4 year hiatus, account hacked, cataclysm changes

I'm virtually a new player because I haven't touched the ground in WoW for 4 years. I have purchased game time yet and all I have right now is the original game. I found out last night from support that 1 year ago my account got hacked somehow and the only thing they strangely left was my lvl 53 rogue, which was my highest level, all of the alts were deleted. I'm sure my rogue was left in a sad state as well.

I'm considering restarting but it will probably be with a brand new alt until I get my feet under me again.

Since I have not purchased any of the expansions and really don't want to throw down money for all of them at this stage in the game, will I still be able to experience the new changes for newbie players that came with cataclysm? It sounds like leveling was made easier so that encourages me to restart after the learning of the loss of my alts.

Any insight is appreciated!|||The only thing you will miss out on by not starting with the expansions is that you won't be able to make a Blood Elf, Draenai, Goblin, or Worgen. (You also won't be able to got to their starting areas.)

So, there should be plenty of new content for you to explore until you are 60.

Blizzard could probably restore all of your old characters, but I'm not sure it's really worth the effort. Leveling is pretty fast now, and there are more options on how to level. Aside from that, there is so much that has changed, you might as well enjoy experiencing the game form the start again.

You still have questing, but it's been overhauled so that it's much more streamlined experience. Zones are self contained, so quest lines don't send you running back and forth between continents. (That's one important factor in faster leveling. You spend more time on quests and less on travel. You also get mounts much earlier, which also reduces travel time.)

At level 15, you can start using the Dungeon Finder to run instances. You sign up, and once the game assembles a full group you are teleported to the instance. When you are done, it puts you back where you were.

Battlegrounds now give experience, so you can mix in some of those as well if you enjoy a bit of PvP. Like the Dungeon finder, you can sign up from anywhere using the PvP interface and when you finish the battleground, it puts you right back where you were so you don't lose time running back to whatever you were doing before the battleground.|||Unfortunately Blizzard was unable to restore my alts due to two factors, one was that a whole year had passed since they were deleted and the other was that they were not past 60 lvls yet. Apparently at 60 an alt can never be permanently deleted from the database and the system stores more extensive information about inventory leading up to the deletion.

No luck for me there. I'm still surprised that the account was dormant for almost 4 years before they hacked it. The password was not simple, and I didn't have a WoW installed on any working PC for years. The most likely thing that happened is that they stole my password shortly before I logged off, then waited until a free period was issued. Somehow they hacked the urls for activating the free periods and then used my password to get into the account. That's very sophisticated.

Thanks for the information. I will probably start without buying all the expansions. I'm not sure how invested monetarily I want to get with Guild Wars 2 right around the corner. I'm a very casual player and prefer the up front costs instead of subscriptions.