Picking up DF open world content again (to do trading post and bail) since doing solely legacy content since December after being burned by various systems, I was promptly reminded by DF is a hard avoid.
Quest spam all over the place when you zone in. No proper order and everything all over the place.
Bag clogging currency items meant to force you to travel to turn in npcs every 5 minutes to artificially prolong engagement metrics, a la Airport Oribos 2.0.
Pushing crafting instead of just giving drops normally. Gives pay to avoid playing vibes hard which belong in mobile games.
Meaningful Choice timegated professions. This is what got me to stop playing in December. The fact I couldn’t actually grind for power a solo side thing is terrible. Hiding the timegate behind drop caps as a form of hidden mechanic is what trolled me into stopping IIRC.
No interest in crafting for power. Making tier a timegate dripfeed to craft is the worst combination possible.
Just remove raid lockouts and change looting in m+ and raids to be depreciating returns rather than waiting on vault instead.
The system designers have failed when playing legacy xpacs up to and including SL is superior to acting like DF exists. I basically am reminded every time that they’re trolling players to drag out subs even if it makes the game feel like a worthless troll. The gearing experience is so bad that anything that remotely involves it is instantly ruined in my eyes. No I’m not complaining about it being too hard, just about steered towards mobile game crafting and fomo weekly for timegate as progress.
I’d rather pretend gearing doesn’t exist, nor anything current that involves itself in such. In case Blizzard wants to know why 99% of my gameplay is in older xpacs. Trash mobile game systems that want to troll players rather than let them do what they want properly with a decent progression experience rather than timegate/fomo as gear and profession progress.
I honestly think they’re hellbent on driving their one trick pony FOMO/timegate shticks into the ground since it’s the path of least resistance. They don’t care.
Would you rather have to do X questline to access whatever new content they put out? As someone who doesn’t play very frequently, that doesn’t sound very accessible for you.
The only currencies that I have in my bag for DF are the crests and they’re going to the currency tab next season so.
Drops still exist normally. You don’t have to interact with crafting if you don’t want to.
I actually agree with this point, but it seems counterproductive to your last point. If professions were easier to unlock, wouldn’t that be more incentivize crafting which you’re against in your last point?
Neither of these points are relating to the open world experience.
It’s not meaningful to play timegate as progress for player power to the extent and annoyance DF does it. Sugaring it up with cosmetics doesn’t work.
It’s precisely why I gave up and exclusively do old xpac farming for mounts and mogs instead.
Legion did it best with artifact power and titanforging. All they had to do was make artifact power timegated like they do conquest and valor points and it would have solved the issue mythic raiders made it out to be. Titanforging was nice and again they could have just made the ilvl window on it increase over the course of a patch.
That’s the whole “casual gearing” mess at its best imo.
Torghast legendaries were better than legions and the crafting system in dragonflight is the best its been, having mats come from kills in the world would’ve felt better than from gatherers this expansion but I get that its to reinforce gathering professions as primary instead of turning them into secondaries like fishing.
I think there’s a growing % of the playerbase who live for artifical progression brought on by gradual nerfs / ilvl creep. Its always existed but its pretty ridiculous how themes like limiting pvp viability based on seasonal play time have remained and even great vault chasing instead of things like the fated vendor for mythic raiders. I don’t even think most players enjoy playing the game game, they enjoy gambling except they need it to be as far removed from traditional gambling in order for them to get the most joy out of it (titanforging was too obvious).
I thought story, side, and world quests were all pretty straight forward. Nothing you have to really go searching for.
Yeah. It is pretty annoying. So much stuff in my bags that I might get around to using someday. Don’t want to throw it haha. Less bag space currency would be nice.
I’m not hardcore but I just didn’t craft anything. I never see the point of the gold cost to craft stuff that is going to be obsolete in a few months. Maybe I’m just cheap haha.
I really don’t understand this complaint. If you could grind the entire game activities and story, the game would get stale faster. I don’t mind the time intervals in the story. There is always so much else to work on between story parts.
Crafting didn’t seem necessary to me. Between drops and vault I could gear up pretty fast to a level that I was happy with.
I am not a fan of this. It would make it feel that anytime I wasn’t running raids/m+ than I was losing out.
I agree with OP. DF is absolutely horrendous to try and get BACK into. Apparently it’s enjoyable for the folks that have been playing continuously since release. I played more DF at release than I did SL or BFA but have found it waaaaay less inviting to come back into after a hiatus. Where am I supposed to go? Why are there a thousand quests in Valdraaken? Why don’t 95% of them actually matter in any meaningful way?
I want to enjoy the game a bit as a solo player getting back into it before jumping into group content - HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO DO THAT?
Maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with the design of a game that leaves new and returning players with this question of how to enjoy the game.
This is so much better than the on rails design of Shadowlands. Literally angels picking you up by the neck, flying you to the next quest and telling you, “Do this one NOW!!”
Barely survived the shadowlands leveling experience. Was so sick of the exposition heavy on rails quests. Felt like the game was playing me.
Dragon flight has it’s issues, but the open world questing was the most fun I’ve had in this game in a long long time.
Artifact power was timegated. But it was soft capped rather than hard capped.
Nowhere. Almost none of the stuff in Valdrakken is relevant to anyone. 90% of the quests are just leveling stuff and can be ignored. The rest is also irrelevant, just old stuff or profession quests. Besides the questline giving by Shandris, which may or may not be required for next patch.
I like dragonflight a lot better than SL. If you had compared BFA to Dragonflight and said BFA was superior for open world content/crafting I would have agreed with you.
Never cared for professions in this game tbh(boring, unfun imo). Fooled with fishing in Mop, because of the Nat Pagle bug water walking mount, and they did make cooking kind of fun for once with the Halfhill farm. Wod did some, because there really wasn’t anything else to do in that xpac, if you didn’t raid. Since then, I haven’t leveled out any profs. Mop, Legion, and BFA had the best open world content this game has ever had imho. Why they drifted away from that model idk.
…you mean like… drops coming from quest completions, killing current patch mobs, running dungeons, collecting currencies for turn ins to buy specific gear? yeah, we definitely have none of that at all.
It’s not at all like you can hangout in a dreamsurge area for a bit and collect enough gear from just drops alone and then target specific slots for 400+ gear.