the quests in that expansion) before moving on to the next expansion, keep in mind, Im referring specifically to expansion content here since the Cata redo of vanilla content rebalanced the number of quests available to more accurately reflect the changes in how much XP is required level - ie. you pretty much need to do all of Westfall before you are ready to move on to Duskwood, but this is fine because Westfall no longer has 140 quests, they dramatically decreased the quest count by about 2/3.

In the case of the Outlands, I can do a complete clear of Hellfire, Zangarmarsh, and Nagrand, completely bypassing every other zone in Outlands in order to move on (without heirlooms or guild perks).

In the case of Wrath, Borean Tundra, Howling Fjord, and Grizzly Hills (without heirlooms or guild perks).

In the case of Cataclysm, Mount Hyjal and half of Uldum (although I like Uldum so I usually 'finish' it) - (without heirlooms or guild perks).

Everything above I did in the month of October of this year.

But the guides have never been updated to reflect the XP changes, they remain how they used to where you practically had to finish every zone in order to have enough XP to move on, thus, you are completing nearly every quest (like you used to have to do in order to have enough to reach high enough level) rather than cherry picking quests (something we have the ability to do now since we do NOT need to nearly complete every quest in order to reach high enough levels to move on).

This is why Im somewhat perplexed at what Zygor is aiming to be, you say its designed for the fastest leveling possible yet you include nearly every quest in the game in the leveling guide (extra quests would be included in the loremaster guide under the above mentioned theory that it is designed to be as fast as possible), the majority of which are not necessary for unlocking a future required quest hub nor do they provide XP in a fast enough time to be worth doing.

And no, you cant say that the extra quests provided are to make sure you have enough to level, thats like me handing you a $100 bill in order to buy a soda, there are WAY more quests in the leveling guide than will ever be required to level.

[Cartman]

Finding the perfect leveling path for everyone is very difficult.
First Blizzard made questing very linear, I don't think there are that many quests you can skip without running into problems later in in a zone. Outlands may be a bit different as it's a very old design, especially with Cataclysm Blizzard made questing so linear you won't even need a guide for the best quest order but more for only navigating and telling you what to do without looking into the quest log.

Another thing is that still some people run into problems with higher level quests. maybe not in the 1-85 content but I remember several threads about Pandaria where people were raging about certain quests being far too difficult.

An experienced player like you or like me knows how to play the class and as you mention, we know all the quests without even looking at the guide.
I currently have 15 Alliance and 1 Horde level 90 character, the last one only needed 2 days and 20 minutes with heirlooms. And I have a Warlock that is leveling even faster than that, level 42 in less than 9 hours.

I level the same way like you do, I complete whole zones even picking up quests not in the guide, especially in Outlands, and therefore can skip entire zones which saves me a lot of traveling. And I never had the feeling I'm leveling slower than possible. Only in Outlands, for example Nagrand, the last bunch of quests (the Lantresor ones) is a bit too much traveling because there are no flight points and you only have slow flying.
I personally think the last Nesingwary quests are not worth the time you spend unless they get you to level 68.

But this discussion is all about personal preferences in playing the game.
We as experienced players would like the guides to cover all quests while the Zygor team is busy enough doing other things and therefore don't see the need to rework the old guides for the minority of the players as the guides do what they should, the let you level fast and easy and if needed get you the loremaster title.

I'd have suggested to create a guide for the missing quests and include that in my custom guide package. But I'm a bit low on free time at the moment and you already did that. Maybe that's something I do when I get bored of WoD - which may happen pretty fast as the new raid mode structure will make it difficult for my guild to, we liked the old flex mode and the ability to do parts of the raids. But now we'd have to start over from the first boss every time. With only one raid day with 3 hours...