In World of Warcraft each of the major Alliance cities has a set of starting areas that will, if you follow the bread crumb trail left by the quest givers, get your character into the 30s before you need to merge onto the common quest superhighway that everybody follows to level cap.
The night elves over on Kalimdor have Teldrassil, Darkshore, and Ashenvale.
The dwarves and gnomes have Dun Morogh, Loch Modan, and the Wetlands.
The humans have Elwyn Forest, Westfall, and the Red Ridge Mountains… and Duskwood too.
Our cloven hoofed Draeni friends get a little short changed with only Azuremyst Isle and Bloodmyst Isle play in before they have to join somebody elses party, but that still can get them to 20.
The first zones listed above for each group seems to be relatively active on the servers on which I play. But the second zone seems to be dead, except for Westfall. Westfall is always very active and full of humans, night elves, dwarves, and draeni.
I have to admit that the pattern hold true for my characters as well. If I look at their reputations, their standings are all highest with Stormwind, no matter their race. That is, of course, because after their initial experience, I ran them all to Elwyn Forest and Westfall and the quest lines there.
I do not know if the quest lines in human territory are superior to the other locations, but you might get that impression from the population.
And so I was amused to find that my mother and my daughter managed to find their way to Westfall without any real guidance from me despite the fact that they both play night elves as their primary characters. Westfall is the place to be.
Of course, with the Wrath of the Lich King changes they got to take a boat straight from Auberdine to Stormwind, thus skipping the low level night elf nightmare run across the wetlands and through to Loch Modan that so many of us endured to get the hell away from Darnassus.
So our last couple of gaming sessions have concentrated on getting through the Westfall quest lines. And true to the title of this post, Westfall is still a very active zone with people running all over to complete the various quest lines.
Everybody also includes some bored horde players as well it seems. We had a problem with a level 80 Bloodelf player who was sitting in Moonbrook and killing the Defias Traitor that people were trying to escort to the Defias hideout to complete a quest. We gave up after a couple of attempts and came back later to finish it.
And, in finishing that quest, I think we are all lined up for a run through the Deadmines.
I don’t think we’ll be able to do it in our little group, but I have a level 40 hunter on the same server. I’ll get him out and lead us through the instance. That is our WoW plan for this weekend.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
The Human lands have Human NPC’s which carry better loot and money. Killing Bears and Spiders in Loch Modan doesn’t get you much money. Also, as you stated there is the Deadmines with VanCleef. The quests and lore are flushed out. This area is better than all others.
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Deadmines is why. It was the best group instance in the entire game when I played, there was no #2, either. Alliance or Horde, you went to Deadmines.
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Yep, Tipa has it right, people are mostly in Westfall to run Deadmines. Though the quests are pretty good too. The instance itself has some really good loot available, especially for twinks.
Shame about that blood-elf. Some people play the game just to be jerks. Was he/she flagged? Sometimes I think people do stuff like that hoping to get some PvP action.
Oh and there are breadcrumbs on Bloodmyst for Draenei to follow to Ashenvale. If you haven’t done the Bloodmyst quests I strongly recommend them. Though you have to roll a Draenei to get the full effect.
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Hrmm, I did not know about the Deadmines when I veered off to Westfall years back, and I am going to guess that my mother and my daughter were not aware of that instance before I mentioned it.
I will grant that as a reason people return to Westfall, but how did I end up there as a dwarf the first time around? Heh.
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Historically, I always used to need more than one of the three areas to level, but these days I don’t have any problem zipping on through using just the human areas (though I will often go to the Draenei areas instead for better quest loot).
I also try to avoid Ashenvale whenever possible due to the past trauma of having to run back and forth across the zone on the Alliance side. That’s not quite as bad now that they added the quest hub in the west half of the zone (caveat, you have to use the Azshara flight path, which means at least one run past the Horde town guards to get there), but I haven’t forgiven it.
Speaking of quest hubs, Darkshore, the old Ashenvale (which also breadcrumbs players to parts of Stonetalon in the late 20’s), Wetlands, and Duskwood all suffer somewhat from having the zone’s major town being on one side of a relatively wide zone. By contrast, Westfall, Redridge, and Loch Modan (which often cracked my quest rotation pre-TBC) all have centrally located hubs that require relatively little running across the entire zone (i.e. you fly in and you only have to cross half the zone to get to your quest target).
It’s also worth noting that the flight from SW to Duskwood is much shorter than the flight from Darnassus to Ashenvale, and you’re not stuck basing your training activities out of Darnassus. The flight from IF to Menethil isn’t bad, but it potentially dumps you on the wrong end of the zone. With Duskwood, you can fly to the Rebel Camp or Westfall if you need access to the western half of the zone, or you can simply run south from SW, swim the river, and end up in the middle of the zone in about the time it would have taken to run from the nearest flight point.
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There’s a large concentration of copper/tin in westfall/elwynn. I went there to level mining on my death knight, maybe that’s why you took your dwarf there?
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I still love Westfall as a quest zone, being my favourite low-level one.
It has great appeal as I can run from Elwynn Forest, pick up quests at the people at the cart, then the farmhouse, then Sentinel Hill. From there I can run around the whole of Westfall and slaughter anything in my path and almost be guaranteed to be progressing a quest.
The quest chains that follow, along with the exploration reward of finding the lighthouse quests and the treasure map quest, plus the whole Deadmines chain, makes Westfall one of the richest and most compact questing areas in the game.
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“Of course, with the Wrath of the Lich King changes they got to take a boat straight from Auberdine to Stormwind, thus skipping the low level night elf nightmare run across the wetlands and through to Loch Modan that so many of us endured to get the hell away from Darnassus.”
Awwww…you’re right, and that makes me kind of sad. I think that Wetlands run was a rite of passage for most of my main characters, going back to the days when you could make a corpse run (rez at a graveyard closer to where you actually wanted to go). I don’t think you can do that anymore, can you? I liked levelling in the human areas much more than the night elf starting area.
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I love deadmines. This instance had some thought behind it when the game creators put it together. I really like the tauren guy just before the ship. He’s full of confidence, thats for sure!
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