Dragonflight Alpha/Beta General Discussion

[Cheezits]

Even the fact that the Deluxe Edition mount is a mount you literally will never use is stupid enough as is.

Could have easily made it a skin for one of the dragons. Same with the Wrath Promo Protodrake.

The Wrath Drake can probably get the animations, the problem is that there isn't an "adult dragon" dragonriding animation set in the game yet. The Azure drake is different, and we know the next dragon is probably the noodle.

So until they add dragon riding animations for the regular dragon rig... yeah

[Lady Atia]

I hope all the areas that get added in patches are part of the same time and portals/quicktravel isn't required.
Last and only time this properly happened was in WoD, but that only had 1 zone. MoP almost had all zones like that besides Isle of Thunder being accessible only through portals.

My guess is that 1 patch will have the forbidden reach as a max level area, then there was the 10.1 datamine of "Dragon Isles Underground" which probably indicates a separate world instance but I would hope it would be the same. There is potential for the giant body of water surrounded by islands west of Ohn'ahran Plains and tbh they could just as well add islands surrounding the main island like they did in various mop patches.

Tho I must ponder what Dragon Isles Underground might be. If its a full zone it probably won't have dragonriding enabled, but its not excluded seeing how an underground zone like deepholm has flight. And it could possibly be a massive zone. But I believe it is more likely the Dragonflight mega dungeon that will be that, and not a whole new zone. My guess is that 10.1 would be forbidden reach with the underground area being the dungeon..

Another thing I wonder is what will we get for S3 as far as dungeons go? If they do a megadungeon then that could be split into 2 m+ dungeons, but what about the other 2 from DF? Could they release 4 m+ dungeons over by the time S3 starts and have them be S3, and then S4 be all the dungeons?

The underground zone is prolly the new dwarfen zone mentioned in the Uldaman books, and I'm quite sure that's where we will get the noodle dragon since it looks like a cave dragon already. We could already fly in Deepholm, there is literally no reason why we shouldn't be able to fly in the new underground zone too.

[Sondrelk]

They still could do as many recolours as they did with Shadowlands, the skins are in the data and actually the first alpha build had them in already. But the recent builds purged more and more mounts, we are now at 27 new ones if my count is right and many of them only have one colour available sadly.

They could, i just don't think it's really all that necessary. It wasn't that Shadowlands needed so many mounts. It was that it seemed to want a covenant themed mount, with four variants to match the four covenant armor recolours, and then an upgraded version if the mount, also with four recolours.

And of course, Dragonflight has the dragonriding mounts, which if you count the various effects, would easily add up to a large amount of new mounts. Probably similar to BfA.

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The Wrath Drake can probably get the animations, the problem is that there isn't an "adult dragon" dragonriding animation set in the game yet. The Azure drake is different, and we know the next dragon is probably the noodle.

So until they add dragon riding animations for the regular dragon rig... yeah

I wouldn't be surprised if a future patch makes it so all dragons are capable of dragonriding. Or otherwise makes it so you can toggle a mount as dragonriding or regular, based on what is available.

[Lady Atia]

They could, i just don't think it's really all that necessary. It wasn't that Shadowlands needed so many mounts. It was that it seemed to want a covenant themed mount, with four variants to match the four covenant armor recolours, and then an upgraded version if the mount, also with four recolours.

And of course, Dragonflight has the dragonriding mounts, which if you count the various effects, would easily add up to a large amount of new mounts. Probably similar to BfA.

But the dragonriding mounts are still just four new mounts. Idk, I'm always in favour making all possible tints available as seperate mounts, so people can choose what colour they want to match for their transmogs. Now it looks like we are back to "you will get one thunderlizard mount, be happy about it, don't ask for the other colours!", which is a huge step back from what we had in Shadowlands.

I honestly hope they just moved some of the recolours to 10.5 so we will have ~25+ mounts per patch instead of ~50 mounts every second. (so at the end of an expansion we still get the same amount of mounts and all the recolours, just better spread out)

[Nymrohd]

Tho I must ponder what Dragon Isles Underground might be. If its a full zone it probably won't have dragonriding enabled, but its not excluded seeing how an underground zone like deepholm has flight. And it could possibly be a massive zone. But I believe it is more likely the Dragonflight mega dungeon that will be that, and not a whole new zone. My guess is that 10.1 would be forbidden reach with the underground area being the dungeon..

Ideally I'd hope for a fairly large zone that has entrances all over the Dragon Isles and allows for dragonriding. But something tells me that Blizzard cannot do that and it will have to be instanced.

[Makabreska]

Tho I must ponder what Dragon Isles Underground might be. If its a full zone it probably won't have dragonriding enabled, but its not excluded seeing how an underground zone like deepholm has flight. And it could possibly be a massive zone. But I believe it is more likely the Dragonflight mega dungeon that will be that, and not a whole new zone. My guess is that 10.1 would be forbidden reach with the underground area being the dungeon.

That would be an extremely illogical move for Blizz to not allow DR in any new patch zone. No chance for that to happen.

[Shadochi]

Ideally I'd hope for a fairly large zone that has entrances all over the Dragon Isles and allows for dragonriding. But something tells me that Blizzard cannot do that and it will have to be instanced.

Im not sure if phasing is done per amount of players in a zone or in the whole map that zone is a part of, but that could be a problem to where it would feel empty if the phase is shared with everyone above ground.

That would be an extremely illogical move for Blizz to not allow DR in any new patch zone. No chance for that to happen.

I didn't say in any new patch, obviously forbidden reach will have it and I suspect there wont be a portal to forbidden reach since its a quick glide from Valdraaken.
But Dragonriding would work way different in an enclosed underground zone compared to regular flight in Deepholm. Can be pulled off but would cut a lot of zone design aspects that people are hoping for in an underground zone IMO.
The easiest way would probably be to have some/most of the outer walls and pretty much the whole sky as a sandbox of the cave, but then there is no way that would be on the same map as DI, but another instance instead

[Aucald]

It's because Dragonflying makes ground mounts unfortunately obsolete. This expac is going to be rough for mounts until they just enable the system on all mounts or a select amount.

I agree on that score, and it is a bit of a likely unintended consequence of Dragonriding mounts in the Isles. I know from my experiences in the Beta, I've had zero call to use my other mounts outside of the Isles - and the "Favorite Mount" functionality that I tend to use prioritizes the Dragonriding mounts over all the rest, so unless I manually summon a mount it's going to be one of the small stable of eligible Dragonriding ones. This could of course change in future content patches in DF, especially if traditional flying opens up and all that, but at the start, the multitudes of my other mounts are going to just chill for the time being.

[Makabreska]

I agree on that score, and it is a bit of a likely unintended consequence of Dragonriding mounts in the Isles. I know from my experiences in the Beta, I've had zero call to use my other mounts outside of the Isles - and the "Favorite Mount" functionality that I tend to use prioritizes the Dragonriding mounts over all the rest, so unless I manually summon a mount it's going to be one of the small stable of eligible Dragonriding ones. This could of course change in future content patches in DF, especially if traditional flying opens up and all that, but at the start, the multitudes of my other mounts are going to just chill for the time being.

TBH, ground mounts have been getting obsolete for quite some time, and DR only hastened this process. Their only saving grace was no flying early into expansions. As soon flying got enabled, all these horses and wolves were getting forgotten. There needs to be some new idea for ground mounts usage.

[Lady Atia]

TBH, ground mounts have been getting obsolete for quite some time, and DR only hastened this process. Their only saving grace was no flying early into expansions. As soon flying got enabled, all these horses and wolves were getting forgotten. There needs to be some new idea for ground mounts usage.

You still can use them in arenas, bg's and (most) dungeons.

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Also, they just confirmed that illusions for artifact weapons will be available with an early patch after the launch:

https://www.bluetracker.gg/wow/topic...ifact-weapons/

[Nymrohd]

TBH, ground mounts have been getting obsolete for quite some time, and DR only hastened this process. Their only saving grace was no flying early into expansions. As soon flying got enabled, all these horses and wolves were getting forgotten. There needs to be some new idea for ground mounts usage.

Imo the solution to that would be to add mounted combat for ground mounts. Take the idea from Diablo 4 and give ground mounts an ability they can use that dismounts you but has a significant effect in combat and/or allow some mounted combat (and maybe let classes whose class fantasy is tied to ground mounts like paladins and DKs have a benefit there).

[Marlamin]

In regards to music still not being there and Dracthyr being playable only as of 10.0.2, I honestly think it's purely time crunch at this point, a bunch of classes are still going through iteration and Evoker is definitely one of those (even some pretty large stuff like the Soar changes). They might just need those extra 2-3 builds of tuning/fixes and adding music they can still do between 10.0.0 and 10.0.2. We're getting very close to release and the amount of changes we're seeing every week still is... pretty large for this time of testing. I really hope the launches (all three of them) go smoothly, but I'm definitely expecting a ton of hotfixes.

[Cheezits]

Between the hints ingame, the lore that states that Dracthyr aren't only evokers, and what looks like it could be datamined heritage armor for Dracthyr (something that got hidden) I wonder if they will unlock Dracthyr for other classes within the expansion itself. I know they said before it would be AFTER Dragonflight, but what's the point of heritage armor for a race that only has to level 12 levels?

[Polybius]

Funny, that you say that and right after wowhead posts this article-

https://www.wowhead.com/news/retribu...nt-tree-329400

Their ret paladin guide writer is not happy with the current state of the spec on beta.

Paladins are infamously known for being whiny. The class isn’t broken, nor op. Ret is boring and proc heavy, but it’s always been.

[Sondrelk]

Between the hints ingame, the lore that states that Dracthyr aren't only evokers, and what looks like it could be datamined heritage armor for Dracthyr (something that got hidden) I wonder if they will unlock Dracthyr for other classes within the expansion itself. I know they said before it would be AFTER Dragonflight, but what's the point of heritage armor for a race that only has to level 12 levels?

Given we still don't know why the Dracthyr were sealed (as far as I know), and we likely will end up returning to the Dracthyr starting zone later, i wouldn't be shocked if we get heritage armor and the remaining classes as early as 10.1, or 10.1.5.

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In regards to music still not being there and Dracthyr being playable only as of 10.0.2, I honestly think it's purely time crunch at this point, a bunch of classes are still going through iteration and Evoker is definitely one of those (even some pretty large stuff like the Soar changes). They might just need those extra 2-3 builds of tuning/fixes and adding music they can still do between 10.0.0 and 10.0.2. We're getting very close to release and the amount of changes we're seeing every week still is... pretty large for this time of testing. I really hope the launches (all three of them) go smoothly, but I'm definitely expecting a ton of hotfixes.

Isn't their internal build supposed to be a week or two ahead of the one we get?

[Marlamin]

Isn't their internal build supposed to be a week or two ahead of the one we get?

I'd say we're currently about 1 week behind on average (also backed up by the release candidate retail build for next week being released just now and compiled a week ago) which leaves us with maybe ~3-4 proper non-hotfix builds before 10.0.2 releases, which ain't a lot of time for all the small stuff (and some of the big stuff like music) that usually happens at the end of beta. I'm hopeful it'll go smoothly, but there's so much stuff going on still that shouldn't be.

[Alanar]

Paladins are infamously known for being whiny. The class isn’t broken, nor op. Ret is boring and proc heavy, but it’s always been.

Did you read it? It wasnt about the ret tree realy, but about the class tree. Which was the main complain there.

[Makorus]

Between the hints ingame, the lore that states that Dracthyr aren't only evokers, and what looks like it could be datamined heritage armor for Dracthyr (something that got hidden) I wonder if they will unlock Dracthyr for other classes within the expansion itself. I know they said before it would be AFTER Dragonflight, but what's the point of heritage armor for a race that only has to level 12 levels?

I mean, we have the Dracthyr leaders saying that they are planning an expedition back to the Forbidden Reaches to awaken the remaining Dracthyr.

If that is not going to be a setup for Dracthyr as other classes, I'll be surprised.

[AngerFork]

Between the hints ingame, the lore that states that Dracthyr aren't only evokers, and what looks like it could be datamined heritage armor for Dracthyr (something that got hidden) I wonder if they will unlock Dracthyr for other classes within the expansion itself. I know they said before it would be AFTER Dragonflight, but what's the point of heritage armor for a race that only has to level 12 levels?

Personally, I still think it'll be after Dragonflight. There's still too much they'd need to do...animations for weapons, animations for spells linked with the body, determining what does/does not take you out of visage, etc. There are a lot of pieces already in place to be sure, I think voice lines were recently added. I just see it being potentially problematic to get all that work done for 10.1 or 10.2, but it would definitely make more sense within DF than afterwards.

That being said, I do think there's some good that could come from the Heritage Armor, even without other classes attached. Most of the core race heritage armor quests helped to show more of the lore behind certain races...from a tale around Sylvanas for the Blood Elves to a future ruler learning about what her people are going through in Gilneas to a tale of the spirits in Mulgore. As there's a lot about the Dracthyr still somewhat unknown to themselves, a heritage armor quest would be a great chance to learn more about why & how Neltharion initially created them.

[Cheezits]

This may seem pointless, but I was thinking about how Danuser said that something like the "Reclamation of Gilneas" isn't happening off screen because they want players to experience it. Which makes sense, even if a world revamp without explanation would be nice, wanting to let players actually experience big parts of the story like that makes sense too.

Here's the thing though: does this mean that the Worgen couldn't take back Gilneas in the year(s?) following DF? Are they really going to press pause on anything happening in Azeroth and Kalimdor for the X years following DF?

Or... will there be something with the Bronze that lets us either go back in time to these events happening during the timeskip, or for whatever reason, time traveling back to before the timeskip at the end of the expansion? Which would make that completely pointless of course.

Third option is that old world revamp could happen for 1-50 with 50-60 being Dragonflight, after this expansion. So things that happened in the timeskip will be put into the game AFTER Dragonflight, but will take place before it. Confusing but would make sense in the long run (timeline would be Vanilla to Shadowlands - 1-50 11.0 - Dragonflight - any endgame 11.0 content)