It’s been almost a whole year since DF released and this expansion does not live up to any of the hype.
SL Storyline was superior, it ties in with Azeroth more and brings back a lot of characters/locations from the old world.
SL PvP was superior, even when people hated Rating Locked gear it had way more players and way more participation proving it was better.
SL PvE was superior, the M+ was way more fun, the raids were also far more interesting and had better mechanics and boss fights.
Not to mention Torghast was also a very fun mini-game addition, and for all the complaining people did about SL systems, it had far more players actively playing it.
I miss Shadowlands, I want that back. DF is doing far worse than SL in almost every single aspect.
Shadowlands was poorly done IMO.
Dragonflight had potential but due to them upping the patch cadence, decided Zereth Mortis was a good template to use for their zone design and content which sucks hard. So overall both expansions are pretty low tier IMHO.
Dragonflight isn’t done so won’t judge it on a full expansion basis but so far it went from 10 to 4 in a quick matter of time. Shadowlands on the other hand was so disjointed, so buggy and boring that I just couldn’t bring myself to play it apart from boredom leveling alts, AH play. I did a BIT more in DF but it’s coming up to the same as SL for me in terms of how I’m playing.
Shadowlands was such a disaster it almost killed the game. 9.1 may have been the worst patch ever. 10.1 is below average but not Korthia/conduit energy bad. Too early to compare them completely.
“Seasonals” (the ones people actually liked) need to come back on a weekly rotation as “variety” affixes instead, and they need to delete fortified and tyrannical.
I didn’t enjoy BfA or SLs. But SLs felt like there was more to do personally and I enjoyed the dungeons more than I do in DF.
I enjoyed not being gated by rep to progress through SLs story like DF is making me. I have absolutely no interest in renown or world quests so I had to use YouTube to watch cutscenes. I would have felt more invested in DF if Blizzard didn’t design things this way. Narratively, DF isn’t that interesting anyway and is just more of the same.
heressy, purge the infidel, burn him in the pyre for its nonsense accusations… i kinda want the wolkt era crafting system though. no legendary spam nonsense and a crafting system making me feel i have to work in the game just like irl
I’d say that once you got past all the BS there was more toys to play around with in SL. The covenant system was far too unbalanced but being able to build around another ability if you really hated one of them made some aspects of it fun. Legendaries were also fun but at the beginning the Torghast grind was a pain and the cost of the base items were stupidly expensive. It encouraged people to just buy token if they weren’t sitting on a pile of gold already.
DF on the other hand doesn’t quite feel like it hit the right spot. I personally think talent trees fail in the same ways as the prior talent system did only now it makes your kit, in my experience, feel constantly incomplete. It is just a bunch of under-tuned or non-synergistic talents competing with the meta picks. “New packaging, same product, losers.” - Megatron
The overall theme and story of DF just feels “meh.” It is too much in the opposite direction of SL’s constant ret-cons and trying too hard to seem epic and edgy. Dragons are too generic and, personally, I’ve never liked WoW’s take on dragons. From what they look like to them sharing personalities defined by what flight they are a part of. I’d rather have them finding their places outside of what the Titans charged them with rather than trying desperately to reclaim what they lost.
My hopes are that going forward WoW can become a little more grounded and focus on developing the world and cultures they have introduced, only to have left them in the dust for so long.
While I still believe that Cata is the worst expansion simply for what it did to the structure of WoW ever since it’s released, I onboard with SL being the worst expansion since. I have always enjoyed to lore of the game, and Blizzard had done numerous retcons (it does happen), SL destroyed it all and has come close to reducing WoW to a digital action-future game.
Probably the biggest thing is it created the most toxic environment I have seen in the game. True, it has never been about holding hands and singing songs around the campfire. Throughout SL it seemed like there was always a minority that was for something and a majority that was not (I’m not saying 10%/90%, this less than/greater than). It seemed like Blizzard did their best to make every style of playing more difficult and reliant on other styles to advance. If anything was done to simplify one side it drew the ire of the other.
DF seems to have eased up on that a bit for the most part - perhaps Blizz sees themselves as extending a bit of an olive branch?. Initially there was heated “debater” concerning dragonriding/flying but it has largely died down. Personally I had major issues with the dragonriding but found my work around - still wanted access to my hundreds of mounts and it looks like that is going to show up soon. Expectedly, all of the armor upgrade and catalyst stuff has sparked controversy. I honestly do not understand how it is supposed to work or see how it impacts my playstyle but obviously others do not think the same way lol.
