I dont like Final Fantasy Online, but there you can play all the expanssions/story content through…gradully increasing your power level and able to do harder content.
Why doesnt Bliz make it so that you can for ex start from Cataclysm and do all the story content/raids as “current content”. You could earlier content solo or in a group, but it would still be somewhat challenging.
I have friends who havent played WoW in 10 years. Would love to get back with them and start for ex from the beginning of BC and do all the main story quests and raids as challenging content. Then we need to get enough ilvl from BC so we have enough power to continue to Wotlk.
You used to be able to do this, but for some reason they changed it. I have not levelled up any new characters in a while so not sure how the new format actaully works. What I have seen and read mentioned on this forum is that you can speak to Chromie and level up in any expansion. Trouble is you will ding 60 long before you even finished it.
Personally I wish we had the option to start in our racial starting zones like it used to be and they need to introduce an xp stop heirloom trinket so you can level a zone at your own pace. Something like the Tortoise Stone they have in LoTRo.
wow progresses vertically, mean that with each expansion you become stronger & old expansions lose their meanings. other mmos usually do it horizontally , you progress with every expansion. both has upside and downsides. the issue with wow is it has so much old content that it’s hard to ignore & it doesn’t help new players get into the lore in any way . it’s hard to maintain all 10 expansions at the same time. there are bugs in old content that has been going on for many months now. what can they do ? a revamp or a brand new mmo. right now it’s a mess . you get lost in a content dump as a new player & they’re aware of it.
they added scaling to make old content easier to solo. even if we didn’t have scaling you still wouldn’t be able to do it one by one because you’d have isues filling the raid groups.old content is basically legacy stuff people farm for tmog at this point.
As a long-time, oldschool returning player, I can confirm that starting a new character is confusing as hell.
I haven’t played since Pandaria ended, so I am familiar with the changes that Cataclysm introduced, but outside that, it’'s confusing as hell:
Quests are all over the place.
You’re forced into Battle for Azeroth basically, unless you figure out time-walking.
Even in the current content, the quests between the main story and added patches are overlapping, it’s really confusing to figure out where the main story goes, compared to being sent to the island in the north.
Dungeons not being accessible from LFG, unless you’re in the right time-walking setting
No consistency in quests, some assume Cataclysm happened, others assume you’re in a specific setting.
While the implementation in FFXIV is a bit too tedious as you’re forced to run everything from start to finish, and doing the current endgame content is quite far away when starting a new character, WoW can definitely improve on smoothening the experience and make it more enjoyable for new/returning players.
I would love for Blizzard to allow us to play some sort of Story Campaign Mode similar to the FF14 one.
I don’t say make it mandatory like FF14. It could be optional.
It could be something like this:
You select one expansion to play, and then the game only shows you quests for that expansion, hiding any quest for other expansions.
Then, in the expansion, you selected the quest chain play in order, so even if normally all quest chains for the main story and added patches are available in Story Mode, only the leveling main story is available. Once you complete the quest chain for the max level at the start of the expansion is available. After that, the quest chain for the next patch is available, and so on.
Bonus point if they include in between the quest chain one quest pointing to every dungeon and raid at the moment, the story of the dungeon/raid makes sense for the story.
This is not so hard. They don’t need to make bigger changes to the game to make the Main Campaign. All the quests for a Story Mode are there.
They only need to flag the quests in chronological order, and that could sound too much because there are too many quests but actually, they only need to flag the first and last quests of each patch quest chain. Even the quests that points you to dungeon and raids are there. The number of instances without a quest during the story is minimal.
Everything to make a story mode is there in the game, already available. The only problem is that Blizzard doesn’t provide the player with the order in which to play the quest chains.
Why do you think he is lying? He has a big achievement gap between 2012 and 2023, with only two weeks during 2018 in between, that probably could be any of those Blizzard promotions that allow old players to check the game for free.
Okay, and what is the relevance of that for this topic? Who cares?
This is about how bad WOW is if you try to play the Story in order. The fact when he has played and when not is irrelevant to this topic. Even his existence as a person is irrelevant to this topic.
Perhaps this would be possible through an AddOn but I’d like something leads you through a complete story, either of a zone, an expansion, a race (be it Dwarves, Dragons or Blood Elves).
There is an AddOn that leads you through the fastest way to level, so it has a path of quests laid that that will level you fastest. So I would like something like this but instead of leveling speed it is a cohesive story of some kind.
A Dragon story would have plenty in Northrend, a lot in Cata and obviously loads from DF.
A story for Wrath could lead you through the scrouge stuff in Borean Tundra to that keep in Dragonblight (ignoring all the dragon stuff in the Nexus) and on to Zul Drak (although ignoring the Troll stuff) and then into Icecrown.
A titan story take you all over the world, all those Ulds - Ulduar, Uldum, Uldaman, Uldir…
When it comes to story, old expansions don’t really have an overarching campaign that ties it all. They have loosely connected zone storylines but they were written in a way that they wouldn’t affect each other even if you skipped zones.
As for old raids, you could theoretically gather 10 people at level 30 and run a 10 man Icecrown, but realistically there is little interest in that. The closest thing we could have is having all old raids with a timewalking difficulty but I don’t think Blizzard is interested in maintaining that.
That is not actually true. Old expansions without an overarching campaign that ties it all only apply to Classic, TBC, WOTLK, and the revamped 1-60 zones of Cataclysm. Everything else, including Cataclysm new zones (originally levels 80-85), has a campaign that has progressed the story from the start of the expansion until the last patch.
Cataclysm (from level 80 to 85), Pandaria, WOD, Legion, BFA, Shadowlands, and Dragonfligth all have quest chains that could make a campaign.
It has been datamined a dungeon mode with AI bots. If it is true, they can use that for story-mode raids. Anyway, even without this mode, most expansion raids can be solo. If a player plays the whole story in order of an expansion, it is easy for him to reach level 60 before even requiring him to do the first expansion raid. Another option could be to make raids and dungeons optional in the campaign story.
You didn’t really progress through all the expansions much though, even under the old system. You stayed somewhere until it was more optimal to move to get xp in the next place.
That’s party why they changed it, you never saw any story through. Not even a zone story.
Pls no. I’m here for the gameplay and the atmosphere. A nice background lore is enough but pls no force and shove old expansions and stories in the face of the players.
One of the main reasons why I stopped playing FFXIV. ARR and HW were fun, but everything else was a slog. I’m playing games for the gameplay, not for the story.
etc expansion is a seperate story they don’t connect at all and that was always one of the major failings of wow “in my opinion” earlier stories may become invalided by newer packs that contradicts the old lore etc
If WoW could find the in between option that allows players to do it if they want to, but doesn’t force anyone, that would be great. Forced story progression is the reason I got bored with FF14.
No one is asking Blizzard to force players to play the game story in order. What we are asking Blizzard is a way to do it for those who want it.
Maybe Square force players to do that in FF14, but Blizzard don’t, and given the current state of the WOW story, it is hard to believe they will change everything and make it mandatory for everyone to complete every previous expansion. It won’t happen.
The most they can do is to create an optional Story Mode. I believe they could use the Party Sync system to create it. Making players who choose that mode sync with template characters with the required quests completed so only the quest for the chosen expansion in order is available.
You already do; it’s called Chromie time. Stop making gains at level 59, and you can level through every expansion as intended. This will stop at Shadowlands, by the way. You can do this until you choose your covenant. Then you need to be at a higher level, but that will change next expansion when the level limit is increased.
We are not asking for that. We are asking for a way to play the story of a given expansion in chronological order. You can’t do that with Chrome time because once you reach the maximum level of a given expansion, every quest chain for every patch of that expansion is available at once, and there is nothing in the game that tells you in which order to play it.
That is not just for old expansions. It even happens with Dragonflight. If you reach max level today, all level 70 quest chains, dungeons, and raids from patches 10.0 to 10.1.7 (and 10.2 once it is released) are available at once, with no one way to know the order.
There is no quest chains campaign order for any expansion, including Dragonflight. The campaign only works for the leveling experience. You reach max level, and then the lore order is a mess.