no longer obtainable items are mostly mounts and silly misc stuff, but at least last time I played in BfA you could still grind your way into strong raid gear. will def take some time though

no idea if that is still the case in shadowlands

You're not at a disadvantage at all. All of the unobtainable items are just collectibles from old content. They don't make your character more powerful or anything.

You'll have to level up a character to the max level (60) and do content to get geared, but that's purely time and skill based. You can pay for a level boost or buy gold to skip that, but imo you're just paying to not play the game if you do that.

WotLK classic comes out in September I'd 100% recommend trying that when it comes out. Shadowlands is "playable" but there are grinds associated with it as a brand new player which are kinda aids to do if you only wanted to focus on one specific area of the game. If you do play I'd highly recommend trying to find a decent guild to join will make the experience a lot better.

guild wars 2 > wow

ive played wow casually since tbc but this past season was the first time i tried to do some relatively "hard" content and got keystone master, even though i was pugging it it was a super rewarding experience and i enjoyed it a lot (season 3 destro lock lololol), honestly felt comparable to when i first got over the fear of not being good enough for tf2centers
gameplay can be super rewarding when you actually play well, but like tf2 theres a lot of default settings and ui elements that make the game waaay harder than it should be
id recommend watching a few videos on keybinds, ui setup and weakauras if you want to give yourself a leg up
wowhead/icyveins guides are also very nice and help you wrap your head around setting up your character properly
ive mentioned it in this post already but a lot of the more exciting content is actually relatively accessible, for me i had to get through the exact same mental hurdles i had to get through while getting into 6s, which was honestly a cool experience to have again 9 years later
theres not much of a downside to just trying it out and seeing if it sticks, theres a reason a lot of people love wow as much as they do

playing the hard pve content is really fun and challenging in wow nowadays, but the grind involved in getting to the point were ur even ABLE to step foot into mythic raiding or high keystones is incredibly tedious and all interesting content is hidden behind a literal time-gate (ur only allowed to grind out a certain amount of resources each day/week). u will basically have to spend at least 3 months once youve hit level cap, just playing catch up to acquire the entry level stuff thats needed for u to start even remotely enjoying the game.
its a very cancerous system designed to honey trap u with the promise of letting u do content u enjoy only after uve spent literal months doing content that no person in their right mind would enjoy (torghast, grinding up ur keystones, maw dailys/weeklies, grinding up the flavour of the month covenant rep, etc.) that u cant just bang out in one sitting bc the game only allows u to do an hour or two of these "chores" each day. u will be tricked into paying 12 quid a month for a game u can only meaningfully play for 2-3 hours a day before ur locked out of resource gathering.

having said that, the pve content at the top is immensely enjoyable as long as ur not trying to participate in the race for world first """events""". mechanics are fun, challenging and satisfying, there is more variety to character builds and minmaxing than there used to be and everything is fairly viable, even if not always optimal. race for world first however has been blatantly pay to win for a while and the top guilds are so inbred that u will never have any chance of competing, ever.

theres some truth to what wan said before me, the game is very fun to start getting into and learn, but once u realise what their business model is set out to achieve, it leaves a very bad taste in ur mouth imo. there is a very good reason that wow is and has been in massive decline for years. outside of pvp and organised raiding its an incredibly barren and soulless corporate product rather than a game.

what mostly attracted me to the idea of this was the seemingly deep and evolving story around the whole thing

i grew up playing a much simpler mmo, and i think that playing something more complicated and popular would be lots of fun

thank u everyone for the advice

key word
writing in wow has never been good and was only okay up until wotlk
playing that game for the story now will be a very disappointing experience for u

I agree with torrit (and probably the majority of players) that the high level story is pretty shit. They've been repeating the same two storylines of "THIS CHARACTER IS NOW EVIL YOU MUST STOP THEM" and "VANQUISH AN ANCIENT EVIL" for an extremely long time. However, I still think it's really cool to explore the zones, complete some of the quests (even though lots are along the lines of 'slay ten draco-boars for their gallbladders'), and immerse yourself in the world. Lots of people who have been playing for a long time lose sight of that, but it's still a very real appeal for a lot of players.

Right now you can level to 20 without paying anything so I'd try that and see if you like it. If you do, I'd recommend subscribing and maybe trying wow classic too, but don't buy the current expansion pack. It's not very good and the next expansion pack is coming out before the end of the year so you'll just end up wasting money.

Played wow on and off since cata (around 2010ish) never really got into it all that much until the last couple expansions (from legion and upwards) and the game is very gripping once you learn and figure out how to play the class you want to play. It's honestly a lot of fun but I recommend trying to get people to play with if you're going to play the dungeons at max level as it can be a very toxic place to be when you're learning your class, the dungeons themselves and you're completely new to everything around you. My advise would be watch some twitch streams and see what people do. The end game content atm is m+ (Dungeons that scale up with keystone level and get harder and add more to the dungeons like affixs which change on a weekly basis like maybe one week enemies will drop a pool on the floor that will heal the other enemies up or damage you.) There is raiding which has 4 difficulties, lfr which means looking for raid which is the easiest form and you just queue and get little to no mechanics of the bosses, normal, heroic and mythic. There is also pvp which has battlegrounds and arena if you think that would be more your thing, battlegrounds are 10v10? (not a pvper) and arena has 2v2 and 3v3.

Actually learning the game and playing a role I enjoy was one of the most fun things I have ever done in gaming. Highly recommend. And a lot of newer players do this but don't fall in to the trap of mount collecting before doing the actual content of the game. A lot of people will only do that and never learn how to actually play unfortunately.

There are websites like wowhead and raider.io I recommend.

If you need some advice then feel free to ask.

disc: Ascend#0586

dont play wow for the story. It makes no sense and the revolving door blizzard has had over the past couple of years has made the story make no sense and have no sense of direction.
If you want an MMO with an actually good storyline id recommend FFXIV. Hands down the best story in any videogame ive ever played.
If you like starwars SWTOR is also quite good, but the level of storytelling is not as good as in FFXIV.

SWTOR class campaigns are some of the best mmo stories u can play but outside of that the game is kind mediocre, FFXIV is probably just a better game than WoW right now but a lot of people ive talked to just hate the way the gameplay feels compared to WoW
WoW nowadays is a scam but it's still the best-feeling mmo out there by a lot imo, maybe wait until dragonflight comes out to actually drop money on it if ur planning on paying cause i personally dont think shadowlands is worth getting in to right now as a brand new player

game nose dived into a swamp when they merged with activision :)

praying this game is fun in dragon flight, just doing mythic+ and getting 2400 in arenas for the mogs until then