WoW is not a 'play with friends' game now

Returning player here (I left in Legion)

I returned during the Legion Remix event and it was great! I leveled approximately eleventeen alts to 80 playing with my spouse. Now as we march towards Midnight, I have been leveling up through Dragonflight and beyond with older characters.

Here’s where the fun stops:

  1. Whenever my spouse tries to play WITH me, and I try to use the party sync, he gets ‘you are not eligible to do this content / you have done this content already’. Leaving me to solo along by myself for quests, dungeons, etc.
  2. In War Within in particular, we tried to do a follower dungeon 3 times - either errors above occured, or we went through the whole thing, with followers, and it didn’t complete my quest.
  3. Today, the straw that broke this camel’s back. We went to the Storm Altar dungeon in BfA to get the decor. We knew we had to run it twice to get two rolls, one for each of us.

First, run, he won the roll. Second run….I was running in on the water, and the boss went down. There was no roll. He got the fireplace. Again. Which is not tradeable like literally every other piece of dungeon/raid loot.

The takeaway: We are better off / need to solo all of our content in order for me to experience the story and both of us to get the decor items. I though that WoW was a ‘play with friends’ game, but that is no longer the case?