Questions on questing, leveling and going thru different zones

WoW newbie here, I got the game cause I wanted a sense of adventure and exploration. From lvl 1-70, completed quests on 3-4 zones in Kalimdor and 1 zone in Outlands. I though you need to complete quests of one zone to get to another. I’m leveling up at a nice pace, but it’s like I’m experiencing so little of the map. The quests are a cycle of: go here, kill that, go there, collect that, cool quest, go here. I’m not complaining about the quests but how it restricts me to a zone or specific area.


Is the game supposed to be played where your main priority is leveling asap to max (hence the few zones explored), then going back to exploring, completing quests, doing raids and dungeons?

Is there a way of questing (abandon other quests, etc.) or a quest line I could follow that would take me thru the different zones (for my race/side/class) while leveling at the same pace (1 to max lvl)?

Would playing different alts of different classes let me experience all of the zones via their default quest lines?

Is this issue of mine because I’m just in lvl 70 and things will be better when I reach the rest of the expansions?

I’m not a completionist, just want to experience as much as I can.

The only way you could do that would be to freeze your XP when you hit the level caps for the various expansions - freeze at 60 while you finish playing through Kalimdor & Eastern Kingdoms, then freeze at 80 while you finish playing through Outlands & Northrend, freeze at 90 while you finish Cataclysm & Pandaria, etc. It doesn’t get better as you level up - right now you can pretty much get from 110-120 in just one zone of Kul Tiras/Zandalar.

This has been exacerbated by the 100% XP boost currently in place, but even without that, the rate of XP gains guaranteed you would outlevel an expansion long before you finished it.

This is supposed to be addressed in the next expansion (Shadowlands, coming out later this year) by having your character pick one expansion to level through. You would have to create several different characters in order to experience all the continents, but you would get to more fully experience each one as you played through it.

Also, there are literally well over 20,000 quests in the game. Completing them all on one character is problematic even without xp buffs.

To answer your question frankly, you can move around the map as much as you want, the enemies will scale to you for the most part with exceptions to make it fun.