Hi! I haven’t played retail in years and have a lvl 41 feral druid on horde and a lvl 64 mage on alliance. I am interested in playing both but am unsure where to start for either.
I’m not really sure which to start in for either character to get back into things and level, could I get some suggestions?
Thanks!
Currently doing timewalking dungeons is super fast for leveling, but I’d say go to chromie and pick up in whatever expansion you left off at, or just start in dragon isles and go from there.
Welcome back, I just returned to the game myself a week or two ago!
If you want fast leveling it’s usually through dungeon spam, atm you just kind of lfg in and let the level 11 level locked twink carry the party and wrap it in 5 minutes.
Otherwise pretty much whatever you do will rocket you forward in xp. If the event is still going on you can pick up an additional 10% xp boost there for 12 hours.
do i not really need to worry about what area im questing in then? i was worried I’d be doing either too low or high level quests.
i was hoping to do some quests before dungeons to get my rotations and such figured out.
Anywhere you want, it all scales now.
You will be sent to the current expansion once you hit level 70.
awesome! appreciate the info, thank you everyone 
The entire world scales to you now. Just speak with Chromie in Stormwind or Orgrimmar to choose which area you want to level in.
I highly recommend questing instead of dungeon crawling for returning players for exactly your stated reason.
If there is a particular expansion/area you missed and are interested in…tell Chromie you want to go there and it will be scaled for you.
If you have no opinion or preference, just go straight to Dragon Isles and skip the Chromie Time step.
Going to Dragon Isles from level 10+ - 70 is the most cohesive reintroduction currently available, in my opinion.
Do classic TW if you can, i think i went from 70-80 in one day on my alt
If flying is important to you and you missed all of DF then start the campaign through the Dragon/Sky riding part of it to learn about the new flying style.
If you end up hating Sky Riding, then you’ll have to do the pathfinder achievement in DF and TWW to be able to fly old style in each expac,
The achievements are doing the campaign and exploring all the zones in both expacs. Sky Riding requires you to gather glyphs that are needed to get max vigor (sky riding fuel).
Jump in and have fun but the flying situation to me is one of those “wish I knew before I returned” things.
Somehow I started with all the skyriding tree unlocked…
Really? Well okay thats 
I believe it’s that way for everyone now upon starting DF.
my best suggestion is going to be to create a new character picking whatever your favorite class is and just starting from scratch. The game has changed a lot in that many years and trust me it’s not gonna feel the same at all trying to pick it up and continue.
Tw dungeons super fast. Ive been doing nothing but leveling alts for a minute cause I didn’t get the new expac till today. Ally has better leveling zones than horde imo. More bang for your buck 
Horde: southern barrens, stone talon mountains and honestly the swamp area next to the thousand needles with all the ogres in it I thought was great. Very condensed.
Ally: Duskwood for sure, loch modan, there’s a few more zones as well for them that are really good and don’t forget to hit up the WOD intro quest and the gorgrond zone for both factions that gets you a lot of xp.
Work this in between time walking and you’re all set, Easy peezy
To be clear, if you just straight up walk to an (older) zone without interacting with the Chromie Time system, you will 100% hit exp walls where you stop gaining experience and the game will not tell you why or how to fix it (the answer is you move to the next expansion bracket, but you level so fast it’s unreasonable to level in this manner, as most brackets are 5 levels or so).
You need to enter a Chromie Time “Timeline” for wherever it is you’re going.
If you don’t want to mess with Chromie Time, the “default” is to level 1-10 in your racial starter zone or the new Exiles Reach “tutorial” zone, then go 10-70 in Dragonflight / Dragon Isles, and 70-80 in the current expansion.
That is the “current” timeline that will work and scale properly without messing with anything. It’s also where new accounts are pointed toward.