How are you enjoying Dragonflight so far?

[Relapses]

The user metacritic score for Shadowlands was 5.6 on January 6, 2021 (and ended the expansion at 2.9).

The user metacritic score for Dragonflight is 5.3 right now.

The internet does not have a worse metric for gauging the popularity or quality of a video game than metacritic.

[Le Conceptuel]

We've had dark expansions since Vanilla. It's what makes WoW feel like WoW.

I don't really think WoW is particularly dark—the only expansion I would really say had a consistent and overt dark tone was TBC. BfA did also grow pretty dark at places, so I'd peg it as the runner-up. Shadowlands was dark in theory, but the lack of exploration given to the actual implications of the dark elements made it more bland than dark, and its dark elements were more "grimderp" than anything anyway. WotLK was kind of dark in overall aesthetic and executed its tone excellently, but I don't think it was darker in terms of overall magnitude than BfA and is probably tied with it in spite of a more overtly dark aesthetic.

[Speedlance]

I dont like pre raid bis items being locked behind insane grind.
Dragonriding, however, is the best thing ive seen from blizzard in a long time.

[Lei]

If you are solely an outdoor player then why are complaining you have to do outdoor content to get rewards? Wtf is your argument even? Of course renown rewards are for you, but if you cant be bothered to actually slowly grind it, then quit i guess? Its literally the easiest xpac with the least amount of chores to stay relevant since Cata.

Learn to argue.

[Capultro]

I never asked for this, the things that I have asked for, blizzard did not give them to me...

but I don't lose hope... gladiator, warden, knight... look, right now I would settle for being given a simple hero class skin, like the one for the dark ranger for the hunter (which by the way is missing the title of dark ranger or simply ranger. ranger of the tower does not work at all for fantasy...)

[saixilein]

So far i love everything about df. Only thing im missing are internetfriends, so i dont have to do everything solo/with strangers :c

[Nyel]

This is what most people predicted would be the problem with DF.

It's like, we ordered a steak and salad in SL, and we got a steak and a bowl of steaming turds. We rightfully complained that this is not something we want to eat. Now in DF, we get a steak and an empty bowl with a single leaf, and somehow are expected to say "well that's better than a turd, right?" rather than call it out for being what it is, i.e. practically nothing.

We do still have the steak, but the question is, does that make for a good meal.

It isn't apparent right now, but as soon as the honeymoon is over and people are forced to grind Renown (because it's the only kind of "system content" we have at max level) without getting stronger or enhancing your combat power, the complaints will start and they'll be massive.

There's a shit ton to do at level 70, there are so many (useless) quests, I feel like it's MoP all over again where is so much filler content to keep you busy that it's just too much and peopel instead give up.

- - - Updated - - -

I think you're assuming we'll be getting infrequent updates, when we have nothing to indicate thats the case yet.

WoD did not have infrequent updates, the expansion was just cut short towards the end and that resulted in a terrible and long content drought. When you compare WoD up until 6.2, the only thing that was lacking was a meaty 6.1 patch, but we still got BRF during that time - I know 6.1 is decried as the selfie patch, which it is, but BRF was a thing that came around that time, too.

- - - Updated - - -

People are going to realise quickly there really isn't much to do at max level - outside of dungeons/raids/pvp.

There is a lot to do (it's very one-dimensional though as it's purely quests). It's just not worth it, because it mostly is boring quests that give you reputation, which then gives you pretty meaningless fluff and nothing relevant to make your character better.

[Megor96]

I've seen some people saying how vanilla/BC/wrath didn't have much side content as well but are still considered the peaks of WoW. They're correct, those were great expansions...for their time when gaming as a whole was pretty basic and nothing but WoW had such a large active positive community and world.

Besides the remaining WoW community taking a turn for the worse since Legion with m+. The devs have been making poor attempts to add side content and then instead of trying to improve on those things when people called it shit, they just scraped it all. Now with DF they just gave up on making new stuff for the endgame and just released the barebones new dungeons and raid.

Renown is just reps with a different UI, Dragonriding while being a cool mechanic just transports you to the same old boring WQs/dailies we've seen since Legion, and the profession "revamp" is still the same thing but now you need to manage slightly more clutter which just seems like a change they made to have an extra feature to put on adverts without much thought.

WoW of course won't die since there will always be at least 50k+ people paying a sub to run m+ forever, but it'll basically just be the Simpsons of gaming eventually. That'd be pretty sad to see for me at least after all those years of playing.

[Tojara]

WoD had a great leveling experience and garrisons were at least fun for the first like month, but that was it really. Did it have great dungeons? Yeah. Did it have amazing raids? Yeah. But that was really it with the expansion. As a raid logger this expansion was great, but putting on my hat that looks at the overall experience for everybody would leave me to believe that it wasn't that great.

DF for me has the exact same opening experience as WoD, with mechanics that will easily keep people entertained for longer than what WoD did. The thing that's nice about this though is those things that keep you entertained aren't mandatory really, so if you want to treat it as a raid logging experience with some M+ strung throughout the week (especially once you get rolling) you absolutely can. The problem with WoD is that if you wanted to be constantly entertained, you really couldn't because the post leveling experience was pretty limited if you weren't raiding really.

Unpopular opinion to some but Shadowlands was only 'awful' insofar that they fucked up with design pillars of the game. Renown heavily gated story progression and for the first 6-7 months you were essentially locked behind one covenant. Torghast if it was completely optional would've been fine, and the Maw was just well, awful. If Torghast could've been grinded to your hearts content, renown wasn't gated, and you could freely swap between covenants most people probably would've loved the expansion.

DF is essentially what Shadowlands could've been because none of the reps offer real tangible power (I mean they do to a degree, but it's minor in the grand scheme of things), you can choose to grind them like old reps, or you can just take your time with them. You can swap between talents whenever you want, focus on story beats or reputations that interest you the most, or you can just choose to ignore all of it if you only care about arena, M+ or raiding (well mostly, but compared to other expansions this ones incredibly friendly). Nothing is super mandatory, professions got revamped, and you can choose to be a raid logger if you want with plenty of side stuff to do if you want it. WoW in previous years has either been one or the other. Raid loggers paradise with nothing tangible to do, or tons of borderline chores you had to do keep mostly relevant or up to date.

Can't say it's the best because it's too early. It 100% has potential to be one of the best, or the best as long as the patch cycles are good though. That's what "killed" WoD. BRF was basically just a raid and HFC was more or less just a raid with one of the worst end game zones they ever added. Both of the raids were killer, but raids alone being killer doesn't appease everybody that plays the game.

[oldgeezer]

Honestly, I think that the issue for me is that Shadowlands simply offered a terrible take on a dark story. I'd have absolutely loved for Shadowlands to have a very dark and gloomy aesthetic if it were executed competently. There was all sorts of Grimderp stupidity like having Sylvie feed souls into an obliteration engine, which already just makes WoW's afterlife look stupid and ineffective, and even that didn't work in making the setting dark since nobody seemed to really treat souls being annihilated as any different from just dying, but none of it was really dark in an interesting way. If there had been a little bit more prying into the Shadowlands' nature and were the characters capable of thinking about the actual weight and implications of things, the revelation that the afterlife is just a giant factory designed to extract anima from souls could have at least been pretty interesting.

I quite agree, and this was my main issue with Torghast. For a place of eternal torment it simply wasn't horrifying enough (or, at all really). Just a bunch of mobs standing around chatting in mostly empty hallways and a few lame ghosts. Now, I get that there are censors and game rating issues to take into account, but the level of psychological (if not actual) horror could have been tweaked a bit. Compare with Thaddeus in Naxx, for example. Or those frankly unsettly ex-Draenei mounts in Argus.

I also agree with your afterlife reveal. This should have profound social and philosophical implications for the citizens of Azeroth, but nada.

- - - Updated - - -

It's the worst zone, once you've done it'll get way better.

Yeah, I'm finding the centaur stuff pretty dull. At least the Desolace centaurs had a bit of attitude (and flies).

[Nyel]

the updates were also spaced pretty far apart, and the content drought on the end meant players spent a larger percentage than ever with no new content. Contrast this with Legion/MoP which had plentiful content (sans MoPs pretty big drought at the end).

Comparing this expansion to WoD is extremely premature, since WoDs base was great, but it just didnt have the post launch support it needed... If we get a post-launch with infrequent content updates? Yeah I'll compare it to MoP, but considering how blizzard has been expanding the WoW team like crazy, I'm inclined to be hopeful that we get a larger amount of updates, comparable to MoP, or Legion, or perhaps more.

Personally I am not comparing Dragonflight to WoD, I'm just saying that WoD wasn't that bad until the worst content drought in WoW's history kicked in. Blackrock Foundry is often regarded as one of the best raids Blizzard has ever designed and WoD's leveling and "early" game was unanimously praised by most. I mean the expansion had severe issues, but they only became apparent later on - that's where I would dare a comparison to Dragonflight. Max level is just really one-dimensional, you have the outdoor content (like in WoD) and your usual dungeon + raid stuff and that pretty much is it. The Garrison is pretty much the same like Dragonriding, it's a nice additional feature that doesn't give you any worthwile content. And besides that, there just isn't any other interesting system - a lot of players like this approach, but I can see the problems starting quite soon after the "early launch shine" of Dragonflight wears off. I don't expect Dragonflight to be as content starved as WoD though, definitely not.

- - - Updated - - -

I quite agree, and this was my main issue with Torghast. For a place of eternal torment it simply wasn't horrifying enough (or, at all really). Just a bunch of mobs standing around chatting in mostly empty hallways and a few lame ghosts. Now, I get that there are censors and game rating issues to take into account, but the level of psychological (if not actual) horror could have been tweaked a bit. Compare with Thaddeus in Naxx, for example. Or those frankly unsettly ex-Draenei mounts in Argus.

I also agree with your afterlife reveal. This should have profound social and philosophical implications for the citizens of Azeroth, but nada.

- - - Updated - - -



Yeah, I'm finding the centaur stuff pretty dull. At least the Desolace centaurs had a bit of attitude (and flies).

It really gets better. When I entered Ohnahra I was like "wow" and then you start questing there and it immediately becomes a "meh". Azure Span and Thaldraszus easily make up for that low though, they're great zones.

[Julian Rayne]

Early days yet, but so far I'm enjoying it even more than BFA, which was my previous favorite.

[JustaRandomReindeer]

the updates were also spaced pretty far apart, and the content drought on the end meant players spent a larger percentage than ever with no new content. Contrast this with Legion/MoP which had plentiful content (sans MoPs pretty big drought at the end).

Comparing this expansion to WoD is extremely premature, since WoDs base was great, but it just didnt have the post launch support it needed... If we get a post-launch with infrequent content updates? Yeah I'll compare it to MoP, but considering how blizzard has been expanding the WoW team like crazy, I'm inclined to be hopeful that we get a larger amount of updates, comparable to MoP, or Legion, or perhaps more.

People have been taking this revisionist approach to WoD and it's quite weird. WoD was not good. People were quitting in droves way before any drought. But I will be fair here and say that was mostly the result of years of stale endgame and WoD was just the expansion where people gave up. Still, WoD almost killed WoW. You can say the leveling experience, dungeons, and raids were great during WoD but that's been the case in every expansion.

Now compare it to Legion which was the first expansion since Wrath that managed to keep a solid amount of the playerbase playing the game. Legion had everything that WoD had and it had systems that kept players wanting to play. Dragonflight does not have those systems and we have to wonder now whether raids and m+ are enough to keep us playing or this is gonna be a repeat of WoD.

[Coldkil]

Still in honeymoon, but so far it's really good and clearly a candidate to be one of the best if they keep going this direction.

Activities are fun, nothing is mandatory but i'm waiting for m+ and raid. For the first time in years i'm already planning to level an alt right now since i have unlocked most of the stuff already

[Grapemask]

I hit "one of the badder expansions" but as I think about it more I probably mean "meh." My complaints and the things I like mostly even out. My more major issue is I just don't have much to say about this game, good or bad. It feels so small compared to previous expansions.

The one thing that really bugs me is that I have had a suspicion that WoW started hiring their writers directly from the WoW lore and RP communities since about two expansions back, and this expansion feels like they let them go nuts.

The problem with the WoW lore and RP nerds - and you can see this in this very forum by heading over to the dedicated sub-forums for those - is that they don't understand "less is more." They also are terrible writers that love making every character a darling, but the larger issue is that they never. stop.writing. Every single thing needs 10 pages of text. This is great for nerds, but for those of us who have ventured outside and appreciated the feel of grass on our skin, this is just a fucking lot of boring shit. Good lord 36 pages of centaur internal politics that aren't even the tiniest bit interesting unless you're the kind of guy that prefers to read shampoo bottles in the bathroom instead of your phone. The same 36 pages could be accomplished with a couple lines of text and maybe a few seconds of stuff happening in game, the good old "show don't tell."

In fact it annoyed me so much I had to make a second paragraph going into the other part of WoW lore and RP nerds that bugs me, the obsession with interconnectedness. Not everything in the entire world is connected nor does there need to be an epic backstory for every single thing in the world. But WoW lore and RP nerds, in their refusal to adhere to less is more, need everything to have that 36 pages of backstory and it needs to be connected to something else with 36 pages. It really helps out the fan wikis if they can get fully circular links between every element in the game. And because the simpler times were written with an objectively better story where Deathwing wasn't farmer John's uncle, that's where the retconning comes in to save the day. So far I've picked up at least 5 retcons in this expansion that exist only to make sure everything has a bigger, dumber story that somehow connects to someone else's story.

But other than that I like flying until I run out of fly juice and then it's boring again. So whatever.

[FelPlague]

levelings fun, endgames stale. I think as soon as raid opens and everyones done with leveling/open world people are going to realize this is WoD 2.0

Wod would have been fun if not for it getting only 1 major patch.
Issue with wod was not the content that was there was bad, it was that there was so little.

[JustaRandomReindeer]

The playerbase cried out against borrowed power for years, I dont think the game needs borrowed power to succeed.

We'll see how things fair when all the S1 features are in, like primal storms, M+, the raid, etc.

The playerbase did not cry out against borrowed power. The playerbase cried out against Blizzard fucking up good features instead of improving them or maybe not even touching them. The playerbase was very confused when we replaced Artifact weapons for a fucking necklace. Isn't that why the term "borrowed power'' was coined? How exactly did we come to the conclusion that the only way to move forward is to completely remove all of the features that made Legion the best modern expansion, after giving us inferior versions of those features two expansions in a row? Now we are back to the good old WoD days - and remember - it's WoD that is remembered as one of the worst expansions in WoW history, not Legion.

I am sorry but if comparing DF to Legion makes Legion look like a newer and better version of WoW(which has been the case with BfA and Shadowlands too) then we have a problem and it's gonna become apparent real quick when the honeymoon effect wears off.

[AlexTinny]

It's ok, but not more than that.

[VMSmith]

Not at my endgame yet, so I can't fairly judge, but the leveling is entirely "meh". It's leveling. The story held me for most of one zone and now I just want to be finished with it. I'm not into manual grouping so I don't hold great hopes for the endgame, which I'm guessing will be LFR and Invasions for me, and that's about it. Every other game I play is just much more interesting right now.

[Utrrabbit]

Yeah, my strategy with the profession system so far has been to touch nothing. It's overwhelming, not super intuitive, and there is minimal forgiveness for "mistakes." Some things like this in games I will just impatiently yolo but this one has instead just been choice paralysis. I will do nothing.

WoW professions needed an overhaul and on paper they might have been a good job but I don't like that I feel like I need to meticulously research outside of the game what I am doing there because if I fuck up, it's fucked up for good. If I was a person who intended to spend a huge amount of time on professions and could count on getting everything, fine, but I'm not.

Honestly, they could let us retalent and just put a longass cooldown on it (like... once a week or something). Even the promise of the ability to respec in a future patch would probably be enough, but as it is, I don't want to touch anything.


I've actually had several friends complain they finished the entire campaign by 68-69, and they had to go back to do side quests. I don't know how aggressive they were at doing the bonus areas when they were in that area for a main quest, but I think probably you may need to at least do a little extra stuff or a dungeon or two also.

Weird I hit lvl 70 on my main before I even did 1/4 of the last zones campaign. I did not touch any side quests. That being I did do the bonus areas.