I previously played WoW from launch until the Mists of Pandaria expansion. During that time I took breaks here and there, but I never fully left the game. I raided with a guild through WotLK and MoP fairly consistently, though I was always more on the casual end of the spectrum. While primarily a Horde player, I had a slew of Alliance characters as well to see their side of the story, and by the end of MoP had characters at level cap for every class and all professions maxed. This gives a rough idea of where I left off and the amount I played in ye olden days.
After Mists of Pandaria, I drifted away. I purchased Warlords of Draenor, but barely booted it up before losing interest after a few quests. At the time, I didn’t realize I had well and thoroughly burnt myself out on the genre, and I kept trying to force it. The same happened for the launch of Legion. With Battle for Azeroth, I stuck around long enough to maybe finish a single zone, then completely missed Shadowlands and Dragonflight.
In each instance where I attempted to return, I ran up against different issues that turned me away. The largest of those issues is one endemic to the genre, and that is the complete and utter bewilderment I suffered when logging in to my old characters. Why did I have all this random crap in my bags? Where did half the things on my bars go? What are these quests on my tracker even about? Because, of course, when we quit, we rarely do so with two weeks notice and an offboarding period to leave everything nice and tidy for when we return. No, we start to log in less and less, taking longer breaks between sessions, then one day we just don’t log back in at all.
I would be remiss if I did not mention the elephant in the room and state that, as I’m sure most other fans of the genre experienced, I did find Final Fantasy XIV to be a fun adventure. The story was great, and more than anything I enjoyed the ability to play every class/job on a single character, including every crafting and gathering profession. That focus on crafting and gathering alone played a big part in drawing me more to the casual side of things. I will likely touch on FFXIV more over the course of this blog for comparison purposes, or maybe we take a little side quest to discuss that one, but for the moment I only want to illustrate how my tastes and area of focus evolved over the years.
One other detail to touch on, which should provide a little more context and background, a large part of why I drifted away was also due to burnout. At the time, I did not realize the signs, and I ended up blaming the game for changing or not drawing me in, when in reality, the main issue lay with me. Over the years, I tried each new MMO that hit the market, and while some had unique and interesting mechanics that would draw me in, nothing ever got the hooks in quite like the old days with WoW (Or Final Fantasy XI, but that is for later in the series). I want to touch on this, because I feel it is important to learn to recognize the signs, and to be able to acknowledge that there is nothing wrong with becoming burnt out, nor can you fix it by trying to force it. I also feel that a good portion of “The MMO genre is dying! Everything sucks!” type discourse can be tied back to players being burnt out with the genre. I ruined multiple expansions for myself in both WoW and XIV due to attempting to ignore my issues with burnout, and I have truly only come to realize in recent years that I need to pivot from the genre wholly to allow myself time to come back around. Taking time to enjoy some single player games, or just games of a completely different genre with friends has helped immensely in breathing new life into the MMO genre when the itch to return starts back up.
Was there a point you were getting to…?
So, ALL of that said, on to the actual point of this post. Unlike previous times where I have attempted this, I will not be trying to dive back into my old characters. It is too confusing, and leads to too much time spent trying to clean up and organize when I could just be playing. I am not going to do anything so drastic as delete my old characters or start a fresh account, because I do intend to eventually dip my toe back in once I hopefully get a better grasp on what I have missed.
Instead, I plan to start a fresh character, and level through each expansion again from Vanilla, through The Burning Crusade, all the way up to The War….wait…
If you are a current WoW player, you will likely realize the error in my thinking as it relates to Retail.
After some research it has come to my attention that the leveling process has been significantly overhauled, and attempting to play through Classic > TBC > WotLK and so on is no longer strictly possible.
Enter “Chromie Time“
It appears that in current World of Warcraft, something called “Chromie Time” now exists, which allows a player to select an expansion they want to play through from level 10 to 70, with all content scaling to the players level throughout. I vaguely remember there being a stat and level squish along the way at one point as well when I popped back in, but having all my previously capped characters now at level 30-ish was a bit odd.
While definitely a massive change from when I previously played, I don’t necessarily disagree with it. Every MMO suffers over the years from bloat, and each addresses it differently. With FFXIV, it is a frequent comment that the game is amazing and the story is one of the best Final Fantasy stories “once you get through ARR”. No one likes to acknowledge that the “once you get through A Realm Reborn” alone is a daunting task, and can take a significant time investment for new players. With WoW, prior to Chromie Time being introduced, the game had a good 10-15 years of history to play through. Most of the zones and content from the early years had received no update, so for a new player, the change from playing through The Burning Crusade zones would have been jarring, and Cataclysm threw a massive wrench in the continuity with it updating the old world, while TBC and WotLK stayed the same.
I am very curious to see how it feels to level using Chromie Time as a new player. If I select a later expansion, am I just a level 10 nobody, or am I shoved into the story as it was, being the Savior of Azeroth who has slain gods, but also just a level 10 who is fresh off the boat? Time will tell.
So anyways, first speed bump encountered, but no biggie. It looks like I will instead be picking a specific expansion, and leveling my way through that from 10 to 70, then jumping into The War Within. This should allow me to experience both a part of the content I missed over the years, and the current content that players are engaging with presently, and compare what has changed or been added over the years.
Choosing what expansion to play was less straightforward. Ironically, when I look at expansion rankings now, MoP is very highly rated, which is the exact opposite of how it was received at launch. Largely derided as the “Kung Fu Panda” expansion and being too tongue in cheek, it appears players now look back fondly on the balance and endgame? Either way, MoP is out, as it was the last expansion I truly played, and for me, it feels like MoP was basically the last expansion. Wrath of the Lich King and The Burning Crusade are similarly knocked out of the running as I played both, enjoyed both, and feel like they would not fit the bill of “experiencing something new”.
This leaves me with:
Warlords of Draenor: (2014)
Legion: (2016)
Battle for Azeroth: (2018)
Shadowlands: (2020)
Dragonflight: (2022)
After a bit of searching around, the general consensus appears to be that Legion would be the best of that list, and by a decent margin. I was all ready to dive in and enjoy hearing Liam O’Brien tell me that I was not prepared, but it turns out I was, in fact, not prepared. It seems there is an upcoming event called a “remix”, which will throw back to Legion and allow players to re-experience the expansion as it was. With only minimal reading, I am not 100% sure of what the “remix” event entails, but while I do want to see the expansion in its original form, the idea of playing through along with other people also sounds quite fun, and I have numerous others to choose from, so we will shelve Legion until the Remix and take a stab at that.
Of the remaining expansions, Shadowlands seems to be far and away the least liked, and the others are all somewhere in the middle. I thought on this one a bit, and in the end figured I may as well go chronologically. A lot of the complaints about Warlords of Draenor seemed to be around the endgame, and that is a whole section of the expansion I won’t be experiencing. Due to it being old content, I would not be able to stop and experience the gearing and balance that existed at endgame when WoD was current. Instead, I will be playing through, taking my time to enjoy quests, the story, and see what mechanics were added after my time with MoP. That last bit lent itself to the choice to go chronologically, as it seems like WoD laid the groundwork for some systems that are still in place today, and I would like to see how those came about and evolved.
The downside to this approach is that, well, I’ll be playing less well-liked expansions first, and that could very well temper my experience with the game. Additionally, from what little I have read, it sounds like Chromie Time may make it difficult to fully experience each expansion before I out-level it. I can always stick around in an expansion after hitting the point where experience stops to see some of the story if I am close, or I can always make another character. Depending on just how fast you level with this system, my initial thought is that I can level through specific zones with one character, then explore other zones with the next. I am something of an alt-aholic after all.
Next time: Who Am I?! (Starting Fresh with a New WoW Character)
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