June News/Discussion

[NiteFox]

My biggest complaint is the removal of the elite zones 1-58 (Stromgarde in Arathi, Vilebranch in Hinterlands etc). It opens up quests for solo play but it removes the most important part of WoW, in my opinion - small group content. Those areas did not need five people like an instance. Three would suffice if you were of level. They provided a somewhat challenging task that required you to branch out, stop following your leveling guide and gather a group together.

To be honest, that all depends on your server and whether you're in a guild or no. For the rest of us who just can't get access to a Party In A Can™, those elite areas were a huge levelling block. It's also no coincidence that all those blocks occur at pretty much the same level...

I remember struggling for weeks to get through the Stromgarde after finishing all the solo quests. Arathi was my alternate choice, having started the 30-40 grind in Desolace (With it's annoying centaur reputation system that's also a requirement to levelling and thus also a severe block), and once all you have left in Arathi is the Stromgarde line, you're either forced to pick up low-return green quests elsewhere or just try and power your way through.

I'm not sad to see the elite zones go. If I were in a guild, they would at least be doable, but sitting on your kiester trying to scrape together a group for Stromgarde (And then getting ganked repeatedly by a level 50+ Alliance party that had no business whatsoever there aside from, naturally, ganking lower-levelled Horde parties), to make meagre progress through one of a dozen sequential quests ("Thanks for doing that for me in Stromgarde, now here's another quest that involves you going back in there, good luck finding another party after the ad-hoc group you spent hours forming decided to call it a night."), before having to do it all again tomorrow, is just not fun.

I probably spent longer in Arathi than I did anywhere else before hitting the level cap. There were other zones, but, well, when you've got a bunch of unfinished quests in one zone, you really don't want to move on until they're resolved. And then I moved on from Arathi to Hinterlands, where the whole bloody process is copied pretty much ad verbatim.

It was in the Hinterlands where my patience finally snapped: The second any questline in any zone led me towards the elite subzones, I'd abandon it. No questions asked. Ditto for anything involving a 5-man that I would easily level past by just doing solo quests.

Group content is fine while there's groups to actually do it, but when you're in a suitably high-levelled zone such as Silithus only to see, maybe, two or three other names in /chatlist 1 and you have a few quests that demand a full and balanced group, you realise what a pain it is. Thankfully, this is something TBC got right; granted, most major questlines cap things off with a few group quests, but there's always an alternative to help you level on up to the next zone.