Most -enjoyable- starting area?Follow

Herbalism, mining, Draenei. . . . sorry, but Azuremyst is the best Ally starting area. Regardless of race, class, or professions.
Maybe you could try Teldrassil though?

Draenei starting area is nice because it was released 2 years after the other ones so they had a chance to look at what they liked or didn't like and improve. There is good quest flow, more dynamic quests and its got a loot table friendly to the classes available to draenei and quests seem the same.

I just did the Night Elf one (got my ambassador of the alliance today) and its solid, though near the end of the quest cycle it seems like a lot of running.

Human I never liked.

Dwarf is nice but lots of travel time. I just liked the snow though.

dk's lol. op :p

Blood elves have the best starting area by far. Dranei's are pretty good. both have the advantage of having centralized cities on both the 5-10 area and 11-20 area. both areas will get you the most efficient questing. Compare this to like the long trek towards the east end of elwynn forest to that logging camp. that's a long walk.

You're going to be in the actual starting area for a very short time. Go in, blast through, move on. In terms of boredom, time played in the starter area should be inconsequential.

Teldrassil is the only Alliance starting area you haven't ruled out, and even so you appear to have stalled out at level 7. It is good for herbalism, but not for mining. It also leads to the same areas you've leveled through with your paladin.

Elwynn takes you to Westfall, Redridge and Duskwood. It isn't a bad path and offers decent nodes. On the other hand, you've done Duskwood and the Elwynn/Westfall/Redridge quests suffer from a bizarre pig fetish. Kill pig, kill super pig with annoying escort, kill and cook pig, kill and cook more pig. Look, Outland ... pigs! /cry



Dun Morogh - Loch Modan - Wetlands & Duskwood - Dustwallow seems to offer the biggest change from what you've listed. You could skip some of Duskwood and do the chains that tie in with Wetlands. Dustwallow should take you to around 45 and after that the options are pretty limited anyway.

With that all said, for a real change try taking a Horde toon up, maybe a Belf or Troll priest. You'll get a whole different set of quests and start areas you haven't played through. Never mind ... I was slow and hadn't seen your second post.





Edited, Jan 24th 2009 10:05pm by Rhodekylle

The Draenei and Blood Elf starting areas are vastly superior.

1). The maps are drawn better.
2). The Quest Rewards are MUCH better. Darkshore has some WHITE quest rewards at Lv10-15+. You start seeing GREENS at Lv8 quests in Azuremyst.
3). The quests are more clustered and close-quarter, with very little unused portion of the map. Less travel.
4). The greens have better stat combos on them (almost all mail having +str and +stam, most leather has agi/stam, most cloth having int/stam). Older areas have lolspirit on leather and mail.
5). Both starting areas give you at least one bag in the starter quests. even if it is only 4 slot, it is better than praying a 6-slotter drops soon. This helps a load with your first character on a given server.
6). The areas are drawn a lot more brighter and more detailed. Azuremyst and BE area are much more detailed than any of the other starter areas.
7). Fewer annoying quests in Azuremyst, though trying to find a group for Deatholme kinda sucks sometimes. And the boss is a bit hard, even for 3 people.

So eh, really... I can't think of a reason to *not* start in Azuremyst or the BE lands. Even if you are playing a class that a Draenei or BE cannot normally be, it is still advantageous for you to go there. Personally, I'd go there, and only go back to get training once every 4 levels unless there's a major ability you are missing. I'd do Lv1 to Lv10 in your normal stater area, and then migrate ASAP if you are playing a non-Draenei/BE class. If you ARE playing a Draenei/BE class, I'd make the move as soon as I got Lv5 and the very first starter quests done. The only exception I can think of, is Druid because of the many druid quests until you get into the 20s. Even then I think I'd hit up Bloodmyst for the greens, even if the quests are green and grey, the quest rewards will be better than anything Darkshore gave you.

Have you played one yet? They're a lot of fun.

Azuremyst is good, but I'm still partial to the dwarf/gnome starting zone, at least from 1-12.

As far as personal enjoyment, of the Horde races I prefer Valley of Trials, and on the Alliance side is Dun Morogh. Everything is just so fast there, it flows so well...I love it.

As far as total 'zone' experience, well, Durotar. I know that there is quite a lot you can get gear wise in the Blood Elf area, but Durotar still remains my favorite. Hell, these days pretty much everybody has a decent leveled main, and funding is never much of an issue, so the quest rewards really mean little to me. It's very rare that you'll encounter someone playing WoW for the very first time anymore.

Mulgore has a bad taste in my mouth, mainly due to that being the first WoW zone I was exposed to. Wandering around in the middle of the night in Bramblescar Ravine, totally lost, thinking I could scale those big vines, and not knowing what a hearthstone was = major :( .

Now, I will say that I loathe Teldrassil and I think I'm going to have pretty much the same opinion of Darkshore. First off, I felt it was blatantly obvious that Blizzard gave a lot of attention to the Night Elves. Auberdine...jeez, it could pass for it's own city. That turned me off a lot, mainly due to being use to the shanty towns that the Horde gets in it's initial zones. Barrens you get a couple tents and people standing around, Silverpine is a damn graveyeard, and Tranquillien is two buildings. I didn't enjoy my first experience as a Night Elf, but I am honestly trying it.

Until you hit a roadblock that is Loch Modan.

Is it just me, or did they somehow fail to give players enough quests to keep them going?

I once took a human character there, before they gave us Stormwind Harbor, because I hate Westfall (such a boring dreary place), just to try it. What a mistake. I did all the quests I could find, and got stuck at Lv12-ish, because everything in my quest log was Orange, and I was 75% away from the next level, with no yellow quests anywhere. And this was after the increase in XP gain. What was it like before?

Either they didn't give us enough quests, or there are too many dwarf-only quests, or they designed the zone very poorly, that the player somehow misses an entire quest hub and doesn't know it.

I wouldn't believe a single word typed by someone who made a statement that Death Knights are OP. Only village idiots believe that malarkey. Sorry, loser.

In response to someone in this thread...

Unless recently changed, Teldrassil does NOT have mining nodes. It is also the only starting zone to include Mageroyal (most only have Peacebloom-Earthroot).

Whoops, you're right; I did misread. lol. Sorry about that. I need to look at what is Really going on there. *grins*

About Loch Modan...

If you start a Dwarf or a Gnome, the logical progression is to finish Dun Morogh at which point they send you to the next zone -- Loch Modan.

Now, Loch Modan, unlike all of the other "Tier 2" zones, does not have enough quests to reach Lv19-20. I don't know why Loch Modan was singled out like this, really. All it would have taken is a few quests to bridge the gap, or slight adjusting of some of the mobs in the existing quests so you don't run into the "Orange Barricade"...

Edited, Jan 25th 2009 9:32pm by Zariamnk

what other class starts off with blue items? Name one. Anyways it's not a big deal, I was joking anyways if you can't tell from the post. But you can't argue that starting at level 55 with good gear is a powerful boost.

Edited, Jan 25th 2009 7:16pm by thrashering