A few of my (least) favorite quests

Cooking with peacebloom and sunfish in cauldrons
Slaughtering Vykrul to earn some new pauldrons
Killing a dragon to get a locked chest
These are a few of my favorite quests

I read a post over at this blog about people's least favorite quests, and just had to share my noob's perspective.

I sort of like questing. When I was playing my first character, questing was just a means to an end (I wanted to join my friends who were all 80s), and as such it was something of a nuisance. But now that I have a couple of toons at 80 that I can raid and do end-game stuff with, I like to go back on alts and quest just for the sake of questing. And most of the time I rather I enjoy it. It can also be good "alone time", or time spent with one or two friends. There's no rush, and I get to see different places and do different things that I didn't do the first time around, or that I did but forgot to take the time to enjoy.

But not all quests are created equal. I tend not to remember specific quests, but there are a few different quest genres that I really dislike. Here they are in no particular order:

1) Anything involving murlocs. I hate murlocs. I hear that gurgling noise in my nightmares. Murlocs have an aggro range of about 1000 yards, and it is almost impossible to pull one without pulling five more standing near him. Then when they are almost dead... they run away and aggro some more of their friends. And you get three beating on you from up close and two casters standing at 50 yards in opposite directions shooting fireballs at you. I've probably died more often in murloc encounters than I have in encounters with all other creature-types combined.

Sometimes when I'm feeling frustrated and need cheering up, I pull one of my level 80's out and go randomly slaughter huge groups of low-level murlocs... you know, just for fun.

2) Collection quests with pathetic drop rates. Don't tell me that I "only" need to collect 5 of an item, only to realize later that it has a 10% drop rate. Just tell me to go kill 50 of them from the start and I'll be much happier. At least then I know how close I am to being done with this nonsense. It would also allow me to make an informed decision as to whether the quest reward is worth the time, or if I can just abandon it and move on to something more interesting.

3) Collection quests that require you to get a body part that, for some unknown reason, not every creature has. This was mentioned quite often on the other blog as being people's least favorite. ("Who knew that not every Hillsbrad farmer has a skull?") But here was my noobishness coming through: I can't remember how many times I struggled on my first toon to figure out what I was doing wrong. Need to collect "10 pristine goretusk livers"? I must've tried 10 different ways of killing them so that I would stop ruining their livers! But nothing seemed to work. Don't use the sword, because you'll just tear them up! Try bopping them on the head with your fist. Same with "unblemished pelts", "perfect skulls", "intact fangs", etc. Don't throw a fire spell, because clearly you'll never get an unblemished pelt after you barbeque that bear.

It wasn't until much later that I realized it wasn't my slaughtering technique that was causing the failure, it was just a stupid game mechanic. There was some percentage on a loot table in some unseen piece of WoW code. This is why I'm certain that the office building that houses the Blizzard developers must be heavily armed and fortified. Otherwise someone like me might go off my nut and wander into the building dual-wielding an Uzi and a 9mm yelling, "Higher drop rates, damn you all to hell!"

4) Vehicle quests. I wouldn't mind these... if I got to KEEP the vehicle and use it later on at the time of my choosing, sort of like a mount. It might be useful to be able to ride a tank around to slaughter a bunch of murlocs. But having to learn some stupid set of arbitrary abilities just for a single quest? Pain in the ass.

5) Escort quests. "Walk faster, asshole." 'Nuff said.

No that isn't enough said about escorts. What's the deal with the NPC running forward to help you battle the next monster, then running BACK to their previous position, only to start meandering forward again at their original glacial pace? I have purposely let more than one NPC die just because I was tired of his bullshit. "Stop complaining about your injured leg! I KNOW you can run, fuckwad. I just saw you run up and start beating on that last monster! Not going to walk faster? Fine. You can fight those cave trolls by yourself, thank you very much."

Ah, I feel better now. Thanks for letting me vent.