I’m quite satisfied and having fun too! Despite opting out of Shadowlands and playing contrarian.
On my mage I got to level 30 in Draenor and decided to disable XP to try the dungeons and complete some more quests. At first I was HORRIFIED when I saw a message on screen that said with XP disabled I cannot join a party. But apparently they changed or fixed it, because the dungeon finder works (I even found enraged discussions on the forums, because a patch disabled xp for all party members, so if you happened to join a dungeon with someone who had disabled xp you’d end up with no xp as well). So I’m not quite sure how this works now, or if there are separate queues, but I ran three instances successfully with xp disabled, with everything else working properly.
I’m pleased because the difficulty is set well, at least when playing a mage. I’ve found some challenging quests, normal quests out there in the world. One had an encounter in three phases, with no possibility to rest in between. I actually had to develop a strategy and optimize a rotation. I died 4-5 times before succeeding (the three dungeons I run were overall easier!). The garrison gives one timed skill that is quite powerful, so when I hit challenging content I avoid it, and use it to speed up the more standard quests.
At level 30 there’s also flying enabled, so I get to play the leveling experience with access to flying. And that makes it quite faster despite that content wasn’t designed for it.
So I found a niche to play the way I want. The best thing would be giving the option of a custom sliding bar: from 1% to 100%. 100% is the current leveling speed, and you could push down to whatever value you want, in the case you prefer slower leveling through old content. Without the need to disable xp completely.
I’m even considering buying SL later, and plan characters around the content. One locked at 49 for old content, one at 50 for some other things, one alt to go through each expansion I haven’t played… Bringing the mage to 35 would unlock all the instances, so it could work as a temporary plateau.
I suspect some things are in limbo, though. I heard that for example in Legion there was an artifact to level, but it was removed, so now you have pieces of the content that don’t retain the purpose and function they had. I have the same impression with Draenor. I have this settlement and followers and missions… But I don’t know if they have any purpose anymore. It all seems self serving. I send these followers in missions, and they level up… to go into harder missions. What’s even the goal? The only output right now seems to invest resources to obtain some crafting recipes.
Anyway, if I didn’t disable xp I’d be close to level 40, and I’m not even done with the first zone in Draenor, out of 5.