World of Warcraft: Dragon Desperation

[Rean]

Also, women with beards.

Tolkien has a lot to answer for.

 

[Keshik]

Is usual fare so far, finished Isle of Dorn for the most part. The side quests have been nice - the jewel crafter lady getting the predictable Twilight Zone ending and the dying Earthen suffering dementia/alzheimers were memorable. First three Delves were ok. The Follower dungeons seem better than before, it's not atrociously slow as I found it when I first did a couple back in DF.

 

[Reever]

The narrative is making Magni out to be some deadbeat father who "failed" Moira and Dagran. Huh? It was Moira who chose to say "screw you dad!" and have a baby with an evil demon worshipper who then got killed and left Moira a widow and Dagran without a father. It was Moira who decided to continue living with the evil demon worshipping dwarves rather than come home to the safety of her people. But Magni is getting blamed for the foolishness of his daughter, and she's thrusting the responsibility of her actions on him? What a joke.

The whole writing around Moira is retarded.
Magni gives his speech about how he finally feels absolved of his responsibility to Azeroth after returning back to his normal form and Moira does what she always does and makes it about herself. I get that this is also part of Magni's character but it's so on the nose and embarrassing that it almost feels like they're making Moira unlikable on purpose even though I'm sure that's not their intention.

 

[Late Bloomer]

3400 reply forum post. Quite entertaining. The amount of girl power in this expansion is more than I have witnessed in any game. This thread will be 404'd soon I am thinking.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/new-xpack-all-female-leads/1926290

 

[Dr1f7]

i've seen some pretty crazy posts last a long time on the wow forums funny enough, it's not like reddit where a thread like that would immediately get you ip-banned and reported to obama

i think they don't really moderate their forums. they probably pay some guy 100 rupees a week to clean up the most egregious things. honestly i'm surprised that they even still have a forum

 

[Thalstarion]

Moira just fits the trend of the game refusing to hold women accountable for anything. That's been a problem long before DEI/ESG and can be attributed in large part to the writers being disgusting simps.

Much like how Jaina and Vereesa never answered for the Purge of Dalaran and Sylvanas was turned into the 'real victim all along actually' at the least possible second, Moira isn't held responsible for any of the shady stuff that she did.

I'm glad to see it being called out, especially on the official forum. There's similar threads over on the European side of the fence as well.

It's a shame because the zone design and music is great, even some of the plot beats are good. Then it's inevitably ruined by another generic 'strong woman' character or worse yet a they/them abomination. There's a quest after the main campaign is concluded involving Lillian and a Nerubian of all things that goes by they/them pronouns. In what is meant to be a tragic moment - the Nerubian in question being corrupted - Lillian yells 'THEY ARE NOT THEMSELVES' which made me burst out laughing, at least.

It's just awkward and immersion breaking. I noticed that Faerin's dead friend is always referred to as 'they' rather than being outlined as explicitly male or female. Which is weird. Especially when she suddenly wants to find a different missing friend later on, who turns out to be a slain blacksmith who is directly referred to as a guy all along.

 

[Reever]

All I'm waiting for is for Alleria to show up more in my campaign in order to do more strong independent woman crap so she can screw up some more. People are talking about anduin not doing anything (which is correct, sat least at the point where I'm at) but Alleria is straight up sabotaging at this point.

 

[Elttharion]

At this point I am just happy I quit this game before Blizz went full retard

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Just as I finished the last sidequest in The Ringing Deeps, I hit level 80. I hope I'm going to get something from questing besides just gold and rep.

The only standout sidequests in The Ringing Deeps were #1 the one where you worked with the Mistweaver Pandaren to track the fog beasts and the reveal of flying around the corner and finding the hidden alcove of gigantic fog beasts. #2 Magni's mace Fearbreaker (which predictably he gave to Moria...). and I guess #3 the group of Earthen who agreed to die striking a fighting pose was neat.

I am enjoying the dragonriding races. It's more visually stunning when you have cave walls all around you and a ceiling above you, rather than in Dragonflight where you only have land below you and nothing else to the left/right/above you. Just wish that the game could facilitate racing against other players.

Music: I'm really liking this Jake Lefkowitz guy. He did many of the tracks that I liked from Shadowlands and Dragonflight too. Need to check out what else besides WoW he has done.

@15:03




Part of the problem with WoW's music post WoD is that it changes too often, so you don't get to listen to the whole thing and become absorbed in it. The zones are subdivided into many small areas and the music changes whenever you cross one of these small area borders, and the nature of the gameplay (particularly once you finish the story) is that you are on your mount travelling across the continent across all of these different little area borders to reach these daily world quests spread out across the world. Or even while doing questing, you cross all of these borders to get to the next quest, which stops the current track before it has even started getting to the good part and begins playing a new track, which is then abrupbtly cut off before it reaches the good part, and so on. FF14 and GW2 don't have this problem as they just have a track that plays for the whole big zone and isn't constantly being cut off as you travel around in it.

As nice as the outdoor environments are to look at, it is a shame how neglected the interior houses are. Almost every Earthen building interior is the exact same layout, and you enter a lot of them.

I am overall fine with the Deathbringer hero talent tree (-10% damage taken is also nice), though it is a little finnicky to use. Basically, you get an ability to plant a DoT/bomb on an enemy (45 second cooldown). After a few seconds (or when the enemy reaches <30% HP and there are no other enemies around), the DoT/bomb will explode. This will then turn your Obliterate ability into two charges of a double scythe attack called Exterminate, which looks neat. Nowhere near as spectacular as Reaper's attacks in FF14, but still neat.

The finnickyness is:

• #1 Exterminate is not represented on your hotbar (you would think that the Obliterate icon would flip over into Exterminate and show the 2 charges), but is instead represented by two buffs up on the top right of your screen.
• #2 when you press Obliterate (with your two charges of Exterminate ready), the double scythe attack Exterminate will only activate if the Obliterate did not kill your enemy. So you can be running around with 2 charges of Exterminate ready and pressing Obliterate, but Exterminate may or may not go off.
• #3, if you apply the bomb to a mob but the mob dies immediately afterward (as in less than a second), then the bomb won't go off and you won't be able to use Exterminate.

Another odd thing about Deathbringer is that when you use Exterminate, the double scythes are actually staff weapons (Frostscythe of Lord Ahune) that your class cannot wield, and there are no polearm versions. Also interestingly, the visual size of the scythes scales to your target, so if you use Exterminate on a small enemy (as in smaller than you) than the scythes will be tiny, but if you use it on a big boss than they will be quite large and you can see them despite all of the other players and their effects.



Hallowfall

Gorgeous zone, good color palette with the azure blues and greens and bright golds and brownish reds.

The story catches your attention right away with you and Anduin immediately meeting Faerin and then fighting back an invasion.

Faerin has a nice voice, is very pleasant to listen to. Total mismatch with her character design. Should have looked like a cute girl. She is thus far the only expansion character I kinda like, besides maybe Baelgrim (rip).

This is the most engaging zone storyline thus far, with only a couple of parts making me facepalm. Anduin, we are at the bottom of this void cave. Our very souls are being erroded by void magic! We need to get up and out of this cave! Why are you slow walking and pouting for the Nth time about when you were mindcontrolled by the Jailer and shanked someone who survived? Why are you and Faerin stopping to have a discussion about hope and light and darkness? WE ARE TURNING INTO TENTACLE MONSTERS! I wish I could have slung these dumbasses over my should and hoofed it out of there.

I feel these paladin people should be tilting their head at Anduin being escorted by a zombie panda who is dressed in skull armor, rides a skeleton dragon, and performs necromancy to raise corpses as minions.

Mereldar has nice music, looks good, and is very pleasant, and has a gorgeous backdrop. Should have been the capital city for the expansion. At least it has profession trainers. I just did a sidequest writing a letter of recommendation to the trading post NPCs to come set up shop down here, but I don't think there is a bank or an AH down here. If it did I would set my hearthstone here.

This book stand wheel inside the Mereldar Church is neat.

Once again, a lot of the sidequests that feel like they're part of the main story, such as the Faerin and Anduin quest. Sometimes it's difficult to tell whether or not a sidequest is just throwaway filler or something you really should be doing.

I should have done all of the Hallowfall sidequests once the party reached Mereldar. A little after that, the plot becomes urgent and seamlessly goes down to Azj-Kahet and it doesn't make sense to stop and turn around and finish up stuff in Hallowfall, which canonically takes place earlier in the story.

Anduin, if you really want to help these people, you could do a lot more than continuing to pretend that you are a lone grunt adventurer doing tasks for other people, trying to bail out the ocean with a bucket. You are a king. Grab a radio or a mage and call up Stormwind and bring in the armies and airships. If the Horde and Alliance were able to get their airships down into Deepholm then they can just as easily get down here.



Azj-Kahet

Hold up. Blizzard confiscates my MoP remix tinker gems so I can't use Heroic Leap as a Death Knight anymore, but Anduin gets to leap as a paladin? What?

I like this warm glowing plant that is used as a substitute for a burning campfire.

Orweyna (the dancing troll lady) is insufferable. The girlboss I thought Faerin was going to be.

 

[Just Locus]

Maybe I have abnormal self-control or something but I never particularly understand why so many find quitting WoW to be this difficult task, I don't see anything gripping besides the really enjoyable leveling experience. I guess it only magnified when TBC added daily quests and the difficulty was made easier...

 

[Late Bloomer]

Maybe I have abnormal self-control or something but I never particularly understand why so many find quitting WoW to be this difficult task, I don't see anything gripping besides the really enjoyable leveling experience. I guess it only magnified when TBC added daily quests and the difficulty was made easier...

1. The friends I played and still play with. We play other games together, but a couple of them still enjoy the various forms of WoW, and I enjoy playing with them.
2. The gameplay. WoW has tight, responsive controls, is fun to play and always has a few (or more) classes that have an enjoyable playstyle.
3. My characters. I have some characters from 2004/5. I like spending time playing them. I recreate them in other games, but on occasion, I like to play the game they were made in. This mindset applies to EQ & EQ2 as well.

 

[Sweeper]

Maybe I have abnormal self-control or something but I never particularly understand why so many find quitting WoW to be this difficult task, I don't see anything gripping besides the really enjoyable leveling experience. I guess it only magnified when TBC added daily quests and the difficulty was made easier...

Sunk cost fallacy.

 

[Thalstarion]

I quit successfully for years. Most of my friends did too. Some of us moved over to other MMO's. TESO sates my desire to be able to play around with and build houses for my characters but it's painfully dull when it comes to the combat. FFXIV drew me in by promising to be a love letter to the Ivalice games and the Final Fantasy franchise as a whole.

It collapsed on a level far beyond anything WoW did to drive me away. Seriously, it's almost impressive. I was stalked for years over saying I didn't like a specific character in FFXIV. The community is unhinged. Also posted a lot on the official forum there, met some good people through it who have all since quit due to how spectacularly the game blew up its own story and world.

So, yeah, I went back to WoW to get my MMO fix. The market isn't exactly swimming in options right now and though I'm cautiously optimistic about Ashes of Creation and Pantheon, they're not due to launch anytime soon.

 

[Late Bloomer]

I was stalked for years over saying I didn't like a specific character in FFXIV.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I was stalked for years over saying I didn't like a specific character in FFXIV.

Hydaelyn/Venat fanatics. FF14 starts with Hydaelyn being the good goddess (also sometimes called "the Will of the Star") and you're her Chosen One (she also chooses a couple other heroes), and she is the mission control directing your actions in the fight against the evil rebel being satan stand-in, Zodiark. Then come the Shadowbringers expansion and completely upends the narrative, revealing that Hydaelyn is a fraud. She's not the goddess at all (actually there is no actual god in the FF14 setting). She's just some wizard named Venat who was controlling a puppet made out of a lot of magic, and was stringing our characters along the entire time. ShB reveals that Zodiark saved the world and was the most popular and was the actual Will of the Star (not only figuratively in that he had majority vote of the population, but also in that he became the literal embodiment of the laws of physics of the planet), only for Hydaelyn an unpopular rebel with only 12 backers comes along to beat him up and literally breaks the world. In the beginning, there was no war or strife or death. Everyone lived forever, was beautiful, could wield powerful magicks, held authority over creatures, etc. But when Hydaelyn sundered the world, everyone then grew old and decayed and died, and there was now war between people, and animals devouring people, etc. She caused the Fall of Man. The Endwalker expansion is further incriminating because we find out that she is responsible for the very apocalypse that required Zodiark's creation in the first place. She knew it was going to happen but made zero attempt to stop it. The FF14 game tries to present her as the hero, but it is impossible to reconcile that with the actual content of the game. Unfortunately the FF14 fanbase for whatever reason has a lot of people who just take what the cutscenes and the happy/menacing music says at face value (Hydaelyn is good and you should feel happy for her, Zodiark is evil and you should hate him) rather than stopping to think about what just actually happened (Hydaelyn is an usurper who caused all of the suffering in the game, Zodiark was doing the best he could to make as many people happy as possible before he got ganked). And some of these people are very, very fanatical.

 

[Thalstarion]

Yeah, it's usually either Venat/Hydaelyn or any of the Scions. A 'fun' experiment would be to search any FFXIV character's name on Twitter and it won't take long before you find all sorts of weird art or obsessive players building their entire identify around even the most obscure characters.

It's really strange. WoW has Goldshire, sure, but Goldshire usually stays in Goldshire. Plus you can openly bash pretty much any character in WoW and not face the same level of extreme scrutiny and venom. There's still some crazies to be sure, just not anywhere near as many in FFXIV.

 

[J1M]

I did not consent to a thread title change.

Our tradition is new expansion = new thread. Not the very very clever thread title's fault that nobody cared enough to make a new one this time.

 

[mediocrepoet]

I did not consent to a thread title change.

Our tradition is new expansion = new thread. Not the very very clever thread title's fault that nobody cared enough to make a new one this time.

The funny thing to me is that WoW's zombified corpse has become such a wet fart of a game that I haven't really even registered that they've made any expacks since Shadowlands.

My interest in the game had been waning over the years, but I kept coming back to at least check out new expansions though for less time each time. Shadowlands took my remaining interest and nostalgia for the game and staked it through the heart. It's sort of like what Disney's been doing with Star Wars. Just rape a thing until all the fans give up in disgust.

Was there actually anything of interest in the Dragon thing or this new one? What's the point of this War Within or whatever anyway?

Are they still doing the Old God of the year expansion thing where they keep uncovering another eldritch/cosmic horror that is totally the most craziest world shattering threat evar! That shit just wore me out and is why I think they really need to finally kill this game and try to launch something else. Or find a way to re-ground it into Azeroth politics and battles and inter-faction conflicts, not let's be frenz and find a reason to fight together albeit temporarily... yet again.

 

[Caim]

I'll just watch the lore video after the final patch and be updated that way, no game time needed.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Was there actually anything of interest in the Dragon thing

It's fundamentally a retail expansion which means it's fun to play for a month and tour through the content, and then once you've seen everything you unsub because otherwise you just speedrun the same current raid/half dozen dungeons/same instanced 10 vs 10 RBGs over and over again until you get bored.

For Dragonflight, I liked the solo adventure puzzle gameplay in the Zskera Vault and the Niffen Seeking. The capital city looked really nice, being a central tower with good sight lines and lush colorful vegetation and waterfalls around it. Some of the boss fights were fun. I liked the Ice Spider that you fought while ascending a spiral staircase and she tries to yank you off of the staircase with webs, the Zskarn fight in Abberus where you have the traps going off that have to be disarmed or avoided, Echo of Neltharion where he is raising earth walls trying to separate the raid and knocking people back, and the Tindral fight where you mount up to chase him. The dragonriding races were fun. Some of the music was good.

Are they still doing the Old God of the year expansion thing where they keep uncovering another eldritch/cosmic horror that is totally the most craziest world shattering threat evar!

Yup

 

[Reever]

Was there actually anything of interest in the Dragon thing or this new one? What's the point of this War Within or whatever anyway?

For dragonflight no. In fact, probably one of the most boring expansions in terms of storytelling. No stakes whatsoever until the last patch and that's only if you're a treehugger.
For the war within I didn't find it that bad until now. Some of the writing is very predictable but at least there's some semblance of a story moving forward and character progression. And yes, it's once again centered around Eldritch stuff since I think at this point it's the last thing warcraft has to a villain.

 

[Dr1f7]

of the modern wow xpacs:

shadowlands>=legion>bfa>>>>>>>cata>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>mop>>>>>>>dragonslop

haven't played war within no time (busy getting laid) but it looks like it's somewhere between cata and mop. maybe worse than mop but that would be pretty bad

not surprising that the art direction took a nosedive after the tit-milk drinking scandal happened just after shadowlands release that caused them to fire all of the people responsible for cool design between legion and shadowlands and replaced them with dei hires and consulting firms (EHRRMM yeah that whole expansion theme is spiders? spiders are problematic ehhhrmmm how about making them crabs)
it's funny that people thought Cuckold Chris "i'm sorry" Metzen was going to fix course
it's sad because they had nice long stretch of good xpacs then that happens
oh well

 

[Reever]

shadowlands>=legion>bfa>>>>>>>cata>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>mop>>>>>>>dragonslop

 

[Dr1f7]

shadowlands>=legion>bfa>>>>>>>cata>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>mop>>>>>>>dragonslop

well one day you'll realize that the entire shadowlands backlash was a dei psy-op takeover and you fell for it
shadowlands:

dragonflight:

 

[Axel_am]

My main issue is that by adding so much new shit like races and whatnot the game is starting to look more and more streamlined. When WoW was just starting it had to compete with Lineage, Guild Wars and other stuff like that no matter how you slice it had some Asian appeal to them. There was a stark contrast between those games and the fantasy art style and direction of WoW. Even when compared to Everquest and the other MMO's WoW was able to retain a strong sense of identity simply by its visual style.

Right now I don't see any of that. When I look at it it just look like a grindy MMO game. With all the flashy spells and sparkly mounts that I can see in any other MMO. Mediocrepoet hit it out of the park when he called the game a wet fart.

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