The breakneck pace that I’ve been hitting lately as far as leveling goes has mostly been in the form of questing. Now I’ll admit I don’t always pay attention to why I’m doing quests, or even the rewards that come from them, but when I stop to read a bit of the text it does occasionally give me pause. Basically I’m breaking it down in my head into three categories. The premier quests of the zone are almost always the story quests. These are the ones that have a bit of voice work done and have you completing epic tasks like wrecking named elite mobs, burning down villages, and kicking puppies in the face. I like these quests. When I see that orange-ish background on a quest dialogue I tend to resist my urge to click Accept and actually read the damn thing.

Now, everything can’t be a story quest obviously, so the rest of the fluffy crapsicle quests are usually the Kill 10 foozles variety. I spam click accept on these in an attempt to get them off my screen faster. On the rare occasion that I stop to read one I’m left feeling disappointed as they probably don’t have much more in them besides “OMG foozles are raping the children! Go pwn them!” and then you do that. Or collecting shit; “Holy poop! The foozles are pooping all over the place! Go pick up that poop!”. Then you go out and do that too. Occasionally they’ll get creative and you see something along the lines of “Quick grab some foozle poop from across this field, bring it back here to saturate it in yak piss, and then go throw it at the foozles!” but those are pretty rare. Singular task objectives are the majority of crapsicle quests in the game, and reading them will probably not make you feel like a Big Damn Hero type. I normally refer to these as Bitch Quests.

There is a third type of quest in the game that I do enjoy, but only because of how natural it feels. Any time you’re running around slaughtering the landscape and you run across a dead body with sparkles coming off of it, it’s usually a good thing. This means you’re either rewarded immediately for discovering the rotting corpse, or you roll the body and steal some precious family heirloom that can be returned to some long lost uncaring relative that couldn’t be arsed to give a proper quest in the first place. Also, lumped in this section are the ever elusive trophy quests from killing trash mobs. These are the ones that pretty much every zone gets people hung up on finishing the zone questing achievement at 3-5 shy every damn time. You kick a mob in the nuts, some teeth fall out, and you deliver them like an excited schoolchild to the nearest authority figure who then gives you some candy for being a violent sociopath (in the form of XP and $$). These I have lovingly dubbed, Corpse Quests.

So amidst the Story, Bitch, and Corpse questing I’ve had very little time to do any PvP. Cannot be arsed I believe Bootae would put it? PvP doesn’t reward enough XP to justify it, and chances are unless you roll with a premade you’re gonna get hosed on grouping that makes sense. Typically this will lead to losing, and getting very little, or no XP. CBA indeed. The open-world PvP-ish objectives in Scarlet Gorge and Scarwood Reach are worth doing. Fun times there, until the wandering L50 sees you flagged and forces you to swallow your own teeth via the business end of a pointy boot. Thems the breaks though, don’t PvP flag if ya can’t handle it.

Dungeons… oh dungeons… how I miss thee so. The 30-39 bracket is terribly devoid of players queuing for dungeons, and good tanks that pull at an insane speed are really hard to find (I know one other besides myself in the 30 bracket). They are by far the fastest way to level when you have a good group. On any given night I would crap my pants if I were able to do 6 runs at a reasonable pace, and I’m really missing my L50 toon that could queue up and get nearly immediate pops. Alas, the grinding continues. The sooner I hit 50, the sooner I can get back into the groove of things. Particularly another Deep Looks post since those seem to be well received…