Honestly that’s something that should have happened back in Mists of Pandaria when monks were all the rage
Monks don’t even get a beam weapon. Some class.
They get a hadouken, though
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one thing i have discovered is that the dracthyr dance is cool as heck and it’s great to watch them dance.
Come to Duskwood, my friend! That’s where Alliance RP happens these days
I vaguely recall someone in another thread complaining about how much the Dragon characters spend out of their true forms and I didn’t think much of it at time, but now that I think back on it, it does seem that they spend a lot more time in Visage form throughout, even in times it would just as well if they weren’t.
Trying to rationalize it, perhaps the devs simply prefer the latter for their expressiveness. Granted, that doesn’t justify every instance where the Dragons chose to look like flamboyant people with minor reptilian features instead of what they really are, but I can’t be bothered to try harder.
I suppose size might also be a factor. Many notable Dragons are pretty big. The Aspects especially make it difficult to see when they have quests for you without help.
…Also there may be a hidden message to be interpreted in there somewhere, perhaps about the Dragons connection/relationship with the Titans and their perception of themselves, but again I can’t be bothered with it.
The “therapy sessions” are helpful in the intrinsic sense of healing and growth on individual and personal levels but they are devoid of spectacle, excitement, and just the factor of “cool”—which for me is the motivation of why I play the game. And what the narrative got confused is by assuming that character depth is exclusively the realm of character’s airing out their trauma’s and working through them in exposition. It swung so far in the direction of red table talk that there are more cutscenes in screentime of character’s mulling around how to heal with words than doing anything that has defined or reinforced the Warcraft brand. Or better yet, deal with trauma in other valid(not necessarily healthy) ways beyond just being told to Let it go. ™
For the record personally, I don’t have a distaste for therapy or consultation, I’ve personally had to exercise both. And I’m fine with character’s being more than Lok’tar Bro’gars. But I found it all ham-fisted and just oh so boring. It didn’t make the character’s more interesting. It didn’t make them more multi-dimensional. It didn’t make them multi-faceted. It simply flipped a switch that said “Ok you were hurt/bothered now you’re passive/happy” and left it like that.
The story was ultimately boring to experience. I haven’t had to say that about WoW in a long time, even through Shadowlands(as even though it screwed the Lore a big one, I at least felt the stakes), and that’s saying alot.
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I’ve been getting back into playing my Troll Shaman on Horde Side. I enjoy playing resto and being a healer. I want to try to do mythic stuff, but that anxiety just spikes and leaves me like 
But on the bright side, Sitting around Org has allowed for some unexpected but welcome spontaneous RP. Fleshing my shaman out into an IC witch doctor healer. So that’s fun!
That is a made. I mostly only go to 2500 rating this season cause I decided to tip toe my way up mythics literally 1 key level at a time
if you want a noob-friendly mythic group, try warcraft made easy. but yeah otherwise i get it. personally i prefer healing because it’s a lot more relaxed than trying to output dps and do mechanics but that’s just me.
Hey Enekie, I’m doing well. Thanks for asking.
I figured I would throw in my two cents here, as there have been a lot of good comments in this thread and I like to be associated with good things.
Dragonflight is a mixed bag for me. I agree that the new talent trees feel good (for me it’s because they actually resemble talent trees again), and in my opinion dragonriding is the best new game feature added in years. But while I will agree with those who say that the “low stakes adventure” is what WoW’s story needed—a breather from one chaotic near-miss apocalypse after another—I will also say that Dragonflight’s story delivery was terrible.
Regardless of how you feel about the story itself, I think one of the most significant problems is the presentation. Has anyone leveled a character to 70 recently? My gods, when you get to Valdrakken, you are inundated with quest givers proudly sporting their “look at me, I’m important” shield-icon main story quests. And if you’re anything like me, you probably wondered at some point, “What is actual correct order in which to do these? Is there a correct order? Will the story not make sense if I make the wrong choice?” Not to mention how some of these “main story quests” for the different factions are locked behind renown.
I don’t know if this is just my FFXIV sensibilities causing me unnecessary hang-ups about a narrative that I really shouldn’t expend this much emotional energy on, but it really bothers me that main story quests from patch 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, and everything in-between are all presented to you at more or less the same time with no clear in-game indication about which order you should complete them in. Maybe the quest log interface should be reworked to make this more specific? It can’t be that hard, and if Blizzard are truly “playing for all the marbles” with the story going forward, I hope they’ll at least expend some extra effort to ensure that none of those marbles roll under the couch to be forgotten about for years on end until one day you’re moving and suddenly you discover a few lost ones.
But even with its problems, I have been enjoying Dragonflight. I can’t really tell if the game has become more chill, or if I’ve just stopped caring as much, or both. But I’m playing at a much slower pace now and that seems to be working for me. At some point during Dragonflight, I feel like I looked at WoW and just said, “I’m old.” And WoW looked back and said, “I know.”
So, what do old RPers do? Well, we keep RPing I guess. I started a guild with some friends, and that’s been going extremely well. We have a nice community, and I get to play all of the characters I love so much with cool people and zero drama. This past year my mantra in RP, amidst the pervasive doomsaying about server mergers and faction death, has been, “Find your own happiness.” And, like taking WoW at a slower pace, that also seems to be working quite well for me.
I confess that I am looking forward to The War Within. It feels like we’re picking up a loose end we were meant to follow after Legion, and after having a chance in Dragonflight to discover where my own slice of happiness lies in WoW, that seems like an exciting prospect.
Anyway, this post has gotten rather long, so I think I’ll close out with my best impersonation of a centaur: cough “Get some rest.”
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One plot bit that I wonder about in Dragonflight is like how do all you guys know each other
https://i.imgur.com/7LyrS4e.jpg
Alexstrasza has Rexxar’s number?? She brought Velen in too? Khadgar is in this expansion? When did these characters meet? Is there like an Azerothian UN where they discuss important world affairs? Or do they hang out in a more casual manner and get drinks after work? Just who is located within Rokhan’s social circle?? Everyone is friends and shares numbers except for poor old Captain Fareeya, who nobody ever asks to bring her ship to things?
This was a goofy scene but the question of “who is our peer group” is sort of an enduring thing in WoW, because the game treats us like we, the adventurer who has interacted with all these characters, is sort of the core of this cast, but at the same time it isn’t really credible that we all know each other because most of the characters do not interact with each other and only interact with the player in the role of giving orders, so I don’t really feel like the core friend holding the gang together, more like one of potentially thousands of troops at their command.
It was a good thing in FFXIV that the characters did feel like a coherent peer group for the player. Yeah I believe the tater receptionist knows who I am and knows who the other characters are. Me and the mask wearing genki girl hang out, sure. It’d be smart to cultivate a group like that in WoW, player-tier individuals who have obvious relationships with each other and the player. This was sort of achieved in Suramar, where the various elves you helped did form a good player “peer group”, though I guess Thalyssra and I are no longer friends since she joined the Horde without even calling me to talk about it first.
The Suramar gang was obviously very zone-specific but I’d love to see a cast like that of recurring cross-expansion characters who are plausibly “peers” to the player and each other.
In Legion there was a quest where Amber Kearnen, the human sniper from MoP, was unceremoniously killed off-screen, and there was an outsized negative reaction because, I guess, people got attached to the character since that band of MoP characters really felt like “our friends” as a player.
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I’m probably cynical, in addition to being incredibly intelligent and morally flawless, but whenever they trot out their Greatest Hits cast, I feel like it’s because they think they need to remind you this is still Warcraft.
If they feel that way stop creating non-warcrafty settings!
You don’t need to introduce a new species we don’t know or care about every 6 months! I didn’t like the mole people, I don’t think many people did, and either way nobody will think about them ever again in a year! Something warcrafty could have gone where they were! We’ve got dwarves and gnomes, they’re all over underground!
Dragonflight was marginally better for this than Shadowlands, which bore almost no connection to the world we knew, but it is still fairly bad. BfA, whatever its flaws were, was great for being obviously part of the existing setting rather than rando new stuff. I mostly got to interact with the playable species, not “and proudly introducing new type of person number 787, who we will never see again”
…well ok there were ankoan and sethrakk they were sort of unnecessary
If it sounds like I’m saying “don’t be innovative, just retread old ground”, that’s not really what I mean–you can tell new stories with somewhat familiar species and places, because while the setting keeps getting broader there are many areas where it is still extremely shallow and underdeveloped. The return to Gilneas will be fun because it addresses a story question that was just sort of vague for years and years–what is going on there? Who controls it? It was just barely addressed because the stories were focusing on new continents rather than filling in the blanks on the ones we know about.
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If they made the Niffen more obviously a subspecies of Kobold, I think it would have worked far better than ending up being the one-off mole people joke.
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Her name is Tataru Taru and she’s a force to be reckoned with.
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It’s cute how you guys still care about the story.
Anyway, I’m good. There’s some cool hats coming in 10.2.5 and that’s the only reason I’m here.
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tbh the story in dragonflight is bad, i’ll agree to that, but it doesn’t feel uniquely or offensively bad.
Never have 
*astronaut meme
The story’s bad
Always has been
Which IS a step in the right direction!
I’m just waiting for Midnight for elf madness and maybe, hopefully, please… Ethereals.
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As someone who RPs as an Ethereal using Blood Elf and Void Elf…I am here for this as well.
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