Dragonflight Alpha/Beta General Discussion

[MCMLXXXII]

There's a difference between making fun of "X leakers" and straight up making fun of the concept behind a class, which is what the Bard April Fool's announcement was. It doesn't actually make fun of Tinkers as a concept anywhere here, it's more of a jab at "leakers" in general.

If they had made a detailed fake announcement about Tinkers (like they did with Bards), then yeah, it would be time to kiss goodbye to that whole idea lol. But until that happens, it remains a possibility.

They mention Bards too, look at the warrior section. But being subject of April fools in no way increases or decreases the chance of any class being added. Unless if your name is Teriz, then you'll grasp any straw within sight.

[Nymrohd]

BFA nuked the core of the playable factions, the vessels through which we experience the entire game and which recur past episodic expansions. One expansion later, whether someone is getting their nipples tweaked by vampires in hell will be peripheral, but all the Horde institutions will still be destroyed and its characters will still be copy-pasted clones. It's why it will always be the worst expansion in terms of consequences by an absurd margin. The only reason people discuss the Bald Man is the same reason why people were for months on end apocalyptically assmad about infinite Burning Legions, namely that there's nothing else to talk about because the plot is in an off-world cul de sac. SL's story and setting are significantly worse than WoD's,

The thing is, the factions had to be nuked. Not for a story reason. The factions had far more to give storywise in the long term and that is just not viable any longer. But gameplay the population of the game had shrunk significantly and poor decisions in the past meant that cross faction play was both inevitable and in no way possible to be done elegantly.

Now I insist that cross faction or the unifaction could have been done elegantly by hitting the players with a Greater Threat the size of a mallet if they had done a Black Empire expansion. Remove all subtlety and have a greater evil that is truly vile target both factions and just expose the players to the option of either saving helpless civilians from the opposite faction or just sit and watch kids get eaten or sacrificed by giant squid monsters. An alarming number of players would probably cheer as it happened but the vast majority would get shuffled into the unifaction.
Sadly that never happened. While gameplay necessitates it and Blizzard finally admited defeat (and with Blizzcon dead and most of the bros who wanted to scream For the Horde at poor Alliance fans there no longer in the company) we will move forward. If we had the population to go on with two factions without the gameplay suffering, I think they would have never went the road they did with BfA.
And yes, I do think it took them a long time to make sure cross faction was technically viable. But it's probably been a fair while that they knew and were planning around it.


Ultimately though I think the issue is far deeper than individual expansions or storylines. WoW is meant to last. At least the suits at ATVI and the new suits at MS probably think so. That means you cannot afford to burn through plots like they have been doing with Legion onward. Legion to Shadowlands should have been 5 or 6 expansions instead of three. If you keep burning plot points for shock value you end up with a soap opera.

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There's no need to argue which of the two expansions is worse, they came back to back, we can consider it a single package of suckage.

We may even get an expansion to this package soon!

Oh absolutely, I consider BfA and Shadowlands a single act as far as gameplay is concerned. And if talking about story I'd chuck Argus in that mess as well.

[Sondrelk]

To paraphrase Atia: Shadowlands is fine if you ignore the pacing issues, the twists that are just as asspully as they are predictable, the barely characterized villain and how crucial details can only be found outside the game. This means that it isn't fine, it is extremely low quality, but can be considered your average Blizzard story.
BfA was a complete incoherent mess and now amount of external material makes it any less confusing.

The main problem with the story of Shadowlands (beside everything to do with the Jailer) is that we all get into it with the expectation of finally learning what's the deal with Sylvanas. But that is told in the novel, not the game. Overall I would say BfA had more and better content, but a far worse story. Like, nothing is worse than the BfA story.

Personally I always saw it as Shadowlands just being kinds boring.
Yes it's not great, nor is it terrible. It has some neat concepts, the characters are mostly consistent with the exception of Sylvanas. And the plot bumbles along perfectly satisfactorily with only a few outlandish moments, again mostly surrounding Sylvanas.

BfA meanwhile is almost incomprehensibly badly written. Plotlines are tortuously dragged through twists that it doesn't support. Characters are twisted and bent into whatever shape or form the plot requires them to be instead of the plot arising from the characters. Things that seem important like Azerite is barely even tangential to the plot except to support concepts that are so tame they barely even need rationalizations within a soft-science world like WoW.
BfA is the kind of expansion where you defeat N'zoth and can barely even understand how that ending is supposed to fit the beginning.
Even basic stuff like the heavy naval focus at the start just melts away as the Old God thematically linked to the ocean doesn't even pretend to have anything to do with it by the end. I mean for god's sake, the final two zones in BfA is a desert and a landlocked valley. The idea that the expansion started with the specific plothook of "we need tons of ships" is absurd by the end.

[Wangming]

Personally I always saw it as Shadowlands just being kinds boring.
Yes it's not great, nor is it terrible. It has some neat concepts, the characters are mostly consistent with the exception of Sylvanas. And the plot bumbles along perfectly satisfactorily with only a few outlandish moments, again mostly surrounding Sylvanas.

Yeah, boring is the word. I mean in BfA Sylvanas was a villain you could hate. Really hate with a passion, especially in how bad she made the Horde look. And you could hype for Azshara and N'zoth because they have been long-rumored and requested baddies for a long time now.
Zovaal on the other hand? It is very hard to care about him either way. It took us till 9.2 to learn if his plan would affect us at all.

[Kiria]

Wow, can't believe they confirmed Tinker. Wonder how Dark Ranger fans are dealing. Hope too many of them don't kill themselves.

That's a pretty damned harsh thing to say... If anything the April "FOOLS" joke neither confirms or denies Tinkers.

[Catastrophy349]

Wow, can't believe they confirmed Tinker. Wonder how Dark Ranger fans are dealing. Hope too many of them don't kill themselves.

https://twitter.com/MrGMYT/status/15...T-ceOvm1ePW53Q It's Happening!!!

[Kiria]

https://twitter.com/MrGMYT/status/15...T-ceOvm1ePW53Q It's Happening!!!

This is good but lets hope we get to customize spells as well, fans want more than just customization.

[Wangming]

https://twitter.com/MrGMYT/status/15...T-ceOvm1ePW53Q It's Happening!!!

Well, whoever made that edit is pretty good. I ain't gonna believe shit today.

[Catastrophy349]

This is good but lets hope we get to customize spells as well, fans want more than just customization.

April Fool's Day in full force this morning.

[Super Dickmann]

Yeah, boring is the word. I mean in BfA Sylvanas was a villain you could hate. Really hate with a passion, especially in how bad she made the Horde look. And you could hype for Azshara and N'zoth because they have been long-rumored and requested baddies for a long time now.
Zovaal on the other hand? It is very hard to care about him either way. It took us till 9.2 to learn if his plan would affect us at all.

This is the root of it, @Sondrelk puts the difference very well. Shadowlands' worst sin is that it's just kind of disposable and boring which coupled with having the slowest release schedule of all time has made things that would otherwise be dismissable become interminable wastelands. It's the case with both story and gameplay. Storywise it's made people on forums like this talk about the minutiae of a mechanical, uninteresting plot for well past its sell by date and made many others just tune out. Gameplaywise I think Shadowlands, if it were properly paced, would be the best of the Legion-likes in terms of basic construction, but core system problems significantly less annoying than the infinite grinds or the Legiondary lottery are made into dealbreakers by the sheer amount of time we're stuck with them.

With BFA the plot was terrible, but it was so much of a trainwreck and over the course of itself it checked off and then wrecked so many untapped plot points and characters all the while pivoting wildly from one point to the next that you couldn't take your eyes away. I hated BFA's plot more than any other WoW expansion but it was engaging in its failure. I can't muster any real animus for Shadowlands because short of some cool worldbuilding ideas and the occasional character beat there's nothing there to grab onto and its biggest failures, the Bald Man exempted, like Sylvanas and Tyrande are all BFA leftovers. I genuinely can't parse the mindset of the person who is mad about Sylvanas's punishment or lack thereof when BFA ended with the Alliance collectively letting off the Horde with a slap on the wrist after the Horde itself pivoted on enthusiastically supporting Sylvanas's wargoals because she called them names and inexplicably flew away.

[Catastrophy349]

Don't believe a WORD Morgan Day says today in his interview. However, still watch it! https://twitter.com/WarcraftRadio/st...T-ceOvm1ePW53Q

[Wangming]

April Fool's Day in full force this morning.

Looked at it closer and the undead skin tone was applied when yellow skin was selected. This is a very well made fake, but still would be fake even if it weren't April 1st.

[Super Dickmann]

The thing is, the factions had to be nuked. Not for a story reason. The factions had far more to give storywise in the long term and that is just not viable any longer. But gameplay the population of the game had shrunk significantly and poor decisions in the past meant that cross faction play was both inevitable and in no way possible to be done elegantly.

Now I insist that cross faction or the unifaction could have been done elegantly by hitting the players with a Greater Threat the size of a mallet if they had done a Black Empire expansion. Remove all subtlety and have a greater evil that is truly vile target both factions and just expose the players to the option of either saving helpless civilians from the opposite faction or just sit and watch kids get eaten or sacrificed by giant squid monsters. An alarming number of players would probably cheer as it happened but the vast majority would get shuffled into the unifaction.
Sadly that never happened. While gameplay necessitates it and Blizzard finally admited defeat (and with Blizzcon dead and most of the bros who wanted to scream For the Horde at poor Alliance fans there no longer in the company) we will move forward. If we had the population to go on with two factions without the gameplay suffering, I think they would have never went the road they did with BfA.
And yes, I do think it took them a long time to make sure cross faction was technically viable. But it's probably been a fair while that they knew and were planning around it.

As we've talked over back in BFA, faction collapse or separating the archetypal hero character from the factions to allow gameplay co-op were both more sensible ways to get to this goal and solve the problem of a dwindling playerbase. Legion has us up against the biggest bads in the setting in a war to end all wars and the premise of the Order Halls is that since the factions can't sort their shit we team up together. Whatever my grievances with the Order Halls in terms of story, what this approach does is not require the undermining of the component races and factions. There's no need to make everyone adopt the same vague honor code, remove all the Horde's core institutions, expel every character who's ever looked at another wrong, destroy the Night Elves' city and go back to wreck the entirety of the Forsaken identity and surgically chop out their leader in order to allow gameplay cooperation. The reason people are attached to these races is the cumulative investment over the years that comes with a certain set of expectations and those races and classes are the eyes through which we experience the setting. Ditching the factions while preserving racial and character variety allows you to tell more stories and still achieve your gameplay goals.

BFA however did the opposite. Throughout its interminable runtime it ground every race it touched into the same lawful good slop where every participant is interchangable with any other outside of cosmetic appearance. Then when the moment came for that to pay itself off at least from the point of view of gameplay utility by merging the factions, it backed off, leaving both the resolution of its plot and of the only gameplay objective that could explain, if never justify the steps it took storywise, up to Shadowlands. Everything in BFA built towards the Unifaction in story, with all the consequences that come with wringing out the variety and conflict out of races and characters in a game to which this is an essential selling point. All to build up towards a gameplay change that would be required to support the franchise going forward, but when it came time to pull the trigger on that change it backed off, leaving us with all the negatives and none of the positives.

As a side note, where've you been, man?

[Kiria]

April Fool's Day in full force this morning.

Yeah I gathered as I went and checked myself on the PTR. But I don't think fans would be happy with just a skin under any circumstance.

[Sondrelk]

Looked at it closer and the undead skin tone was applied when yellow skin was selected. This is a very well made fake, but still would be fake even if it weren't April 1st.

It did make me wonder though. Obviously a questline only available to hunters giving a reward for Blood Elves specifically wouldn't really work. But what would be a fitting reward that all hunters could use to show off they completed the questline? Sylvanas' bow maybe?

[Kiria]

It did make me wonder though. Obviously a questline only available to hunters giving a reward for Blood Elves specifically wouldn't really work. But what would be a fitting reward that all hunters could use to show off they completed the questline? Sylvanas' bow maybe?

No just a spell effect and skins like Warlocks got would be cool tbh, although some would love the full class experience I know I'd be happy with Class skins provided they come with new effects and skins to go along with the suggested class.

[Wangming]

It did make me wonder though. Obviously a questline only available to hunters giving a reward for Blood Elves specifically wouldn't really work. But what would be a fitting reward that all hunters could use to show off they completed the questline? Sylvanas' bow maybe?

Yeah a skin an eyecolor update for only Night and Blood elves that can only be unlocked by hunters, is suuuper weak. Something more would be needed.

[Sondrelk]

Yeah a skin an eyecolor update for only Night and Blood elves that can only be unlocked by hunters, is suuuper weak. Something more would be needed.

On the flipside I wonder whether the the Belf questline will give this dark ranger cosmetic to Belf hunters who complete it, same as how Belf paladin who complete it seemingly get the red and black recolor of the Antorus set.

[Khaza-R]

Oh my lol. What did they do.

Between Ybarra's stream comments and the April's fool jokes its like they feed on the trollishness of a certain class's fervent followers.

[Deventh]

Wow, can't believe they confirmed Tinker. Wonder how Dark Ranger fans are dealing. Hope too many of them don't kill themselves.

You're really cringe.

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That's a pretty damned harsh thing to say... If anything the April "FOOLS" joke neither confirms or denies Tinkers.

Actually, it confirms that Tinkers are 100% not coming in the upcoming expansion and most likely for several expansions after.