I choose to level in the troll starting area at echo isles, and when I hit level 15, I was expecting I could queue for rage fire chasm.
I don’t even get the option to choose any of those dungeons. Is there a quest chain or something I need to do to open those up? I only see battle for Azeroth dungeons to queue up for.
You need to enter chromie time and then you get the dungeons of that expansion to queue for (cataclysm chromie time gives you classic dungeons)
Oh. Thats strange. Shouldn’t the default if you are leveling through the old world zones be old world dungeons?
In other words, why do I have to opt into chromie time to level through the old world and do old world stuff?
iirc bfa is the default because bfa was the first expansion to be scaled appropriately for all levels, if you defaulted into level-appropriate outside of chromie time what you’re queuing for would change every 5 levels after 30.
I think that restricting the leveling dungeons to the specific expansion timeline that you’re in was a poor design choice. You should be able to access every dungeon that your level allows. It isn’t like you need to travel to them. Everyone gets ported in and ported out.
BfA is the new player experience, so when people get out of Exile’s Reach, they’re supposed to be transitioned into BfA content. Thus, BfA dungeons are the standard without Chromie Time. Next expansion, Dragonflight will be the new player experience and BfA will be then added to Chromie Time and DF dungeons will be the standard without Chromie Time.
The default is BFA dungeons because that’s where Blizzard decided new players should focus on, due to design and overall story advancement that happened in that expansion, or something like that.
You’re basically running into 2 different systems conflicting with each other.
I think it was during Legion, they made it so things scaled by expansion bracket. So you could level 1-30 in Vanilla-WotLK zones, 30-35 in Cata/MoP, 35-40 in Legion, etc, etc. As opposed to every zone having a set range of levels. The intent was so you could finish zone stories before moving on to the next one instead of constantly having your quests turn gray halfway through a story.
Then I think the very next expansion we got Chromie Time, which scales any expansion up to Current Content - 10 levels. BfA, as the default new player experience, functions the same way without fiddling with Chromie Time.
Blizzard expects you to either be leveling in BfA as new players do, or choose a Chromie Time expansion which will scale things appropriately.
Leveling the “old” way is still available, but nothing actually leads you directly to doing it in that manner anymore. It’s basically just older players defaulting to what they know and then getting confused after level 30 because it’s an awful mess after that point.
(I think Heroes Call Boards still lead players to old content zones too, which NEEDS to be deleted, because new players will never understand what’s happening when they get into the level brackets where they hit the exp wall every 4-5 levels.)
Technically, since just about everything is capable of scaling thanks to Chromie Time, that would mean that just about every normal dungeon in the game would be available since normal dungeons don’t really have ‘level ranges’ anymore. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but just something I felt like pointing out.
But knowing Blizzard these days, the UI would probably break if it had 60 dungeons available to queue for at once.
Dungeons do absolutely still have level ranges. So do zones, even in Chromie Time.
I remember running to Kun Lai for a profession trainer on my level 10 Twink and running into skull level mobs when running through the tunnel, when things before that were my level.
Similarly, a level 10 in WoD Chromie time only has access to SMBG and Slag Mines.
A level 10 in BC only has 4 dungeons.
A level 10 in WotLK only has Utgarde Keep and Nexus.
A level 10 in MoP only has Jade Temple.
You still unlock more dungeons as you go, the lower end requirements still exist, it’s just that the upper end scales up further.
It’s inconsistent though. Classic has a ton of dungeons unlocked off rip. Shadowlands I believe has all of the normal leveling dungeons (which is only like 4, but still). BfA has all of the leveling dungeons. Not sure about Legion as I have basically 0 reason to go there on my 10s.
It’s probably that some of the newer expansions that offered non-linear questing just have everything open due to that design. Not sure for the Classic ones though.
I didn’t know there were still minimum levels on some dungeons! I just assumed everything got wrapped up in the CT blanket and that level didn’t matter anymore for anything outside of level cap. 
How fast leveling goes probably contributes to that lol.
Good points. I think its fine if they want newer players who have never played the game get that tailored experience of leveling through exiled reach and then onto BFA. Cool. But after you level 1 character and get it to max, when you make a new character, you get to choose your starting zone, either exiled reach, or the race’s starting area. If you start leveling in your race’s starting area, thats the old world questing experience. I would think people who choose that path at the start should be able to just que and enter old world dungeons at will.
Right now, if I wanted to do RFC, or Deadmines, or some of the early dungeons, I would have to form the group manually and enter them, which in the queue UI, everything on rails environment we have, no players are going to see that random guy looking to form a manual group in retail. So it never will get done.
I just think blizzard should allow all dungeons if you become the appropriate level with the new scaling in place to be able to queue and enter those dungeons regardless of what chromie time, or expansion they are leveling through.
Realistically, Blizzard views the starting zone choice as your choice of intro and nothing more.
The progression is: [Intro] → [BfA] or [Chromie Time] → Current Expansion
I don’t disagree that it feels weird. There should probably just be an option to queue for “All Dungeons” in addition to being able to specifically queue for only 1 Expansion’s dungeons.
But that’s how it is right now.
i been doing old world dungeon queues while doing old world quests while leveling my baby DH, so not sure what kinda issue you got.
He’s not chosen Cata Chromie Time.
Worth noting that if anyone in your group has a different chromie time active, you will be able to queue for any expansion currently active.
Which is how I can spam WoD dungeons while not in Chromie Time, since there will always be someone present in WoD Dungeons who is in Chromie Time for WoD.
Your problem has a solution. Why are we still hearing you?
The actual audacity to complain that you have to click an NPC to get what you want. Lol Go design your own game, then. Insane levels of entitlement.
The old world is not the default leveling zone, it’s BfA zones.
Exiles reach is bfa content. The whole premise is horde and alliance at war. They’d need a new one for df to take over or it would make little sense.
Tbf it does that after you’ve been in Q for long enough, but it should be by default