Hello there, I know that this is a bit of an odd question to ask but hours of looking online came up with nothing substantial.
To get to the point: I wanted to know if anyone could help me figure out how to play Retail WoW in order? As in: I wanted to know if you guys have advice or a way to help a brand new player experience the expansions and their relevant quests entirely in order and not jump around rapidly? Be it personal advice or (doubtful) a setting I might have missed that highlights expansion-specific quests since lots of major cities are connected to several expansions and it doesn’t make it obvious at all?
Starting the game up in BfA, only to be thrust back in time repeatedly in Orgrimmar to long-dead warchiefs and storylines I have no clue about, has been an extremely jarring experience. Many people told me to “just read the books or watch a video lol”, but that isn’t a solution to the new player experience being so severely random.
I was enjoying the story I was experiencing but now I don’t understand the timeline due to it being a jumbled mess. Some friends of mine had suggested just going to the continents that certain expansions were on and trying it that way but the interconnected main cities complicate that quite a bit unfortunately.
If you have any advice for me, I would genuinely appreciate it. Thank you.
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EDIT: I have received many great replies and advice about things to do in what order and videos to watch that explain things that the game doesn’t! Thank you all for your help, I greatly appreciate how helpful and kind you all have been <3
I didn’t realize when I made this post that the game would pick my first character I ever made on the server I moved off of to represent me. I’ve actually been playing on my characters Yewhi (Horde) and Redcamelia (Alliance) on Moon Guard (I heard the server was funny and I wasn’t disappointed), so I didn’t mean to make anyone think that I had stopped playing!
I’m currently leveling in Legion with my group of friends and we’ve been having fun stumbling on dungeons and doing them as well as the overall storyline of the expansion. I’m happy to announce I got to level 30 and have been enjoying my time in the game quite thoroughly. I’ll also be checking out the new expansion when it comes out as well.
Hello, I see you posted a thread about a new player experience. Best thing you can do is to just ignore as much as possible! Level up quickly and ignore everything because no matter what you do, the story is a massive mess! Not only is the leveling a meme, some important story aspects have been removed from the game, as well as the fact many others aren’t in the game at all! Just get to max level and hop onto the gear grind with everyone else, haha!
If you want to experience the lore properly, classic wow is the most authentic way to do it, it’s very lively at the moment and a lot of fun.
Otherwise, as new player you have to play through to level 50 on one character before chromie time becomes available on your alts. So there is no easy way to do the expansions in order.
It does kinda suck, but it is certainly easier to jump into the new content with minimal effort.
I would get one character to level 50 and then shelf that character for later. Now you have chromie time unlocked so make a new character and level lock them below 48 whenever you get there (you can lock xp in stormwind). Stay in Chromie time. Then quest in Kalmidor and Eastern Kingdoms → Outlands → Northerend → Cata zones → Pandaria → Draenor → Broken Isles → you already did bfa no action required → shadowlands
I had seen something about Chromie Time mentioned but didn’t know what it was–but thank you for the feedback! I was looking at Classic for a while wondering if maybe that was the best place to actually start, so I think I’ll probably do both things you suggested haha!
Thank you for the advice!
Follow the quests (questing areas) that you find most fun. I’m guessing the exclamation points for new quests will pop up for various locations so you can check them out pretty easily. Follow what’s fun for you - sorry so general but that sums up how to play this game imo.
Classic will tend to be less linear than retail. You’re best to stick with retail. This is what I would do after starting a new account. Level through out BFA (it’s default, doesn’t need chromie), this will get you to level 50 and even enable you to unlock your allied races.
Well, the key problem I tend to find with new players is that it is WAY TOO EASY for them to wander away from the Battle for Azeroth storyline. Coming into Shadowlands, the leveling experience was overhauled. The way it is supposed to flow is this: a new player does Exile’s Reach, gets a tour of their capital city, then the game puts them on the starting quest for BfA which ends with the player leveling to 50 within that expansion before moving on to SL. The idea behind this was that the events of BfA lead directly into SL, and it quickly gets new players acquainted with some of the characters that are important in the present game without bogging them down with nearly 30 years worth of lore if we go all the way back to the original Warcraft.
The problem is that at its core, WoW is still supposed to be an RPG. While the intent might be to NOT confuse new players, naturally a player is going to want to explore. It doesn’t take long for a player to suddenly be on a quest taking them to Westfall, or Stonetalon, etc. Once that happens, it’s far too easy for a new player to be doing the very things that Blizzard wanted to avoid: a new player confused by the fact that the Horde Warchief/Alliance High King can somethings change quest to quest, a disjointed storyline that can sometimes reference events they haven’t even seen happen yet, and way too many questions about what’s going on that can get fairly overwhelming with each additional layer added on.
And that’s before we get into the fact that Chromie Time/level scaling is active by default on BfA. A new player spending long enough on old content is eventually going to get confused by the fact that they’ve stopped gaining XP at level 25, 30, etc.
As far as where to start with the lore goes? Honestly, I say go all the way back to the original RTS trilogy. Plot summaries can be rather dry however. While it has a mixed reception, at the very least you could potentially watch the Warcraft film from 2016 as that condenses the first game (minus the Fall of Stormwind) down to a film that’s a little over two hours. However, do be aware that like with any adaptation, some changes were made from the source material. For you however, it might actually be the best place to start as that covers some of the really early lore, and you won’t have the key complaint about the film as you’re a new player (that being the fact that people hated that it was a Warcraft movie, and not one based on either Warcraft 3, or WoW itself)
Following that, here’s a really quick (and humorous) breakdown of everything all the way up to the start of Shadowlands:
How can anyone get lost you start from exiles reach then to Battle for Azeroth content and do the three zones (both zone and side quest) or dungeon and level to 50 and then move into shadowlands where you level from 50 to 60 and bam leveling is done and after that gear grinding through normal and heroic dungeons.
Short answer wowproffesions dot com is a fan site. That shows maps of all the leveling of professions.
Why you might ask ?
… they give the mining and herb gathering in order, so that must be the order the game would be played through at.
As I say in my previous post, that’s how it is SUPPOSED to flow, but it rarely ever does. Seriously, join Newcomer Chat and watch that at peak time for a few hours. People will be on their first character and rarely within BfA content.
Let me put this another way.
Have you played Skyrim or Fallout 3//NV/4?
If so, did you actually do the main story quest from beginning to end WITHOUT getting distracted by a side quest at some point?
That’s essentially what’s happening here. People aren’t following what is supposed to be the main quest. They’re wandering off without any clue that the quest they picked up is not related to BfA at all, or in some cases they are outright ignoring BfA quests (my guess being that Elwynn/Durotar are much closer and something they can actually see on the map as opposed to a travel point/portal they have to find)
Without access to chromie time every other zones will be maxed out at level 30 or 45 (legion) other than that there are no quest in BFA content that would lead you anywhere to those extremely old zones.
Thank you for taking the time to give me such a thorough breakdown and your introspective on the situation! It was admittedly very frustrating trying to just find a starting point to the lore but this will help me a lot in understanding and experiencing WoW better my first time through.
In my original post it might have sounded like I was completely averse to reading or watching videos about the subject but I’m definitely not, I was just hoping that there was a way in-game to still experience things in a decipherable order. With the feedback I’ve seen though, it’s a gigantic mess in that regard so my best bet really is to dabble in outside content for the series and just keep having fun with what I’ve been doing in the game.
I’ll definitely make sure to give the video you linked a watch, and I’ve heard things about the Warcraft movie but irregardless of its rating or fan reviews, I’ll also give it a watch as well!
Thank you so much again for the response, it’s going to help me a lot in the long-run.
New players don’t have any access to old content their thrust into BFA horde zuldazar and if alliance kultiras. Chromie time exist only for non-new player (returning players).
Thing is, there’s not really an overarching story in WoW. And it isn’t really until Legion that the story from one expansion started to lead directly into the next. You can do the content in release date order, but there’s not really any “next time on Dragon Ball Z!” sort of thing until the end of Mists of Pandaria. And even then, that one happens mostly in flashbacks and out-of-game material.
Your best bet, once you hit max level and have access to Chromie time on alts, is to just take a character and go exclusively through one expansion’s zones from start to finish. You can even turn off experience gain to keep from outleveling stuff too fast.
Well, unfortunately, Blizzard has actually made it very difficult for us to actually experience WoW in a chronological order. You see, the current developers of the game are really only interested in developing boring raid after boring raid, and aren’t too keen on allowing new players to feel particularly welcome in the world of 1% raiders.
They care very little for the story. Their storytelling is evidence of this enough.
Blizzard actually has the ability to at least allow people to experience the entire history of the game and how it even got to be the crap that it is now, by simply enabling the ability to use chromie time at any level, without scaling gear past level 48-50?
But they refuse to exercise that ability because, seemingly, they want to cultivate/maintain a confusing and hostile experience for new players.
Basically Blizzard isn’t interested in making money anymore. Only raids that they can play over and over and over, and hope that we too, the players still actually paying for their game, enjoy the raids as much as they do, and only enjoy raids as they do. This is why there really isn’t any other kinds of content to do at the end of the game.
Sorry to say that! But it’s a little impossible to enjoy any semblance of a chronological order of events when chromie time shuts you off automatically at level 48 or 50, and then older content mobs revert back to level 30 which, needless to say, are very very boring to fight as a level 50-60.
If that is upsetting, I just want to say that I understand how you feel and I am sorry. Perhaps someday Blizzard will actually want to make money off of new players such as yourself and we can actually play the game without as many unnecessary restrictions but. Yeah. They must really hate money, contrary to popular belief. So weird!
