Hello,
I know about Chromie and that typically people create alts to do this, but I don’t want to do that, at least not yet. I don’t mind if I don’t get EXP or if I’m killing everything in one hit, just want to experience the story at the earliest timeline possible so I can understand who these characters are and what the bedazzle is happening. lol
I want to go do TBC as Horde with my high lvl DH. I know I just go to any TBC zone to get into TBC, but my question is…which zone is the “start” for a Horde character? In fact, how would I figure out the “starting” zones for each expansion by race/class? Is there an addon for this, or a link I can go to that will walk me through the exact order by expansion and alliance/horde?
If I’m not making any sense, my apologies. 
thank you for reading! 
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Look at the starting levels for the different zones shown on the map:
Hellfire Peninsula 10-50
Zangarmarsh 10-50
Terokkar Forest 15-50
Nagrand 15-50
Blade’s Edge Mountains 20-50
Netherstorm 25-50
Shadowmoon Valley 25-50
And that’s basically the order you should play them.
Some expansions are a bit more flexible: Wrath you can start from either Borean Tundra or Howling Fjord. In Warlords of Draenor, Alliance start in Shadowmoon Valley & Horde start in Frostfire Ridge but that will be really obvious once you actually start that expansion & build your garrison. Legion lets you play the first 4 zones (Highmountain, Stormheim, Val’Sharah, and Aszuna) in whatever order you like; Suramar, Broken Shore, and Argus are last and in that order. BfA used to let you choose the order as well but I don’t know if it still does.
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Hello,
Holy cow, thank you for the incredibly simple list! I’ve been googling for days for something like that and couldn’t find the answer whatsoever. You saved my sanity! 
I noticed that two zones are labeled 10-50 though, why is that? Is one for Horde and one for Alliance, or am I over thinking it?
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I don’t know why Zangarmarsh also starts at 10. When you go though the Black Gate to start the expansion, you’re in Hellfire Peninsula; that was always the first zone everybody did, both Alliance & Horde.
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Hello,
Alrighty, thank you so much for the awesome help, Tureja! 
I think the main reason is that before they changed how leveling worked and added scaling, you had to level through Hellfire Peninsula for at least a little bit if you were questing a character to max level, and a lot of players were a bit tired of it. So, I think they set Zangarmarsh as a level 10 zone to give people who had leveled up a bunch more options.
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Hello,
So I finally sat down to start the process and whatnot. While I waited for support to unstick my main from a quest, I started a new toon to go through the game in order. I don’t recognize the names of timelines in Chromie from what was provided above…well, except for the obvious ones. I just wanted to be sure before I drop time into this alt.
From what I’m seeing the labels as in Chromie—
- Portal to Outland = The Burning Crusade
- Fall of the Lich King = Wrath of the Lich King
- The Cataclysm = Cataclysm
- Wilds of Pandaria = Mists of Pandaria
- The Iron Horde = Warlords of Draenor (?)
- The Legion Invasion = Legion
—would that be correct?
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That all looks correct except the Cataclysm option also covers vanilla Warcraft (the original 1-60 zones); in fact you can’t even start playing the Cataclysm expansion stuff until you hit level 30. I don’t know what your plans are for turning off XP gains but you’ll want to make sure you are at least level 30 at the end of Wrath.
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Thanks again, Tureja! And so does that mean Cataclysm includes the original/classic WoW, or literally just the zones?
And I planned on level locking with an NPC at lvl49, but I may work through the entire series with this character. If I do decide to go to lvl50, I’ll just use a portal to get to the other expansions.
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The dragon reshaped the world during the Cataclysm so the original Classic wow story doesn’t exist in retail any longer although the zones remain.
Note that if you want to do old world raids and dungeons in chromie time, using the group finder tool, you have to select cataclysm.
Zones added during Cataclysm require flying though and are therefore restricted to level 30 and higher.
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Cataclysm includes Vanilla and Cataclysm proper.
Like the post above notes, Vanilla was outright destroyed during Cataclysm and the leveling process was rebuilt. For Vanilla, questing effectively begins at each racial starting zone and branches out zone by zone from there fairly linearly. As a Horde character, these would be:
Durotar, Mulgore, Tirisfal Glades*, Eversong Woods
*For Tirisfal, you may need to speak with Zidormi inside the zone itself to restore the original, before the events of BFA.
Each area should have a natural progression to “the next area”. All the zones above begin at level 1.
For Cataclysm itself, players originally started at level 80 and leveled to 85 through the following zones, listed generally in order:
Vash’jir
Mount Hyjal
Deepholme
Uldum
Twilight Highlands
…
If you are attempting to play “in order”, you would likely start with TBC because the “rebuilt” vanilla zones follow WotLK chronologically. My recommendation is to do TBC then WotLK before advancing to Cataclysm. Once there, start with the old 80-85 areas listed above to understand the overall Cataclysm arc, and then go back to the rebuilt zones to get a feel for the world-building and new context of those Cataclysm zones.
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WOW!
Thank you so much for such a detailed answer! This is the kind of information I need, thank you! Because WOW wiki and WOWH are a massive archive and I have no idea what I don’t know, so googling just gets me more lost. lol
And yes, I’m intending to play “in order” as reasonably possible. I know I’ll be missing vanilla game story, but I figured that could be the one story I skip and just watch videos on or something. I also plan on watching the SP WOW games for their lore too, or play them.
I’m working through TBC right now, but for just wanted to be sure I understand the Cataclysm part well enough. As Horde, I should pop into Vash’jir to begin the “old” version and then work through the rest of the zones in the order you dropped? If I understood that right, how would I then go back to the “rebuilt” zones? Would it be just a travel thing, or do I need to complete something or talk to a specific someone first?
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Youtuber Nobbel87 has an extensive series of lore videos.
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To go back to the rebuilt zones it’s about 95% of the zones located in Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms (opem your map and take a look). In my opinion the most natural way to play through those original “Cataclysm Overhaul” zones is to make a new character and just naturally progress from one zone to the next. For example a new Orc charcter would look like:
Orc Starting Zone
Durotar
Barrens
Ashenvale
Etc etc
But honestly there is flexibility. Often times youll be led from one zone to the next. Whichever zone borders each other.
If you have to play on your main character what you can do is google what quest starts each main zone questline on google and do that for each zone. Hope that makes sense.
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Bear in mind that there are tens of thousands of quests in WoW. Doing them all on one character is problematic. Particularly as xp needed to level has been reduced.
However, there is a Loremaster meta achievement that awards the Loremaster title and requires the completion of most of a factions quests through Pandaria.
Loremaster is account wide and consists of sub achievements for each xpac - Loremaster of XXX xpac. Different characters can earn each xpacs Loremaster achievement and it will count towards the account wide meta achievement that awards the title.
The achievement for each xpac is further subdivided into an achievement for each zone in the xpac. All the zone achievements for an expac, however, have to be done on a single character.
People generally follow one of three paths to earn the Loremaster title.
- Do all of it on a high level character who can one shot everything.
- Do each xpac on individual character(s) and freeze xp at strategic points.
- Some combination of 1+2. E.g. Loremaster of BC requires running dungeons. When I did it on this account, people running BC dungeons were few and far between. I did BC on a high level toon just to be able to solo the dungeons. BC is the only xpac requiring dungeon runs for Loremaster.
Wowhead.com has tools for tracking your Loremaster
Regress. I think icy-veins.com might as well.
Ingame, the two Addons Wholly and Grail can track what quests to have or haven’t completed in a zone.
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If you’re planning to do a full tour, I’d lock your XP at 47. That will prevent any Shadowlands stuff from interfering. (It will also give you access to Chromie Time if you want to use the dungeon finder for Dungeons.)
Once you get to Legion, there are two ways to proceed. You can keep XP locked at 47 and just use the group finder with Chromie Time for dungeons or you can level up to 50 and lock XP again. At 50, you get a modest overlevel bonus in Legion content and should be able to solo normal dungeons for story stuff. You don’t really get a power benefit beyond 50 until you start end game gearing at 60. Staying at 50 will let you keep access to the BfA dungeon finder when you get there, as to solo them, you need to get to 60 and get some Shadowlands gear.
There’s also no sane way to get XP past 51 without heading into Shadowlands.
Keep in mind that the above advice will very likely change once Dragonflight comes out and the level cap goes up, but you’ve got a while before you get there. (You probably won’t be done though — I think my “full tour” character took a year, and I was already very familiar with the quests.)
I’d also recommend starting the Character in Exile’s Reach and then completing the BfA tutorial (up to getting the Come Sail Away or Welcome to Zandalar achievement.) That will minimize some phasing issues for you, and you can rerun those quests on a dummy character when you get to BfA to refresh the story.
Then, I’d start with the Blood Elf or Draenai zones (depending you your faction.) They were not updated in Cataclysm, so will actually be the “first” part of the Burning Crusade story. For Horde, that will be Eversong Woods and Ghostlands, and for Alliance Azuremyst Isle and Bloodmyst Isle.
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Vash’jir is a Cataclysm starting zone but so is Mount Hyjal. At any given level throughout the game, you will have choices as to which zone you want to level in.
Personally, I find Vash’jir difficult for melee characters. It’s all under water so you have to continually position your self in three dimensions in order to engage an enemy. sometimes it’s hard to tell just how far away from them you are. No problem with ranged characters though.
I prefer Mount Hyjal which has quest lines in a very sequential order and ends up in Firelands where there are a lot of achievements you can earn.
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The revamped zones are just the current state of those zones in game, so there’s nothing special you have to do. There are a couple that have phases for later expansions, but if you are less than 50 and haven’t done the later expansions quests, the Cataclysm phase should be the default with the possible exception of the Blasted Lands. For the Blasted Lands, the NPC to turn back time is at the entrance from Swamp of Sorrows. (The NPC will be marked by a speach bubble icon on the world map if you have different phases unlocked to choose between.) When you’ve changed your timeline phase with the NPC, you’ll get a buff saying you’re time-travelling to remind you you’ve swapped the phase.
As for story order, especially in Cataclysm, isn’t always super clear. Each zone is meant to stand largely on it’s own, and some zone’s event’s are taking place at the same time as other zones.
Generally speaking, the revamped Vanilla zones take place before the high level Cataclysm zones story wise. In some cases, this is actually pretty clear story wise. For example, Darkshore takes place very clearly before Hyjal. (At the end of Darkshore, Malfurian actually leaves for Hyjal leaving the player to finish up the work in Darkshore.)
I’d say the best strategy for Cataclysm is to pick a racial starting zone to start with and then just follow the quests as they lead through the zones naturally. (And when you get multiple options, do the one that involves the least travel first as it will usually be more tied in to what you are doing.) Then, pick another racial starting zone and repeat the process. Then clean up any zones you’ve missed (which will probably be Felwood as I don’t remember any natural breadcrumb quests to it.) Then move on to the High level zones. (Hyjal/Vashj’ir > Deepholm > Uldum > Twilight Highlands.)
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Can you timewalk once you hit 50? Is that why you recommend locking your level at certain points?
WOW!
You have all been so incredibly helpful with getting me started in this massive world, and for that I thank you! I’m more into the lore/story of games, so feeling as if I couldn’t achieve that at all before hand, was very disheartening. With your help and your clear list of where to go and how to do it, the journey is already so much easier to make. I’ve been enjoying it so far! 
I have bookmarked this thread and will give it to others I meet with the same problem. Once again, I’m so very grateful for the help and support you have all provided. 
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