I’ve been away from the game for a while (since MoP), and I have just created a new character that I wanted to take through all of the expansions in order (not necessarily doing all of the story, but leveling professions, do some exploration to open flight paths etc). But I can’t seem to get to the outlands. The portal in Stormwind in the Mage’s Tower is inactive, I can’t click it. Somebody in general chat advised me to pick up a quest at the hero’s call board, and I found a quest that leads to the outlands (Hero’s Call: Netherstorm!). It tells me to take the Dark Portal to Outland. But if I’m in the current timeline, that portal takes me to WoD, and in the “past” timeline it doesn’t work at all. Like I’m literally walking through it, but I’m remaining in Blasted Lands.
I’m currently on a lvl25 character, and Hellfire Peninsula is marked as lvl10-30, so I should be able to go through if it’s about the level. Am I missing something, or is it a bug?
Also I’m aware of Chromie, but I don’t want to mess with it since the expected leveling campaign is apparently Dragonflight, and I’ve already done a few quests there, and I don’t want to mess with it. I just want to get to the outlands.
When you say that you’ve tried the Dark Portal in the “past” timeline, do you mean that you’ve spoken to Zidormi to see the past version of the Blasted Lands? And the portal still doesn’t work?
Furthermore, is it the Shattrath portal you’ve been trying in the Mage Tower?
Yes to both. I’ve tried both timelines available for Blasted lands, switched between them at the NPC marked with the chat bubble on the map, in the north of the zone. As I said previously, the “present” version leads me to WoD, which I don’t want to do yet, and the “past” version doesn’t work.
And yes, with the Stormwind portal I do mean the Mage’s Tower. The room with a bunch of portals leading to a bunch of different places. Most of those portals work on my lvl80 char, but the new char I made can’t use most of them. When I mouse over them, the cursor doesn’t change, and right click doesn’t do anything.
What I want and suggest you to do next, is to go to Chromie in Stormwind City and pick the Portal to Outland option to begin the Burning Crusade quests and campaign.
If you can, follow the first quests of the campaign into Hellfire Peninsula upon which you’re going to hop on a flying mount and go to straight to Shattrath. The idea is that we’re going to force open the campaign quests by getting you to the other side of the portal and into the zones first, upon which we’ll then jump out of it again.
With some luck, even after you drop the Timewalking Campaign, the area and the quests will still be unlocked on the other side as part of the open world and you’ll have the Mage Tower portal unlocked.
Addendum
I also just want to add to see if the previous Timewalking Campaign itself isn’t causing any issues.
At the moment, I assumed that you had left the timeline of Dragonflight at Chromie. However, if only to have it mentioned the issues could potentially stem from not having talked to them to return to the present.
Changing Choice for Chromie Time
Article ID: 000305670
Common Problems
I want to learn the BC recipes but I’m in WOTLK and want to level here.
How do I swap between expansions for Chromie time?
I can’t leave Chromie time.
To pick a new expansion to level up to 68 in Chromie Time, visit Chromie in your faction’s main city and choose the expansion you want to level in. To leave Chromie Time entirely, use the dialogue action to return to the present time. You can re-enter Chromie Time after leaving it until you reach level 68.
Ok, so I started the outland campaign, it led me to an NPC in the Mage’s Tower that has a dialogue option to teleport me to the dark portal (on the outlands side). It also made the portal to Shattrath clickable. I then went back to chromie and “returned to present”. Now the portal is again not clickable, but the NPC that the first quest led to is still there and still ports me to the outlands. Then I logged on to a different char (lvl23) to see if it still works with one that didn’t touch chromie, and indeed it does.
So yeah, the real solution is apparently talk to the mage right at the entrance (before going up to the portal room). As for why the portal to Shattrath is still locked unless I’m specifically in the TBC timeline with Chromie, no idea. The game has gotten unnecessarily convoluted at this point.