Hello!
I was unsure if this should be put under support, general discussion or here but i settled here because it seems like the most sense as i am a new player. I am sure the thread will be moved if need be.
I started wow, i wanna say a week or two ago. It started me in BFA, which was weird to me as that was the most recent expansions (besides shadowlands).
I made a Death Knight, started me in Zuldazar. Zuldazar eventually took me to Nazmir and Vol’dun. This is besides the point but figured i would add it for reference.
After i do all that, side quests and all, i start ‘The War Campaign’ This is where things get confusing, for me personally. I find myself, i feel like, jumping around the story / areas and not staying in an area for too long because they send me miles away to a different part of the world.
Maybe i am playing through the game wrong and i am unsure the order to actually follow but i am very confused on why the game plays as such. If it’s me, i would like to know what i am doing wrong, if anything at all and/or if this is intentional game design for WoW.
Any response is very much appreciated. Thank you for your time and i hope everyone has a wonderful day (:
3 Likes
You’re not doing anything wrong, it’s the way the game is set up now.
BfA is set up with two different continents. Horde spend most of their time in Zandalar and Alliance spend most of theirs in Kul Tiras, but each side gets sent over to the other continent occasionally. You complete a short quest chain & get sent back.
As for starting in BfA, that’s a little more involved. It used to be that you leveled up by playing through all the expansions in order, but that had a couple of problems. There were so many expansions that if you actually played all the way through all of them it would take forever to get caught up to the current expansion (at this point we’re talking the original game plus 7 expansions prior to Shadowlands). They put various mechanisms in place to speed up leveling but that just meant that you jumped from expansion to expansion without ever playing any of them all the way through, which was also frustrating & confusing for new players. So they came up with the current scheme where you pick one expansion and level up in that. New players get automatically sent to BfA because it’s the expansion immediately preceding Shadowlands & helps set up the story.
Once you’ve gotten a character to 50 you’ll be able to choose for future characters which expansion to level up in (using something called “Chromie Time”), letting you go back & play through the other expansions.
4 Likes
i see. i appreciate your response and for clearing a lot up for me. i assume it would be safe to finish BFA, do Shadowlands after then do The War Campaign etc… after covenant campaign?
if you’re high enough level to go into Shadowlands content, there’s no reason not to head directly there.
you don’t need to stay in BFA, you’ll get very little XP.
you can go back to any lower level content whenever you want
To add to what Tureja said, there is questing for the initial leveling experience, but there is also questing for the end game content at max level. This might seem confusing to new players going through the campaign (meant for leveling) and other forms of questing (war campaign, mechagon & nazjatar) that was not entirely meant to be for leveling experience. Since that expansion is no longer current and its all available pretty much at once, the lines of distinction are blurred.
As Nobully mentioned, you do not have to stay in BfA if you do not want to. The WoW model is to push all players into the new expansion, however depending on what your goals are, you can choose to do something else. If your goal is to level to max and explore Shadowlands, you no longer have (nor should you) to stay in BfA. If your goal is to explore the story, you can just proceed doing BfA. You also have the option of locking your XP to prevent xp gain so you won’t overpower everything in BfA.
Somethings that popular is for players (after getting one character to level 50) is to make a new character and have them go through a certain expansion for the story and to lock their characters at 49 or 50 so they can continue doing the story and to explore.
its just as confusing for returning players as well, its like they change everything each expansion because they think it’s keeps things fresh, no, no way
3 Likes
I’m so sorry it’s confusing. But it is. As it is the default Newcomer experience (rather than the latest expansion that will include end-game in the same content) I do wish they’d actually set it up more ideally for Newcomers (I mean aside from removing all the Azerite powers) with a better flow, better way to navigate and actually EXPLAIN that Tirigarde is first, Drustvar opens at 25 and Stormsong at 35. Guides often don’t know this either because our experience leveling through it was different.