Think it's worth clearly mentioning in the original writeup that the intro includes a day's worth of activities that you would be doing even if there was a skip option. The more monotonous tasks (travel, dungeons) would amount to 15-30 minutes per character, and that depends on your gear, travel and teleport capabilities.
I dont have to worry about the prereqs then. They're all done on the toons I intend to play on.
I'll be spending hours flying through half the Pandaria again, thanks blizz.
PROTIP: The Org teleport capes you get from guild vendor do not share same CD. So you can get 3 capes for fast teleports to Orc without having to wait 2hr for the epic quality one. Blue one is 4hr and green is 8hr CD all on separate CD timers.
The Thrallmar Mage will only port you if you haven't completed the TBC introduction questline, which most people will have done.
Yeah I'm not looking forward to doing this on my alts (the Naz/Mechagon introductions were bad enough the nth time around).
Another portal for horde to use is Twilight Highlands portal from Cata expansion. I've used that portal several times to get to those dungeons/raids in that area.
Wow, yeah, I have, uh, 30? Something like that, 120 alts. I try to keep them reasonably geared (nothing special; they have the base benthic gear, base essence, empty necklace spots because I'm not going to farm up other essences for them). I was planning for them all to get their cloak, because it would be a significant upgrade. Now, not so much. It's gonna be enough of a pain on my five that I play regularly/try to keep geared (to my standards, anyway :).Tmptfate mentioned on page one that they may not have the code for a full skip, due to all the unlocks built into the chain, but maybe they'll add skips for the various stages once you've done it on one character/enough time has passed. We can only dream...
I'll be looking forward to reading the wow general forums the first week when people realize this 1.5-2hr intro quest isn't skippable. I would wager majority of remaining players are HUGE altoholics. It's the only way to keep you actively doing stuff in the game otherwise you end up jumping around main city thinking " what do I do ?" . The amount of salt will be hilarious. People have been complaining for a while about having to do mechagon rep for essence on alt. Just yesterday I was reading someone saying he was annoyed having to do mechagon rep for the 6th character for rep/essence. Obviously the problem is the player at that point but still it will be fun to read the drama that ensues.
Well, I guess this is the only thing I'm doing week one of the patch.
One question. The introduction questline is timegated, or it can be complete after release of 8.3.. Both assaults Will be active for quests?
Under Starting the Questline, both quests (An Unwelcome Advisor) are pointing to the same Alliance quest when it should be Return of the Black Prince.
The complaints on this are purely inane. As people have stated multiple times, the quest chain unlocks a Legendary cape, Essences and the playerhubs while also introducing all the new mechanics and how they all tie into each other. When in WoW's history has such content ever been skipable?An RPG should first and foremost put the experience of a single character at the forefront for pleasing, rather than design everything with how replayable it is for 12th time to the detriment of the first experience. To put it another way, Legion was completely stupid with a single character only having access to 1/12th of the vast majority of developed content at launch, with only Suramar's story being truly shared. What an individual character experienced was extremely lackluster and rife with constant dripfeeding as your followers had to spend a day to unlock the next 3 quests for you(or you know, the next 5 days when you reached the step where you had to gather 5 things to continue). Now imagine a world where those 12 lackluster pieces were instead used to create 2 campaigns, 1 for each faction, and then put that on top of Suramar and the Insurrection campaign that no longer needed that amount of timegating they had and could likely have a like a 5th of each saved to deliver a far better 7.2 instead of the non existent story we got.(arguments that that is what BfA tried not withstanding, there is a massive difference in development time Legion got vs BfA(Legion literally launched with people datamining full on Nighthold fights and 8.1 was long ready before even launch)Shadowlands has me hopeful with only splitting the story into 4 pieces, and allowing a choice of who to side with rather than tying it to your class, AND that one character CAN experience it all by switching sides(though unless you are an extremely casual normal raider, I would advise against it).In the end so much of WoW is gone to make alt gameplay smoother. The only way they can make the intro questline skipable is either award alts a massive amount of stuff for literally doing nothing, or removing said stuff from the questline and having it obtainable from other activities(which still would be mandatory, but somehow preferable to people). That is a clear case where the game would bend over backwards and worsen the first time experience just to make it less time consuming on subsequent replays. People point to hardness, slowness or a vague terms like "it was an actual RPG" why WoW used to be better and more popular, yet I feel those all just see side effects not what made the game good. What the game used to be is a complete package for all characters to pick and choose what they want to do(or you know do the things that were the prereqs they might not wanna do but have to do to do what they wanna do). But as it is, it is far simpler to develop a game that got more and more hollowed out to make the experience more bearable on repeat than creating a singular experience that is meant to last. I may look forward to Thorgast, but that is the first time replayability is at the center of a gamemode where it is actually that actually benefits from it(ie an actual roguelike. and not a warfront with different races that works the same, islands where with any changes offering minimal to no changes to how you approach them or even m+).Point is if there are people who'd play 8.3 12-30 times over doing the same exact stuff, why develop anything that constitutes a fun experience the first time around? Isn't it just easier to cut down the experience to make skipping parts of it as easy as possible? This kind of thinking has been plaguing WoW development for nearly a decade, and any pushback against it is mercilessly hounded down by the altoholics.(The Essence grind does not even come close to what was needed to reach peak performance in the WotLK age what with far slower item acquisition, necessary upgrades from far slower rep grinds and in general slower gameplay, yet it is being burned at the stake).I am sorry, but a GOOD RPG has to be altunfriendly to a certain extent! the easier you make an experience to relive the more of it you have to make unimportant, less interesting the first time around. Vast majority of people play a branching RPG one time, and get one ending.