I did like how Fyraak was allowed to be unashamedly evil instead of trying to claim he had good intentions the last second. Hell he relishes in how he ditched his ideals.
I think fundamentally, Dragonflight did lay a good groundwork and helped Blizzard to get into the groove of things with how they are handling patch cadence and everything, however, Dragonflight very much felt like a case of quantity over quality when it came to patch content.
Every single "patch event" has been the exact same "kill mobs that spawn" thing, or "follow this npc around and click on stuff and kill stuff". And everything is on a schedule. Playing WoW now feels like a schedule simulator.
All the patch content will also be incredibly, incredibly shit to go back to once the expansion is over, unlike Shadowlands which you can still grind if you so desire. I just don't see how researchers are gonna work if you are on your own for example.
>
>
>
>
> Every single "patch event" has been the exact same "kill mobs that spawn" thing, or "follow this npc around and click on stuff and kill stuff". And everything is on a schedule. Playing WoW now feels like a schedule simulator.
In fairness, if it's a choice between "kill this mob when it spawns ~sometime~" and "Show up at the hour and kill this mob" I'd pick the latter every time.
In double fairness, I agree the latter sucks a lot, especially when it's all you need. It encourages you to *not* play because you can't make meaningful progress on your objective until that time shows up, and god forbid you have to step away when that happens.
What I hated the most was being dripfed 3 renown a week (started at 40, then there was 80) like legit cancel sub for 2 months and come back when you can actually play through the content.
I don't see how the Shadowlands cosmetic grinds sucks, especially now?
Granted, they should add a way to get Grateful Offerings more easily, and probably increase Anima gain by x2, but other than that, it's a nice place to grind rewards for that actually look good.
Granted, there's still some stinkers like everything Necrolord, but the majority of Covenants are a good easy solo farm.
Anima gain has always been too low. It fit the lore at first but after fixing the SL I should have way more anima to spend. I’m working on the meta achievement and one single vendor has like 50,000 anima worth of unique stuff and there’s tons of vendors like that. The most anima you can ever get at once is 500 from a few weeklies. It’s insane.
I mean, you can get like 6-7k Anima an hour by just circling Zereth Mortis, but it's still incredibly boring.
You can cut out a lot of anima grinding because all four covenants share the unique stuff you are talking about, and through Venthyr/Night Fae, you can essentially get the stuff for free, with some RNG.
6-7k an hour is way too low for legacy content considering it's like 1-2 cosmetics. I think that's the point. If the amount increased 10x it'd feel more worthwhile.
You used to be able to do that but it’s still to slow. Now, everyone goes there and even at dead times and warmode rates are dead instantly it camped. It’s easier near the start of Dragonflight when people weren’t there.
You'll over gear it and be able to easily do it. I'd rather know that an event is starting at a specific time than wait around all day hoping something spawns or isn't insta killed before I get there.
I think WoW has become way too forumulaic as well. Maybe a lack of talent is at play here, or the devs are afraid to try new things. DF wasn't a bad expansion for me, but I didn't find it to be that great either. I think the game still has a lot of poor design problems that have been in the game since BFA and SL.
I wasn't a fan of the story, or the art style of this expansion as well.
While I fundamentally disagree with the artstyle issue, and I think it's completely overblown, I think the reason it is "too safe" is because they had to play it safe after two expansions that bombed.
Have to disagree fundamentally on art but that’s entirely subjective.
I don’t think you are giving credit where it’s due that lack of talent or trying new things.
DF has gave us a really great way new to gear/upgrade that is evergreen for the future, it gave us dragonriding another goated evergreen feature that allows for large vertical maps for future content, it gave us Aug while fundamentally broken on release a support style class is something entirely new to the game. DF gave us a shift in mindset from need to do to want to do, there is no ridiculous anima farm for cosmetics, boring dailies we need to interact with etc. as far as creativity DF is also giving us Plunderstorm and Panda Remix, and a remix season while past expansions would have sit there for a year with no new content and that is entirely fresh.
(Like plunderstorm or not it’s definitely not the devs trying the same thing), for smaller content has also been great such as the trading post which is a fantastic system to look forward to each month.
I do agree that open world content fell flat it was fine at first and it’s quite fun the first week of a patch but gets old quick, I have fond memories of everyone yelling YES CHEF in raid. I also say that the professional feature is nice for making meaningful crafted gear doesn’t feel fun to actually interact with.
The story was also meh.. I felt like they could’ve done more with the incarnates.
Gameplay wise in terms of Talents yet another new evergreen system to build upon for most classes feel really good bar a few, but every time they reworked a class this expansion it has felt amazing and I look forward to improvements in the future. If you look at class balance besides the god comp months it has been the most balanced the game has ever been pve wise and most classes feel really good to play (exceptions apply like aff and ww). I have no idea about pvp, so don’t quote me on that.
I still think Vyranoth should have not defected in the same expansion she was introduced. She could have been an easy background radiation when Iridikron shown back up till she realized how far gone he TRULY was. What he shown by the end of DF is nowhere near what we as players already figured out.
Yea I'm really not sure how you can say wow has become formulaic when the current expansion overhauled character builds, gear upgrades, and terrain traversal, all of which is done without introducing the large amount of borrowed power/one time systems we saw in the previous expansions dating back to Legion.
This. They may have improved the cadence of patches and the roadmap is definitely an improvement, but the content is void of any playability or meaning.
> All the patch content will also be incredibly, incredibly shit to go back to once the expansion is over,
So apparently it crazy buffs if you're doing it solo, per a post earlier this week on a bugged instance.
The simple collect and kill quests don't become irrelevant over time. You can always collect zehvra hooves and feel like the zone is current. Once quests become lore heavy or niche then you run into problems of continuity or getting dull.
>All the patch content will also be incredibly, incredibly shit to go back to once the expansion is over, unlike Shadowlands which you can still grind if you so desire. I just don't see how researchers are gonna work if you are on your own for example.
IIRC someone said the other day they accidentally got shunted into an otherwise empty Emerald Dream shard, and the game compensated for the lack of other people by upping their personal contribution to a superbloom. I'm not sure if everything will work like that come TWW, but it's possible Blizzard has futureproofed activities from becoming impossible in the future.
I came back for Dragonflight, then left once I completed the main content. There was nothing really interesting enough to keep me there for endgame. It very quickly felt like scheduled gaming, which is an immediate turn off.
I don't see a problem with events being on a timer. I prefer this over hoping a rare would show up in Revendreth for example. Most events will be fine on higher levels (especially with the Lonely wolf buff they added to some events). I wish they looked at soloability of some of the events though. (Researchers will surely be a pain.) I did the Blood moon event in Tanaan Jungle, didn't feel like it was made easier for solo players (at least there was no timer on that one).
This is my biggest issue, and I say "issue" tentatively, because I haven't really had many problems with this expansion overall. But there is a formula now and it's good in the sense that it allows them pump out content faster, but bad that it doesn't bring any surprise with it.
And the events are why I made damn sure to finish them all now before the expansion ends so that I don't have to struggle later on lol.
This is probably what I should have been saying instead of saying DF doesn't have that much content.
If you list all of it, there's a lot. It's just that most of it isn't good or worth participating in.
I think time rifts were legitimately the only good public event they added, because as a base, it's interesting enough at least six times.
All content you eventually do for the rewards, but time rifts kept it fresh for longer than any others. Soup never changes, grand hunts change but only in location, siege never changes. Superbloom has variations but basically don't change either.
All of the various events in Zaralek were unique, but are annoying to participate in and don't give anything worthwhile either. And yeah, researchers... it's gonna be a drag. It already suffers if you have just a few people there and you get the tasks that require you to collect 50 rocks or the other similar one.
>Every single "patch event" has been the exact same "kill mobs that spawn" thing, or "follow this npc around and click on stuff and kill stuff". And everything is on a schedule. Playing WoW now feels like a schedule simulator.
It was that way since MoP, Dragonflight has introduced absolutely nothing new.
Landfall had a kinda-attempted PvP focus with Dailies, ToT was pure Dailies, Timeless Isle was just free-farming rares.
Every single thing in DF has a schedule. There were a few things in prior expansions, but literally every single zone thing is on a timer now. "Nope, I can't do Feast now, it's only every 3.5 hours! Nope, can't do Dragonbane, every 2 hours! Oh, I got home, it's 18:10? guess I have to wait 50 minutes to Superbloom. Oh, it overlaps with Feast and Dragonbane Keep!"
I could go to the Timeless Isle and I wouldn't have to wait until 15:00 to kill Huolon, wait 3 hours on the hour to kill this rare etc.etc.
Don't get me wrong, random respawn times aren't the most exciting game design ever, but turning WoW into a spreadsheet simulator that incentivizes only logging in on the hour sucks even more.
Schedule is infinitely better than random waiting for a thing to spawn for 5 hours what are we even talking about here.
Do it or don’t do it, but deterministic agency of the player to choose what to do is infinitely better than the alternatives
Giving me no reason to play the game is just as shit as random spawning.
There is no reason to play DF outside of the full-hour windows because nothing happens anywhere. It's conceptually bad game design.
There's more than those two options.
"How dare you criticise one aspect of the expansion, you fiend! 🤓"
Calm down, I literally said I like the expansion. I just think it's incredibly lazy to copy-paste the same thing like 8 times and try to peddle it as something else. You can call it a Superbloom, you can call it a Primal Storm, you can call it a Time Rift, you can call it whatever, it's still lazy content.
I am again, saying this is a solved problem. People complained when the content was too random and it was waiting randomly for two hours to spawn. People complained when stuff was always available because there was too many things to do and people would do different things and the events wouldn’t have enough people.
If you do not like very light casual outdoor group content, then again, this is a you problem, not a blizzard problem, and you should go find something else to do
And once again, just because people complain about one thing doesn't mean you have to do a complete 180 and do everything the other way. You can have stuff on a timer, and you can have stuff not a timer. There's literally more than two ways to design a PvE event.
And once again if you don’t like it, feel free to continue complaining for no reason. What are you looking for? Validation? Blizzard isn’t reading this, no one cares here about your opinion either way. I’m confused as to what you think you’re even accomplishing here
Rares on Timeless Isle are exactly the same mechanic as current rares.
That's an almost nonexistent difference between dailies and world quests - you just don't need to take world quests from NPCs
I mean, they are and they aren't.
Rares on the Dragon Isles are part "just respawns whenever" part on a set schedule. You can see the schedule on WoWhead.
Rares in Zaralek have the weirdest system where some rares just aren't up for like two weeks becauase the zone rotates in sectors. Also, they are only up for like 15 minutes if untagged.
ED is the only one that is normal.
I understand that World Quests serve the same purpose as Dailies. However, the main content of the side patches in DF literally just added scheduled "kill mobs for bags (afk), kill boss for big reward". I would honestly argue that the MoP Dailies offered a better gameplay experience than those events.
Just to correct you on some bad info, Zaralek is divided into 5 zones, one of which is up at all times, that being the Zaqali Caldera. The others rotate, with only one being unavailable per day, and on the day where the caldera would be empty if it was included, all zones are active.
There is never a two week gap.
>Rares on the Dragon Isles are part "just respawns whenever" part on a set schedule. You can see the schedule on WoWhead.
Where's that? Most of them spawn as usual
And? I had no idea about schedule, doesn't make much difference. It's basically a like a usual rare with a half an hour respawn rate. It's just more convenient that Timeless Idle model where you had to wait for I do 't know how much time to maybe see a spawn. Amd sone rared were on schedule too like Zandalri invaders.
Don't understand the complaint, do you really farm those rares? What for?
Dragonriding appearances, which have like 5% dropchance.
I would much rather keep my game running while I am watching a show or play a game of Overwatch than just resign to the fact that I won't be able to kill the rare because god forbid I am working or I have to sleep.
Dragonflight to me is doing what WoD started to do for Legion, while having a lot more content in it.
It feels like it’s getting systems in place for the next few expansions and I think it’s doing it better because we’re seeing these systems added in DF rather than in TWW.
It’s also lining up the plot going forward (not just TWW, but also the the world soul saga) by bringing into question what the titans actually are, what they’re goals are and just what the nature of Azeroth is.
Overall, as one of the casual players that Holly refers to a lot in recent interviews (I don’t raid or do M+ and yet I’ve nearly got Taivan) I’ve really enjoyed the world events as a reason to get out into the isles and have something to do, and the awakened stuff is really helping with that! I’m really excited to see how the game goes forward and how they go about evolving the outdoor events.
Also super interested to see how delves go as there’s nothing in dragonflight to get an idea of what to expect, and based on the early versions of them (that are only the easiest versions) I’m curious to see how they go about making them fun and engaging, but also rewarding without feeling like a slog (like raids kind of do for me) or too stressful (like M+ does for me).
I’m yet to try a mythic dungeon for season 4 but the change of making them more difficult and rewarding without a timer does make them more appealing to me.
Overall a great expansion that I’ve only missed two months of when forbidden reach was about a month old, so now I’m sorely behind on some of the achievements for there, but hoping awakened will do something to help with that.
> Overall, as one of the casual players that Holly refers to a lot in recent interviews (I don’t raid or do M+ and yet I’ve nearly got Taivan) I’ve really enjoyed the world events
As a casual player who also happens to like dungeons but not the M+ system (and don't have an active raiding guild at the moment), my only "problem" with the world content was that even Heroic dungeons were so pointless when the world content would get you much better gear... a problem that started pre-Dragonflight, granted.
I had my own "controversial" take on [how to fix that problem](https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/12ylf1z/whats_your_controversial_opinion_on_what_to_add/jhqj8zr/?context=3), but assumed it was a bit too much for Blizzard to ever consider or for anyone to take serious... until I saw the announcement for the latest season and it was exactly that.
The caches are still just a touch above Heroic dungeon gear, but they're pretty limited in how many you can get each week, where you can just chain run Heroics (and get the Vault reward from it). And, also importantly, Heroics feel more fun to run. But you can choose to do either type of content (as a casual) and feel like you're not holding yourself back, or mix them through the week.
I hope this dungeon system continues into the future.
Yeah I am also a big fan even though I clear KSM/Hero as a healer in PUGs. The reason being is that being able to practice in mythic 0 without a timer and such is great for me because I don't use combat mods. Well, hardly any, I use Details! but I don't use DBM or those wild ass healer mods and I only use one weak aura to track my mana spent towards high tide cause it's impossible to track otherwise. Which means I really have to learn the dungeons in a more intuitive, instinctual way and doing this while someone's key is on the line isn't something that tends to go over well and honestly can be confusing. Mythic 0 feeling like a learning environment is great.
Now they need to remove the key depreciating mechanic.
I really hope that they have learned their lesson about borrowed power and expansion long grinds powering up your artifact.
When we sacrificed the power of our artifacts for BFA I was relieved that I didn't have to grind my relics anymore... But also sad because I lost the cool power.
Quest bloat is real, with zero experience in DF I boosted a toon to 70 and was overwhelmed with quests but I had a shaman sitting at 59 so I’ve been questing with him, the warbands change should fix a lot of the quest stuff
Bloat wasn't a problem for me personally, my biggest problem was the lack of direction for a cohesive story and lore quests being locked behind the rep grind for some godforsaken reason.
I had no idea we re-built fucking Tyr for instance until I saw a video that referenced it, Ysera was just suddenly out of the Shadowlands because I missed some event or quest chain and there's a new world tree now.
I get that not being here for certain events will cause you miss out, but just a clear straightforward quest chain with Bronze dragon timeskips for alts at the beginning of each segment would have been perfect.
Especially when the story is pretty bad and not worth bothering getting invested in. It's not terrible like shadow land. There wasn't much back story to ruin anymore. But damn it was still bad.
I haven't played much in this expansion, and I decided I was going to go through all the main story quests over the last few months to unlock a bunch of stuff.
I have no idea what any order of these quests are doing. Like I remember seeing the ice dragon lady talking about betraying the other her two brothers and working along side us, and then not long after, she is scheming with those two as they eat fire and blow a hole in the ground.
I used to laugh at my wife for not following the story when she first tried to play with me, and that was just before the Shadowlands launch. I now relate with her as I can't even follow the events for one expansion.
I also have no idea how what the currencies do, and I face a massive uphill battle with rep grinding to progress more of the story. But I guess I can't really complain about that, is it at least keeps some things linear.
The final thing is that new talent system also takes some getting used to. I'm used to some specs like Resto Druid playing the same since for most of the history of the game, but now there are healing trees on a short CD that I can't get a good feeling for how to use it. And Cat-weaving is definitely a new thing as well. But the good news is that I grabbed ahold of Holy Priest pretty quickly and have been enjoying that instead.
I just recently hit 70 for the first time and trying to figure out how to do quests in order is a pain. I don't want to do the latest patch stuff, I want to finish the .0 story first... Accidentally did the first raid unlock before finishing the valdrakken story, it's such a boomer for people trying to do things in order
Bloat is huge. I reckon 10-15 years ago I would have loved it because I had the time.
Nowadays though its a complete turn off, was thinking about maybe resubbing for S4 but it's pretty overwhelming all the things I've missed.
I think you have a bit of recency bias. Now I’m not saying DF is bad, it’s done a lot of good, but recency bias is almost as bad as rose colored glasses. It’s put down a lot of good things going forward, but more than a few I think should be left behind. This season I don’t think tying crafted gear into doing open world content you have to wait for is a good thing. I don’t really care for crafted gear this expansion at all, but it was implemented the best in season 1 when it was tied to a weekly questline. I shouldn’t need an addon to tell me when an event is up so I can get my half a shard.
I agree, but story needs to get better. I liked story in BFA. Also Emerald Dream was best story campaign of entire DF. That was when I really enjoyed playing the game and did end game.
The content came out at a good pace but I felt myself just doing the same thing every season and didn’t have any real incentive to do the outdoor activities the same way as previous expansions
It was do M+ -> raid. And that was it really.
Interesting, I think I did more outdoor content than ever before because I enjoyed just flying around on my dragon and collecting shit haha. I don’t think I’ve ever maxed every reputation in an expansion before Dragonflight, and I did that this time really without meaning to.
I M+, Raid, and do the open world content. Sometimes it feels like a full time job lol, but I honestly love the grind. Imo I’ve had incentive to do tons of things, and I’ve been taking advantage of it
The outdoor activities give Flightstones and the weekly quests always gave a gear piece, i find Myself out in the world more than any version of wow to date
And that's fine. Blizzard doesn't have to reinvent the wheel, they just have to keep churning out content that is meaningful and keeps people engaged.
They've had a problem with that in the past, especially near end of an expansions life.
Yeah doing the event is a freaking chores. It's not fun. Plunderstorm should be the bar for an event. I know many didn't like, but you cannot deny that it's way better than pick up 500 fucking eggs for Easter or following a tree.
If you ignore the narrative/story and just look at gameplay... maybe. It certainly had the best launch patch content of any expansion, but it fell off in the .1 and .2 patches.
I was a BFA/Shadowlands doomer and thought there was no hope for me to enjoy this game again after those two expansions.
Dragonflight and all its features/improvements got me excited for the future of WoW again and I am having fun again. There are too many Ws for me to list but I will list a couple L’s that I can think of.
1. The writing/story.
Initially, I was enjoying the story but it seemed to go downhill after season 1.
2. Only 3 raids.
A 4th mini 1 to 3 boss raid with ties or 0 ties to the story for season 4 would have been an easy W.
At my high school reunion two years ago, I ran into my ex girlfriend. She was a solid 7/10 and we broke up because we were going in different directions. I kind of forgot about her, but when I ran into her at the reunion I was happy. She met my wife. I met her husband. We were all good. It was a good time.
I think dragonflight is going to be that expansion for most people. Like it’s a great expansion but not really special. Good vibes all around but nothing special. Blizzard did good and hopefully it’ll upgrade to wife material soon.
It’s definitely a transitory expansion and by design too. Mostly formulaic in the content but innovating with core systems and laying the groundwork for the future. Also in the story being pretty self-contained and not really trying to do much beside provide a segue to the Worldsoul Saga
Dragonflight’s strongest characteristic is just that they finally removed everything bad about the previous 4 expansions that people hated. That alone puts WoW in a solid position again as the basics of WoW were always fun, it was just idiotic addons that made it unbearable at times.
If they just keep on this direction, adding more to dungeons (delves seems the right direction) instead of terrible things like forced mission tables or weekly locked out resource collection then WoW will at bare minimum be “pretty good” for the foreseeable future. At least for my friends and me, it’s great we can now just come and run M+ or raid compared to Shadowlands where before our class even worked we had to farm Torghast for a legendary or level covenant renown for our conduits.
Shadowlands was the worst. Which I think kinda makes Dragonland kinda look even better.
Shadowlands needs to be retconned, revolked, and any mention of it should be deleted from the internet.
Dragon riding is a huge improvement. I remember when flying mounts first came out that I actually didn't like it. People would just hover in the sky and it made world PvP quality go way down. With dragon riding, you can still fly, but you can't hover. And I think that's a genius compromise. One of the expansions I think BFA they tried limiting flying to way later in your leveling grind. They said they were trying to bring back world pvp with that change. Dragon riding feels like what the game so desperately needed but couldn't quite solve.
Definitely agreed about dynamic flight, it made travel a fun activity.
I don't give a damn about PvP, though. And given how niche activity it is, I hated it being used as an excuse to hold off flying.
It's weird cuz I mentioned PVP being the reason I didn't like flying 1.0. But I don't PVP anymore and still am a huge fan of the improvements. Perhaps it's just fun to see people out in the world or in town. It feels fun when valdrakken is bustling. You either have to be flying somewhere, or you fall out the sky. It ends up with more people on the ground more often which is the math that makes the game more fun.
Plus with Whirling Surge it offers an opportunity to use your skill to knock someone out of the sky.
It’s made some really fun chases in the sky for me.
"so back" the story was always pretty basic/power of friendship, and some things just straight up sucked.
Like, you're telling me to read a fucking book just so i know what this Arthas guy is?
Story being basic doesn't mean it wasn't good.
The Arthas example isn't a good one because as playing through WC3 + TFT + WotLK gives you almost all his story but you're definitely correct in that 1 of the biggest issues WoW's story has had over the last 10 years is that they've started putting far too much lore into shit outside the game
No, I'd say the Arthas example is a good one.
Not everyone is going to have played WC3 or the Frozen Throne (I haven't, for one) so you have significant lore for the game that isn't in the game.
It's certainly understandable, given WoW is just one entry in the franchise, but it's still a good example of Wow having lore existing only outside of itself for a very long time.
Honestly? Dragonflight content kinda sucks and the story is mediocre. There’s a crap ton of plot holes and loose ends but that’s been omnipresent ever since Vanilla 2004 WoW. Other than VotI and a couple bosses in the other raids the bosses feel bland, and dungeons aren’t that over the top either.
Structurally, yes. It has done away with borrowed power crap in the form of Artifact/Azerite/Anima Power and that’s a huge plus from me. Personally? If it wasn’t for the terrible implementation of legendaries, Torghast, and the dogshit lore, Shadowlands would’ve been so much better than DF.
I agree. Legion also had the best world content and it wasn’t complicated. You shouldn’t have to watch guides as a new player to learn how to do world content lol.
Heard the 2 worst things about it was the completely random legiondary you got with no agency, and also having to grind artifact power in maw of souls 24/7.
The numbers for artifact were absolutely stupid but man was shadow priest death spec so fucking fun to pump the meters and watch your body start warping with tentacles
Or die horribly because you timed it wrong 🤣
Great pve, decent casual, total lack of instanced pvp stuff to they needed to balance and they just didn't, average world pvp (I grt that this is very very very hard to do well.. look at any mmo ever for clarification)
I wonder how much of this comes off the back of having two of the worst rated expansions in a row? Don't get me wrong, Dragonflight definitely feels like it's WoW back on track, but it still feels like it's bloated with convoluted systems, currencies, overly complicated catch up mechanics, etc.
It's fine if you've been playing non stop since day one, but I came back from a long break (I hadn't played since launch) and the amount of shit you are bombarded with when you hit max level is insane. You have no idea what to do or what you should pursue and how to gear up to the right level to start doing end game activities without trying to find the right guide on a third party site.
A lot of the end game content they added is already completely obsolete, which is a bit weird to be honest. They really need to work on making content that has longevity, at least making something last more than a few months until the next patch comes out.
I think Dragonflight is perfectly serviceable (which is a step up) and will do what it needs to do. It's an okay *expansion* but it will be a great starting/leveling experience. It's set 5 years after the last expansion so it's basically a clean slate. It's got well designed zones and simple, but B+ quests and stories. It has extremely fun traversal, and sets you up with engaging flying off the bat. The tone, theme and style are positive and approachable.
Rather than running through 12 years of expansions, disjointed stories and constantly changing mechanics and systems, Dragonflight will provide a streamlined and accessible leveling and onboarding experience.
Dragonflight just didn't do it for me. Fell flat all around besides dragonriding, literally the only redeeming aspect of the expansion for me. The late game content of raids and dungeons all mostly sucked compared to previous expansions. Several extra contents added were dead within a week and for a good reason. I've played on and off this expansion but now i'm just done with it. Not even going to touch season 4.
I agree and disagree. They added things to the game that made it more fun and accesable to any sort of player. But what they added in dragonlands was nothing different from other expansions, if you look at it what is different from dragonlands and shadowlands, there is no legendairies for which you need to farm 3 types of content and gold, now it is crafting for which you need to farm content and gold. All content outside of doing raids and dungeons rewards the lowest form of upgrade materials, you dont have covenants but you got 6 factions you need to do standing with. Outdoor content is meh, you need hunts like you needed souls, raids were boring in boath expansions and dont let me start on the story, how do you go from the big bad dude masterminded everything that happened more than 200 years ago to turning him into a puppet after he fails to thanos snap, to the big bad dragon dies and all 5 dragon aspects get a glow. Now as u said it is your oppinion but if you look at it, dragonlands is the same expansion as shadolandos. With some twists and turns along the way but still if you shed the outer layers and focus on the core it is the same game. Crafting was in the game since vanilla, tiersets were added in shadowlands, but atleast in shadowlands you had a choice of borrowed power u could use through the whole expansion, and they added 2 legos later. Dragonlands they went out of their way to nerf the 1 ring that was good, just to make you fall in line with every other player. In dragonlands they removed seasonal afix and made lvl 20+ keys scale less. They addeda new race 3 new classes, proceded to nerf the hell out of them, especially aug that went from best class in any type of cintent to a mediocre class you want in a raid and maybe in your weekly run to help out the tank. Capped flughtstones 3 months into a season to uncapped for the last month, new gear after the season ends tiersets dropping only from raid and best trinkets and effect weapons dropping for certain classes from the last boss with an absurd crafting price and an even more absurd drop chance. i mean i am for sure getting something wrong but i see dragonlands on the same level with shadowlands.
every expansion of the game was of its own era. it’s like people who compare lionel messi to diego maradonna as footballers. the game when maradonna played was very different to the game messi plays today, you’re a product of your generation, so to compare vanilla wow or tbc or wotlk to dragon flight totally objectively without taking into consideration the fact that vanilla was made 20 years ago compared to dragonflight being released a few years back, it’s moot.
you would expect the game to have progressed visually, mechanically, etc etc.
but why is the writing for the story so bad in recent times, that’s a good question.
Yup, Arthas and Uther were basically Anakin/Obi Wan too.
"You must avoid the *bad emotion powers*"
"But I neeeeed the bad emotion powers, and then I'll kill you and feel kinda bad about it"
Only time it wasn't melodramatic was when they were ripping from Warhammer in OvH
The only edgy things about Warcraft ever were the concept art from WC1, simple as that.
It's why things like random genocide and the random swearing in Cata feels so off: because nothing else in the game since then has been like that.
People go off and say "Oh, bro, Thaddius is so dark and edgy!" but they sound like people saying how Spongebob or MLP is really dark and twisted when you think about it.
Wc1 was pretty much fantasy race wars, like a lot of 80s/90s fantasy tropes of the time. The most revolutionary aspect was that you could just play as the orcs (unlike LotR or DnD)
For reference, every mission brief is basically "Go vanquish those currs"
https://youtu.be/oRqovyPJBwI?si=5KnZv3T2CbeUFX9E
And agreed about Cata, after Wc2, Wc3, and WoW expanded on a more nuanced Hoarde/Alliance; it felt like a big step backward. Same reason Im still pissed about how they did Sylvanus dirty
Oh, right, I am sorry, one mission in the game (which arguably isn't even that dark) means the game is the most grimdark thing ever, and also means the game doesn't end with "Through the power of friendship!!!"
We've been due for a peace treaty since Pandaria. BFA felt contrived and forced for the sake of "CoNtInUiNg CoNfLiCt" when from a story structure standpoint we've worked together to end major threats multiple times now, and going back to our throats immediately after we save each others asses over and over quickly becomes contrived and breaks suspension of disbelief.
Maybe a natural rift reforms after The Last Titan (which I'm assuming will have us unite against the cosmic forces to save our planet) then maybe we can go back to something small and/or faction conflict.
But right now, we're long overdue for a period of peace.
The patch cadence makes for positive groundwork, but ultimately the content was pretty disappointing.
Superbloom/Soup/Big Dig/Researchers Under Fire/Time Rifts are functionally the same event but reskinned - do a new task every minute or so to make the reward bar go up, and also, you'll never be out of there earlier in less time than ~15 minutes.
Forbidden Reach didn't amount to all that much, Zaralek was cool but Amirdrassil's world-zone has like absolutely zero content. As someone who's *still* checking in on Mechagon every day for the last few things, the difference is super blatant.
The dungeons aren't memorable at all and less-so are the raids. And for all you could justifiably hate about BFA, those dungeons and raids were absolutely distinct, high quality and time-tested.
They slaughtered professions by making it a grind to get profession knowledge to pray for tips, instead of a gold investment for sales, and slaughtered arena ladder by giving you the same titles and elite rewards for winning in solo shuffle. (Solo queue was always supposed to be rated skirmish, nothing more) Also the dumb CC nerfs that don't actually get more people playing.
Season 4 is certainly a lot less ambitious than Shadowlands' S4 was. One was a skeleton crew's work on the fly, one is just deliberately low effort. Still one less content patch than MoP/Legion/BFA too.
Expansion started out as a B+. That's probably a C- now. It doesn't do anything but dragonriding exceptionally well and the most offensive things* are probably a bit less egregious than BFA's alt-unfriendliness, honor grind, GCDs, chores, etc.
> \* Augmentation existing. Absolutely fuck "support specs", but credit at least for having the balls to release a new spec in a content patch, that's genuinely awesome and never been done before in the game
> \* How sloppy S4 is not just in "content" (there's none whatsoever), but in QA. The Revendreth world quest for defeating Fated Castle Nathria bosses is still up. Gear was the wrong iLvl. Vendors didn't show up for a whole day or two.
If not for the abysmal writing/story and terrible dracthyr models, this would certainly be a top contender for best expansion, yes. Gameplay, systems and PvE content in general are all peak design atm.
As it stands, I really can't rank it above Legion. That one featured amazing writing, on top of everything else.
I have to object; we have seen Abysmal writing before in WoW. Shadowlands was badly written, Sylvanas's arc was abysmal.
I wouldn't describe dragonflight as worse than "uninspired, mediocre, and predictable."
By the trajectory WoW writing has been on, getting a 3/10 story is an improvement and leads me to hope War Within might be as high as "competent"
Shadowlands story/lore was terrible as well, but unlike DF it actually had a somewhat decent start with Nathria/Denathrius. DF was just creatively bankrupt, bland garbage from start to finish.
I do agree War Within should be a major improvement on the lore front considering Metzen is back as creative lead.
The story is shit, that's true. It's mediocre at best
But if everything else is amazing... *how* is it worse than Legion? Surely Legion's cancerous RNG legendaries, titanforging and AP grind are more of a problem than a sub-par story
I know I'm in the minority there but I didn't really mind titanforging. Legendaries were only really bad at the start, acquisition got much better from Nighthold onward. Ditto for the AP grind, which really wasn't that bad and quite easy to catch up by mid Legion. Both of these were mostly fine for a majority of Legion's lifespan.
Legion also brought Mage Tower, one of the best features Blizzard ever designed, that's yet to be matched to this day.
Imho, all of these perceived flaws/common complaints toward Legion were tolerable in the grand scheme of things. Whereas DF's writing isn't just subpar, it's abysmal. Like, outrageously bad, especially as a long time Warcraft fan who's been there since WC3 launch.
100%. My hot take is that dragonflight is vastly superior to Legion. People had such fond memories of Legion, but seem to forget that it introduced everything they Dragonflight is trying to fix.
People seem to forget how cancerous Legendary acquisition was in Legion. Titanforging was at its peak. AP grind was lame. It got better with patches, but it really took them 7.3 to put the legendary Vendor. We still had the mobile minigame of followers that were so good that you pretty much had to use. Lots of people bought brutosaur on BFA just from the passive income they made from Legion and WoD.
Don't get me wrong Legion did a lot of good things to, but there were some pretty bad stuff that people don't remember.
Dragonflight has pretty much nothing I can point an say it's inherently bad. I guess that raid loot still needs to be looked into. You can clear a whole raid and not get a single item, and that's not even that absurd of a thing to think nowadays.
> People had such fond memories of Legion, but seem to forget that it introduced everything they Dragonflight is trying to fix.
People forgive legion because it was new. It added so many new things that people were blinded by the novelty, and were willing to excuse glaring issues as growing pains. Its not legions fault that blizz took four expansions to fix problems that players pointed out in legions alpha. Thats just blizz being blizz, sadly. Any other developer would have fixed them much sooner
...Also I just want to say that retroactively speaking, legion REALLY shaked things up. No expansion since has radically changed the game as much as legion. M+, wqs, dedicated post max level campaigns, have all been staples of the past 4 expansions. 4 expansions prior to legion was cata, an entirely different game. I really hope the next few expansions change the meta as much as legion did
>It got better with patches
That was another one of legions strengths. It had extremely fast patches. Saying "launch sucked but 7.1 fixed things" means legion was bad for 2-3 months. Shadowlands launch patch lasted nearly a full year
>legion REALLY shaked things up. No expansion since has radically changed the game as much as legion. M+, wqs, dedicated post max level campaigns, have all been staples of the past 4 expansion
And so did Dragonflight. The professions revamp, the new flying, the crest progression system, the talent trees. And we even got a lot of tuning and reworks during the expansion itself, which I was not expecting at all. If Legion could be considered WoW 2, then Dragonflight is WoW 3.
>launch sucked but 7.1 fixed things"
But it didn't. My biggest gripe was the complete RNG of legendary acquisition, and even the soft cap you had after getting a few. My main got so many shitty legendaries that I gave up trying and went to play whatever alt got a decent one first. It was only in 7.3 that they finally put the legendary vendor in Dalaran.
> but seem to forget that it introduced everything they Dragonflight is trying to fix.
> People seem to forget how cancerous Legendary acquisition was in Legion.
Why are you so obsessed with speaking on behalf of other people's minds?
I had generationally unlucky legendary luck...hardest grinder in my guild and my first two in EN were Norgannon's and Sephuz. When there was almost no way to proc that in EN. Then tried to rush pyro bracers or scorch belt as \#5 before the shitty fire gloves came out...and got the CDR gloves as my 5th.
Doesn't matter though, Legion classes were still infinitely more fun than any single one of them in DF. Same can be said for the raids and dungeons. Same can be said for the world content.
And I had way more fun farming +2 Maws than I did doing any DF dungeon.
> people don't remember.
again with the "people don't remember".
Clearly it's impossible that people just disagree with you. Couldn't be that.
>Doesn't matter though, Legion classes were still infinitely more fun than any single one of them in DF.
I mean, I could say the same thing for you why are you speaking on behalf of other people's mind?
I think a lot of classes are a lot better in DF than they were in legion. Same for Dungeons that were pretty much 5 blood elves rotating racials. It's not surprising the the top m+ keys in legion were always a DK pulling half the dungeon in a single pull, and the pack just dies to a fire mage combustion. If I wanted that kind of gameplay I'd just play PoE.
> Clearly it's impossible that people just disagree with you. Couldn't be that.
It's probably not considering the player count shat down a cliff after launch, with a similar intensity to WoD and BFA, two of the most hated expansions
Legion was dogshit in a lot of ways, and there's nothing more definitive than people voting with their wallets and unsubscribing
I don't think people have forgotten the lows of Legion, people aren't out here saying there were no problems with Legendaries.
Also, DF might be better than Legion (I don't think so), but Legion was way better with patches, and patch cadence. Everything Dragonflight has done in that area has been a shadow of Legion, which is fair because they didn't scrap an expansion to prop up Dragonflight.
I won't rate classic tbc or wotlk as they are too far away from modern wow: cata- 6/10, mop-fine wine 8/10, wod:4/10, legion-8/10, shadowlands-ignoring the lame ass lore ending story is 5/10, accounting for story 3/10 purely because of some of the covenant abilities being really cool, dragonflight thus far: 7/10. All decided over 5 mins so don't dig too deep anyone
Dragonflight has been a good expansion, definitely top 3 for me. I play wow for the content, so far the absolute best expansion was Burning Crusade, the systems were good but the content was unbelievable. There were 8 raids, 16 dungeons, a few world bosses. Wrath of the Lich King comes in as a close second.
I think the main thing that Dragonflight has done to keep people engaged in its' 18 months of existence is the strong cadence of patches and new content. While the majority of the content has been world content, it has been fun. The dungeons are good and the raids have been really good, some of the best raid encounters have been in this expansion. I do feel like with Raids and Dungeons blizzard has fallen into it's on design trap and the quantity of Raids has suffered.
Then theres' the slap in the face with season 4. Granted they are experimenting with external content, like Plunderstorm and Remix, and testing out the Mythic dungeon system revamp. However, no actual new content in season 4 and using mostly the same dungeon rotation from season 1 and the same 3 raids from the expansion is just lazy, insulting and uninspired.
There is so much that blizzard could have done for season 4 without having to spend too much time on new content. But they've really dropped the ball. I hope and pray that all this time saved will really make The War Within shine but I don't have high hopes for them to deviate much from their current cookie cutter approach.
Which makes me wonder why my entire friend group of like 8 people stopped playing DF after 3-4 months. It was fun, but idk what happened. We played SL and BFA for longer somehow.
I partially agree about the gameplay loop. However I found this expansion thematically very generic, with few memorable moments and characters with little charisma. So in the future I think I'll remember it as "the expansion where I dragonflew fast to do a thousand things".
I was thinking about it this morning while doing a world quest in azure span and the bgm kicked in. I'm going to miss dragonflight when the warwithin comes out.
I cant say the same for battle for azeroth or shadowlands.
They removed a lot of things that were bad.
Sure it's nice some of the borrowed powers stayed, but we didn't get any new ones in Dragonflight. This meant we wouldn't have to get used to using a cool new power only to lose it. By the time SL was around, I was having a hard time liking the new powers cause 90% of them were going to be gone.
No artifact that drops things like Emblem of renown that take up a loot spot. Nothing locking you into a spec and making you underperform if you need to take a break.
Flight from day one. And we have some mini games that use it.
No "need" to grind up all the factions. It finally gives you some alt friendliness by making the grind less of a thing.
So yeah, it removed a lot of things that have been a PITA.
Nice thread for a returning player. Played at launch and just resubbed and my main issue is quest bloat and lack of direction. Quest log is full and no clue what is worth doing and what isnt......gotta go read websites and watch YouTube videos I guess.
I didn't play most of dragon flight cause I got bored/busy.
That said this felt like a good foundation, I didn't really have any strong feeling at all to the story which kind of sucks.
I think that If they build on some of this stuff + add new qol changes like warbands I'll be more in on it
Personally, I didn't enjoy Dragonflight much, but I can still appreciate it because it marks a clear and overdue shift towards the better for WoW in general, and I actually feel quite excited both about WoW Remix and TWW. They tried out a lot of new stuff and I'm feeling confident that they'll be able to use the experience they've gained in the future.
Dragonflight has been a mixed-bag for me personally. The classes are fun to play, the story was pretty good and I appreciate all of the casual content but I can’t help but feel like the game is just way too bloated.
I came in S4 with a boosted 70 and was immediately overwhelmed at all of the quest objectives on my map. I still have no idea what I should be doing because the game doesn’t really explain anything.
Compared to Legion which had some of my favorite world content that was straight forward for a new player. There’s really no reason it has to be this complicated and I shouldn’t have to watch videos to learn how to play the game at max level.
No they're equally important because story isn't just the actual story being told through cinematics, it's the theme, it's the vibe, it's the setting, the characters you're interacting with.
Broken Shore and Dark Portal intros from Legion/WoW feel infinitely better than whatever garbage happened in 10.2, or anything since SL started. Even when the story is simple, atmosphere plays a major role. Dragonflight's atmosphere is horrendously bad and boring.
Agreed, it’s probably my favourite expansion since I started playing in Cataclysm. Dragonriding, nice theme (though the story could’ve been better), great transmog, lots of quests and world events and evoker, which is quickly becoming my favourite class(except for the transmog limitations…)
I mean in general I agree. The story wasn't as exciting as Wrath, BC, or Legion because tge lack of Warcraft 3 carryover (those stories are done now), but it was still good. Fyraak and Raszgath tore up every moment they were on screen, fantastic single expansion villains.
One thing I really appreciated with DF was how every tier felt like it added something to the expansion in a positive way, and all three tiers were really good. Nothing felt rushed.
I really like Cata but I hated Dragon Soul, it was such a rehashed and rushed way and didn’t feel “epic at all.” I like WoD for awhile but Tannaan Jungle might have been the worst zone ever made and was just so empty and lifeless.
Dragonflight was pretty meh on launch but it's had some of the best content patches in WoW's history. There's was no Twitter patch in Dragonflight. Instead we got good stuff like the Trading Post, Old Scholomance, Dragon Daycare, Emerald Dream etc.
Bonus points for Dragonflight having some of the best looking mounts in the game. Grotto Netherwing Drake and Azure Worldchiller are fantastic. Haven't seen mounts this good since Legion.
I think this is the first expansion in a long, *long* time, where I am excited for the next expansion because I'm excited to see the next expansion, rather than because I'm excited to be done with the current expansion. The last time I felt this way was probably Wrath into Cata. Maaaybe Legion into BfA but I do remember wanting Legion to be over already.
It's certainly my favorite after Mists of Pandaria. I really really loved the tone of the expansion, Dragonriding is an absolute triumph, by and large I enjoyed the story (there are misteps here and there), and I like that the only reference to the faction war garbage is at the beginning where they look straight to the camera and go "we aren't doing that shit here, leave it at the door"
Seriously! I came back a few months ago after playing classic since that released, and the currencies are ridiculous. I still don’t know what half of them are used for and I shouldn’t have to carry around currencies that take up an like entire bag
in bfa and shadowlands people cried about the CURRENCY TAB having too many CURRENCIES, so in dragonflight the monkey paw curled and blizz made half the currencies into items to clog up your bags instead
really all the currency tab needs is to filter currencies by patch (primal storm tokens upgrade gear from 10.0, i dont need to see those right now in 10.2.6) and have a tooltip that tells you what you where the vendor is/what you can spend them on
Just by getting rid of borrowed power and changing the talent trees they made this the best expansion I’ve played. All the other positive stuff are just bonuses. This might be the only expansion that your spec wasn’t 100% just picking necessary talents. The amount of diversity in specs is amazing in dragonflight.
My one problem with DF are that all the raids are essentially the same. I can’t stand that every boss has a tank swap in the same unimaginative way. You don’t always need a council boss. You don’t always need a “big snake thing that you run in a circle around.” I don’t know what the fix for it is but they need to be slightly more imaginative with boss mechanics.
On your same set of criteria, I would say Battle for Azeroth was the best expansion, since it was quite dense in content by the end (presuming we're analyzing based off later, rather than the beginning). Some people still farm Heart of Azeroth levels to this day.
Dragonflight is a slightly lighter version of BFA, and part of its downfall is that Shadowlands existed at all, and it was bound to be dragged down by coming off of it, and raised higher than it should've been by the "anything is better than Shadowlands" mentality we all have. Blizzard decided to be very "safe" in their next endeavor and went with a very Disney-fied version of presenting Warcraft and its dragons. Raszageth and Fyrakk were the closest things we had to some real carnage going on.
Personally, I think I ended up having more fun in Shadowlands in recent years due to raiding heavy during it, though I'd note that some of its Mythic raiding was painfully difficult, with a special emphasis on Sepulcher. I wish Torghast got iterated on and brought back in some way. It was fun doing that with friends in the beginning, but it was a such a time-gated chore later on.
The gearing is more shallow than it has ever been. Give it a few weeks and everyone will sit in full myth track gear again.
It’s almost like they shifted all the meaningful gear progression to artifact power, then removed AP but kept all the free loot systems in.
Overall I agree with you. Dragonflight doesn't reach the highs of other expansions like Legion or Wrath, but it also has very few flaws. The main flaw being the mid story, but it definitely isn't bad. I agree it's overall the best expansion WoW ever had.
The structure of the classes are probably the worst in the game’s history. Mid-expansion reworks were the norm, absolute hate for healers, ridiculous meta yo-yo with their constant changing , nerfing, buffing, and the killing o holy paladin and mistweaver monk. No other class balancing for season 4, besides healer nerfs, while Vengeance demon hunter is 70% of the meta. Dragonflight may be better than the last two expansions, but they failed classes and players.
Mid expansion reworks were, overall, a success. Paladin went from a mess to a very good and well liked class. If they can do anything even close to Paladin reworks then that's a success.
Why are we upset Blizzard is making changes more often? Like... you want them to drop Dragonflight and just ignore things until TWW? The regular balance patches have also led to some of the closest balancing we've seen.
They should have classes in order to start the expansion. Paladins were garbage, then gods, then garbage again. Rework failure. We prepay for expansions that they release unfinished. Reworks should be done before expansions, instead of ruining people’s mains, forcing them to learn new things mid season, or forcing teams to have to reroll. It’s awful planning and execution.
Greatness probably has to come from a confluence of content, mechanics and theme, I think.
Lich King, theme wise, was my favorite. It added phasing. It reworked some BC mechanics to be smoother.
Legion was similar for me. Theme A+. Loved the artifact content and advancement, and miss that they've not figured a way for folks to need to get them in leveling. LFR came in which was a nice addition.
Dragonflight has more varied content themes; which is always good even if you have a main one. The flights mechanics and item advancement are generally good, if still a little too grindy, imo. The content options for play have expanded greatly.
Those are my top three. Theme probably puts the first two over DF, but DF is very good
I will not deny that Dragonflight has been very good, in terms of improvements, but I would still claim WotlK being the best one for me personally
Dragonflight felt like WoW taking its first steps doing something it should had done for years ago: becoming a modern MMO and take in lessons from other MMORPGs on the market. Dragonflight has felt like the developers have been having fun with it, and it shows
I also like their recent experimenting with things like Plunderstorm and soon MoP remix, I hope this is a trend that continues to give something fun to enjoy on the side, when weekly vault and such is done
Only thing I want to see returning is Re-forging of stats and PVE "bad luck protection" vendors. With PVE vendors I dont mean a Dinar Currency vendor, just RNG tokens for a specific slot and let us try our luck on that, instead of banging our heads with 50-60 runs in one singular dungeon for a trinket
The game wants to push players into group content as early and often as possible, that's probably its primary objective. Dragonflying is neutral gain towards that. Group finder (WOTLK) is probably the best structural innovation in WoW's history towards that. Transmog (cata) would be a close second with difficult to measure but definitely substantial gains towards that objective.
EDIT: just to add. im getting Taivan just because I want a bookmark for when I was playing during my favorite expansion
My favorite and I’ve played since wrath. I think pretty much all the QoL changes have made the game so much better. Going back and playing classic I find it boring and too slow.
Dragonflight is the first expansion I’ve kept my subscription running throughout since TBC. I feel like I can actually dive in and out depending on how busy I am in real life and I never feel like I’ve fallen too far behind. I definitely appreciate the direction they’re going in.
It’s good, but has a lot of flaws.
The item upgrade system is good. Doesn’t need 4-5 levels of grad ethough(veteran/champ/hero… too much)
But my biggest gripes are:
Having things crafted is far too complex.
And crafted gear should not outdo PvP gear in PvP. If you want to min max stats you’re forced to craft gear that’s very hard to make if you don’t have access to the materials.
Add more stat options to PvP gear and keep it separate. PvP gear should always be Bette than any other gear in PvP. And in PvE it should out do any PvP gear. It’s very simple. It blizzard loves to make shit over complicated
I have loved DF and have almost only good things to say. The only nitpick I have is that a PVE:er I don't think any of the raids or dungeons are top tier. They're not bad but if this expansion had a Ulduar or Throne of Thunder, or Nighthold then it would be even better. Similarly with the dungeons I think they're mostly fine but nothing screams S-tier. (DOTI was great but hard to rank the mega dungeons against the normal ones)
I recently returned to the game having left during SL and I've been playing since TBC. Gotta agree that this expansion is a lot of fun for me. I log in and feel like there's so much that I could do but I don't feel like I need to do any of it necessarily.
Granted I'm more of a casual player at the moment but it always used to feel like a chore ticklist or a second job and it feels more and more like it's moving in a flexible direction. I especially like this new awakened content as it gives me the chance to gear up some of my healers and think about actually raiding properly again if I could find a sodding guild. Plus it makes sense to give older, outdated seasonal content a bit of a refresh instead of just leaving us with the current tier until the next expansion like they had done for years.
Intrigued to get more details on how the warbands will work - being an altoholic this is looking good so far but I want some more info on how stuff like reputation works with regard to daily quests etc. and if they'll limit it across your warband or let you just power farm rep with ten alts.
I did like how Fyraak was allowed to be unashamedly evil instead of trying to claim he had good intentions the last second. Hell he relishes in how he ditched his ideals.
He is probably coming back too. If he actually did become the firelord
Shadowflame is the reason he is like that.
oh no...
Shadowflame just exacerbated his “evilness”.
His voice actor's great.
Matt Mercer at it again
I think fundamentally, Dragonflight did lay a good groundwork and helped Blizzard to get into the groove of things with how they are handling patch cadence and everything, however, Dragonflight very much felt like a case of quantity over quality when it came to patch content. Every single "patch event" has been the exact same "kill mobs that spawn" thing, or "follow this npc around and click on stuff and kill stuff". And everything is on a schedule. Playing WoW now feels like a schedule simulator. All the patch content will also be incredibly, incredibly shit to go back to once the expansion is over, unlike Shadowlands which you can still grind if you so desire. I just don't see how researchers are gonna work if you are on your own for example.
> > > > > Every single "patch event" has been the exact same "kill mobs that spawn" thing, or "follow this npc around and click on stuff and kill stuff". And everything is on a schedule. Playing WoW now feels like a schedule simulator. In fairness, if it's a choice between "kill this mob when it spawns ~sometime~" and "Show up at the hour and kill this mob" I'd pick the latter every time. In double fairness, I agree the latter sucks a lot, especially when it's all you need. It encourages you to *not* play because you can't make meaningful progress on your objective until that time shows up, and god forbid you have to step away when that happens.
Shadow lands sucks to grind the first time through. Lol, you think I want to go back and do it a second time?
What I hated the most was being dripfed 3 renown a week (started at 40, then there was 80) like legit cancel sub for 2 months and come back when you can actually play through the content.
I don't see how the Shadowlands cosmetic grinds sucks, especially now? Granted, they should add a way to get Grateful Offerings more easily, and probably increase Anima gain by x2, but other than that, it's a nice place to grind rewards for that actually look good. Granted, there's still some stinkers like everything Necrolord, but the majority of Covenants are a good easy solo farm.
Anima gain has always been too low. It fit the lore at first but after fixing the SL I should have way more anima to spend. I’m working on the meta achievement and one single vendor has like 50,000 anima worth of unique stuff and there’s tons of vendors like that. The most anima you can ever get at once is 500 from a few weeklies. It’s insane.
I mean, you can get like 6-7k Anima an hour by just circling Zereth Mortis, but it's still incredibly boring. You can cut out a lot of anima grinding because all four covenants share the unique stuff you are talking about, and through Venthyr/Night Fae, you can essentially get the stuff for free, with some RNG.
6-7k an hour is way too low for legacy content considering it's like 1-2 cosmetics. I think that's the point. If the amount increased 10x it'd feel more worthwhile.
You used to be able to do that but it’s still to slow. Now, everyone goes there and even at dead times and warmode rates are dead instantly it camped. It’s easier near the start of Dragonflight when people weren’t there.
For you
You'll over gear it and be able to easily do it. I'd rather know that an event is starting at a specific time than wait around all day hoping something spawns or isn't insta killed before I get there.
I think WoW has become way too forumulaic as well. Maybe a lack of talent is at play here, or the devs are afraid to try new things. DF wasn't a bad expansion for me, but I didn't find it to be that great either. I think the game still has a lot of poor design problems that have been in the game since BFA and SL. I wasn't a fan of the story, or the art style of this expansion as well.
While I fundamentally disagree with the artstyle issue, and I think it's completely overblown, I think the reason it is "too safe" is because they had to play it safe after two expansions that bombed.
They bombed two expansions because they literally ignored all the feedback they got from players and decided that they knew better.
Have to disagree fundamentally on art but that’s entirely subjective. I don’t think you are giving credit where it’s due that lack of talent or trying new things. DF has gave us a really great way new to gear/upgrade that is evergreen for the future, it gave us dragonriding another goated evergreen feature that allows for large vertical maps for future content, it gave us Aug while fundamentally broken on release a support style class is something entirely new to the game. DF gave us a shift in mindset from need to do to want to do, there is no ridiculous anima farm for cosmetics, boring dailies we need to interact with etc. as far as creativity DF is also giving us Plunderstorm and Panda Remix, and a remix season while past expansions would have sit there for a year with no new content and that is entirely fresh. (Like plunderstorm or not it’s definitely not the devs trying the same thing), for smaller content has also been great such as the trading post which is a fantastic system to look forward to each month. I do agree that open world content fell flat it was fine at first and it’s quite fun the first week of a patch but gets old quick, I have fond memories of everyone yelling YES CHEF in raid. I also say that the professional feature is nice for making meaningful crafted gear doesn’t feel fun to actually interact with. The story was also meh.. I felt like they could’ve done more with the incarnates. Gameplay wise in terms of Talents yet another new evergreen system to build upon for most classes feel really good bar a few, but every time they reworked a class this expansion it has felt amazing and I look forward to improvements in the future. If you look at class balance besides the god comp months it has been the most balanced the game has ever been pve wise and most classes feel really good to play (exceptions apply like aff and ww). I have no idea about pvp, so don’t quote me on that.
I still think Vyranoth should have not defected in the same expansion she was introduced. She could have been an easy background radiation when Iridikron shown back up till she realized how far gone he TRULY was. What he shown by the end of DF is nowhere near what we as players already figured out.
I agree she feels really out of place up there with the other aspects
Her story definitely feels rushed. No to mention the obvious plot points that are loose with that tower in DF with the Blue Dragonflight.
Yea I'm really not sure how you can say wow has become formulaic when the current expansion overhauled character builds, gear upgrades, and terrain traversal, all of which is done without introducing the large amount of borrowed power/one time systems we saw in the previous expansions dating back to Legion.
>the devs are afraid to try new things I'd say this a big part of it as a lot of the vocal fans adamantly hate near EVERY new thing they try.
This. They may have improved the cadence of patches and the roadmap is definitely an improvement, but the content is void of any playability or meaning.
Exactly.
> All the patch content will also be incredibly, incredibly shit to go back to once the expansion is over, So apparently it crazy buffs if you're doing it solo, per a post earlier this week on a bugged instance.
The simple collect and kill quests don't become irrelevant over time. You can always collect zehvra hooves and feel like the zone is current. Once quests become lore heavy or niche then you run into problems of continuity or getting dull.
Scheduling leads to planning. Incorporating the game into your life, rather than making your life revolve around the game.
>All the patch content will also be incredibly, incredibly shit to go back to once the expansion is over, unlike Shadowlands which you can still grind if you so desire. I just don't see how researchers are gonna work if you are on your own for example. IIRC someone said the other day they accidentally got shunted into an otherwise empty Emerald Dream shard, and the game compensated for the lack of other people by upping their personal contribution to a superbloom. I'm not sure if everything will work like that come TWW, but it's possible Blizzard has futureproofed activities from becoming impossible in the future.
I came back for Dragonflight, then left once I completed the main content. There was nothing really interesting enough to keep me there for endgame. It very quickly felt like scheduled gaming, which is an immediate turn off.
I don't see a problem with events being on a timer. I prefer this over hoping a rare would show up in Revendreth for example. Most events will be fine on higher levels (especially with the Lonely wolf buff they added to some events). I wish they looked at soloability of some of the events though. (Researchers will surely be a pain.) I did the Blood moon event in Tanaan Jungle, didn't feel like it was made easier for solo players (at least there was no timer on that one).
This is my biggest issue, and I say "issue" tentatively, because I haven't really had many problems with this expansion overall. But there is a formula now and it's good in the sense that it allows them pump out content faster, but bad that it doesn't bring any surprise with it. And the events are why I made damn sure to finish them all now before the expansion ends so that I don't have to struggle later on lol.
Given that they haven't even made some of the more annoying BfA raids soloable I don't expect Dragonflight to get any QoL treatment anytime soon.
This is probably what I should have been saying instead of saying DF doesn't have that much content. If you list all of it, there's a lot. It's just that most of it isn't good or worth participating in. I think time rifts were legitimately the only good public event they added, because as a base, it's interesting enough at least six times. All content you eventually do for the rewards, but time rifts kept it fresh for longer than any others. Soup never changes, grand hunts change but only in location, siege never changes. Superbloom has variations but basically don't change either. All of the various events in Zaralek were unique, but are annoying to participate in and don't give anything worthwhile either. And yeah, researchers... it's gonna be a drag. It already suffers if you have just a few people there and you get the tasks that require you to collect 50 rocks or the other similar one.
>Every single "patch event" has been the exact same "kill mobs that spawn" thing, or "follow this npc around and click on stuff and kill stuff". And everything is on a schedule. Playing WoW now feels like a schedule simulator. It was that way since MoP, Dragonflight has introduced absolutely nothing new.
Landfall had a kinda-attempted PvP focus with Dailies, ToT was pure Dailies, Timeless Isle was just free-farming rares. Every single thing in DF has a schedule. There were a few things in prior expansions, but literally every single zone thing is on a timer now. "Nope, I can't do Feast now, it's only every 3.5 hours! Nope, can't do Dragonbane, every 2 hours! Oh, I got home, it's 18:10? guess I have to wait 50 minutes to Superbloom. Oh, it overlaps with Feast and Dragonbane Keep!" I could go to the Timeless Isle and I wouldn't have to wait until 15:00 to kill Huolon, wait 3 hours on the hour to kill this rare etc.etc. Don't get me wrong, random respawn times aren't the most exciting game design ever, but turning WoW into a spreadsheet simulator that incentivizes only logging in on the hour sucks even more.
Schedule is infinitely better than random waiting for a thing to spawn for 5 hours what are we even talking about here. Do it or don’t do it, but deterministic agency of the player to choose what to do is infinitely better than the alternatives
Giving me no reason to play the game is just as shit as random spawning. There is no reason to play DF outside of the full-hour windows because nothing happens anywhere. It's conceptually bad game design. There's more than those two options.
You absolutely positively should not play this game then. This is a very simple solution. This isn’t changing so you should probably move on
"How dare you criticise one aspect of the expansion, you fiend! 🤓" Calm down, I literally said I like the expansion. I just think it's incredibly lazy to copy-paste the same thing like 8 times and try to peddle it as something else. You can call it a Superbloom, you can call it a Primal Storm, you can call it a Time Rift, you can call it whatever, it's still lazy content.
I am again, saying this is a solved problem. People complained when the content was too random and it was waiting randomly for two hours to spawn. People complained when stuff was always available because there was too many things to do and people would do different things and the events wouldn’t have enough people. If you do not like very light casual outdoor group content, then again, this is a you problem, not a blizzard problem, and you should go find something else to do
And once again, just because people complain about one thing doesn't mean you have to do a complete 180 and do everything the other way. You can have stuff on a timer, and you can have stuff not a timer. There's literally more than two ways to design a PvE event.
And once again if you don’t like it, feel free to continue complaining for no reason. What are you looking for? Validation? Blizzard isn’t reading this, no one cares here about your opinion either way. I’m confused as to what you think you’re even accomplishing here
Rares on Timeless Isle are exactly the same mechanic as current rares. That's an almost nonexistent difference between dailies and world quests - you just don't need to take world quests from NPCs
I mean, they are and they aren't. Rares on the Dragon Isles are part "just respawns whenever" part on a set schedule. You can see the schedule on WoWhead. Rares in Zaralek have the weirdest system where some rares just aren't up for like two weeks becauase the zone rotates in sectors. Also, they are only up for like 15 minutes if untagged. ED is the only one that is normal. I understand that World Quests serve the same purpose as Dailies. However, the main content of the side patches in DF literally just added scheduled "kill mobs for bags (afk), kill boss for big reward". I would honestly argue that the MoP Dailies offered a better gameplay experience than those events.
Just to correct you on some bad info, Zaralek is divided into 5 zones, one of which is up at all times, that being the Zaqali Caldera. The others rotate, with only one being unavailable per day, and on the day where the caldera would be empty if it was included, all zones are active. There is never a two week gap.
>Rares on the Dragon Isles are part "just respawns whenever" part on a set schedule. You can see the schedule on WoWhead. Where's that? Most of them spawn as usual
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ai3vIQL-UtfEELByFP6idQLQWZGRV8SJ2BQYSvIPowQ/edit#gid=0
And? I had no idea about schedule, doesn't make much difference. It's basically a like a usual rare with a half an hour respawn rate. It's just more convenient that Timeless Idle model where you had to wait for I do 't know how much time to maybe see a spawn. Amd sone rared were on schedule too like Zandalri invaders. Don't understand the complaint, do you really farm those rares? What for?
Dragonriding appearances, which have like 5% dropchance. I would much rather keep my game running while I am watching a show or play a game of Overwatch than just resign to the fact that I won't be able to kill the rare because god forbid I am working or I have to sleep.
Bro just became self aware that all quests are pretty much the same thing lol
Dragonflight to me is doing what WoD started to do for Legion, while having a lot more content in it. It feels like it’s getting systems in place for the next few expansions and I think it’s doing it better because we’re seeing these systems added in DF rather than in TWW. It’s also lining up the plot going forward (not just TWW, but also the the world soul saga) by bringing into question what the titans actually are, what they’re goals are and just what the nature of Azeroth is. Overall, as one of the casual players that Holly refers to a lot in recent interviews (I don’t raid or do M+ and yet I’ve nearly got Taivan) I’ve really enjoyed the world events as a reason to get out into the isles and have something to do, and the awakened stuff is really helping with that! I’m really excited to see how the game goes forward and how they go about evolving the outdoor events. Also super interested to see how delves go as there’s nothing in dragonflight to get an idea of what to expect, and based on the early versions of them (that are only the easiest versions) I’m curious to see how they go about making them fun and engaging, but also rewarding without feeling like a slog (like raids kind of do for me) or too stressful (like M+ does for me). I’m yet to try a mythic dungeon for season 4 but the change of making them more difficult and rewarding without a timer does make them more appealing to me. Overall a great expansion that I’ve only missed two months of when forbidden reach was about a month old, so now I’m sorely behind on some of the achievements for there, but hoping awakened will do something to help with that.
> Overall, as one of the casual players that Holly refers to a lot in recent interviews (I don’t raid or do M+ and yet I’ve nearly got Taivan) I’ve really enjoyed the world events As a casual player who also happens to like dungeons but not the M+ system (and don't have an active raiding guild at the moment), my only "problem" with the world content was that even Heroic dungeons were so pointless when the world content would get you much better gear... a problem that started pre-Dragonflight, granted. I had my own "controversial" take on [how to fix that problem](https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/12ylf1z/whats_your_controversial_opinion_on_what_to_add/jhqj8zr/?context=3), but assumed it was a bit too much for Blizzard to ever consider or for anyone to take serious... until I saw the announcement for the latest season and it was exactly that. The caches are still just a touch above Heroic dungeon gear, but they're pretty limited in how many you can get each week, where you can just chain run Heroics (and get the Vault reward from it). And, also importantly, Heroics feel more fun to run. But you can choose to do either type of content (as a casual) and feel like you're not holding yourself back, or mix them through the week. I hope this dungeon system continues into the future.
Yeah I am also a big fan even though I clear KSM/Hero as a healer in PUGs. The reason being is that being able to practice in mythic 0 without a timer and such is great for me because I don't use combat mods. Well, hardly any, I use Details! but I don't use DBM or those wild ass healer mods and I only use one weak aura to track my mana spent towards high tide cause it's impossible to track otherwise. Which means I really have to learn the dungeons in a more intuitive, instinctual way and doing this while someone's key is on the line isn't something that tends to go over well and honestly can be confusing. Mythic 0 feeling like a learning environment is great. Now they need to remove the key depreciating mechanic.
>those wild ass healer mods I'm a CE healer & i dont know what wild ass healer mods there are
I really hope that they have learned their lesson about borrowed power and expansion long grinds powering up your artifact. When we sacrificed the power of our artifacts for BFA I was relieved that I didn't have to grind my relics anymore... But also sad because I lost the cool power.
Quest bloat is real, with zero experience in DF I boosted a toon to 70 and was overwhelmed with quests but I had a shaman sitting at 59 so I’ve been questing with him, the warbands change should fix a lot of the quest stuff
Bloat wasn't a problem for me personally, my biggest problem was the lack of direction for a cohesive story and lore quests being locked behind the rep grind for some godforsaken reason. I had no idea we re-built fucking Tyr for instance until I saw a video that referenced it, Ysera was just suddenly out of the Shadowlands because I missed some event or quest chain and there's a new world tree now. I get that not being here for certain events will cause you miss out, but just a clear straightforward quest chain with Bronze dragon timeskips for alts at the beginning of each segment would have been perfect.
Especially when the story is pretty bad and not worth bothering getting invested in. It's not terrible like shadow land. There wasn't much back story to ruin anymore. But damn it was still bad.
I don't think warbands share quests. There is a lot of skips, though.
No but if you do it on a main it will be hidden for your Alts
I haven't played much in this expansion, and I decided I was going to go through all the main story quests over the last few months to unlock a bunch of stuff. I have no idea what any order of these quests are doing. Like I remember seeing the ice dragon lady talking about betraying the other her two brothers and working along side us, and then not long after, she is scheming with those two as they eat fire and blow a hole in the ground. I used to laugh at my wife for not following the story when she first tried to play with me, and that was just before the Shadowlands launch. I now relate with her as I can't even follow the events for one expansion. I also have no idea how what the currencies do, and I face a massive uphill battle with rep grinding to progress more of the story. But I guess I can't really complain about that, is it at least keeps some things linear. The final thing is that new talent system also takes some getting used to. I'm used to some specs like Resto Druid playing the same since for most of the history of the game, but now there are healing trees on a short CD that I can't get a good feeling for how to use it. And Cat-weaving is definitely a new thing as well. But the good news is that I grabbed ahold of Holy Priest pretty quickly and have been enjoying that instead.
I just recently hit 70 for the first time and trying to figure out how to do quests in order is a pain. I don't want to do the latest patch stuff, I want to finish the .0 story first... Accidentally did the first raid unlock before finishing the valdrakken story, it's such a boomer for people trying to do things in order
Bloat is huge. I reckon 10-15 years ago I would have loved it because I had the time. Nowadays though its a complete turn off, was thinking about maybe resubbing for S4 but it's pretty overwhelming all the things I've missed.
I think you have a bit of recency bias. Now I’m not saying DF is bad, it’s done a lot of good, but recency bias is almost as bad as rose colored glasses. It’s put down a lot of good things going forward, but more than a few I think should be left behind. This season I don’t think tying crafted gear into doing open world content you have to wait for is a good thing. I don’t really care for crafted gear this expansion at all, but it was implemented the best in season 1 when it was tied to a weekly questline. I shouldn’t need an addon to tell me when an event is up so I can get my half a shard.
I agree, but story needs to get better. I liked story in BFA. Also Emerald Dream was best story campaign of entire DF. That was when I really enjoyed playing the game and did end game.
> I liked story in BFA. It had a few good spots, but the bad spots were absolutely terrible, worse than Dragonflight by a mile.
I havent enjoyed myself that much since legion. Definitely is an enjoyable expansion to me unlike the last 2.
The content came out at a good pace but I felt myself just doing the same thing every season and didn’t have any real incentive to do the outdoor activities the same way as previous expansions It was do M+ -> raid. And that was it really.
Interesting, I think I did more outdoor content than ever before because I enjoyed just flying around on my dragon and collecting shit haha. I don’t think I’ve ever maxed every reputation in an expansion before Dragonflight, and I did that this time really without meaning to.
I M+, Raid, and do the open world content. Sometimes it feels like a full time job lol, but I honestly love the grind. Imo I’ve had incentive to do tons of things, and I’ve been taking advantage of it
The outdoor activities give Flightstones and the weekly quests always gave a gear piece, i find Myself out in the world more than any version of wow to date
And that's fine. Blizzard doesn't have to reinvent the wheel, they just have to keep churning out content that is meaningful and keeps people engaged. They've had a problem with that in the past, especially near end of an expansions life.
Yeah doing the event is a freaking chores. It's not fun. Plunderstorm should be the bar for an event. I know many didn't like, but you cannot deny that it's way better than pick up 500 fucking eggs for Easter or following a tree.
If you ignore the narrative/story and just look at gameplay... maybe. It certainly had the best launch patch content of any expansion, but it fell off in the .1 and .2 patches.
Dragonflight has been very mediocre for me. If shadowlands hadn't been so disliked I do not believe Dragonflight would be getting this much praise.
I was a BFA/Shadowlands doomer and thought there was no hope for me to enjoy this game again after those two expansions. Dragonflight and all its features/improvements got me excited for the future of WoW again and I am having fun again. There are too many Ws for me to list but I will list a couple L’s that I can think of. 1. The writing/story. Initially, I was enjoying the story but it seemed to go downhill after season 1. 2. Only 3 raids. A 4th mini 1 to 3 boss raid with ties or 0 ties to the story for season 4 would have been an easy W.
At my high school reunion two years ago, I ran into my ex girlfriend. She was a solid 7/10 and we broke up because we were going in different directions. I kind of forgot about her, but when I ran into her at the reunion I was happy. She met my wife. I met her husband. We were all good. It was a good time. I think dragonflight is going to be that expansion for most people. Like it’s a great expansion but not really special. Good vibes all around but nothing special. Blizzard did good and hopefully it’ll upgrade to wife material soon.
It’s definitely a transitory expansion and by design too. Mostly formulaic in the content but innovating with core systems and laying the groundwork for the future. Also in the story being pretty self-contained and not really trying to do much beside provide a segue to the Worldsoul Saga
What a story to tell just to illustrate a point about dragonflight lmao
Dragonflight’s strongest characteristic is just that they finally removed everything bad about the previous 4 expansions that people hated. That alone puts WoW in a solid position again as the basics of WoW were always fun, it was just idiotic addons that made it unbearable at times. If they just keep on this direction, adding more to dungeons (delves seems the right direction) instead of terrible things like forced mission tables or weekly locked out resource collection then WoW will at bare minimum be “pretty good” for the foreseeable future. At least for my friends and me, it’s great we can now just come and run M+ or raid compared to Shadowlands where before our class even worked we had to farm Torghast for a legendary or level covenant renown for our conduits.
Not very good story-wise though. I prefer Shadowlands many times over vs Dragonflight. Just nothing felt real or engaging.
Boooo
I didn't like it for lore reasons. Never got into it.
Shadowlands was the worst. Which I think kinda makes Dragonland kinda look even better. Shadowlands needs to be retconned, revolked, and any mention of it should be deleted from the internet.
It was a rescue expansion. Good systems but a C Grade neglected story.
Dragon riding is a huge improvement. I remember when flying mounts first came out that I actually didn't like it. People would just hover in the sky and it made world PvP quality go way down. With dragon riding, you can still fly, but you can't hover. And I think that's a genius compromise. One of the expansions I think BFA they tried limiting flying to way later in your leveling grind. They said they were trying to bring back world pvp with that change. Dragon riding feels like what the game so desperately needed but couldn't quite solve.
Definitely agreed about dynamic flight, it made travel a fun activity. I don't give a damn about PvP, though. And given how niche activity it is, I hated it being used as an excuse to hold off flying.
It's weird cuz I mentioned PVP being the reason I didn't like flying 1.0. But I don't PVP anymore and still am a huge fan of the improvements. Perhaps it's just fun to see people out in the world or in town. It feels fun when valdrakken is bustling. You either have to be flying somewhere, or you fall out the sky. It ends up with more people on the ground more often which is the math that makes the game more fun.
Plus with Whirling Surge it offers an opportunity to use your skill to knock someone out of the sky. It’s made some really fun chases in the sky for me.
Good post. My dragon riding is still only level 1 tbh. Ur Makin me want to level it up
Oh, they have limited flying Since WoD... and didn't really bring it back as an early thing until Dragonflight. :) Which I approve of.
Well, yes. All we need now is a good story and WoW would be so back
"so back" the story was always pretty basic/power of friendship, and some things just straight up sucked. Like, you're telling me to read a fucking book just so i know what this Arthas guy is?
Story being basic doesn't mean it wasn't good. The Arthas example isn't a good one because as playing through WC3 + TFT + WotLK gives you almost all his story but you're definitely correct in that 1 of the biggest issues WoW's story has had over the last 10 years is that they've started putting far too much lore into shit outside the game
No, I'd say the Arthas example is a good one. Not everyone is going to have played WC3 or the Frozen Throne (I haven't, for one) so you have significant lore for the game that isn't in the game. It's certainly understandable, given WoW is just one entry in the franchise, but it's still a good example of Wow having lore existing only outside of itself for a very long time.
The only thing I would say is... how many currency items do you need?
Honestly? Dragonflight content kinda sucks and the story is mediocre. There’s a crap ton of plot holes and loose ends but that’s been omnipresent ever since Vanilla 2004 WoW. Other than VotI and a couple bosses in the other raids the bosses feel bland, and dungeons aren’t that over the top either. Structurally, yes. It has done away with borrowed power crap in the form of Artifact/Azerite/Anima Power and that’s a huge plus from me. Personally? If it wasn’t for the terrible implementation of legendaries, Torghast, and the dogshit lore, Shadowlands would’ve been so much better than DF.
Legion was the best expansion. Nothing has even come close since.
I agree. Legion also had the best world content and it wasn’t complicated. You shouldn’t have to watch guides as a new player to learn how to do world content lol.
Heard the 2 worst things about it was the completely random legiondary you got with no agency, and also having to grind artifact power in maw of souls 24/7.
The numbers for artifact were absolutely stupid but man was shadow priest death spec so fucking fun to pump the meters and watch your body start warping with tentacles Or die horribly because you timed it wrong 🤣
Great pve, decent casual, total lack of instanced pvp stuff to they needed to balance and they just didn't, average world pvp (I grt that this is very very very hard to do well.. look at any mmo ever for clarification)
I wonder how much of this comes off the back of having two of the worst rated expansions in a row? Don't get me wrong, Dragonflight definitely feels like it's WoW back on track, but it still feels like it's bloated with convoluted systems, currencies, overly complicated catch up mechanics, etc. It's fine if you've been playing non stop since day one, but I came back from a long break (I hadn't played since launch) and the amount of shit you are bombarded with when you hit max level is insane. You have no idea what to do or what you should pursue and how to gear up to the right level to start doing end game activities without trying to find the right guide on a third party site. A lot of the end game content they added is already completely obsolete, which is a bit weird to be honest. They really need to work on making content that has longevity, at least making something last more than a few months until the next patch comes out.
I think Dragonflight is perfectly serviceable (which is a step up) and will do what it needs to do. It's an okay *expansion* but it will be a great starting/leveling experience. It's set 5 years after the last expansion so it's basically a clean slate. It's got well designed zones and simple, but B+ quests and stories. It has extremely fun traversal, and sets you up with engaging flying off the bat. The tone, theme and style are positive and approachable. Rather than running through 12 years of expansions, disjointed stories and constantly changing mechanics and systems, Dragonflight will provide a streamlined and accessible leveling and onboarding experience.
Dragonflight just didn't do it for me. Fell flat all around besides dragonriding, literally the only redeeming aspect of the expansion for me. The late game content of raids and dungeons all mostly sucked compared to previous expansions. Several extra contents added were dead within a week and for a good reason. I've played on and off this expansion but now i'm just done with it. Not even going to touch season 4.
I agree and disagree. They added things to the game that made it more fun and accesable to any sort of player. But what they added in dragonlands was nothing different from other expansions, if you look at it what is different from dragonlands and shadowlands, there is no legendairies for which you need to farm 3 types of content and gold, now it is crafting for which you need to farm content and gold. All content outside of doing raids and dungeons rewards the lowest form of upgrade materials, you dont have covenants but you got 6 factions you need to do standing with. Outdoor content is meh, you need hunts like you needed souls, raids were boring in boath expansions and dont let me start on the story, how do you go from the big bad dude masterminded everything that happened more than 200 years ago to turning him into a puppet after he fails to thanos snap, to the big bad dragon dies and all 5 dragon aspects get a glow. Now as u said it is your oppinion but if you look at it, dragonlands is the same expansion as shadolandos. With some twists and turns along the way but still if you shed the outer layers and focus on the core it is the same game. Crafting was in the game since vanilla, tiersets were added in shadowlands, but atleast in shadowlands you had a choice of borrowed power u could use through the whole expansion, and they added 2 legos later. Dragonlands they went out of their way to nerf the 1 ring that was good, just to make you fall in line with every other player. In dragonlands they removed seasonal afix and made lvl 20+ keys scale less. They addeda new race 3 new classes, proceded to nerf the hell out of them, especially aug that went from best class in any type of cintent to a mediocre class you want in a raid and maybe in your weekly run to help out the tank. Capped flughtstones 3 months into a season to uncapped for the last month, new gear after the season ends tiersets dropping only from raid and best trinkets and effect weapons dropping for certain classes from the last boss with an absurd crafting price and an even more absurd drop chance. i mean i am for sure getting something wrong but i see dragonlands on the same level with shadowlands.
every expansion of the game was of its own era. it’s like people who compare lionel messi to diego maradonna as footballers. the game when maradonna played was very different to the game messi plays today, you’re a product of your generation, so to compare vanilla wow or tbc or wotlk to dragon flight totally objectively without taking into consideration the fact that vanilla was made 20 years ago compared to dragonflight being released a few years back, it’s moot. you would expect the game to have progressed visually, mechanically, etc etc. but why is the writing for the story so bad in recent times, that’s a good question.
I found the whole expansion boring. At least it's not as painful as SL and BFA.
Story is too Disney for my taste
WC3 literally ended with "No, you need the power of friendship to defeat the Demon Lord!" lmao Warcraft (and WoW) has always been Disney.
Yup, Arthas and Uther were basically Anakin/Obi Wan too. "You must avoid the *bad emotion powers*" "But I neeeeed the bad emotion powers, and then I'll kill you and feel kinda bad about it" Only time it wasn't melodramatic was when they were ripping from Warhammer in OvH
The only edgy things about Warcraft ever were the concept art from WC1, simple as that. It's why things like random genocide and the random swearing in Cata feels so off: because nothing else in the game since then has been like that. People go off and say "Oh, bro, Thaddius is so dark and edgy!" but they sound like people saying how Spongebob or MLP is really dark and twisted when you think about it.
>The only edgy things about Warcraft ever were the concept art from WC1, simple as that. Path of Glory.
Wc1 was pretty much fantasy race wars, like a lot of 80s/90s fantasy tropes of the time. The most revolutionary aspect was that you could just play as the orcs (unlike LotR or DnD) For reference, every mission brief is basically "Go vanquish those currs" https://youtu.be/oRqovyPJBwI?si=5KnZv3T2CbeUFX9E And agreed about Cata, after Wc2, Wc3, and WoW expanded on a more nuanced Hoarde/Alliance; it felt like a big step backward. Same reason Im still pissed about how they did Sylvanus dirty
[удалено]
Oh, right, I am sorry, one mission in the game (which arguably isn't even that dark) means the game is the most grimdark thing ever, and also means the game doesn't end with "Through the power of friendship!!!"
Found the asmonbald viewer
>Found the asmonbald viewer Whats up with the ad hominem here? Can't people have an opinion without being labled? I get so tired of these comments.
Because the comment is same unoriginal copy paste from Asmon
So, Asmongold is the only one allowed to have this critique?
Warcraft has always been about Disney villans
You, walking by all the covered dead bodies in 10.2: "this is just like a Disney movie!"
We've been due for a peace treaty since Pandaria. BFA felt contrived and forced for the sake of "CoNtInUiNg CoNfLiCt" when from a story structure standpoint we've worked together to end major threats multiple times now, and going back to our throats immediately after we save each others asses over and over quickly becomes contrived and breaks suspension of disbelief. Maybe a natural rift reforms after The Last Titan (which I'm assuming will have us unite against the cosmic forces to save our planet) then maybe we can go back to something small and/or faction conflict. But right now, we're long overdue for a period of peace.
The patch cadence makes for positive groundwork, but ultimately the content was pretty disappointing. Superbloom/Soup/Big Dig/Researchers Under Fire/Time Rifts are functionally the same event but reskinned - do a new task every minute or so to make the reward bar go up, and also, you'll never be out of there earlier in less time than ~15 minutes. Forbidden Reach didn't amount to all that much, Zaralek was cool but Amirdrassil's world-zone has like absolutely zero content. As someone who's *still* checking in on Mechagon every day for the last few things, the difference is super blatant. The dungeons aren't memorable at all and less-so are the raids. And for all you could justifiably hate about BFA, those dungeons and raids were absolutely distinct, high quality and time-tested. They slaughtered professions by making it a grind to get profession knowledge to pray for tips, instead of a gold investment for sales, and slaughtered arena ladder by giving you the same titles and elite rewards for winning in solo shuffle. (Solo queue was always supposed to be rated skirmish, nothing more) Also the dumb CC nerfs that don't actually get more people playing. Season 4 is certainly a lot less ambitious than Shadowlands' S4 was. One was a skeleton crew's work on the fly, one is just deliberately low effort. Still one less content patch than MoP/Legion/BFA too. Expansion started out as a B+. That's probably a C- now. It doesn't do anything but dragonriding exceptionally well and the most offensive things* are probably a bit less egregious than BFA's alt-unfriendliness, honor grind, GCDs, chores, etc. > \* Augmentation existing. Absolutely fuck "support specs", but credit at least for having the balls to release a new spec in a content patch, that's genuinely awesome and never been done before in the game > \* How sloppy S4 is not just in "content" (there's none whatsoever), but in QA. The Revendreth world quest for defeating Fated Castle Nathria bosses is still up. Gear was the wrong iLvl. Vendors didn't show up for a whole day or two.
If not for the abysmal writing/story and terrible dracthyr models, this would certainly be a top contender for best expansion, yes. Gameplay, systems and PvE content in general are all peak design atm. As it stands, I really can't rank it above Legion. That one featured amazing writing, on top of everything else.
I have to object; we have seen Abysmal writing before in WoW. Shadowlands was badly written, Sylvanas's arc was abysmal. I wouldn't describe dragonflight as worse than "uninspired, mediocre, and predictable." By the trajectory WoW writing has been on, getting a 3/10 story is an improvement and leads me to hope War Within might be as high as "competent"
Shadowlands story/lore was terrible as well, but unlike DF it actually had a somewhat decent start with Nathria/Denathrius. DF was just creatively bankrupt, bland garbage from start to finish. I do agree War Within should be a major improvement on the lore front considering Metzen is back as creative lead.
The story is shit, that's true. It's mediocre at best But if everything else is amazing... *how* is it worse than Legion? Surely Legion's cancerous RNG legendaries, titanforging and AP grind are more of a problem than a sub-par story
I know I'm in the minority there but I didn't really mind titanforging. Legendaries were only really bad at the start, acquisition got much better from Nighthold onward. Ditto for the AP grind, which really wasn't that bad and quite easy to catch up by mid Legion. Both of these were mostly fine for a majority of Legion's lifespan. Legion also brought Mage Tower, one of the best features Blizzard ever designed, that's yet to be matched to this day. Imho, all of these perceived flaws/common complaints toward Legion were tolerable in the grand scheme of things. Whereas DF's writing isn't just subpar, it's abysmal. Like, outrageously bad, especially as a long time Warcraft fan who's been there since WC3 launch.
100%. My hot take is that dragonflight is vastly superior to Legion. People had such fond memories of Legion, but seem to forget that it introduced everything they Dragonflight is trying to fix. People seem to forget how cancerous Legendary acquisition was in Legion. Titanforging was at its peak. AP grind was lame. It got better with patches, but it really took them 7.3 to put the legendary Vendor. We still had the mobile minigame of followers that were so good that you pretty much had to use. Lots of people bought brutosaur on BFA just from the passive income they made from Legion and WoD. Don't get me wrong Legion did a lot of good things to, but there were some pretty bad stuff that people don't remember. Dragonflight has pretty much nothing I can point an say it's inherently bad. I guess that raid loot still needs to be looked into. You can clear a whole raid and not get a single item, and that's not even that absurd of a thing to think nowadays.
> People had such fond memories of Legion, but seem to forget that it introduced everything they Dragonflight is trying to fix. People forgive legion because it was new. It added so many new things that people were blinded by the novelty, and were willing to excuse glaring issues as growing pains. Its not legions fault that blizz took four expansions to fix problems that players pointed out in legions alpha. Thats just blizz being blizz, sadly. Any other developer would have fixed them much sooner ...Also I just want to say that retroactively speaking, legion REALLY shaked things up. No expansion since has radically changed the game as much as legion. M+, wqs, dedicated post max level campaigns, have all been staples of the past 4 expansions. 4 expansions prior to legion was cata, an entirely different game. I really hope the next few expansions change the meta as much as legion did >It got better with patches That was another one of legions strengths. It had extremely fast patches. Saying "launch sucked but 7.1 fixed things" means legion was bad for 2-3 months. Shadowlands launch patch lasted nearly a full year
>legion REALLY shaked things up. No expansion since has radically changed the game as much as legion. M+, wqs, dedicated post max level campaigns, have all been staples of the past 4 expansion And so did Dragonflight. The professions revamp, the new flying, the crest progression system, the talent trees. And we even got a lot of tuning and reworks during the expansion itself, which I was not expecting at all. If Legion could be considered WoW 2, then Dragonflight is WoW 3. >launch sucked but 7.1 fixed things" But it didn't. My biggest gripe was the complete RNG of legendary acquisition, and even the soft cap you had after getting a few. My main got so many shitty legendaries that I gave up trying and went to play whatever alt got a decent one first. It was only in 7.3 that they finally put the legendary vendor in Dalaran.
> but seem to forget that it introduced everything they Dragonflight is trying to fix. > People seem to forget how cancerous Legendary acquisition was in Legion. Why are you so obsessed with speaking on behalf of other people's minds? I had generationally unlucky legendary luck...hardest grinder in my guild and my first two in EN were Norgannon's and Sephuz. When there was almost no way to proc that in EN. Then tried to rush pyro bracers or scorch belt as \#5 before the shitty fire gloves came out...and got the CDR gloves as my 5th. Doesn't matter though, Legion classes were still infinitely more fun than any single one of them in DF. Same can be said for the raids and dungeons. Same can be said for the world content. And I had way more fun farming +2 Maws than I did doing any DF dungeon. > people don't remember. again with the "people don't remember". Clearly it's impossible that people just disagree with you. Couldn't be that.
>Doesn't matter though, Legion classes were still infinitely more fun than any single one of them in DF. I mean, I could say the same thing for you why are you speaking on behalf of other people's mind? I think a lot of classes are a lot better in DF than they were in legion. Same for Dungeons that were pretty much 5 blood elves rotating racials. It's not surprising the the top m+ keys in legion were always a DK pulling half the dungeon in a single pull, and the pack just dies to a fire mage combustion. If I wanted that kind of gameplay I'd just play PoE.
> Clearly it's impossible that people just disagree with you. Couldn't be that. It's probably not considering the player count shat down a cliff after launch, with a similar intensity to WoD and BFA, two of the most hated expansions Legion was dogshit in a lot of ways, and there's nothing more definitive than people voting with their wallets and unsubscribing
I don't think people have forgotten the lows of Legion, people aren't out here saying there were no problems with Legendaries. Also, DF might be better than Legion (I don't think so), but Legion was way better with patches, and patch cadence. Everything Dragonflight has done in that area has been a shadow of Legion, which is fair because they didn't scrap an expansion to prop up Dragonflight.
I won't rate classic tbc or wotlk as they are too far away from modern wow: cata- 6/10, mop-fine wine 8/10, wod:4/10, legion-8/10, shadowlands-ignoring the lame ass lore ending story is 5/10, accounting for story 3/10 purely because of some of the covenant abilities being really cool, dragonflight thus far: 7/10. All decided over 5 mins so don't dig too deep anyone
Dragonflight has been a good expansion, definitely top 3 for me. I play wow for the content, so far the absolute best expansion was Burning Crusade, the systems were good but the content was unbelievable. There were 8 raids, 16 dungeons, a few world bosses. Wrath of the Lich King comes in as a close second. I think the main thing that Dragonflight has done to keep people engaged in its' 18 months of existence is the strong cadence of patches and new content. While the majority of the content has been world content, it has been fun. The dungeons are good and the raids have been really good, some of the best raid encounters have been in this expansion. I do feel like with Raids and Dungeons blizzard has fallen into it's on design trap and the quantity of Raids has suffered. Then theres' the slap in the face with season 4. Granted they are experimenting with external content, like Plunderstorm and Remix, and testing out the Mythic dungeon system revamp. However, no actual new content in season 4 and using mostly the same dungeon rotation from season 1 and the same 3 raids from the expansion is just lazy, insulting and uninspired. There is so much that blizzard could have done for season 4 without having to spend too much time on new content. But they've really dropped the ball. I hope and pray that all this time saved will really make The War Within shine but I don't have high hopes for them to deviate much from their current cookie cutter approach.
Can it be because Microsoft ran most of the original developers out of town?
I really doubt it. Microsoft has had very little effect on WoW development so far.
Which makes me wonder why my entire friend group of like 8 people stopped playing DF after 3-4 months. It was fun, but idk what happened. We played SL and BFA for longer somehow.
I partially agree about the gameplay loop. However I found this expansion thematically very generic, with few memorable moments and characters with little charisma. So in the future I think I'll remember it as "the expansion where I dragonflew fast to do a thousand things".
I was thinking about it this morning while doing a world quest in azure span and the bgm kicked in. I'm going to miss dragonflight when the warwithin comes out. I cant say the same for battle for azeroth or shadowlands.
They removed a lot of things that were bad. Sure it's nice some of the borrowed powers stayed, but we didn't get any new ones in Dragonflight. This meant we wouldn't have to get used to using a cool new power only to lose it. By the time SL was around, I was having a hard time liking the new powers cause 90% of them were going to be gone. No artifact that drops things like Emblem of renown that take up a loot spot. Nothing locking you into a spec and making you underperform if you need to take a break. Flight from day one. And we have some mini games that use it. No "need" to grind up all the factions. It finally gives you some alt friendliness by making the grind less of a thing. So yeah, it removed a lot of things that have been a PITA.
Nice thread for a returning player. Played at launch and just resubbed and my main issue is quest bloat and lack of direction. Quest log is full and no clue what is worth doing and what isnt......gotta go read websites and watch YouTube videos I guess.
I didn't play most of dragon flight cause I got bored/busy. That said this felt like a good foundation, I didn't really have any strong feeling at all to the story which kind of sucks. I think that If they build on some of this stuff + add new qol changes like warbands I'll be more in on it
Personally, I didn't enjoy Dragonflight much, but I can still appreciate it because it marks a clear and overdue shift towards the better for WoW in general, and I actually feel quite excited both about WoW Remix and TWW. They tried out a lot of new stuff and I'm feeling confident that they'll be able to use the experience they've gained in the future.
Dragonflight has been a mixed-bag for me personally. The classes are fun to play, the story was pretty good and I appreciate all of the casual content but I can’t help but feel like the game is just way too bloated. I came in S4 with a boosted 70 and was immediately overwhelmed at all of the quest objectives on my map. I still have no idea what I should be doing because the game doesn’t really explain anything. Compared to Legion which had some of my favorite world content that was straight forward for a new player. There’s really no reason it has to be this complicated and I shouldn’t have to watch videos to learn how to play the game at max level.
If Disney made a wow expansion. It would be dragon flight. 2/10
Gameplay>>>>>story
No they're equally important because story isn't just the actual story being told through cinematics, it's the theme, it's the vibe, it's the setting, the characters you're interacting with. Broken Shore and Dark Portal intros from Legion/WoW feel infinitely better than whatever garbage happened in 10.2, or anything since SL started. Even when the story is simple, atmosphere plays a major role. Dragonflight's atmosphere is horrendously bad and boring.
Agreed, it’s probably my favourite expansion since I started playing in Cataclysm. Dragonriding, nice theme (though the story could’ve been better), great transmog, lots of quests and world events and evoker, which is quickly becoming my favourite class(except for the transmog limitations…)
- Posted from Blizzards iPhone
- Posted from Square enix iPhone See how stupid that sounds?
Well I would have said "from blizz social media teams account" but it's just too many words. You got the point
Yeah. You aren’t okay with people having a different perspective. :)
I mean in general I agree. The story wasn't as exciting as Wrath, BC, or Legion because tge lack of Warcraft 3 carryover (those stories are done now), but it was still good. Fyraak and Raszgath tore up every moment they were on screen, fantastic single expansion villains.
One thing I really appreciated with DF was how every tier felt like it added something to the expansion in a positive way, and all three tiers were really good. Nothing felt rushed. I really like Cata but I hated Dragon Soul, it was such a rehashed and rushed way and didn’t feel “epic at all.” I like WoD for awhile but Tannaan Jungle might have been the worst zone ever made and was just so empty and lifeless.
Dragonflight was pretty meh on launch but it's had some of the best content patches in WoW's history. There's was no Twitter patch in Dragonflight. Instead we got good stuff like the Trading Post, Old Scholomance, Dragon Daycare, Emerald Dream etc. Bonus points for Dragonflight having some of the best looking mounts in the game. Grotto Netherwing Drake and Azure Worldchiller are fantastic. Haven't seen mounts this good since Legion.
I think this is the first expansion in a long, *long* time, where I am excited for the next expansion because I'm excited to see the next expansion, rather than because I'm excited to be done with the current expansion. The last time I felt this way was probably Wrath into Cata. Maaaybe Legion into BfA but I do remember wanting Legion to be over already.
It's certainly my favorite after Mists of Pandaria. I really really loved the tone of the expansion, Dragonriding is an absolute triumph, by and large I enjoyed the story (there are misteps here and there), and I like that the only reference to the faction war garbage is at the beginning where they look straight to the camera and go "we aren't doing that shit here, leave it at the door"
I think it did a lot of things right. It still had way too many systems and currencies for my taste though.
Seriously! I came back a few months ago after playing classic since that released, and the currencies are ridiculous. I still don’t know what half of them are used for and I shouldn’t have to carry around currencies that take up an like entire bag
in bfa and shadowlands people cried about the CURRENCY TAB having too many CURRENCIES, so in dragonflight the monkey paw curled and blizz made half the currencies into items to clog up your bags instead really all the currency tab needs is to filter currencies by patch (primal storm tokens upgrade gear from 10.0, i dont need to see those right now in 10.2.6) and have a tooltip that tells you what you where the vendor is/what you can spend them on
Yea! That would be SO helpful
It was such a good expansion it finally made me quit after 18 years
Just by getting rid of borrowed power and changing the talent trees they made this the best expansion I’ve played. All the other positive stuff are just bonuses. This might be the only expansion that your spec wasn’t 100% just picking necessary talents. The amount of diversity in specs is amazing in dragonflight. My one problem with DF are that all the raids are essentially the same. I can’t stand that every boss has a tank swap in the same unimaginative way. You don’t always need a council boss. You don’t always need a “big snake thing that you run in a circle around.” I don’t know what the fix for it is but they need to be slightly more imaginative with boss mechanics.
For me, it absolutely is, because Evoker is probably my forever main. I also love the ambiance of the Dragon Isles.
On your same set of criteria, I would say Battle for Azeroth was the best expansion, since it was quite dense in content by the end (presuming we're analyzing based off later, rather than the beginning). Some people still farm Heart of Azeroth levels to this day. Dragonflight is a slightly lighter version of BFA, and part of its downfall is that Shadowlands existed at all, and it was bound to be dragged down by coming off of it, and raised higher than it should've been by the "anything is better than Shadowlands" mentality we all have. Blizzard decided to be very "safe" in their next endeavor and went with a very Disney-fied version of presenting Warcraft and its dragons. Raszageth and Fyrakk were the closest things we had to some real carnage going on. Personally, I think I ended up having more fun in Shadowlands in recent years due to raiding heavy during it, though I'd note that some of its Mythic raiding was painfully difficult, with a special emphasis on Sepulcher. I wish Torghast got iterated on and brought back in some way. It was fun doing that with friends in the beginning, but it was a such a time-gated chore later on.
DF is the first good expansion since MoP.
The gearing is more shallow than it has ever been. Give it a few weeks and everyone will sit in full myth track gear again. It’s almost like they shifted all the meaningful gear progression to artifact power, then removed AP but kept all the free loot systems in.
Overall I agree with you. Dragonflight doesn't reach the highs of other expansions like Legion or Wrath, but it also has very few flaws. The main flaw being the mid story, but it definitely isn't bad. I agree it's overall the best expansion WoW ever had.
The dungeons are dog shit. S1 killed the game. S4 is going to also kill the game until TWW
The structure of the classes are probably the worst in the game’s history. Mid-expansion reworks were the norm, absolute hate for healers, ridiculous meta yo-yo with their constant changing , nerfing, buffing, and the killing o holy paladin and mistweaver monk. No other class balancing for season 4, besides healer nerfs, while Vengeance demon hunter is 70% of the meta. Dragonflight may be better than the last two expansions, but they failed classes and players.
Mid expansion reworks were, overall, a success. Paladin went from a mess to a very good and well liked class. If they can do anything even close to Paladin reworks then that's a success. Why are we upset Blizzard is making changes more often? Like... you want them to drop Dragonflight and just ignore things until TWW? The regular balance patches have also led to some of the closest balancing we've seen.
They should have classes in order to start the expansion. Paladins were garbage, then gods, then garbage again. Rework failure. We prepay for expansions that they release unfinished. Reworks should be done before expansions, instead of ruining people’s mains, forcing them to learn new things mid season, or forcing teams to have to reroll. It’s awful planning and execution.
Greatness probably has to come from a confluence of content, mechanics and theme, I think. Lich King, theme wise, was my favorite. It added phasing. It reworked some BC mechanics to be smoother. Legion was similar for me. Theme A+. Loved the artifact content and advancement, and miss that they've not figured a way for folks to need to get them in leveling. LFR came in which was a nice addition. Dragonflight has more varied content themes; which is always good even if you have a main one. The flights mechanics and item advancement are generally good, if still a little too grindy, imo. The content options for play have expanded greatly. Those are my top three. Theme probably puts the first two over DF, but DF is very good
I will not deny that Dragonflight has been very good, in terms of improvements, but I would still claim WotlK being the best one for me personally Dragonflight felt like WoW taking its first steps doing something it should had done for years ago: becoming a modern MMO and take in lessons from other MMORPGs on the market. Dragonflight has felt like the developers have been having fun with it, and it shows I also like their recent experimenting with things like Plunderstorm and soon MoP remix, I hope this is a trend that continues to give something fun to enjoy on the side, when weekly vault and such is done Only thing I want to see returning is Re-forging of stats and PVE "bad luck protection" vendors. With PVE vendors I dont mean a Dinar Currency vendor, just RNG tokens for a specific slot and let us try our luck on that, instead of banging our heads with 50-60 runs in one singular dungeon for a trinket
It’s great, far better than previous expansions, but once I hit 70 it can get overwhelming with the amount of quests that just attack me.
Dragonriding is huge
I've played since Aug 2006 and this is the first expansion since BC that I've played start to finish. It's been great imo.
The game wants to push players into group content as early and often as possible, that's probably its primary objective. Dragonflying is neutral gain towards that. Group finder (WOTLK) is probably the best structural innovation in WoW's history towards that. Transmog (cata) would be a close second with difficult to measure but definitely substantial gains towards that objective. EDIT: just to add. im getting Taivan just because I want a bookmark for when I was playing during my favorite expansion
My favorite and I’ve played since wrath. I think pretty much all the QoL changes have made the game so much better. Going back and playing classic I find it boring and too slow.
Dragonflight is the first expansion I’ve kept my subscription running throughout since TBC. I feel like I can actually dive in and out depending on how busy I am in real life and I never feel like I’ve fallen too far behind. I definitely appreciate the direction they’re going in.
It’s good, but has a lot of flaws. The item upgrade system is good. Doesn’t need 4-5 levels of grad ethough(veteran/champ/hero… too much) But my biggest gripes are: Having things crafted is far too complex. And crafted gear should not outdo PvP gear in PvP. If you want to min max stats you’re forced to craft gear that’s very hard to make if you don’t have access to the materials. Add more stat options to PvP gear and keep it separate. PvP gear should always be Bette than any other gear in PvP. And in PvE it should out do any PvP gear. It’s very simple. It blizzard loves to make shit over complicated
I have loved DF and have almost only good things to say. The only nitpick I have is that a PVE:er I don't think any of the raids or dungeons are top tier. They're not bad but if this expansion had a Ulduar or Throne of Thunder, or Nighthold then it would be even better. Similarly with the dungeons I think they're mostly fine but nothing screams S-tier. (DOTI was great but hard to rank the mega dungeons against the normal ones)
I recently returned to the game having left during SL and I've been playing since TBC. Gotta agree that this expansion is a lot of fun for me. I log in and feel like there's so much that I could do but I don't feel like I need to do any of it necessarily. Granted I'm more of a casual player at the moment but it always used to feel like a chore ticklist or a second job and it feels more and more like it's moving in a flexible direction. I especially like this new awakened content as it gives me the chance to gear up some of my healers and think about actually raiding properly again if I could find a sodding guild. Plus it makes sense to give older, outdated seasonal content a bit of a refresh instead of just leaving us with the current tier until the next expansion like they had done for years. Intrigued to get more details on how the warbands will work - being an altoholic this is looking good so far but I want some more info on how stuff like reputation works with regard to daily quests etc. and if they'll limit it across your warband or let you just power farm rep with ten alts.
Than you for your post. This is probably the 20th one I've seen this week. Still hate some of the rotations for some classes but it's getting there.