How difficult is it to play WoW retail in order? Chromie time?

Guides New/Returning Player Questions & Guides
1

I just hit level 60 in classic and am about to finish off the zones that do no longer exist. I want to play WoW chronologically because the story and lore seems so cool. But how difficult is it to play TBC - War Within in chronological order? Does the game fight you every step on the way to push you to war within?

Is it better to stick with classic and assume it will go through all the expansions again? In like a cycle, if MOP ends when it catches up to War Within?

2

Starting there - IF Blizzard keeps walking up the expansions in the Classic series,which they might not, they would have 4 more expansions after Pandaria before they reach TWW. At 2 years per expansion. So 10 years, by which time Midnight and The Last Titan and two more expansions will have gone by.

That’s that option.

You can’t experience WoW As It Was in Retail. All the quests are there, all the dungeons are there, all the raids are there. But your character is not going to be the same as a character that played through older expansions. Level, scaling, builds, abilities, stats, availability of gear will all be different.

AND you accumulate XP at astronomical levels. In Retail, you can start TBC at Level 10 in Chromie Time. You will gain so much XP just by questing that you will be level 70 long before you reach the last zone.

Level 70 is important. At 70, you are pushed out of Chromie Time and therefore out of scaling, and you become Godlike in older content. So to keep playing with a reasonable difficulty, you should stop your XP at level 68.

But you can definitely quest through TBC.

But then you want to go on to the next expansion, Wrath. And your character is already 68, or 70 if you released the XP lock.

So start a new character. Make it a different class and race for the variety. Get it to 10, see Chromie, ask for Wrath/Northrend, and repeat the process there.

For each expansion, create a new character. That way, you see the game from a lot of different viewpoints and you end up with a nice little collection of characters if you want to carry on into and beyond The War Within.