Class focus

The latest post over on Blessing of Kings brought up an interesting topic, and while I won't be taking his suggestion to come up with my own set of class specific tasks to get an achievement, it was actually one of the comments to the post that got me thinking.

Hopefully I'm not overstepping my WoW blogger bounds by talking about a comment from someone else's blog, but here it is:

"What a great idea, but Blizzard seems to be a bit down on providing class specific quests - probably for the good reason that it wants to concentrate it's resources on creating content that's playable by virtually all of it's players - which is hard to fault."

While he does end up saying that it isn't a bad thing that Blizzard decided not to include too much class specific stuff, I think the point is still valid. Would it have been better if there were more class specific content?

It's hard to say at this point, because the game is awesome as it is, but wouldn't it have been cool to face a new class specific quest every 10 levels? At the start it seemed that this was the route they were taking, but then after the level 10 and level 20 quests they decided to spread them out more.

Paladins and Warlocks got the most attention in this area with their epic mount quests at 60. These quest lines required lots of items and help from a group of others to bring down a summoned boss in an instance. Druids now have a similar situation at 70 to get Swift Flight Form. Some other classes had this to an extent, like priests getting Benediction, but that required running MC and so was unavailable to anyone but raiders.

The point is I think it would have been nice to see some more soloable quests for the different classes, maybe getting them a nice blue or a new spell as a reward. These could be ongoing quest lines, requiring you to gain some more levels in order to complete the next one. The quest objectives would require you to use strategies that only your class can use, making you feel more like your class rather than just leveling another character.

Warriors have a pretty good grasp of this with their quests for new armor at 30 and the Whirlwind Axe at 40. If they could make these quests continuous, such as after getting your armor the quest giver sends you to the troll with the quest for the axe, or maybe even throw smaller quests in there that eventually lead you to the troll, it would make for a much more class oriented experience.

With the various ways to get through the game they would have to make any item drops you need for these quests available from mobs in different zones so you wouldn't have to go too far out of your way, but I don't think that would be a problem.

Am I sad they're taking out the epic mount quests? To some extent I am. The sense of achievement won't be there anymore if you can just buy the spell, although it sounds like you'll still have to pay for the riding skill, and that won't be cheap.

The problem is how hard it will be to find groups that are willing to help you on level 60 instances, and with players raiding at level 80 the druids will have trouble with theirs too. I guess it's just the fact of life with MMOs that once they release an expansion and raise the level cap it causes everyone to abandon the previous end game content and makes it too hard to complete any quests having to do with it.

I guess at this point the focus on specific class quests won't change, but I just wonder how the game would have turned out if they had put more in. The new Death Knight starting quests actually seem to go this route, and I'm excited to see what everyone who was in the beta loves so much about it.