I found Zuldrak very creepy. Much more so than Icecrown, or pretty much anywhere else.
I loved Zul’Drak because 1) I love finding out more about the downfall of the Troll civilizations. Lots of interresting lore there, and 2) because I love central-american ‘ancient’ architecture. (and 3) Hi, Opal!)
No one goes to Sillithus anymore unless they -really- have to. It’s a nice place, but the drop rate for -anything- is horrendous (except maybe runecloth, I guess). Only time I see people there is when they’re going for explorer points or rep-grinding.
Un’Goro is also very fun, and if you do a certain quest-line in Northrend, you actually go back there… Sorta. It’s the only Northrend questline I’ve seen that sends you back to the earlier lands.
Silithus is also pretty good for Thorium, in so far as anywhere is good for thorium.
It’s only to the cities, but the two Wrath Gate questlines send you back. And there’s another in Icecrown which sends you to several locations.
Crafted items are great for starting Heroic 5-mans and Naxx, which will then supply you with better gear so you can continue to progress. Wearing greens to go into a Heroic 5-man is okay; if you want to start running Naxx, OS, etc., that’s when greens become a problem, because it means you didn’t put in the basic effort necessary to upgrade your gear so that everyone else doesn’t have to carry you.
Nope. You can only see your current quests in your in-game quest log, and there is **no **way to see what quests you’ve already completed. (Which is really stupid, but there you go.) If you can’t remember whether or not you’ve completed a particular quest and you really need to know, you can open a ticket and ask a Game Master–and be prepared to wait for a few hours to get an answer.
In this situation, you want to give a general idea of your sustained DPS given how you’re usually buffed for the instance in question. So, if it’s for a Naxx10 group, you could say “2.5k DPS buffed in a 10-man group.” Knowing how much DPS a given person expects to put out is essential for some fights so that you know you’ll have what you need to beat an enrage timer.
Most of the items are pointless for an 80, but there’s an 18-slot bag. I was still using that up until a couple of months ago.
If I was looking for PUGs to come into a raid and you gave me that answer, I’d give you a pass. You don’t need to run crazy tests and spreadsheets to get a general idea of your sustained output in a given raid group. Yes, your DPS is going to change based on who you’re grouping with, but it should fall within a general range such that you should have a general idea. When someone asks for your DPS, they just want to know that you’ll be contributing instead of just being a warm body.
Hell, I can give you a general idea of my **Threat **Per Second, and I can’t even get Recount reports for that. IMO, saying that you “don’t know” your DPS is just plain silly.
I think ZD might have been my favorite Northrend zone while I was leveling. You have to love the idea of the place, too–they killed their own gods to try to gain the power to protect themselves from the Scourge. Whiskey tango foxtrot, no wonder everyone’s crazy.
Which includes me, unfortunately. I’m currently grinding to Neutral with the Brood of Nozdormu (finally ran BWL on Friday to complete Only One May Rise) so that I can get onto the AQ opening questline so that I can finally get my hands on the last Cooking recipe I’m missing in the entire freakin’ game. I’m at about 25k out of 36k Hated, then I have two more rep levels of 3k each before Neutral. In related news, I discovered this weekend that a Prot War and a Resto Druid can two-man AQ20, which was the last vanilla raid I still hadn’t done. 
Does anyone else find themselves getting a little bit sad about this sort of thing?
I didn’t start raiding until BC (my highest level main was about level 56 at that point), so my first “real” raid was Karazhan, but I’d imagine for the folks who raided the vanilla content it would go back that far for them as well. Here were these raid instances which were hard as hell at appropriate level and gear (AQ was so tough that many newer servers didn’t even get the gates open before BC, and even Karazhan was hard when it first came out) and now they can be two-manned by a couple of 80s with decent gear. Our guild routinely wanders into Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, AQ, Black Temple, Hyjal, Tempest Keep, Zul’Aman, and various other 60 and 70 raids with 5 or 6 people or fewer. We do Sunwell with about 10. Parts of Kara can be soloed by the right class, and my mage and his prot pally friend duo the Zul’Gurub tiger boss twice a week.
I know, it’s progress and there’s no real way around it. But I get a bit wistful when I think about how many times we beat our heads against Illidan, Archimonde, Prince, et al., and how now we just go in and eat their lunch.
Me, I’m waiting until level 90 so I can get my pally friend to help me duo Kael’thas for shots at Ashes of Al’ar. 
I’m guessing you’re also missing Thistle Tea…
I’m only missing both of those, as well, but I have no intention of running through BWL (and no one to run it with even if I did).
There are still fights with mechanics that can’t be brute-forced through. Twin Emps in AQ40, for example, will still repeatedly wipe you if you don’t know what you’re doing. But it would be nice if there were a “downgrade level and equipment” option for old content–so that you could go back at 70, 80, 80 and have the challenge of fighting your way through the content with the same stats as you would have had if you’d done it at-level.
Well, I’m not counting Thistle Tea since only Rogues can learn it.
There isn’t a way to find out what quests you have/haven’t done in a particular zone, is there? I’d love to go back and do some cleanup on a couple of my toons, but they don’t have flying mounts yet and I’m not going to gallop all over the zone scanning for exclamation points.
That was a fun quest chain. I missed that whole zone the first time through, and went back to do it when I was level 80 and it was quite easy.
Un’Goro was, indeed, a fun zone. Those devilsaurs used to piss me off, showing up out of nowhere–usually when I was in combat–and kicking the snot out of me. Every now and then it makes me happy to go back there with one of my high level toons and go devilsaur hunting. Too bad you can’t make mad money selling devilsaur leather anymore. I keep hoping to run into King Mosh (that’s the name of that huge devilsaur rare spawn, right?) when I go back there, 'cause I owe him a painful death or two, but I haven’t seen him in a long time.
Indeed, which is why only rogues can make any claims to having every Cooking recipe in the entire freakin’ game 
The rest of us have to be content with “every recipe, sans the one we can’t get”.
Nope. The closest you can do is to check on something like Wowhead and try to remember which you’ve done and which you haven’t.
I go with “every recipe that’s obtainable.”
Agreed on the lore and architecture, but Zul’Drak is currently the one zone that makes me despair of ever getting my Loremaster title. The zone, IMO, has far too many “vehicle” and “remote control” quests. I got completely stuck on that quest that requires you to ride around on that giant’s shoulders and direct his attacks because I couldn’t see a damn thing I was doing. That’s without even considering the question, “Why the hell do I need to direct this guy in the first place? He’s the !@#$% King of the storm giants! Doesn’t he know how to fight? Shouldn’t he know how to use his own abilities far better than I could?”
And then there’s that “Betrayal” quest, where I have to use an item to take control of Drakuru’s minions and make them fight him, and I have to click buttons to control their attacks while simultaneously running in a circle non-stop to dodge Drakuru’s extremely-high-damage magical bolts (it only takes about three hits from those to kill me, and they come too quickly to heal myself in between them).
To both of those, add in the fact that I can’t use my toon’s own abilities, which makes me feel more like a spectator than a player.
So I’m dead-ended at those questlines, and the only other quests I can find in the zone are ones that want to send me into Gundrak (which I can’t do solo and probably don’t count for Loremaster anyway), and those arena quests from that goblin. I’ve flown all over that zone and can’t find anything else.
That’s what I figured. But since I’ve been playing for three years and leveled a whole bunch of toons (and I have a lousy memory to start with), I have very little clue what any particular toon did back at the lower levels.
Although there are some very memorable quests–like that whole Stalvan quest chain in Duskwood (and every other freakin’ zone in the area). I did that with my very first toon, and started it when I was inexperienced and a bit too low level.
The EveryQuest addon will keep track of the quests you’ve done, but you unfortunately need to have it installed from level 1, since it can’t read the quests you completed before you installed it.
This really bugged me when I was looking to get the mechanical chicken pet. Because the quests that lead to getting that pet come from random drops, I had no way of knowing if the lack of drops which trigger the quests were because I had already done those quests way back when (obviously, I did not recall if I had actually done them or not), or was just unlucky in terms of getting the beacons to drop.
So I just bought the damn thing from the AH (the pet itself is, fortunately for me, BoE).
I have a question about this chain. If one of those beacons had dropped for me, and then I abandoned the quest and dropped the beacon, would it ever drop for me again? I think my 80 priest did 2/3 of those and I would like to do the other one for the chicken, but I haven’t been able to get the third beacon to drop again (missing the one in Hinterlands).
Really, this quest isn’t hard, just take a couple of minutes to study his abilities, worst case scenario is you fail the first time and have to try again.
This one is hard to solo no argument there, but the pet you get to control does have an ability that will heal you.
The easiest way to do this is to find someone else who is on the same quest and do it together, or failing that, since anyone who is on the quest get to loot the quest item when Drakuru dies, you can be sneaky and wait for someone else to kill him for you.
Just try to find a group, once you’ve gotten a group together the Amphitheater of Anguish quests take about ten minutes and are really easy.
This is one situation where you’d want to open a ticket to ask a GM.
You’ll go back to whatever point you were at. So, if you had the beacon, accepted the quest, then dropped the quest and destroyed the beacon, the beacon would drop again. However, if you accepted the quest and then turned it in at the chicken, the beacon would not drop again, and you’d have to go back to the chicken to get the escort part of the quest from it.
Zul’Drak is very tight in terms of what quests you need to complete in order to finish the zone requirement. You don’t have to do the last quest with riding the storm giant to kill Thrym, but that will mean that you almost certainly have to do the arena quests and to kill Drakuru. I’m 99% sure that the quests that send you into Gundrak don’t count.
Did you do the quest for that undead vendor when you were disguised as a Scourge (feeding the ghouls)? That one counts too.
Another method for Drakuru is get a friend (or more than one) who has a flying mount to group up with you. Go up top and have them hovering above until you engage, then they can dismount and attack. Makes it much easier to finish.
Aha! And at this point, the quest exclamation point would be invisible to me unless I had the low-level quest tracker on!
To the Hinterlands!