Now that you’ve played Dragonflight for a week, what are your early thoughts on this expansion? Please use this thread to share your stories, favorite moments, or parts of the game that surprised you (or didn’t 
).
And what are you now looking forward to or anticipating, based on your first week of play?
I’ve only witnessed BfA and Shadowlands on release, and it feels so much better than both! No borrowed power system pressure. World lag still exists, but is much, much less than with the previous expacs. I didn’t feel like I was getting weaker while leveling up either. In both BfA and SL hitting max level made me feel so weak.
The story is refreshing, the new renown system is really great (a little confusing at times though), and Dragon riding made the world feel much more alive.
The only things that bother me:
crafting
while it’s a definite improvement, it still feels like there’s a lot of work to be done. Like what’s the point of not being able to craft low level items that are soulbound while giving talent points?
I’m also having a hard time getting a grip of the immense system, and there’s no good overview on what specialization I need to pick for what. Combat talents are pretty clear in how it works, but I have no idea how to consistently get crafting talent points, or how much I will be getting in total, or even if I can respec (I haven’t found anything in the UI about this).
Valdrakken
For some reason I have ~60 fps in Valdrakken while my GPU is sitting at ~38% usage. Something is causing microstutter in this zone and it’s extremely annoying.
Nodes/Treasures
Finding cave entrances, going in, just to have all nodes and treasures despawn, or having them spawning inside objects/walls, or even being able to click them with nothing coming out of them is really frustrating.
Lack of explanation/introduction on Wrathion/Sebellion
I know I can get some reputation here, mainly by farming keys? It’s really unclear in-game.
Drake colors being locked behind high renown
The colors need to be unlocked waaaaaaaaay earlier. It’s the main visual of your drake and it takes too long to unlock. Also disappointed with how few colors are available to both the dragon itself, and certain elements such as armor/plates/hair etc. Odd thing that feathers don’t take the hair color.
Despite these things I’m loving the expansion already! Lots of wholesome and hilarious quest chains <3
I think this expansion has probably been one of my favorite starts and continues. Leveling, questing, PvP, and Professions have been absolutely wonderful. I would have fully geared PvP after hittting 70 day one if the vendors had the gear on then but so far I have very few complaints outside of PvP and general bugs. I think all the profession stuff is amazing and feels great. I Actually value all my crafts and didnt get to fly to max crafting and never make anything again which is real great. Leveling was absolutely amazing not many things to complain about. I really hope they keep up the smoothness of how the gameplay feels.
As far as PvP besides some obvious nerfs that need to happen it has been feeling pretty balanced and no one extremely feels overpowered. Wpvp feels amazing besides people who are server hopping to avoid dying.(seems really bad this expansion) I am hoping rated goes well when the season starts.
I’m surprised that the respawn time for mobs that drop magemotes and obsidian keys got nerfed.
Personally, I’m really liking this expansion so far! Loved the questlines throughout each zone - Especially the last one in the zone, Thaldraszus. Not going to spoil it by posting what happens in it, But I found it to be quite epic and perhaps one of the best quests I’ve encountered in World of Warcraft in many years.
The only real issue I’ve encountered was with Dragon Riding. I’m sure I’m doing something wrong when it comes to it, But I’m really horrible at it. Each time I take off, I’ll land like a minute later as I run out of charges fast. Hoping that we can use our older flying mounts to get around as well eventually in a future patch.
Haven’t really dived into my professions yet, So won’t leave any feedback regarding this at this time. I’ll edit this post once I get into those.
Other than that, This expansion is enjoyable and fun to play!
Large I’m pretty happy with Dragonflight. I love dragonriding, the questing experience (some new all-time gems in there), the talents (at least on my main), the zones, the music, alt friendliness, etc.
Dragonflight is probably my all time favorite expansion at this time into an expansions release. I can go on, but that’s probably not worth a ton of time both on mine and the readers end.
Things have doubt about/don’t like
Craft orders
I’m doubting the effectiveness/use of the craft order system. It feels really barren right now. I’m assuming it is either because crafting orders are getting fullfilled VERY quickly, or not many people are using the system. Some more incentive to post crafting orders might be worth it to even up the supply and demand.
Story quests behind grindable renown
I don’t like story content being locked behind renown, at least not in this form. I like the new renown system and it being grindable is fine, but not if you can grind your way to story content 99% of players cant access allowing for a lot of exclusivity around spoilers. This forces people who want to stay up to date with the story to either grind renown (which is not a great experience, and already got nerfed) or look it up, or even get spoiled accidentally, online (also not a great experience). I would rather have timegated story quests that aren’t locked behind renown. The rest of the renown system is pretty great in my opinion, fwiw.
Looking ahead
I hope that the increased patch/content cadence that was talked about is something Blizzard is going to be keep up with. With less systems (I know, s-word, sorry) compared to previous expansions to keep people busy with the exception of renown and crafting, which while it is a great thing, will lead to people getting bored quicker.
I’m very curious to see what 10.0.5 or 10.1 will bring, and how soon. I’m usually not that quickly curious so soon after an expansion release, so that might be an indication I’m running out of content, but I also steamrolled through most of the content (outside of renown-locked content) so this is extremely anecdotal and due to my own fault, but I’m probably not alone in that.
I have had a positive experience, for the most part! The launch itself was frustrating and soured the experience a bit, but once I got into the Dragon Isles proper I had a great time doing the campaign, unlocking the dragon glyphs and hunting down side quests.
Positives:
Mixed bags:
My main worry for the future is sustainability. I’m not sure how long Dragonflight will last at this pace. For players who are grinding really hard, I suspect it might end much sooner rather than later. I’m taking a semi-casual approach myself, grinding a little bit but not nearly as much as many others I’ve come across, and I think I’ll have plenty of time to enjoy the expansion. I hope this means the patch cycle will be quicker than Shadowlands’, because Dragonflight might be one of the shortest opening patches in a long time. I also don’t want to make this sound like I want to nerf the rate at which everything is progressing.
The biggest pain point for me is the Aiction house. Often times, I have come across items that I try to buy, but I get caught in an error and am unable to buy the items I need.
I am also hearing more and more about AH Goblins who are actively engaging in price wars who post items so cheap and cancelling right away, and tricking others to post there items at a lower price to buy it at that low price.
Erosium made a YT Short about a short time ago that shows it in action.
Outside of that, I didn’t know I would like the profession revamp as much as I do, but i’m worried that once we max out our points, how is that going to carry over to the next expansion? Is this going to be another borrowed power type system where we have to regrind all the things again but for the next expansion and DF’s growth being tossed out?
Professions
Getting into the new professions system has been a lot of fun.
I definitely died once of twice getting yeeted off a cliff collecting a Windswept Herb/Ore, died to the decay before learning to jump, and gathered two molten nodes too quickly and burnt to death.
Crafting has also been fun, working with my guild to get stuff levelled up, crafted, and organized has been great as well. I’m looking forward to more recipes becoming accessible and being able to work on levelling up further.
Dungeons
Not to say I’ve run NEAR as many dungeons as many other people, but I’ve enjoyed the runs I did. Felt good to get into dungeons on live servers with a full talent build, as opposed to pre-patch having 10 missing points. It will be interesting to see how some of these dungeons interact with M+ affixes, and aside from my general continuing disappointment about the existence of some of those I am looking forward to getting into some M+ this season.
Outdoor Content
I was thrilled to see Dragon Races be made into World Quests. Having a continuous reason to go back and do them for fun will be a great change of pace from time-to-time. Some of the outdoor grinds have been good to get into, and being in Warmode feels pretty good again.
But the big winner here is Dragonriding itself. I mean, it’s been said plenty already but these zones being designed knowing we would have access to our Dragons from the get-go feels AMAZING. The zones are massive and being able to use momentum to fly from one end to the other (once you have all the glyphs 
) is great.
What I’m looking forward to
Raiding will always be at the top of this list for me. Can’t wait to get in there and kill stuff!
Just to preface, I am enjoying the expansion, however, as the first section will indicate, I am going to run out of stuff to do this coming week, and hope it gets addressed.
My main thought throughout this week, that I want to emphasize more than anything:
As a mainly open door player, I have pretty much no content to play throughout the week.
All of my content is done day 1 of a week and day 4 of a week. Turning world quests into bi-weekly quests was a horrible decision. On top of that, most of the main reputation things are weekly quests, not even world quests at all.
Thus, why even bother playing WoW at this point, if I only have enough content to last me 4-8 days a month? Outdoor players rely on daily quests for content, and have since they were first introduced. Outdoor players matter, and this backpedaling makes it feel like you don’t think that, and honestly, makes me incredibly sad.
You had made a post stating you were turning the bi-weekly WQs back into daily quests, and it was well received by the outdoor community - the community the change was aimed at. But then you backpedaled because of the crafters, even though there’s a very simple solution that would solve both problems.
Move all of the Centaur/Tuskarr/Valdrakken/Expedition Crafting Recipes to the Consortium Vendor. They have their own reputation, and it’s obtained via crafting. This way, crafters are not forced to do WQs for their recipes, and can get them via their preferred avenue of play - crafting. However, please also add reputation for fulfilling work orders.
You also state you didn’t want to make things feel like mandatory daily things, but you have essentially caused Grand Hunts, Assault on Dragon Keep, and the Tuskarr Feast to become mandatory daily things by keeping the bi-weekly quests, because they’re the only daily things to do. And as they don’t change, they are even more monotonous than world quests.
Or do you expect all outdoor players to do nothing but fly around gathering ore, herbs, and treasure for all of 10.0 except on Tuesdays? Please reconsider on world quests and make them dailies. In that thread, I have repeatedly asked every player saying “Outdoor players have plenty to do!” what we can do, and not a single one has said anything other than “Gather Treasures, Ore, etc.” That’s not a game. That’s effectively forcing us into servitude to the raiders and M+ers to get their flask/potion/gear prices down low.
Anyway, I just wanted to make that extra clear with a larger paragraph. It would be nice if you reconsidered the backpedaling on this and made them daily. Even if we have to wait until next week when the raid launches. Cause at least then every player gets their “daily content” at the same time. (M+, Raid, Rated PvP, and Daily WQs)
Thoughts on other stuff that I actively participate in:
I enjoyed how most of the wild pets this time weren’t simple “go out and capture” pets, there were small hidden secrets. Like one was a beaver locked in a dam you had to break, and it didn’t appear on the minimap until you did. A few were frustratingly rare, but eventually I found them. I also love that there’s a few “puzzle” pets that we’ve been finding - though they’re bugged and not showing in the pet journal currently. ^_^;
One thing to note, there’s a pet achievement added this expansion:
It requires 4 pets for a neat title: “, Knight of Feathersworth”
But… it requires Mister Muskoxeles. For those unaware, this pet is a reward for 2,000 unique pets. There were ~1540 at the end of SL in the game total, and DF added ~100. So we’re looking at a title that isn’t going to be obtainable for 3ish expansions down the line for even the top collectors. This seems… odd. I heard that Ion clarified that Muskoxeles being the 2000 Unique Pets reward is not within the design philosophy of the game, but I can’t find that interview, so all I have is word of mouth. It’d be nice to know if this title will actually be obtainable in DF? (Likewise, the 1750 Pets achievement also shouldn’t be obtainable in Dragonflight by even the top collection, and seeing as this would screw over achievement hunters, it might be best to hide the achievement/pet in 10.1 until it becomes obtainable? Like, keep it in the files, but hide it from players/armory)
I still wish we had a way to Hover, cause there are times I have to rush to the bathroom, or just stand up, and faceplanting into the ground is unfortunate. Having an ability that costs like 1 Vigor that allows your Drake to hover in place but lose all momentum would be very helpful. Even if it makes us fall if we move at all.
I still prefer old flying, but this is definitely better than no flying at all.
As with Lina, it feels not too fun that drake colors are locked behind high renown, because these are mounts we’ll be looking at all expansion - we should be able to change the most obvious thing we see from nearly the get go. It feels like the colors for the drakes should have been locked behind powering up the 5 Oathstones, not Renown.
I’m not a fan that Mining/Herbalism/Skinning Knowledge is apparently timegated. If we want to grind that knowledge, why are we being stopped from it?
I went into length in the Crafting Order thread, but I feel like crafting orders need to be expanded to more things, like materials like bolts, gears, etc. Things like the S.A.V.I.O.R. also need to be orderable.
I love most of the dungeons. Nokhud Offensive is by far my least favorite though. I do not like the Dragonriding Mechanic whatsoever, and wish there was an alternative to it for the dungeon.
There’s a few trash packs I feel need significant tuning, like the waterbender mob in Halls of Infusion before the last boss - I can’t even imagine that gauntlet on M+. It was hell on earth in m0 and that was with a guild group in Discord, I don’t even want to think about it in a PuG.
Brackenhide Hollow’s disease really needs to be made into a magic effect. It does too much damage for only half of the existing healers to be able to dispel it. Yes, alchemists can help dispel it, but only alchemists. Why can’t cooks also interact with the pot, for instance? Why can’t Pandaren (since they cook a lot), etc.
Honestly? Dead honest? Nothing.
LFR is dead to me with Group Loot, My guild has decided to focus on heroic raiding, so I don’t expect to do Normal this time either.
I don’t do M+ because the timers give me panic attacks and there’s no alternative to a timer.
And as outlined in detail above, I have no daily content to do as an outdoor player. I have literally nothing to look forward to in the coming weeks. For the first time, I may actually just blatantly unsubscribe at the start of a patch due to lack of content unless something is addressed.
Don’t get me wrong, I have enjoyed the story, main quests, and the content I did get to play. But now I’m out and I had hope today when you said daily WQs were coming back, but you dashed those hopes an hour later.
*For you
Many players, such as myself, were really disappointed that the world quests were being made daily instead of bi-weekly tomorrow. I was thrilled they reverted it. Simply because, I don’t want to have endless chores to do on my main every day. I want to play alts, I want to play other games with my friends who don’t play WoW, and I want to not feel bad about not logging in for a day.
Yeah this would be really good, especially in Warmode.
Yes. That is what “my” content means.
There is a medium they can get instead of completely wiping out all content for outdoor players past the weekly reset. Surely you can see that.
This is the equivalent to if they only allowed M+ to be ran a specific amount of times a week to avoid making people feel pressured into running as many M+ as possible for gear - do you realize how many M+ players would quit? (And yes, just like you liking this change, there would be people who LOVED that change - it doesn’t make it the right decision though)
And this is probably the topic I care most about since joining the CC - because they robbed me and many others like me (if you view the thread and the wowhead comments, I am far from alone in this) of quite literally any non-farming/grind content to appease a group of players that isn’t the main focus of the content. It’s like if they announced tomorrow that the raid was postponed until March because outdoor players needed time to gear up.
Also, this is essentially like if I said, “I want them to remove Heroic/Mythic Raiding because I don’t have time to commit to Heroic/Mythic Raids, so no one else should have that opportunity.”
And, game-wise speaking, Reputation has always been the outdoor player equivalent to gear for Raiders. They are different types of content and reward different things. Outdoor players should gain rep faster than people who don’t actively participate in the content. Just like I do believe Raiders/M+ers should gain gear faster than outdoor players.
Saying you don’t want to participate every day is like complaining you fell behind on progression because you skipped a week or two. Yes, that’s what is going to happen. And it’s not the end of the world. The game is not a race, stop treating it like one.
What you’re essentially saying is you want everything, but you don’t care if they take it from someone so they get left with nothing. And if you genuinely think it’s okay to leave an entire group of players with no content just so you don’t feel pressured to do dailies, then to be blunt, that’s being selfish.
So I don’t really want to disagree here, I’m an outdoor player and I’m also feeling a little light on endgame content, but I think the assessment here is a little wrong and I will try to explain why I think so.
I don’t think not having daily quests is the problem. Daily quests are first and foremost curated goals created by the game, which come with the downside of being time-limited, which triggers FOMO. The fact that they’re also randomised (especially world quests) means that you might have to wait a long time until you get the one you wanted to spawn, just because you missed it that one day because you had to work late. Moving quests into (bi)weekly formats are just a lot friendlier to the wider audience. That goes for outdoor players and players that prefer doing other things. Personally, I don’t like daily quests and I like how there’s been less and less emphasis on them as time has gone on. I find it a lot more exciting to log in to figure out what I want to do, if anything at all, rather than logging in to find a list of things the game is telling me to do.
You can still have a rich list of daily tasks to do, even without any daily quests to guide your hand. But you will have to make those goal posts yourself, and that can actually be a little taxing. I understand why some people prefer having daily quests to do the heavy lifting on that part.
I can add a few things to that list:
There’s lots of stuff to do. I don’t necessarily think a lot of that stuff is particularly interesting content, because it’s very repetitive, but there is something to do. Herein lies the problem, in my opinion. World quests and daily quests tend to have more variety in them. The rock-climbing and Pokemon snap minigames, for example, are very different from what we usually do, but we only get to do them twice a week. It’s really unfortunate that the majority of content outside the (bi)weeklies is mindless grinding, whether that is killing djaradin or picking herbs.
TL;DR: I don’t want daily quests back, but I want more content, so that I can make my own daily routines.
Maybe a compromise like this could work: make world quests have 7 day durations, but have new ones spawn every day. Say, 3-4 new ones every day for about ~25 for a whole week, numbers not final. Players who log in every day have something new to chew on every day, but players who can’t do that have plenty of time to actually get these quests done.
Also, is this the right place to have this kind of discussion? This is supposed to be about first week reactions, after all.
Both of these have a finite limit and you’re done after ~5 hours of grinding. So no, not really.
Which are significantly worse than world quests because they’re the exact same thing every single time. World Quests changed each day to give variety so it didn’t feel monotonous.
This is the same as “Go loot treasures and ore/herbs.”
Yes, and I gave my first reaction. I didn’t ask for Letholas to reply to my post. I simply gave my first reaction. I have nothing to do second week on because they made a decision against outdoor players to cater to crafters and raiders. However, I won’t reply after this to avoid clogging the thread.
PvP is a completely unbalanced mess.
Talent trees has added way too many CCs in the game and even more multiplicatives on abilities causing instances of people getting killed in a global.
Power creep is still a major issue where a few item levels increases a character’s power exponentially.
I don’t know what I’m looking forward to, balance changes I guess?
I’d love to see a massive pruning on CC abilities or at the very least a condensing on DRs and something done about the over abundance of interrupts that makes casting any spell near impossible.
Also, why is renown with faction not account wide? This completely kills my desire to level another character because it feels like all the renown I get on the other character is a complete waste of my time.
One thing I forgot to add was that in terms of crafting, getting some of the more specific materials is a pain. Yesterday I’ve been flying around for over an hour trying to find the titan mining nodes because I wanted to craft a S.A.V.I.O.R., and despite having nearly 1000 of the basic ore, I fail finding the titan nodes.
While the world is vast and you can get to places really fast as well, finding the right mining node is a pain. By the time I can hover over the minimap icon to see what node it was, it’s already gone. We really need a way in the default UI to easily track and differentiate those nodes.
With dragon flying and the new map being expanded upon in Z axis, the height difference not hiding nodes anymore is really good, but it also makes it much harder to find where the nodes are. Most of the time they are invisible because they are hidden inside a cave or behind a rock. The combination of speed required to cross the distances and the time it takes to find nodes without having to visually see them in the world needs an improvement imo.
What I like
I like the open world, the dragonflying is really fun and much better then running on a ground mount for months.
The items from rars and the general loot from almost everywhere that increases your itemlvl is pretty nice and very easy to get for everyone.
Professions got a lot of love and are a big content now for those who want to dive deep into it.
What I dislike
I think that the overall professions, getting knowledge and so on, is too complicated for the average player. I think its a big mistake that you never can reskill your profession talent trees, because if you make a mistake now, your stuck with it.
Work orders are total crap in my opinion, it happens what i expected people are not willing to pay a fair amount for all the work and money that was spent into the profession to get there. Furthermore you don’t get a guaranted quality. I wanted a pickaxe in 5 stars and got only a 2 star even with a lot of expensive materials i bought.
Everything you skill for leveling up is worth nothing because there is better stuff at the higher levels.
Also there are not many work orders and if you don’t sit there the whole day, you will miss the most lucrative ones anyway.
Also you have so many materials, the material bag is way to small and the material bank was also not increased.
This is a great question! I’ll try to give some useful feedback on my experience so far:
Dragon Riding
This is the feature that got me really excited for this xpack! So far I REALLY love it! It’s FUN! So much fun in fact that I find reasons to go out into the world just to play around with flying. The momentum effects and the dynamic feel of banking, diving, climbing are really exhilarating. Covering so much distance quickly and having so much control over the destination (or lack thereof) is fantastic.
I’m not a fan of the dragon riding tree and really have a hard time seeing the point of it. It was something I filled out ASAP the second I got Dragonriding and did nothing else until it was complete. Dragonriding felt awful without it. I struggle to see the purpose of the tree at all, it seems like it’s just there to show how bad Dragonriding could be and for a few hours it really is awful until the tree is filled out. It begs the question of why the tree exists at all and why not just start out with full Dragonriding as soon as you get it? In any case it’s maxed out now and I’ll never have to suffer with it like that again 
I’d like to see another ability added to the Dragonriding skillset that is essentially a low speed cruising mode. When I get to a destination going at Mach 5 or even just taking off from a stop to take a peek around I’m always moving way to fast to maneuver in a small area like when I’m closing in on a chest or rare spawn and want to scope the area out a bit before I land in the middle of a pack of mobs or when I just want to jump from one area of Valdrakken to another, like from the AH to a crafting table for instance. A hover mode would be nice also but I hear that is verboten in any case there are plenty of mob less high spots to AFK on if I need to.
Leveling
The leveling experience was great! I feel like I’ve done as much leveling in WoW over the course of 18 years that I’ll ever want to do. I did loremaster and have leveled about 20 alts and really have had just about as much questing as I can stand in my WoW life and ideally would never do a quest again if I didn’t need to. These days I level my alts chain running dungeons.
The campaign quests format is great. If I have to quest to level the first toon then that is how I want to do it. Point me to the next dude and lead me by the hand until I’m done with the chore that it is to me.
I got to lvl 58 and was finished with the campaign quests so I did a few dungeons to finish it all off.
Overall about as painless as I can hope for. This is an MMO after all and despite my quest exhaustion of 18 years that is part of the game for most other people.
Alt Friendliness
I LOVE that when I finished the campaign on my first toon everything just unlocked! I could just take the portal to the Dragon Isles and just do whatever the heck I wanted World quests, all dungeons, PvP, questing etc. Very transparent and simple. No clunky story skips which is great!
My only real suggestion here is that the scouting map that opens up is not immediately obvious and actually took me a lot of time to figure out how it works. Rather than go into detail about what all my problems with it were I will just offer this suggestion. Once the first char has unlocked Adventure Mode change the quest pop-up for alts to something different. Have the new quest lead the alt through their capitals portal (optionally) and then point them directly to the scouting map to unlock it straight away. It’s much too clunky for for people to figure out that there even is a scouting map nevermind what convoluted set of actions needs to be taken to open it up. I’ll also point out that anyone who quested past a certain point before Adventure Mode was unlocked is out of luck as far as unlocking the scouting map. The ability to unlock the scouting map should be able to occur regardless of quest progress prior to unlocking Adventure Mode.
Dungeons
Overall the dungeons are great and very interesting. They are fun. Personally I don’t mind the one with Dragonriding in it but can definitely see how it’s hard for people with unleveled Dragonriding to keep up with the group, even while using the flight points. The flight points should be sped up such that people can keep up with the Dragonriders. This is also important for those or are unable to utilize Dragonriding in an effective way due to no fault of their own.
My initial runs through a few dungeons were as a lvl 58 Resto Druid. Generally healing was a challenge to keep up with. I was able to do it but I had to work at it and I’m a very experienced healer. I’m sure less experienced healers or people new to the role will have a very hard time with it. The normal dungeons are more unforgiving than they should be. It was vaguely reminiscent of the agony of what was Cataclysm dungeon healing at release. Not that bad of course, nothing could be that bad, but it made me remember the horror. There is also a pretty hard hitting disease in Brackenhide Hollow that my Druid can’t dispel. I really don’t enjoy getting screamed at by the entire group for being a moron for not dispelling something I can’t dispel that is killing everyone. Also in The Nokhud Offensive Granyth’s Eruption ability was not interruptible rendering the dungeon incompletable.
I’d really love for the first several M+ levels to be accessible by the dungeon finder. M+ is something I’d really enjoy but my life is just entirely incompatible with anything resembling a set schedule or advanced planning lol.
Crafting
I attempted to level Leatherworking and pretty much came away from the experience feeling very frustrated and angry that I flushed 30k gold down the toilet for apparently nothing. I leveled using the trainer recipes up to about 60. Crafted one of almost everything I could for the knowledge points. Flew around all over the map to collect the knowledge points in world treasures. Specialized in shaped armor shoulders.
All of the items I crafted while leveling are selling on the AH for a few silver or copper thanks to a bunch of AH trolls that are using their billions of gold and crafting dominance to crush the rest of us into oblivion. Meanwhile crafting orders at the table are non-existent, can’t craft a thing for anyone and all the other recipes are locked behind 5 faction’s renown. Seriously, this is so far the absolute worst experience of the xpack. Total disaster IMO. I am NOT grinding renown in order to participate in crafting. You know where you can shove it …
PvP
I LOVE the new PvP gear ilvl system. It takes a few hours to grind out the honor set and then feel like you aren’t just cannon fodder for people. It feels GOOD! I hear that the Gladiator gear is about +13 PvP ilvl above the honor set; better gear but not such a dramatic gear advantage that a bad player in good gear always owns a good player in bad gear.
The maps themselves seem to have received some balancing, Glaives seem to be generally more durable but not so durable that they are the new 100% meta to win. I think continuous passes to the maps to fix broken graveyards (if they are still broken) and generally paying closer attention to honor BGs in general is something that is very important. A LOT of people play honor BGs. Worth making that aspect of the game feel like it’s important rather than just an afterthought left to rot for decades at a time.
Crowd Control in honor BGs, especially Epic BGs is a very big problem. If you’re a melee class or just happen to find yourself in a crowd you’re just chain CCd until your dead, one stun type after another, even with a trinket you’re stunned again. Too many classes with too many different ways to incapacitate you, non of them sharing and diminishing returns. It’s a terrible experience still in that regard.
Well, that’s a wall of text … I might come back to add some more if I think of something important that I missed but I think that covers most of the big things.
Incoming essay lmao
I’ve played every day one launch of this game and this is one of the best first weeks I’ve experienced gameplay wise. On par with BC which we had years of high anticipation for. And compared to the last few expansions, this is better by far.
The biggest difference for me is the questing. Usually in the first week, leveling is a train ride through the zones. I take a seat basically as I get guided from Quest Hub A to Quest Hub B to Quest Hub C and then we’re done. But not this expansion. I found myself following the campaign but doing side quests that led to other side quests. Even now I’ve completed loremaster and I’m still finding new quests. Its amazing and makes the world feel alive. Also the quests were really well-written and thought out. Usually its “kill x to collect y” over and over but this time there was so much variety. I also knew why I was being asked and I felt like I wanted to help. There is so much emotion in the quests, fantastic writing that I feel is a huge improvement over past writing.
Timegating is different and I love that. In the past few expansions, the story just stopped aka wait until next week to find out. Now I’m able to finish the main campaign in the first week. Then I was so happy to see there was more campaign chapters that were kind of timegated behind renown, but the renown is grindable however we want. I can spend hours digging dirt piles or key farming to slowly get rep. I feel like I can play however I want.
And speaking of reputation, I love the changes. No longer is it “fill the small bars with random quests until the big bar is full”. Now its “actually help and interact with the faction” and then you get a lot of stuff, lol it feels so rewarding to me. I love it. I’m looking forward to the story as it unfolds with each of those. I think it was quite brilliant to have each faction have a part of the campaign to unlock as it all feels so connected and important. I’m into the story like I haven’t been in a while. I didn’t mind SL or BFA stories, but I just didn’t care. Here I find myself caring about what happens next.
I’m in love with rock climbing and the photography quests and the high peaks challenges. I am hoping more content/challenges comes with those and I love that I can buff them. I feel like an explorer and its super fun. The pet collecting is top-notch too. I caught all the ones on the list but then I found out there were tons of other new pets to discover like I had to clear branches out of a dam for one that I randomly came across.
The fishing is nice, and I can see what’s intended, but I think its a little confusing with the fishing holes. Why is the fishing hole that great? It doesn’t seem to be better than fishing outside of the area. And my nets don’t seem to work. Like it says it will take 10 hours to fill but when I go back, there’s nothing there and I have to put down a new net. I don’t know how lunkers work yet (seems to be tied to only a world quest) and the fishing hole drops from Rich to Moderate so fast and no one restocks. I am curious to see where fishing goes and I’m looking forward to figuring it out more. I love that fishing has tools now like harpoons and nets and the ice-cracking fishing holes are very cool.
World quests no longer being daily is HUGE. Massive improvement. At first, I was like “what do I do with myself?” then I realized how much time I have now to do whatever I want instead of mindlessly grinding out the dailies. And my alts appreciated it too. I love the hunts, I love the seige, I LOVE the community soup (even tho its laggy lol). These are group things that don’t require a group, you know like I just show up and I’m playing with other people with a common goal. I enjoy it so very much. The soup is my favorite thing to do ‘Yes, chef!’ over and over. I love it.
Gear-wise I’ve never been more happy at the start. Rares give good gear, USABLE gear. And crafting… for the first time in a long long time, I was using crafted gear while leveling that was beneficial and useful. I can’t remember the last time I was able to craft something that was actually useful to my character right away. It was better than quest gear!
Crafting is confusing af but I’m hoping I’ll figure it out more as time goes on. Right now though I think it feels a little too restrictive on the learning points for specialization. Like the points are too rare and there’s too many points necessary for buffs that don’t seem to proc that often (yet) or don’t seem to add value that I can see. I’d like the ability to reset my crafting talent points. Maybe once a week or month or maybe just once. I added points without really knowing what I was doing and I want to start over lol
I do feel the crafting order system needs a little work because there’s nothing to fill on smaller servers. Maybe there will be in the future, but the achievements for filling 500 orders feels way out of reach to me even years down the line. I don’t see that many people using it and all crafters will be competing for the public orders.
Dragonriding is top tier fun for me. It felt so easy to learn and master. I am really looking forward to other content with dragonriding races. I am so happy to be up in the air instead of stuck on the ground. Also, the zone designs are so great for dragonriding, like the high mountains and valleys, it makes it so much fun to zoom around.
Mythics were quite fun and ‘easy’ to get into. I think the pressure off the mythic+ players to rush made a nicer time for everyone. This was the first time I did Mythics in the first week and it was actually fun with nice groups. I might do mythic keys this expansion (maybe ha). I do think there should be a queue for M0s, like it doesn’t seem to be any reason for there not to be at this point. I understand why keys themselves would not work in a queue, but for the zero’s, it was almost the same difficulty level as Heroic.
The biggest thing I’m looking forward to (and I’m hope I’m right) is that this expansion feels like we are going to get content patches on a more frequent basis. Instead of these HUGE patches twice a year with sweeping changes, we’re going to get maybe bi-weekly patches with a smaller amount of new content being pushed so there’s always something new to do. I say this because every time I log in, I seem to have a new quest that I didn’t before and there doesn’t seem to be enough to take us through the next 6 months. So I’m thinking we might be heading towards smaller content patches more frequently which would be very interesting.
I love this expansion!
Dragonriding is amazing. It’s very fun and very scenic. I rarely use flight points anymore; I prefer to dragonriding everywhere and maybe pick up some writhebark along the way. Combined with the increased draw distance and beautiful environments, it’s a win for sure. My guildies keep posting screenshots of gorgeous views they’ve experienced while dragonriding.
It does create some challenges, like dive-bombing an herb node only to land in the midst of a bunch of elite mobs. Fortunately I can just take off again if I react quickly enough. Scoping out a situation before diving in requires some thought, but I kind of like the challenge and interest of that, plus I feel sort of like a bird when I look for a perch to land on just above the action before I dive all the way to the ground.
Also the races are great, and the dragonriding world quests are my favorite WQs, hands down.
Dungeons are great so far, and I’m looking forward to the raid.
Crafting has felt a little chaotic–there is so much to learn and so much we don’t understand yet–but it feels like an entire separate game mode this expansion and I’m into it. I’m still a little at sea with it but I enjoy how much complexity and depth there is and look forward to figuring out more. The work orders system might need some work. I’ve literally never seen a public work order for my craft (Inscription).
World PvP has been a disappointment. I’m not really a PvP player, but I like to dabble in it a bit, and it’s been consistently miserable. We put together a world pvp event for the guild and flew around doing world quests and looking for Alliance to engage with (we’re Horde). We really never found a fair fight anywhere. There were Alliance in the Cobalt Assembly, but they had buffs making themselves literally invulnerable and were one-shotting us with map powers, so that wasn’t fun. The rest of the time, all we could find was solo players to gank and that wasn’t fun either.
Since then I’ve done some world pvp solo or in small guild groups, and I still haven’t found a good fight anywhere. It’s always 4 people vs 30, or no targets available. I did a couple of pvp world quests and both were so miserable that I turned off war mode a few days ago and haven’t turned it back on since.
But with war mode off, I’m having a really good time with everything else. The storylines feel more character-driven and personal this expansion, and I love it. The world events are a bit of a mixed bag. The cooking event is hilarious, and it’s on a predictable timer so I can show up just at the right time. But the Trial of the Elements required me to sit in a cave doing nothing for an hour while I waited for it to spawn, and I hated that because I wanted to play the game and not just stand around.