Returning to retail after SoD

I played dragonflight up until Season 3. Then I played SoD and really enjoyed it. But have come back to retail to play bits of this patch and MoP remix.

I have convinced a group of SoD players to play retail - some of them originally left during Cata, some of them after wotlk. None of them have played after legion and one has only played classic.

A group of them will play MoP remix to level a main and maybe an alt or two if it’s fast for 2nd/3rd chars. A few of them have level 70 boosts. A couple want to level characters to learn the talents (not sure you learn much levelling as it is so trivial). I have no idea what is best.

What appeals to them is dragonriding, delves, open world content and some mythic+ and maybe normal/heroic raiding (lfr has no appeal). They have no interest in pvp although they enjoyed it during classic/SoD but have heard it’s not so great in retail.

I’m wondering what advice to give them about when to start playing. I was thinking the pre-patch to gear up during the pre-patch events.

I am wondering if there are other bits of the game they will need to do before TWW launch. For example, the questline involving khadgar and alleria in the current patch seems very related to TWW. Do they need to complete this?

If they start in the prepatch or at launch of TWW will they have the dragonflight skills filled in or will they have to get them? I know you can learn dragonflight as part of MoP remix with some sort of tutorial - I assume a similar ‘learning’ thing will happen for returning players starting TWW.

I think the key takeaway is to not overthink things. They’ll be fine if they just try to jump in with the pre-patch, but if they want to see Dragonflight, there’s no harm in doing that now. (Although I don’t know how active end game content will be in season 4 once remix gets going, so I wouldn’t plan on doing much there.)

Really, the only think I can think of is if it turns out that you don’t get a way to unlock the Dragonriding talents just by playing MoP remix, it will be worth it to collect the glyphs in the Dragon Isles. Dragonriding is miserable without the talents and I don’t think they’d want to wait for TWW to launch to unlock them that way. But given how miserable it is without the talents and the fact that they aren’t requiring Dragonflight for MoP remix, I’d be pretty surprised if they didn’t give you a way to unlock the talents.