World of Warcraft: Dragonflight is removing yet another system from Shadowlands as it paves the way for the Warcraft saga's next chapter: the alternative leveling method known as Threads of Fate. When Shadowlands came out, Blizzard had hoped that Threads of Fate would offer players a liberating sandbox to level throughout the Realm of Death, allowing their alts to immediately unlock their chosen Covenant and skip the introductory Shadowlands quest campaign. Its implementation left a lot to be desired, and many World of Warcraft players who picked the option ended up regretting it.
The chief issue with Threads of Fate for most players was the limited questing experience it offered. Though they had a head start in their Covenant campaign, allowing their alts to catch up with their main World of Warcraft character, the Threads of Fate experience in early Shadowlands largely devolved into queuing for dungeons while mindlessly jumping from zone to zone, world quest to world quest, without the convenience of flying mounts that the latter patches provided.
It made little sense to keep this progression through the Shadowlands zones, and unsurprisingly, Blizzard Entertainment will remove the feature with the launch of Dragonflight on November 28. Furthermore, Shadowlands will be integrated into Chromie Time, allowing players to level through the zone should they so desire, but otherwise letting them skip the Shadowlands in favor of other expansion zones on their way to Dragonflight.
Battle for Azeroth zones aren't being folded into Chromie Time, and for all intents and purposes, they are meant to be the baseline World of Warcraft experience for new players. Despite the Shadowlands zones being more recent, the tone and aesthetic of Shadowlands is understandably alien compared to classic Warcraft. It makes a great deal of sense for Blizzard to standardize the leveling experience for new players in favor of guiding them through a traditional World of Warcraft story, away from the grandiose scale of a cosmic conflict fought within a spiritual plane.
World of Warcraft: Dragonflight has simpler villains and a simpler story, and it may be argued that the tone of Battle for Azeroth segues into it much more smoothly than Shadowlands does, even if the timeline isn't direct. An important thing to note is that the three-year time-skip for Dragonflight lets the developers iron out any lingering threads in the story at a rapid pace, as well as set the plot accordingly for future expansions. Whether they utilize the benefits to their full potential remains to be seen, but there's a lot to be hopeful about.
World of Warcraft is available now for PC. Dragonflight launches on November 28.
Source: World of Warcraft