Travel time

You know what the worst part of playing a low level alt is? It's not going through the same content, that can sometimes be fun trying to figure out strategies to get through difficult areas with a different class. It's not that you're low level and don't have access to many areas of the game. No, it's much more fundamental than that. It's the fact that you no longer have a mount, or any way to get yourself around in the world faster than if you just run. I really believe this is the biggest time sink in the game. The Barrens itself is a huge zone, and while it does have multiple flight paths for Horde, it still requires lots of running around to get all the quests done.

I was playing yesterday, had a few quests to turn in at Thunderbluff, and let me tell you, that place sucks to run around. All that running across bridges to the different rises, I seriously spent half an hour in there just turning in two quests and learning new spells. At least the other big cities are set up fairly well, the common setup being a central area and then areas along the perimeter which tends to be where you learn your skills and abilities, and you can run around the perimeter to get to each of these if you wish. Thunderbluff on the other hand has no way of running around the perimeter, meaning if you're on one of those outer rises and want to get to the next one over, you can't just run straight there, you have to run across the bridge to the central area, then find the bridge to the next rise you want to get to, sometimes requiring you to climb the tower in the middle to get to the tier you want to be on. Even Undercity is better than that, and that place requires you to run around and find elevators just to get in.

The crappy thing now is that I already have mounts for all the characters that have some sort of travel form before getting a mount (hunter, shaman, druid). I think the only one left would be my mage, and Blink isn't really that much better than just running.

I find the best way to do any traveling is to use downtime where you don't really have enough time to play WoW, but you still don't need to be anywhere quite yet. Like say you get home from work but are going to dinner in 15 minutes. If I know I have to travel somewhere with a character I do it during that time, or at least use it to get me closer to where I need to be so when I actually want to sit down and play I don't have to deal with traveling first. The easiest way is when you just need to fly across the continent for something, because you can log in, hit up the flight master and get going, and you can do other stuff while flying too so you just come back later and find yourself where you wanted to be. If you can remember way back when, the flight paths didn't flow into each other. If you wanted to get to Loch Modan from Redridge you had to fly to Stormwind, get dropped off, then fly to Ironforge and get dropped off, then fly to Loch Modan, meaning you had to be there to talk to each flight master on the way. It was such a pain. But now they are connected and it is much better, only thing I would still want to change is have an option to cut your flight off early. Maybe you realized you had to stop at one of the earlier stops but you were already flying at that point, happens to me sometimes, and then I have to get to the end of the flight and backtrack. It really makes you think hard before you start flying because you don't want to waste your time like that.

One thing I never understood was the whole autorunning naked thing. I think the whole point is you take off your gear and turn on autorun and just aim yourself where you need to go and do something else while you wait. While I can understand the thought process, it doesn't really work that way all the time. I don't know how many times I'll see somebody set on autorun, and you can tell because they ran into a wall or rock or tree and are still doing the running motion. Also, if you run into a bunch of mobs and get killed you're gonna have to run back to your corpse. In both of these examples you'd still have to be paying attention, which sorta defeats the purpose, because I think the whole point is that you can do something else in the meantime. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like no matter what you still have to pay attention when you're running somewhere, and I'd rather just run myself and probably get there faster than turning on autorun and and coming back 10 minutes later to find out you only made it a tenth of the way there before you got stuck on a tree.