I so agree! I remember back in the day having a hunter with cooking, Eng, and mining. It felt great making my own gear, having food for my pets, and able to make money, but now? While I love the new system they have for crafting, depending on what level you are or what crafting skill you picked, you tend to end up with a profession that you can’t even use till you are max level.
If you are under 60 for Dragon flight or 70 for TWW, you can’t even use anything you make. If you are 60 or 70, then you have to hope what profession you pick doesn’t have a pure random/luck set up and you can craft anything you can use before max level. My same hunter, while I can make food and totally mine, making my own guns/ammo and other stuff is so random that at level 74 I am wondering if I will ever be able to make anything for myself at some point that I can use before 80.
A new player should not be exposed to 20 years of lore. They can go back to level old expansions or watch youtube if they really want to know. I think leveling in shadowlands is fine. Personally, i have always gone to WoD first to get a garrison, and then to legion to do the class hall. I don’t use the garrisons much at all, but like the idea of an extra hearth to acces the bank. Another thing i always do is get a shadowlands covenant.
If i do choose to go make a new toon from scratch, i might do cata next time.
they’ve definitely painted themselves into a corner.
I just came back to retail I leveled a character strictly questing with like 2-3 follower dungeons when I had quests there.
Starting at level 10, I hit level 69 with 3 bars till 70 by the time I was sent to the main city and I found that super super weird.
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I agree with this structure of introduction. The game is too big for a linear, on the rails, everything and everyone introductory quest.
If anything, the caverns of time should have all the cinematics and cut scenes from all the expansions available at all times for the curious.
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Leveling in WoW is beyond its time. WoW just needs to move on to logging in not having to level and just playing the game. Wanna do the story and learn it go ahead, wanna PvP sure, wanna do dungeons hop in or start a group same with raid, delves fine. Just let people play the game. Maybe some pre-requisite quest for the raid wouldn’t be bad.
Some are introduced by their parents. Yes, WoW is that old.
I agree with ALOT of what I’m reading in this thread… I just don’t understand why they don’t just make the current expansion the one you level in.
It’s all broken and thrown together in a big muddle… Just start characters out in TWW and then if they want to see previous expansions it’s all there. I also find the clunky Zoridormi time ways in random zones super off-putting, in Uldum and in Tirisfal in particular.
Either go back constantly and remove/change zones permanently, or continue on with new areas. Clunky and cringe is an understatement, it’s so bad.
What if Chromie did a tour of the timeways and you leveled by doing scaled versions of important events throughout all the xpacs?
Start in Org or SW and level in vanilla zones, but you get teleported to certain objectives by Chromie. Have the leveling continue through xpacs at a pace that shows you the key points, and has roughly commensurate time spent as what the xpacs took. You hit TWW at 70 with a basic outline of the events that brought you there?
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I think your suggestion is the only one that would actually work.
Something like this–a completely new and highly linear, specially constructed questline for first-time levelers–is probably the only way it will be good for the new kids. It would accomplish two very important things:
- It would put all of the first-time players in one track together. This is a good thing.
- It could be carefully curated to tell the basic story, introduce the world in a less overwhelming way, familiarize the player with the larger world/continent map, and allow new players to level at a slower pace.
They could have so many possibilities here, as these folks would literally be phased away on that first trip through the world.
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They could reintroduce class trainers. One great way to do this would be having the player visit his/her trainer every 10th level to do a Proving Grounds type of quest and get rewarded with a new weapon at the end (just an example).
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Proving Grounds in a leveling scenario could progress from basic button pressing in the first one to walking them through interrupts and utility abilities in the second to role-specific testing in the third…something like that. Toward the end, they get sent into follower dungeons that finish out that segment’s storyline with a Proving Ground type of deal where all of it is put together with boss mechanics, NPC’s that make it possible to fail if you don’t interrupt or use personals, etc.
So yes, Atari, I think your suggestion is the only realistic way it could be done, but that is a MASSIVE undertaking to do well, and even if they did it in a very basic, no frills way that didn’t include any of this stuff I’m suggesting, it would be a lot of work.
“It’ll cost you a raid tier” seems like an understatement for an overhaul of that nature, and I suspect there aren’t enough truly new players joining to make it worth their time financially to make it.
I guess we’ll see how it all progresses.