Dragonflight Alpha/Beta General Discussion

[Wharren]

Yes, because Dragons have always shown propensity for technology.

If it’s Cata 2, the class can be literally anything as the first expansion stretched nearly the whole continent. It doesn’t have to be locked to Dragons, that’s just the theme of the new zones.

[username993720]

If it’s Cata 2, the class can be literally anything as the first expansion stretched nearly the whole continent. It doesn’t have to be locked to Dragons, that’s just the theme of the new zones.

Yes, it has.
Death Knights = Death theme.
Monk = Pandaren theme.
Demon Hunter = Demonic theme.

[Wharren]

Yes, it has.
Death Knights = Death theme.
Monk = Pandaren theme.
Demon Hunter = Demonic theme.

Goblin and Worgen had nothing to do with the elements and dragons aside from the backstory of their joining the factions.

[username993720]

Goblin and Worgen had nothing to do with the elements and dragons aside from the backstory of their joining the factions.

These are races, not classes.

[Wharren]

These are races, not classes.

Right. But each expansion had primarily races that were tied to the theme.

TBC- Outlands themed races
Cata- unrelated
Mists- Panda
Legion- Broken Isles and Argus themed races at the end
BFA- 4 South Seas island races from the war and two unrelated races

Cata is the ONLY expansion that has a box feature completely unrelated to the expansion theme.

[Jokubas]

It might sound funny but this is the most excited about the game I've been in awhile. Trying to guess at these little pieces really brings me back.

I'm going to try to hold onto that feeling as best I can though, because it's hard to imagine what little we have leading to an expansion I'd be excited about once we actually know the details and aren't just guessing. As I said before, I don't mean to sound negative or cynical about that, just that at this point in the game's history there's not a lot left that is really going to grab me.

Dragons, for instance, is something I know a lot of people would be happy about and I think they could do some neat stuff with it, but it has no real appeal for me at all.

[Makabreska]

Right. But each expansion had primarily races that were tied to the theme.

TBC- Outlands themed races
Cata- unrelated
Mists- Panda
Legion- Broken Isles and Argus themed races at the end
BFA- 4 South Seas island races from the war and two unrelated races

Cata is the ONLY expansion that has a box feature completely unrelated to the expansion theme.

You mean Deathwing was unrelated?

[Wharren]

You mean Deathwing was unrelated?

The races weren’t and still aren’t related to elements or dragons outside of Deathwing having an impact on their starting zone.

[username993720]

TBC- Outlands themed races

Blood elves have no ties to Outland. Their leader simply used this place for his own needs.

BFA- 4 South Seas island races from the war and two unrelated races

Dark Irons and Mag'har.

Cata is the ONLY expansion that has a box feature completely unrelated to the expansion theme.

Both were affected by the Cataclysm.

The races weren’t and still aren’t related to elements or dragons outside of Deathwing having an impact on their starting zone.

Well, Goldrinn did feature in Mount Hyjal and Gilgoblins did feature in Vash'jir.

[Jokubas]

Yeah, Goblin and Worgen feel like they were tied more to the world revamp part of Cataclysm than the Deathwing and Old God part, in which case they basically could have been anything (and we know ogres were considered, and it makes me wonder if any of the other decoys were jokes referring to other internal considerations). I'd actually be really curious to hear about how choosing the races for that expansion might have differed from others.

But that's also part of why the current expectations have me nervous. I think I can say that I'd guess the vulpera animations are for a pet and not a race even if I wasn't ogre-biased, but dragon mounts don't have me feeling too good about ogres. I guess that's probably another subconscious reason I want a world revamp. When it comes to ogres (I mentioned other topics in relation to the revamp a few pages ago) I've said it's because I want ogres to be kept in mind for the new status quo since Horde ogres are basically nonexistent in the current game despite being canonical, but if I think about it it's probably also because it's a better chance for them. Like worgen and goblins, ogres have a better chance when the old world is relevant than when any specific plot is.

The Stonemaul Clan do have a connection to the Black Dragonflight due to almost being wiped out by them and wanting revenge at one point, but even my ogre bias doesn't make me confident about that giving them a chance. ;P

[Sondrelk]

Dragons should not be a class for the same reason DHs were a mistake. They've very limited design space and aesthetic options and are bound to become increasingly contrived over time while not having a mechanical identity others don't cover. I bet you a decent amount of money that, if they're anything at all, they'll be the Covenant gimmick of this expansion, but with a switch implemented from launch so Blizzard can claim they learned from their mistakes.

As for levels, cut it down to level 50 and you future proof the idea. Increase the cap and you pigeonhole people into Shadowlands, rendering the SL level-changes pointless and doom yourself to having to do a level squish again eventually.

Blizzard already ripped off the bandaid when they removed 60 levels going into Shadowlands. A d while adding just 10 more levels won't exactly immediately nullify the progress made by this decision it would be setting Blizzard up for having to do a similar squish again, which is kinda pointless when the technology to just revert levels back to 50 when you start the new expansion is already there.

Levelling is as close as it will get to perfect right now in terms of the framework levels have to work under. Adding 10 more levels means either having to make the new levelling phases 10-60-70 instead of 10-50-60, or 10-50-60-70, which would either make individual levels more diluted in the critical "main levelling" phase, or require making Shadowlands a mandatory part of levelling.

The game has long struggled with making individual levels feel meaningful, and adding just 10 more does in fact mean 10 distinct levels that need to either get dedicated upgrades, or diluting the overall pool of abilities further.

[Beloren]

Blizzard already ripped off the bandaid when they removed 60 levels going into Shadowlands. A d while adding just 10 more levels won't exactly immediately nullify the progress made by this decision it would be setting Blizzard up for having to do a similar squish again, which is kinda pointless when the technology to just revert levels back to 50 when you start the new expansion is already there.

Levelling is as close as it will get to perfect right now in terms of the framework levels have to work under. Adding 10 more levels means either having to make the new levelling phases 10-60-70 instead of 10-50-60, or 10-50-60-70, which would either make individual levels more diluted in the critical "main levelling" phase, or require making Shadowlands a mandatory part of levelling.

The game has long struggled with making individual levels feel meaningful, and adding just 10 more does in fact mean 10 distinct levels that need to either get dedicated upgrades, or diluting the overall pool of abilities further.

It's silly to keep squishing

Have a final level .. if it's 70, then start a new system, that doesn't do it in numbers, or does, but different types of numbers - and that's your nex xp and level. so you would always be level 70 at max level.



When a enw expansion comes out, the old expansion gets counted in the 1-60 climb, and the new expansion gets a new system of progression etc etc.

[Jokubas]

I wish I could say that hanging out for leak season for a decade has given me the ability to piece together even the slightest of clues. I honestly feel like we might have enough information to make some accurate guesses of details (and some guesses probably already are right) but I certainly don't feel confident about it personally.

In the end, most expansions end up much more predictable than they seem at first, and I don't just mean because hindsight is twenty-twenty. I remember when the Mists of Pandaria trademark was found and even among those who believed it there was a divide between those who wanted a Pandaria expansion and those who thought it was too narrow a theme. I was sort of both. I wanted playable Pandaren, but I couldn't believe the entire expansion would be literally just Pandaria.

Most expansions really do tend to be that focused, it turns out. Battle for Azeroth kinda broke this, which made some early speculation messy, because we got Kul Tiran items and the Pandarian precedent would imply Kul Tiras could be turned into a single expansion (especially if places like Crestfall and Zul'dare weren't ignored or left to Island Expeditions). Though I think we might have also had some file references to Zandalar? I know speculation about both was a thing, even if it wasn't universal.

Storywise isn't that different. I doubted 7.0 would be so heavily Legion because I felt the ending of Draenor was putting it off (I still say, why have Yrel promise to help us with the Legion some distant day, when the Legion gets us immediately?), but if I just took it at face value that "Gul'dan escaped means the plot isn't over" then I could have guessed it (and others certainly did). Similarly, until the final raid, Ny'alotha was often assumed to be the 9.0 destination even when people gave it a Shadowlands name, but taking the Sylvanas subplot of Battle for Azeroth at face value, a death (rather than Void) expansion could have easily been guessed.

So I should maybe just be taking these dragons at face value? I don't know what would be face value storywise right now though. The story has been fairly narrow. I guess the dreadlords have been pretty in our face and shown to have greater ambitions, but didn't we also hear that bailing them out was a last minute decision?

[Aeluron Lightsong]

I wish I could say that hanging out for leak season for a decade has given me the ability to piece together even the slightest of clues. I honestly feel like we might have enough information to make some accurate guesses of details (and some guesses probably already are right) but I certainly don't feel confident about it personally.

In the end, most expansions end up much more predictable than they seem at first, and I don't just mean because hindsight is twenty-twenty. I remember when the Mists of Pandaria trademark was found and even among those who believed it there was a divide between those who wanted a Pandaria expansion and those who thought it was too narrow a theme. I was sort of both. I wanted playable Pandaren, but I couldn't believe the entire expansion would be literally just Pandaria.

Most expansions really do tend to be that focused, it turns out. Battle for Azeroth kinda broke this, which made some early speculation messy, because we got Kul Tiran items and the Pandarian precedent would imply Kul Tiras could be turned into a single expansion (especially if places like Crestfall and Zul'dare weren't ignored or left to Island Expeditions). Though I think we might have also had some file references to Zandalar? I know speculation about both was a thing, even if it wasn't universal.

Storywise isn't that different. I doubted 7.0 would be so heavily Legion because I felt the ending of Draenor was putting it off (I still say, why have Yrel promise to help us with the Legion some distant day, when the Legion gets us immediately?), but if I just took it at face value that "Gul'dan escaped means the plot isn't over" then I could have guessed it (and others certainly did). Similarly, until the final raid, Ny'alotha was often assumed to be the 9.0 destination even when people gave it a Shadowlands name, but taking the Sylvanas subplot of Battle for Azeroth at face value, a death (rather than Void) expansion could have easily been guessed.

So I should maybe just be taking these dragons at face value? I don't know what would be face value storywise right now though. The story has been fairly narrow. I guess the dreadlords have been pretty in our face and shown to have greater ambitions, but didn't we also hear that bailing them out was a last minute decision?

The Denathrius part was a recent change. As in he was supposed to die in the original SL plan but us players love him so he sticks around. We'll be back on Azeroth, thats as much certainty we can hold onto.

[Jokubas]

It's silly to keep squishing

Have a final level .. if it's 70, then start a new system, that doesn't do it in numbers, or does, but different types of numbers - and that's your nex xp and level. so you would always be level 70 at max level.

I don't know what Blizzard will actually do, but I kinda hope they do this. Leveling has been sort of obsolete for awhile now, and I'm not talking about numbers.

I mean that content is always gated by something else anyway which makes leveling redundant. You have to play through certain kinds of content before you can access certain features regardless of what level you are. In the last few expansions, hitting max level itself basically does nothing except unlock access to the ability to unlock the things you actually need to do to start playing the endgame.

In some ways I'd almost prefer the opposite (going back to having normal leveling, but you get access to max level content automatically once you hit the number), but as long as the game puts 4 hour questlines to unlock every new expansion and patch feature, then they might as well just remove leveling because you're still having to put in that time and effort and they don't have to pad and balance more levels.

It would make alts a lot less stressful, and I think it would make a lot of the expansion-limited features and abilities easier to swallow. If the effort we were putting was not to raise our universal level, but specifically to unlock that feature for that expansion, it would feel more organic (in other words, instead of getting abilities from 61-70 that are exciting, only to arbitrarily lose them at 71 to gain entirely different ones, you'd be 60 the whole time and earn the abilities for that region, instead of for those levels).

The Denathrius part was a recent change. As in he was supposed to die in the original SL plan but us players love him so he sticks around. We'll be back on Azeroth, thats as much certainty we can hold onto.

Good point. I wonder then if the dreadlords (minus Denathrius specifically) could still be the retroactively-obvious setup-plot then. It's way more speculative and less "face value" that I was just talking about (exactly my point about me never being able to focus ;P), but perhaps the "Dreadlords infiltrating each cosmic power" and "dragons" will combine into some sort of "the dragonflights become associated with the cosmic powers on Azeroth and the dreadlords get involved."

[Shadochi]

Demon Hunter has the basic idea of "Be Illidan", who's skillset is at least a little concrete and DHs were a hero in WC3. Monks had kung fu movies for inspiration but dragons are very vague and most of the stuff hypothetical aspect-based specs could do are already in mages, shamans and druids. There's no hero character like Illidan to base the fantasy from either.

Entirely agree with the latter paragraph though. As said, Dragons aren't really my jam, but five colours of mount, five flights and a ready-made borrowed power system based on a familiar element both seem down Blizzard's alley.

While I agree that the classes you mentioned share features with the five main dragon aspects, i think their vagueness is what would allow them to be implemented as classes, either pure or by somehow combining two colors.
An issue I see is all the "Dragonsworn" or "Dragonknights" or whatever name the class gets is sharing an armor type for all 5 specs (or however many there would be).
Now I definitely don't think it would be actual dragons in the class where we transform into a dragon (except maybe some big CD like Meta for DH) but more of a Hero Class infused with the power of the dragonsoul or whatever.
If for example it was a cloth class it would be interesting seeing a Black Dragon cloth tank, or some battle mage like melee spec for Bronze or Blue.
Black and Red would obviously be easiest to come up with a unique playstyle IMO, tank for black and healer for red that does Fire Damage and Healing.
Blue and Bronze would be harder. Blue in order to distinguish from arcane mage (could be done by making a battlemage) and Bronze because it would be hard to pull off as there are very few spells currently that control time and they belong to mages but they would probably end up being something like dots, delayed or staggered damage or something like that, or make him more support.
Green would be the hardest if they made them a healer since it would end up being resto druid 2.0. But if they went for a nature based Ranged DPS with okay off healing or like an AOE heal, it could provide something new (in nature I mean actual nature based green spells, not like elemental or balance aspects of nature).

But as most dragon aspects don't do just one thing it might be a way to bring in a new role, or more support spells to the loadout of classes, to kind of step away from the main 3 (for if you split DD by range).

As for there not being any WC3 hero classes to base them off, I agree that halts things, however basing classes off of WC3 stopped being important long ago when more lore developed in game and other media and games. They have what they can base it off from in game Dragon encounters for spells, what NPC dragons can do, from books and if the RPG/TCG has anything and also there are the Dragons in HotS.

I completely agree that it would be hard to make them feel distinct, however the vagueness does help, it is possible to pull it off in a unique way but that would a hard undertaking.

At the end of the day, they still make more sense than Necromancers and Dark Rangers.

And writing this out and discussing I noticed that currently from the playable classes that Demon Hunters are the only one truly unique to WoW, and not something you might find in other games or tabletop RPGs, and in that sense from all the possible classes people suggest I think a class based on each of the aspects could also be something you don't really find in other places (Yes there are dragon knights but WoW aspects are a bit different than what generically dragons can do in lets say the Forgotten Realms setting)

- - - Updated - - -

How significant was that Dragon thing with Ogres at the end of Exile's Reach and did it leave any avenues open?

[Revamp Man]

While that is an option I feel reverting levels to 50 again feels like a better option, mostly because it removes the strict requirement to justify another 10 levels of stuff, which is exactly the reason we had the squish to begin with, levels being meaningless as individual ones meant nothing for player power.

If the reason to go to level 70 is just to prevent complaints of losing levels then I think the complaints of Shadowlands being faster to level through after 10.0 releases would be about the same, so on a sense it's down to which option Blizzard wants to go for.

The issue with constant level squishing is the fact they suck at scaling and that it removes any character progression

In terms of player’s enjoyment I would go with leveling up until 100 then squish again and maybe add some talent rows because god does it feel bad to not have any permanent power gain for the last 8 years

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That's not at all what I described. I was suggesting a Dragon class, with dragon abilities, that picks its "race" to be it's humanoid guise. You're suggesting the "awesome power of dragons" to be delegated to the nigh-irrelevant status of "racial abilities"

Because that’s what races do

A dragonsworn is essentially a paladin but instead of the light it’s a dragon
Or like a DH
Or a monk
Or a priest
Or a Druid
Or a shaman

Instead of making a race a class

[Palapop]

Cata is the ONLY expansion that has a box feature completely unrelated to the expansion theme.

are you suuuuuuuuuuuuure about that?

[Revamp Man]

Oh and btw., no matter what blizzard is going to promise, they will add new trash systems. They cannot get rid of one of their biggest mistakes. They will just find another label. "Renown" becomes "Dragonpower", "Anima" becomes "Dragon dust".. or anything like that. Do not believe their lies.

If Hazzikostas is going to tell you "we learned from the past" and "we will focus on player agency", he will lie by opening his mouth. He already did that in the past and managed to fool players the game would change to better. It never did, it never will, until the day Hazzkostas leaves Blizzard.

You blame watcher but ignore the fact he doesn’t actually do much compared to the guy that said “anybody worried about this game is part of the problem. Without my systems team you wouldn’t even have a game”

[Aeluron Lightsong]

Who said that Zan?(The "Anybody worried about the game is part of the problem without my sytems you wouldn't even have a game." Or is that...fake