I soft disagree, Even though i love dragonriding and the zone design this expansion, the theme is just horrible and boring, like every game and every genre tried dragons, it’s been a thing since 1990.
All they had to do was to go with a cool theme, anything but dragons.
I’ve described it before as a ‘step in the right direction’
gear upgrade system is just good, I’m sure people feel like the catalyst should be here sooner or later, but at the end of the day its still there, so is the gear you can upgrade. I like this gearing system. It blows all past versions save for maybe WoD (rip reforging) out of the water and is miles ahead of the past two in that sector.
Other parts of the games have become problematic though, storywise we still havn’t gone back to warcraft because when we entered SL we still had functioning factions, now SL is gone but so are our factions and it just feels like we’re still not there yet. 10.0 had good buildup, but it not paying off at all and 10.1 just starting up new threads feels like they will just keep doing this until there’s some lack luster payoff in 10.3 that was meant to be way bigger but saw extensive content cuts.
We’re not experiencing a story, we’re getting snippets of a whole story. Maybe if we had access to their heads to see the story they wanted to tell we’d be blown away, but its not translating to the ingame.
PvP I havn’t played since prot paladin became a WoG offheal battery cause I just don’t like that playstyle but its the only viable one, I do hear a lot about balancing issues though.
Stone man should’ve died in the cinematic, crushed into dust by the fall after reigniting the beacon of the dragon isles. Him being caught undermined a potential emotional moment. But yes, there’s no way to know who dragonflights enemies are based on the trailer, what the threat is. There’s no big bad staring at you daring to take it down and that probably did play a part.
I’m more active now then I’ve been in shadowlands and BFA content wise
I no longer feel grabbed by the throat by content I don’t want to do but have to in order to be a viable group member in other content, makes me feel like I have more time to spend on what I want to do (nor do I feel to drained after the mandatory content to do the things I want to do and just end up alt f4-ing)
To me its just obvious that Shadowlands was Blizzards last chance to do right in many eyes and they simply just completely failed. Many people at the time predicted that if SL would bomb they would have permanent problems with subscriptions going forward. They doubled down on everything what made people say Shadowlands is your last chance and I doubt most of those players are ever coming back, even for a 11.0.
And as reports have stated; there’s a good retention level for people who did buy the game, but a lot of people who quit havn’t returned.
This is entirely subjective.
I like Dragonflight, and I think that it is actually an extremely good expansion which feels like fun for the first time in a very long time.
With regards to Dragonflhight having no villain - they had to build one from scratch after killing or otherwise removing all of the more iconic villains over time. Iridikron is being built perfectly and it takes time. I’m sure that even you can understand that.
You know the game is great when it’s biggest strength is that you don’t have to play it as much.
Funny, when thinking about it. FFXIV also quite recently went through most of their villains by concluding their initial story. But at the same time, they have the advantage that pretty much every square title can be used as a base for future stories.
While blizzard over the years have only produced hearthstone and a few books, so again they don’t have anything to work from. (Though not going to lie, would loved an laid-back expansion based around stuff from hearthstone like return to Gagetzan.)
I was thinking something along the lines of another planet or something cyberpunky.
Or perhaps a seas expansion with pvp naval battles, or kraken pve fights, maybe a mixture of both pve and pvp.
Could work well with having player housing instanced islands.
I can only talk about lore perspective as that’s the most important for me as a casual pleb…
The way I see it lore wise: there is no closure the team could work with. It’s much easier to write a story if you know how to end it - obviously it can change in the process, but if you know where to go, the only thing you need to figure out is how to get there. They had this with the Warcraft games and the WoW expansions that built on those until Legion I’d say. After Legion, which had a closure again (same as WotLK), they didn’t know where to go, or at least it seems like it for me.
A few people stated that introducing multiple universes dug a grave on the lore, which is true in a way. There are many plot holes, weird new characters, shallow personalities, characters that have 0 impact or purpose. With DF I feel like (besides ridiculous writing and some shallow plots) that we are actually back to where we came from - except the champyon crying bs I hate wholeheartedly, that can go away - being an adventurer, exploring something from the past. Personally I like it - not all of it, but most - and as others said: it’s nice not to have a chore on top of irl stuff.
My 2 cents.
I am enjoying it a lot more than SL.
Sure, the story is not as interesting so far because there is no real greater conflict going on. But many gameplay changes are based entirely on requests of the community, like…
… Did I miss something on my list? That’s like 22 good major changes made to the game in this expansion so far.
I fail to see where Dragonflight is a bad expansion.
It’s seems like the point of DF was to fix and upgrade WoW to adhere to modern standards. Hence the choice of a much more simple story. Dragons, Titans, now the void, potentially old gods - we know and love all that.
I didn’t play much during SL, I returned 2 months before DF launch, before that I played a couple months during BfA and even longer ago I played for a year during WoTLK, despite not playing regularly, i did follow the news about the game, read community discussions on reddit and the general consensus from the community was that SL was bad, BfA was bad but a bit less and so on. Cata killed WoW, MoP wasn’t even WoW, and so on. According to the loudest and most noticeable opinions, the game has been dying every since 1.0.
Obviously, this my personal, subjective opinion, but the fact that I managed to remained subscribed and have been playing daily since October 2022, at least for me, this expansion is great. I have max levelled 10 toons from level 1 (or 10), unlocked all allied races, even delved into previous expansion content, like getting my first class hall set and all mounts and many artifact weapon tmogs from legion.
Here is the good things I like about the current game. note that it comes from someone who hasn’t delved too deep into high level end game content like raids, m+, and only did a little rated pvp.
I really like the UI revamp, with the ability to move around, hide and enlarge stuff on the screen according to one’s preferences. It is incomplete at the moment but it will only get better with time. I don’t think it’s good for the game to rely on addons, devs should design the game in such a way that eventually the addons are used only for very specific niche things, but unlike up to this point, addons are required not just for every end-game content, but for general convenience too. Because of the UI rework and constant little QoL updates, I have found myself being less dependant and outright uninstalling certain addons.
Another good new addition is the new talent tree, before we had a pick out of 3 options each 10 levels system, that was just whack. I also like that they did the level squish in SL and added chromie time, because when I started playing in BfA, my god levelling as a returning player that hasn’t played in nearly 10 years, was awful. You literally do an expansion for 10-15 levels then you have to move on the next one. So that was a good change. but with chromie, time you can at least get more sense of the certain previous expansion.
Then there is dragon riding. As far as I understand, it will be called dynamic flight later on, and we will have 2 modes of flying, the vanilla one and the dynamic one. I think it is a great addition to the game, the vanilla flying was so outdated, glad they implemented this, and plan to leave the vanilla flying, for more afk flying when you want to rest.
The new crafting system I think is awesome aswell, I never cared about crafting before DF, actually in any mmorpg I have played.
levelling alts is fun, the race, class spec variety, constant visual upgrades. outdoor content is usually a mess, but in a good way, you need that balance between linear dungeon runs and chaotic 100 player npc killing like we now have with the soridormi event.
So overall, from perspective, I like the game in its current state.
To each their own, as they say.
Yeah, wow didn’t really need multiverse. We still got planet hopping and time travel to work with (though the time travel stuff needs to have more repercussions to happen).
Nailed it.
People don’t want to earn tier anymore
It’s more that blizzard has changed what tier is, it’s no longer just a raid reward, that’s blizzards decision.
Besides, you’re still restricted by item level unless you go out of your way to get higher gear.
Even if you take the catalyst away though, the concept of rather then having gear locked to an itemlevel having something that is variably upgraded within a certain item level range as it is now just feels better then what we’ve had before
Now you it gives player power…: oh wait
I’ll be honest man, I’m indifferent to the tier abilities, add them or remove them I just want blizzard to have a reason to make 1 cool class specific transmog per patch per class
Maybe it’s you.
I like most of what they’ve done with the UI.
Is cool. And it will be improved over time; this version is meant to let players climatize to the system.
Factually wrong statements.
You may not like any of them; but that doesn’t mean they’re not there.
I sometimes feel the same; but the thing is… We don’t know what we’ll get then.
It might be much, much worse. At least with these devs we kinda know what to expect (and can hope that we can bring forth change for what we don’t like).
I don’t see that helping. We have the playerbase we have. The Internet is populated by these people now. This isn’t 2005 anymore.
We have a way to isolate yourself in a smaller social circle, it’s called a Community. Although I do think they could be larger, 1,000 is too few (especially when alts count towards the total).
The systems could be made less toxic through rewarding good behaviour and punishing bad behaviour but they don’t seem capable of even try this.
Or by reducing the friction in certain areas of the game. M+ seems designed to be toxic (which is why you can’t randomly queue for it).
The realm was that system originally. 3000-7000 per faction per server. They even considered 500, but this was thankfully shot down.
It was never a technology limitation. People just think it is, and so did the new developers for a while there.
I’m not saying everyone will enjoy this or that we should forcibly split everyone apart. That ship sailed long ago. But I think it sounds like a fun experiment. Reconnecting community and world in that way.
you can gift wrap a piece of poop and it’s still a piece of poop
yeah talents, crafted gear are nice but there’s still no content besides m+ and raids.
I’m confused as to what kind of content you’re talking about. The game has always revolved around PvP, m+, raids, alt leveling, gold making and collecting stuff.
If you don’t like doing any of those, then why even play WoW?