Vanilla questing is perhaps best epitomized in the level 20 shaman water totem quest:
With no mount and much sparser flight paths than are currently available, you had to travel from the central barrens to ashenvale, back to central barrens, then to sepulcher in Silverpine, then I think back to a different part of central barrens, then to southern barrens? I might be forgetting a step.
Reminds me of getting my pets as a warlock back in the day. Those involved a lot of hoofing it, and yeah sure you get a free mount at level 40 but the pet quests were all before that >.<
This is borrowed from
here
"this quest line to receive your Fel Hunter, has to have the most running of any quest ever created in this game. First you had to go to Ratchet only to be sent to Ironforge. Even with the help of flight paths, this would still take a fair amount of time just to go from point A to point B.
Then you were given a quest to recover two tomes, one in Hillsbrad while the other one was in Thousand Needles. The one in Hillsbrad was easy enough to find on the coastline where it was guarded by Murlocs. That was simple but the one in Thousand Needles, on the other hand, was a nightmare for me.
This was my first character so I didn't exactly know the names of all the zones. In fact, when I first read that the tome was in Thousand Needles I thought it was the name of an npc so I was very confused. Eventually I learned from a friend that it was a zone south of the Barrens so off I went. When I got there I was amazed to see the sheer drop that awaited me and that I needed to use an elevator to safely enter the zone. Again, this was primarily a horde zone, so there actually was a guard at the elevator that I had to kill every time I passed through there.
The tome for this zone was guarded by centaurs inside of a cave. After running through the cave a bit, I found the tome and promptly hearth stoned out. I remember thinking that after all that trouble the quest must surely be finished. But no...I turned it in in Ironforge and was then given yet another quest to go to the Wetlands.
I was so terribly annoyed but I bucked up and went to the Wetlands to kill some orcs for the rods for the ritual. After finally getting them, I then had to head for Ratchet, summon the Fel Hunter, defeat it, and finally the quest line was over."