I am a recently returned player after 10 years away. A whole lot has changed, and I thought there might be others who might like to catch up. New players may also find some of this information helpful.
The original level cap was 60. BC raised that to 70, added Draenei and Blood Elves, and implemented The Outland zones: Hellfire Peninsula, Shattrath, etc. Significant PvP elements were added.
WotLK raised the level cap to 80. Death Knights were added. New zones are in Northrend.
Cataclysm raised the level cap to 85. There were significant changes to the old world lands of Kalimdor and The Eastern Kingdoms. Worgen and Goblins were added as playable races.
Pandaland raised the level cap to 90. Pandas were added as a race and monks as a playable class. Pandaria held the new zones. (And some of them are amongst the prettiest in the game). The Pet Battle System was introduced.
Draenor raised the level cap to 100. Flying in Draenor is by a fairly significant quest and reputation grind.
Legion raised the level cap to 110. Flying in Legion involves a new, extensive quest and reputation grind.
This isn't a how-to-play guide to WoW. I presume you already know or can figure that out. This is really for people who want to jump back in after a break, so I'll offer my comments.
First, you may have character level boosts. On my main account, after pre-buying Battle for Azeroth, I had 3 boosts to 100 and 1 boost to 110. So far, I have used one level 100 boost.
If you boost a character, you'll be loaded down with a bunch of level appropriate, green gear. You won't have a level 100 character wearing level 1 gear. But you'll quickly replace it.
Also, I may not be 100% accurate about this, but if you level your character to 60 before taking a boost and that character has primary tradeskills that have been leveled, those tradeskills also get boosted. This can significantly decrease the tradeskill grind. So if that's important to you, you'll want to make sure you have the full details before you boost. Getting to 60 doesn't take that long.
No longer do you need to look at a zone level chart to decide where to hunt. Basically, the region your in will scale. That is, if you go to Ashenvale at level 54, the mobs will be 54 (or close to it). If you go at 24, they're only 24. To make it even more interesting, if a 24 and a 54 see the same mob, they'll see the mob as if it's 24 or 54, respectively, and somehow the damage it does to you / you do to it will be scaled.
This is a huge improvement to the game. It means you can hunt where you want, within some limits.
Up to 60: hunt the old world zones.
In your 60s, go to Outlands.
In the 70s, go to Northrend.
At 80, Pandaria.
At 90, Draenor.
At 100, move to Legion.
That's not an absolute, as Cataclysm is in there somewhere. But if you open the map and hover over a zone, it will tell you the level range the zone scales for.
But understand if you take a level 54 to babysit a level 24, that 54 can now get killed by mobs the 24 thinks are level 24. But that's okay.
I haven't played a Panda, so I don't know the rules for them.
This isn't useful for your first character so much as subsequent characters, but you should know about it. You can now buy Heirloom gear, and it levels with you. So you could buy it at level 1 and still be using it at level 100.
http://www.wowhead.com/heirloom-guide
You will periodically have to upgrade it so it continues to level, but the upgrade is account-wide, so if you do it on one toon, it affects all toons. This is great for twinking. If one character on your account buys the gear, it's available for all other characters on your account.
I played a little with this, but by the time I could afford any, I had almost outgrown how good it might be. But this is a great way to twink your toon, because the gear is really good for leveling.
And some of it gives improved experience gain! Several of the pieces give 5 or 10% greater XP, and it stacks. I'm not sure what it will cap out as, but it's a significant advantage for twinking, at least until you hit Draenor or Legion.
This hasn't really changed, but i'm going to give you a chart.
By comparison, the mounts themselves are cheap. If you take a boost, I think it also boosts your flying skill, but only to Artisan level. You have to come up with the last 5k for the fastest mounts. Note that high reputation with the trainer faction can lower this price. I think I've been paying 4,750 or something like that.
Some people collect mounts. There are now several hundred you can collect. I have about 20, but most of them just sort of happened, I'm not entirely sure how. I think when I bought one fast gryphon, it actually gave me all of them, for instance.
I bought my slow and fast ground mounts and a slow and medium speed flying mount. I think the medium flying mount automatically flies faster once you acquire master riding.
I also killed a mob for the Twilight Drake, which is really, really pretty, and I'll make a separate section for that.
There are several other very useful mounts. So I'll talk about all of them.
This one is just pretty, really pretty. It offers no advantages over a basic fast flying mount, except did I mention it's pretty?
http://www.wowhead.com/item=43954/reins-of-the-twilight-drake
This was EASILY soloable when I got it (I think i was about level 100.) My primary is a Hunter. My pet killed the mob before I could get an arrow off. But then I got absolutely mobbed, and it took another 5 minutes to kill off all the trash, but it wasn't hard.
There's only one trick: you can't kill any other mobs first. You have to go in, find the main mob, make your way to it (not hard), and engage. do NOT go around killing off the other stuff first. You can kill the trash, I guess, but not the named mobs. I made sure not to kill anything. It wasn't hard to engage the boss first.
This actually turns you into a drake (sort of a dragon) and then one person can fly with you even without any flying skill at all. This is great for helping a buddy! I use it because only one of my two accounts currently has Legion flying.
http://www.wowhead.com/item=65891/vial-of-the-sands
It's made by alchemists and is NON TRIVIAL to make. Going market rate in the Auction House on my server is about 100,000 gold. That's actually not that hard to come by, if you're focused on it. Well, once you're 100+ anyway.
All mounts are available for all toons on that account, so my Hunter bought it, but my Druid uses the same mount.
I'll talk more about what happened to Dalaran as part of Legion. But in the New Dalaran, there's an Exotic Mounts Vendor very very near Krassus Landing. Basically if you exit the landing and turn right (NW), it's the next mob you'll see on the right side of the path.
The mount costs about 20k gold.
You get a huge mammoth that lets you bring passengers (I think, but I might be confusing another large ground mount). It carries two NPCs that you and everyone else can interact with. You can repair your gear and sell unwanted drops . This is useful so you don't have to toss greys on the ground and can make money back, plus it's nice if you die several times to be able to repair your gear, as long as you're outside and can mount up.
http://www.wowhead.com/item=44234/reins-of-the-travelers-tundra-mammoth
http://www.wowhead.com/spell=118089/azure-water-strider
I think they come in colors. This mount can walk on water. Given how much water there is in Legion, this is helpful.
I don't have one yet. It's available via fishing quests in Draenor. You can also get a raft, which is kind of cool.
There are two other classes of cool things you want:
This fishing pole can be enhanced so that it gives you water walking that even lasts through combat (but you have to equip it!) and also transmutes you into a shark with underwater breathing! That's really cool, and you can fight underwater. Neat. And travel fast.
And it's kind of a pain to get. Read the guides.
I'll offer only a few tips that weren't useful from the guides.
You need arcane lures, which the guides discuss. What they do a poor job of explaining is why you should get them with friends. You have a chance to fish up an item that you toss back into the pool, and when you do, you automatically get an arcane mana with each cast, which is the currency for buying arcane lures. The thing is -- the "buff" on the pool works for all others, so if there are enough people fishing, then the buff is on constantly, which dramatically increases how fast you get arcane lures.
Most (all?) bait is obtained by using an arcane lure while fishing in the fishing pools. You know, the ones that give you uncommon fish. On the minimap, they're little yellow dots.
You do not need to equip a fishing pole. You click the bait and it's a buff, usually lasting just 2 minutes.
The rare fish you need are most easily found in pools, but most of them can be found in other places. But you probably only get 4 casts per pool, so if you exhaust the pools on your minimap, don't go looking for more. Just keep fishing.
Arcfish were the roughest for me to fish up, once I figured out to use pools. For that, I use water walking and headed to the furthest island southeast of Dalaran. If you go far enough, you're in The Great Sea, but you're still able to stand on land. THEN apply the bait and you get a lot of fish.
Throw back extra of the rares for extra fishing skill. You need skill 800 to get the final prize.
Use hotkeys to swap the pole once you have it. You have to equip it for the buffs to apply.
Read the guides. They'll help you.
As always, bags are a factor. You can buy them from the AH. On my server, 16-slot bags are easily obtainable by noobie toons (they're about 15 gold). But larger bags become expensive.
As I write this guide, the largest bags are 30 slot hexweave bags made by tailors. On my server, they cost 2,000 gold. This is because a particular tailor can only make one every few days. They require 100 hexweave cloth, and you can only make about 10 a day. (You can increase this with work orders at the garrison tailoring emporium, but it is still deeply limited.) NOTE: Hexweave cloth is soulbound. You can't hurry the process by making cloth on multiple toons, unless each toon will separately make bags.
If you do the full quest line in Highmountain (a legion zone), you'll get a a really nice 26-slot bag from Addie. She's an annoying gnome associated with Helmut Nessingwary, but she gives great bag :-)
http://www.wowhead.com/item=130320/addies-ink-stained-satchel
There are also 20-, 22- and I think 24-slot bags that drop from various raid encounters that are easily solo'd at 100.
http://www.wowhead.com/the-big-bag-guide
Papa's New Bag comes in a 20- and 24-slot version. The 24-slot is very rare. I had a boosted druid take me hunting one day and got a 20-slot version, a Pit Lord's Satchel (20 slots), a Dragon hide bag (22), and maybe the 22-slot bag from Onyxia (I'm not sure). I boxed both the druid and hunter, and none of these bags were hard to get.
I'm now upgrading to hexweave, so these have been moving first to the bank and then will probably get destroyed, although I doubt I'll put full hexweave in the bank. That's just ridiculous.
As part of Draenor, you now get a garrison. It's really rather cool. You can build buildings, and those buildings can do things for you. Even at level 110, I visit my garrison a few times a day to collect my stuff and run the missions. I'm not entirely sure why :-) Except my tailor (the druid I've mentioned) needs supplies for making hexweave bags, and my hunter is the herbologist.
One of the buildings you can have is the Lunarfall Inn. I have one with all my characters. Once per week, you can recruit a new follower from a recruiter in the inn. The process involves you asking what attribute or trait you want. At least so far, I ask for the skills that give me more choices for completing missions (skills that counter the enemy skills -- you'll figure it out when you do missions). So my process is this:
Stop by the mission table and see what skill is least-well countered. On some of my characters, one or two skill is only countered by one follower, so if I have multiple missions that need that skill, I have to wait. On others, I still have something that I have 0 followers that handle. You get the idea.
When you talk to the recruiter, she asks which skill you want. I pick the one I just talked about.
She gives you 3 people. Your people can have ranks: uncommon, rare, etc. I think they go green, blue, purple. Once they hit maximum level, further XP goes towards upgrading that way, but I pick the one that is already the most uncommon. So if there are two greens and a blue, I pick the blue.
Legion added class halls. This is where you do class hall missions similar to garrison missions. You can also do them on the Vindicaar (part of Argus, the final leveling zone of Legion).
You also manipulate your artifact weapon, which is next, both at your class hall and on the Vindicaar.
Things you can do at the class hall:
Sometime early in your Legion career, you will receive a quest to begin your first artifact weapon, which is what you'll keep as your weapon at least through legion. I understand they'll be retired in Battle for Azeroth, as you'll upgrade past them.
The artifact scales with you and gets enhanced with new capabilities. The quest line shows you how.
There is a unique artifact for each build, so you can get 3 (4 for druids) and swap them based on how you are specialized. I'm strictly a beastmaster hunter, so I only use one. But make sure you pick your first one carefully, for the build you're going to use the most (at least for now).
I don't know everything. But you visit the NPC and pick between two different features. He charges you order hall resources to pay for it, and then the research itself takes him time. (Come back tomorrow.)
Remember to come back and continue to upgrade.
Late in the relatively short tree is a very, very important choice that allows you to wear a second Legondary armor piece. These are item level 1000 drops, but you can by default only wear one total. With this feature, you can wear two, which is twice as good as one. Guess who kept thinking a quest line was going to open up for this.
D'oh.
Upon reaching level 110, you're going to want to focus on becoming friendly with the Legion factions. You need this achievement:
http://www.wowhead.com/quest=43341/uniting-the-isles
Once you do, you unlock World Quests. You're going to do a lot of them. Remember I mentioned you have to do a lengthy reputation grind to start flying in Legion. Guess what? That involves a few hundred world quests completed.
Here's an important tip for that: Wardens faction is the hardest to get. Keep that in mind.
This is my current goal.
http://www.wowhead.com/allied-races
My next character is going to be a void elf priest. To unlock void elves, you must:
For Void Elves, the quest is You Are Now Prepared!
http://www.wowhead.com/achievement=12066/you-are-now-prepared
This isn't bad. It's the rep grind that will take me another week or two.
So... Dungeons. You know about 5-person, 10-person, 25-person, and 40-person content. The basic dungeons are 5-person events. A single group. There is also 10-person content that is very similar. Raids are either for 25 or 40 people. I haven't done much raiding since getting back and very little 10-person content. So this information concerns 5-person content, but I suspect it applies to at least some of the others. I don't know.
A particular dungeon can be run on Normal mode. Easy-peasy, really.
However, if you right-click your avatar, you will see an ability to set dungeon difficulty, and the next set up is Heroic. The instance will be more difficult, but you get better loot.
And up from Heroic is Mythic.
That all makes sense, right?
Well, there's also Mythic-Plus, often listed in chat as M+ or +7, or something. This is mythic on steroids. I'm not an expert on this yet, but I'm going to share what I know.
To do an M+ instance, someone in the group needs a special key. You zone into a dungeon already on Mythic level and right at the zone in is a short pedestal. You click the pedestal and insert the special key. The key is specific to a particular instance, so you can't do an Arcway key somewhere else. It also is for a particular M+ setting. The first one I got was an M+2.
You put it in the pedestal and click "activate". A 10-second timer counts down. When it does, a longer timer of roughly 40 minutes (varies by dungeon) starts. If you complete the instance on time, you get a chest at the end. I believe if you complete it really fast, you can get more than one chest, but I haven't had that happen yet.
The instance will be harder. The mobs have more specials. Lots of fun. I'll add more when I have it all figured out.
If you win, then you get a new key that's good for another 2 or 3 more mythic levels higher. Your M+2 turns into an M+4 or M+5. I'm not sure the exact progression. If you lose, then your key downgrades in a similar fashion.
And the fun part: keys are good until the Tuesday reset. If you get one Monday night, use it fast, because you'll lose it in the morning.
There's no loot until the end of an M+ dungeon. You get a chest. The item level of drops in the chest is based on the M+ rating of the instance. Also, after the Tuesday reset, in your class hall somewhere is another chest. If you completed any M+ dungeons in the previous week, the chest is unlocked for you, and you get something quite nice. How nice? It's based on the highest M+ you did last week. If you just did an M+2, you get a lower level item. If you do 10 M+10 dungeons, you get the same loot in the bounty chest as if you had only done one.
People will talk about "pushing keys" or "pushing mythics". What they mean is to start with a key at M+5 or whatever. Run the dungeon. Win. You get an upgraded key (which might not be the same instance). Maybe it's M+7. Run that. Then run the M+9. Then the M+12. Keep going until you lose.
At M+4, you get your first Affix. It shows up if you click on the key. You get a second affix at M+7 and a third at M+10. Affixes are:
Your gear has an item level to it. Once you hit 110, your gear is going to have ilevels of, say, 750 or higher. Higher level content offers higher level items. BoE (bind on equip -- ie: tradeable gear) tends to be significantly lower than bind on pickup -- soulbound. So the BoE gear I'm seeing is usually 750ish, and random soulbound gear is 840-895 or so.
On Broken Shore, right near the very first place you start, there's a vendor that will let you buy ilevel 850 gear for Nethershards, which drop on Broken Shore.
Once you get into Argus, you'll start seeing gear in the low 900s. And you can buy ilevel gear of I think 915. It used Veiled Argonite which drops on Argus and is yet another form of currency.
And see the discussion above regarding M+ zones.
You can also get Legendary drops. They're very rare. Legendary drops are ilevel 1000 and initially you can only wear 1. Your class hall research near the end of the research line lets you wear 2. At this point, that's the max. But that's two ilevel 1000 pieces, which is nice.
There are references that help you figure out what ilevel gear is found where. But what you also need to understand is that you need a certain level to engage certain content.
But here are some bits I've gathered from various threads.
|Mythic Level|Recommended iLevel|Dungeon Chest|Class Hall Chest| |------------|------------------|-------------|----------------| |Normal | | 845 | | |Heroic | | 865 | | |Mythic | 840-860 | 885 | | |M+2 | | 890 | 910 | |M+5 | | 900 | 915 | |M+10 | 920 | 915 | 935 | |M+15 | 950 | 940 | 960 | |M+17 | 965 | 950 | 970 |
It may seem like gearing for M+17 is close to impossible, but by now you probably have two legendary items for ilevel 1000 each. That brings you up probably 15-20 points from the average ilevel of the rest of your gear.
The chart above shows the base ilevel for gear that drops from the listed content. Pre-mythic, items drop from mobs. From mythic+ on, you get a chest at the end. (I'm not sure about M0). Either way, gear drops, and it has a base item level as indicated.
However, gear has a change of being warforged or titanforged. They are the same thing. When the game rolls a piece of equipment, there's also a chance it will be +5 ilevels higher than the content suggests. So you could get an ilevel 850 drop in a normal dungeon. That's warforged. If the random number generate gives you that +5, it then rolls again, and it could be +10. Repeat until a max (which also varies by content). So you could end up with an ilevel 895 item from normal content, but the chance is about 1 in a trillion.
Items that have been enhanced this way are designated warforged. If it makes it to +15, that designation changes to titanforged. That's the only difference between the two.
The idea is that even if you repeat content, you have a chance, however small, of upgrading from the last run.
A basic gear up plan once you hit 110... You're going to be doing WQs for flying anyway, so do that and get what happens.
- Do Broken Shores content for nethershards and use them to upgrade
any crap to ilevel 850.
- Once you can, move to Argus, which will begin moving you towards
915 gear.
- Once your ilevel is 850 or so, run normal mythic dungeons.
- Once your ilevel is 890 or so, you can do M+2. You'll need 900 to
find groups doing M+5 or guild groups that pull you along.
- Push mythics.
You'll get lots and lots of purples from hitting world quests. Getting to the upper 800s isn't hard. 915ish isn't hard once you spend a couple of weeks in Argus. I'm now about 930, and my upgrades are going to come almost entirely from pushing mythics.