Dragonflight Alpha/Beta General Discussion

[Makabreska]

Challenging doesnt have to mean extremely difficult. The final boss of a Normal raid is challenging.

What I want from Dragonriding is more specifically that it doesnt end up trivial. I don't need a mythic equivalent to Dragonriding, but I would like a NM variant, so to speak. Something that requires a baseline amount of effort such that it doesnt end up feeling unearned. There should be a level of skill that separates those that do it well enough to those that do it great, just like how in a NM raid you don't need amazing DPS, but you are definitely rewarded for having it.

Apples to oranges. What will you get by being better at DRing? Getting to your destination a little faster?

[Nymrohd]

Apples to oranges. What will you get by being better at DRing? Getting to your destination a little faster?

Yeah. That would be enough for me tbh. Or getting to my destination in a more creative way. And more importantly, actually getting to it instead of just afking there and then remembering I was flying only to find myself dying on fatigue water.

[Makabreska]

Yeah. That would be enough for me tbh. Or getting to my destination in a more creative way. And more importantly, actually getting to it instead of just afking there and then remembering I was flying only to find myself dying on fatigue water.

Well, that last part is already there since the start.

[Sondrelk]

Apples to oranges. What will you get by being better at DRing? Getting to your destination a little faster?

The good feeling you get from being good at something.
I still think that the best metric for a good version of Dragonriding is one where you can, if you are good at it, fly from the shore to the highest peak, and for this to be challenging enough that it's not a simple checklist achievement.

Currently it seems like it's mostly trivial to fly around at max level. It takes the bare minimum to regain vigor, and with lenient turning circles and plenty of movement options staying in the air is more of an AFK check than anything.

A different metric on which to judge Dragonriding is whether players organically feel that the Flight Master is a good option, rather than simply using Dragonriding everywhere.
Obviously if you are in Valdrakken then the game is very clearly laid out to use your mount to get down and that is perfectly fine. But what I wonder is whether Dragonriding will become so trivial that even stuff like moving from the North tip to the South tip will be trivial enough that players will only choose the Flight Master if they have something else to do rather than play the game. Not quite as severe as with regualr flying where you only use the Flight Master if you are afraid you will autorun into the fatigue zone, but still.


In short. I want Dragonriding to be tuned to such a level where it isnt trivial at the games highest level of intended challenge, like Advanced flying courses, or even regualr Gold courses. And in many ways be tuned in such a way that Blizzard has plenty of room to make new challenges or changes to it later, without those changes solely being to add areas where it isnt useable.

[Arkura]

The good feeling you get from being good at something.
I still think that the best metric for a good version of Dragonriding is one where you can, if you are good at it, fly from the shore to the highest peak, and for this to be challenging enough that it's not a simple checklist achievement.

Currently it seems like it's mostly trivial to fly around at max level. It takes the bare minimum to regain vigor, and with lenient turning circles and plenty of movement options staying in the air is more of an AFK check than anything.

A different metric on which to judge Dragonriding is whether players organically feel that the Flight Master is a good option, rather than simply using Dragonriding everywhere.
Obviously if you are in Valdrakken then the game is very clearly laid out to use your mount to get down and that is perfectly fine. But what I wonder is whether Dragonriding will become so trivial that even stuff like moving from the North tip to the South tip will be trivial enough that players will only choose the Flight Master if they have something else to do rather than play the game. Not quite as severe as with regualr flying where you only use the Flight Master if you are afraid you will autorun into the fatigue zone, but still.


In short. I want Dragonriding to be tuned to such a level where it isnt trivial at the games highest level of intended challenge, like Advanced flying courses, or even regualr Gold courses. And in many ways be tuned in such a way that Blizzard has plenty of room to make new challenges or changes to it later, without those changes solely being to add areas where it isnt useable.

While you do have some valid points you also have to consider that this is a feature ment for everyone.. And by that meaning it means literally everyone playing the game at different levels and different amounts of time each week. For example if you have a disability that makes everything a little more challening making this ment to be a fun feature considering it doesnt really empower your character in any way almost impossible to do at max efficiency due to something like that.
All I'm saying is that we have to kind of think of it more ways then what we would prefer for ourselves here because this feature is ment for everyone.
But I do see what you're saying and maybe they can find a middle ground to give us options to test ourselves or face more challening things rather then making Dragonriding itself more challenging as a base.

[Nymrohd]

While you do have some valid points you also have to consider that this is a feature ment for everyone.. And by that meaning it means literally everyone playing the game at different levels and different amounts of time each week. For example if you have a disability that makes everything a little more challening making this ment to be a fun feature considering it doesnt really empower your character in any way almost impossible to do at max efficiency due to something like that.
All I'm saying is that we have to kind of think of it more ways then what we would prefer for ourselves here because this feature is ment for everyone.
But I do see what you're saying and maybe they can find a middle ground to give us options to test ourselves or face more challening things rather then making Dragonriding itself more challenging as a base.

And if Dragonriding was a bit more challenging all it would mean is that people who don't want any challenge would just not reach top speed and would occasionally pick a flight path.

[Revamp Man]

Well, the Nathrezim in the Legion actually are demons, the Eternal Ones did not fight one another at any point outside of their fight against Zovaal and the Jailer just gave the Legion the sword and helm when they were already planning to go to Azeroth anyway. He also didn't have any servants there before the Lich King that we know off and the whole Lich King thing didn't really work out.
And Sylvanas turned on him immediately once she realised what she was being manipulated into.

So pretty much everything.

Also, the Nathrezim are servants of Denathrius, not Zovaal. They work for Zovaal, but they aren't his servants and likely not truly loyal, only staying because Denathrius told them to.

1. The nathrezim are dreadlords from the shadowlands I will however concede the point the fel caused them to become technical demons

2. The covenants are fighting when we get to shadowlands and don't seem fond of one another

3. The Jailer used the helm and sword to make a servant on Azeroth and THEN went through trouble to make Sylvanas follow him

4. Sylvanas did to anduin what Arthas did to her...was even a point in a cutscene with anduin and she served him by doing exactly what she was ordered to and was OK with everyone else serving until he said everyone.

So to sum up the Jailer (who denathrius worked for and who the dreadlords called master) had the dreadlords give the legion the helm and sword saying they crafted it. Then he got lucky that sargeras sent it to Azeroth but that was apparently part of the plan then he had the dreadlords send Arthas after the helm and then had him make Sylvanas and the dreadlords betray Arthas and try to keep him from becoming the lich king.

Then after Arthas became the lich king and resisted the Jailer he had his dreadlords attack him. When Sylvanas got penetrated by old god blood he talked to her in the maw and made her a deal telling her that she will serve him eventually and told her signs. She ended up seeing the signs and decided to serve him.

[huth]

2. The covenants are fighting when we get to shadowlands and don't seem fond of one another

No, they're not. Rogue Maldraxxians are and Maldraxxus is in a state of civil war at the time. The Covenant is essentially defunct until we go there and beat down that war. The other Covenants aren't even interacting, much less fighting.

3. The Jailer used the helm and sword to make a servant on Azeroth and THEN went through trouble to make Sylvanas follow him

Which is completely different than what you said before, so i fail to see your point.

4. Sylvanas did to anduin what Arthas did to her...was even a point in a cutscene with anduin and she served him by doing exactly what she was ordered to and was OK with everyone else serving until he said everyone.

So she served him until she realised what she was doing.

[infinitemeridian]

Is there a way to preview the Dragonriding mount customizations?

[plz delete account]

Challenging doesnt have to mean extremely difficult. The final boss of a Normal raid is challenging.

What I want from Dragonriding is more specifically that it doesnt end up trivial. I don't need a mythic equivalent to Dragonriding, but I would like a NM variant, so to speak. Something that requires a baseline amount of effort such that it doesnt end up feeling unearned. There should be a level of skill that separates those that do it well enough to those that do it great, just like how in a NM raid you don't need amazing DPS, but you are definitely rewarded for having it.

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This is pretty much the case.
I still stand by that what I want from Dragonriding is the same feeling I get from gliding in Just Cause 3. Or using the Elytra in Minecraft. Not something that is difficult and requires lots of learning, but something that rewards good play with more gameplay opportunities and challenges than what you get it from it by doing the minimal amount.

Denath was challenging at release for being a dps race.
It's now challenging to limit your dps enough to cleanse enough stacks before P2

[Padwarle]

PTR realms are back (but offline) after being gone since last week, I assume this means soontm.

[Revamp Man]

No, they're not. Rogue Maldraxxians are and Maldraxxus is in a state of civil war at the time. The Covenant is essentially defunct until we go there and beat down that war. The other Covenants aren't even interacting, much less fighting.



Which is completely different than what you said before, so i fail to see your point.



So she served him until she realised what she was doing.

she served him until she decided not to and it was framed as some moral epiphany (she even admits herself that she knew the entire time what she was doing was wrong)
yeah genocide and domination was all well and good until she realized the slaves would include her which is not even a unique turn around in a plot but is essentially a cliche for the whole "i teamed up with a greater evil because they said they are doing good and you will see...oh wait they are actually going to be evil to me to!!!" plot. Heck the rune carver being the primus was called out almost immediately because the plot much like the lore is extremely shallow.

i said the jailer had gone through the trouble of making a new servant on azeroth when he already had one and you thought that i meant he went through the trouble of making the lich king and not the very obvious point of making sylvanas a servant when he already had a lich king which he can apparently dominate insanely easily.

Heck because of what i can only assume is lore that never made it into the game or even an overpriced book we do not see why anduin was the one needed specifically for his plans and why the others werent good enough and the only real thing even remotely interesting linking to past expansions is the fact lothraxion is actually still a spy that is just pretending to be cleansed.

i get that some people like the story of the expansion but can we at least agree that the multiple leaps they had to do to make any of the lore connect to the already established universe might not be the best??

heck the writers couldnt even get their own in-universe power scaling "the eternal ones are like titan+" and then a book saying "the eternal ones are the death equivalant to the titans of order" and all of them are created by these first ones who foresaw the entirety of events leading to the maw walkers showing up and thus made it to where only we would activate those waystones because it is all a part of a cosmic pattern which the bad guy is focused on breaking...again...for like the third time in warcraft and once again we are supposed to be left thinking "ya know maybe the jailer wasnt such a bad guy" because the writers have an obsession with making us view the bad guy as some poor misunderstood being that had the right idea but the wrong execution.

sargeras did nothing wrong

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PTR realms are back (but offline) after being gone since last week, I assume this means soontm.

it means scribes should start dumping those tomes because prepatch announcement is incoming

[Super Dickmann]

Kind of wish it had been used. Really the Soul Forge was a cool concept that made no sense during ICC and perhaps the only thing that points to them having some vague idea about a Lich King-related villain using the World Soul in the future which would have been some solid planning on their part. I really find it hard to believe they actually DID plan that ofc.

Also I now have this idea of how it might have been if instead of being blandness incarnate, Zovaal had been themed after James Brown like Bronjahm was, with a Superbad based cover as his theme song. We need a villain with a deep v-neck!

I severely doubt World Souls were even considered before at earliest Cataclysm, but yeah, it was something that was always vaguely explained. I don't know how long they were considering something Death-related beside the Lich King, but the first seeds of something like the Bald Man were in Legion with Odyn looking into the Shadowlands and Varimathras's intro. I'm unwilling to give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt on planning anything further.

On the characterization point, you really might as well have, a hammy villain can be a lot of fun, and while my preference if we're going to have a Jailer character would be what @Sondrelk alludes to, going cheesy with it would at least be memorable. No one'll say Castlevania's Death is some masterpiece of writing, but the Grim Reaper being a petty swearing jackass is at least not forgettable. Incidentally, the opportunist angle to explain away his involvement in the plot has always been coping, but re: @huth it's pretty decisively thrown out with the Sylvanas book. While he does predict some things more generally - a burning shadow, Sylvanas being Warchief, the sword in the planet is insanely specific. @Sondrelk's angle and what I believe they were going with, but like much of SL declined to commit, was that he knew this would happen because of fate/foresight. Either his fate machine in SoD or the eye from Odyn, empowered by Aman'thul, could have done it. But it wasn't, much like the character wasn't written at all and all his dialogue comes out of an algorythm for villainous one-liners.

[Nyel]

Tbf here, it MAY NOT be, who knows. We got 5 more realms and their zereths to fully explore. But I think the idea is that the Progenitors made the Cosmos, and likely the forces ontop of it. Light and Shadow may have much more specific ideals however...

Pretty sure all of the Zereths are gone and forgotten (by the devs) the minute we leave the Shadowlands behind.

[Kiria]

Pretty sure all of the Zereths are gone and forgotten (by the devs) the minute we leave the Shadowlands behind.

Good, I think the Shadowlands needs to be forgotten.

[Sondrelk]

PTR realms are back (but offline) after being gone since last week, I assume this means soontm.

Depends on what, and how much they want to test on the PTR. Possible they only want to test gamebreaking bugs, basic pre-patch stuff, and get some extra data on tuning. In which case we might be looking at a cool one month PTR, which would mean we are still 2-3 weeks away from it going up.

Really its impossible to say. It could come out today, it could come out a month before the pre-patch launches. We will only know once its out.

[huth]

i said the jailer had gone through the trouble of making a new servant on azeroth when he already had one and you thought that i meant he went through the trouble of making the lich king and not the very obvious point of making sylvanas a servant when he already had a lich king which he can apparently dominate insanely easily.

Lich King didn't work. When he corrupted Sylvanas, we had already killed him as well. So you're still wrong either way.

You keep showing you never actually paid attention to the lore.

[Berkilak]

Just because you don't like it, that doesn't mean it's not the case.

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Tbf here, it MAY NOT be, who knows. We got 5 more realms and their zereths to fully explore. But I think the idea is that the Progenitors made the Cosmos, and likely the forces ontop of it. Light and Shadow may have much more specific ideals however...

I absolutely love cosmic worldbuilding. In other settings. WoW's stab at it is too pretentious and cynical to enjoy.

[Avikur]

Depends on what, and how much they want to test on the PTR. Possible they only want to test gamebreaking bugs, basic pre-patch stuff, and get some extra data on tuning. In which case we might be looking at a cool one month PTR, which would mean we are still 2-3 weeks away from it going up.

Really its impossible to say. It could come out today, it could come out a month before the pre-patch launches. We will only know once its out.

I agree that we won’t know until it goes up BUT the fact they added an actual build to it shows they intend for it to go live sooner rather than later, if it was going to be weeks or even a month+ before the PTR is live they wouldn’t have added the current build to it as they would only need to take it down and add a more recent build when they’re ready to open it for testing.

[Arkura]

New build today or we thinking tomorrow is more likely?