Project Lore

I'll admit it, Icecrown Citadel is already starting to wear a little thin. No, my guild hasn't conquered it yet. And we haven't even started Hard Modes (which seem to be a mixed bag in terms of difficulty themselves), but we're sort of at that point where everything is on farm except for one or two fights that we continually butt our heads against week after week.

Progress, at this point, is being made at a snail's pace. So, with little else to do when I log on and we aren't raiding, I've been turning my eye towards earning old world achievements once again. At the top of my priority list have been those associated with faction reputation (like Timbermaw Hold or the Argent Dawn) and the notoriously frustrating Loremaster title.

For those of you not in pursuit of such goals, finding and completing every quest can be quite maddening. You can't always depend on quest hubs, as some start as drops from random creatures, or can only be found in the farthest corners of a given zone. The hunt only gets worse the more that you complete, since the remaining ones are all that much harder to discover.

But if there's one thing that makes this journey far more annoying than it needs to be, it's all the absolutely useless junk that finds its way into your bags! Isn't there an easy way to solve this problem?

Well, I propose to Blizzard the introduction of a customized loot system, something that allows you to pre-determine what your characters will pick up and what they won't. I really don't need five stacks of Deep Fried Plantains cluttering up my bags.

Just to give you a little bit of an example, I was trawling through both Stratholme and Scholomance yesterday, making that final trek towards exalted with the Argent Dawn, and getting some old-school quests with the faction out of the way in the process.

Amongst the things I needed to loot were Bone Fragments, Crypt Fiend Parts, Vials of Holy Water, several uncommon drops I know I'd want for other quests later down the line, and three varieties of Scourgestones that I could turn in for rep. I already have a full bank and several bags worth of Level 80 junk, so auto-looting the corpses of my fallen enemies quickly filled up what space was left with largely useless white and grey items.

And if you've ever taken a solo trip through either of these instances, you know how much you're going to be looting corpses! 

I kept finding myself going back into my bags and manually deleting things I had picked up just to make room for something I actually wanted. Sure, there's always the option of turning off auto-loot, but you still spend a lot of time sorting through drops to get the ones you want. It doesn't exactly lend itself to swift completion.

On top of all that, filling your log with a bunch of old world tasks at once is a good way to load your bags down with a bunch of quest items before you even set foot in a dungeon. Open space quickly becomes a premium.

I was able to find at least one third-party add-on that allows you to set some filters (though it's out of date and, thus, useless), but most of the rest are focused on looting in a party or raid setting.

What I want is something built-in that gives me a list of boxes that I can check or un-check depending on the kind of drops I'm looking for at any given time. Say, like this:

[  ] Auto-loot Quest Items

[  ] Auto-loot Money

[  ] Auto-loot Leatherworking Items

...and so on.

I don't figure this would be something exceedingly difficult to implement, as most items are already tagged with identifiers that tell the game what categories they fall into. With all the world-traveling and quest-hunting I've had to do lately, anything that speeds up the process a little bit would make my life that much easier.

And while we're at it, Blizz, I swear I recall hearing something about sticking quest-related items in a separate window so they wouldn't take up bag space sometime before Wrath of the Lich King came out. These are the sorts of things we can only hope find their way into the next expansion.