Keeping busy

WoW does a great job of making sure you have something to do. I found myself running back and forth a lot this weekend, doing quests, turning them in, then being sent right back to where I just was to do the next part of the chain. This is the tactic they seem to use the most in order to keep players occupied. Normally I try to get multiple quests done at the same time and sort of go through them in a circular pattern to minimize travel time, but that doesn't always work so a lot of the time I end up taking a lot longer to finish quests than it should take because of all the running around. It's something I didn't really notice when I first started playing as everything was new and exciting, but now that I've been through enough quests I get to see all the patterns.

One new tactic I'm noticing in the Outland quests is how drop rates work for quest items. Thinking back to my Westfall days and killing endless amounts of boars who all seemed to be missing the body parts that I needed to make stew, I've noticed it's become a little different since then. Now instead of getting a drop every so often, you start out with no drops at all, then all of a sudden you get all the drops at once. It's like Blizzard figured out exactly how many of each mob you should kill and tuned the drops to that number. Most recently I was killing raptors in BEM in hopes that they would drop some of their teeth. Well after killing about 20 of them with no teeth, I all of a sudden got 5 in a row that dropped them, and was all I needed to complete the quest. Hmm, seems a little too convenient to me, and I think it's actually better than the totally random drop rates they used to have that took forever.

I'm really starting to feel the pressure of getting to 70 now. I'm about halfway to 69 and I really want to push to finish up the last level and a half to get to the cap. I remember when I was level 58 on my rogue, and I had run out of quests that I could do on my own, so my only option left was to grind my way up. I ended up going to Silithus and killing the elementals in the northwest corner until I hit level 60, which seemed to take forever. Now I'm in a similar situation with regards to my proximity to the level cap, but I still have two zones that I haven't seen yet. I think Blizz did a much better job of making quests available all the way up to the level cap and beyond. The problem was before they would give you a bunch of group quests at the end, and if you couldn't get a group together you were stuck grinding. Now the group quests are optional for the most part, and are just nice bonuses that can give you some extra XP and better rewards.

I'm really starting to think that I will hit level 70 without even needing to go to one of the last two zones, but while it would be nice to get there faster, I'd rather see all the zones before the expansion comes out and I move on to Northrend. I suppose if there are any quests left over I can finish those up once the expansion comes out so that when I do head to Northrend I will be a little ahead in levels. That wouldn't be so bad.