Dragonflight Alpha/Beta General Discussion

[Cosmic Janitor]

As I said earlier, 7.2's Mage Tower wasn't tested on PTR at all. Of course main reason for that was to keep us surprised, but maybe small closed environment for specific spec like that just doesn't require extensive testing.

They pretty much banked on it becoming playable as the expnsion progressed in legion. I'm not sure they have the same luxury with a 2 week limited time event that happens 3 times a year.

[TheFirstOnes]

I'm genuinely happy for you in that you seem to be the sole person that the current story was designed to interest. It gives me hope that my extremely specific interests will some day have an entire expansion dedicated to them, regardless of however many others would be completely turned off.

Need a hug bro?

[Dracullus]

They pretty much banked on it becoming playable as the expnsion progressed in legion. I'm not sure they have the same luxury with a 2 week limited time event that happens 3 times a year.

If MT really needs more testing and they are running out of time, they wouldn't open it just for 24 hours.

[Lahis]

As someone earlier mentioned it seems like they're going with the brilliant plan of "make sure it loads but don't bother to balance test it at all."

Making sure it loads properly is better than most stuff they do these days.

[Sondrelk]

They pretty much banked on it becoming playable as the expnsion progressed in legion. I'm not sure they have the same luxury with a 2 week limited time event that happens 3 times a year.

The Legion version was also very much a horribly tuned mess that was held up at least in good part by the idea that gear would trivialize it. I guess this version trades the exclusivity from being time limited with the exclusivity of being a difficult challenge, but it still seems like something that will definitely need more tuning before it becomes more accessible.

On the other hand I guess the lack of abilities being useable means you only need a max level character to get the full intended experience. Trinkets and the occassional item effect seems like it will be what carries this system. No idea whether Legiondaries will work, and for that matter if tier sets will work either, though if they do then it might be slightly simpler.

[Dracullus]

On the other hand I guess the lack of abilities being useable means you only need a max level character to get the full intended experience. Trinkets and the occassional item effect seems like it will be what carries this system. No idea whether Legiondaries will work, and for that matter if tier sets will work either, though if they do then it might be slightly simpler.

We don't know if it we will be squished to Legion level/ilvl or not. In both situation there will be BiS items, with scalling just some of them will come from Legion/BfA. Hopefully it will be just our lvl 60 characters, so a) there will be reason to gear alts, b) if you're not good enough to finish it on some spec, you can come back later with better gear.

[Sondrelk]

We don't know if it we will be squished to Legion level/ilvl or not. In both situation there will be BiS items, with scalling just some of them will come from Legion/BfA. Hopefully it will be just our lvl 60 characters, so a) there will be reason to gear alts, b) if you're not good enough to finish it on some spec, you can come back later with better gear.

Based on what has been datamined it seems it works on the old PvP template system where each spec gets assigned a specific value of stats. Back in Legion where this system was used it was affected by ilvl only, but who knows what will happen with this Mage Tower.

[Dracullus]

Based on what has been datamined it seems it works on the old PvP template system where each spec gets assigned a specific value of stats. Back in Legion where this system was used it was affected by ilvl only, but who knows what will happen with this Mage Tower.

Then sadly it won't be good tool to involve alts into endgame like Legion MT was. Well, to be honest every expac should have something like that anyway, Horrific Visions and Torghast encourage only mains of higher difficulties.

In that case minimal public testing makes even more sense, they only have to check stability and tune it for one specific set of stats.

[Sondrelk]

Then sadly it won't be good tool to involve alts into endgame like Legion MT was. Well, to be honest every expac should have something like that anyway, Horrific Visions and Torghast encourage only mains of higher difficulties.

In that case minimal public testing makes even more sense, they only have to check stability and tune it for one specific set of stats.

I would argue that this Mage Tower challenge is close enough to encouraging alts. What Legion did that made it so good for alts was that at the end you had a unique questline that awarded a class specific title, a unique class specific mount, and then you could cap all of that off with the Mage Tower challenge, which was fairly trivial at the end. It wasnt just the Mage Tower that carried the end of that expansion, and in fairness the expansion as a whole suffered when so much content had to be spread across all the calsses, which left the experience fairly anemic for players only going for a single, or even two characters.

Really what Blizzard needs to do is keep adding Timewalking stuff like the Mage Tower timewalking or the M+ timewalking to all the different expansions.
Complete some Timewalking islands and Warfronts for the unused elite warfront sets, help the Klaxxi in Pandaria for unused weapon varieties, add unique transmogs to all Timewalking raids.

Timewalking is really anemci when yo ureally look at it. Old expansions are an untapped source of content that is old enough that by this point I doubt most players even actually remember what it was like to play them.

[Lady Atia]

I would argue that this Mage Tower challenge is close enough to encouraging alts. What Legion did that made it so good for alts was that at the end you had a unique questline that awarded a class specific title, a unique class specific mount, and then you could cap all of that off with the Mage Tower challenge, which was fairly trivial at the end. It wasnt just the Mage Tower that carried the end of that expansion, and in fairness the expansion as a whole suffered when so much content had to be spread across all the calsses, which left the experience fairly anemic for players only going for a single, or even two characters.

Really what Blizzard needs to do is keep adding Timewalking stuff like the Mage Tower timewalking or the M+ timewalking to all the different expansions.
Complete some Timewalking islands and Warfronts for the unused elite warfront sets, help the Klaxxi in Pandaria for unused weapon varieties, add unique transmogs to all Timewalking raids.

Timewalking is really anemci when yo ureally look at it. Old expansions are an untapped source of content that is old enough that by this point I doubt most players even actually remember what it was like to play them.

People need to stop saying that Legion "suffered when so much content had to be spread across all the classes" because it's bullshit. Everytime Blizzard went and made the next feature "not so spread out" we ended up with less content and less rewards. MoP Challenge Modes had 11 unique rewards which you had to play with all different chars, meanwhile WoD CM's were a one and done thing and that sucked. Legion had 12 unique campaigns, class mounts, titles, transmogs aswell as the artifact skins and you never ran out of content to do - meanwhile BfA was a snorefeast as you could do everything on one single character and be done. Shadowlands is a step in the right direction again, atleast ....

[Sondrelk]

People need to stop saying that Legion "suffered when so much content had to be spread across all the classes" because it's bullshit. Everytime Blizzard went and made the next feature "not so spread out" we ended up with less content and less rewards. MoP Challenge Modes had 11 unique rewards which you had to play with all different chars, meanwhile WoD CM's were a one and done thing and that sucked. Legion had 12 unique campaigns, class mounts, titles, transmogs aswell as the artifact skins and you never ran out of content to do - meanwhile BfA was a snorefeast as you could do everything on one single character and be done. Shadowlands is a step in the right direction again, atleast ....

The content being divided did end up paying off for Legion, but only once the final patch was out and quality of life changes aimed at alts were added, before that the story really did suffer from encouraging alts on one hand and making it extremely difficult on the other.

Sure, MoP challenge mode dungeons were better than the WoD ones in that it gave more rewards in a sense, but it also required you to complete the same challenge 11 times with a slightly different topping.
It didn't really give you 11 different challenges so much as it asked you to complete it 11 times, and while that is giving the player more to do it isn't exactly the same as making more content.

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Shadowlands is a better version of what Legion did I would say. Because the content is spread out, but it can also be done on a single character. Once you have completed everything you wanted with one covenant you can easily just swap over to a different one and start earning rewards once more.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Legion clearly ran out of stream production-wise after they've used up all the buffer they had built during the extra dry content drought at the end of WoD. This is also why they consolidated everything again for the last Legion patch. While it is laughable that a company the size of Blizzard can't keep a somewhat decent class based narrative going for a whole expansion, at the end of the day the reality seems to be that this is what Blizzard can - or at least is willing to - do. I was among the people that said that the content we got for Boring Chore was substandard and I'd rather have something decent that fully entertains me on one character, instead of having to play all 12 classes to get everything out of a patch. Argus kinda gave us that, but I will also say that I had alot of fun playing all classes for the first time at the end of Legion to see what the expansion had to offer. If this was another game where I can be everything on 1 character I would have been probably even more thrilled, as I'd have seen it earlier. The class specific content was great, just going through all the shared stuff 12 times gets tiresome quick.

[Sondrelk]

Legion clearly ran out of stream production-wise after they've used up all the buffer they had built during the extra dry content drought at the end of WoD. This is also why they consolidated everything again for the last Legion patch. While it is laughable that a company the size of Blizzard can't keep a somewhat decent class based narrative going for a whole expansion, at the end of the day the reality seems to be that this is what Blizzard can - or at least is willing to - do. I was among the people that said that the content we got for Boring Chore was substandard and I'd rather have something decent that fully entertains me on one character, instead of having to play all 12 classes to get everything out of a patch. Argus kinda gave us that, but I will also say that I had alot of fun playing all classes for the first time at the end of Legion to see what the expansion had to offer. If this was another game where I can be everything on 1 character I would have been probably even more thrilled, as I'd have seen it earlier. The class specific content was great, just going through all the shared stuff 12 times gets tiresome quick.

The class based narrative was clearly too ambitious to begin with though, and that's saying something considering how little of it there was per character. Some classes like Death Knights had a really good in-depth questline with lots of care put into it, but even they couldnt escape from large chunks of the plot being blatant padding. Requiring items with low drop chances, or better yet straight up timegates whenever the game asked you to get something from the mission table.

I am also pretty sure there was no new content added fro individual classes in 9.1, and 9.2 is the poster child example of why Legion ended up really suffering under the ambition of focusing on classes. A single short questline for each class, and a slightly more interesting short questline at the end for the mount, and the rest of the patch really suffered from the lack of attention.


Will be interesting to see what the game has to offer going forwards though. Class specific content is a good idea in theory, we just need some way of getting it that doesnt end up where only a few classes gets anything interesting, or worse still that the class specific content ends up taking up all the designers time and effort.
In that regard I feel Covenants really managed to get it right. At least in 9.0. 4 distinct progression paths, and each one is available to everyone, and for that matter available to a single character if you are willing to put in the time and effort. For someone with only a single character that doesnt put a lot of time and effort into everything I wouldnt be shocked if getting everything available to them from Shadowlands to take years. It's certainly taken me the good part of a year to get everything available from only 2 covenants, and while that will undoubtedly go faster in later patches it's still surprising just how much content there is.

[Nyel]

Looks like there's going to be something going down in Northrend, specifically the Hall of Reflections.

https://twitter.com/keyboardturn/sta...615126528?s=20

We were speculating for a very long time that this expansion culminates in Icecrown / on Azeroth, so it’s nice to see this.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

World content is usually in moderate to little amount and the big Class content in Legion was a lot, some even was the same because well having absolutely everything original is a lot of work. Yes people did have gripes about Legion, this narrative that nobody was upset about it are just flat out wrong. I liked Legion don't get me wrong, but it wasn't always sunshine(Felshine?)

[draugril]

The class based narrative was clearly too ambitious to begin with though, and that's saying something considering how little of it there was per character.

I'd rather have ambitious designs that falter than complete stagnation.

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We were speculating for a very long time that this expansion culminates in Icecrown / on Azeroth, so it’s nice to see this.

I wouldn't read too much into it. Many were also convinced that BfA would end with Silithus given how BfA started with the sword. SL will not necessarily end with Icecrown given how it started with the sky shattering.

[Sondrelk]

World content is usually in moderate to little amount and the big Class content in Legion was a lot, some even was the same because well having absolutely everything original is a lot of work. Yes people did have gripes about Legion, this narrative that nobody was upset about it are just flat out wrong. I liked Legion don't get me wrong, but it wasn't always sunshine(Felshine?)

The version the expansion launched at was absolutely trashed. Players were mostly happy with no longer being stuck in their garrisons and actually having something to do, but the amount of problems were seemingly endless.
Legiondaries being entirely RNG, meaning some got their best one and shot up in DPS whereas others got the interrupt ring after weeks of constant trial and error.
M+ was an absolute mess when it launched. Failing a run didn't just make your key worse, it made it useless requiring you to run a successful run with it just to get a useable key.
Some specs were extremely OP. Prot warrior was basically unkillable in PvP, and Shadow Priests were so dominant in raiding that it all but trivialized the entire world first race for Emerald Nightmare.
Class questlines were absolutely rife with timegating, which was not even getting into how some were not doable for all specs.
Some class order halls had everything you could ever want, like the Druid one with a dedicated teleport and utility that is still useable to this day. Others like the priest one was pretty much a big room with some tables in the middle.


All expansions have problems that eventually get smoothed out and eventually forgotten. What's important is important is what the developers learn from it.

[Varodoc]

Enlighten us Prophet, why is the Sylvanas novel delayed again and what does this mean for Patch 9.2 @Nyel

[Kereberus]

Nov 2 release date

[Raetary]

https://www.wowhead.com/news/officia...h-notes-324587

Release is Nov. 2nd.
Just as predicted.