"Even old-school Loremasters can get in on the action, as the zone quest achievements will still be available for them to complete."

Yeah, that's my question as well. I assume it probably depends on the zone. I don't think you're just going to automatically get all the zone achievements, so if you managed to avoid certain zones while doing Loremaster (I know I avoided the Badlands for instance), you'd still have those achievements to do.

And there are going to just be zones that are so overhauled that even though you did quest there extensively, so many of the quests you did before were removed that you'll still need to do quests to fill out the achievement.

And I know I used a fair amount of dungeon quests to finish up Loremaster, but dungeon quests don't count toward zone-specific achievements, so you may again find some gaps where you did a lot in Dire Maul but none of that counts toward Feralas, for instance.

I will try to answer your question with an educated guess..

I think what happened is that in vanilla, the quests were either tagged as being on either of the two continents or in a giant database of quests for each continent. When BC came out...for some reason, the developers decided to have the tags reference individual zones/have quest databases for all the zones, and the same for wrath.

It would have been too much work to make the quests tagged/be in a database for each zone without a huge revamp of all the quests in old azeroth.....which is what the cataclysm is all about...revamping azeroth.

TR;DL: I don't think you will automatically get the zone quest achievements because the quests you have completed were tagged for continents, not individual zones. You may have partial credit for zones, or complete credit for some zones, but you will not get all the achievements.

Judging from how it is phrased, Loremasters who have already completed the pre-4.0 achievements will keep their titles, but will NOT automatically have the new zone-wide quest achievements.

That is, you will still be The Loremaster -- maybe even "of the Eastern Kingdoms" or "Kalimdor" -- but you will still be able to work toward, say, "Loremaster of Arathi Highlands" or whichever if you want to.

I have a toon I transferred to the ptr that had over 3500 quests completed. Loremaster and then some. I'm totally OCD about doing quests. On the ptr he had just over 2200 completed. None of the zone achievements had more than 10 quests completed. There were yellow "!" everywhere. I did one quest and was awarded the Seeker title again.

Now I'm not sure all data transferred. Hopefully the quest tally that I worked on for so long isn't reduced, but it's not looking good.

Yeah...Starlin has it right. You will have the meta-achievements earned and you will definitely keep your title, but you will seemingly need to go back into zones to "re-finish" them if you want their respective achievements.

You'll still have credit for any quest IDs that still exist, though. So, in Westfall, for example, you might have credit for all the Westfall Stews and Kill 10 Defias type quests that still exist...but you won't have credit for all the completely brand new quests. So, you'll likely start with 10/35 or something similar.

But what if existing loremasters have done every quest in every zone already?

Will there be enough NEW quests in each zone for us to be able to go back and get the new zone-specific achievements?? Or will we be SoL?

For example, say a zone has 100 quests, i've already done them all, cataclysm removes 30 old ones and adds 30 new ones in their place, but the requirement for the zone-specific achieve is 50. I then wouldn't be able to get the new achieve unless old quests i already did there count toward it, because there would only be 30 new ones for me to do.

This.

Maybe it's me but wouldn't a Loremaster already have probably completed the requirements for most "complete x quest in y zone"? I mean, I remember it was kind of a nightmare to find more quests.

Sure, old quests removed would lower our amount of "x quests completed", but... don't mind me, remembering the nightmare that was finding all those questss.

At least this new quest-hunting will give us something nice to do until cataclysm goes live. :)

In short, when Cataclysm goes live (or 4.0.3a, probably) if you have done enough quests in a zone to get the zone achievement, you will be awarded it immediately. If you have not done enough quests, you won't get it, but you can go out and do quests to fix that.

The Loremaster meta does NOT automatically give you all the lower achievements. You'll have to go earn those yourself. I didn't get Loremaster and when I copied my hunter over to beta the only zone achievement I got was Silithus. I didn't have more than 5 quests done in any of the rest of the achievements. Pretty scary. Or on the other hand, pretty awesome! That's a lot of new quests to do! A Loremaster will certainly be better off, but you'll definitely need to do some questing to get all the new zone achievements.

"For example, say a zone has 100 quests, i've already done them all, cataclysm removes 30 old ones and adds 30 new ones in their place, but the requirement for the zone-specific achieve is 50. I then wouldn't be able to get the new achieve unless old quests i already did there count toward it, because there would only be 30 new ones for me to do."

Old quests that are still in the game count. In your example, since your total dropped to 70 and the achievement only requires 50, you would automatically get that zone achievement. Now if you'd lost 60 quests you would have to go out and do 10 of the new ones to get back up to 50.