Dragonflight isn’t a good expansion. Infact it’s far from being good expansion but it’s just better than the previous 2.
I’m not sure why Ion retains his position as game director but I really hope Microsoft do some swift purging of people because I’m getting sick to death of terrible expansion after terrible expansion.
When I really look at Dragon Flight all i see
Fail UI development
The UI is a failure, more people are using addons and the UI causes more bugs with addons than every before. Every update I find myself finding a way to remove what you add. Like the recent Casting / Flashing buttons? They look good when taken out of context of the game but as an actual feature is PURE GARBAGE
The new talent system
You created 2 talent trees which just give every class every ability they once had to choose. The choice nodes are poorly used and you’ve made every class so powerful that balance is nearly impossible. Every redesign makes a class God Tier and most nerf over gut things.
Your marketing is beyond weak
Dragon Flight has no core. No Villain, No real lore. Nothing for old players, new players and current players to look at the marketing and think THIS IS COOL… The Zones are pretty but they lack any soul. Even Shadowlands had more Soul even though it was a virtual meme expansion for lore.
I just feel like the wow development team need purging…or at least those in charge with the direction of it
I think DF is a very good expansion, i think SL was absolutely awful, now not everyone gonna agree with that stance, but attempting to illastrate a opinon as factual seems abit dishonest at best.
I can agree here, UI although is fine now, did cause multiple problems on the way. Addons im sorry the number hasnt gone up. Theyve always been massively used.
No incorrect the new ralent trees while were a power leap, arent that bad, id say classes may have been given too much overlapping CC and i think thats carried some issues into pvp for sure. But in pve? Absolutely fine lol.
Eh no, DF has been a major step in the wrong direction, and while sure i can find faults in it, and it isnt perfect no expansion was, and i defintly werent expecting it from DF.
Over the past 8 years the game has gone so far in the wrong direction, to think one expansion will immediately fix every issue is madness.
I think their open world design needs alot of improvement, i dont think rare farming offers interesting design.
I think while proffessions are defintly alot better there are some QoL features id love to see added, i also dont like the fact recipies come from raids exclusively. It causes the items values to sky rocket.
But as far as raids, m+ and day to day content. Df has been amazing, and tbh i think if they can pick up wome of its flaws it will keep being amazing
It’s true that it doesn’t reach WoW’s heights because it’s still trying to distance itself from its MMORPG roots, especially in terms of social cohesion and world building.
But it’s not a bad expansion. I rather enjoy it.
My main gripes with Dragonflight are:
The overall storyline is pretty weak, but there are a lot of smaller stories which are not
The classes are ridiculously overcomplicated, either in terms of buttons or in modifiers or even both
The social systems have broken down and there is nothing solid to replace them - I also recommend trying to restore the social systems of yesteryear through a server isolate of some kind for people to roll on if they want to
They fix those up for the next one and change nothing else, it’s gonna be amazing.
That said, I can still just about manage to comprehend the classes through my many years of experience with it and I can call upon IRL friends to play through some dungeons without spending all my time on mandatory grinds, and that means I’m having a good time.
I agree with your points. Also, I saw an interview, and apparently a lot of stuff they just don’t do to prevent degenerate gameplay. So the game is purposefully less fun just to prevent some hardcore players to do degen stuff. They make the game less fun just to prevent some bullcrap. I think it’s a dumb mentality. If ppl play the game like their job, they are already behaving degenerate. Why not just let them be degens, and make the game as fun as possible for everyone else? I wish it would be more like a mmorpg, and I wish pvp for example would be more about fun world pvp and BGs. The rewards from doing some of the most fun activities are very underwhelming, and there is no content for those too.
There should be a renown track for PvP activities.
I think they just gave up to be honest. It’s an old game, it’s a convoluted mess, it’d be too much work to truly fix it so they’re happy enough maintaining 1-2 million subscribers.
As long as they throw raids and dungeons at us, generic WoW stuff like dragons and aspects, the usual barrage of useless cosmetics, rep, rares, gear and don’t burn us out with mandatory treadmills, there’s a large enough market of players that will just keep WoW as something on the side to play now and then and be happy with it.
There’s no ambition with DF. It’s designed to simply be “good” and maintain a stable player base. It’s not designed to be an outstanding immersive return to the glory days that we want to play as much as possible, because that’s too much work and risk for them, especially in such an old game. There’s easier profit in mediocrity and a large enough audience to make it viable.
Crafted gear is a win.
No mindless daily farming for player power.
There is a lot of lore, if you’re not reading the quests and dialogues, that’s entirely your problem and the devs can’t fix that. I recommend you level up again on an alt and actually read the quests this time and try to enjoy the world around you.
The UI is objectively better and still needs further improvement. If the cost of that is a few broken addons for a while (which I experience as well), that’s perfectly acceptable. The only valid point you made is that the new flashes and all that, should be toggleable.
The new talent system is much better and the talents actually matter and are fun to play around with. It’s fun trying out different builds with slight talent changes. Though they do need to be slightly faster with talent tunning perhaps.
So you’re clearly not playing the same game as me.
It’s the longest I’ve been subbed to WoW in forever and I’ve been playing since late WOTLK, because it truly doesn’t feel like a job. It’s the first season since BFA that I started doing m+ and raiding. And gearing feels very rewarding because of the new gearing system.
In BFA and SL, daily and weekly requirements tied to player power (and that’s only for main) took up enough time that unless you were very motivated or just didn’t care about them, it took up enough time to make you burnout.
This is gone in DF and I’m eternally grateful for it. Skill should be the main differentiatior between performance, not mindless easy content grinding needed for some player power boost.
God knows that comparing yourself with the best WoW players already feels opressive, even when on even footing. But you know what? That’s kinda inspiring. It’s nice to know that I could match their performance (if I was equally skilled)* after gearing regularly, without having to grind artifact power for 200 hours.
I partially disagree. It should just be fun. Idc about some insane skill ceiling though. I don’t see how it’s fun to have one hardcore player with same gear do 4 times the damage of a casual just for having used like 20 3rd party things to perfectly sim their chars, improve their rotation with wcl+sims, etc. and have like 10 weakauras intelligently set up to make everything as clear as possible. Hardcore players in wow strive to be simulations. It’s just a dumb trap and they hope to achieve something like completing some key level, but that means absolutely nothing. The value of a game should be the fun. Not the sport and competition. I feel like people playing wow competitively have no other skills in life, so they try to derive their ego from this video game. If you wanna do sports, do a sport, do chess, and if you wanna be an esports-champ, go play CS:Go, valorant, or LoL. The funny thing is though that even esports, who are actually competitive, unlike wow, are considered something very weird in society and people don’t respect it that much. Video games as a sport? How about you play a real sport? Like if you play wow competitively, you are a tiny niche of a tiny niche of a tiny niche in a video game that isn’t even respected at all in that niche. Don’t play wow as a sport, and expect anyone to give a flying **** about it… Blizzard wastes their time completely, if they do anything to make wow a sport. The devs do though for some mystical reason. Idk why. The existence of M+ is the biggest driving factor for this fallacy.
lol at least that worked out for them. I mean at least in time rifts i have something to do, depsite that it is afk brain dead content.
I remember sl was bad with the weekly torghast grind, locked in 1 covenant and so on but they changed it and zereth mortis and the jailer gauntlet was fun! i have every torghast achievment, did this meta achievment which gave a title and played a lot more.
this is one of the big L from blizzard. these embelishments are the new legendaries. op stuff you need in pve and pvp. without the effects crafting gear would be great.
-With no more endless chores, I find myself doing more content than usual, I log when I want to do content, I do not feel like I missed stuff and am now forever left at the backrows due to attending to irl…
-I dig the story, dragons, centaurs, that’s a personal take ofc, it’s my weak poitn x’D I quite like it!
-UI was really bad at first, with lots of issues but I like the current irritation.
-I gotta agree with classes bit…Each class is over complicated, any class can heal/off heal, and has a button for every scenario.
In my opinion, Dragonflight is pvp wise the worst xpac ever
main reason is Solo Shuffle, it killed 2v2 and 3v3
also Blizz still didnt Fixed the mmr bug, this means close to nobody can archive his goal anymore, getting frustrated and quit, from what i’ve seen most of my friends in dragonflight have quitet
then everytime when a class getting reworked, this class is broken for more than 4 Months
So yeah, these Devs did nothing for PvP in Dragonflight, except making a hardcore Inflated solo Shuffle in Season 1, so everyone can get the 2.4 for free
i’ve never had so little fun as a pvp player as i did in dragonflight and i already miss bfa and sl
This expac had 0 hype, this is also the first expansion that i skip every cutscene/story quests.
It’s not all negative though df fixed alot of mistakes blizzard made in the past 3 expansions, hopefully next expansion is not as boring as this one though.
Yeah, WoW had bit of an bad-good pattern but after BFA-SL bad and worse it’s difficult to stay engaged. Especially when SL invalidated most of the games past lore and both BFA and SL ruined most of the characters.
Meanwhile the last three expansions also burned through most villains the game had so we hardly have anything to look forward to other than the usual “wait and see”.