New player here. Just reached level 60, need to choose Outland or Northrend, which one would be better for a new player like myself? I have a friend doing doing Northrend right now and I’m wondering if I should join him.
Also, can you change once you are done with all the quests? for example, if you finish the story line for Northrend can you then start Outland?
Thanks!
I generally do Outland first due to profession item level requirements.
Many items made by professions have minimum character levels to equip and/or use.
Outlsnd used to start at level 58 so your most useful profession items usually require you to be at least level 55 to use.
Northrend used to start at level 68 so your most useful profession items usually require you to be at least level 65 to use.
If you start Northrend at 60, it will be at least 5 levels before you can make anything you can really use.
If you don’t care about professions, you can do them in either order.
It will be similar at level 80 between Cata and Mop. Profession-wise, Cata comes first and then MoP.
You don’t have to finish Outland or Northrend before going to the other. You can jump back and forth at any time.
EDIT: If you have engineering, you definitely want Outland first to learn to make the
Outland Zapthrottle Mote Extractor to mine clouds for motes in both Outland an Northrend.
The first thing to realize is that both Outland and Northrend are older zones (most 1-60 content was revamped in Cataclysm) so the questing style is going to be different that what you’ve been doing. Especially in Outland, it’s a lot less structured. You’ll hit a hub and often get a whole bunch of quests that send you all over the place. Northrend is somewhere between Outland and Cataclysm style-wise.
I think story-wise, it’s going to be easier for a new player to jump into Northrend. While not as structured as the Cataclysm stuff, it’s still got a lot more structure than Outland, and so it will lead you through the story a bit more. Outland is more about world-building, where you’re exploring this broken world and helping out various groups. What would be considered the main story involving Illidan is mostly involved in an end-game quest chain that requires raids. It’s a lot easier to do all of that when you outlevel it and can solo all the stuff needed. (Which for reference, the low 90s should make all the Outland raids soloable.)
Thanks! appreciate the help!
One last consideration, which you may have discovered already, is using a flying mount. If you get attacked while airborne at significant altitude, you can fall off and die. Running from the nearest graveyard to where your corpse landed can be difficult to impossible, depending on what dismounted you and where.
Outland has relatively few high-altitude threats. Northrend, however, has a good many low to medium altitude enemies who WILL attack you. It also has some higher altitude really bad things. As you go out of the starter zone and into others, flying gets more and more dangerous. You can still do it, but you have to be on your toes, and/or fly NOE (Nape of the Earth - just skimming above the ground, like a combat helicopter). If you’re flying NOE, getting knocked off won’t kill you because the fall is a short distance.
Once you hit level 90 (Warlords of Draenor expansion content), flying is irrelevant. The achievement(s) needed to enable flying in 90+ zones require that you find and complete just about every quest in every zone. You’ll advance out of the region long before you qualify for the achievement.
Outland sucks. The quests are tedious and less rewarding than those in Northrend. Some of the areas look a bit nicer, but I would avoid Outland completely if your goal is character progression outside of professions.