OK, I think that is a bad idea. BfA is much worse than Shadowlands and is out of date for events going forward.
It’s because Blizzard sees how much of a steaming pile of crap Shadowlands was, and how universally hated it is, so even they are choosing to just ignore Shadowlands and hope it recedes into the night to be forgotten. And for new players they don’t even have to experience it.
I disagree with the premise; the Faction conflict can mainly be ignored after just being touched on if you’re just leveling through BFA rather than playing it through completely like when it was current content. I think that going from BFA to DF and skipping SL is actually fairly logical to me if you’re new to WoW. You go from island continents ruled by either trolls or swole humans to island continents ruled by dragons and never deal with the confusing incoherent mess of going to multiple heavens and hells.
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You can only skip the faction war if you know what you’re doing. If you’re a new player doing quests as they are given to you, you will be doing the war campaign, and the mission table as well.
If you’re Alliance it’s a lot harder to ignore considering Brennadam happens half way through Stormsong. Maybe a new player will miss that if they choose to go Tirigarde and Drustvar first, but if any new player picks Stormsong they will be thrust into that faction war. Likewise if they choose Zuldazar(A) or Stormsong(H) as one of their campaign bases, both involve faction conflict.
While the transition from BFA to DF might not be as jarring as BFA to SL, I don’t think BFA zones are as timeline agnostic as they perhaps should be. Maybe I’m overstating the amount of confusion that could result out of it, however I think there is a disconnect going from Brennadam, dinging to whatever level is required to hit for you to go to DF, and then finding out there’s been an armistice for the past 5 years.
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They should just lock shadowlands and BFA in some opt-in leveling feature.
The game should go directly from Exiles reach to DF.
Most likely new players will not be confused by too many old returning characters and get a fresh start.
Except for the Night Elf thing and the shadowlands tumor seed they will bring with them.
And BfA was any better. I unsubscribed during BfA. I played through Shadowlands. BfA was totally worse.
We will have to agree to disagree. Personally I thought BfA was much better at the beginning, and the leveling experience was WAY MORE enjoyable. The questing in Kul’Tiras was amazing and the zones were beautiful, Drustvar is one of the best zones in the game.
Meanwhile Shadowlands leveling was brutal. It was so boring, and the overarching story for Shadowlands was garbage. The complete focus on Anduin and Sylvanas made me quit because I was so tired of them being the focus. I didn’t unsub from BfA until after 8.1, and that was because of how poorly they handled the Night Elf situation. But I did end up coming back for 8.2 and 8.3 to see the patches.
I unsubbed during 9.0 of Shadowlands and have not come back until recently and that was to play WotLK Classic, not to finish Shadowlands. It was the worst expansion imo, it was a garbage tier story, they ruined every character they could to force this Sylvanas story, and took 20 years of lore and just crapped on it.
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If you remove their endgame considerations (including borrowed power) and their prepatches, which is basically the state of the game today:
- WoD and BFA are two of the best expansions
- Mists remains solid
- Legion is a pretty mediocre content run
- Cata and Shadowlands are bottom tier
- Wrath is low tier
- BC is low tier
Cata and SL are the only expansions that were terrible both live and revisited, imo
That ship has sailed. Blizzard doesn’t really believe that there is a new player market for this game and they’re simply going to coast on their existing player base. The BFA setup is simply there to get alts up and running on a half-assed basis to get players to pay for boosts. Even the professions are run that way, you don’t need theprofession skills of the previous expacs to level the current content skills.
Needing to level up professions from scratch linearly through 18 years of content is about the least new-player-friendly thing I can think of.
You are probably correct that Blizzard’s changes are oriented more towards retention and reactivation of old players, but the profession change was beneficial from every aspect.
Also, BFA leveling is so incredibly fast that I don’t see the argument for it being done to encourage boosting. Seems more like recognition of the fact that only non-obvious treadmills work.
Absolutely, especially since what’;s produced in those old professions is absolutely useless for the most part. (save for Inscription).
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Another exception is engineering; every new gnome of mine spends time to go to Pandaria to get that out of the way for their Goblin Glider and water jets, Northrend for MOLL-E, and Cata for Loot-a-Rang. But still, exceptions and for relatively trivial things.