I’m not sure if this is where this goes, so please let me know if I should delete it and take it elsewhere.
I’ve been back for about 4 months now and I still couldn’t confidently tell you how any of the major systems in Dragonflight work.
- The game doesn’t tell you what’s on a weekly character lockout, an account-wide lockout, or what can be farmed on multiple alts. This makes a lot of content frustrating because the first time you do it maybe you got great rewards, but then you spend time doing it again and get little to nothing. And then you don’t know if it’s bad RNG, a character lockout, or an account lockout, so all you can do is run it a third time on an alt, knowing it might be a waste.
- There seems to be absolutely no pattern to which currencies go in the currency tab and which pile up in your bags.
- There are tons of gear sets and crests. You have no way of knowing which sets upgrade into alternate colors, and if that changes how they catalyze. And the crests all have nearly identical names, making it hard to remember which are for which. At least you can mouse over them and see where to get them, I guess?
- There are a ton of events that move or have short windows and put your rewards on a timer. I can’t count how many times the Big Dig has ended while I was 90% of the way to finishing a purple tome.
- The zerg format is extremely unfun. If you’re new and you don’t know where anything is, you just miss spawns constantly because everyone else swarms them before they’re even damageable. It doesn’t help that all the maps are extremely vertically layered wherever these rares tend to occur. I can’t count the times I’ve searched in vain for the entrace to a cave because the rare spawn marker says it’s right under me or right above me but I can’t get to it.
Earlier today, I also picked the wrong rare to pursue. I was going after them in chronological spawn order, but nearly everyone else decided to go a different route, so in the time it took me to attempt a hard rare with only one other person and be forced to retreat, 2 of the other spawns were dead. And by the time we got halfway to the other 2, they were dead, too. So I tried to go back to the first rare I attempted, and it died before I got halfway there. - I don’t even want to touch on crafting or how hard it is to level some skills beyond 50 now that nobody is placing crafting orders for lower level or mid-level stuff. I got hyped when I heard they made crafting a bigger investment and a more worthwhile endgame activity, but I’m told that was mostly only true at the start of the expansion. Now, 90% of the people I ask for tips tell me to not even bother with only one season left to go.
All in all, I feel like I have to have wowhead open on another monitor with 30 tabs open just to figure out how things work and keep track of them. It’s hard to prioritize what to do because of this, and, worst of all, the weird cadence and timing of these systems give me something like FOMO.
I used to enjoy spending a day doing pet battles or running old dungeons or leveling an alt, but now I’m keenly aware that there are events that have rewards I still lack going off every 30-60 minutes and I can’t help but feel like I should avoid doing what I want to do and focus on doing the tedious little fetch quests for the soup and the dig, among other things, before they get harder after the expansion ends.
Plus, I’d love to go back and finish some Shadowlands content on one or two of my characters, but I now have a hard time justifying revisiting that content, some of which is harder now that everyone has moved on, when I could be grinding current content.
It feels like Blizz has built a mirror maze and there’s only one path through it, and it requires retracing your steps many times and taking no diversions. Like I need a spreadsheet with a cheat sheet on all the systems and mechanics and drops to guide me through the same events and world quests over and over again if I want to make any progress in present content.
Oh, and hearing about all of the addon requirements for higher level dungeon and raid content is daunting. I’ve tried a lot of UI customization and I can never go a week without one of my addons giving me constant errors. Knowing that I’m going to want to heavily customize everything in order to pull my weight in endgame content just adds an extra hurdle to everything. They almost feel like old school attunements. “You must do these 8 tasks before you’re allowed to enter this raid.”
My only feedback would be to normalize certain restrictions and elements of events for consistency, so players always know, “I can do this once per week per character” or “I can do this once per week per account”, etc. And a more explicit way of know how things upgrade and what they might catalyze into. I love upgrading and catalyzing gear. I just dislike how unclear it is. Even a tooltip option might help.
Thanks for listening to my TED Talk?