I’ve been meaning to post this…elsewhere, but since I can’t just “Speak ‘Friend’ And Enter” there at the moment, maybe we can discuss it here.
My likes include
The Onomatopoeia: Many of the sounds are new to me, and I like hearing them.
The Movements: I had mentioned this before, but I really like watching Jonãsskirt a big box rather than walk over it. More real that way.
The Cinematics: I like these better than any I’ve watched. Must be the dragons.
Some things I *don’t * like:
Too much reading. I like hearing the lore over reading too much of it. Seems like this time, there’s a lot more since BC (when I signed on). I have 5 items which require reading I need to get to,
The music. I’ll say it first, since I’m a musician: Game music should be mostly ambient in nature, meaning it is there if you want to hear it, and it’s there if you REALLY want to hear it, but this time I miss the “happy, Irish-type music” of expansions in the past.
I’m still miffed I can’t look my characters up on character planner and its adjuncts, but I am slowly getting used to that.
No Borrowed Power grind. The Reps and World Content are essentially optional and for players who don’t care about Collections, they only really exist for a bit of Alt Catchup before you jump into M+. This is a good thing. World Content in MMOs is almost never engaging to me, so feeling forced into grinding it isn’t a matter of “effort”, it’s a matter of actively hating spending my time in that way.
No significant Faction Conflict. It’s a tired fallback plot at this point and I know it’ll come up again eventually but for now I’m just glad it’s taken a back seat.
Evoker is cool. At least Preservation and Augmentation. I haven’t really played Dev. And the Dracthyr Visage forms are fantastic, to the point where early on in DF I actively used the most screwed up talent build you could imagine and took Breaths off my bar to just never transform as Preservation.
Dragonriding is cool. I don’t think it’s so groundbreaking that it deserved to be touted as one of the main selling points of the expansion. It’s not THAT exciting. But it’s still fun and faster flight is always going to be a plus.
Neutral:
Most of the expansion. Dungeons are fine. Raids are fine. Story is par for the course for WoW. Crafting is a good concept with horrible flaws that average out to an okay feature overhaul. M+ still has a LOT of things I dislike about it, but not really anything that was introduced as part of Dragonflight so I can’t fault it.
Dislike:
Item Upgrade System. It’s too… full? Getting gear from a specific level of difficulty feels a lot less meaningful when someone who’s upgraded the stuff from the lower difficulty is just a few points behind you after all the upgrading. And it’s a lot like Titanforging was, where you end up in a situation where base drops aren’t upgrades because you have TF/Upgraded gear from the previous content or difficulty, so the NEW stuff isn’t actually good until you’re done upgrading it. Go back to the MoP version where you just dumped Valor or whatever to be able to upgrade the ilvl a small amount twice. Basically just a little bump as a nerf-over-time to harder content, rather than a system intended to make you endlessly re-grind your gear.
The continuation of the “Fated Season”. Content Lulls suck. Getting soft reset for the sake of a soft reset with no new content associated with said reset sucks even worse. I might be in the minority on that one, but if there’s nothing truly NEW I’d rather just stay strong and derp around during the content lull.
Late-Patch Crafted Gear being so prevalent is annoying. I get that it’s timegated so it’s not OP right out of the gate, but seeing people in half crafted gear is kinda lame. I actually preferred WoD’s way of handling it where you could get strong crafted gear (like DF) but were capped at using 3 pieces at a given time. In general I think the new crafting system is cool, but I think they leaned too heavily into crafted gear being a major part of gear prog. It should pretty much always be a gap filler for slots you’re not having luck with IMO.
Thanks, Ventorath, I was hoping someone would comment who has more game-speak and tech-speak than I do. I’m good at what you see, but as I told someone recently, "I’m more Mr. ‘What does the cow say?’ " than Mr. “Boot from Safe Mode”
I guess the most significant thing I can say about DF is that there’s nothing major that really sticks out to me either way. It’s not a bad expansion but I don’t know I’d call it actively good either.
Likes:
Dragon mounts
Talent system for professions.
Dislikes:
Story
Rep system
Crafting system(they’re not fixing it for the next expansion, so a dislike for War Within as well)
Still haven’t fixed soloing old raids.
Item upgrade system
M+
A bunch complained about having to read the books for some info - spoil sports, sniff - /s
I like the story.
Don’t like that it’s boringly honeysweet.
Like flying.
Music isn’t as impressive as SL’s - imho
Just got bored quickly and the forums just filled up with endgamers earlier on than usual. Also having higher geared players faster than usual too. Made it a wee bit more frustrating for open-worlder’s to do their quests when these super soldiers come in an area and wipe it clean before you can say ‘howdy doody’!
It’s a meh expansion - lot’s of pretty if you stay on the ground though.
My wife and I typically play the new expansion for a few months before we burn out. My wife lasted about two weeks and I lasted a month. I went to playing lowbie twinks, then went back to Classic era. Been bouncing back and forth between Wrath Classic and SoD.
I mainly run M+ so most of what I feel is based on that. I don’t quest “unless forced to as I have to progress to open something” cause it’s boring as hell. I rarely raid cause I don’t have 5 hours to spend running continual content with 30 people hoping they don’t make a single mistake and make us start all over again. I do M+ cause it fits the time I have to jump on and play a little at night.
Dislikes
New Talent Tree - Complete disaster, Page full of icons I have to constantly mouseover to see what the hell they are, trying to do comparisons is a complete waste of time cause of the load meter they have worked into talet swapping, When you do swap talents half the time you have to try and figure out what changed and where it is in your spell book. Old three column layout was way simpler and easier to work with. This new tree/point/waterfall/whatever is crap.
Professions - Thanks for completely overcomplicating crafting in every sense and form. We now have to open orders to craft something, to open an order to craft something else to be used to craft something else. Not to mention needing crests, sparks, etc. No thanks I have completely abandoned everything to do with crafting and professions cause of this monstrosity they have created.
Dragon Riding - Great way to timegate movement, thanks! They have somehow convinced everyone that DR is the greatest thing. Your movement is limited to the charges you have and they don’t regenerate fast enough, so sometimes you left stuck sitting around waiting for them to recharge. They also just took your entire mount collection and made they pretty much useless. It helps some when they finally got their heads out of thier a$$s and opened up normal flying in DF.
New M+ Affixes - Incomporeal and Afflicted, WTF! Thanks for limiting the classes that get to play on those weeks cause you designed affixes that some classes have zero ability to deal with. Completely unlevelled the playing field, bad enough there are weeks I refuse to play/push due to bad affixes like Bursting, but now you’ve added affixes that I can’t even get into a group with on some characters due to design flaws.
Unavoidable damage output - I see the need to want to get healers more involved with healing, but they went too far. Some classes will straight up fall over due to unavoidable damage taken in M+ due to piss poor design. There is literally nothing that can be done and I blame the dev’s not the healers. Some classes only really have a single defensive on 2-3min cooldowns but the unavoidable damage continually rolls so we’re stuck waiting it out as we can’t do anything else. They pushed too much on forcing group cohesion instead of individuals mastering the actual content itself.
Diminishing returns and GCD - This hit the hardest with DF, I especially noticed this on my Hunter where Haste is a primary stat I shoot for. Pre-DF at 30% haste my GCD was down to 0.99, now at 30% haste I sit at 1.07 GCD which is a massive hit. Even worse now that Lust/Hero feels like complete sh!t. Haste drops to like 0.3 but it doesn’t seem to help with Focus generation at all. Lust on boss and I’m still sitting here waiting for focus to generate, I see zero increase in focus generation and it honestly feels like Lust was never even on. I feel this the same on my Pally. The completely screwed something up. Clases that used to play fast, meaning I’m not waiting on GCD to push a button, are now laggy and slow. I’m not interested in the dps output being the same, If I’m not pushing buttons then it’s a slow class. Rather be able to slam buttons as fast as I can, then sit around waiting between each button push like I’m playing a turned based game.
Item Upgrade system - Again something they went and overcomplicated, more currency crap to deal with, and another form of timegating. It’s bad enough trying to get a specific piece of BIS to drop from a Dung/Raid, But now you have to do it multiple times, cause you get you bis item to drop as Veteran, which max caps the ilvl and zero means to getting it to the next tier, so you have to farm a higher key level hoping the exact same piece drops at Champion tier, then to do it all over again praying for Hero tier. Regardless of skill you sort of have to push yourself through the various tiers to get ilvl in order to push higher keys.
Dawn of the Infinites Dung - Too much pointless travel through portals, dragon riding, etc. that all should have been removed when it was split out as an M+, Can’t even open map when riding to see where people are. Morchie fight, we all know this is complete disaster with the blue hair thing, sorry can’t see it, never have been able to, IF I run it I just follow the group hoping someone say it, mostly I avoid running it and refuse to push a key for that stupid dung. The maze after the first boss I also refuse to attempt, the hit marker for the balls is way off and world ping greatly messes it up. Puzzles/Mazes in M+ need to go and stay away, not here to play puzzles/mazes.
M+ Portal timeway - Thanks for multiple load screens, load screen to get to the timeway, then loadscreen to get to the dung, then load screen to get into the damn dung. Again it’s not even the dung, it’s just dropping you off somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, atleast it’s in the same zone. FFS
Dung Rotation - it’s really annoying that in Season 3 now we have reverted back to nothing but old content as far as the rotation, outside of that disaster Dawn is, none of the Dung are actually DF dung. It’s all recycled content. Maybe they should have built enough new dungeons to actually cover all of the seasons for the expansion so that we are not forced to run recycled content for multiple seasons. They did the same thing in SL splitting the mega dungeon to try and fill in the dung rotation when they ran out of expansion specific dungeons but atleast Tasavesh was a good dung.
Class Inconsistencies - This has been an ongoing problem for some time. I believe all classes should be balanced out to all include the same thing and that they shouldn’t need to do specific things in order to spec into it. All classes should have a CC, Interrupt, Defensive as default and that you can change what those basics can do, CC = single vs group, Etc. Some classes like Warlock has to run a specific pet to get an interrupt, Hunters have to choose a pet and either get lust or get a defensive. Lust should be default for Hunters regardless of pet. All healers should have a dispel, remove disease, etc. This removes the need for choosing specific classes over another because one has something the other doesn’t when it comes to basic abilities that are now required to compete.
Likes - Not many and not really DF specific.
Factionless groups - Being able to group up with anyone regardless of Faction is nice, it really opened things up, especially queues.
Global AH - Finally, it was hilarious in the beginning as the bots fought things out trying to outprice each other
Dragonflight has been a very empty expansion with little to fill your time with.
As a world content player its good for maybe one day a week. 6 less than every other expansion ive played.
Zaralek cavern was a mess and i hope we never get a zone so bad again.
Otherwise the expansion has been alright.
Nothing amazing or anything.
But no more big issues.
It is too Flashy, Trashy little or NO questing out in the world in the xpac. Dragon Flight- IS NOT WOW…I don’t know what it is but it doesn’t fit the script. All the dumb looking battle pets and goofy looking mounts make me IRK… I’m a very long time player and when DF rolled out I thought I joined the CIRCUS. I will not follow this kind of World…
No more layers and layers of borrowed power systems with daily AP grinds to feed them
Evoker. Preservation is now my #2 healing spec
Drac’thyr. I actually like them and how much I can customize them. The lack of transmog doesn’t really bother me as it does other players
Opening up more Race/Class combinations. Still waiting for Paladin and Shaman to be opened up.
Dislikes:
Too many World Events that died after about week with no tuning to make them more solo friendly
Zaralek Caverns was pretty meh
The convoluted upgrade system of Flightstones + four different tiers of Crests. The Explorer > Adventurer > Veteran > etc tracks were fine, but they should’ve just stuck with Valor Points for the currency
It’s great if you need to fly across the map but when you use it the same way you use regular flying (starting and stopping constantly) you’ll find yourself stuck on the ground or on the side of a mountain for a bit.
I stand with you from an MMO stance specifically. Though I wouldn’t mind if there was battle music of sorts that altered the current underlying ambience. It’d be a lot of work but it’d feel cool as heck.
As for what I don’t like.
The forced story. Again. No thanks. If I want that I’ll go read a book.
Classes are out of hand from lazy carry over from SL.
M+ is PvP in PvE. Why not just fix PvP to be the rush those players want?
New professions are a no for me and will probably be so going forward.
Dragon Isles feels boring somehow. SL felt a little more alive. Dunno.
The new dragon race is a no. Next please.
Things I like.
I just love WoW in general.
How the game feels.
The random awesome encounter with a good spirited individual.
The knowledge players have about the game.
The class design.
Overall DF is a miss for me. Thankfully it’s still WoW so I’ll keep playing regardless.
I like that the game feels like a game and not a job.
I like dragons, and dragonriding is pretty cool.
I like that there’s no borrowed power.
I like where VDH is right now.
I don’t like that I can’t max out my professions like in prior expansions.
I don’t like that I can’t get 263 ilvl trinkets through open-world.
Dragon riding, particularly the races and the dream surges. Zooming around and hitting targets is simple zen fun.
The crafting system upgrade. It’s actually a hot mess, but I like what they’re going for in the concept. If they can refine it, it’s going to be super fun. Right now it’s annoying we need to have so many levels of materials. Like we don’t scream about bag clutter enough as it is!
The artwork. Amazing. The way the buildings in Valdrakken do that crystalline opal glimmer when you’re close to the walls. The massive expanses of the landscapes and stunning views almost everywhere. Except maybe ZC. Didn’t love that zone.
The new fishing system. Netting fish, lunker fishing, making tools to get access to different pools like the rimefin tuna. I hope they build more into this. I love fishing in real life and in game.
Dracthyr. Super fun to play on all 3 specs. Very mobile - not having to stand still and cast all the time is sweet.
The world events. The Great Hunt was probably by far my favorite. The rest got so congested and shard heavy I quit attempting them. Still I like the concept they’re going for, if they could just refine it and get the bugs/glitches worked out.
Dislikes:
The bugs and glitches. Sharding. It seemed like a really messy expansion quality wise for this reason. If you’re going to promote all this new world group content, make sure it works first.
The rapid fire rate of the patch zones, which made them hot spots and then obsolete. There has to be a better formula to keep them relevant. I’m not sure what that formula is - maybe return the daily quests that give you rare crafting materials like they had in Legion. Something.
The drop rates for the rare crafting materials and the need to have to go to special areas to craft some things. Altar of decay was honestly a headache for awhile.
The pester quest NPCs following you around. If I haven’t interacted with it in the first 3 minutes, can it please just go away?
I really only do unrated PvP and level alts these days, so my likes and dislikes are based around those two things.
As far as likes, obviously the changes to PvP gearing were excellent in DF. Extremely easy to gear, easy access to customization with crafted gear, besides extreme edge cases there aren’t really any PvE items terrorizing PvP.
I still think that PvP should get its own tier bonuses and then have PvE tier disabled in PvP, but they don’t seem to want to do that. I think conquest catchup in unrated PvP could probably be a bit faster, but if you play from the start of the season gearing is fine and with Blitz and wPvP gear you can still catch up even without doing something like spamming 2s which is nice. Obviously the lack of PvP tuning is a major downer at the moment, as were things like the ret changes in s1.
I think leveling has been nice in DF. Having dragonriding with account-wide glyphs from the start was a great change from previous expansions. I’ve leveled 60 characters to 70 (most of those being just from 60-70) and have no real complaints about the DF zones. It seems pretty fast, especially once you get a route down, and the quests for the most part aren’t annoying like some older expansions tended to be.
I’m overall really happy with DF and I think if they keep gearing the same and stay on top of tuning in TWW I’ll greatly enjoy that too.
I need to stress, this depends entirely on the game, the devs intention, and the on screen events. Action packed games, level based games, etc, are far more lilely to have actual music than ambient music, while survival and serene games are more likely to focus on ambience.
However it’s also not incorrect to do the opposite. A solid catchy tune that captures the general theme and essence of the area, or invokes the feeling of setting out on a grand adventure, can work just as well, sometimes even better, than an ambient track.
And, of course, on screen events should also determine the music. WoW has historically been pretty bad at that. Oh it puts in action music in cutscenes and stuff, but then you’d also be fighting Ragnaros to generic cave music, or raiding a camp to the dull drones of the barrens.
As with many things this all comes down to personal preference and opinion, and it is entirely fair for you to prefer ambient music, and it’s fair for you to not like Dragonflights music, but I see this bold claim of “video game music should mostly be ambient” and that ruffles my feathers as an avid video game music enjoyer
