My thoughts about Dragonflight
Hi everyone! This is probably one of the last days in the council for me and I thought I’d share my feelings regarding the state of the game, both during my period in the council but also looking back at the recent releases we’ve had. I’ll split this into segments and add my finishing thoughts at the end of it.
With the help of Yumuros, the post is created with dropdown menus to avoid a huge wall of text (it probably still will be).
I would like to highlight at the start of this that these are my opinions and you do not have to agree. The threads purpose is to highlight the up/downsides of the recent releases Blizzard has made and I hope that other council members will add their thoughts below.
Dragonflight
While I had some misfortunes with my Collector’s Edition arriving late and missing the first two weeks of Dragonflight, I personally feel that the expansion took many steps in the right direction. The base 10.0 delivered many needed system updates ranging from Dragonriding to reworked professions to our new talent trees.
We were introduced to new types of outdoor content that was a much needed improvement over what we had previously (speaking of Legion=>Shadowlands WQs). We even got a new UI and while I personally heavily dislike the cartoonish elements of it, it’s still a huge improvement over what previuously was offered to players.
Let’s dive a bit deeper into some of these topics shall we…
Dragonriding, soon to be called Skyriding (?)
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I personally still think that flying was the greatest single mistake Blizzard has ever made in WoW but that cat is out of the box by so many years it doesn’t matter.
What we did get is instead a huge rework on how flying works and much for the better. The new system is far more interactive, much faster and much more fun to use. Blizzard also delivered in customization, races (both in DF and old world) and accessibility options for it.
Dragonriding, huge W in my book!
Reworked professions
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There are probably many players who are more qualified to talk about this topic than me but here comes my thoughts regardless. I invested a pretty large amount of time leveling Blacksmithing and Mining in S1 and I did enjoy it from an RP point of view.
However, in S2/S3, I rerolled to another class and my Blacksmithing wasn’t really that useful anymore. I now had to interact with other players via the Crafting Orders system and boy do I not like that system at all. First off, you’re limited to the same realm group as your character is on, despite the fact that almost everything on the AH is region wide. So while I had friends on other realm groups that could craft things for me, they couldn’t.
If you needed to get something crafted at max item level, you now had to interact with the RNG system of 
Inspiration . I won’t go deeper into this as Blizzard is addressing it in TWW.
You can’t put up a public craft order for higher item level things because Blizzard wants you to look for crafter “organically”. However, being on a small-medium pop realm, there are few crafters posting and most of them just try to be the latest poster in the Trade-chat. This type of system doesn’t work for me as I don’t have the time to stand around Valdrakken for an hour to get my gear crafted. Either add a bulletin board or allow public crafting orders.
Reworked professions, potential but so far missing the mark…
New talent trees
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I’ve had many discussions about the new talent trees and I feel that it’s been a mixed bag. I greatly enjoyed playing my protection warrior with the new talent tree because I felt that I had meaningful choices to make. I can’t say I play at the level where any of it matters (heroic raiding and 14-20 keys) but the ability to actually pick things that I think make the game easier and more fun to play is a solid 10/10. However, I didn’t really feel that when I played my hunter in S3. Instead, I felt pigeonholed into picking certain things and I felt that I was right back at where my feelings were for the previous talent system.
While some of the talents in the Hero Talent system in TWW looks cool, I’m worried that the system might pigeonhole you even more into certain build paths/talents. Even more so with tier sets.
New talent trees? Hit or miss, appreciated for trying
Updated UI
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I’m surprised it took Blizzard this many years to update their UI but I’m glad it finally happened. Overall feeling is that it’s great, both the editor and the UI elements. It wasn’t great at the start, but Blizzard has been steadily improving it throughout the expansion and it looks like their continuing their work into TWW with the elements that haven’t been updated. Great work, love the dedication and definitely something that was needed to bring WoW into the modern era.
I would however like to point out that some of the art styles are a bit too cartoonish in my taste but alas, that’s why we have addons. I’m happy to continue using ElvUI for my UnitFrames and Nameplates but I’ve gone back to most UI frames being the default one in game.
Another hidden gem is that all three versions of the game now use the same foundation which means that I can now dump the same ElvUI version in all three versions of the game. We also have things like new addons being available via /reload instead of having to restart, F to interact and many accessibility features.
Much needed, great work, love to see what you bring here in the future!
Outdoor Content
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We’ve seen Blizzard evolve into using events as a complement to world quests and that has definitely been a rollercoaster. The Community Feast is probably one of the best grouped open world content Blizzard has produced and I personally enjoyed hunts as well. Dragonbane Keep was a bit of a letdown, so were the storms, Researchers under Fire and Time Rifts. And then we come back with Dreamsurge and Superbloom which I enjoyed. Updated fishing events were fine, same with Fyraak Assults.
It overall seems like they were mostly trying different things and I hope that they somewhere in the future land on something good. But yeah, they’re competing with Guild Wars 2 here and they have a long way to beat that.
Keep trying, you’ll get there eventually
Story
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I could write an entire post about only this but I’ll try to keep it short. Dragonflight has been very, how you you frame it, safe (?) in its story. The main story did not resonate with me at all and I couldn’t really connect all the dots to make sense of it. The Primalists didn’t hit the mark, Wrathion story was horrible and I didn’t really see the need to make the Black Dragonflight be some high school drama.
I already have a lengthy post regarding the Reclamation of Gilneas (The Disaster that is the Reclamation of Gilneas - #2 by Safeguard-garrosh) but yikes…
However, the storylines connected to the Renowns and the Blue Dragonflight were great. I also liked the Human, Blood Elf and Orc heritage questlines so I feel that there are some gems in here as well. And while a bit cheesy, the ending of the 10.2 questline also worked for me.
Let’s hope that the Worldsoul Saga delivers
Misc
I like that Blizzard is feeling brave and that they’re trying new things such as Hardcore, Season of Discovery, Remix and Plunderstorm. I hope that they keep doing these types of things and that they learn from their mistakes and the feedback they get from the community.
Closing thoughts
The game is certainly alive and well and while Blizzard seems to be addressing some of the concerns of the community, we still have at least one elephant in the room to mention.
The game has seen a huge increase in both the quantity and speed of which content is delivered. However, this has come to the cost of quality as there has been a decent amount of issues that should have been solved in internal testing or on the PTR.
Some of these includes bugged guilds and pets on Cata launch (something that was pointed out at the earliest of the beta), tier sets, and certain classes being left in the dust for large portions of seasons, group comps/metas not being an issue, rares in every possible way it can be mentioned.
The above QA issues together with the lack of discussion between Blizzard and the community as well as the direction of the story is what’s personally making me take a break from the game. I was planning on playing Cata but I’ll probably wait for MoP (if even that). TWW is addressing some of the issues I have with the game but not enough to warrant me to stay.
I still hope that this game will continue to improve and that I someday will return. Until then, thanks for the recent years of gameplay and thanks for the opportunity to be a part of the council.