WoW: 9th expansion; Dragonflight

[GotNoRice]

How are you all liking Dragonflight expansion so far?

Dragonflight has a lot of pros and cons. Shadowlands felt very similar to BFA overall, not a ton of changes. In contrast, they changed a LOT of stuff in Dragonflight.

The Good:
New talent system. It's more complicated and has a lot in common with the classic talent system, but I like how it allows for more customization. You still have sites that recommend cookie-cutter builds and it seems like the majority of people just go with one of those cookie-cutter builds, so things have not changed in that respect. But, for those who have a deep understanding of how their class & spec works, you can create a spec that is very synergistic with your actual play-style. A talent/ability is only as good as you are able to make use of it. A "bad" talent that you make excellent use of can be better than a "good" talent that you almost never use, so creating a spec that you can make great use of feels very rewarding. There is now a lot more freedom to do exactly that.

Lots of unnecessary restrictions removed. As a Resto Druid, I now have access to abilities that formerly required me to shift into moonkin form or sacrifice healing talents in order to use. Things like instant-cast Starsurge, being able to cast Starfire, having access to Nature's Vigil without compromising healing talents, etc. It's great for people like me who remain in a healing spec even while questing, etc. Although it does slightly raise the expectation of healers contributing more DPS in dungeons which I'm not too thrilled about.

World Quests. They put some good effort into making fun world quests, and they give better gear than they did in previous expansions. For people who mainly quest rather than raid or do mythic 5-man dungeons, things have never been better. Even for people who do raid, etc, it makes the quests seem less trivial.

Mythic+ dungeon rotation. Each Mythic+ season, there are a mix of current Dragonflight dungeons as well as dungeons from older expansions. Like right now, you have Halls of Valor and Court of Stars from Legion, as well as Shadowmoon Burial Grounds and Temple of the Jade Serpent as part of the current rotation. I think it's fun to revisit these older dungeons on a competitive level as opposed to a trivial level (timewalking) and it helps keep things fresh not doing the same 5-man dungeons for the entire expansion.

Tier sets. They brought back tier sets and made it clear that it will continue to be a part of the expansion going forward. There are multiple levels of tier sets, some which can be acquired from doing world content.

The Bad:
Difficulty of most content has increased, dramatically in some cases. Raids are much more difficult to clear especially if you are in a casual guild made up of members who don't end up over-gearing the content via gear acquired via other means. So, if you have a raid group full of people who are all ilvl 395-405+ via gear from Mythic+, etc, then clearing Normal raid is easy. But if you have a group of people who are getting their gear from the raid itself as well as world quests, etc, it can be painfully difficult. Mythic+ gets painfully difficult very quickly as you move to higher keys. Learning mechanics is important and has always been a part of the game, but there has always been some wiggle-room for a certain amount of failure. In Dragonflight there is simply too much content where you have to do everything absolutely perfectly or you die instantly. There are times when you are trying to juggle 4+ different mechanics at the same time and if you fail at any of them, even once, then you wipe. Even good players still make mistakes from time to time, and that's always been part of the game. As long as you aren't making tons of mistakes, you should be able to recover. But now things like a high-level Mythic+ key are so stressful I feel like I need to take a break from the game afterward each time just to relax.

Mythic+ Timers. Expanding on the above, most of the timers for Mythic+ are way too short. This forces groups to over-pull trash, never allow the healer to drink for mana, never allow people to eat a food buff, etc. It's all just GO GO GO GO. It's like Blizzard is so focused on pushing the E-Sports angle that they are willing to sacrifice any ability to actually enjoy the content along the way unless you only play the game at very low difficulty levels that reward irrelevant gear. God forbid that you ask the group to take a short break to use the bathroom, or to answer the door when someone knocks, or want to refill your drink, or because your baby started crying, etc. None of those things are compatible with the game anymore if you play Mythic+.

Dragonriding. This is their attempt to revamp how flying works in WoW. It has it's pros and cons, but far more cons IMO. With the old flying system you just pointed yourself in a certain direction and could basically AFK as you flew there. Maybe some people found that too simple, but I never had a problem with that. The new system requires constant effort on your part just to keep yourself in the air. You have a limited amount of "Vigor" which gets used in order to keep yourself in the air. It's very convoluted and non-intuitive. You regain vigor by remaining on the ground or flying downward at a steep angle. There are a lot of weird quirks with the way this works. You gain vigor much faster flying downward than you do by simply being on the ground. You don't gain any vigor by simply gliding downward unless it's at a steep angle, even if your wings aren't flapping. It would make much more sense if you simply regained vigor any time your dragon wasn't forced to flap it's wings, but that's not how it works. Some things can be very cringe-worthy. You can easily use all of your vigor by simply trying to fly to the top of a tall tower. There is also no way to simply hover. This makes it very painful when you are trying to locate a world boss, etc, which are often located in caves or other hard to spot locations. You have to try to fly in circles while trying to search the map below you and it's just stupid. About the ONLY good thing is that after you've learned how to game the system in it's required non-intuitive way, you can fly faster than traditional flying. It's also rather insulting as a Druid, where I have had the ability to transform into a bird ever since Burning Crusade (the first expansion) yet I guess my character forgot how to do that, and I have to ride this dumb dragon instead? If my dragon can fly, then why can't I fly in bird form? And also, blizzard is still selling flying mounts that you can't actually use for flying anymore since they are tied to the older style of flying. It's just a mess with two different kinds of flying, and seemingly arbitrary restrictions on where you can use each type of flying.

Professions. They made professions WAY more complicated in Dragonflight. It's no longer something you can just do on the side, you really have to dedicate yourself to the profession in order to max it out. Many recipes are gated behind vendors that require extremely high renown levels in order to purchase, etc. You have to use these weird talent-trees that are way over-complicated, with no way to change your profession "talents" if you decide to go in a different direction. There are multiple quality tiers now, so for every enchant, gem, etc, there is a bronze, silver, and gold version with different amount of stats. I don't know of a single person who likes the new system other than maybe gold sellers.

In-game money/gold. They removed all the easy ways of making money, such as the mission table, while also making everything more expensive. The increased expense is partly a result of the increased complexity of professions as less people are selling consumables, etc. I can't remember the last time (pre-dragonflight) where I had people asking to borrow money to buy potions or repair, but it happens all the time now. The cynic inside me can't ignore the potential connection to them selling tokens for gold. In BFA and Shadowlands many people were making so much gold in-game that they were basically playing the game for free by buying tokens with gold and using the tokens for their subscriptions. Now almost no-one is doing that, and people are instead buying tokens with real money just to buy potions, etc.


So, overall, I'm disappointed at how chaotic and non-intuitive some things are as well as the increased difficulty, but I'm still having fun with my guild and as long as that continues, I will keep playing. Then again, I'm more dedicated to the game than most people are. We'll see how it goes. There is a threshold... I've hit it before. Like when your raid-leader cancels raid that night for whatever reason and you realize that you are actually happy/relieved instead of disappointed. When I get to that point, I usually take a break from the game. I have not got to that point since Mid-Legion, but I'm closer now than I have been any time in the last ~5 years. I hope that Blizzard listens to feedback and fixes some of the things that they have taken in the wrong direction. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

 

[Zorachus]

Great post

GotNoRice​

 

[Zorachus]

I would say M+ dungeon keys getting more difficult is an issue.

Doing M0's is easy
M5's a bit harder
M10's get pretty difficult
Anything above an M+ 10 in my opinion starts to get seriously hard and crosses the line of fun to stressful and aggravating.

People that say and do M+ 15's are weirdos LOL. those are not easy runs.

 

[Westwood]

If I get a 10 in, that's unreal. I'm doing 2s and 3s right now. I'm fine with staying there.

Healing anything above 5 and I'm like,

 

[Zorachus]

If I get a 10 in, that's unreal. I'm doing 2s and 3s right now. I'm fine with staying there.

Healing anything above 5 and I'm like,

View attachment 544376

Agreed, I like to stay in keys under 10.

Heck we ran a +7 last week, The Nokhud Offensive, and kept wiping on this mob mini boss they would one shot each of us every time. Res and go again, one shotted each of us again. This happened 3 times in a row and we disbanded the key.

That's not my idea of fun. And I still don't understand exactly what was happening and how to have stopped it?

 

[WarriorX]

Agreed, I like to stay in keys under 10.

Heck we ran a +7 last week, The Nokhud Offensive, and kept wiping on this mob mini boss they would one shot each of us every time. Res and go again, one shotted each of us again. This happened 3 times in a row and we disbanded the key.

That's not my idea of fun. And I still don't understand exactly what was happening and how to have stopped it?

Was probably the explosives affix. During a fight, orbs will spawn with a timer, if the timer pops off it does like 40% damage to the group. To prevent, just tag them with any damage, they have 1 hp or LoS.

 

[GotNoRice]

Heck we ran a +7 last week, The Nokhud Offensive, and kept wiping on this mob mini boss they would one shot each of us every time. Res and go again, one shotted each of us again. This happened 3 times in a row and we disbanded the key.

Yeah that dungeon sucks with explosives. It's a very annoying affix. Everyone assumes that everyone else is going to get the explosive orbs. Many have taken to assuming that it's simply the healer's job, but as a healer I don't have my UI optimized for targeting specific mobs like that. Years ago I simply made a macro that was basically "/target explosive" so I could use that to moonfire each orb but then Blizzard thought it was a great idea to introduce an artificial limitation that prevents them from being targeted via macro. So that means I either have to tab target until I target an explosive or play a "Where's Waldo"-style mini-game hunting for the orbs and clicking on them so I can moonfire them. Of course they have a super tiny hitbox so if the explosive orbs are behind anything, they are super difficult to target. And trying to do that while I really need to be focusing on healing is very aggravating. The more hectic the dungeon gets, the more likely everyone will be to ignore the orbs. And of course, people don't understand that the more mobs you aggro, the more chances that orbs will spawn - so when people try to pull tons of trash and 6+ explosive orbs spawn at the same time, it usually ends bad.

And another common theme in many dungeons are mobs having abilities that will one-shot someone unless they are interrupted. But especially while in a pug, you can't count on people to interrupt every time. So you end up getting one-shot by a mob that someone else was too lazy to interrupt, creating a situation where it's really not obvious what went wrong or what you need to do to fix the problem. I would help interrupt but as a druid healer I don't have easy access to a true interrupt and things like Typhoon don't always work; not to mention that as a healer I don't spend much time monitoring what spells mobs are casting.

The extra difficulty really creates a lot of toxicity in the game as everyone plays the blame game when things go wrong. But it can be rewarding sometimes. I managed to get 4 +16 dungeons done last week so that it would give me two 415 options in my vault. One of those was a Shadowmoon Burial Grounds. The last boss has a mechanic where there are a number of spaced-out skeletons walking across the boss room, covering it in purple. You have to focus and kill a single skeleton before the purple covers the entire room, which creates a path through the purple. Touching the purple, even for a instant, puts a DoT on you that is nearly unhealable. One of our DPS players died so we didn't have enough damage to get a skeleton down in-time and got overwhelmed by the purple, but I was able to frantically heal everyone just enough to keep them alive inside the purple just long enough for the boss to die right before we did, and we got a 2-chest on that 16 key.

But my favorite activity in game is still raiding. I mainly do mythic+ in order to get gear for raids. I'm in a pretty casual guild. We just got our first Raz kill on Normal tonight. It was a tough battle but we got him down with less than half of the raid still alive

 

[Zorachus]

Kind of off topic, but the games multiple currencies and how to obtain them, and do stuff like the new crafting is really confusing to noobs I've spoken too in DF. I know a few brand new players to WoW with this expansion, and they have zero clue about most of these currencies and what's needed to be done to get them etc...

The game itself does almost nothing to explain how or what to do, and if your not in a Guild or have RL WoW friends, it's pretty insane to figure it all out yourself alone.

Even myself one thing I've not liked the past few expansions, was first the borrowed systems crap like Essences, and Azerite and Renown and Anima, etc...Glad that's gone. But also the games multiple currencies each expansion, and the convoluted way to acquire them, and then how and where to spend them.

I personally don't think it's hard or anything, but I do agree for new players it can be pretty confusing and not so simple to figure out on your own.

A new Guild member that just started playing WoW in DF, said he has no clue about the Storm's Fury Event, he's like ok, I need to go to some time changing NPC and flip the time, then go do some world quest type stuff, and kill some boss, that drops these new token currency things that can only be spent at one NPC, but that NPC needs 2 different types of currency to be abler to buy the stuff, so you then need to do other activies to get that currency too, and then you are able to buy stuff, but you need a lot of that other currency first. Guy was like, uh ok...

 

[Westwood]

Yep. I've got a whooooole bag of currencies and not the slightest idea what to do with them. I'm working on reknown right now on my priest. I started the campaign on my hunter, but I don't think I finished it. So now I'm redoing it on my priest. I solo as Disc which is an absolute blast to play, but a total pain in uncoordinated groups.

I may do a druid next. there's a lot of running around and getting a flash heal or heal off can be a chore. Being able to heal and run is awesome. But, I hate elves and don't care for Worgen. So I'll have to unlock the fatties.

 

[Talon Blackrazor]

What’s the current status of Azeroth? Is is still stuck in 2009 Cataclysm with the hole in Westfall or did they rework it again?

 

[Westwood]

I'm almost never in Azeroth. Just to get to Stormwind/Org if I need to. That's it.

 

[Zorachus]

What’s the current status of Azeroth? Is is still stuck in 2009 Cataclysm with the hole in Westfall or did they rework it again?

Good question, but I really don't know, never go to the old world, except Org / SW.

 

[Zorachus]

Good comment from a forum member on MMOChamp;

The game really has not done a good job at explaining some of the activities. Even as an relatively experienced player I didn't really know about some events and how they worked until I read about them.

I generally have an issue with games where things are left vague sometimes it works, but I don't think it works here.

Although there are exceptions, if I need to read sources that exist outside of a game to understand how something works I consider that less than good.

 

[Zorachus]

I've ran dozens of pug dungeon runs, and why is everybody so quiet in those? I'll always type hello to start, I rarely got a reply.

And then I'll type a message or something about the next boss or stuff like that. And still maybe one person might reply. Typically no one replies the entire dungeon run.

What's up with that? Comes off very rude and cold as if I'm not even playing with real people but bots.

I'm in a great guild but they're more of a Raiding guild. They do M+ dungeon runs but it's infrequent and not always at the same time when I'm on so I have to resort to PUG's. And it's kind of a turn off. It's not even fun. Feels more like a chore.

 

[Westwood]

eh, I usually don't talk either. I'm still learning the dungeons and I'll let others know.

Heyas. Second time here. Still learning the ways.
No prob. Its easy. I'll pull smaller.

So far its been great. I'll get a quick reminder of a boss mechanic or something. been very supportive.

 

[GotNoRice]

I've ran dozens of pug dungeon runs, and why is everybody so quiet in those? I'll always type hello to start, I rarely got a reply.

And then I'll type a message or something about the next boss or stuff like that. And still maybe one person might reply. Typically no one replies the entire dungeon run.

What's up with that? Comes off very rude and cold as if I'm not even playing with real people but bots.

Eh, depends. They might just be busy with their game and not really looking at the text. There are a lot of players from places like Brazil that don't always speak great English. There is also a big thing going on right now where they just shut down World of Warcraft in China, so there is a flood of Chinese players making characters on American and/or Oceanic servers now (which share the same dungeon finder pool). Or maybe they are on Discord with their other friends in the dungeon.

 

[Zorachus]

I think would be an interesting experiment if Blizz tried a no gear drops in Raids and Dungeons.

And there'd be a whole other way of gearing up.

Then the question would be, to people like to actually run Mythic difficulty Raids just for the complexity of it, and challenge? Or do they tough it out and hate it, but only do it for the gear?

Because who cares if you i420 geared? Just wait till the next patch when i420 will drop everywhere.

Is it the e-penis thing, for bragging rights to be highest geared? Who cares.

Also I laugh at people who get butthurt if you could gear up to i400+ just with World Quests LOL. Like why care how others got geared up? It should only matter what you want and do in the game, not what others do and get.

Unfortunately WoW has always been elitist attitude for a lot of players, and has become World-of-carrot-on-a-stick-Craft. Always need the new shiny piece of upgrades.

Is a MMORPG supposed to be about your gear? Thought it was about the journey not the destination. The story. The friendships. Exploring the open world's. Not just about being addicted to some meaningless number on your sword in a video game.

 

[GotNoRice]

I think would be an interesting experiment if Blizz tried a no gear drops in Raids and Dungeons.

And there'd be a whole other way of gearing up.

Then the question would be, to people like to actually run Mythic difficulty Raids just for the complexity of it, and challenge? Or do they tough it out and hate it, but only do it for the gear?

Because who cares if you i420 geared? Just wait till the next patch when i420 will drop everywhere.

Is it the e-penis thing, for bragging rights to be highest geared? Who cares.

Also I laugh at people who get butthurt if you could gear up to i400+ just with World Quests LOL. Like why care how others got geared up? It should only matter what you want and do in the game, not what others do and get.

Unfortunately WoW has always been elitist attitude for a lot of players, and has become World-of-carrot-on-a-stick-Craft. Always need the new shiny piece of upgrades.

Is a MMORPG supposed to be about your gear? Thought it was about the journey not the destination. The story. The friendships. Exploring the open world's. Not just about being addicted to some meaningless number on your sword in a video game.

Well that's a pretty complex question and I think the answer is going to vary a lot from person to person. But you hit a lot of good points, and the elitism is the reason why I stopped raiding with mythic raid guilds a long time ago. It's not fun to be in a guild where everyone expects everyone to be perfect and you get bitched out if you make a mistake, etc. I think that gear and content goes together, not just as for carrot-on-a-stick reasons, but also because it helps ensure a sense of progression even if you only do one type of content. Being stuck on a certain boss sucks but at least people are getting better gear each week from the earlier bosses and making things easier. I actually raid with two raid groups each week on the same character, and so I'm not even eligible for loot from the 2nd raid, but I do it just because it's fun. Ultimately it's the community aspect that drives this game. I like to get better gear, not to brag, but because I want to be able to perform my role as best as I can and do my part to help my raid teams progress forward.

What’s the current status of Azeroth? Is is still stuck in 2009 Cataclysm with the hole in Westfall or did they rework it again?

Yeah, much of the old world is still stuck in it's post-cataclysm state, which is a bit of a pet-peeve of mine. Many of the original nostalgic areas from Vanilla were destroyed and never "repaired", which just doesn't make sense IMO, especially given the amount of time that has passed since then. I personally think it's time to move away from the concept of every expansion being almost completely limited to some new zone. There are just so many areas in WoW from all of the expansions over the years that are mostly abandoned, forever remaining static in their previous state. I think that it's time to start incorporating more of the legacy zones. They have done that a bit with how they are re-using older instances in the Mythic+ rotation but I think that these old zones should have new quests, etc also. It's "World of Warcraft" but for the most part each expansion is really just "The new zone of Warcraft".