The lonely journey to the top

About five days ago, I earned Loremaster of Cataclysm, thus, for all intents and purposes, beating Cataclysm's solo content. I have done every quest I could find in Mount Hyjal, Vashj'ir, Deepholm, Uldum, and the Twilight Highlands, and in doing those quests, I noticed a particular absence, something missing that was once an integral part of the questing landscape. I noticed it in the way that I progress swiftly and almost effortlessly (comparatively, at least) through Cataclysm's zones. I noticed it in the way that I didn't need much help as I went through doing the quests. I noticed it in the way that I said nothing in general chat other than occasionally answering other players' questions about the new quests. That absence was the absence of group quests.

You remember group quests, I'm sure--those quests that recommended you bring an ally or two along with you to take down the baddie in question. They peppered the landscape throughout WoW's history, especially in Icecrown, and we had to group up with other players to do them. Yet it seems, if memory serves me correctly, that outside of the first few months of any given content's lifespan, there weren't many groups to do these quests with. In any given zone, I might have gotten lucky and found someone else willing to do them with me, but for the most part, I remember either trying to do those quests on my own (and learning ways to push each class to its limit as a result), or just skipping over them entirely. Thus these quests weren't, for me at least, group quests, so much as they were really challenging solo quests.

Now, this wasn't really a tragedy, because some of my proudest moments while leveling have been taking down the elites required for these group quests without the help of a group. Those were the true epic moments of my solo play, the moments that rivaled my memories of raiding in terms of satisfaction and challenge. Those battles were long and difficult, like raid fights, and required me to use all of the tricks that I could to take down these elite opponents. In the way that raids require raiders to maximize their awareness, their damage, their efficiency, these group quests required me to maximize my survivability, and I quite enjoyed them for that.

But while Cataclysm may lack group quests, it is not lacking in elite quests--quests where you take down an elite opponent--but these elite quests are a little different. Unlike the elite quests of yore, which were synonymous with group quests, these quests are fully designed to be accomplished on one's own. Yes, you do fight an elite opponent with a ridiculously large health pool, and these battles often go on for a good deal longer than most other battles, but unlike most elite enemies, these enemies will not kill you before you've taken away even a chunk of their health. Some of them are designed to have avoidable attacks, while others are fought while an NPC ally acts as the tank, thus you yourself take little damage. These kinds of quests peppered the Cataclysm questing landscape, and I'm pretty sure they were designed with the specific intention of taking the place of group quests.

Do they succeed in this regard? The answer to that question depends on whether they can accomplish the same thing group quests were originally designed to accomplish. Group quests, when I could actually get a group together for them, had an epic feel to them because I was taking down an enemy who was many times bigger or more powerful than me, and they also gave a bit of experience with the dynamics of grouping (tanking, healing, threat, etc.). Do Cataclysm's elite quests hold up to those parameters? They certainly feel epic, and they provide a very satisfying conclusion to whatever quests they end. But what about teaching group dynamics? You may not learn tanking or healing from these quests, but they do have some pretty sneaky ways of teaching you other important aspects of group content. In killing Skullcrusher the Mountain, you are encouraged to run around activating various relics which give you and your allies buffs to help you fight Skullcrusher, and you also have to right-click your fallen allies to revive them. This teaches you that you do need to do things other than attacking your target in order to succeed in a group environment. The fight against the Obsidian Colossus in Uldum teaches you how to not stand in the fire, as does the fight against Barron Geddon in Hyjal. These are things the old group quests didn't often teach, so I'd say that Cataclysm's elite quests teaching them to new players is an improvement.

But where these two kinds of quests differ most, and where Cataclysm's elite quests are much stronger than the previous expansion's group quests, in my opinion, is that two or three years from now, when most of the players are off questing in whatever new zones we find ourselves in in the next expansion pack, if you decide to level an alt and you find yourself in one of Cataclysm's zones, you will be able to complete these elite quests in spite of the fact that you will be one of three of four people in the zone (and probably the only person in the phase you are currently in). As it stood in the days of group quests, if you couldn't complete a group quest on your own (which, if you were the appropriate level for a zone, theoretically, you shouldn't have been able to), you would simply be unable to complete that quest, and if that quest should happen to advance the story of the zone, too bad; you'd just have to make up the rest. With Cataclysm's group quests, though, since they never required a group in the first place, players will be able to complete them well after Cataclysm's zones have been abandoned.

When you consider Cataclysm's linear quest-design structure (a structure which I don't mind and actually support), it really is a necessity for the elite quests to not require groups. If these quests did require groups and you couldn't complete one due to being unable to form a group, you would either be stuck in a zone's progression and be unable to continue, or you would have to leave the quest undone as you enter a new phase. The former possibility makes the solo content unplayable, and the latter makes certain quests become unavailable to players, something which they wouldn't be very appreciative of. So instead, we are left with group quests becoming something seen very rarely in Cataclysm. The only group quests we have now are dailies, which people will probably continue to do for a very long time (due to their being level-cap dailies), but can still be solo'ed pretty easily, and the Crucible of Carnage chain, which was probably added more out of tradition than anything else. Thus we are left with the conclusions that there really are no proper group quests in Cataclysm other than the Crucible of Carnage, which is it's own stand-alone quest-line and thus doesn't pose the potential issues brought up above, and for the reasons I have mentioned in this post, I don't mind that fact.