Phasing start from the start in most starterszone. Like when ur lvl 5 in dwarfzone, the tunnel collapses so you need to take a helicopter to first dwarventown close to ironforge. Last time I played night elf on beta nothing was changed. will check again if they have updated it
Just played couple of quests and none are in the same order as old quests, couldnt do more that 6-7 quests, after that questgiver was bugged. Think questing will be a problem at start since if you don't do one quest, next quest will not be triggered. Dunno if you can skip them by outgrinding the zone. So they will need to make questhandling more specific to get it working properly.
You have massive quests you need to interact with stuff or follow mobs from what i have played in beta.
To me questing was never good with hb. Even when you did a questoverride it sucked.
Hell, most of the good stuff came from devs that werent from the HB team .