World of Warcraft: Dragon Desperation

[Prince(ss)]

Oh I see that Anduin got turned into a generic triple-A protagonist.

 

[Cheesedragon117]

The art-style of the cinematic just looks weird to me. It's like it's halfway in the actual Warcraft art-style and halfway hyper-realistic Hollywood movie adaptation.

 

[J1M]

The only thing that confused me was Thrall wearing alliance boots and them not bothering to model the sword in 3D for the big reveal shot at the end.

 

[J1M]

I also think they are giving Anduin the Medan treatment inadvertently. He's speed running his way through the classes.

Priest -> Death knight (dominated) -> Warrior (magic free) -> Paladin? (story arc)

Wouldn't be surprised if they write a novel about his 4 years away where he essentially learns the skills of a rogue or hunter.

 

[Frayman]

The cinematic trailer was so goddamn lame. Just two dudes talking in a desert for five minutes

 

[Late Bloomer]

Asked AI if WoW was up

It is unclear whether World of Warcraft (WoW) is up or down. According to sources, WoW has been in maintenance mode for a long time, and there is no in-game moderation. LFG is plagued with boost adds, and reports only work to mass report someone. Class tunning is nonexistent, and content is mediocre and scarce at best. On a weekly basis, WoW servers (both retail and Classic) go down for a short maintenance period around 9am CT. These weekly resets occur on Tuesdays in North America and on Wednesdays in Europe, and usually take significantly less time than that. WowUp is an essential program for WoW players that helps them find new addons and manage or update existing addons from an easy-to-use, intuitive interface.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Patch 10.2 released, bringing with it the Emerald Dream zone.

Right now you can only do half of the new questline, which is about an hour. It wasn't engaging like the Zaralek questline, where on week one you were adventuring with Wrathion and Sabellian and Ebonhorn and finding recordings by Neltharion and bumping into Sarkareth and ended with Ebonhorn being stabbed and the Fyrakk cinematic. Here you just kill some random proto-drake and you go "okay what's next?" and then there is no next quest to take. Oh. I guess Matt Mercer is voicing a villain now. That's new.

You don't get crests from doing Dreamsurges in the Dragon Isles anymore, so now the only relevant content is the new Emerald Dream zone. It would be nice if you could get crests from doing any Dragonflight content.

Farming the seed events and doing Superbloom is really good if you're a skinner. There are a LOT of bears, stags, lizards, and faerie dragons right on top of the seeds and on the superbloom route. You pretty much get to loot almost every mob twice.

For the dewdrops I would like to be able to turn them in batches of 25s, 50s, and 100s. Having to click 100 times to fill up a seed is tedious when I should have more than enough dewdrops in my inventory to completely fill up the bar in one go.

The superbloom event is a little better than prior events, in that there is some periods of less intensity and you're not constantly fighting all the time, but since you need 8,000 points you're still pressured to be constantly trying to fill up that bar. The devs need to borrow from GW2's meta event chain design where you have like 30 seconds where there is nothing that can be progressed in between phases, giving you a moment to eat your toast or sip your water.

The server hopping strategy from GW2 still works. What you want to do for Superbloom is to open group finder and join a raid for it. Complete the event for it. Loot the last boss. Then, immediately leave group and you will phase back to your server, which will probably have not killed the last boss yet, so you can tag and loot twice.

With the new dragonriding talents, you can now regen vigor while flying low to the ground AND get vigor regen from going fast. When combined you can now just spam Surge Forward uphill as long as you are close to the ground.

My mount randomly turns invisible for some reason.

 

[lvl 2 Blue Slime]

WoW has to be the most exhausted setting in fiction. How many "undiscovered" places in Azeroth are there gonna be? They literally had you exploring another planet in TBC but no one knew Pandaria or Dragon Isles existed?

Haven't even gone to either moon yet.

They probably will. Elune as a raid boss.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Aesthetically the zone is a little forgettable. It is yet another verdant magical forest zone, in a game that is already heavily oversaturated with them. Teldrassil, Ashenvale, Moonglade, Hyjal, Shadowmoon Valley, the Dreamgrove, Val'Sharah, Ardenweald, Zereth Mortis, etc, and those zones were more unique than the relatively bland Amirdrassil. They had more colors than just green, some of them had magical VFX on the water and rivers, etc. I felt that Amirdrassil especially felt like a copy-paste of Hyjal, Val'Sharah, and even WoD Shadowmoon Valley along the river. There are some things I like about Amirdrassil visually, such as the green sparkles or floating trees, or being able to see a starry sky during day time, but the zone still overall feels very samey as prior zones, too generic.

(EDIT: I just noticed that the Emerald Dream does actually have waterfall sparkles like in Ardenweald. Maybe it's the overpowering green filter that made it hard to notice them).

The one saving grace of the zone is that at least it isn't opressive. It looks and sounds pleasant enough which is imperative for an endgame grind zone you are supposed to toil in for dozens to hundreds of hours on end, which was a failing of Tanaan Jungle/Broken Shore/Argus/Nazjatar/The Maw.

The second issue is that there is zero difficulty. On Timeless Isle, you could die just pulling too many normal mobs. And then if you went up the ramp, there would be elites who would kill you if you weren't in a party. And the rare were effectively bosses who would kill many. Cinderfall and Huolon wiped many raids, even late into the patch. But here, even on launch day there is zero danger whatsoever. You can wander around anywhere, pull every mob in sight, and meh you won't die. There is no feeling of accomplishment killing a rare either.\

The third issue is how tedious the Dream Warden rep grind is. You are constantly flying around right clicking seeds, and getting 20-40 rep per minute. You need 2,500 rep to advance one renown level and you need to reach renown level 20 to get all of the rewards. The one time sidequests only give you about 5 renown levels worth of rep so that's about that is at least 20 hours of nonstop seed planting to reach renown level 20. Awful. You also run out of seeds pretty quickly so you need to do the Superbloom event to get more seeds, which takes 20 minutes and is tedious, so you're looking at maybe 25 hours of grinding for this one rep. Not even the Shaohao rep was this awful.

The questing content is meh. It lacks the mystery and wonder of prior elf forest zone quests like Teldrassil or Hyjal. Even Ardenweald had interesting stuff with the reincarnation cycle of the pods/eggs, and meeting spirits like Huln Highmountain or that alien stag who died fighting to save his world from old gods or the Legion (I forgot).

Another thing too is that Amirdrassil's story sounds repetitive. It is yet another night elf druid zone that is being corrupted by evil invaders and you have to go into underground burrows and wake up the druids from their slumber and you meet the wild gods and etc. Been there, done that.

A couple of the musical tracks are neat, but that's it. Otherwise a lot of it is forgettable.

 

[Keshik]

The new zone's dragon riding races are a fun challenge, at least that's something

 

[J1M]

The new zone's dragon riding races are a fun challenge, at least that's something

Talent trees and dragon riding. Only two features of the expansion.

 

[Kem0sabe]

The new expansion zones, from the trailer, look like shit. This entire Saga thing feels like a series of low budget expansions being sold for full price. Lots of low effort art, no new classes, no new features beyond rebranding of previous expansions side content.

Blizzard really is hitting the bottom.

 

[Myobi]

Couldn't even bring myself to throw money at the last expansion, shadowlands felt super fucking boring, this one also looks pretty meh... and got a feeling that FF14 won't be much different, mofos really want me to stop playing MMOs completely.

 

[J1M]

The new expansion zones, from the trailer, look like shit. This entire Saga thing feels like a series of low budget expansions being sold for full price. Lots of low effort art, no new classes, no new features beyond rebranding of previous expansions side content.

Blizzard really is hitting the bottom.

Art isn't gameplay. One of the big problems WoW has had in recent years was limiting how much content could be added by how much custom art can be made.

They basically chose to make all of the profession buildings in WoD in a bespoke way with new art instead of making a raid tier. When most players will only see two buildings. And that art has no gameplay value. And they could have made a raid with existing art asset and spell effects.

I would much rather see reused trees and hue shifted terrain textures than a bunch of resources wasted.

Also, you have it backwards. Previous expansion patch content is testing ground for next expansion features. I agree a lack of discussion around other specs to fill the support role is lame and they must have had a subscription bump from releasing the rest of the evoker class in a patch because it seems obvious they will do that again.

Finally, delves are the most significant gameplay change since Legion. Not clear why you are dismissive of that.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Well I finally got around to doing the level cap Blue Dragonflight questline. It was neat but overhyped.

The voice acting was overall above average for WoW. Senegos and Azuregos were the standouts in particular. Tyrigosa, Zeros, and the Crystalsong Forest lady were also good.

The fun was frontloaded, with you helping Senegos roll the ball around sucking up the insects, and then inspecting the gravemarkers, and then getting to revisit Pandaria. The second half of the questline kinda drags.

It was disappointing that none of the NPCs in Dawn's Blossom reacted to me. I am the Legend of Pandaria. I did quests for these people, saved them from the Sha, the Zandalari, the Mogu (and my own Warchief). I have since gone on to become an even more renowned hero. But instead no one reacts to my presence. It's also unfortunate that Azuregos didn't recgonize me from when I did his Azshara questline way back in Cata.

Riding Tyrigosa was saddening. I wish that my Drake mount was big enough to convincingly carry a big Tauren like she did, and as threatening too.

Looks like the writers have abandoned trying to ship Kalecgos and Jaina together and are now shipping Kalecgos and Tyrigosa together.

The Zeros part was funny, but it makes no sense why a DRAGON would worry about being indebted to a small time Goblin loanshark. He could transform and intimidate the goons. He could use his blue magic to earn money. He could just fly or teleport away and never have to worry. Etc. If this quest had come out 10 years ago it might have been a funny joke, but now we're so oversaturated with passive wimp characters (especially in Dragonflight) that it just feels stupid.

The mages at Theramore was nonsense. Theramore was nuked 11 years ago in lore. If there were survivors who were going to avenge it, they would've done it by now. There were two wars in which they could have enlisted or gotten Alliance backing to reverse engineer the mana bomb. Jaina even controlled Dalaran for a few years, they certainly would have gotten aid from her. Also, too much whining this expansion. "We can't just kill the Drakonoid rebels/Sundered Flame/Infinite Dragonflight/Primalists/Druids of the Flame/Theramore survivors/etc! We have to talk to them about their pain!"

There was a missed opportunity to explore pre-WotA Malygos. In Dragonflight we got to see a sane, respectable Neltharion in stark contrast to his portrayl in Cataclysm, but here we are still only hearing about how kind and lighthearted Malygos was before the WotA, not actually seeing him like that.

Would've been nice so that during the part where you revisit Coldarra, the dozens of hostile Blue Dragons were phased out. They would've all been killed 13 years ago in WotLK.

They basically chose to make all of the profession buildings in WoD in a bespoke way with new art instead of making a raid tier. When most players will only see two buildings. And that art has no gameplay value.

I would much rather see reused trees and hue shifted terrain textures than a bunch of resources wasted.

The Horde and Alliance garrison buildings were reused as default Horde/Alliance buildings in later expansions instead of the old Vanilla models.

 

[Dr1f7]

The new expansion zones, from the trailer, look like shit. This entire Saga thing feels like a series of low budget expansions being sold for full price. Lots of low effort art, no new classes, no new features beyond rebranding of previous expansions side content.

Blizzard really is hitting the bottom.

you don't think an entire underground nerubian city zone is cool?
or the elden ring rip off zone?

what style of zone would look good to you?
also if every xpac = 8 or 9 more dungeons then the faster they release them the better as far as i'm concerned

 

[Dr1f7]

The new zone's dragon riding races are a fun challenge, at least that's something

Talent trees and dragon riding. Only two features of the expansion.

still convinced that DF is a filler xpac that mainly serves as a testing ground for fixing old broken systems and course correcting the game

 

[J1M]

The new zone's dragon riding races are a fun challenge, at least that's something

Talent trees and dragon riding. Only two features of the expansion.

still convinced that DF is a filler xpac that mainly serves as a testing ground for fixing old broken systems and course correcting the game

Hard disagree. The internal narrative that media shills helped sell was that Alex Afrasabi was the root of all problems with the franchise and their mishandling of Shadowlands was not their fault because he had tainted it by making some early decisions, like burning the tree.

Dragonflight was the outcome of second generation staff being fully in control. They spitefully cut a raid tier and a lot of coherence from Shadowlands for their pet project. If it was a tight budget project, they would have cut things like new autism faces for centaur, deviant art playable dragons, a DPS spec that fills a new role, dragon riding, introducing new characters that require multiple unique character models, convoluted token systems for pity gear, etc.

The day they had to eat crow and decided not to announce expansion sales numbers was the day execs started looking for an adult to fix the embarrassment of Classic being more played than Retail. Metzen was the answer and you can be sure that some of the staff is butthurt about how effective he was last week.

 

[Keshik]

The new zone's dragon riding races are a fun challenge, at least that's something

Talent trees and dragon riding. Only two features of the expansion.

still convinced that DF is a filler xpac that mainly serves as a testing ground for fixing old broken systems and course correcting the game

Well, correct about it being an attempt to course correct the game. Shame they couldn't have just skipped Shadowlands, let Tyrande stomp Sylvanas and chuck her in a jail or something at the end of BFA and just go to Dragonflight.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Is there a Coles notes summary somewhere of what's going on with nuBlizz and WoW lately?

Saga trilogy expansion what? Metzen? ???

Like wtf. I'm curious enough to read a summary, but don't care enough to do any significant research.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Is there a Coles notes summary somewhere of what's going on with nuBlizz and WoW lately?

Saga trilogy expansion what? Metzen? ???

Like wtf. I'm curious enough to read a summary, but don't care enough to do any significant research.

Metzen left in 2016. The story was then helmed by Afrasabi and Danuser, and people generally did not like the story under their watch. In Legion there was the demonization of the Light. In BFA the Horde wipes out Teldrassil unprovoked. Some Horde players did not like their faction being demonized. Alliance players dissatisfied because they never really got a catharsis. Sylvanas gets scapegoated while the rest of the Horde gets off the hook. And then Shadowlands ruins the afterlife and religions of the setting, and was about brand new factions that the writers failed to get the audience to care about. It also retconned everything bad that ever happened into being the master plan of the Jailer, a new villain in Shadowlands, and people didn't like that. Also, players didn't get to kill Sylvanas. She's the final boss fight of the second Shadowlands raid, but at 50% HP a cutscene plays where she wins, so you don't get the catharsis of beating her, and then in the following patch the story bent over backwards to say that "actually her soul was split in half and we've only known her evil half! You can't judge her!". The current expansion, Dragonflight, is meh for a lot of people. The main questline is really boring and it introduces a lot of plotholes. Another grievance people have is that Blizzard keeps throwing away plotlines that had been anticipated for decades and were expansion material on mere patches, like the Emerald Dream, Azshara, N'zoth, Argus, etc. So a lot of people are very frustrated with the story.

There were also a few gameplay frustrations people had, such as alt unfriendliness in a game where you're incentivized to play multiple characters, grinds, environments that were unenjoyable to navigate that just made you want to bypass them by flying over them but Blizzard kept restricting flying, borrowed power, etc.

This Blizzcon, Metzen announced the next three expansions (I think the Worldsoul Saga was in the works before Metzen came back and that's what enticed him to come back, to nail the execution). The main selling point is that it's going to be a story spanning a trilogy, and that there is a definite beginning, middle, and end. They're selling the promise that the story will be better. I think part of the reason why they're playing up the story so much is because 1. the story is main selling point of WoW's current competitor, FFXIV, and 2. they're trying to deflect away from how little new types of content of interest there is compared to garrisons/class orderhalls/island expeditions/warfronts/torghast/covenants. Delves* seem to be 5 man scenarios which isn't that novel anymore. On a lesser note, they're also advertising that they are finally removing player frustrations such as alt unfriendliness. They're also saying that they want to push out expansions faster, but they don't want them to be shorter expansions and players to be getting less bang for their buck, but that they want them to be full expansions.

TL;DR

Expansion #1: The War Within

• 3 out of the 4 zones are underground
• New race is Earthen (dwarf reskin)
• New content type is Delves*, which are scenarios that scale from 1 to 5 players
• You can get great vault (raid/mythic+ dungeon) loot from doing delves
• Quality of life features like sharing reputations across all your characters

Expansion #2: Midnight

• Is about the Void invading Quel'thelas
• They have said that there's going to be new content and features but we don't know what they are yet

Expansion #3: The Last Titan

• We return to Ulduar and call the Titans back
• They have said that there's going to be new content and features but we don't know what they are yet

*EDIT: I just remembered that the Zskera Vaults existed and I had fun the first two times I explored it. I wonder if Delves are less scenarios, and more Zskera Vaults. If that's true and there are 12 delves and each on has multiple different variations, then that could actually be really fun.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Val the Moofia Boss thanks man.

I sort of wondered if they had announced a trilogy of expansions to basically try and re-attract a playerbase while they start to figure out wtf to do, such as by trying to set up WoW2 or whatever.

Maybe Microsoft will dump all the dangerhairs. A man can dream.

 

[Elttharion]

Funny how Blizzard is still saying they want to push expansions faster. They have been saying something like this since TBCs last patch, when we were waiting for Wotlk.

 

[Caim]

Funny how Blizzard is still saying they want to push expansions faster. They have been saying something like this since TBCs last patch, when we were waiting for Wotlk.

They're called battle passes.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I've managed to get up to Fyrakk on normal PUGs. Will get him tomorrow.

I was surprised by the penultimate boss fight. I knew about the dragonflying segment (which was neat), but I was surprised that the boss seemlessly flew to another platform, and it didn't seem like the devs pulled the usual trick of phasing different copies of the NPC. They must've really upgraded their tech.