From the most recent Test patch notes:

– While we feel that solo quests can be quite rewarding, we were not satisfied with the experience from solo combat alone, especially for those characters who prefer to target slightly lower creatures. Therefore, we have increased the experience earned in the following situations:

* Non-Heroic creature experience has been increased slightly.
* Experience for blue con creatures has been increased slightly.
* Experience for green con creatures has been increased significantly.
– In addition, we also wanted to increase the reward for defeating the nastier foes you meet during raids. Therefore, epic creature experience has been increased significantly.

Hm, I don’t know if I like these.

Solo *quests* aren’t rewarding at all. The problem is that right now, even before those changes, killing random monsters gives already WAY TOO MUCH experience compared to the experience you gain from completing a quest.

I know because I use to play with combat exp disabled and only getting it directly from completed quests. I can complete ten or more of them and my exp bar only inches forward. But as I enable the combat exp and go kill a monster I see the exp bar moving much more consistently just after a few kills.

What I mean isn’t that I want more grind, but that I would like the proportion between “killing creatures” and “completing a quest” better balanced. And better balanced toward the latter.

“Completing a quest” already implies that you have to go kill a number of monsters. What I don’t like is that I get 90% of my exp or more for killing them and only 10% when I return to a NPC to complete my task. I don’t care about the amount of total reward, but I would like it to be better distributed between those two moments. So that there’s an actual incentive to go questing, discovering the world and lore and all the rest that makes the game slightly more complex than progressquest.

WoW for the first time made the quests the core of the game. But they didn’t become the core of the game just because they were accessible and fun, but also because they were an efficient way to level and get good equipment instead of just killing the same mob on the same camp spot.

So, if the balance is already so disproportioned toward the direct kills instead of quest completition I guess that after these latest changes the situation will be even worse.

P.S.
Irony.