World of Warcraft: Questing on Rails

The questing experience in World of Warcraft changed drastically with the release of the Cataclysm expansion. Back in the 'good old days' most quests were self contained. There's a dude who wants you to kill some deer. As soon as you're in level range he wants you to kill some deer. After you kill some deer for him he gives you some experience and then just stands around looking stupid. Nothing changed because you killed some deer. Every now and then you'd run into a long chain of quests that had to be done in order but the deer killing guy wasn't involved in those and didn't care if you did that chain or not. With Cataclysm that changed and they made entire zones into one huge chain. There'd be a guy who wants you to kill some deer but he'll only ask you to do it after you do a seemingly unrelated quest to kill some fire elementals. Further along is a guy who wants you to sift through poop but for some reason he only wants the poop sifted through after the deer have been killed. Blizzard also made heavy use of 'phasing' during these chains so it's entirely possible you can't even see the poop guy at all until you've killed deer.

On the one hand the idea is pretty neat that you'd be playing through a single contained story. With phasing the world actually changes (for you, anyway) as you complete quests. Some people like it, some people hate it. I've leaned on the side of not liking it. Up until today, anyway, when I've seen how rails questing can impact my Ironman character. Now I'm firmly against the whole rails concept as there are two consequence which are going to hurt me in my journey.

The first problem is the inability to skip dangerous quests. Maybe my poor undergeared and untalented shaman simply can't kill deer at all. Maybe they have nature resistance or something, I don't know. In the old way I'd just abandon the deer quest and move on with my life. Go and sift through some poop or something more appropriate for my skills. Now? I risk my life trying to kill the deer or I find an entirely new zone to quest in. I lose everything in my current zone after the deer quest because for some reason they're all dependent on killing deer.

The second problem is the inability to just drop in on the middle of a zone. My thinking is that once I gain a few more levels I'm going to have to search for quests that are barely green in order to find things I can plausibly do. This shouldn't be a problem since the game is filled with tons and tons of quests. But if I can't access most of those quests because they're behind other quests I could run into a problem. Some quests could be locked behind dangerous quests I want to skip. Others are locked behind quests that are too low to be worth experience at all.

I haven't leveled a new character since Cataclysm launched (well, other than solely in dungeons) so I don't know if the rails problem is going to infest every zone but it is certainly the case in Azshara so far. I was given stealth in order to do a quest today which really worried me. I had to sneak past some elites which were 5 levels higher than me. If they saw me I was dead, guaranteed. But I didn't know how good the stealth was going to be. A druid trying to stealth around would be screwed for sure, but is this stealth better than that? Maybe this quest was designed to teach people how bad stealth can be so they stop whining about 'overpowered' rogues? But if I didn't do the quest I was done with the zone. I could probably try the Barrens instead? But I was right here! Ultimately I decided to risk it and lived so all is well. (And all that stealthing made me crave playing Metal Gear Solid again...)

I'm up to level 15 which slots me in as the 89th highest living shaman. Woo!