New Player Experience Sucks! - Impending Expansion Problems

[Astarotha]

i got through arr in like a week and hw in a similar timeframe (on an alt watching all the cutscenes, spent a looong time on my main doing everything at my own pace cause below, did 2.x in like 7 hours on al different alt just bum rushing for pure speed) so its totally doable to GET to shb by the time it drops, but my actual advice is to slow down and queue for their dailies and while youre waiting for a pop explore, unlock the side dungeons, do the msq, help guide him to certain things so he gets the full experience in a (mostly) efficient manner, while preserving the worldbuilding in arr that does set up a lot of threads that come in during hw and sb, once you have access to poe msq daily every day, get your iw+ gear to be ready for hw by the end of 2.x, then start saving up for shire+, sb will be the more involved gear grind since its got a cap but 70ing early should mean your dailies start giving you tomes, and thatll help you through 4.x, yall have plenty of time.

take it from someone that pushed straight through wow to 90(?) during pandaria because all my friends were at endgame and then stopped because the entire point of the endgame was running one dungeon ad nauseum until the next expansion hit wasnt fun, i didnt have friends running with me that entire time, i skipped nearly every dungeon along the way, and i just didnt have fun for large swaths of it cause grind (and i originally played back during vanilla/bc days so the removal of trainers and skill ups and a bunch of other things removed the fun little sidetracks that kept the game from being one singular grind all the way through). the best resource your friend has is YOU