Dragonflight Alpha/Beta General Discussion

[Ersula]

Okay let's put the pieces of the puzzle together.

You really don't need to do this much hypothesizing. We have post-raid dialog already. Sylvanas & Tyrande have a short conversation & as demonstated by the animations she tells her to go clear out the maw of all the souls languishing there. Azeroth gets pulverized by by the Jailer in the third phase so it *might* be changed irrevocably. (Okay world revamp, but if you need a world soul to use the machine that edits physical reality, why don't we just use the Jailer's soul to fix what he broke? They imply Titans & Eternal ones' souls are the equivalent to a world soul. We definitely kill him in the raid. Why not just use his? Hell you could even bring back Teldrassil at this point)

- - - Updated - - -

They are Azerothian dragons hatched in OL.

OL is Draenor sucked into the turbulent winds of the Twisting Nether so what I said is still accurate. Also Faerie Netherdrakes* have nothing to do with Azeroth, they already visited Draenor before the opening of the Dark Portal.

*It turns out this is still frought information: The shop describes the Enchanged Fey Dragon as being a creature born in the Emerald Dream, but then Warlords of Draenor came out & the devs placed them in Shadowmoon valley being used by the Draenei as flying mounts. When people asked about this because it made no sense with established more, a dev said something about them being some kind of netherdrake who visited Draenor after traveling through space???? They're still there so who knows?

[Nebron]

Okay let's put the pieces of the puzzle together.

- We know the Jailer wants to reshape reality to a dark one where everyone serves him. He seems to be defeated, but likely after he has had the chance to at least deal some damage. His plan to reshape reality should partly come to fruition, although we don't know what that looks like.

- We know the WoW team, unless being hyperbolic, considers 9.2 as the closing chapter of a story spanning all the way from Warcraft 3 (i.e. Arthas, Sylvanas, Uther, Jaina, Thrall, etc.).

- We know the WoW team have been doing their usual rounds of "leaks" with the store, datamined assets and so on leading up to an expansion, and these clues this time around seem to revolve around dragons in general, Emerald ones in particular, the moon and the sun, and so on.

- We know there's some form of "Living World" animation coming, possibly letting players transition between phases or dimensions.

- We know the WoW team have alluded to the next expansion as more grounded.

- We know the WoW team has designed a bunch of more down-to-earth Azerothian assets over the last few years, suitable for places like the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor.

- We also know they have stated (IIRC) that they like revamping zones when and where it makes sense and fits what they're doing with the story. Hence WSG, AB, Arathi Highlands, Darkshore, Silithus.

---

So... Azeroth dies more or less, and the key to restoring her lies in the Emerald Dream (or whatever they choose to call it). But they don't want to do another cosmic expansion so it won't be a full deep-dive into that realm. Instead they'll do some sort of hybrid like BfA, where we'll visit a more traditional place on Azeroth and also dip our feet into the cosmological stuff.

For example, the Dragon Isles is where we'll go because the Dragons and their powers is all we've got to keep Azeroth protected, and we need to use their various powers to undo the damage wrought by the Jailer.

The Green flight will guide us into the Dream, letting us "renew" Azeroth. Tyrande and the World Tree Nordrassil will likely play a role.

The Black flight and Wrathion will help us preserve Azeroth's foundation.

The Red flight will let us save the living, all mortals who suffer from the Jailer's wrath.

The Bronze flight will aid us as we stave off the Infinite flight and perhaps do something with the timeways. Maybe we need to bring back the Dragon Soul from Cata or something.

The Blue flight could perhaps be instrumental in empowering Azeroth the titan, seeing as how Arcane and Order go hand in hand.

Patch 10.2 could be a trip to Elunaria or whatever the place is called.

Over the course of the expansion and future ones, Blizzard gradually releases new zone revamps.

NGL, I like your logic here
But yeah, Dragon Isles are bascailly out of question at this point.

- Wrathion hints of Dragon Isles
- dragon-themed store bundle
- emerald drake thing that is expected to be part of deluxe edition
- just revealed mini-set for Hearthstone is actually Onyxia's Lair
- the Worth its weight in gold. official WoW's twitter account tweet from 09/02/2022 points to a netherdrake dragon egg
- another tweet from literally 5 MINUTES ago points to Blackwing's Lair raid that will be released on 22/02/2022, but shows paladin that holds the Red Dragonscale Protector.

Might be reaching, but come on...

[Amstrup]

i hope they will add new casting/fighting animations in 10.0.
would love to get the human female casting animation on my night-elfs.

It could be cosmetics you could farm.

[Nyel]

What the hell happened that y’all are talking about catboys now? What did I miss?

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

What the hell happened that y’all are talking about catboys now? What did I miss?

Something about Elunaria or something. I think folks are memeing on the Everquest moon expansion.

[Nyel]

Something about Elunaria or something. I think folks are memeing on the Everquest moon expansion.

Sometimes this thread is dead for hours or even days and sometimes it’s completely random alive over some nonsense, it’s fascinating.

[Catastrophy349]

10.0 World of Warcraft: Different It will be completely unexpected and no one will even come close to guessing it.

[Izalla]

You really don't need to do this much hypothesizing. We have post-raid dialog already. Sylvanas & Tyrande have a short conversation & as demonstated by the animations she tells her to go clear out the maw of all the souls languishing there. Azeroth gets pulverized by by the Jailer in the third phase so it *might* be changed irrevocably. (Okay world revamp, but if you need a world soul to use the machine that edits physical reality, why don't we just use the Jailer's soul to fix what he broke? They imply Titans & Eternal ones' souls are the equivalent to a world soul. We definitely kill him in the raid. Why not just use his? Hell you could even bring back Teldrassil at this point)

I haven't looked too closely at the datamining and only know that we have a model of Zovaal where he is a completely drained husk, sooo... do we have anything to say that your idea isn't already possible? Like do we know why he is empty, what we did to kill him and cause that? Because that's a very good idea to turn the machine on him in a way that makes him the power source for us to repair Azeroth. Heck, maybe when he is blowing things up it gets rid of the sword and then we fix things enough to heal her good as new as if she was never stabbed. Not like a time reversal thing, just a healing so we can have a properly done, "out if time" revamp that makes the world more like vanilla and less locked to a specific world altering event of recent damage and destruction and impending doom that never lessens or goes away even though we settled the elements and killer Deathwing ages ago...

[Marlamin]

Lots of hotfixes to the Jailer encounter since yesterday's build, guess some internal testing is going on! Hopefully won't be broken once the race gets to it. Some Anduin hotfixes just now too.

[huth]

They could model them after the Thundercats, that would probably the easiest and most acceptable way of adding them into the game.

Unless they take their cues from Thundercats Whimper Quietly.

[Syegfryed]

No, you dork. They are irrelevant to the entire story.

everyone is fucking irrelevant to the story until they are written into relevancy


bs argument all together.

- - - Updated - - -

Disagree on both counts. Aside from wanting the Horde & Alliance to continue fighting because reasons, what's the issue with a story where the Horde & Alliance races wind up finding out more about their past experiences and where they might be linked?

If you don't know how garbage and nonsensical that is, you are not paying attention to wow lore for a while.

Its even more nonsensical when night elves and trolls are literally the ones who didn't sign up for the armistice, they would not be hand to hand discovering bs together
.

A hypothetical race like this could also be similar to the Miqote from FFXIV,

hell fucking no for that too.

[Hitei]

everyone is fucking irrelevant to the story until they are written into relevancy


bs argument all together.

No?

Prior to the allied race, Mag'har were still former allies of the Horde. Currently, despite not being written in to current events, Yrel's forces are former(?) allies of the Alliance who represent a potential threat after having become zealous followers of the light. Furbolgs are ancient allies of the Night Elves and druidic forces who have been involved in many events across multiple continents.

Naga have a 10,000 year history of involvement with the Night elves, grudges with the trolls, and a leader who is an outstanding potential threat who has nearly steered the planet to destruction twice.

Earthen, despite not being majorly involved in the storyline for like more than a decade, have strong ties to groups of dwarves and remain vigilant protectors of the planet against threats.


Saberon are literal nobodies even on alternate Draenor, even to alternate Draenor groups and factions, even during the expansion that they were a part of. They matter to no one besides Terokk, for whom they are a forgotten, brief annoyance already dealt with. They have no connection to any ongoing plot anywhere, because they were never involved in any ongoing plot to begin with. They are a group of zero importance stuck on a different planet, who exist only to be filler enemies for that region.


Not mattering at all and having no connection to anyone or any ongoing plotpoint is a very good argument for why they're not great as a race to potentially add.

[Blizzbest]

I dont get where this "world revamp" speculation comes from. I cant find the article but i vividly remember that Blizzard viewed cata revamp as a failure on many fronts. They couldn't balance the workload of endgame vs revamping the zones and i think they even flat out stated they were overburdened and thought it was a mistake. And that was a blizzard at his peak coming from the woltk gravy train

And now we are talking about blizzard that is at their worst arguably AND are still not adjusted to working from home like other devs, judging how long patches this expansion still take (this one took 8 months from 9.1, i believe)

Just because people found some assets? That shit does happen all the time in videogames that are ongoing, especially in a big ongoing game as wow. Remember the entire assets that were scrapped for raids like in cata and WoD?

It seems more of player wish then anything substantive

[Chickat]

Okay let's put the pieces of the puzzle together.

- We know the Jailer wants to reshape reality to a dark one where everyone serves him. He seems to be defeated, but likely after he has had the chance to at least deal some damage. His plan to reshape reality should partly come to fruition, although we don't know what that looks like.

- We know the WoW team, unless being hyperbolic, considers 9.2 as the closing chapter of a story spanning all the way from Warcraft 3 (i.e. Arthas, Sylvanas, Uther, Jaina, Thrall, etc.).

- We know the WoW team have been doing their usual rounds of "leaks" with the store, datamined assets and so on leading up to an expansion, and these clues this time around seem to revolve around dragons in general, Emerald ones in particular, the moon and the sun, and so on.

- We know there's some form of "Living World" animation coming, possibly letting players transition between phases or dimensions.

- We know the WoW team have alluded to the next expansion as more grounded.

- We know the WoW team has designed a bunch of more down-to-earth Azerothian assets over the last few years, suitable for places like the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor.

- We also know they have stated (IIRC) that they like revamping zones when and where it makes sense and fits what they're doing with the story. Hence WSG, AB, Arathi Highlands, Darkshore, Silithus.

---

So... Azeroth dies more or less, and the key to restoring her lies in the Emerald Dream (or whatever they choose to call it). But they don't want to do another cosmic expansion so it won't be a full deep-dive into that realm. Instead they'll do some sort of hybrid like BfA, where we'll visit a more traditional place on Azeroth and also dip our feet into the cosmological stuff.

For example, the Dragon Isles is where we'll go because the Dragons and their powers is all we've got to keep Azeroth protected, and we need to use their various powers to undo the damage wrought by the Jailer.

The Green flight will guide us into the Dream, letting us "renew" Azeroth. Tyrande and the World Tree Nordrassil will likely play a role.

The Black flight and Wrathion will help us preserve Azeroth's foundation.

The Red flight will let us save the living, all mortals who suffer from the Jailer's wrath.

The Bronze flight will aid us as we stave off the Infinite flight and perhaps do something with the timeways. Maybe we need to bring back the Dragon Soul from Cata or something.

The Blue flight could perhaps be instrumental in empowering Azeroth the titan, seeing as how Arcane and Order go hand in hand.

Patch 10.2 could be a trip to Elunaria or whatever the place is called.

Over the course of the expansion and future ones, Blizzard gradually releases new zone revamps.

I love this. Even if they only revamp like 4 or 5 zones per expansion it would be awesome. Revamps for leveling, plus world quests and rares for max level stuff?

[ExiHext]

I dont get where this "world revamp" speculation comes from. I cant find the article but i vividly remember that Blizzard viewed cata revamp as a failure on many fronts. They couldn't balance the workload of endgame vs revamping the zones and i think they even flat out stated they were overburdened and thought it was a mistake. And that was a blizzard at his peak coming from the woltk gravy train

And now we are talking about blizzard that is at their worst arguably AND are still not adjusted to working from home like other devs, judging how long patches this expansion still take (this one took 8 months from 9.1, i believe)

Just because people found some assets? That shit does happen all the time in videogames that are ongoing, especially in a big ongoing game as wow. Remember the entire assets that were scrapped for raids like in cata and WoD?

It seems more of player wish then anything substantive

You may not forget that this statement from Blizz about a world revamp and how Cata was a failure is now many years old. Opinions change, teams change. Perhaps they now want to modernize the old areas.
That said, I do not believe in a world revamp either. Blizzard always takes the easy route and I don't really see the (financial) benefit they would have from revamping the old world. If someone wants to play WoW now as a new player they do it because of friends or because they like the franchise but surely not because the graphics which after a revamp would still look bad in comparison to modern games. And existing players are used to the blocky graphics in older areas. So what would be the incentive to do a revamp?

[Chickat]

Lost Ark is very overhyped by the way. Areas look nice, spell effects are cool, and the character creation system is pretty powerful too. But man, what a drag it was to start playing. Tedious dialogue that never ends, bad writing overall, and an uneven pace for introducing new enemies to kill. Obviously super generic Asian MMO with all the women looking like little girls with huge assets.

Really makes you appreciate Blizzard games and quality even more. Like, even if 10.0 is mediocre in the end, it'll still be vastly superior to Lost Ark IMO.

Im downloading it now. Not feeling it, but im gonna give it a chance.

[Blizzbest]

You may not forget that this statement from Blizz about a world revamp and how Cata was a failure is now many years old. Opinions change, teams change. Perhaps they now want to modernize the old areas.

I addressed this and pointed out how the situation is even more unlikely than 11 years

[Sondrelk]

I dont get where this "world revamp" speculation comes from. I cant find the article but i vividly remember that Blizzard viewed cata revamp as a failure on many fronts. They couldn't balance the workload of endgame vs revamping the zones and i think they even flat out stated they were overburdened and thought it was a mistake. And that was a blizzard at his peak coming from the woltk gravy train

And now we are talking about blizzard that is at their worst arguably AND are still not adjusted to working from home like other devs, judging how long patches this expansion still take (this one took 8 months from 9.1, i believe)

Just because people found some assets? That shit does happen all the time in videogames that are ongoing, especially in a big ongoing game as wow. Remember the entire assets that were scrapped for raids like in cata and WoD?

It seems more of player wish then anything substantive

1. The world revamp being a mistake was in regards to Cataclysm, where it was done without giving much in the way of actual benefits outside allowing flight.

2. The old zones are just sitting there not doing anything. Do we strictly need entirely new zones when we can out a fresh coat of paint on old ones and gain the same benefit?

3. New zones have to be made regardless, and there is no definitive data on whether making an entirely new zone is faster, slower, or the same speed as remaking an old one.


And most importantly, we are fast running out of areas that have been set up enough to make setting an expansion there something players would expect, even more so when you discount cosmic plots and space travel.

At some point a world revamp is inevitable, the question is just when it will happen.

[Blizzbest]

1. The world revamp being a mistake was in regards to Cataclysm, where it was done without giving much in the way of actual benefits outside allowing flight.

So they need to even invest more resources then they already did, which they described as taxing on the dev team, to make it good this time
How is that a pro argument?

2. The old zones are just sitting there not doing anything. Do we strictly need entirely new zones when we can out a fresh coat of paint on old ones and gain the same benefit?

Why not make better new exciting zones with full creative freedom of location and themes instead revamping old zones? Seems like a super dumb marketing decision. Why would blizzard do otherwise?

3. New zones have to be made regardless, and there is no definitive data on whether making an entirely new zone is faster, slower, or the same speed as remaking an old one.

Even if its the same time its strictly inferior, see above

And most importantly, we are fast running out of areas that have been set up enough to make setting an expansion there something players would expect, even more so when you discount cosmic plots and space travel.

Appealing to lore or story in world of warcraft of all things, were things were retconned or changed in favor of gameplay since the first expansion release, and where most of people checked out of the story of wow years ago, must be the weakest argument i heared

[Raetary]

I dont get where this "world revamp" speculation comes from. I cant find the article but i vividly remember that Blizzard viewed cata revamp as a failure on many fronts. They couldn't balance the workload of endgame vs revamping the zones and i think they even flat out stated they were overburdened and thought it was a mistake. And that was a blizzard at his peak coming from the woltk gravy train

Cataclysm failed because they spend a ton of resources revamping zones that they never utilized for the rest of the expansion.
End-game content was strictly designated to the brand new cata zones, rather than spreading it over the continents.

That was one huge case of resource mis-management.

Not to mention them grasping on overly-ambitious ideas like Vahj'ir, which just went nowhere.
Just more resources gone down the drain.

When people are talking about a revamp, the idea is that Blizzard would NOT make the same resource draining mistakes that they made in cata.
For one, not adding 5 (7 if you count vash as 3) on top of the revamped zones and actually putting the revamp to good use.