It’s really not. Sorry if you came here looking for some sage advice on coming back to WoW in the wake of the release of The War Within. But while I have you here, if you are like me and have returned or are thinking of returning after a prolonged absence, let me bend your ear a bit on how I managed to go from enjoyment to low-simmering annoyance with World of Warcraft.

I had written a whole post with examples about why I was annoyed, but the thing is that I hate misrepresenting myself or my situation, and because of the way I think about WoW, I’m not 100% certain that I’m 100% certain; I can point at specific mechanical examples and say “see?”, but as for the motives behind them, I am less confident. So here’s an updated version in which I talk about specifics in vague but verifiable terms. Enjoy. Or don’t. Whatever.

WoW’s “New (To Me) Player Experience”

If I am correct, WoW has undergone a significant sea-change in how it presents itself, and how it expects — apologists would say “allows” — players to interact with the game. From my understanding, the track is now that players spend their first 10 levels in their species home or some other, newer equitable zone. From levels 10 thru 70 they can pick any expansion to play. At level 70 they are encouraged to start — and at level 71 are forcibly removed to — the newest content which is The War Within. It took me a few drafts of this post to distill this situation to what I believe to be true, and to figure out why this annoyed me.

First, it’s weird because no other MMO that I know of does this: forces new players to pick a specific, historical product-branch to play until they reach the point where they re-merge with the masses in the newest content. As WoW is the ur-theme-park, it’s doubly weird. Most games have a linear progression from start through end-game, and when an expansion drops it’s to provide an extension from the previous level cap to the new level cap with more stories, more locations, and maybe some new features and functions. WoW’s approach is…interesting. Not bad, mind you, but for me and me specifically, it’s given me a headache.

In Situ

I logged in with my level 62 hunter and started Dragonflight. According to what I assume is Blizzard’s new approach to WoW, this is like a 85 year old going back to college: not impossible, but…why? I was immediately close to the warning that I should move to TWW, and when I was teleported against my will to Stormwind at level 71, I was irked. I stoned back to Dragonflight and continued my game, but as I was now officially over-leveled for pretty much everything, I ran afoul of the “hide low-level quests” feature. After about an hour of trying to figure out which NPCs I could talk to in order to continue the Dragonflight story, I had to admit defeat and head over to TWW, leaving 2/5 of the Dragonflight content unfinished for my Hunter

In the moment-to-moment gameplay, the fact that I was constantly and increasingly hunting for NPCs to get quests from was making me angry. I was trying to advance the story but key NPCs weren’t givin’ it up. Part of that was solved by turning on the low-level quests (warband quests didn’t play into this as I hadn’t done this content before, ever), but even then there were many important quest NPCs who weren’t sporting the “!” or “?”, weren’t carrying the new-ish “…”, or weren’t ringed in the “interactable halo”. I don’t know if this is a widespread bug or if there’s some system I am not aware of, but I found it very off-putting.

What bugs me now that I have had time to think (and have re-written this several times), is that for returning players like me, we can no longer experience an entire expansion unless we’re lock-step with Blizzard’s new “10-70” advancement protocol. I don’t remember where I leveled my 62 hunter, but she had nowhere to go this subscription; I picked Dragonflight because it’s semi-recent, but I started the story from scratch meaning I only had 8 levels in which to complete all the content before either I was moved to TWW, or I was over-leveled and soft-stonewalled from completing the story by Blizzard’s belief that we should no longer be anywhere but in TWW after level 70.

Begin Again Again

So I guess there’s only one way to play WoW now if you’re returning. If you have anything other than an up-to-date, level capped, fully geared character who isn’t already in that sweet 10-70 level range and in the appropriate quest progression for your current zone, any attempt to play any content that isn’t TWW is a time-bomb. You can and apparently should stick with whatever era you opt to play in — and you probably left off in the middle of some expansion, right? — because jumping to another expansion zone doesn’t net you anything and will cost you everything in your previous zone. If you have any hankerin’ to experience any expansion, you’ll need to roll a totally new character, and then stick with that expansion until you’re called to TWW.

What really irks me though is that there’s seemingly no way to experience WoW as it originally was, unless that was the point of WoW Classic all along…and it very much might be. I can no longer roll a new character and progress through the expansions in chronological order in Retail and again…I find that weird, and especially weird for WoW.

Footnotes

I am not sure exactly how to find a proper explanation of the leveling system in WoW, but I did a quick search for “WEWE” and landed on this post at Wowhead which explains changes to the leveling experience before Dragonflight dropped. I can’t really follow the thread backwards, but it seems that the whole “level through expansions” system came even before that, assuming I’m reading this correctly. This also shows how long it’s been since I’ve paid any attention to WoW if this whole system is brand-spanin’ new to me.