WoW: 9th expansion; Dragonflight

Well at least it looks like they have some better ideas for this expansion. I am not getting excited though yet, although the profession revamp has got me interested as I am a huge profession goblin. Plus it looks like another thing to do to have fun as opposed to professions being dead for many years. The new talent trees look better too, as that system has also been untouched for multiple expansions . I hope they do better, but it is blizzard after all....
 
Well at least it looks like they have some better ideas for this expansion. I am not getting excited though yet, although the profession revamp has got me interested as I am a huge profession goblin. Plus it looks like another thing to do to have fun as opposed to professions being dead for many years. The new talent trees look better too, as that system has also been untouched for multiple expansions . I hope they do better, but it is blizzard after all....
Small indie company should be able to pull it off. I am hopeful. Even SL was fun though. I am looking forward to the talent changes a lot. I hope there is enough play in it that same classes/specs can still differ from eachother a bit.

Yea profs are a bit in a bad spot right now. like i chose alchemy just to get a longer flask duration and thats about it. enchanting to get more out of my gear that i dont use instead of vendoring.
 
Well at least it looks like they have some better ideas for this expansion. I am not getting excited though yet, although the profession revamp has got me interested as I am a huge profession goblin. Plus it looks like another thing to do to have fun as opposed to professions being dead for many years. The new talent trees look better too, as that system has also been untouched for multiple expansions . I hope they do better, but it is blizzard after all....
Exactly what I was thinking. Sounds good on paper, but Blizzard always manages to fuck it up.
 
I restarted about a month ago. What recently killed the game for me now, is I need a smartphone and hand over my phone number to properly post LFG. Welp, I don't have a smartphone and I refuse to hand over my number. And as someone that really cannot commit to a guild with scheduled raids, I'm pooched.
 
Left after Legion. Will have to see how it goes between now and release but I'm interested so far. First thought on the talent tree was we have come full circle and are going back to classic. Not the same of course but close enough.
 
Underwhelming cinematic. I like they’re going back to the old talent system. New race and class seem odd. Everything else was just…okay. I get a sense that the WoW team doesn’t know the direction they want to go anymore.
 
Maybe I've missed it since I'm busy at work, but where are all the details on the new expansion?

Like the main city? Revive classes or updates? Where this new island is located and the zones?
 
This sounds fun;

  • Talents have been revamped as well, with a return to a tree system, featuring one tree for class talents and another for specialization talents. The new talent trees allow for a deeper customization and combinations not previously available, and loadouts can be saved and swapped for any occasion.

  • Professions have seen big updates as well, with the addition of the crafting orders system, which allows players to have specific items crafted for them despite not being the right profession or level to do it themselves. Crafting orders can be filled by other players in the same realm or guild, or by an NPC. This allows for players to get their hands on Soulbound items from a different profession they may not specialize in.
 
Has there been any rumor of a possible release date?

Not that I know of, but it won't be soon. Dragonflight isn't even in Alpha yet. We aren't very far into Shadowlands Season 3, and we already know that there is also going to be a Season 4 before Dragonflight. We're probably a year off at this point. Maybe they will try to rush it for the holiday season but I doubt it, and kind of hope they don't.
 
Underwhelming cinematic. I like they’re going back to the old talent system. New race and class seem odd. Everything else was just…okay. I get a sense that the WoW team doesn’t know the direction they want to go anymore.
We have this metric on our yearly assessments called "Leading Change". It means you should change things throughout the organization to make things more productive, essentially.

Problem is, we get a new boss every 2 years, like clockwork. So a new boss will come on and make a stupid change and then 2 years later his replacement will revert it. Both effectively leading change that didn't need to be made.

Seems like that some times with Blizzard.
 
This sounds fun;

  • Talents have been revamped as well, with a return to a tree system, featuring one tree for class talents and another for specialization talents. The new talent trees allow for a deeper customization and combinations not previously available, and loadouts can be saved and swapped for any occasion.

  • Professions have seen big updates as well, with the addition of the crafting orders system, which allows players to have specific items crafted for them despite not being the right profession or level to do it themselves. Crafting orders can be filled by other players in the same realm or guild, or by an NPC. This allows for players to get their hands on Soulbound items from a different profession they may not specialize in.

Work orders at least are a good idea as my main has been a blacksmith since vanilla and has pretty much all the BS recipies. So at least I can actually sell some of these finally, I also wonder if you can use this to give them to alts for transmog.
 
[*]Talents have been revamped as well, with a return to a tree system, featuring one tree for class talents and another for specialization talents. The new talent trees allow for a deeper customization and combinations not previously available, and loadouts can be saved and swapped for any occasion.

I'm kind of nervous about this TBH. I am an "old school" healer who prefers to focus exclusively on healing. There is already an increasing amount of pressure for healers to do as much DPS as possible for content such as Mythic+, etc. With the ability to create an actual Healer/DPS hybrid spec, I could see this as being the new expected norm for a lot of content. That leaves me to wonder, will there still be room for "pure" healers?
 
One thing I don't see much discussion about so far is the technical side of things. WoW is pretty terrible when it comes to multi-core CPU utilization. For a very long time WoW was almost entirely single-threaded. Then the first round of improvements made it so that it could use ~1.5 cores. More recently, around the time they introduced DirectX 12 support, they increased that so the game can sometimes use up to 3 cores or so, but there is still a LOT that is done in that first thread. For WoW, currently, there is almost no benefit to using anything more than a Quad-core CPU, unless you run a lot of stuff in the background while you play. Since they are putting a lot of emphasis on improving things such as the UI, I wonder if they will modernize the game in other areas as well. With that said, I hope that they don't get rid of DirectX 11 support. My backup computer with 3x GTX680 is dependent on DX11 for SLI to work, and my laptop with a Quadro K4000M (similar to a Geforce 680M or 770M) can't do DX12 either, but runs the game fine with DX11.
 
I'm kind of nervous about this TBH. I am an "old school" healer who prefers to focus exclusively on healing. There is already an increasing amount of pressure for healers to do as much DPS as possible for content such as Mythic+, etc. With the ability to create an actual Healer/DPS hybrid spec, I could see this as being the new expected norm for a lot of content. That leaves me to wonder, will there still be room for "pure" healers?
With hybrids it would be a shift but not total. Like maybe you have 2 pure healers and 2 hybrids in the raid but for super intense raid damage maybe 3-1. For keys depends on your group, if you pug everything expect a random hodge-podge of expectations, but if you find a solid group to run with it will just work better with everyone playing what they are comfortable with.

edit: With scaling boss health it might come in to play a bit depending how much HP the boss is worth for hybrid or pure healer.
 
Ungeek Interview
https://www.ungeek.ph/2022/04/inter...racthyr-and-dragonriding-in-wow-dragonflight/

  • The Dragon Isles are large and so Dragon Riding was added to allow a unique and easier way to navigate this world designed for dragons.
  • Flying hasn't changed much in 17 years, and Dragon Riding was added to provide a modern take on it that involves physics and momentum and is available early into the expansion that grows over time.

Gamespot Interview
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/w...lent-trees-and-a-whole-lot-more/1100-6502576/
  • Flying in the Dragon Isles will not require a Pathfinder achievement.
  • The Dragon Isles was chosen for this expansion because it was one of the few remaining known places on Azeroth yet to be explored.
  • The Evoker class came about as the team realized that the Dracthyr race was too unique to be accessed by the current classes.
  • A Threads of Fate leveling system for alts will be utilized in Dragonflight and Blizzard is looking into making more systems account-wide.
  • Blizzard also plans to provide a more in-depth open world experience going forward.
  • There are no borrowed power systems in Dragonflight, but instead a revamp of systems that players are familiar with.
  • The team saw with the release of WoW Classic that much of the strengths of the old talent system still worked today and tried to find a way to incorporate that into the modern game.
  • The team is taking a "when it's ready approach" to release and so there is no release date yet.

Gamerbraves Interview
https://www.gamerbraves.com/world-o...es-qa-with-patrick-dawson-and-laura-sardinha/
  • You will get a new talent point for every level from 60-70 with the new talent system.
  • The Dragon Isles will let players explore familiar themes while feeling fresh. We will see centaurs, primordial trolls, and Tuskarr in a land that hasn't been visited in 10,000 years.
  • The Dracthyr Evoker may interact slightly differently with the Dragon Riding feature, but they will be able to utilize it as well.
  • The Dracthyr Evoker might feel limiting because of the single race and only two specs, but the customization and unique spell casting makes it seem extremely unique and engaging.
  • The starting zone for the Dracthyr will tell the story of why they are waking up now and their place in the story.
  • The UI for customizing your dragon mount is based on the barber shop revamp from Shadowlands, so it will feel very familiar.
  • The new UI will be customizable based on your spec, and will change accordingly whenever you switch your role.
 
I restarted about a month ago. What recently killed the game for me now, is I need a smartphone and hand over my phone number to properly post LFG. Welp, I don't have a smartphone and I refuse to hand over my number. And as someone that really cannot commit to a guild with scheduled raids, I'm pooched.
There are guilds around that do not require you to adhere to a raid schedule or raid at all that still do all content where you can join in when convenient for you. with all the new tools you can even make communities over different servers and do content together.
 
Ah, new expansion. Time for people to dump more money into this shambling corpse lol. Anyways the new race looks like someone's Tumblr-tier fursona project. Good work Blizz!
 
Only other MMO coming that could be a WoW competitor ( not killer ) is Ashes of Creation. Or whatever MMO game that newer company of Blizzard employees created, Riot Games. Both games with rough release dates of late 2023 or 2024.

Those 2 games are probably the big MMO future titles to look out for.
 
Only other MMO coming that could be a WoW competitor ( not killer ) is Ashes of Creation. Or whatever MMO game that newer company of Blizzard employees created, Riot Games. Both games with rough release dates of late 2023 or 2024.

Those 2 games are probably the big MMO future titles to look out for.
Although we don’t have numbers to compare, FFXIV is most likely beating ‘Retail’ WoW in both number of players and content quality by a decent margin.

‘Retail’ WoW has been in a continuing decline since BFA released in 2018. Legion was the last good expansion and before that expansion it wasn’t doing hot either.

If you’ve played Shadowlands you can see the WoW team essentially gave up less than halfway through that expansion and this new expansion so far shows they’re lost on where to go.
 
I've been saying but WoW, probably won't return to its glory if ever until Microsoft officially owns Blizzard and injects some of their employees into leadership at Blizzard to redo WoW, and let Ion retire.
 
I've been saying but WoW, probably won't return to its glory if ever until Microsoft officially owns Blizzard and injects some of their employees into leadership at Blizzard to redo WoW, and let Ion retire.
That’s my hope as well. I’d actually prefer if they just completely reboot the game and didn’t move forward with another expansion. The game needs a complete rework from the ground up with some tasteful, meaningful modernizations.

I equate present day Retail WoW to what was once a beautiful Ferrari that now has layers of cheap paint jobs and modifications to the point you cannot recognize what it originally was.
 
‘Retail’ WoW has been in a continuing decline since BFA released in 2018.

Do you have anything whatsoever to substantiate this other than your personal opinion? You yourself admitted that you don't have any actual numbers, so maybe you can tell us how you are forming your conclusions?

Legion was the last good expansion and before that expansion it wasn’t doing hot either.

I'm guessing that's around when you stopped playing and have reverted to the predictable tired old rhetoric of "It sucks compared to when I used to play it".

If you’ve played Shadowlands you can see the WoW team essentially gave up less than halfway through that expansion and this new expansion so far shows they’re lost on where to go.

I'm playing Shadowlands right now and i'm seeing more enthusiasm in-game than I have seen in a while. They certainly did not "Give up halfway through the expansion" :rolleyes:. The new tier sets are a huge hit and the new raid is fun and has fights that they clearly put quite a bit of thought into.

Nothing wrong with having a personal opinion, but it really seems like most of the people in this thread bagging on WoW do not currently play it, and in some cases have not played it in 10+ years.
 
good chance ill come back to try it. i was expecting alot less honestly.
 
Do you have anything whatsoever to substantiate this other than your personal opinion?
The fact that Blizzard decided to stop telling their own numbers says a lot. When they were doing good they had zero issues bragging about player counts, so what changed? FFXIV has been eating WoW's lunch for a little while now by basically just being a more fun game to play with a much larger variety of ways to kill time, which in the end is what a MMO is. A time killer.
 
Do you have anything whatsoever to substantiate this other than your personal opinion? You yourself admitted that you don't have any actual numbers, so maybe you can tell us how you are forming your conclusions?



I'm guessing that's around when you stopped playing and have reverted to the predictable tired old rhetoric of "It sucks compared to when I used to play it".



I'm playing Shadowlands right now and i'm seeing more enthusiasm in-game than I have seen in a while. They certainly did not "Give up halfway through the expansion" :rolleyes:. The new tier sets are a huge hit and the new raid is fun and has fights that they clearly put quite a bit of thought into.

Nothing wrong with having a personal opinion, but it really seems like most of the people in this thread bagging on WoW do not currently play it, and in some cases have not played it in 10+ years.
I literally have a couple hundred of hours in Shadowlands across 4 characters. Keystone master both season 1 and season 2. I quit at the end of 9.1.5 since 9.2 was another half assed patch and enough is enough. I went through 9.2 PTR and it was nothing new, raid was mediocre at best. Season 4 they’re rehashing old content again because they’re at a creative dead end.

I’ve played every expansion EXCEPT for Legion ironically since life didn’t allow me to do so during that period. Of course everything is anecdotal, I said we don’t have numbers to go off of. But the insider who leaked all of Blizzcon a few years ago said that subscription numbers dropped below 1 million for the first time right before WoW Classic dropped in 2019. Keep in mind WoW peaked at over 13 million subscribers back in WotLK.

Everyone who I’ve played with has quit. Guilds are falling apart left and right from ‘wiping’ to roster boss.
 
Not remotely interested, Im interested in WOTLK again and will keep my sub for that, and that alone.

Im done chasing retail and hoping it will bring back what I get from classic.
 
The fact that Blizzard decided to stop telling their own numbers says a lot.

They stopped publishing the numbers like 10 years ago or more. There have been a handful of expansions since then and one just announced yesterday. I would contend that a 17+ year old game that is still making new expansions also "says a lot". There would be no point in devoting resources to a game if it was dead. I would not be surprised at all if WoW is still trucking along long after FFXIV is put out to pasture. It certainly wouldn't be the first new MMO that WoW has outlasted. But regardless, there are almost 8 billion people on earth, there is room for more than one MMO.

Everyone who I’ve played with has quit. Guilds are falling apart left and right from ‘wiping’ to roster boss.

Few games have been around as long as WoW has. People who started playing in their teens or early 20's are now in their mid 30's or above and have families and more important jobs now, etc. That's life. I thought the 9.2 raids were a bit over-tuned at first but as more of my guild has got their tier-set pieces it's become apparent that the boost from the 2-piece and 4-piece set bonus is quite substantial and that the raid was clearly designed with that power-boost in mind. Our guild attendance is higher than it's been in a while and enthusiasm is very high also.
 
They stopped publishing the numbers like 10 years ago or more. There have been a handful of expansions since then and one just announced yesterday. I would contend that a 17+ year old game that is still making new expansions also "says a lot". There would be no point in devoting resources to a game if it was dead. I would not be surprised at all if WoW is still trucking along long after FFXIV is put out to pasture. It certainly wouldn't be the first new MMO that WoW has outlasted. But regardless, there are almost 8 billion people on earth, there is room for more than one MMO.



Few games have been around as long as WoW has. People who started playing in their teens or early 20's are now in their mid 30's or above and have families and more important jobs now, etc. That's life. I thought the 9.2 raids were a bit over-tuned at first but as more of my guild has got their tier-set pieces it's become apparent that the boost from the 2-piece and 4-piece set bonus is quite substantial and that the raid was clearly designed with that power-boost in mind. Our guild attendance is higher than it's been in a while and enthusiasm is very high also.
I was referring to the people I started playing Shadowlands with. I was actually the GM for my guild. It was fine at the beginning but then 9.1 and 9.1.5 were so long that my raiding roster constantly had turnover. The server discord basically was full of guilds trying to merge with other guilds because they also had significant attendance attrition from the content drought.

I have a couple of former guildies that came back for 9.2 with another guild and already quit after a few weeks. They said it’s some more content, but nothing interesting enough to keep them coming back.
 
There would be no point in devoting resources to a game if it was dead.
Lol of course there is. They can still get those short term revenue bursts from people saying "Oh maybe it'll be good this time" and then stop playing again after a couple months.
 
I literally have a couple hundred of hours in Shadowlands across 4 characters. Keystone master both season 1 and season 2. I quit at the end of 9.1.5 since 9.2 was another half assed patch and enough is enough. I went through 9.2 PTR and it was nothing new, raid was mediocre at best. Season 4 they’re rehashing old content again because they’re at a creative dead end.

I’ve played every expansion EXCEPT for Legion ironically since life didn’t allow me to do so during that period. Of course everything is anecdotal, I said we don’t have numbers to go off of. But the insider who leaked all of Blizzcon a few years ago said that subscription numbers dropped below 1 million for the first time right before WoW Classic dropped in 2019. Keep in mind WoW peaked at over 13 million subscribers back in WotLK.

Everyone who I’ve played with has quit. Guilds are falling apart left and right from ‘wiping’ to roster boss.
hmm, this says otherwise
"Data from Blizzard’s Q2 earnings call reveals that the current amount of WoW monthly active users (MAU) sits at around 26 million players. While that may sound like a lot at first glance, this means that the game has almost halved in popularity over the last four years."

https://sosordinateurs.com/gaming/how-many-active-wow-players-are-there/
 
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