Posts with tag gray

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's (almost) daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky be your host today.

I'm just going to let that video speak for itself today, and get started on the questions.

@sammagher asked...

"Why do grey items even exist, if only to be sold to vendors or occasionally used as RP gear?"

Players have been asking for a way to track even their gray quests for a long time (in order to go back and do them for lore or reputation value), and now it looks like Blizzard is finally listening. Tigole says that in the next Wrath beta build, even gray quests will be trackable on the minimap, like normal quests are now. While a few players argued when the minimap first got updated that it would make the game way too easy, I've found (as I've been leveling my alt again lately) that it actually lets you focus on the important part of the game -- the quest text. Not poking around looking for those exclamation points keeps your mind on what's actually going on as you go back to a quest giver, and makes it more fun as you turn in the overdeveloped gizzard or whatever you're giving away.

So good news on this one for completists -- if you've been thinking about going back and hunting down all of the old quests, for reputation, for the new achievements, or just for the heck of it, you might as well wait until you can see them on the minimap.

While the "rumor" that starts this thread is really stupid and completely untrue (that red quests will give you negative XP), later on, the thread actually clarifies a few things, even for me, about quests and the XP they grant at different levels.

Any quest you get has a level associated with it-- that's Blizzard's method of determining which quests you should do at which levels. As listed in the thread:

Grey - Trivial
Green - Easy
Yellow - Somewhat Difficult (Blizzard says "Normal," but some yellow quests are more frustrating than others)
Orange - Hard
Red - Very Hard

(There are addons, also, that will do away with the whole color thing and simply tell you what level your quests are-- I use MonkeyQuest.)

But here's the thing, and this is something I had wrong: every quest you do gives exactly the same amount of XP, unless it's gray. If a quest gives 4000xp, it'll give 4000xp whether you do it at red, orange, yellow, or green. I had previously thought that a red quest would give more XP (because that's how it works with monsters-- higher level kills mean more XP), but that's not the case with quests.

And here's the other thing I learned: while killing a gray mob grants no XP at all, gray quests do give XP, but it drops for every level the quest is gray to you. That number is determined by this formula-- gray quests are 5 or more levels below you, and the XP you receive drops as your level rises.

Finally, while the same XP is given for a quest no matter when you do it, it still might not be worth it to only do green quests-- 1100xp is great at level 17, but not as helpful at 22. While doing red quests won't actually give more XP, they will push that experience bar farther (because the bar is relative to the XP you need for next level). As with mobs, you generally want to be doing yellow quests, while doing orange or red when you can (when you have a group willing to help out) and green when you have to.