Alongside the level squish and accompanying redesign of low-level progression Shadowlands naturally has its own leveling experience. Understanding how level 50-60 progression works before going in will help you have a smooth experience on launch day, and that can help you try to get ahead of the infamous launch day crowds and griefing. If you intend to play Shadowlands on launch, this is probably the most critical information to improve how much fun you have as the first day or so can be rife with players who unfortunately take joy in making the game worse for others.
The most important thing to know is that leveling in Shadowlands is moving away from the asynchronous zones we’ve gotten used to. To present a more cohesive story, the Shadowlands campaign will be structured in the style of earlier expansions where you proceed through zones in a fixed order. However, this more restrictive change comes alongside a more-open change once your first character has hit 60. Following this, you’ll unlock world quests account-wide and can level alts in a much more freeform manner.
The Shadowlands Campaign
The events of the pre-patch event Death Rising function as an immediate prequel to the start of the Shadowlands campaign which opens on a mission involving the player to free the kidnapped faction leaders from The Maw. This is where the now-traditional cinematic expansion opener takes place. You’ll start your leveling with a very guided and very linear trip there beginning with the quests A Chilling Summons and Through the Shattered Sky. You’ll find it hard to get lost here, but it will illustrate an important new change.
As you can see, the quest icon has changed but this is specifically for the main quest. If you see a shield, you know immediately that the quest is part of the main campaign and will be required to move forward. If you instead see a more traditional quest icon above an NPC this means it is a sidequest not required to move forward. Keep in mind that while the numbers have been in flux on the beta, you have generally needed some number of side quests to keep up on level.
The upshot of all of this is you don’t need to know ahead of time which quests move you forward the most quickly. This is going to be very important early on; on early characters, you’ll want to prioritize getting to newer zones. In your first zone, you should only be doing the side quests that are right on top of where you are unless you need more EXP. Once you’re safely ahead of the pack, you’ll have a less laggy experience and one plagued by far fewer intentional griefers. Later into the expansion’s lifecycle you’ll still want to focus on the main quest, but pick a sidequest line or two in each zone along the way. In the past with quests all scaling wholesale this was unnecessary, but now it’ll protect you from hitting the end of one zone without being the level to move to the next. The biggest time sink while leveling is travel, so you don’t want to be crossing a zone more times than you need to.
The order of zones in the campaign begins with Bastion after you exit the Maw. You then head to Maldraxxus, Ardenweald, and Revendreth in that order. As stated above, the story this time around carries between these zones. Instead of something like BfA where the stories of say Stormsong Valley and Tiragarde sound were simultaneous and compartmentalized, the things you see happening here will carry forward. The core of the Bastion storyline urges you to investigate what’s going on in Maldraxxus for instance. This should also cut down on the frequent confusions we faced with storylines sometimes featuring factions that had been supposedly defeated in a zone you chose to do earlier or other continuity problems. Overall, this change is probably a good one but it does make your first character a bit more linear than we’re used to.
The Threads of Fate System
New to Shadowlands, we have an alternate leveling method unlocked by reaching level 60 on your first character. For those familiar with Blizzard’s other titles, this is lifted pretty much wholesale from Diablo 3. To start you’ll have to do a singular run of the story, afterward you can immediately engage with the endgame loop to level other characters. Chances are good that choosing Threads of Fate will be the “correct” option as it allows you to immediately begin earning covenant renown and emissary rewards. This may not be the case, and the leveling speed may end up being slower to compensate for the non-EXP rewards you get but we’ll need to see how the tuning falls on live to have a firm grasp on what you should select for different goals. The safe bet on your alts is to choose Threads until we know better since it gives a greater variety of rewards and will be hard to compete with if the speed is even close.