Dumbed down?

I got an interesting comment from Anonymous on my post about druid versatility last week and it deserved some thinking on my part. Here it is:

So although I am happy that you are finding the druid powerful I think you also must look at the severe nerfing to quest level difficulty in the game as well.

This really got me thinking about my experience with questing through Outland and how it compares to what we got with Northrend. The first question we have to ask is, does it seem like Northrend is a little dumbed down compared to what we're used to?

Now being that I'm still level 73, almost 74, I may not be far enough in to make the most accurate assessment, but from what I've seen so far it does seem to be a bit easier than what I was used to. I can solo elites without much trouble, the regular mobs seem to die much faster, and I'm not even in the TBC raid gear that many of you started in.

But here's the thing. While the quests may be easier than we're used to, they also have a lot more variety, and there are more of them in each zone. They really set up many more quest hubs, and a lot of those quests are a lot more fun what anything we did before. I think they wanted to scale back on the grinding aspect of questing and focus more on accomplishing objectives that are both interesting and fun.

I'm finding I have to think a lot more about how to get quests done. It's no longer just finding the right mob and killing enough of them to complete the quest or collect a certain item (well it is, but the ratio is significantly lower).

Now we get to fire cannons at giants from a ghost ship, trick wolves into letting you help them by disguising yourself as one, and scare the crap out of bats so you can collect the guano. It's not as straight forward, and even when you figure out where to go you still have to figure out what exactly you have to do when you get there.

I'm finding it a lot more stimulating, and I really don't run into those quests that are just so boring and monotonous that I have to take a break afterwards just to let my brain come back online.

Back to the point. Are the quests easier? Well if you base this only on how easy the mobs are to kill then I would say yes, but I don't think that's the only factor they look at when they come up with this stuff.

I think we all know that Blizzard wants the fastest way to level to be questing, but also that all those end game junkies want to get to level 80 as fast as they can, so why not make quests that those people are able to blow through quickly so they can level up? They also know that players like me, who just like the experience of solo questing and exploring, are excited about fun quests that are stimulating and don't frustrate us.

I guess what I'm saying is, maybe the quests aren't as difficult as we're used to in the way that it was almost impossible to solo an elite of the same level, but those elites are still difficult and require us to use up our cooldowns to take down, they aren't a cakewalk that we can defeat without some amount of skill.

I think what they took out in mob strength they managed to make up for with quests that appeal to a wider variety of players and won't frustrate the hell out of those of us that choose to solo as much as we can. So while the quest difficulty may be nerfed, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing unless you really like to struggle your way through the levels.