I really don’t mind that exploration is an active part of the gameplay now. Having to pay attention to travel made about 40% of the game interesting again.
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Yeah I think a big marketing point of the expansion was the way dragonriding made you interact with the game and the environment of the dragon isles. It’s pretty intentional. I also hate when I can’t get somewhere because I messed up or pressed the wrong button. It happens rarely now that I’m all skilled up with it but before I would literally just log out instead of waiting 15 minutes to climb a mountain or run on the ground
Really, this was a marketing point? I didn’t actually ever see any of the marketing.
“New flight system! You’ve had flight for almost two decades: now have more of that, except it’s hard and doesn’t work half the time!” Like that?
I’m at a point where I mostly just use my ground mount unless I physically have to fly because while it takes longer and requires more effort, the alternative is to take longer, require more effort, be frustrating and sometimes I don’t even get where I was trying to go.
I like dragonriding to the point that I have logged in specifically do to dragonriding and nothing else when having a really bad mental health day, so that drives me to come be contrary.
I don’t mean to be contrary to the idea of implementing regular flight on the Dragon Isles, specifically. I think it should have been implemented a lot sooner, especially given that there are people who, like Norman brought up, have disabilities that make dragonriding impossible or very unpleasant. I also suspect that there are people who can do dragonriding but don’t like it who would have ended up disliking it a lot less if they hadn’t been essentially forced to use it for a year*. But that dragonriding isn’t for everyone does not mean dragonriding itself is objectively bad.
*Flight paths exist, and I think people should use them more, but the Dragon Isles weren’t designed to make flight paths sufficient (in my opinion) so that’s not really a counterargument.
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I am enjoying how cinematic Dragonflight is. Lots of cutscenes, lots of interesting characters, stories that are actually fun to follow.
Shadowlands seems to have been somewhat like that, too, except… Shadowlands is like the distilled essence of everything that doesn’t work about Warcraft Deep Lore; it’s a perfect storm of confusing, boring, and infuriating, except where it delves into the completely new concepts it introduced. Dragonflight is mostly new concepts, I think that’s why I’m having a lot more fun with it. That, and the established lore is overall less bonkers. The dragons have mostly been in the background, relative to the faction conflict and Titan stuff and whatnot; the new story does a good job of paying off things set up long ago without getting tangled up in them. Really well-executed, overall.
I’ll tell you what I’m bitter about: all this new faction collaboration, including with all the new allied races, is exactly what I wanted to see follow after Legion. It’s exactly what should have, and makes so much more sense at that point than what actually happened. But because Bofa was conjured out of the primeval nonsense and jammed up our noses instead, the context makes it just not work. I’m seeing all this cooperation and interaction and mutual respect and all I can think is I give it another week before all my new friends are completely inexplicably murdering each other again.
Makes me grumpy. I’m trying to suppress that and just enjoy it because, seriously, this is everything I’ve wanted ever since Legion.
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This is a perfect description of how I feel about the factions in DF.
I like the stories where the factions work together, due to a mix of a) the more forgiving elements are willing put aside their not-too-extreme/not-too-personal past, and/or b) even the angrier elements can agree that the other faction is the lesser of two evils. Bolvar and Saurfang Jr. at the Wrathgate is still one of my favorite team-up cinematics. And the human and orc in the MoP cinematic were an absolute blast.
Cata strained the ‘not-too-extreme’, ‘not-too-personal’, and ‘lesser of two evils’ aspects of that.
BfA took those aspects, spiked them into the ground, stomped the remaining fragments into ash, and snorted that ash to go into the fever-dream that was SL.
…And now DF tries to act like we’re back at square one and just peachy about working together. Sure, fine, I don’t want to deal with the massive amounts of awfulness to fix things either, but can Blizz at least retcon BfA/SL (or at least wide swathes of them) if they’re going to ignore so much of it anyway?
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It is something a lot of folks have been talking about, how narratively disconcerting it is that now we’re willing to work together to this level, now, after no less than five genocidal wars pushed by the Horde (Old and New), without it being heavily skewed in the Alliance’s favor, or openly admitting it is how we’re keeping the two factions disintegrating into hunter/gatherer societies because without the war effort, there’s no other way to facilitate trade and share resources to help slowly rebuild both factions up to a mutually sustainable level.
On another note, you’ll be happy to note a lot of the podcast/twitter (we shall never call it X!)/other Social Media on the nature of Shadowlands and the alternate timelines are being flat-out rejected as unofficial takes.
You don’t fuse together after death with all your alternate selves and are judged as one single individual. The Garrosh that died in Shadowlands is our Garrosh, and he’s gone forever now, unless we put that pile of ash in a First One Rhoomba and strap Gorehowl to it to make the Azerothian version of Stabby.
Every ‘stable’ Timeline is a self-contained Multiverse, with all separate Twisting Nethers, Shadowlands, etc. The Twisting Nether no longer touches on all realities, but it is temporally messed up. No Demons are invading every alternate timeline, these are our demons and not from alternate realities or timelines.
If you do the Uldaman Dungeon for Dragonflight, there’s some rather interesting lore books you can claim along the way that reveals just how much of an increasingly-puntable pratt Odyn is, and just how strained Tyr’s relationship was with his Prime Designate.
Locations are in the notes section.
What’s a little genocide between friends?
A Friday night.
On other Dragon-related subjects: am I just being a crankypants again or is evoker kind of…not very good?
Have you played it?
It is very squishy for a Hero Class. I love Preservation and I can run Destruction, but Augmentation makes my head spin in the same way that Discipline Priests do.
Give me my Holy Priests, Holy Paladins, Resto Shamans and Mistweaver Monks. Those make sense and don’t require weird mechanics reliant upon your healing targets not being wall-humping gremlins with a lust for toasted taints and screeching about how their meters are better than everyone else’s.
Yeah, I did the intro sequence; my lizard is level 60 and just waiting to go back to dragonland. So, it’s still introductory-ish; I figured I just hadn’t got the full experience yet, and also it’s plausible that I’m just bad at it.
But what I played so far doesn’t fill me with excitement. It’s on the squishy side, and the damage output feels pretty underwhelming for how fiddly the controls are.
I was wondering if this was a common perception or I should log more time on it before making a judgment.
I liked it a lot just because it was different and it felt cool. But I haven’t logged on him since hitting 60 so maybe not. I haven’t heard a lot of negative things, but those who don’t like it really don’t like it.
I tried Evoker and lost interest. It’s ok, but it’s not for me. And I didn’t feel like I had clear enough lore at the beginning of the expac to RP as an Evoker, so…
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I mained it this season and am fully geared w/ the legendary. I love devastation but the charge-up moves and channel for disintegrate are polarising.
I mained mistweaver in season 1 and had a huge work project parallel to that which made it hell on my hands.
Dev has the least presses-per-minute of any spec IIRC, due to charged abilities and chaining disintegrate casts. It was a good rest for the fingers. Soothing, even.
I was on RP servers in season 1 but moved to OCE servers for season 2, so this is from a PvE perspective. PvP-wise, Evoker isn’t really my thing outside of healing large battlegrounds. I’ve never RP’d on any of mine beyond naming them and playing with a bit of personal headcanon.
You ever notice how many of our brave new allies we end up finding locked in a closet somewhere?
The Demon Hunters were locked in a closet. The Dracthyr were locked in a closet. The Death Knights were, I guess, in more of an emotional closet.
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Those were tombs, Enekie.
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What is a tomb but a closet full of skeletons?
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Look, I get what you’re going for here, but none of us are drunk enough to mix Warcraft and existential philosophy. No one could be that drunk and survive.