yeah I’ve seen this complaint before. It’s beyond stupid that you can’t just pick where you wana go. lol blizz is total noob status. STILL after 18 years you’d think they learned SOMETHING.
/shrug
I think BFA had a great leveling experience. That wasn’t the issue with the x-pac at least for me. I’d say post leveling is where things started going off the rails.
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Chromie Time - It’s One Tamriel from ESO but with lots of extra rules and conditions to limit you from doing what you want.
Because Shadowlands wouldn’t make sense unless you did 1 and 1/2 zones worth of BFA content until randomly skipping out to some Deathknight guy you never met before telling you that some helmet was broken by that elf lady that’s your boss and it broke the sky in this place you’ve never been too and now you’re going to angel Narnia to do simple tasks for some greek analog smurfs.
This is the new player experience: Dinosaur Wrangler ==> greek smurfs ==> quitting.
I love the interaction with Bwonsamdi especially if you died.
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sorry this happened. blizz needs to do better. this is why new players dont stick around and veteran players with no one to play with are like
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Is it? I haven’t played SL so I could be way off-base, but from what I’ve heard of the story apparently every single expansion is intertwined with SL’s story lol
Snark aside, with current leveling speeds and a lot of BfA’s story content essentially being walled off (since nobody’s doing BfA raids anymore), new players really aren’t going to see much of any of the tie-ins with SL. Even without the current XP buff, you hit 50 before you even finish the second zone and then you’re off to SL!
It is a definite mistake that they FORCE you to take a certain path. I get why they funnel you into BFA, but there should be a way out. More importantly there should be a way back in. Having to choose a path and being stuck with it and only being able to do the associated dungeons is very poor design.
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Also I noticed BFA dungeons are really hard how do Blizzard expect new players to enjoy them?
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Well, that’s a relief then. Last thing WoW needs is yet another player who can’t read easily obtainable information and throws a hissy.
Oh noes! He can’t play vastly inferior expansions in a particular order when playing ONE expansion “out of order” will take but a few hours of time and not lose THAT much as far as storyline goes.
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I sometimes like to do this thing where i level new chars and since i like both cata and bfa dgs i usually do one or the other and I gotta say i dont see how bfa dgs are so hard beyond like, screeching pterodactyls in atal dazar which are more of an inconvenience than anything. Everything else is so piss easy that I can’t imagine new players are truly having a hard time of it that they also wouldn’t have in any other expansion.
You’re a brand-new adventurer stepping into Azeroth for the first time. You’ve gotten off the newbie island and are being introduced to the main story. Which makes more narrative sense?
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You undertake a diplomatic mission to recruit a nation into your faction
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You go back in time through a portal and fight on an alien world against a demon army
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You go back in time and fight undead armies including their leader that’s since been killed and replaced
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You go back in time and fight against a giant dragon that’s been dead for years
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You go back in time and fight against a warchief that’s been killed and replaced twice over
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You go back in time to an alternate version of earlier mentioned alien world to fight against said now dead warchief and the demon army for the second time in a row.
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You go back in time and fight the demon army for the third time in a row…
Any option that involves time travel should be for someone who’s already played through the story once, not a brand new player.
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There was a new player posting on Reddit the other day saying that he wasn’t sure if he should keep doing his zone or go to a different area because the story wanted him to do UNDERROT next, and he’d heard that it was so complicated, and he wasn’t sure he was ready.
I genuinely think people complaining about how hard the dungeons are for new players is way worse than any difficulty they actually have.
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I’ve seen more wipes in TBC dungeons because of the lack of telegraphing lots of old bosses have (and because they mobs can really hurt).
BfA dungeons really aren’t that much more difficult than any other dungeon. They’re pretty mechanically neutered on normal mode.
BFA zone stories are isolated from the bigger plot points and the main story happens during the main war campaign which isn’t available till level 50 but even than you would be moving on to shadowlands.
For all of the faults that the MSQ in FFXIV has, such as classes being hard-locked behind it at various points in the story, one good thing about forcing the MSQ is that you understand what the hell is going on at pretty much every step of your journey through the game. You know who the Scions are, why Thancred is like he is, what’s going on in Ul’dah, who the Garlemald Empire is, what’s up with Doma, etc. I honestly couldn’t tell you a single narrative beat of what happened in WoW outside of the big CG moments (which also don’t involve your character so there’s another point of detachment from the main game).
I mean, unless you spam through the dialogue and quest text, which a lot of players do which has the same results as players who don’t bother reading quest text here in WoW.
14 players usually aren’t skipping dialogue and such. WoW refugees in 14 might, though, and that’s gonna come back to bite them hard at certain story beats, but 14 players are conditioned to ‘wait for the sprout’s cutscene to finish before pulling’.
Honestly, I am a firm believe that the best expansion to start in is Cataclysm. It’s just the normal world, and it’s a great way to introduce people to the factions, the types of story telling WoW does, and a lot of the more basic characters. Without playing classic, you’re always starting in the middle of the World of Warcraft story, but since Cat was a world reset, it was still pretty good at explaining lore to a newbie like me when I joined.
BFA is awful makes very little narrative sense if you don’t know the world (or in general) and really doesn’t’ establish the world. Just a very specific, and frankly poorly told story part of it.
Not to shoot down this idea, but a lot of the background lore behind World of Warcraft is from Warcraft II and Warcraft III. And also, after playing through the BFA storyline, which I agree is stupid, he can just compartmentalize that as one timeline, and go back to the beginning, Classic, TBC, Wrath, Cata, MoP, WoD, Legion, then BFA and Shadowlands.
Technically you can just go find the first starter quest for where ever you wanna go. If he wanted BC go talk to the guy who teliports you there outside the portal to shatt and get sent to the dark portal