World of Warcraft

Chromie Time — the nine campaigns and which one to level through

Updated 2026-09-22 · checked against Midnight 12.1

Every character past the starting experience makes the same decision: which old expansion to level through. Blizzard call these Timewalking Campaigns. Players call it Chromie Time, after the bronze dragon by the Stormwind and Orgrimmar embassies who hands you the choice. The zones scale to you, so any of the nine carries a character the whole way. You can switch at any time.

It is one of the few decisions in retail with no wrong answer and a real difference between the options. Each has its own page below, in release order. If you would rather be told, the picker underneath makes the call for this alt from what you have already ticked on the collection pages.

Why there are nine

Two expansions are missing from the nine, and both are deliberate:

• The original game has no campaign. Vanilla zones are where you level before Chromie Time begins, not an option inside it.
• The War Within is not a campaign either. It is the expansion after the campaigns end, and in Midnight it is played as a shortened story mode before the Midnight campaign picks up at level 78.

What every campaign shares

• No unlock needed. New accounts have had no requirement since patch 10.1.5. New characters are placed in Dragonflight by default.
• The group finder follows the campaign. You can queue for that expansion’s dungeons. Raids and Mythic dungeons cannot be entered while you are in a campaign, and some Heroics refuse entry below a set level.
• World bosses scale with you, which also means they cannot be soloed.
• You can stop experience at level 69 or below, to finish a story before you outlevel it.

The sources disagree on where it ends

This decides how much of an alt’s levelling the choice actually covers, and it is not settled.

• Starting a campaign is possible up to about level 68–69. The sources agree on that.
• Staying in one past 70 is where they split. The wiki says zones scale to 80 and you are removed at 81, after patch 12.0.1. Two levelling guides say Chromie Time covers 10 to 70, after which The War Within’s story mode takes over. Players report being able to stay in until 80 if they entered early.
• There is no Blizzard patch note covering it in either direction. The wiki’s own 12.0.1 page does not mention the change it cites.

If the wiki is right, a Chromie Time character can skip The War Within’s levelling entirely. If the guides are right, it cannot. We have not picked one. Levelling a character through it settles it, and this page will say which.

What nobody has settled

• Whether any campaign is faster than another. Everyone has an opinion, and nobody publishes timings from the same character on the same patch. The one measured ranking we found is from 2020, two level squishes ago.
• The current dungeon list per campaign. The finder rules above are sourced; which dungeon opens at which level inside each campaign mostly is not.