Dragonflight Alpha/Beta General Discussion

[Aeluron Lightsong]

Admittedly, the same goes for much of the playerbase. It did seem like people decided to stop giving that issue press when it really should've continued. Everybody moved on to the new big outrage and didn't seem to have the time to dedicate to the issues which remained.

Its more a symptom(At least from my side of the world) of capitalistic perceptions and well we should only rail when we hear more crony behavior going on in the workplace not do it when things are "calm" cause not everyone there is afriascreeperlord(You all know who I mean here). Companies aren't a hivemind. Having said that, you don't have to trust Preach at all, his outrage from way back is probably sells better on YT then well sticking to whatever morality you have on you(If any at all).

[Sondrelk]

Well, from the name alone it can't be a titan facility, orelse it'd be called Uld-something.

We don't know a lot about it.Just that the Keepers tried to reach it multiple times and failed.

Guess that it could be in Gilneas then. Whatever it is...
Just trying to figure out a way to make Gilneas relevant without just jumping to the usual World Revamp argument.

Patch 10.2, finding Avaloren in Gilneas, alongside Nelf stuff in Ohn'ahran plains. New zone either off the coast of the plains, or in revamped Gilneas.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

Guess that it could be in Gilneas then. Whatever it is...
Just trying to figure out a way to make Gilneas relevant without just jumping to the usual World Revamp argument.

Patch 10.2, finding Avaloren in Gilneas, alongside Nelf stuff in Ohn'ahran plains. New zone either off the coast of the plains, or in revamped Gilneas.

It being in Gilneas and somehow the Keepers are not able to get there would be strange. Its probably some far off land and Blizzard pushing the lore past what we're all used to(As in not the same continents that we know of).

[Catastrophy349]

Based on the ending of the 10.0 campaign, wouldn't be surprised if we had some form of Emerald Dream, Life, Green flight, etc. storyline.

[Valysar]

The entrance of the Emerald Dream is already IG in Ohn'ahra Plains so, why not

[huth]

Guess that it could be in Gilneas then. Whatever it is...
Just trying to figure out a way to make Gilneas relevant without just jumping to the usual World Revamp argument.

Patch 10.2, finding Avaloren in Gilneas, alongside Nelf stuff in Ohn'ahran plains. New zone either off the coast of the plains, or in revamped Gilneas.

It's some sort of island or continent that the Keepers needed ships to get to where a bunch of rebels was hiding out. All we know is that they repeatedly failed to land and only got broken driftwood back. So we're not exactly talking about weak rebels, either.

[Ferlion]

It's pretty stressful being a Night Elf fan tbh.



I would rather get no story than whatever the hell that was at the start of BFA. Losing the capital city? I mean, first it was half of Ashenvale and Auberdine was wiped from the map, ok not much of a problem since the Cataclysm hit every race. But then not only does Darkshore get destroyed a second time, they completely wiped the starting zone and the capital off the map, meanwhile the Forsaken just get to do a little clean up and they get their city back. By the way does anyone remember how they turned one of the ancient Night Elf zones into the horde symbol? I sure do.

Then comes DF with all this Malfurion and Ysera stuff. I mean like, ok, I feel pretty defeated at this point. Then I saw the dialogue that Tyrande has with him where she says she wants to stay in the Shadowlands with him, essentially abandoning her people. Who else is going to lead? Maiev? Shandris? Sure they could, but I don't think either of them want to do that. Shandris leads the sentinels and Maiev the wardens. Anyway, And I'm thinking, this doesn't sound like Tyrande at all. Sure, she feels tired after all this crap but still, this doesn't sound like Tyrande to me.

And then there's the people who hate Tyrande because she wants revenge against a psychopath who burned her home and her people alive... Like, piss off man, do you even understand what the circumstances are of what Sylvanas did or not?

It's so tiring...

The biggest issues with Night Elves getting focus is.. It's largely not true. Not exactly.

Night Elven focus in Legion was almost entirely separated from the playable Night Elves. Like, not even a matter of "We used to be these people", but actively "We have expunged these aspects from our culture". Demon Hunters and Nightborne largely have as much to do with Blood Elves as they do Night Elves. This isn't to say that Illidan does, mind.

And ultimately, that is part of the problem. If modern day Night Elves get any attention at all, it's either in a negative light, or it's never finished.

Like, Teldrassil was a big deal.. It was also almost entirely ignored all of BFA except for the Darkshore patch. Which, mind, immediately included a section of the raid story line that had an entire section of almost exclusively Night Elves die off screen. As in, the entire story line and purpose of them was to die off screen. Their stated purpose of the story was to literally be a suicide mission to draw peoples attention. That is the canon story.

People want to say "But night elves get so much attention". And it's not quite that simple. The playable faction gets very little, and as far as Azeroths history goes, Elves are the only race on both factions that have a shared heritage, which means generic "ancient elf" content is an easy way to bridge factions.

When the playable faction gets attention, it's... "Yeah, your job is to literally die. Like, not as a mistake, not as a bad twist of fate. You are literally ordered by your military commanders to die as a distraction", followed by Shadowlands, which is all over the place. And honestly, fine. It's a bad metric because Shadowlands development was all over the place.

Except for Maiev. Who showed up at the last minute. For no reason at all. After not appearing in Shadowlands before now. To specifically say "Ohh this is extra super good justice for Sylvanas" which was done as a direct counter to the fans saying "Man, Maiev would never even think about saying Sylvanas should be anything else but dead"

But hey, that touches on the flaws of Shadowlands itself, because we literally just spent the entire expansion hammering home and repairing the system of death, which focuses on bad but redeemable souls going to Revendreth to be cleansed and either help other people or move on to their final resting place... LITERALLY the exact punishment that Sylvanas is due as per the cosmic rules, and literally allows the character to be reused in the future. It was stupid, even out side of Maiev and the NEs.

But then it swings around, and the conclusion to the Night Elves storyline in Shadowlands (which is only expected to carry onto Dragonflight)....to completely erase themselves from existence by sacrificing their anima and essences.

So, literally twice in as many expansions, the entire Night Elf plot was written to die. Once, explicitly ordered by military commanders (oh but no, its ok they volunteered) and one by their own just because Blizzard thinks they can do a payoff.

EDIT: To be fair, and it's been a long time, I think only like a third of the forces for "Throw troops at the Horde as a distraction" were Night Elves. So almost exclusive is hyperbolic

[Revamp Man]

Guess that it could be in Gilneas then. Whatever it is...
Just trying to figure out a way to make Gilneas relevant without just jumping to the usual World Revamp argument.

Patch 10.2, finding Avaloren in Gilneas, alongside Nelf stuff in Ohn'ahran plains. New zone either off the coast of the plains, or in revamped Gilneas.

It's a place that "heretics" held up in and was reachable via ship by the dragon isles.

The heretics could be keepers or likely watchers that didn't agree with Changing history and Avaloren might be located by the fissure that the new dwarfs were found at. Honestly I'm OK with these lore developments compared to SL because they just feel better.

- - - Updated - - -

It's some sort of island or continent that the Keepers needed ships to get to where a bunch of rebels was hiding out. All we know is that they repeatedly failed to land and only got broken driftwood back. So we're not exactly talking about weak rebels, either.

Titan watchers and some leftover black empire forces??

[huth]

It's a place that "heretics" held up in and was reachable via ship by the dragon isles.

The heretics could be keepers or likely watchers that didn't agree with Changing history and Avaloren might be located by the fissure that the new dwarfs were found at. Honestly I'm OK with these lore developments compared to SL because they just feel better.

Isn't that fissure supposed to be part of the Dragon Isles? Not much point in using ships to get there.

[Kiivar86]

Someone here mentioned some days back how Blizzard reduced the amount of new mounts in Dragonflight and now that I had a chance to look, boy howdy they weren't kidding. I know they always make more than they use but I was expecting at least a few otters, but it looks like there's just the mount achievement one and one from renown. And so forth.

Woof.

[Atticon]

Someone here mentioned some days back how Blizzard reduced the amount of new mounts in Dragonflight and now that I had a chance to look, boy howdy they weren't kidding. I know they always make more than they use but I was expecting at least a few otters, but it looks like there's just the mount achievement one and one from renown. And so forth.

Woof.

Dragonflight launch in general seems exceedingly weak in terms of cosmetic rewards. I think they misunderstood that it's not the "overwhelming amount" of rewards that turned people off, but the asanine piecemeal, timegated and RNG implementation of the reward structures for getting them.
Covenants, their flavors and rewards (mounts, transmogs, minions, toys) weren't hated, the coupling to player power, the anima currency, grateful offerings and RNG drops were the problem.

Where are the DF transmog sets? 4 Covenant x 4 armor type sets just got replaced with 1 x 4 armor types primalist sets. They seem to have just put the usually unlisted quest and dungeon gear in the collection tab this time and pretended they have as much new visuals as ever.

[Revamp Man]

Isn't that fissure supposed to be part of the Dragon Isles? Not much point in using ships to get there.

the only thing in terms of location was "sctor blah blah blah"

[Jaggler]

Dragonflight launch in general seems exceedingly weak in terms of cosmetic rewards. I think they misunderstood that it's not the "overwhelming amount" of rewards that turned people off, but the asanine piecemeal, timegated and RNG implementation of the reward structures for getting them.
Covenants, their flavors and rewards (mounts, transmogs, minions, toys) weren't hated, the coupling to player power, the anima currency, grateful offerings and RNG drops were the problem.

Where are the DF transmog sets? 4 Covenant x 4 armor type sets just got replaced with 1 x 4 armor types primalist sets. They seem to have just put the usually unlisted quest and dungeon gear in the collection tab this time and pretended they have as much new visuals as ever.

Allocation of ressources. With Dragonriding being a major feature including a very custoizable dragon, putting a lor of effort into regularmounts doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
With class sets returning, cosmetic armor like the covenant armor or heritage/warfront armor is likely coming out slower.

the only thing in terms of location was "sctor blah blah blah"

We do know, that they call their home Khaz Algar. But that's it

[Lahis]

If I quit my shitty job saying "I will never come back here again" and then I crawl back to said job once it looks like things are going up, then yeah, I feel like people would be justified to call out my hypocrisy.

He didn't say he'll never come back.

He said if the game changes direction and starts to look like one worth playing again he'll check it out.

[Dracullus]

He didn't say he'll never come back.

He said if the game changes direction and starts to look like one worth playing again he'll check it out.

Well it didn't change direction. They get rid of some deadwood systems, changed theme and make some improvements like in every other expac. Only thing that really different compared to mid 2021 is that WoW will be popular for few months again.

My problem with Preach is that he advocated for many changes we end up getting in SL (except covenants/ripcord), liked SL theme/zones (especially fact that we have otherworldly zones again like back in TBC), even loved Torghast (back when it was 50 or 70 floors on Alpha), liked launch, even liked Korthia on PTR. But when scandal broke and bashing WoW was easy win, he made video how he is quiting covering WoW because dev don't listen to people like him for YEARS, excuse was drama with some 9.1 raid system that I already forgot about.

And I think part of issue in general are his clickbait titles and miniatures on youtube. They often tell different story than video. We have sad face with Torghast (bad) in background, title RIP END OF AND ERA WERE QUITING WOW. Then few weeks later you hear dude still raid in 9.1, then you hear him crying he didn't get Alpha in first batch and suggesting Blizzard has some grudge with him. It's just so easy to make fun of.

So no wonder people were mocking making news on wowhead with title "Preach return to WoW" like it's some very important event. And I'm not saying news itself was mistake because we may get some good info from his trip.

[Lady Atia]

Allocation of ressources. With Dragonriding being a major feature including a very custoizable dragon, putting a lor of effort into regularmounts doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
With class sets returning, cosmetic armor like the covenant armor or heritage/warfront armor is likely coming out slower.



We do know, that they call their home Khaz Algar. But that's it

And yet this approach contradicts what Ion said in the interview with Hazel - that mount collectors "shouldn't worry and everything with two or more legs that we can imagine to be a mount will become a mount". At this point I'm just hoping that they will use an evolution of the Zereth Mortis mount system to allow us to "tame" our mounts for patch content, hence the current low amount of mounts. (High copium alarm: Maybe that's what the new stables in Org/SW will be used for, if they bring it as evergreen feature like pet battles)

Btw, on Beta we have roughly ~10 mounts more than on life in the journal, so there's atleast that. Still, lots of recolours are still missing, and they were there on like the second alpha build so it has NOTHING to do with "allocation of ressources" since these mounts are already done and ready, they just need sources ...

[Jaggler]

And yet this approach contradicts what Ion said in the interview with Hazel - that mount collectors "shouldn't worry and everything with two or more legs that we can imagine to be a mount will become a mount". At this point I'm just hoping that they will use an evolution of the Zereth Mortis mount system to allow us to "tame" our mounts for patch content, hence the current low amount of mounts.

Btw, on Beta we have roughly ~10 mounts more than on life in the journal, so there's atleast that. Still, lots of recolours are still missing, and they were there on like the second alpha build so it has NOTHING to do with "allocation of ressources" since these mounts are already done and ready, they just need sources ...

If they are on beta, they might just show up on live once DF releases.

[Lady Atia]

If they are on beta, they might just show up on live once DF releases.

Yeah, but there are still a lot of recolours missing from stuff that was there already in early alpha, which is super concerning. Shadowlands was great for collectors, I honestly don't want to go back to a world (of warcraft) where your favourite recolour isn't available to earn in the game because of "reasons".

[Valysar]

Someone here mentioned some days back how Blizzard reduced the amount of new mounts in Dragonflight and now that I had a chance to look, boy howdy they weren't kidding. I know they always make more than they use but I was expecting at least a few otters, but it looks like there's just the mount achievement one and one from renown. And so forth.

Woof.

Weirdly, just a few mounts are present IG in the prepatch, there are a lot more on beta realms.

[Auxis]

I've got a beta invite! Wasn't on the BNet launcher approx. 18 hours ago so maybe a new wave went out in that period?
Not sure I wanna be bothered with installing it tbh. Got characters to get ready for release on retail and stuff do in FFXIV. :\