Dragonflight Alpha/Beta General Discussion

[Three Faced Goddess]

Why do I feel so much connection to the Black Dragonflight? Am I evil or something?

No, Teriz, you're not evil. Annoying and super persistent sometimes, but I don't think you're generally a bad person.

Black Dragons are cool and are probably one of the most interesting of the Dragonflights lore and character-wise. Liking darker elements and characters doesn't make you evil. What you say and how you behave towards others determines how you are perceived.

The black dragons were once noble protectors of Azeroth and of the races who inhabit her, led by Neltharion the Earthwarder at the height of glory and prosperity. Then came the fall and it was mighty one at that. Neltharion was corrupted and maddened, the rest of his flight followed him to their destruction. Then, when all seemed lost, Wrathion came to be thanks to Rheastrasza's meddling in Cataclysm. He's trying to bring his flight back from the precipice of extinction, to redeem them and recover their lost legacy as protectors of Azeroth. It also helps most black dragons looking fucking cool.I tend to like characters/races who had a fall, fight their dark natures and wish to reform.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

No, Teriz, you're not evil. Annoying and super persistent sometimes, but I don't think you're generally a bad person.

Black Dragons are cool and are probably one of the most interesting of the Dragonflights lore and character-wise. Liking darker elements and characters doesn't make you evil. What you say and how you behave towards others determines how you are perceived.

The black dragons were once noble protectors of Azeroth and of the races who inhabit her, led by Neltharion the Earthwarder at the height of glory and prosperity. Then came the fall and it was mighty one at that. Neltharion was corrupted and maddened, the rest of his flight followed him to their destruction. Then, when all seemed lost, Wrathion came to be thanks to Rheastrasza's meddling in Cataclysm. He's trying to bring his flight back from the precipice of extinction, to redeem them and recover their lost legacy as protectors of Azeroth. It also helps most black dragons looking fucking cool.I tend to like characters/races who had a fall, fight their dark natures and wish to reform.

You can like darker characters as much as one wants, just don't bullshit about their actions.

[Three Faced Goddess]

You can like darker characters as much as one wants, just don't bullshit about their actions.

Very true. I liked the Lich King, but I'm not going to deny that he was an evil fuck and that he committed atrocities. That said, liking darker/evil characters doesn't imply anything about you unless you are okay with their actions. Some of the Sylvanas stans on Twitter worry me more than a little.

[Teriz]

No, Teriz, you're not evil. Annoying and super persistent sometimes, but I don't think you're generally a bad person.

Black Dragons are cool and are probably one of the most interesting of the Dragonflights lore and character-wise. Liking darker elements and characters doesn't make you evil. What you say and how you behave towards others determines how you are perceived.

The black dragons were once noble protectors of Azeroth and of the races who inhabit her, led by Neltharion the Earthwarder at the height of glory and prosperity. Then came the fall and it was mighty one at that. Neltharion was corrupted and maddened, the rest of his flight followed him to their destruction. Then, when all seemed lost, Wrathion came to be thanks to Rheastrasza's meddling in Cataclysm. He's trying to bring his flight back from the precipice of extinction, to redeem them and recover their lost legacy as protectors of Azeroth. It also helps most black dragons looking fucking cool.I tend to like characters/races who had a fall, fight their dark natures and wish to reform.

Yeah, Wrathion is one of my favorite WoW characters at the moment, and I always thought Deathwing was cool because of the Cataclysm art;



Always loved this image.
Hopefully a Dracthyr skin allows me to have lava oozing out of its body.

[Three Faced Goddess]

Yeah, Wrathion is one of my favorite WoW characters at the moment, and I always thought Deathwing was cool because of the Cataclysm art;



Always loved this image.
Hopefully a Dracthyr skin allows me to have lava oozing out of its body.

I like Wrathion too. I loved Deathwing's voice, but then again I like deep voices and I'm biased towards Michael McConnohie whose Lich King voice I also loved. Gods that must have been rough on the throat. Yes, that image is perfect in its portrayal of Deathwing as this primal colossus of magma and earth whose raw power is relentlessly corrupting his form. It evokes feelings of dread in me. DW really loved killing me during Cata almost as much as the Lich King did throughout leveling in Wrath.

I hope so too.

[Eurhetemec]

These would sell visage to me more than humans. There is just something uncanny about female human model/animations that I can't put my finger on, but I strongly dislike

That's my main concern. The human female model is okay, I think, but the animations are awful, and don't even really fit with WoW (human males also have some issues, but not as severe). I say that having played one for several years too. WoW has a lot of animation sets that could use updating, but none are closer to as bad as human females.

[Chickat]

Great catch No, I didn't think of Azshara at the time, more of Stormheim. But I can totally agree with you there

Its really getting odd isn't it. Sure it could and probably is just them wanting to cash in on nostalgia, but a lot of zone art looks like it would be perfect for a world revamp.

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Why not? It really isn't that much effort to do Season 4. It also can be using stuff that would exist in 10.0 so even if it is cancelled it might still show in-game or at least on the PTR.

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Scaleface said classic in September and retail in November.

I don't think we are going to see a longer season 4.

Personally guessing 6 months of season 3, and 5.5-6 months of Season 4.

Season 3 start. March 1
Seasong 4 start. My guess is somewhere around September 20th.
Prepatch- March 7th 2023.
Dragonflight launch March 21st 2023.

[Nymrohd]

Crafting & Gathering is at its core a solo experience. To which I think it's a great idea to have crafting be their stand-in for nightmare visions & torghast. The need to encourage community interaction is paramount, but for the same reason they're never going to remove LFG & queues is because they don't want to alienate players for the times when they don't particularly want to socialize.

Also you phrase it like that was the design philosophy going into it. When in actually the WoW dev's philosophy towards the new crafting system is "make it like FFXIV." They showed a mockup in the hazelnutty interveiw that they made when began developing it & it's identical to the FFXIV crafting window.

I think they could create world events that award some of the rarer or at least more valuable reagents which would require player cooperation. Give everyone a reason to do them ofc.
Personally always though gathering professions should be turned secondary. Let everyone gather and adjust recipes accordingly (by requiring more mats). If you let everyone gather, you can add a lot more world content related to gathering. That way you can replace the timegating of crafting with reagent scarcity by linking them to world quests like Legion did. Then imo they should just add a lot of reagents into instanced content. Not a single type reagent but a wealth of them that match thematically specific bosses in dungeons and raids. You can gate ilvl there by making different quality levels depending on difficulty or even make it a lottery and give people a tiny chance to loot the item in LFR while making it almost certain to loot it from Mythic. Heck you can even return crafting to PvP; let us loot medals and insignias and similar items at BG completion which can be used for crafting; one of the biggest issues with the current loot system is that there is a massive barrier to entry since optimized PvP gear, even at low ilvl, is so much better for PvP than what you get in PvE.

[deucecorp]

Have you finished Sepulcher Mythic? If not, you have no right to demand more raid encounters and especially more challenge. I'm currently progressing on Halondrus Mythic and I'm gonna tell you, we don't need more challenging encounters in this game.

Happy about you, and wishing you good luck with your progression. Sepulcher was tuned extra hard to compensate for much less PVE content released. Hopefully will last 1 more year for you and all your alts.
(Blizz chimes in "No content draught here, we promised back in WoD. Remember?! And you have some PVP achies left too!")

Yes, I want more dungeons. More challenges. How about 4 NEW dungeons with EACH seasons? 20 in totals?
(Blizz chimes in "Shut it and go chew on that 10 year old carrot in RJB (Rabbit Jump Brewery) on your 6th alt! Your penalty is 6 months of farming Tomb of Sargeras in Dragonflight! Until you haven't completed Plaguefall +32 you can't even pre-order it!")

Don't take me overly serious. I just want more content not less. Have the audacity to say what I want. Like everyone else does. You too.
Your opinion was typed here hundreds of times already during the years by other guys btw.

[Nymrohd]

I don't think we are going to see a longer season 4.

Personally guessing 6 months of season 3, and 5.5-6 months of Season 4.

Season 3 start. March 1
Seasong 4 start. My guess is somewhere around September 20th.
Prepatch- March 7th 2023.
Dragonflight launch March 21st 2023.

Maybe they could test shorter season lengths with S4. Imo each raid tier should include TWO seasons of M+. And they could do something similar for raiding as well, e.g. imagine heroic timewalking that is active for the second half of each raid tier. Farm is problematic for most raid guilds; either you turn into boosters or you really start having attendance issues since outside a few people chasing BiS (and often something very specific like Sylvanas loot) most others don't really get much out of farm. We could use something alternative halfway through the tier.

[Gigantique]

I am just going to say that for Legion stuff they are just going to do pretty much exactly what I predicted way back for that expansion.
You get a quest too talk to Khadgar to get an "Artifact" weapon. Possibly even a nice model if they are nice, that function identical to Artifact weapons right now, that being a couple relic slots and some preset stats.
For choosing the zone I think it will literally just be a Hero's call board or similar in Dalaran.

For Azerite Traits I think they will just get a bunch of generic abilities.

And for Covenant abilities they might be a bit more elaborate, but likely not much more than "The pwoer of the Necrolords give you 30% haste for X Seconds" type things. That is of course if Covenant class abilities are even carreid over into the next expansion. The covenant specific abiliteis will probably just be locked to coveantn specific zones and content, but given that many of the covenant abilities seemingly are baked into the new talent trees they might just not get any abilities at all.
The soulbinds I think are definitely not going to carry over. Maybe just the soulbind specific abilities if they are nice.

Doubt that's necessary tbh, Artifacts are just regular weapons now with a fancy colour and Azerite armor will prob be way weaker than any lvl 60 armor so I don't see them even investing any time in it.

As for covenant that I agree with they might do something generic there.

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I'll be making mine Green. Always liked the Green Dragonflight a bit more than the rest.

This is blasphemy.

You either make a Bronze Dragon using the Timelord title and Waist of Time belt mog or you do not play Dracthyr.

This is objective truth and you cannot convince me otherwise!

[Eurhetemec]

Crafting & Gathering is at its core a solo experience. To which I think it's a great idea to have crafting be their stand-in for nightmare visions & torghast. The need to encourage community interaction is paramount, but for the same reason they're never going to remove LFG & queues is because they don't want to alienate players for the times when they don't particularly want to socialize.

Also you phrase it like that was the design philosophy going into it. When in actually the WoW dev's philosophy towards the new crafting system is "make it like FFXIV." They showed a mockup in the hazelnutty interveiw that they made when began developing it & it's identical to the FFXIV crafting window.

The idea that LFG ruins communities is destroyed by FFXIV anyway. FFXIV has the same mechanisms and has far more of a community than WoW did even in Wrath, before LFG. A lot of that is simply because it's more pleasant to interact with other players and feels less forced.

Re: crafting, I think you're a bit confused about the motivation. I don't think they said "Just make it like FFXIV", I think they looked at what crafting systems people actually like and why, and FFXIV was obviously a major influence, but I suspect what we'll actually get will be pretty distinct from FFXIV.

[Nymrohd]

Doubt that's necessary tbh, Artifacts are just regular weapons now with a fancy colour and Azerite armor will prob be way weaker than any lvl 60 armor so I don't see them even investing any time in it.

As for covenant that I agree with they might do something generic there.

Honestly for Covenants they might as well give them one of the later active abilities of their talent trees for free. So when you want to check Shadowlands content on your evoker you can switch to another talent.

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The idea that LFG ruins communities is destroyed by FFXIV anyway. FFXIV has the same mechanisms and has far more of a community than WoW did even in Wrath, before LFG. A lot of that is simply because it's more pleasant to interact with other players and feels less forced.

This is really the issue, the community. Several other MMORPGs have LFG features. Never seen people abused in ESO like they so commonly do in WoW if they don't speedrun everything. And I doubt Blizzard can fix that after well over a decade since 3.3

[Kiria]

Yeah, Wrathion is one of my favorite WoW characters at the moment, and I always thought Deathwing was cool because of the Cataclysm art;



Always loved this image.
Hopefully a Dracthyr skin allows me to have lava oozing out of its body.

I'm with the red flight, red is my favorite color and I love alexstrasza perfect flight choice for me.

[Gigantique]

Ngl I've made belf/human characters to lock in lore-friendly dragon names (Vitaelstrasz for red, Kairosdormu for bronze etc) and made mogs for all of them in preparation.

I might be in danger of getting overhyped over a new class.

[Nymrohd]

Eh, we don't need to choose a flight. There is no Covenant-like system, is there? I support all flights.

[Kiria]

Ngl I've made belf/human characters to lock in lore-friendly dragon names (Vitaelstrasz for red, Kairosdormu for bronze etc) and made mogs for all of them in preparation.

I might be in danger of getting overhyped over a new class.

Me too, I already have my name locked in and ready to go, I am very excited I just feel sorry for all the haters.

[Chickat]

Maybe they could test shorter season lengths with S4. Imo each raid tier should include TWO seasons of M+. And they could do something similar for raiding as well, e.g. imagine heroic timewalking that is active for the second half of each raid tier. Farm is problematic for most raid guilds; either you turn into boosters or you really start having attendance issues since outside a few people chasing BiS (and often something very specific like Sylvanas loot) most others don't really get much out of farm. We could use something alternative halfway through the tier.

I could see a 3 month season 4. early December Dragonfligh release? Possible, still incredibly unlikely IMO.

[Skildar]

Does anyone know where is this art from? Is it available yet?

I have this art on my battle.net launcher though I haven't found the original piece

[Chickat]

The right things to do:
- Get rid of renown, except for story progression probably
- Implement back valor as a currency to buy both gear and upgrades, while you get valor points from world quests and matchmade dungeons. The honor system worked well, this would be an adaption to pve.
- Add a solo queue for mythic+
- Make time runs in mythic+ optional (probably only available outside of the solo queue)

I don't think Mythic+ should get a solo queue option. I could maybe see mythic getting one, but not M+.