Hi, it’s me, someone who has played this game since Vanilla’s beta, when the level cap was still down at 50 and Sunken Temple and BRD were the endgame. Today, I have feedback on the open world experience.
You know, I was impressed with Dragonflight’s launch. The zones were massive and had so much to do. A huge amount of quests, with an even huger amount of extra dialogue and hidden lore text. Thematic, fun, unique world events tied to each faction. Tons treasures both unique and repeatable, as well as rare mobs with a wide variety of spawn conditions and cadence (Some are timed, some tied to events, some summoned with items, some appear after grinding specific mobs). Forbidden Reach even continued most of these trends, I was satisfied with it as a “half patch” zone.
But then we got Zaralek Caverns.
The zone looks great. The concept is amazing. The tunnel transition tech is really cool. But once you’re there? It just doesn’t feel as polished as the rest of the Dragon Isles in terms of gameplay. It’s not satisfying or rewarding, and people are already abandoning the zone. Here’s why.
a) The events suck.
I’m afraid the idea to make a “smaller repeatable world quest” with these Niffen events really hasn’t worked out. They’re fun once, and then they’re a slog. They take too long. They’re unrewarding. Even the “pity currency” acquisition rate is far too slow. I’m willing to bet these have an abysmal participation rate in the playerbase. I will never farm these for coins for mounts; I’ll just do the weekly research event and eventually get it that way.
b) The rares suck.
The change to the rares lockout/reset was a horrible idea, foot traffic in the zone evaporated after the change was made. For true endgame players, nothing of value dropped from these rares anyways - why did we need to restrict how much they could be farmed? In spite of people complaining about “rare circles”, when you actually look at player participation, this activity is quite popular. So I just don’t understand why Blizzard decided to kill the activity in Zaralek. The rares themselves I think are pretty cool in terms of combat activity, they do a lot more than rares usually do. It’s a shame nobody cares about them now. The zone spawn rotation is also dumb, Give us conditional spawns we can control and earn, not ones we have to arbitrarily wait days for.
c) Not enough actual quest content.
Now I know a lot of players are basically just raid loggers and don’t care about quests, and will actively avoid them because they hate reading. Unfortunately, some people choose to be lazy and dumb even though they’re capable of more, we can’t do anything about that except shame them. Know that they are not the majority - they’re just the loudest, as the stupid and lazy often are. That should not be misinterpreted as a reason to cut back on quest content. Let me just say that I enjoyed both the Black and Blue campaigns, The Black was pretty good, and the Blue maybe one of the best quest series ever written for WoW.
However the rest of the Zaralek side quests, with the Niffen I really didn’t enjoy. They were too short, too bland, too light on lore. EG: What is a Kithmane? Why do they keep referring to it? It seems to be some sort of religious figure but you forgot to write any lore about it. And that’s just one example. Here’s another - We are told the Slitherdrakes came from an experiment in Aberrus. But the actual raid zone Aberrus contains literally 0 Slitherdrakes, no evidence of these experiments or explanation as to why they were created. It feels like your different design teams needed to communicate better.
d) Sniffen Seeking is a bit of a dud
While not technically related to the OPEN world, I have to say, Sniffen Seeking is just so weird. It’s pretty fun and has novelty, but you can blast through your 3 weekly runs in 3 minutes and then the feature is entirely forgotten for the remaining 6 days, 23 hours and 57 minutes of the week. But if more maps were available from TREASURES AND RARES, we might see more participation in the rest of the zone, and the activity would be more relevant. We’d have a proper game loop.
e) The elite areas suck.
This somewhat ties into the rares and quests discussion - but the Elite areas are ghost towns. Blizzard did not successfully recreate the experience that things like Obsidian Sanctum and Cobalt Assembly were able to provide. The mobs are too hard and drop nothing of value. The elite world quests are tough to complete at low 400s gear scores, which is what you’d have as an open world player. To me this is the biggest miss - why wasn’t there another Obsidian Sanctum-like grind in the Zaqali area?
f) Lack of “double dip” rewards leads to lack of motivation
This one’s a bit harder to explain, but one of the best things in an MMORPG is when things align and you can get 2-3x objectives completed all in the same place. For example, Needing to do world quests/gain rep for Aiding the Accord, Needing to progress Sabellian Rep, Wanting to farm elemental invasion drops, and wanting your profession knowledge drops off a certain creature type. … Guess what? You could do all 4 of those at the same time in Obsidian Sanctum. Not only that but you made a reasonable amount of raw gold as well as items which can be sold on the AH that were in demand (Sarga tokens STILL sell fast). It all felt extremely rewarding. Sadly, Zaralek Caverns has absolutely nothing that feels this way. Everything in ZC feels like it’s been designed to take longer, and give less rewards - which in turn kills player motivation to collect and complete, and leads to the community telling each other “Ah the zone is worthless, do XYZ to complete the weekly rep quest and then never go back”.
All in all, Zaralek feels like a massive missed opportunity. A lot of work went into the design, main campaign, and special zone tech and that all worked out well. But the side questing, rare hunting, and treasure gathering were all really weak. Unfortunately, that stuff is what keeps players coming back for more - and that’s why they’re not coming back for more Zaralek.
I hope this feedback reaches someone who finds it useful. Thanks for reading.
. I’m shocked. Shocked I say.