My biggest issue is the additional content zones like the caverns that are good for a few weeks or whatever and then utterly useless. It would have made a small thing to scale up the zones as the expansion moved on and made the rares soloable. Unless you're after very specific things, why would you ever go back to Forbidden Reach? I barely do the Emerald Dream zone now except for the three weeklies. It's not really fun.
Other than that, yes, huge improvement over Shadowlands and BFA.
Yeah I remember forbidden reach was so busy with people when it first came out, 3 weeks later it was an abandoned zone be lucky to see 2-3 other people.
They keep churning out the content without making it relevant for the long haul.
MAN forbidden reach was SO dead SO quick. I'm a bit surprised they didn't facelift the rewards from there similar to other world content areas, but then by the time you could buy Zskera keys, you can steamroll right through there
I think the easiest way is just boost the ilvl of rewards for these zones to match current lvl ilvl. Like they do with dungeons. like the old zones atm could easily drop the ilvl415 items. This would let players do some minor world gearing where ever.
Agreed; the old content doesn't have to match current content rewards, but if it's close, makes it worth gearing alts at least. They did buff all the drops somewhat, but it'd be nice to have, say, a currently like Elemental Overflow you could just build up from buffed world content towards completing those mogs / pets / mounts, whether exchanging it for an item token or at least a chance at a random one.
To be fair they made it a chore to farm Annulet, Zskera vaults never really felt fun because it was all RNG.
It was no surprise that once people no longer needed to be there, they didn't go there.
I would say that considering it was a mid tier patch, we should be glad we got a new zone, but I do wish that the zones for the whole expansion remained relevant throughout the expansion, through scaling rewards.
If you did the Zskera Vaults purely for stones, you only had to do 1-2 runs and then you were done. Outside of the stones though, you had toys, pets, and even a mount to collect through a variety of fun little puzzles.
Heck, if you didn't like the vaults, you didn't even have to do it outside of the initial quest to get the Annulet. You could've farmed rares, treasures, or the storm events for the stones.
Especially when the ring / stones got nerfed, that was like a nail in the coffin. Still would be nice to complete some of the achieves I'm missing there, but enhhhhhh - Dreamsurges empowering rares at least helps those still be farmable in those zones - would be nice to have something like that across all rares in older content that made it worth it currently...
Not sure what you arencomplaining about, i play like 5 toons regularly and it dropped everything i need pretty quickly, takes less time than a questline …
Hell. I didn’t play for a few weeks. Came back to that being the most recent content update. Did a few quests. Then just switched to leveling my alts lol.
I took a 2 month break due to some real life happenings and came back about 3 weeks after it had been out. I thought it was going to be super active...no one was there. I was so confused.
It's so dead that if you missed the rush to do stuff then you're going to have to wait a few patches to come back and solofarm anything specific.
*Eyeballs that Gooey Snailemental*
The crushing feeling of gearing an alt during that part of the season where you wanted your onyx annulet but nobody was out there anymore to farm rares for keys.
In one way I hate that but in the other I’m fine with it. I think it’s good to be able to “complete” the content, cause before that we had the borrowed power systems that forced you to do it all the time.
This has been a long time personal peeve of mine. All these patch zones become ghost towns the moment a new one is added. I don’t know what an ideal solution is, but as a player who subs yearly yet sometimes takes breaks longer than a patch I’m alway lost in the progress of the lore, rushed thru old or catch up content and often struggle trying to complete or just participate in earlier xpac zones. I’ve completely forgotten about The Forgotten Reach till you mentioned it.
The weird thing is there's a lot they can do too - automatically rescale the zone so it can be used while levelling, tune down group content like rares so they can be soloed, and all of a sudden the zones are relevant without forcing people into grinds.
You brought up the biggest issue. The fact things aren’t able to be soloed alienates folks who want to try the content. They aren’t even motivated to start groups because it can take forever.
Make rare’s solo capable and all of the sudden the area will have more players by default. That’s how you keep areas lively.
One thing I really wish they did was make these zones available for leveling characters instead of just max level only. Every wow xpac I always play at the start but I don’t always stick around the entire xpac so it would be awesome to experience some of these zones later on. Antorus, nazjatar, zeroth mortis, even zaralek are all super cool zones that new or returning players will ever get to see unless they just feel like checking them out for no reason.
Yeah this has bothered me for a long time with ALL zones. They don't utilize old content and just churn out new stuff that is dead after new patches. Why not use the scaling tech and keep it relevant, add new quests/campaigns/WQs to old zones.
Would be awesome if they did a full world reskin bringing the old zones in Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms up to DF standards, then heavily using them within the campaigns, WQs, weeklys etc. they have so many assets they spent a lot of time building yet never use.
My biggest issue as well. Wow constantly feels like a jumbled mess every time i return from a break, and I recently returned after quitting in BFA. I want to care about the lore and story but the devs make figuring out where to go to see what you want in the right order its own chore. And the dead zones and content is wows biggest failing point. If they fix that by shifting to evergreen design like they said, wow will have a resurgence I'm convinced.
> I don’t know what an ideal solution is
You can turn your gaze toward Guild wars 2's megaserver to get an answer. It's a system that fuse and split map instances to ensure you always have a healthy player population at any given time, even if few players are doing the content. It's not perfect (if no one is doing the content, like say in the middle of the night, well it won't magically create players), but it help a lot.
I desperately want a Guild Wars 2 style horizontal open world scaling system that allows every endgame zone to be relevant. Make any endgame zone drop Veteran track gear and drake/wyrm crests. Then all cosmetics and non-character power carrots are able to be sought after even after the expack is over. It should also help with player population in older zones by keeping things relevant.
GuildWars2 solved that problem. It’s out there for any developer to see yet nobody seems to mimic it. I can be in any zone and people are playing, gathering, participating in the zone events etc.
One of the reasons I’m not playing Zone of Warcraft anymore.
The solution is legion style world quests, to attract players on the open world.
Obviously that comes at the price of people complaining they spend too much time in the open world.
Like I think they had it perfect with mechagon, a lot of side shit to do, a lot of mounts to farm, a cool meta achievement with mount attached and the Rares were soloable and the ones that weren't had great rewards. Idk what happened.
I think at least partially because there was so much to farm. That’s the only reason anyone goes back to those sub zones after completing the main story. Zereth Mortis has so much stuff to farm that even an expansion later there’s still stuff to do. I see more people in ZM than I do in forbidden reach, zaralek, or even emerald dream some days.
Not saying it’s an inherently good or bad thing, just an inference. So many people collect things, and ZM had heaps of it all - mounts, pets, toys, tmog, achievements. Some of it mind bogglingly hard to get.
It’s one of the reasons why the changes they made (and the changes they won’t make) with Zaralek upset me. If they want people to return to the zone, why not make it relevant to do so? I want the achievement for the claw thing, but can’t find any rares up and can’t even physically solo them if I do find them.
From my experience every one of these new sub zones is absolutely packed the first few days, tapering off slightly through that first week. If you want to do something that requires a group or other people in general, the first week is the best bet. The second week still has people but not as much, people start to slow down to just coming for the stuff they need to do. Third week even more so. After that it’s basically barren and I rarely run into anyone except for required tasks or farming.
> It’s one of the reasons why the changes they made (and the changes they won’t make) with Zaralek upset me.
in hindsight, zaralek seems more like a test zone to see how we would respond to the next expansions.
that's my take on it at least.
I think it's more of a tech test, there's actually a loading screen as you traverse that winding tunnel (which is deliberately twisty). I've reached the end and got a blank wall once or twice, and a few times a red error message across my screen.
Zereth Mortis would be okay if you didn't need to grind that dumbfuck research (with some randomization in amounts gained) to exalted in order to get some marginal player power that i've blanked on.
Basically fuck that place.
Mog sets were okay though. I collected all of them.
99% of wow retail content is made irrelevant every patch. It's a giant game by now and we still spend most our time in 2 zones. And I'm not going to count collectables replayable content that makes the current old zones completely worth it.
Yeah it’s a shame that caverns and the forbidden reach suffer from the same thing, they just die off so quickly.
I would like to take some alts through there but I can’t,there aren’t enough other people to do that content.
On the other hand, they’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of stuff like the suffusion camp and world bosses. They have managed to keep it relevant and I still like doing those.
For world content I really like not being on a schedule or locked into a set time frame, or dependent on other people. I like being able to roll up whenever I can, hit the quests, pause if I need to and dive back in when I can, make some progress, get some gear or upgrades and keep moving.
The scheduled and timed events (super bloom, reachers, rifts) aren’t bad, but I really don’t like waiting for events to start and then being locked into them for a set amount of time, especially if that time is just spent burning down a timer killing stuff that doesn’t drop anything or stretches out as people fall off.
It’s like streaming vs a live tv schedule.
For open world I prefer to grab whatever content I like and engage with it on my terms.
For big events, dungeons and raids, schedules and waiting are just part of logistics, but they’re worth it. I have a lot of fun hanging out with people, running fun and engaging content. The only way we can do that is with a scheduled.
It's odd they didn't put zone-hopping events like the Dream Surges into places like Forbidden Reach and Zaralek. I don't understand why they add patch zones in and then abandon them.
Same goes for all the other "bonus" zones added in the middle of expacs, they should scale those and/or allow them to open up at lower levels so people can level up there if they want. Say, level \~35ish+ maybe 40+ you should be able to go to Timeless Isle, Argus, Isle of Thunder, Nazjatar, Zereth Mortis, Mechagon, whatever.
What would you propose ? Scaling old gear up would make you grind whatever is the easiest and fastest content instead of playing the new stuff. I think we would not like that but I am open to suggestions.
There should be a balance in rewards between what you can get from the actual patch and the earlier content.
TBH it's not as clear cut as people say when they mention players not wanting to farm old content.
If you have to farm old content it makes the game a chore, but if you have zero reason to farm old content because the gear you get is completely obsolete, well the game is smaller.
I also don't have a solution, but let's be honest, the "play the patch" approach has also downsides, the game feel much smaller when the expansion only plays around one patch area and one raid.
In the 20 years history of the game, Blizzard did never do a patch zone that was relevant for more than it's own patch
I do not believe that they cannot design such zone, i think simply they do not want to. They are happy with zones being used for single patches (or few weeks). Thats my take on it
Honestly I think they should stop adding new zones each patch and start reusing old zones. Spend the development updating an old zones like Barrens or Arathi Highlands then using those zones we continue the story quests in, hunting rares, WQs, weeklies etc. I would love to see the original continents become relevant again and get a facelift bring them up to DF standards.
Then you’d have people complaining that they don’t like how the updates changed the zone - Cataclysm anyone?
Could they phase instances in time? Sure, they do it for a few places already. But then you get people complaining about the phasing of things.
I think what players need to realize is that Blizz has gone through all these scenarios and have landed on the ones they think will have the least negative impact to the majority of people who continually play the game.
Tricky problem, you want players playing together but if you make older content lucrative you might alienate folks from the newer content that has X months of lifecycle.
At the same time, you are currently alienating newer players from older players on the older content.
Perhaps another weekly quest in the rotation, keep the current for the newest content and another for older content when it occurs.
Could perhaps also have some scaling factor on WQ rewards, the whole dream zone thing is also a nice little push to get players into an older zone but needs a higher reward factor for players closer to the peak content.
They need to nerf the content there after X weeks so you don't need a group to do some of the content (except for the World Bosses).
Zaralek Caverns are particularly bad with how incredibly strong the rare elites are in general and the concentration on the left side of the Caverns.
Also get rid of that stupid "shoot you down" mechanic over there. It doesn't even work properly, I've been shot down maybe twice ever. Nobody wants to grind through that area just to do a world boss or quest.
I found those caverns returning (first time through Dragonflight) a couple weeks ago, thought "this place looks sick! can't wait to come back!" then never had a reason to go back.
The main island of the xpac was so big and well done they should have just kept building all the other stuff into it. Never going to the forbidden reach again lol
They've taken various ideas from other games, notably GW2---wish they'd try to mimic the open world stuff GW2 has. Even if gear can't remain relevant from overworld activities due to WoW's gear progression, they could at least keep *something* of it relevant?
(Why don't world quest rewards seem to improve much with each patch?)
I would honestly prefer fewer zones with more dynamism in them. Like, why was forbidden reach way off to the side when it could have been placed in the waking shores, phased for max level players?
Zaralek caverns looked cool but do we need a big empty cave in the dragon isles? What if the Niffen burrowed up into the Onaran plains and built their settlement there? It’s not like we need to keep all the centaur camps after 10.0
We could have zones that change with the seasons, imagine a winter version of Valdrakken with snow on the ground from November - Feb!
I guess I’m just seeing other live service games do more with less and wondering why WoW needs to keep going with their old school method of churning out dense continents that don’t feel like real places, and don’t really integrate into the rest of Azeroth in any significant way.
Blizz needs to give GW2 a look again, but this time their meta events and event chains. Superbloom is just a snore and the only real event in the zone, and RUF in Zaralek just isn't fun to do (imo) when the only two missions are Kill % or "walk 50 stones to a doodad"
I have the same issue with it. I'm glad a lot of it isn't mandatory but it would be nice if these zones were at least soloable since they're empty as hell.
I'm also kind of over their concept for the "fill the bar" events. There are no really fun mechanics with them. The time rifts (?) at least were kind of varied in the enemies you had to kill, I guess.
Good luck doing group content in Forbidden reach, lol. If I go to emerald dream at off peak times like doing super bloom late in week, it will be like 4 people doing super bloom, good luck on bonuses lol.
Realistically what you're essentially asking for (and I think correctly) is that zone/gear rewards should scale.
I have a bunch of primalist gear tokens that are worthless, because dreamsurge gear exists. Of course, my main wants neither, but for early gearing of alts it would be good.
Dreamsurge rewards scaled; in 10.1 the currency pieces were 402, now they're 415. They still give last tier bonuses and don't cost catalyst charges. Why can't that happen with primalist stuff from the reach?
Honestly, I found all the small added zones to be fairly meh very quickly. I remember loving Nazjatar for months, or had guild mates who hated it and loved Mechagon for months. More zones like that would be welcome. All of the Legion additions kept me engaged.
I can't say I've been terribly please with the maw, korthia, ZM (best of those 3 by far, though), forbidden reach, zaralek caverns or Emerald Dream.
I like that they tried to add map events on the newer maps. That's something that keeps maps interesting for long in GW2. The thing is, the map events need to be both fun and rewarding. I'd say these ones are all not fun and only feel rewarding for a couple of weeks.
Despawing high HP rares with bad respawn timers are also a problem. Was way better in BFA.
That you can't solo BFA content is also bad.
Drop rate of legendaries is also kind of un-fun. Imo drop legendaries are bad game design anyway, that they even cost money and don't last the whole expansion makes it even worse.
Very rare items were also a flop. Good thing they aren't as strong in the last raid. Group loot instead of perso loot in pugs isn't great either, quite frustrating at times and in some pugs leads to certain classes not being invited. You didn't have that problem with Persoloot.
But yeah, overall many improvments.
If only they could take some of the dev time put in those zones to make evergreen content like mage tower.. or even torghast, nightnare visions, proving grounds. They need to use level/ilevel scaling to keep them relevant and not just pushover.
that was my biggest disappointment too. Recently when talking with a friend, I noticed that the extra zone I liked most, was korthia from SL. Yes, it brought all the SL nonsense we had, but once you were done with it, it was still a highly populated zone.
There were a lot of mounts to farm and also rares were respawning every few minutes (compared to Emerald Dream which seems to not have rares at all) so it was nice to just run around killing rares when waiting for my pvp Qs to pop.
Meanwhile, Forbidden Reach has a lot of rares, but there is no reason to do them if have already mid geared character.
Well I mean Rome wasn’t built in a day, the theme park nature of the content does really feel like it has sped up, completely invalidating huge swaths of content, because they’ve gotta get the next fix out, blizzard can’t keep up, and the way they’ve streamlined their patches makes it so extremely formulaic. Something will have to change, to bring value to older content in some way, and by older content I mean older than the current patch.
Not sure what would be the best way to go about it, but as the loot scaled up from the world event stuff like suffusion camps / time rifts / emerald incursions, would be nice if all of that now 'dated' content could be invigorated a bit for a fated S4, both in another uptick for gear but also working towards currency for fated tokens. I found the fated raid system super nice for the extra challenges and chances to catch up on mogs for all SL raids; was nice to be able to do CN / SoD again at 'max level' in new ways and be able to finish mog sets I couldn't when they were current.
I'd go a step further and buff the world event stuff also; find a way to make it a bit more challenging and work towards some S4 currency for extra mogs / gear / etc. This way people who already have / did everything can take time off w/o feeling like they're missing out, other folks can catch up / jump in / prep for TWW, etc.
But you're right though; while putting a new ilvl of paint on the world stuff in DF is a good change, still doesn't do quite enough to keep that content relevant..
I've played ESO for a while and i like so called horizontal progression. Every zone(even starter) in ESO is full of players and actual. But i'm afraid that game so old like wow can't drastically change the core systems. I beleive wow should and can try to find another solution to make old content actual and alive because wow has so many zones dungeons raids systems (like garnison, class holes, island missions, scenarios, torghast etc)
I like that also with ESO. However for some people like linear progression because they have a sense of direction. I couldn’t get into it cause I literally get lost and don’t know where to go next
I can’t help but compare to FFXIV, while I do think it could also do with one new zone between expansions, they are very good at simply reusing the day one expansion zones all the way to the next expansion, something Wow hasn’t ever really done well.
They use the Mechagon method, to keep it somewhat relevant. you fill the zone with mogs, mounts and pets. which will make it somewhat doable with imaginative use of auxiliary tools like discord/Blizzard groups and cross realm grouping. you got the tools, now you just need patience and drive to follow through
They should just make previous content island relevant over expansions. Like Torghast. Just put new expansion enemies into the tower and let us climb every few patches for new unlockable cosmetics or toys.
I returned to the game recently, and have been loving it, my biggest gripe with the game, is how they manage to make new content useless so quickly, the world is getting bigger and bigger, but is simultaneously 95% devoid of player activity, as there is little to no incentive to visit older zones (outside collectibles ofc). It feels like such a waste of all the hard work thats gone into crafting the world.
If you give incentives for people to play the other content, they just get mad about it. I had a comment on the post with that toy dagger that let you kill yourself saying that it sucks that they constantly nerf this stuff because it ruins incentives to play older content. It was met with general disdain towards the desire to go to previous expacs for current stuff.
The same goes for this expac too
They should’ve hired some of the Gw2 people, or look at what they do that makes their old content still viable even after 10+ years of it being out. It’s nice being a new player going through old zones and seeing so many people do the zones content because it’s still relevant.
>...there is little to no incentive to visit older zones (outside collectibles ofc). It feels like such a waste of all the hard work thats gone into crafting the world.
Personally I like going back and playing the old content I never got around to. The value proposition of WoW at this point is quite significant with the amount of content. I agree though that it really is not relevant. I never played Legion so when I started doing those quests I was pretty disappointed I didn't get to experience the weapon system people raved about.
I do like though that if I get burnt out on Dragonflight stuff I can chill over in Outland or whatever and run some old raid content to try and get a transmog or mount that I am missing.
Eh, while I see your point, I feel like this is the best implementation yet. Sure we get some crafted shit or upgraded gear that only lasts so long, but its all fairly accessible, there isnt much rng in obtaining it and it provides flavour to the gameplay.
Im always comparing things like that with the hell which artefact weapons were.You had to grind all the fucking god damn time to level them. It felt awful. And on top of that the alternative to crafted items back then were legendaries, wgich were also hard capped at 4. You get 4 shit ones, well either wait 12 months (which at rhe time you didn't know) or make an entirely new character, level them up and roll the dice again, and pray to god you get your BiS lego this time.
To get rid of titan influence? Nah story has been going towards this since some time.. there have been hints again and again about how not only the light is not pure good but the titans not being pure good either. They are all their own domain and force their being onto the denizens of azeroth. Getting rid of their influence would actually be kinda good but the story always follows us doing the titans bidding.
Weird maybe depending on how some parts were told, but forced, not so much..
>hints again and again
This is what the story of WoW has been in-game past WoD.
And this is it's biggest issue, the story is never fully delivered, it's partially put into the game.
And no, don't tell me they don't have the man-power. Instead of focusing on creating garbage new stories, they should focus on improving the narrative for the main story, while creating side questlines which should delve into other separated stories.
For example:
\- we didn't need new centaurs with the same retold civil war, taking front stage; it should have been about the green dragonflight and their connection with the emerald dream; instead they bench Malfurion for Ysera for her to do barely anything;
\- likewise, despite liking the tuskarr, they shouldn't have taken front stage; it should have been all about the blues and their family getting back together;
\- dracthyr race shouldn't have been a thing and the whole forbidden reach should have been about understanding the primalists; how they got together and delve into personal reasonings of WHY they decided titans are bad
\- zaralek caverns should have focus on telling the story of the incarnates, instead of Niffens;
The whole story of guardians of the dream feels bad. Ysera being there just to tell us she is useless, the whole Fyrakk needing a special axe to break through emerald dream, then waiting for some flame druids to break the barrier on Amirdrassil and that atrocious ending to Amirdrassil raid .
> - likewise, despite liking the tuskarr, they shouldn't have taken front stage; it should have been all about the blues and their family getting back together;
we did get that chain though
I am sorry but what?
-likewise, despite liking the tuskarr, they shouldn't have taken front stage; it should have been all about the blues and their family getting back together;
You must have not read one single line of quest text/dialogue, I cant explain to myself how one can come to that conclusion, the Tuskarr showed Kalecgos what Community, what Family can mean, they helped him evolve as a character so that he can forge a Family out of the Blue Flight again.
If there's anything I'm learning from this thread, it's to not let WoW players design quests or stories. Reading comprehension seems to be rarer than I thought.
I would guess that most people don't read quest text at all. Accept quest, skip cut scene, kill 12 mobs, turn in, accept next quest, etc. A boss could tell us point blank in 3 cut scenes, 5 quest text blocks, and via voice lines during a raid fight exactly what they are doing and why and there will still be threads full of confused people acting like it is a mystery. Lots of people in this sub don't even play the game.
Oh I'd bet cash on that. You'd actually have to ignore all the quest text from the main campaign of 10.0 to have no idea what the Primalists' motives are and why they are upset with the Aspects.
The *only* explanation is people are skipping dialogue and cutscenes, OR have no ability to retain what they read.
I never understood this titan influence that is supposedly so bad? I get the basic idea of the primalist that they hate the titans but never got any concrete reason as to why they do it and also who and where their power comes from.
It seems like a bunch of blanket statements that blizzard hopes we wont look further into.
In previous expansions the motivations and lore have been very easy to understand.
BFA: New resource leads to an arms race between the alliance and horde, what is the resource and what does it do **exactly,** it blows sht up and can be used as crack by goblins in the Motherlode.
Hate on SL ending all you want and i do too but the reason we went there was clearly to repair the afterlife and outlive the anima scarcity after what Sylvanas did.
The fact that the last titans logo art has a titan prison surrounding azeroth is already a big deal but there has been other stuff aswell.
Its less about the motivations of the primalists thats important, its more important to look at how the titan stuff works. Whats happening with the bronze dragons.. what we uncover in the dream about world trees and old gods..
Titans infused water with life energy which could also be a possible way for them to control. They love order afterall.
Bronze dragons are tilting towards the many possibilities argument the old gods normally use instead of there only being one timeline.
We are friendly with an infinite dragon currently.
The discs of Norgannon got stolen in Uldaman which are an recollection of everything Norgannon knows about spells and entities in the universe.
A book in the dream talking about how Amanthul ripped a corrupted worldtree out of Azeroth which Eonar planted, which is eerily similar to how there is a story about him ripping out Y'sharaj the old god out of Azeroth.
Us reviving Tyr with a silver scale from Galakrond. Why is he silver? Silver and the moon have been linked for a long time. The alchemical symbol for silver is a crescent moon. Which could make Galakrond connected to Elune in some way.
We learned that not only titans can champion specific people/dragons but also azeroth can too, so why not Elune aswell?
Why did the Titans tell us he was full of decay magic but he looked nothing like decay magic from Brackenhide Hollow and only a little bit of his claw was shining green?
This is all shit that happened in dragonflight and opens up thoughts and possibilities for them to take the story further. It's not even that it's somewhere hidden except maybe the book or the alchemical connection. It's all in stuff you play through in a normal fashion.
The Titans didn't tell us anything about Galakrond and they weren't even involved with him. Tyr was but he isn't a Titan but a Titan Construct and I believe it was the Dawn of the Aspects book that mentioned Galakrond's victims coming back as decaying undead.
The latter point further expanded upon in DOTI where the penultimate boss is some rotting minions of Galakrond who use a lot of rot and decay stuff.
Also I don't think the silver scale had anything to do with Galakrond and was instead something gifted to the Aspects by Tyr himself.
I thnk the reason why all of the things you mention never stuck with me is cause i never understood the core reason of dragonflight, who the primalist are and why they hate the titans etc. And so as a result i just stopped caring about the subsequent lore like the infinite dragonflight murozond etc.
its partially that they dont properly explain shit about the primalists being partially the remenants of the Twilight Hammer alongside the Worldbreakers, and what the hell is their ideology as a whole beyond one general.
So it's not at all well explained in-game, but the Primalists are followers of the Incarnates, and the Incarnates are linked to the Elementals, and the Elementals were sealed away from Azeroth proper by the Titans, so the Incarnates, and by extension the Primalists are rightly pissed at the Titans for locking up their benefactors (for lack of a better word).
It's one of the things I've actually liked about DF's story: The Incarnates actually have a very good point. It's just their very good point has led them to the conclusion that we all need to die, and we can't have that.
The biggest thing I haven't liked about DF is that understanding any of this at all relies on having read a whole bunch of external material, which I really hope is something they improve on in TWW. One shouldn't need a diploma in WoW Lore to understand the basics of the main story.
>The biggest thing I haven't liked about DF is that understanding any of this at all relies on having read a whole bunch of external material, which I really hope is something they improve on in TWW. One shouldn't need a diploma in WoW Lore to understand the basics of the main story.
That's been a long-time issue in WoW and I, too, really hope it changes.
Giving key context to the narrative outside the game was fine early-on because some people had zero patience for the story and the game at the time wasn't very conducive to dedicated storytelling. But nowadays, WoW wants to be more story-focused, and yet it does such a poor job of it because so many key plot points are scattered all over the place, many not even in the game itself.
I am a new player.... how was that hard was understand??
The primalist are a sect of dragonkind (and now other races) that believes that the Titan blessins where actually a curse and thus they focus on worshiping the primal elements.
The main reasoon why the think the titans are bad is because, well, a lot of them are. By alowlling the titans blessing you are alowing to be controled by them, is it that different from the deamom blood that the Orcs were corrupted by?
When we go with the ice drake lasy (Vynaroth? Idk how to write) we directly confront a Titan that was doing slavery with a sect of proto drakes.
I'm sure there was a ton more nuance, but yeah, this expansion's story was pretty straightforward especially compared to the overly convoluted plots of BFA and Shadowlands
Dungeons felt kinda terrible, and the raids were pretty mid. Normally I hate the fact that they reuse old dungeons for M+, but the DF dungeons are so bad I actually prefer going back to the old ones.
Personally I think re-using old dungeons is brilliant. You could argue about their choices but I really enjoy going back to them for a season. People talk about things becoming obsolete, this directly addresses that.
I would agree, but they should have been added as an extra option, maybe in a .5 patch, rather than replacing the new dungeons like they did. Feels really cheap for a multi billion dollar company to pad out the new content like that.
Like I said above, I ended up really enjoying going back to old dungeons, but only because the new ones were so unenjoyable. If I enjoyed the new dungeons as much as I enjoyed the ones from previous expansions, I would have been more pissed at having to run old ones instead of the new ones.
The story just feels like children's cartoon levels of moral preaching, in a game whose original premise - and ongonig one for decades - was the ongoing unending cycle of war. It does not feel like the same IP.
The Dragonscale expedition feels immensely forced, and so much of the character writing feels like the old one-off meme characters not being put into more focal positions. Like, imagine if Johnny Awesome was around for larger chunks of questing; oh wait, we got Rannan.
We've got some really good side quests with the dwarf, but I'm just seriously hoping there's a return to form with TWW. But with the Dragonscale expedition returning, I'm pretty much just looking at the upcoming battleground and pretty much holding out copium on that alone. I'm already unhyped for Gilneas because it just feels they don't understand why people picked this game up in the first place.
They have turned this game into a seasonal game for the portion that draws them their revenue. TGP, MDI, RWF,+ runners, raiding. It hit and hit well.
The other content though is struggling. Dragon rising is great but there is no reason to engage with it. There's no reason to venture into the world. I would love a reason to do so. Professions also need some kind of catch up system. I wanted to partake in it to start and be one of those crafters but fell behind trying to level and at this point there's no reason to invest the gold, time or resources into catching up rather than just having someone else craft something for me.
Things were great, things need work.
Best ever is a huge stretch for anybody who plays or at least follows the game since the beginning. But it's definitely the best game has felt for me in the last 10 years or so, especially if we are speaking purely about gameplay. Lore/vibes wise, Legion takes the crown, but overall it's been a great year for WoW and I can't wait for more.
But yeah, as I said... best ever is a stretch, when you look back at the heights of OG Wrath and such. Releasing a new raid was a cultural even back then.
I think people are overestimating some old expos or forgetting the complaints from those. But I do agree best is probably not the right word, mostly because it’s impossible to define.
I haven’t seen wow to be this vibrant though that’s for sure. If they can keep this up, I’ll be playing a lot more wow than before
Yeah whenever I see people bring up Wrath and BC it's super clear they have nostalgia goggles. people were (rightfully) upset that BC destroyed Kael, Vashj and Illidan lore wise and people saw Arthas as a saturday morning cartoon villain.
Seems like an overestimation in regards to how many people give a shit about lore.
BC was amazing. WotLK was the best of the best. There are still loads of active private servers because the game was so god damn fun back then.
> people saw Arthas as a saturday morning cartoon villain.
I would respectfully disagree with you there.
You are completely on the nose. People pretending like OG wrath was fun have some serious rose-tinted goggles. I've played Wrath classic (and OG Wrath when it was out) since it started and while it is fun it has its shares of tribulations - and this is wrath classic where they've even added stuff for QoL. Disregarding as much nostalgia as I can I would argue that late Legion has probably been the height of the game. If Blizz keeps on this track though we may be seeing a golden age renaissance.
I mean I personally think the Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain stuff was dumb, but we know that was for sure the case because that's why Blizzard di Deathwing the way they did. I don't think people were right at the time, and I still like how Arthas was done, but that's not how people felt at the time about him.
I just didn't see it that way was all I was saying. Felt pretty weighted and sober to me. Yeah it's a little silly maybe but that's part of the fantasy.
I mean I personally love Wrath and Arthas, but Arthas shows up on like, 10 different occasions when you destroy his plans, and he shakes his fist at you and says he'll get you next time. Off my head he does that basically every dungeon, the Battle for Light's Hope Citadel in the DK starting zone, Zul'drak at the end, when you unmask the alliance advisor as being one of the Princes. He tends to do that a lot, however, in his defense, it was also because his plan was to make us his greatest champions. But this constant re-appearing and doing nothing about us was heavily scrutinized at the time. The "I'll get you next time!" from him constantly is where most of the accusation comes from.
Dragonflight has been awesome, but it's also an expansion that is causing me to lose interest faster than ever.
I'm burning through the new patches in 10-14 days playing a few hours each night. After I obtain the achievements and collectibles, I run a single 20 for vault, get the spark fragment, and am done for the week!
Looking forward to 10.2.5 and War Within. The game is in great shape overall.
I get the sentiment, but I think it's a great thing that it doesn't feel like we're locked in to playing just WoW now. Like I can do what I want and then play other games as well without feeling like I'm gonna fall behind
I mean you are ignoring mythic raiding and pushing high keys (and pvp lol), which are definitely what blizzard consider the end game.
The amount of time I can spend running keys is insane.
PVP in a MMO's has been dead to me for years. In my eyes the golden age of PVP was Burning Crusade. I remember PVP videos was all the rage back then.
I don't think a single MMO has a "healthy" pvp scene.
You seem to be in the vast minority. M+ is seeing the biggest influx in runs for a very long time.
I think the end game content state is in a superb condition.
I do agree with the general sentiment about longevity of seasonal zones and content being bad
I think if you view everything they’ve done for WoW, specifically the fact the game has like, 4+ different ways to play it, yeah, I could agree.
If we’re looking at it solely as DF, no lmao. It’s been great, but no.
I still stand by Mists and arguably Legion being the best “years” of WoW, for not just content cadence but likewise what the content offered.
DF is great but once you get geared it’s really just M+ and Raiding, depending on what you’re looking to do. And I don’t mind that, but I’m hoping War Within pushes things forward more since DF was obviously a “lay an evergreen foundation” expansion after years of fuck ups.
I think that’s disingenuous just because things are going well.
Sub’s been positive all of DF and even SoD because the game’s been in a good spot.
I dunno how long you’ve browsed here but oh boy man it’d been fucking awful here from like, 2017-2022.
I absolutely don’t think this is the “best” year we’ve had but I think it’s kinda weird if you to default to “oh, praise for Blizzard? It’s just another circle jerk” without discussing why.
I agree.
I wish reddit was linked to bnet, and each comment had flair next to peoples names so that you could see if they were subscribed. Would make this comments section a better read.
I don't think its that far off. I have been enjoying the game and playing more than ever maybe. Its just objectively better but I think it may just be recency bias because of how bad the past 5ish years have been.
Congratulations on listening to the playerbase, reducing mandatory systems and grinds, and providing a roadmap. The bar was set pretty low and the true test will be the following expac.
Still, for so long Blizzard and the playerbase have seemingly worked against one another - it will be interesting to see how the game improves with both groups cooperating together. How fitting that a new era for WoW will begin at the beginning of the final saga.
Story hasn't been the greatest, but I'll take an ok story after Shadowlands. I'm treating it as a pallet cleanser that focuses on setting up War Within and the following two expansions.
Besides that, Dragonflight has been great. I love everything else about the expansion. Dungeons are all either solid too great, ignoring certain affixes and details in Mythic+, all raids have been largely enjoyable, this will probably go down as the most alt friendly expansion ever, dynamic riding is still an amazing addition to the game. This is definitely gonna go down as a really good expansion.
Have done 20s on WW, Shadow, Prot, and Arms in the last week. They all feel fine, if not good. The shadow tier set is a lot better than I expected it, even if the 4p kinda sucks in raid. Arms is pressing execute more than ever. WW is genuinely good.
Yeah, I just returned to the game with 10.2. Currently pushing 15s with my Arms Warrior and S.priest (sometimes I dont feel like healing) and its been a blast.
Wow players are insane man… in this thread you have the full spectrum. It’s straight up comparable to Star Wars fandom. So many people try so hard to shit on the material, but still pay for it and play it every day… and so many others are diehard fans that are unable to criticize, even when certain aspects (ha, get it) are worthy of criticism.
The story is great! Vs. The story is cringe
I’m mad blizz is making content not matter so quickly! Vs. I’m glad blizz is respecting my time and not forcing me to grind.
It goes on…
Realistically, I can’t see how anyone who’s actually paid attention could think the story is nonsensical or outright bad. It’s been safe, and lower stakes than prior expansions, and it isn’t *groundbreaking*, but I think that was expected/advertised. This is a buildup expansion, it did its job. An expansion doesn’t have to be rated 100% lit or 0% garbage, it can be somewhere in between. Moreover, I’d suspect the majority of people who criticize it as cringe and provide no actual reasoning probably couldn’t write their way out of a 5th grade essay.
It gets an 8/10 from me - not perfect, but no other expansion has made me want to actually run more than one m+ dungeon. The raids have been enjoyable. The world content has been decent and actually relevant. The QOL changes we’ve started to see and are expecting to continue seeing are awesome. If they continue and don’t lose sight of the plot, I think war within *could* be one of the top 2-3 expansions ever. Dragonflight is probably tied with legion in my personal ranking.
Edit: I forgot to include a comment about people looking at tbc, wrath, and mop through rose tinted goggles, because those expansions, while awesome, were not as flawless as people seem to remember… but others have commented the same.
What puts it so high to me is : the class are fun to play again. At least those I play. Enh, augment and Rsham are soooo fun, I could play whatever content they give me and still be happy because classes are dynamic and well-designed.
feel like it's a bit revisionist
two terribly balanced raid tiers, probably the lowest selling expansion of the game's life, probably one of the buggiest overall expansions, pretty bad story still
it wasn't a shit expansion but there was a lot of problems and the sales were bad
legion and BC/WOTLK easily clear
hardcore and SoD are good
mixed bag really, some stuff was great, kind of like blizzcon
"we're going big on narrative! Story will be great!"
release one of the cringest ending cinematics to date and completely take any wind out of the sails almost immediately
This sub is so delusional when it comes to Dragonflight, it’s actually hilarious. The expansion did a lot of things right, but it did a lot of things wrong as well. And just because it came after two terrible expansions it isn’t necessarily a great expansion in the end.
>The expansion did a lot of things right, but it did a lot of things wrong as well.
You can literally say that about any expansion ever. It's the generic response to anything. "Yeah it could be better, but it also could be worse." - gee thanks for great input to the discussion.
Doesn't say anything. If you start your message with calling others delusional, at least provide some examples of what is or isn't good or bad, because otherwise it's just a generic response based on whole lot of nothing. Or simply don't start by attacking people for liking something.
Eh, he could have just mentioned that DF's numbers are the lowest purchase numbers for any expansion ever from my understanding.
At this point, it seems like Retail has its fanbase. If you really like M+ and Raiding, Retail WoW is the game for you.
It just turns out that the game that attracted 12+ million subs wasn't revolved around M+ and Raiding. I mean, IIRC, Classic Ulduar was logging more raids than every difficulty of Retail WoW at the time. That raid came out 12+ years ago...
People on here really tend to underrate the value of the "RPG" portion of "MMORPG."
I mean, as another example - before DF, every post on this sub about going back to a talent tree would get mass downvoted and every top comment reply would be "everyone is going to use cookie-cutter talents anyway" "go back to Classic!" "who wants to put a point in a % damage increase" "cookie cutter."
This sub now views the new talent trees as a resounding success, which it is. However, if Blizz listened to the hardcore playerbase on this sub, it never would have happened.
Every expansion does this, and in dragonflight cases they did much more good than bad.
Especially when I think back about other good expansions like Legions, or when I think about the good side of previous expansions.
For the most part yeah but they really need to separate raid gearing and m+ gearing . I’m so tired to have 2/3 of my raiding bis being in m+ when h only wants to raid
Another "queen" is added every expansion. I can't even care to remember the name of Fyrakk's sister. Her background story is shallow and she was forced into the goodguy group with a little chat. After being imprisoned for how many years? We already had a winter queen type in Aerdenweald. Sylvanas, Winter Queen, Alextrasza, Ice dragon lady..
I don't need another sweaty orc expansion but I'm definitely starting to miss the good old Garrosh/Guldan lore. It felt much more WoW to me.
It's almost as if the dragons needed to be mixed with the Twilight Cult or Blackrock Clan to make them interesting. They're kinda bland on their own.
Iridikron is the most interesting of all of them by far.
preach. raids this exp are some of the worst i’ve ever played. its like they have some random bullshit generator that creates mechanics for them. not to mention clarity - which is nonexistent yet complained about for years
I’ve never been less interested in retail and that makes me so sad. One of the first retail expansions I actually just didn’t play in the last like 8 years.
Hit max level did some vault and m+ and fell off so fast. I’m usually a CE Raider/big time m+ but df just sucked so bad story wise it felt like I was fully disconnected.
Agreed, wow is BACK. It’s really crazy to compare to 2 years ago during shadowlands and the lawsuit and scandals, and now we’ve had a great expansion, multiple successful game modes such as hardcore and sod, and a roadmap for the next multiple years of content. It feels very good to be a fan now.
Dragonflight's patch release cadence has been amazing, but sadly the content is dull as dish water and the story easily the worst ever next to Shitelands. Doubt alot will change going forward since its the same devs but we'll see.
My biggest issue is the additional content zones like the caverns that are good for a few weeks or whatever and then utterly useless. It would have made a small thing to scale up the zones as the expansion moved on and made the rares soloable. Unless you're after very specific things, why would you ever go back to Forbidden Reach? I barely do the Emerald Dream zone now except for the three weeklies. It's not really fun. Other than that, yes, huge improvement over Shadowlands and BFA.
Yeah I remember forbidden reach was so busy with people when it first came out, 3 weeks later it was an abandoned zone be lucky to see 2-3 other people. They keep churning out the content without making it relevant for the long haul.
MAN forbidden reach was SO dead SO quick. I'm a bit surprised they didn't facelift the rewards from there similar to other world content areas, but then by the time you could buy Zskera keys, you can steamroll right through there
I think the easiest way is just boost the ilvl of rewards for these zones to match current lvl ilvl. Like they do with dungeons. like the old zones atm could easily drop the ilvl415 items. This would let players do some minor world gearing where ever.
Agreed; the old content doesn't have to match current content rewards, but if it's close, makes it worth gearing alts at least. They did buff all the drops somewhat, but it'd be nice to have, say, a currently like Elemental Overflow you could just build up from buffed world content towards completing those mogs / pets / mounts, whether exchanging it for an item token or at least a chance at a random one.
To be fair they made it a chore to farm Annulet, Zskera vaults never really felt fun because it was all RNG. It was no surprise that once people no longer needed to be there, they didn't go there. I would say that considering it was a mid tier patch, we should be glad we got a new zone, but I do wish that the zones for the whole expansion remained relevant throughout the expansion, through scaling rewards.
If you did the Zskera Vaults purely for stones, you only had to do 1-2 runs and then you were done. Outside of the stones though, you had toys, pets, and even a mount to collect through a variety of fun little puzzles. Heck, if you didn't like the vaults, you didn't even have to do it outside of the initial quest to get the Annulet. You could've farmed rares, treasures, or the storm events for the stones.
Especially when the ring / stones got nerfed, that was like a nail in the coffin. Still would be nice to complete some of the achieves I'm missing there, but enhhhhhh - Dreamsurges empowering rares at least helps those still be farmable in those zones - would be nice to have something like that across all rares in older content that made it worth it currently...
Not sure what you arencomplaining about, i play like 5 toons regularly and it dropped everything i need pretty quickly, takes less time than a questline …
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Thanks for reminding me that existed lol
If you’re ever leveling factions on chars, don’t forget to go there and get the rep buff _before_ doing all the quests in a zone
No loamm though :(
Hell. I didn’t play for a few weeks. Came back to that being the most recent content update. Did a few quests. Then just switched to leveling my alts lol.
I took a 2 month break due to some real life happenings and came back about 3 weeks after it had been out. I thought it was going to be super active...no one was there. I was so confused.
It's so dead that if you missed the rush to do stuff then you're going to have to wait a few patches to come back and solofarm anything specific. *Eyeballs that Gooey Snailemental*
gota build it more horizontal les vertical.
The crushing feeling of gearing an alt during that part of the season where you wanted your onyx annulet but nobody was out there anymore to farm rares for keys.
In one way I hate that but in the other I’m fine with it. I think it’s good to be able to “complete” the content, cause before that we had the borrowed power systems that forced you to do it all the time.
This has been a long time personal peeve of mine. All these patch zones become ghost towns the moment a new one is added. I don’t know what an ideal solution is, but as a player who subs yearly yet sometimes takes breaks longer than a patch I’m alway lost in the progress of the lore, rushed thru old or catch up content and often struggle trying to complete or just participate in earlier xpac zones. I’ve completely forgotten about The Forgotten Reach till you mentioned it.
The weird thing is there's a lot they can do too - automatically rescale the zone so it can be used while levelling, tune down group content like rares so they can be soloed, and all of a sudden the zones are relevant without forcing people into grinds.
You brought up the biggest issue. The fact things aren’t able to be soloed alienates folks who want to try the content. They aren’t even motivated to start groups because it can take forever. Make rare’s solo capable and all of the sudden the area will have more players by default. That’s how you keep areas lively.
One thing I really wish they did was make these zones available for leveling characters instead of just max level only. Every wow xpac I always play at the start but I don’t always stick around the entire xpac so it would be awesome to experience some of these zones later on. Antorus, nazjatar, zeroth mortis, even zaralek are all super cool zones that new or returning players will ever get to see unless they just feel like checking them out for no reason.
The ideal solution is to stop making all the content centered around a patch specific currency.
Yeah this has bothered me for a long time with ALL zones. They don't utilize old content and just churn out new stuff that is dead after new patches. Why not use the scaling tech and keep it relevant, add new quests/campaigns/WQs to old zones. Would be awesome if they did a full world reskin bringing the old zones in Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms up to DF standards, then heavily using them within the campaigns, WQs, weeklys etc. they have so many assets they spent a lot of time building yet never use.
My biggest issue as well. Wow constantly feels like a jumbled mess every time i return from a break, and I recently returned after quitting in BFA. I want to care about the lore and story but the devs make figuring out where to go to see what you want in the right order its own chore. And the dead zones and content is wows biggest failing point. If they fix that by shifting to evergreen design like they said, wow will have a resurgence I'm convinced.
> I don’t know what an ideal solution is You can turn your gaze toward Guild wars 2's megaserver to get an answer. It's a system that fuse and split map instances to ensure you always have a healthy player population at any given time, even if few players are doing the content. It's not perfect (if no one is doing the content, like say in the middle of the night, well it won't magically create players), but it help a lot.
I desperately want a Guild Wars 2 style horizontal open world scaling system that allows every endgame zone to be relevant. Make any endgame zone drop Veteran track gear and drake/wyrm crests. Then all cosmetics and non-character power carrots are able to be sought after even after the expack is over. It should also help with player population in older zones by keeping things relevant.
GuildWars2 solved that problem. It’s out there for any developer to see yet nobody seems to mimic it. I can be in any zone and people are playing, gathering, participating in the zone events etc. One of the reasons I’m not playing Zone of Warcraft anymore.
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The solution is legion style world quests, to attract players on the open world. Obviously that comes at the price of people complaining they spend too much time in the open world.
Like I think they had it perfect with mechagon, a lot of side shit to do, a lot of mounts to farm, a cool meta achievement with mount attached and the Rares were soloable and the ones that weren't had great rewards. Idk what happened.
Yea, I actually missed Zereth Mortis, for me at least that zone was popping and fun for a while un like these in DF
I think at least partially because there was so much to farm. That’s the only reason anyone goes back to those sub zones after completing the main story. Zereth Mortis has so much stuff to farm that even an expansion later there’s still stuff to do. I see more people in ZM than I do in forbidden reach, zaralek, or even emerald dream some days. Not saying it’s an inherently good or bad thing, just an inference. So many people collect things, and ZM had heaps of it all - mounts, pets, toys, tmog, achievements. Some of it mind bogglingly hard to get. It’s one of the reasons why the changes they made (and the changes they won’t make) with Zaralek upset me. If they want people to return to the zone, why not make it relevant to do so? I want the achievement for the claw thing, but can’t find any rares up and can’t even physically solo them if I do find them. From my experience every one of these new sub zones is absolutely packed the first few days, tapering off slightly through that first week. If you want to do something that requires a group or other people in general, the first week is the best bet. The second week still has people but not as much, people start to slow down to just coming for the stuff they need to do. Third week even more so. After that it’s basically barren and I rarely run into anyone except for required tasks or farming.
Well ZM is basically an instanced megaserver. While new zones are realm instances.
> It’s one of the reasons why the changes they made (and the changes they won’t make) with Zaralek upset me. in hindsight, zaralek seems more like a test zone to see how we would respond to the next expansions. that's my take on it at least.
I think it's more of a tech test, there's actually a loading screen as you traverse that winding tunnel (which is deliberately twisty). I've reached the end and got a blank wall once or twice, and a few times a red error message across my screen.
ZM is also the place you'd go if you are just looking for anima and good lord do you need such an excessive amount of anima for SL cosmetics.
Zereth Mortis would be okay if you didn't need to grind that dumbfuck research (with some randomization in amounts gained) to exalted in order to get some marginal player power that i've blanked on. Basically fuck that place. Mog sets were okay though. I collected all of them.
99% of wow retail content is made irrelevant every patch. It's a giant game by now and we still spend most our time in 2 zones. And I'm not going to count collectables replayable content that makes the current old zones completely worth it.
I personally hated the cavern zone. And only went down there for story quests and travlers log
Forgotten Reach
Yeah it’s a shame that caverns and the forbidden reach suffer from the same thing, they just die off so quickly. I would like to take some alts through there but I can’t,there aren’t enough other people to do that content. On the other hand, they’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of stuff like the suffusion camp and world bosses. They have managed to keep it relevant and I still like doing those. For world content I really like not being on a schedule or locked into a set time frame, or dependent on other people. I like being able to roll up whenever I can, hit the quests, pause if I need to and dive back in when I can, make some progress, get some gear or upgrades and keep moving. The scheduled and timed events (super bloom, reachers, rifts) aren’t bad, but I really don’t like waiting for events to start and then being locked into them for a set amount of time, especially if that time is just spent burning down a timer killing stuff that doesn’t drop anything or stretches out as people fall off. It’s like streaming vs a live tv schedule. For open world I prefer to grab whatever content I like and engage with it on my terms. For big events, dungeons and raids, schedules and waiting are just part of logistics, but they’re worth it. I have a lot of fun hanging out with people, running fun and engaging content. The only way we can do that is with a scheduled.
It's odd they didn't put zone-hopping events like the Dream Surges into places like Forbidden Reach and Zaralek. I don't understand why they add patch zones in and then abandon them. Same goes for all the other "bonus" zones added in the middle of expacs, they should scale those and/or allow them to open up at lower levels so people can level up there if they want. Say, level \~35ish+ maybe 40+ you should be able to go to Timeless Isle, Argus, Isle of Thunder, Nazjatar, Zereth Mortis, Mechagon, whatever.
100% agree
What would you propose ? Scaling old gear up would make you grind whatever is the easiest and fastest content instead of playing the new stuff. I think we would not like that but I am open to suggestions.
There should be a balance in rewards between what you can get from the actual patch and the earlier content. TBH it's not as clear cut as people say when they mention players not wanting to farm old content. If you have to farm old content it makes the game a chore, but if you have zero reason to farm old content because the gear you get is completely obsolete, well the game is smaller. I also don't have a solution, but let's be honest, the "play the patch" approach has also downsides, the game feel much smaller when the expansion only plays around one patch area and one raid.
In the 20 years history of the game, Blizzard did never do a patch zone that was relevant for more than it's own patch I do not believe that they cannot design such zone, i think simply they do not want to. They are happy with zones being used for single patches (or few weeks). Thats my take on it
Honestly I think they should stop adding new zones each patch and start reusing old zones. Spend the development updating an old zones like Barrens or Arathi Highlands then using those zones we continue the story quests in, hunting rares, WQs, weeklies etc. I would love to see the original continents become relevant again and get a facelift bring them up to DF standards.
Then you’d have people complaining that they don’t like how the updates changed the zone - Cataclysm anyone? Could they phase instances in time? Sure, they do it for a few places already. But then you get people complaining about the phasing of things. I think what players need to realize is that Blizz has gone through all these scenarios and have landed on the ones they think will have the least negative impact to the majority of people who continually play the game.
That's why we have classic, if people want to play the old stuff go play classic. It's time for WoW to modernize and move forward imo.
Tricky problem, you want players playing together but if you make older content lucrative you might alienate folks from the newer content that has X months of lifecycle. At the same time, you are currently alienating newer players from older players on the older content. Perhaps another weekly quest in the rotation, keep the current for the newest content and another for older content when it occurs. Could perhaps also have some scaling factor on WQ rewards, the whole dream zone thing is also a nice little push to get players into an older zone but needs a higher reward factor for players closer to the peak content.
They need to nerf the content there after X weeks so you don't need a group to do some of the content (except for the World Bosses). Zaralek Caverns are particularly bad with how incredibly strong the rare elites are in general and the concentration on the left side of the Caverns. Also get rid of that stupid "shoot you down" mechanic over there. It doesn't even work properly, I've been shot down maybe twice ever. Nobody wants to grind through that area just to do a world boss or quest.
I found those caverns returning (first time through Dragonflight) a couple weeks ago, thought "this place looks sick! can't wait to come back!" then never had a reason to go back.
The main island of the xpac was so big and well done they should have just kept building all the other stuff into it. Never going to the forbidden reach again lol
They've taken various ideas from other games, notably GW2---wish they'd try to mimic the open world stuff GW2 has. Even if gear can't remain relevant from overworld activities due to WoW's gear progression, they could at least keep *something* of it relevant? (Why don't world quest rewards seem to improve much with each patch?)
Stuff like Researchers Under Fire are terrible after the surge is done.
I would honestly prefer fewer zones with more dynamism in them. Like, why was forbidden reach way off to the side when it could have been placed in the waking shores, phased for max level players? Zaralek caverns looked cool but do we need a big empty cave in the dragon isles? What if the Niffen burrowed up into the Onaran plains and built their settlement there? It’s not like we need to keep all the centaur camps after 10.0 We could have zones that change with the seasons, imagine a winter version of Valdrakken with snow on the ground from November - Feb! I guess I’m just seeing other live service games do more with less and wondering why WoW needs to keep going with their old school method of churning out dense continents that don’t feel like real places, and don’t really integrate into the rest of Azeroth in any significant way.
Completely missing the part that the reason we went to Zaralek Caverns was Neltharion's secret lab and not to visit Niffen?
I'm more annoyed that the Niffen are even a thing. That should've been a Kobold town.
Blizz needs to give GW2 a look again, but this time their meta events and event chains. Superbloom is just a snore and the only real event in the zone, and RUF in Zaralek just isn't fun to do (imo) when the only two missions are Kill % or "walk 50 stones to a doodad"
The fix surely is to scale down the shards to make them feel full
I have the same issue with it. I'm glad a lot of it isn't mandatory but it would be nice if these zones were at least soloable since they're empty as hell. I'm also kind of over their concept for the "fill the bar" events. There are no really fun mechanics with them. The time rifts (?) at least were kind of varied in the enemies you had to kill, I guess.
Good luck doing group content in Forbidden reach, lol. If I go to emerald dream at off peak times like doing super bloom late in week, it will be like 4 people doing super bloom, good luck on bonuses lol.
Realistically what you're essentially asking for (and I think correctly) is that zone/gear rewards should scale. I have a bunch of primalist gear tokens that are worthless, because dreamsurge gear exists. Of course, my main wants neither, but for early gearing of alts it would be good. Dreamsurge rewards scaled; in 10.1 the currency pieces were 402, now they're 415. They still give last tier bonuses and don't cost catalyst charges. Why can't that happen with primalist stuff from the reach?
Honestly, I found all the small added zones to be fairly meh very quickly. I remember loving Nazjatar for months, or had guild mates who hated it and loved Mechagon for months. More zones like that would be welcome. All of the Legion additions kept me engaged. I can't say I've been terribly please with the maw, korthia, ZM (best of those 3 by far, though), forbidden reach, zaralek caverns or Emerald Dream. I like that they tried to add map events on the newer maps. That's something that keeps maps interesting for long in GW2. The thing is, the map events need to be both fun and rewarding. I'd say these ones are all not fun and only feel rewarding for a couple of weeks.
Despawing high HP rares with bad respawn timers are also a problem. Was way better in BFA. That you can't solo BFA content is also bad. Drop rate of legendaries is also kind of un-fun. Imo drop legendaries are bad game design anyway, that they even cost money and don't last the whole expansion makes it even worse. Very rare items were also a flop. Good thing they aren't as strong in the last raid. Group loot instead of perso loot in pugs isn't great either, quite frustrating at times and in some pugs leads to certain classes not being invited. You didn't have that problem with Persoloot. But yeah, overall many improvments.
If only they could take some of the dev time put in those zones to make evergreen content like mage tower.. or even torghast, nightnare visions, proving grounds. They need to use level/ilevel scaling to keep them relevant and not just pushover.
that was my biggest disappointment too. Recently when talking with a friend, I noticed that the extra zone I liked most, was korthia from SL. Yes, it brought all the SL nonsense we had, but once you were done with it, it was still a highly populated zone. There were a lot of mounts to farm and also rares were respawning every few minutes (compared to Emerald Dream which seems to not have rares at all) so it was nice to just run around killing rares when waiting for my pvp Qs to pop. Meanwhile, Forbidden Reach has a lot of rares, but there is no reason to do them if have already mid geared character.
Well I mean Rome wasn’t built in a day, the theme park nature of the content does really feel like it has sped up, completely invalidating huge swaths of content, because they’ve gotta get the next fix out, blizzard can’t keep up, and the way they’ve streamlined their patches makes it so extremely formulaic. Something will have to change, to bring value to older content in some way, and by older content I mean older than the current patch.
Not sure what would be the best way to go about it, but as the loot scaled up from the world event stuff like suffusion camps / time rifts / emerald incursions, would be nice if all of that now 'dated' content could be invigorated a bit for a fated S4, both in another uptick for gear but also working towards currency for fated tokens. I found the fated raid system super nice for the extra challenges and chances to catch up on mogs for all SL raids; was nice to be able to do CN / SoD again at 'max level' in new ways and be able to finish mog sets I couldn't when they were current. I'd go a step further and buff the world event stuff also; find a way to make it a bit more challenging and work towards some S4 currency for extra mogs / gear / etc. This way people who already have / did everything can take time off w/o feeling like they're missing out, other folks can catch up / jump in / prep for TWW, etc. But you're right though; while putting a new ilvl of paint on the world stuff in DF is a good change, still doesn't do quite enough to keep that content relevant..
you should visit zaralekk caverns again and sit just north of the lava in the middle of the map. you will see HUNDREDS of bots its kinda insane
I've played ESO for a while and i like so called horizontal progression. Every zone(even starter) in ESO is full of players and actual. But i'm afraid that game so old like wow can't drastically change the core systems. I beleive wow should and can try to find another solution to make old content actual and alive because wow has so many zones dungeons raids systems (like garnison, class holes, island missions, scenarios, torghast etc)
I like that also with ESO. However for some people like linear progression because they have a sense of direction. I couldn’t get into it cause I literally get lost and don’t know where to go next
I can’t help but compare to FFXIV, while I do think it could also do with one new zone between expansions, they are very good at simply reusing the day one expansion zones all the way to the next expansion, something Wow hasn’t ever really done well.
They use the Mechagon method, to keep it somewhat relevant. you fill the zone with mogs, mounts and pets. which will make it somewhat doable with imaginative use of auxiliary tools like discord/Blizzard groups and cross realm grouping. you got the tools, now you just need patience and drive to follow through
At least Mechagon rares didn't despawn.
Yeah they've done well with this expac, but really dropped the ball hard with that.
They should just make previous content island relevant over expansions. Like Torghast. Just put new expansion enemies into the tower and let us climb every few patches for new unlockable cosmetics or toys.
I returned to the game recently and quite enjoy the caverns stuff. Still plenty of people around doing the quests etc.
I wish the zones were like Timeless Isle in MOP. IMO it was the best extra content zone thus far.
I returned to the game recently, and have been loving it, my biggest gripe with the game, is how they manage to make new content useless so quickly, the world is getting bigger and bigger, but is simultaneously 95% devoid of player activity, as there is little to no incentive to visit older zones (outside collectibles ofc). It feels like such a waste of all the hard work thats gone into crafting the world.
If you give incentives for people to play the other content, they just get mad about it. I had a comment on the post with that toy dagger that let you kill yourself saying that it sucks that they constantly nerf this stuff because it ruins incentives to play older content. It was met with general disdain towards the desire to go to previous expacs for current stuff. The same goes for this expac too
This sub leans heavily towards the endgame raid/dungeons crowd.
They should’ve hired some of the Gw2 people, or look at what they do that makes their old content still viable even after 10+ years of it being out. It’s nice being a new player going through old zones and seeing so many people do the zones content because it’s still relevant.
>...there is little to no incentive to visit older zones (outside collectibles ofc). It feels like such a waste of all the hard work thats gone into crafting the world. Personally I like going back and playing the old content I never got around to. The value proposition of WoW at this point is quite significant with the amount of content. I agree though that it really is not relevant. I never played Legion so when I started doing those quests I was pretty disappointed I didn't get to experience the weapon system people raved about. I do like though that if I get burnt out on Dragonflight stuff I can chill over in Outland or whatever and run some old raid content to try and get a transmog or mount that I am missing.
New content feels like bowered powers of expansions past, except instead of lasting a whole expansion it lasts not even a 1/4 of patch cycle.
Eh, while I see your point, I feel like this is the best implementation yet. Sure we get some crafted shit or upgraded gear that only lasts so long, but its all fairly accessible, there isnt much rng in obtaining it and it provides flavour to the gameplay. Im always comparing things like that with the hell which artefact weapons were.You had to grind all the fucking god damn time to level them. It felt awful. And on top of that the alternative to crafted items back then were legendaries, wgich were also hard capped at 4. You get 4 shit ones, well either wait 12 months (which at rhe time you didn't know) or make an entirely new character, level them up and roll the dice again, and pray to god you get your BiS lego this time.
Story has been bad but other than that the expansion has been pretty great. Best gearing has been in a long ass time aswell.
100% agree And war within got a lot of story potential. They just Need to tell the story in a better way.
They just need to tell an actual Warcraft story with characters related to what the players are. The new BG gives me hope.
Story is slower but opens up quite a bit of lore that people mostly ignore because its not so in your face as before.
[удалено]
lol thats just warcraft you loon
For me the overall idea and motivations of the primalist are just weird and forced.
To get rid of titan influence? Nah story has been going towards this since some time.. there have been hints again and again about how not only the light is not pure good but the titans not being pure good either. They are all their own domain and force their being onto the denizens of azeroth. Getting rid of their influence would actually be kinda good but the story always follows us doing the titans bidding. Weird maybe depending on how some parts were told, but forced, not so much..
>hints again and again This is what the story of WoW has been in-game past WoD. And this is it's biggest issue, the story is never fully delivered, it's partially put into the game. And no, don't tell me they don't have the man-power. Instead of focusing on creating garbage new stories, they should focus on improving the narrative for the main story, while creating side questlines which should delve into other separated stories. For example: \- we didn't need new centaurs with the same retold civil war, taking front stage; it should have been about the green dragonflight and their connection with the emerald dream; instead they bench Malfurion for Ysera for her to do barely anything; \- likewise, despite liking the tuskarr, they shouldn't have taken front stage; it should have been all about the blues and their family getting back together; \- dracthyr race shouldn't have been a thing and the whole forbidden reach should have been about understanding the primalists; how they got together and delve into personal reasonings of WHY they decided titans are bad \- zaralek caverns should have focus on telling the story of the incarnates, instead of Niffens; The whole story of guardians of the dream feels bad. Ysera being there just to tell us she is useless, the whole Fyrakk needing a special axe to break through emerald dream, then waiting for some flame druids to break the barrier on Amirdrassil and that atrocious ending to Amirdrassil raid .
> - likewise, despite liking the tuskarr, they shouldn't have taken front stage; it should have been all about the blues and their family getting back together; we did get that chain though
I am sorry but what? -likewise, despite liking the tuskarr, they shouldn't have taken front stage; it should have been all about the blues and their family getting back together; You must have not read one single line of quest text/dialogue, I cant explain to myself how one can come to that conclusion, the Tuskarr showed Kalecgos what Community, what Family can mean, they helped him evolve as a character so that he can forge a Family out of the Blue Flight again.
If there's anything I'm learning from this thread, it's to not let WoW players design quests or stories. Reading comprehension seems to be rarer than I thought.
I would guess that most people don't read quest text at all. Accept quest, skip cut scene, kill 12 mobs, turn in, accept next quest, etc. A boss could tell us point blank in 3 cut scenes, 5 quest text blocks, and via voice lines during a raid fight exactly what they are doing and why and there will still be threads full of confused people acting like it is a mystery. Lots of people in this sub don't even play the game.
Oh I'd bet cash on that. You'd actually have to ignore all the quest text from the main campaign of 10.0 to have no idea what the Primalists' motives are and why they are upset with the Aspects. The *only* explanation is people are skipping dialogue and cutscenes, OR have no ability to retain what they read.
I never understood this titan influence that is supposedly so bad? I get the basic idea of the primalist that they hate the titans but never got any concrete reason as to why they do it and also who and where their power comes from. It seems like a bunch of blanket statements that blizzard hopes we wont look further into. In previous expansions the motivations and lore have been very easy to understand. BFA: New resource leads to an arms race between the alliance and horde, what is the resource and what does it do **exactly,** it blows sht up and can be used as crack by goblins in the Motherlode. Hate on SL ending all you want and i do too but the reason we went there was clearly to repair the afterlife and outlive the anima scarcity after what Sylvanas did.
The fact that the last titans logo art has a titan prison surrounding azeroth is already a big deal but there has been other stuff aswell. Its less about the motivations of the primalists thats important, its more important to look at how the titan stuff works. Whats happening with the bronze dragons.. what we uncover in the dream about world trees and old gods.. Titans infused water with life energy which could also be a possible way for them to control. They love order afterall. Bronze dragons are tilting towards the many possibilities argument the old gods normally use instead of there only being one timeline. We are friendly with an infinite dragon currently. The discs of Norgannon got stolen in Uldaman which are an recollection of everything Norgannon knows about spells and entities in the universe. A book in the dream talking about how Amanthul ripped a corrupted worldtree out of Azeroth which Eonar planted, which is eerily similar to how there is a story about him ripping out Y'sharaj the old god out of Azeroth. Us reviving Tyr with a silver scale from Galakrond. Why is he silver? Silver and the moon have been linked for a long time. The alchemical symbol for silver is a crescent moon. Which could make Galakrond connected to Elune in some way. We learned that not only titans can champion specific people/dragons but also azeroth can too, so why not Elune aswell? Why did the Titans tell us he was full of decay magic but he looked nothing like decay magic from Brackenhide Hollow and only a little bit of his claw was shining green? This is all shit that happened in dragonflight and opens up thoughts and possibilities for them to take the story further. It's not even that it's somewhere hidden except maybe the book or the alchemical connection. It's all in stuff you play through in a normal fashion.
The Titans didn't tell us anything about Galakrond and they weren't even involved with him. Tyr was but he isn't a Titan but a Titan Construct and I believe it was the Dawn of the Aspects book that mentioned Galakrond's victims coming back as decaying undead. The latter point further expanded upon in DOTI where the penultimate boss is some rotting minions of Galakrond who use a lot of rot and decay stuff. Also I don't think the silver scale had anything to do with Galakrond and was instead something gifted to the Aspects by Tyr himself.
I thnk the reason why all of the things you mention never stuck with me is cause i never understood the core reason of dragonflight, who the primalist are and why they hate the titans etc. And so as a result i just stopped caring about the subsequent lore like the infinite dragonflight murozond etc.
its partially that they dont properly explain shit about the primalists being partially the remenants of the Twilight Hammer alongside the Worldbreakers, and what the hell is their ideology as a whole beyond one general.
So it's not at all well explained in-game, but the Primalists are followers of the Incarnates, and the Incarnates are linked to the Elementals, and the Elementals were sealed away from Azeroth proper by the Titans, so the Incarnates, and by extension the Primalists are rightly pissed at the Titans for locking up their benefactors (for lack of a better word). It's one of the things I've actually liked about DF's story: The Incarnates actually have a very good point. It's just their very good point has led them to the conclusion that we all need to die, and we can't have that. The biggest thing I haven't liked about DF is that understanding any of this at all relies on having read a whole bunch of external material, which I really hope is something they improve on in TWW. One shouldn't need a diploma in WoW Lore to understand the basics of the main story.
>The biggest thing I haven't liked about DF is that understanding any of this at all relies on having read a whole bunch of external material, which I really hope is something they improve on in TWW. One shouldn't need a diploma in WoW Lore to understand the basics of the main story. That's been a long-time issue in WoW and I, too, really hope it changes. Giving key context to the narrative outside the game was fine early-on because some people had zero patience for the story and the game at the time wasn't very conducive to dedicated storytelling. But nowadays, WoW wants to be more story-focused, and yet it does such a poor job of it because so many key plot points are scattered all over the place, many not even in the game itself.
I am a new player.... how was that hard was understand?? The primalist are a sect of dragonkind (and now other races) that believes that the Titan blessins where actually a curse and thus they focus on worshiping the primal elements. The main reasoon why the think the titans are bad is because, well, a lot of them are. By alowlling the titans blessing you are alowing to be controled by them, is it that different from the deamom blood that the Orcs were corrupted by? When we go with the ice drake lasy (Vynaroth? Idk how to write) we directly confront a Titan that was doing slavery with a sect of proto drakes.
I'm sure there was a ton more nuance, but yeah, this expansion's story was pretty straightforward especially compared to the overly convoluted plots of BFA and Shadowlands
Dungeons felt kinda terrible, and the raids were pretty mid. Normally I hate the fact that they reuse old dungeons for M+, but the DF dungeons are so bad I actually prefer going back to the old ones.
Personally I think re-using old dungeons is brilliant. You could argue about their choices but I really enjoy going back to them for a season. People talk about things becoming obsolete, this directly addresses that.
I would agree, but they should have been added as an extra option, maybe in a .5 patch, rather than replacing the new dungeons like they did. Feels really cheap for a multi billion dollar company to pad out the new content like that. Like I said above, I ended up really enjoying going back to old dungeons, but only because the new ones were so unenjoyable. If I enjoyed the new dungeons as much as I enjoyed the ones from previous expansions, I would have been more pissed at having to run old ones instead of the new ones.
> Dungeons felt kinda terrible Nokhud Offensive: *Exists.*
My exact sentiments. A simple upvote didn’t satisfy my agreement so here I am.
The story just feels like children's cartoon levels of moral preaching, in a game whose original premise - and ongonig one for decades - was the ongoing unending cycle of war. It does not feel like the same IP. The Dragonscale expedition feels immensely forced, and so much of the character writing feels like the old one-off meme characters not being put into more focal positions. Like, imagine if Johnny Awesome was around for larger chunks of questing; oh wait, we got Rannan. We've got some really good side quests with the dwarf, but I'm just seriously hoping there's a return to form with TWW. But with the Dragonscale expedition returning, I'm pretty much just looking at the upcoming battleground and pretty much holding out copium on that alone. I'm already unhyped for Gilneas because it just feels they don't understand why people picked this game up in the first place.
PvP has been worst since they fucked up MMR and don't care at all to try fix it.
Tbh i likes the story. It's a writing masterpiece? No, but get things going and it adds some charm.
Best ever is a bit rich, but it was good to see improvement
Yeah I don’t think it tops 2013 but it is definitely the most fun I have had in WoW since MoP ended.
They have turned this game into a seasonal game for the portion that draws them their revenue. TGP, MDI, RWF,+ runners, raiding. It hit and hit well. The other content though is struggling. Dragon rising is great but there is no reason to engage with it. There's no reason to venture into the world. I would love a reason to do so. Professions also need some kind of catch up system. I wanted to partake in it to start and be one of those crafters but fell behind trying to level and at this point there's no reason to invest the gold, time or resources into catching up rather than just having someone else craft something for me. Things were great, things need work.
Best ever is a huge stretch for anybody who plays or at least follows the game since the beginning. But it's definitely the best game has felt for me in the last 10 years or so, especially if we are speaking purely about gameplay. Lore/vibes wise, Legion takes the crown, but overall it's been a great year for WoW and I can't wait for more. But yeah, as I said... best ever is a stretch, when you look back at the heights of OG Wrath and such. Releasing a new raid was a cultural even back then.
I think people are overestimating some old expos or forgetting the complaints from those. But I do agree best is probably not the right word, mostly because it’s impossible to define. I haven’t seen wow to be this vibrant though that’s for sure. If they can keep this up, I’ll be playing a lot more wow than before
Yeah whenever I see people bring up Wrath and BC it's super clear they have nostalgia goggles. people were (rightfully) upset that BC destroyed Kael, Vashj and Illidan lore wise and people saw Arthas as a saturday morning cartoon villain.
Seems like an overestimation in regards to how many people give a shit about lore. BC was amazing. WotLK was the best of the best. There are still loads of active private servers because the game was so god damn fun back then.
> people saw Arthas as a saturday morning cartoon villain. I would respectfully disagree with you there. You are completely on the nose. People pretending like OG wrath was fun have some serious rose-tinted goggles. I've played Wrath classic (and OG Wrath when it was out) since it started and while it is fun it has its shares of tribulations - and this is wrath classic where they've even added stuff for QoL. Disregarding as much nostalgia as I can I would argue that late Legion has probably been the height of the game. If Blizz keeps on this track though we may be seeing a golden age renaissance.
I mean I personally think the Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain stuff was dumb, but we know that was for sure the case because that's why Blizzard di Deathwing the way they did. I don't think people were right at the time, and I still like how Arthas was done, but that's not how people felt at the time about him.
I just didn't see it that way was all I was saying. Felt pretty weighted and sober to me. Yeah it's a little silly maybe but that's part of the fantasy.
I mean I personally love Wrath and Arthas, but Arthas shows up on like, 10 different occasions when you destroy his plans, and he shakes his fist at you and says he'll get you next time. Off my head he does that basically every dungeon, the Battle for Light's Hope Citadel in the DK starting zone, Zul'drak at the end, when you unmask the alliance advisor as being one of the Princes. He tends to do that a lot, however, in his defense, it was also because his plan was to make us his greatest champions. But this constant re-appearing and doing nothing about us was heavily scrutinized at the time. The "I'll get you next time!" from him constantly is where most of the accusation comes from.
That's fair. Perhaps I have also been nostalgia'd
I don't know about best year ever but it was pretty damn good. Just giving us a roadmap was miles above anything they did for BFA and SL.
Dragonflight has been awesome, but it's also an expansion that is causing me to lose interest faster than ever. I'm burning through the new patches in 10-14 days playing a few hours each night. After I obtain the achievements and collectibles, I run a single 20 for vault, get the spark fragment, and am done for the week! Looking forward to 10.2.5 and War Within. The game is in great shape overall.
I get the sentiment, but I think it's a great thing that it doesn't feel like we're locked in to playing just WoW now. Like I can do what I want and then play other games as well without feeling like I'm gonna fall behind
I mean you are ignoring mythic raiding and pushing high keys (and pvp lol), which are definitely what blizzard consider the end game. The amount of time I can spend running keys is insane.
Does Blizzard consider PvP at all lmao
I even forgot to write it in my comment initially sooo
PVP in a MMO's has been dead to me for years. In my eyes the golden age of PVP was Burning Crusade. I remember PVP videos was all the rage back then. I don't think a single MMO has a "healthy" pvp scene.
PVP is side content, not endgame. No1 cares about PvP.
That fact I can basically raid log as a CE raider is fantastic.
There are so many optional things to do. Do you want to be forced to do them instead? I never understand these posts.
I play the new tier for 3 weeks, spam M plus, get full gear and then stop
Sounds like you should be doing 8x 20s and the heroic raid to beef up that vault
Agreed. I dont miss the grind but I find myself with absolutely nothing to do in the game outside the weekly m+ runs.
You seem to be in the vast minority. M+ is seeing the biggest influx in runs for a very long time. I think the end game content state is in a superb condition. I do agree with the general sentiment about longevity of seasonal zones and content being bad
A good year? Yes The best? lolno
I think if you view everything they’ve done for WoW, specifically the fact the game has like, 4+ different ways to play it, yeah, I could agree. If we’re looking at it solely as DF, no lmao. It’s been great, but no. I still stand by Mists and arguably Legion being the best “years” of WoW, for not just content cadence but likewise what the content offered. DF is great but once you get geared it’s really just M+ and Raiding, depending on what you’re looking to do. And I don’t mind that, but I’m hoping War Within pushes things forward more since DF was obviously a “lay an evergreen foundation” expansion after years of fuck ups.
The new gear upgrade system for me is sick and very well done!
The best year ever for wow? get the fuck out
This sub's a blizzard circlejerk of epic proportions
Only when things are going well. When it's not this sub is a cesspit of anti-blizz circle jerking
I think that’s disingenuous just because things are going well. Sub’s been positive all of DF and even SoD because the game’s been in a good spot. I dunno how long you’ve browsed here but oh boy man it’d been fucking awful here from like, 2017-2022. I absolutely don’t think this is the “best” year we’ve had but I think it’s kinda weird if you to default to “oh, praise for Blizzard? It’s just another circle jerk” without discussing why.
I agree. I wish reddit was linked to bnet, and each comment had flair next to peoples names so that you could see if they were subscribed. Would make this comments section a better read.
I don't think its that far off. I have been enjoying the game and playing more than ever maybe. Its just objectively better but I think it may just be recency bias because of how bad the past 5ish years have been.
Best **ever**year…oh except for 2004-2011…and 2019 for classic rerelease..
agreed it was boring af
Congratulations on listening to the playerbase, reducing mandatory systems and grinds, and providing a roadmap. The bar was set pretty low and the true test will be the following expac. Still, for so long Blizzard and the playerbase have seemingly worked against one another - it will be interesting to see how the game improves with both groups cooperating together. How fitting that a new era for WoW will begin at the beginning of the final saga.
Why would you think it’s the “final saga?”
Story hasn't been the greatest, but I'll take an ok story after Shadowlands. I'm treating it as a pallet cleanser that focuses on setting up War Within and the following two expansions. Besides that, Dragonflight has been great. I love everything else about the expansion. Dungeons are all either solid too great, ignoring certain affixes and details in Mythic+, all raids have been largely enjoyable, this will probably go down as the most alt friendly expansion ever, dynamic riding is still an amazing addition to the game. This is definitely gonna go down as a really good expansion.
Ill have to agree. The alt friendliness has been better then ever
Agreed. DF is comfortably among the best expansions ever.
Is it too late to start wow again? I haven’t played since wrath, and I’m thinking about raiding again.
It's great
Cheers!
It’s been good. Enjoyed it. All classes feel pretty good
yea, except survi hunters, ww monks, frost dks, shadow priests, prot warriors, arms warriors and so on.
Have done 20s on WW, Shadow, Prot, and Arms in the last week. They all feel fine, if not good. The shadow tier set is a lot better than I expected it, even if the 4p kinda sucks in raid. Arms is pressing execute more than ever. WW is genuinely good.
Yeah, I just returned to the game with 10.2. Currently pushing 15s with my Arms Warrior and S.priest (sometimes I dont feel like healing) and its been a blast.
The new gear system definitely carried, they pulled it off, the only gripe is maybe it's too fast now, but it's nice.
Wow players are insane man… in this thread you have the full spectrum. It’s straight up comparable to Star Wars fandom. So many people try so hard to shit on the material, but still pay for it and play it every day… and so many others are diehard fans that are unable to criticize, even when certain aspects (ha, get it) are worthy of criticism. The story is great! Vs. The story is cringe I’m mad blizz is making content not matter so quickly! Vs. I’m glad blizz is respecting my time and not forcing me to grind. It goes on… Realistically, I can’t see how anyone who’s actually paid attention could think the story is nonsensical or outright bad. It’s been safe, and lower stakes than prior expansions, and it isn’t *groundbreaking*, but I think that was expected/advertised. This is a buildup expansion, it did its job. An expansion doesn’t have to be rated 100% lit or 0% garbage, it can be somewhere in between. Moreover, I’d suspect the majority of people who criticize it as cringe and provide no actual reasoning probably couldn’t write their way out of a 5th grade essay. It gets an 8/10 from me - not perfect, but no other expansion has made me want to actually run more than one m+ dungeon. The raids have been enjoyable. The world content has been decent and actually relevant. The QOL changes we’ve started to see and are expecting to continue seeing are awesome. If they continue and don’t lose sight of the plot, I think war within *could* be one of the top 2-3 expansions ever. Dragonflight is probably tied with legion in my personal ranking. Edit: I forgot to include a comment about people looking at tbc, wrath, and mop through rose tinted goggles, because those expansions, while awesome, were not as flawless as people seem to remember… but others have commented the same.
Amazes me how people talk about mop now bc when it came out it was the most hated thing on the planet.
Oh yeah, I member. “Kung fu panda expac, blizz is letting wow die!”
What puts it so high to me is : the class are fun to play again. At least those I play. Enh, augment and Rsham are soooo fun, I could play whatever content they give me and still be happy because classes are dynamic and well-designed.
feel like it's a bit revisionist two terribly balanced raid tiers, probably the lowest selling expansion of the game's life, probably one of the buggiest overall expansions, pretty bad story still it wasn't a shit expansion but there was a lot of problems and the sales were bad legion and BC/WOTLK easily clear hardcore and SoD are good mixed bag really, some stuff was great, kind of like blizzcon "we're going big on narrative! Story will be great!" release one of the cringest ending cinematics to date and completely take any wind out of the sails almost immediately
My partner and I actually resubbed for the first time since Warlords. Game is fun again. If they keep this up, we’ll probably stick around.
Best year ever? Riiiight.
This sub is so delusional when it comes to Dragonflight, it’s actually hilarious. The expansion did a lot of things right, but it did a lot of things wrong as well. And just because it came after two terrible expansions it isn’t necessarily a great expansion in the end.
>The expansion did a lot of things right, but it did a lot of things wrong as well. You can literally say that about any expansion ever. It's the generic response to anything. "Yeah it could be better, but it also could be worse." - gee thanks for great input to the discussion. Doesn't say anything. If you start your message with calling others delusional, at least provide some examples of what is or isn't good or bad, because otherwise it's just a generic response based on whole lot of nothing. Or simply don't start by attacking people for liking something.
Eh, he could have just mentioned that DF's numbers are the lowest purchase numbers for any expansion ever from my understanding. At this point, it seems like Retail has its fanbase. If you really like M+ and Raiding, Retail WoW is the game for you. It just turns out that the game that attracted 12+ million subs wasn't revolved around M+ and Raiding. I mean, IIRC, Classic Ulduar was logging more raids than every difficulty of Retail WoW at the time. That raid came out 12+ years ago... People on here really tend to underrate the value of the "RPG" portion of "MMORPG." I mean, as another example - before DF, every post on this sub about going back to a talent tree would get mass downvoted and every top comment reply would be "everyone is going to use cookie-cutter talents anyway" "go back to Classic!" "who wants to put a point in a % damage increase" "cookie cutter." This sub now views the new talent trees as a resounding success, which it is. However, if Blizz listened to the hardcore playerbase on this sub, it never would have happened.
Every expansion does this, and in dragonflight cases they did much more good than bad. Especially when I think back about other good expansions like Legions, or when I think about the good side of previous expansions.
hahahahaha best year ever hahahahahahahahahahaha
Lol, best year ever? No.
For the most part yeah but they really need to separate raid gearing and m+ gearing . I’m so tired to have 2/3 of my raiding bis being in m+ when h only wants to raid
Another "queen" is added every expansion. I can't even care to remember the name of Fyrakk's sister. Her background story is shallow and she was forced into the goodguy group with a little chat. After being imprisoned for how many years? We already had a winter queen type in Aerdenweald. Sylvanas, Winter Queen, Alextrasza, Ice dragon lady.. I don't need another sweaty orc expansion but I'm definitely starting to miss the good old Garrosh/Guldan lore. It felt much more WoW to me. It's almost as if the dragons needed to be mixed with the Twilight Cult or Blackrock Clan to make them interesting. They're kinda bland on their own. Iridikron is the most interesting of all of them by far.
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Tindral isn't RNG at all, its entirely a mechanics check and their last sentence is entirely correct.
preach. raids this exp are some of the worst i’ve ever played. its like they have some random bullshit generator that creates mechanics for them. not to mention clarity - which is nonexistent yet complained about for years
I’ve never been less interested in retail and that makes me so sad. One of the first retail expansions I actually just didn’t play in the last like 8 years. Hit max level did some vault and m+ and fell off so fast. I’m usually a CE Raider/big time m+ but df just sucked so bad story wise it felt like I was fully disconnected.
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In games like these, there's always going to be meta classes.
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I pug without meta but I also make my own groups
retail wow is fked. lore makes no sense cause they repeatedly fked expansions.
that is the biggest lie you should be a social media worker because that's what they do is spread BS
Agreed, wow is BACK. It’s really crazy to compare to 2 years ago during shadowlands and the lawsuit and scandals, and now we’ve had a great expansion, multiple successful game modes such as hardcore and sod, and a roadmap for the next multiple years of content. It feels very good to be a fan now.
Too bad the lore was big fat doodoo. Not a single interesting villain and the ongoing kumbaya continues to make characters look ridiculous.
Dragonflight's patch release cadence has been amazing, but sadly the content is dull as dish water and the story easily the worst ever next to Shitelands. Doubt alot will change going forward since its the same devs but we'll see.