What Questing Pays While Levelling
Most characters in Forever earn their first few purses from a quest log rather than from a route or an auction listing. This is how that income behaves, why a long chain pays mostly in experience, and which part of the reward is actually worth money.
Where levelling gold actually comes from
A character that has never posted a single listing still accumulates coin, and nearly all of it arrives through turn-ins. Mobs drop small amounts, trash sold to a vendor adds more, but the quest is the only step that hands over a fixed sum for work already finished. That makes it the one income in the game that cannot miss: the amount is written on the quest before you accept it, it does not depend on a node still being there when you arrive, and it is not split with anyone else in the group.
What it does not do is scale. A quest pays once per character and then never again, so the income stops the moment a zone runs out of them. An instance group working the same hours can clear repeatedly, which is why the gold a dungeon run returns and what a dungeon run returns per hour are measured differently from a quest log. Questing wins on reliability and loses on repetition, and that trade stays the same at every level.
There is a second difference that matters past your own purse. Coin from a turn-in is created by the game rather than taken from another player, so questing is one of the faucets feeding the wider Forever economy rather than a transfer between two characters. Nothing you earn this way came out of somebody else's bank, which is exactly why the amounts are kept modest.
Why a 10-quest chain pays in experience
A chain of 10 quests looks like it should pay 10 times what a single quest pays. In practice the coin on each step stays small, and the weight of the reward sits in the experience bar and in the item handed over at the end. The chain is written as one story with one payoff, and the payoff is a level and a piece of gear rather than a purse. Steps in the middle often pay nothing but experience at all.
The design logic holds up from the economy side too. Experience is spent the moment it is granted and leaves nothing behind; coin stays in the world until something removes it. A long chain that paid well in gold would be a large one-time faucet attached to content every character walks through, so the generous currency is the one that cannot inflate anything. That is also why rested experience and levelling speed sit closer to the hours a climb costs than to any income figure.
The practical cost of a chain is travel. Steps that send you back to a quest giver two zones away burn an evening that a shorter loop would have spent killing, and crossing the continent on foot is subtracted from the same session. Add a bad pull on the way and the bill a death leaves behind can eat most of what the chain paid in coin.
The reward item is the real payment
When a quest offers a choice of items, the question is not which one looks best but which one you will still be carrying in an hour. If none of them is an upgrade, the correct answer is usually the one with the highest sell value, because that is the part of the reward you can actually bank. What a vendor pays for gear varies more between reward options than the quest's coin ever does, and the gap is often larger than the turn-in itself.
The other half of the payment is spending you avoid. A weapon handed over at the end of a chain is a weapon you do not buy from another player, and arming a character before the first dungeon is one of the larger early bills. A levelling character that follows chains through its bracket usually replaces most slots without touching the auction house, which is income in everything but name.
Both of those advantages are limited by what you can carry. Quest items, reward gear kept for later and vendor trash compete for the same slots, and bags bought while levelling are the first purchase quest coin tends to go on. Running back to a vendor with a full pack costs the same minutes the chain already took.
What we have not seen confirmed
We have no published reward values for Forever quests and we are not going to estimate them. Blizzard has not released a breakdown of coin per quest, per bracket or per chain, and nothing in the announcements says whether the reward tables were retuned against Classic or left as they were. Anyone quoting an exact figure for a specific turn-in is reading it off their own screen, which is fine as a report and useless as a plan for a character that has not reached that zone.
The same gap applies to new content. If Forever adds quests that do not exist in Classic, their rewards are unknown until someone completes them, and reward choices can change between beta builds without a note. The reliable approach is to read the reward panel before accepting a chain, compare the sell value of the options you will not equip, and treat the coin line as a bonus rather than the reason to be there. For the stage after questing stops covering costs, the ordered version of the plan is in a staged plan for making gold.
Questions
Do quests pay more than killing the same mobs?
For the same block of time they usually do, because the turn-in adds a fixed sum on top of whatever the mobs dropped on the way. The difference is that quest income runs out: once a zone is finished the coin stops, while grinding the same mobs keeps paying at the same slow rate for as long as you stay there.
Is a 10-quest chain worth doing for the money?
Not for the coin on its own. The steps pay little, and a chain that spans several zones can cost more in travel and repairs than it hands over. It is worth doing for the experience and for the reward item at the end, which is often a slot you would otherwise have to buy from another player.
Should I always take the reward I can sell?
Only when none of the options is an upgrade for your character or for an alt you are already levelling. Gear you equip saves you a purchase, which is worth more than the vendor value of the piece you did not take. If all the options are sidegrades or wrong for your class, take the one that sells highest and move on.
Can questing alone pay for a mount?
We have no confirmed reward figures for Forever, so we will not claim it either way. What is clear from the structure is that quest coin is spent as it arrives, on trainers, bags, repairs and reagents, so most characters reach the mount level with a profession or a farming route carrying the saving rather than the quest log.
Sources
- Blizzard's official site, where Forever announcements and patch notes are posted — World of Warcraft official site.
- Classic quest and reward database, useful for checking a chain and its reward options before accepting it — Wowhead Classic quests.