BFA was a very poor choice for the starting experience.
I get blizzards idea behind it, leveling 1-60 in the post cata classic zones will leave a gap in knowledge: why isnt garrosh warchief? Why is varian dead? Isnt anduin like 10? Why am i fighting sylvanas when shes my racial leader? (I am looking from the lens of shadowlands when they made this call).
It made sense to drop new players into the xpac that explained a lot of that, or was so long since those things that it became irrelevant (eg we were 2 warchiefs past garrosh/varian was dead for awhile). It also put them in a better place to work on allied race unlocks before that was loosened.
Now though, BFA makes no sense as the drop zone. The set ups pay off was last xpac. So it should be changed.
Didnt they announce that DF will be the new player experience in TWW? That works much better imo with a more stand alone story that fits how exile reach ends, heck you see those NPCs again in the first zone.
Well that’s the point, when you started decades earlier you did not have the “qualify of life additions”. My suggestion would be to have new people go start in Classic Wrath/Cat. Classic Vanillia is a little too primitive because quest locations are not shown on the map but Wrath/Cat is fine.
With Classic Wrath/Cat you can start in the starter zones and progress along until you have a good feeling for the story and how the game is played. Then when they are ready they can switch to Retail.
You can level in the old zones as a new player the way we did in past expansions where the zones had minimum and maximum level scaling. ie: go to Outland or Northrend at level 20.
Let alone the horrible continuity.
There is no cohesion at all to what we do in old zones anymore. Chromie time needs to be revamped into a plot summary of all the previous expansions, to allow someone to understand the story at least somewhat then they can go back on alts to do zones they liked the summary of the most with old chromie time.
It’s utterly bizarre, especially compared vanilla / classic 1-15 experience.
It looked like the goal was to get new players into newer zones with the least amount of effort possible. Looking at almost completely empty night elf zone ( the mirror emerald dream zone ) that has a portal to Feralas, my guess is the long term plan is to re do leveling more like classic with properly done starter zones.
man that island whatever its called as an option for a starting zone was such garbage i did it once and swore never again, i’ll do elwyn forest etc again thank you very much
What in the ever living cheetos is this? Think all the events up to this point all condensed and giving you all the basic story aspects of the game all while you engage with a super epic Chromie quest. You go from Exile’s Reach to here. It’s equipped with a full on class/spec trial area where Chromie lets you get a feel for all classes in game or you can skip this an continue. It gives you gear, epic even that might last you awhile, and perhaps even some loot with cool effects on them.
In the end you storm through loads of content from the past in order, dungeons/raids with Chromie and your friends, and fight even some big mean raid bosses with her assistence.
By the end you’re all caught up on a lot of the prior lore, the cosmic universe, and all of whatever is currently going on.
I imagine its pretty bad for a new solo player but i just did this exact thing for a friend who got his first PC in like a decade and it was pretty smooth. We started with bfa but realized around level 30 he had chromie time unlocked so we just took him on a wow’s greatest hit tour.
Since it took us 6 days to tell he could move with the mouse cause i just happened to catch him keyboard turning in a stream; I’m happy he had to do exiles reach, i would never remember to tell him 90% of the things it covers because theyre so second nature after 18 years.
i agree that the tutorials were helpful. but not helpful enough for her to not have to ask for clarifications most of the time. we just ran into the same thing with chromie too haha. she got a random quest from org to start pandaria, so we did that without needing chromie. then we hit lvl 40 and stopped getting xp. now she’s unlocking allied races and doesn’t know ANY main points from ANY expansions, other than the fact that the horde were racing the alliance to get to pandaria. The main issue I think is that there’s no way to experience the game start to finish like you could before, one expansion at a time until you leveled up enough to be able to quest in the next area. and obviously forcing you to play a generic walkthrough instead of just giving tutorials throughout the starting zones for each race.