Reviewing the new quest tracking feature

In all of the excitement over the new dungeon finder feature, a lot of people seem to have forgotten the other big feature added in patch 3.3: the new quest tracking feature. As a long-time user of QuestHelper, I was excited that they were finally including this feature in the game so that I could finally stop using that incredibly memory-heavy addon, but how does it compare? I took my shaman though some quests in Un'Goro Crater to find out. Keep in mind, the only mod I used to make my leveling easier was QuestHelper, so some of the features I mention and extol may be familiar to you already if you use other addons.

The new tracking feature, when activated, puts dots on your in-game map to represent where you need to go for each of your quests (with a few exceptions, which I'll go over later). If you click on one of those dots, it shows you all of the areas where you can do that quest. If there are multiple areas, the dot will be on the closest one to you. The new feature will also show you a question mark where there is a quest giver whom you can turn in a quest to. You can also click a little arrow on the top-right of the map to make it smaller, allowing you to move around and fight while still being able to see the tracking dots, a useful feature considering that Blizzard didn't copy QuestHelper's arrow that pointed you to your next objective.

Then again, I don't miss that arrow, since half the time, it never pointed me towards the quest I wanted to do. The quest tracking feature doesn't suffer that problem since it doesn't have an arrow; it simply shows you where to go for each quest and lets you decide the priority. Well, not each quest. If a quest must be turned in in an instance, the quest tracking feature will not point you to that instance, a feature that QuestHelper had. It will also not point out where to go for quests with general directions rather than specific locations to go to (e.g. the fishing dailies Blood is Thicker or Monsterbelly Appetite) or with a wide area where the quest can be done (like Monsterbelly Appetite or Un'goro Soil). Granted, QuestHelper wasn't very helpful with these kinds of quests and would rarely point you to the best spot to go for them, or it would tell you to do them first when you really should have done them while doing other quests (e.g. Un'goro Soil). Thus, with the exception of pointing out where to go for out-of-zone quests, the quest tracking system is satisfactorily extensive.

Some of my complaints about the new system are that you can't see the quest objectives unless you are looking at the map of the specific zone the quests are in. If you don't know where to go for a quest, you can't just look at the map of the continent and look for the dot there. Still, if you look at the quest in the quest log, you can click on the "Show Map" button, and it will automatically show you the map of the zone the quest is in. Still, the one thing I do really miss from QuestHelper is that the little dots that show you where the quest objectives are do no show up on the mini-map. I'm sure its only a matter of time before someone invents an addon that does that, but it's still a fairly big oversight on Blizzard's part.

Overall, I am very satisfied with this new feature, and though it may not be as game changing as the Dungeon Finder, it has made me as excited for leveling my alts as the Dungeon Finder has made me for doing heroics. My interest in the game had been waning quite a bit since patch 3.2, and these two features together have really brought my interest in the game back up. Well done, Blizzard. Well done.

I suppose that since this is a review, I should end it with a rating of some sort. Three and a half stars out of four.