Probably triggered people with the title, but the struggle is super real to slog through the literally 200-400 hours of story content to get to max level if you aren't unemployed or a streamer. As a fairly long time player who has had a bunch of friends hop over from other games recently, I've noticed that most of them are washing out and quitting before getting to 80 to join me and my other established friends.

Mostly its the post-2.0, 3.0, and 4.0 patch content MSQ that is the culprit here as those storylines are as long if not longer than each expansion's respective leveling MSQ and you generally don't gain a ton of levels from them, making it feel like you are running around doing menial quests without any significant progression.

As someone who recommended people play the story legit initially, I'm now recommending that my firends buy the skip and watch the cutscenes later, because for my (quite large) friend group, we are batting close to 0 on people making it all the way to shadowbringers.

Suggestion: Add some sort of mode or way for players who hit max level for a specific expansion the ability to "fast track" their way through only the patch content portions of storyline. I.e. its basically the unending journey in that you basically watch all the cutscenes back to back without having to do the fetch quests, dungeons, etc that all take the bulk of the time. Then, when you hit the .zero content for the next expansion, you go back to leveling through it as normal as that still feels pretty good.

Just a bummer to entice my friends over with hopes to raid and do other activities with each other, and have to wait weeks or months for them to slog through the story, if they make it at all.