If you want a lore reason why then maybe they’re doing it since according to the lore of this expansion once we enter the Shadowlands we’re stuck there until the end of the expansion.
Or maybe it’s just more of the current devs ongoing contempt toward the play base.
No, we are not.
The hole is still open.
People are coming and going as they see fit, and we even have to go to Azeroth for some quests, like when we have to bring stuff from Alexstraza to Ysera.
Make it like Pools of Darkness, where you need to store your Faerun gear in a vault with Elminster when travelling through the pools of darkness to the dimensions where Bane’s lieutenants live.
And make it exactly like Pools of Darkness : failing to store your gear between dimensions destroys it completely.
Again I repeat.
And again we repeat :
No one cares about map IDs and technical innovations that allow what is essentially :
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Additionally design iteration changes as the years go by. Doing the first way you did things as the only way you can do things forever is not at all smart. And no that doesn’t mean any deviations from the first plan of action are automatically good.
But we were able to use our heart of Azeroth and azerite gear everywhere… all in all this is a just a strange change.
You know what’s not smart ?
And we are about to be 70 levels less in a few days. Look I can point out inconsistencies as well.
I don’t understand why Blizzard thinks restrictions = fun, meaningful game play.
Like, what??
And yet I can still cast Outbreak on Kalimdor, not just in the Plaguelands. 
Lol, is this for real? Lol! They really want you to discourage the old world dont they? However i have a probable reason why this happened. Two words. Ray tracing. Our new abilites are built to interact with ray tracing environment, the old world is built on an older model engine. So when new interact with old it cause problems.
Weird… my dude.
I don’t have ray tracing enabled and I can still use the spell.
Ray tracing also works just fine in Stormwind if you happen to have the hardware for it.
This is just a boneheaded move. I half expect them to go : “Oh hey, look at that, that must’ve been a bug… hehehe, we rever… fixed it”.
Do you even know what the ray tracing they are putting in 9.0 is for? Shadows. That’s it.
All the zones we have now run on the most recent version of the game. It’s just the assets that have variations in quality.
What if tomorrow there was a new system around talents.
You can only change one talent in one of the rows once each day. And each day that passes you get a talent charge. With a talent charge you’re able to make another change in your talent selection.
Like, what dude??
Meaningful!
Conduit restrictions suck and you don’t need to create a strawman to try and reinforce your point about why this change would suck for others.
I think Blizzard is confused as to what meaningful truly means in an MMORPG.
No no no no dude, see, they recently made a change where abilities have an AbilityID and now they can limit those abilities to using a specific charge system tied to this new ID.
It’s all new tech! Just because you used to do it a certain way doesn’t mean it’s smart!
