I haven’t properly started playing the game yet as I am trying to make a solid plan and have a good understanding of all the systems before I begin.
My plan currently is to create a character and get to level 10 in my race’s starting zone, at which point I will activate chromie time for my first expansion. Then get to level 45-49 and go to the NPC to stop gaining XP, finish the expansion and then repeat this whole process on a new character for the next expansion. All the way up until the current expansion.
When I have finished levelling through all the expansions and have experienced the story and the quests I will want to pick one main character. So on this character, I would assume I would invest lots of time into farming gear and mounts etc
Now the only questions I have are:
What is the point of spending time farming loot for my main character just for the next expansion to roll around and I have to create a new character
On my main character if I wanted a mount for example that is from an old expansion I wouldn’t have played through that expansion on this character so would I not have access to it?
So if these two things are the case would it not make more sense to play through every expansion on one character and continue to play upcoming expansions on one character? This way I would have all quests, mounts and gear all in one place and when a new expansion comes out I wouldn’t lose all that time I put in
And from being a Horde on Draenor, I presume you already understand the virtur of being on a large server on which your faction is in an overwhelming majority. Good!
Can you start in your race’s starting zone? Doesn’t the game force you into Exile’s Teach?
I understand your alt and levelling plan, though I would point out that 57 should be the point at which you lock your XP. 60 is when Chromie Time forcibly ends.
On the character you finally select as your main, you will go forward into Dragonflight, levelling to 70.
At 70 is when you will spend the rest of the expansion farming gear and cosmetics.
Why would you have to create a new character for the next expansion? Your level 70 character that you geared up in Dragonflight will carry on forward levelling to 80 in the next expansion. Most people are still playing the same characters they made when they started, however many expansions ago that was. My two main characters, my Mage and Paladin, were made when I started in Cataclysm, and have been my two main characters all these years.
In NEARLY all cases, your level 70 could just travel to the expansion it is from, and get it. There is a Portal Room in Orgrimmar and in Stormwind. When you are a high enough level, you can just walk through the portal to that expansion, and you can do quests and kill things in it, to get what you’'re looking for.
There are a FEW cases where the specific areas you might want to go require a quest chain to open - Shadowlands Afterlives, Nazjatar, Molten Front, Isle of Thunder. Even in those cases, you don’t have to complete the whole expansion; just enough to open travel to those areas.
Most mounts that drop, drop in Dungeons and especially Raids. As a level 70, you can just walk in and slaughter lower-level dungeons and raids … and be disappointed when the mount you wanted doesn’t drop this week!
It depends what you are playing for.
Let me clarify something:
if you learn a mount on one character, ALL of your characters learn it. There are a few exceptions, the main one being that some mounts and Horde-only, and some Alliance-only, so if you learn, say, the Undead racial horce on an Undead, your Night Elf characters will still never be able to ride it.
when you get the achievement for completing the questlines in a zone, ALL of your characters get that achievement.
gear is pretty transitory. You will be earning new pieces of gear pretty much every day you are levelling, and probably every week or so on average at level 70.
IF you want to see and experience the whole story, (there’s a lot of it!) all the zones and characters and quests, then you CAN do it all on one character, certainly. However, once you reach a high level, (58) Chromie will no longer scale you down, and you will effectively be playing in godmode against NPC that die of fright on seeing you - and that gets hella boring. One expansion will get you to 60. The rest will be like that.
By making an alt for each expansion, you get to play fully and engage with each expansion as it was meant to be played, or as near to that as you can get nowadays.
If you DON’T feel the need to experience the whole thing right now - as most people don’t - and just want to catch up with the current expansion, then roll just one character and keep going all the way to 70.
If you then want to try another class or race, you can make an alt and level it through a different expansion.
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Does that make sense? It’s not the easiest thing to explain, so PLEASE ask again if you have any further questions.
All I do want to ask however is if I am going to carry my main character, once I have chosen it, through Dragonflight and future expansions would I not suffer from being overpowered as you have explained in the previous question? Or would I miss out on the levelling 1-60 in the new expansion?
Also if when I decide to go back to previous expansions to collect mounts etc is there no way to make the dungeons not feel ridiculously easy as I am trying to avoid this as much as possible but if not I can live with it as ‘completion’ is my main goal
Chromie time still works at level 59. You get teleported to your capital and ejected from it once but that’s a false alarm, you can still lock experience gains and use Chromie time as long as you don’t hit 60.
As for mounts, at least 99% of them are account wide. Only one that comes to mind that isn’t is the Vashj’ir Seahorse and that one can only be used in one zone anyway.
As for gear, you need it to clear content. It might sound obvious, but the lower your ilvl is, some content might be hard if not impossible to do. Whether you can or can’t solo elite enemies or solo certain older raid bosses or push high level content can depend on the gear you have. So whether you depend on finding a party to do said content or can solo it also depends on that. And if you’re willing to wait a season or two, the same ilvl becomes a lot easier to obtain than it did two patches prior to that.
I don’t understand this question, which suggests that there is still a misunderstanding somewhere.
As you level from 1-70, you will never be absurdly overpowered. You may feel a bit more or a bit less powerful depending on your gear and level and class, but it will all be pretty close. You will always be facing mobs ofyour own level.
At 70, for the next year and a half, you will get better and better gera, and be more powerful, but also meet more powerful enemies. If you raid or do Mythic-plus dungeons, you will have a range of difficulties to choose from.
When the next expansion starts, your character will not go back to level 1. It will still be level 70, and you will level from 70 to 80, which will be just like levelling in Dragoinflight from 60 to 70.
In the new expansion, levelling 1-60 would be done exactly like levelling 1-60 now, Through the same zones, same quests. The new expansion won’t wipe out anything about the world or your character. It will just add a new continent and 10 new levels to what is already here.
Your level 70 character will go on to 80. If you want a new character, it will level 1-80 through the same zones.
There is no way.
And trust me, you won’t want it! When you’re running 10 characters through ICC every week for the 1% chance that Invincible drops, you won’t want to take hours slugging your way to the top every time!
It took me somewhere between 250 and 300 attempts to get the mount Ji-Kun, running multiple alts every week. That was bad enough. If I was struggling and dying for two hours every time on the way, I would never have continued.
No. Once you have been kicked, you can’t access Chromie Time any more.
In fact, I read someone saying that Chromie Time becomes unavailable at 58, even before you’re kicked, which is why I said to stop XP at 57. I don’t know that for sure. I do know that Blizzard have changed the level barrier before, so I reckon 57 should still be safe.
Gear makes you more powerful, yeah. But unless you’re fully decked in mythic raid gear or equivalent it won’t carry you through the entire leveling process of a new expansion. I was at around ilvl 265-270 when DF started which was a bit below normal raiding ilvl of the last SL season, and at level 65 I already had to start replacing my gear.
I have a level 59 character that freely switches in and out of Chromie time so I don’t know where you’ve heard that.
On that note I will mention that BFA is a bit different, and if you want to do max level BFA zones they are level 50 and don’t scale any higher at the moment. Though doing those at level 50 can be pretty tough since stuff you had back then have changed or aren’t available anymore.
Ahh, I think I am starting to understand this a bit better now.
So if I understand it right there is no way to level 1-60 in the current expansion what you do is have a level 60 character and then begin the new expansion content.
If I am correct in saying this would you advise let’s say when the next expansion comes out and I have one character for every expansion before Dragonflight, that I level up another character through dragon flight using chrome time just like I did for all the previous expansions. And then put my main through the newest expansion content
On this forum somewhere, from a new player who got stuck, AFAIR. But I can’t find it now. And anyway, I can believe Blizz vacillated.
YES!
There is the levelling to current expansion, 1-60, which you can do using the content of any previous expansion aka Chromie Time.
Then there is levelling in the current expansion, 60-70. For this, you must have bought the current expansion Dragonflight, and you can do it only in Dragonflight.
Then there is your time at 70, doing whatever end-game content you enjoy.
Next expansion, Chromie Time will cover levelling 1-70, and Dragonflight will be one of the “old” expansions offered by Chromie. Then the new continent, for which you must have bought the new expansion, will level your Dragonflight character from 70 to 80.
Yes.
Though the odds are that you will end up levelling more than one chass to 70 during Dragonflight. You don’t have to, but most people do.
Quite a few people also choose a new “main” when a new expansion comes, maybe because they want a change, or because they’ve heard that a particular class is looking good in the new expansion.
The old world was revamped in Cataclysm so it’s technically part of that. The newer Cataclysm zones aren’t available until level 30 as most of them were designed with flying in mind.
The Original game, what you call “pre burning crusade”, would be referred to as Vanilla, or maybe Classic zones nowadays - but don’t confuse that with Classic the game, which reproduces the opriginal game and items and classes faithfully.
These are the zones in Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms, which you will see on your map. Just to confuse you a bit more, they now actually include starting zones for the Blood Elves and Draenei, which weren’t there in Vanilla.
In Cataclysm expansion, the original zones were given a makeover, and 4 zones were added for Cataclysm’s levelling and endgame - Mount Hyjal, Twilight Highlands, Vash’jir, and Deepholm.
You can level to 30 in Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms without ever talking to Chromie, or you can go to Chromie and choose Cataclysm. At 30, you can go to those zones or go back to Chromie and ask for a different expansion.
So are you saying I’ll still experience the whole story by only levelling through the 9 expansions and not worrying about the vanilla section as that is included in the first expansions now?
Every zone in the game has its own story. usually three or four, and usually one Big Bad you get to at the end of the zone.
If you want to experience all of them, you have to quest through every zone in every continent, inclusing the Vanilla continents. (This is called “Loremaster”. btw.)
There is no single cohesive story that you follow from level 1 to level 70. The dispossessed of Westfall have no connection with the Mag’har Orcs of Draenor. There are some characters you meet again and again around the world, but there is no linear story.
Starting with Warlords, and getting stronger through Legion, BfA, and Shadowlands, the devs have forced in a linear story, or “campaign”, for those expansions. I personally think that has been a failure that has weakened the game, but that’s a longer argument.
If you level through any of those, you will be shepherded carefully through the expansion story.
So the expansions will take me through all zones except the vanilla zones? So I will level through a character in the vanilla zones to experience everything?
Which zones are the vanilla zones and do I have to activate chromie time just like I do to do the expansions?
The Vanilla zones are everything in Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms, except for Mount Hyjal, Twilight Highlands, Vash’jir, and Deepholm. They only go up to level 30.
Mount Hyjal, Twilight Highlands, Vash’jir, and Deepholm are the Cataclysm zones.
You do not have to activate Chromie Time for Vanilla zones.,
Gotcha so would this only be one character to level through Kalimdor and the Eastern kingdoms (missing out the zones you mentioned as I’d come back to them in cataclysm) or would I do one character for each?
