How to Follow the Story of 'World of Warcraft: Legion'

Legion, the latest expansion for World of Warcraft, brings a new leveling system with it that changes the way you progress through zones. Zones now scale directly to your character level, which means that you’ll always be obtaining the optimal amount of experience regardless of which zone you venture through. While it’s certainly a welcome improvement, the new mechanic can cause you to miss some key moments in Legion’s narrative. Following an optimal path is important if you want to get the most out of the story.

As usual, the new expansion features several different questlines: the main one in the expansion, the class campaign quests, and the individual zone quests. It’s worth noting that profession quests are also present via your respective trainers in Dalaran, although they aren’t key to understanding the expansion’s narrative.

So, if you’re looking to experience all of the storytelling Blizzard baked into Legion, you’ll want to keep up with the following during your leveling.

Legion’s Main Quest

When you first get started with the expansion, you’ll be prompted to join Khadgar in Dalaran to witness the teleportation of the city to the Broken Isles, which in turn starts up the main set of quests for the entire expansion. These quests are woven into both the class campaign quests and individual zone quests, too, which make them relatively easy to follow.

The key with these is to not ignore them in favor of completing your class campaign quests or individual zone quests, because the main quest often branches into both throughout Legion. Main quests are typically given to you by Archmage Khadgar who seeks your help to thwart the advances of the Burning Legion during your journey to level 110. Whenever one of these quests presents itself, you’ll want to focus your efforts on it immediately. They grant a decent amount of experience for your character, and, more importantly, they advance the expansion’s story each time.

If you ignore them, youll quickly find yourself backtracking through zones you’ve already completed to catch up. Plus, you might find characters who have passed away or already progressed to a future event mentioned where it doesn’t make sense. Naturally, you can opt to grind through the entire main quest once you’ve hit the level cap — some quests unlock at max level — but many of the early quests won’t have the same impact they would if you completed them early on.

Class Campaign Quests

Much like the main story quests in Legion, class campaign quests are given to you as you progress through the expansion. The first of these is presented when you appear in Dalaran at the beginning and prompts you to pick an Artifact Weapon to pursue. Once you’ve completed your initial Artifact Weapon quest and unlocked your Class Hall, you’ll then be introduced to your class campaign line of quests.

Each of these involves unifying your class order to defeat the Burning Legion. You’ll also be introduced to legendary individuals from Warcraft lore who share your class, each of whom work under your leadership once you’ve recruited them to the cause. These characters will also appear during key points within the main quest too, which makes them important additions to the narrative you might otherwise miss.

Many of the benefits offered by your Class Hall, such as Artifact Weapon research (which speeds up the rate you increase its power) and specific characters, are only unlockable through Class Hall missions, which operate like Garrison missions from Warlords of Draenor.

At first, these don’t take too long to complete, but the further you get, the longer they take. Since these missions are required to progress through your entire class campaign line of quests, you’ll want to unlock and take care of them as soon as possible during your leveling experience. Like main missions, these can be completed once you’ve reached max level, but because they are intertwined with the main story, you’ll want to complete them as you level up.

Individual Zone Quests

Once you’ve completed the introduction to Legion’s main story and done the first step in your class campaign, you’ll be able to pick a location on the Broken Isles to start questing. Highmountain, Stormheim, Val’Sharah, and Azsuna will all scale to your character level regardless of when you start and feature a self-contained story that connects back to Legion’s main quest.

Each zone you complete in Legion revolves around locating and retrieving the Pillar of Creation hidden within. In order to do that, however, you’ll have to work with the locals to defeat the Burning Legion invaders. Every zone features a set of quest chapters you must complete which culminate in a dungeon quest to retrieve the Pillar of Creation from that specific zone (so don’t worry about completing dungeons until they pop up naturally).

What’s great about these new zones is how connected they feel to the greater Warcraft universe. Because of this connection, I recommend diving into either Highmountain or Val’Sharah as your first zone, both of which connect to previous World of Warcraft expansions and involve many legendary figures from the franchise.

No matter where you end up starting, you’ll only be able to complete three of the zones in Legion before you reach the 110 level cap due to the new level scaling mechanic. Once you do, you’ll unlock Suramar — the fifth zone included in Legion. While Suramar is certainly interesting in its own right and filled with rewards, you’ll want to go ahead and finish up the other zones before diving in. Why? Each one connects back to the main story via their respective Pillar of Creation, which then sends you directly into the heart of Suramar for the fifth and final one. But I won’t spoil that experience for you!