World of Warcraft 10.0 Expansion Reveal

[kasuke06]

I'm not saying that this is the thing that will drag me back to the game, but it does look like their market share got hammered hard enough over the last few expansions that they had to make changes that the players would like instead of the suits trying to wring metrics from stone. Probably still driven by number crunchers in suits seeing that "doing literally anything that doesn't feel like you actively hate your player base" has been working out for other companies recently, but still.

As a lapsed player who's been kicking around roughly forever... I'm cautiously optimistic. Not full on "oh yay they listened!", but it seems a step in the right direction. I hope they don't immediately plant their boot in shit.

Things that have me feeling hope: New class looks like they could do mechanically interesting things with it, dragon riding looks neat(looks pretty neat in GW2 at least) and no stupid as fuck borrowed power system that actively discourages playing more than a single character and spec, talent tree revival is nice in concept.

Concerns, founded and unfounded: Danuser finding some way to shove his fucking waifu into the story. Established lore getting taken out behind the shed like ol' yeller(again). Having to deal with even more furries.

[Iain]

who is the enemy ?

Wouldn't mind if there wasn't any enemy in this expansion.

[Sluvs]

I mean... I wasn't really expecting much out of this reveal.

First of all, the positives, of which there are only three...

• Talent trees are BACK, sorta. Never thought that Ion's greatest achievement would be to undo Ghostcrawler's worst fuck-up as class designer. If these trees are present throughout the whole levelling experience that'll be great.
• Profession rework looks decent. If it makes professions actually relevant in endgame then I'm all for it.
• UI rework. New UI looks quite clean, but I can't help but feel that nobody's going to use it since addon usage is the norm now. They'd have to add a lot of baseline features like raid boss alerts, functioning threat and DPS meters, etc to wean people off of addons.

And now... the many negatives

• Dracthyr? Fucking really? They look and sound like something you'd see in a subpar Warcraft fan-fiction written by someone who really loves dragons. To be fair, everything in the game's lore since BFA has screamed shitty fan-fic. Also... they stick out like a sore thumb amongst the other races in the WarCraft universe, even the Dragons themselves.
• Evoker... The class itself is incredibly lame too, being effectively locked to the Dracthyr race like a symbiotic duo. It's impossible to take a ranged DPS spec seriously when they do melee slashes and somehow hurt their foes from 40 yards away. Also... fire breath? Brewmasters can do that already, it's nothing special. Preservation looks like a straight-up remake of Restoration, and it doesn't even make lore sense for anything other than a Red Dragonflight Dracthyr to be able to cast healing magics...
• Dragonrider skill - Imagine if Covenants and Pathfinder hate-fucked and produced an unholy abomination. That's what I envision Dragonrider becoming. It genuinely looks like people are going to buy into another one of Ion's convoluted character progression systems because "look, you can glide like Spyro the Dragon!" I am almost willing to put money on stat boosts and combat abilities being locked behind your choice of drake, and on some sweaty nerd with an Excel spreadsheet min-maxxing every drake/ancient glyph choice to determine what's BiS and what's going to get you booted from every single group.
• I hate how four zones and one raid has become this standard for each new WarCraft expansion. It's like Blizzard are genuinely selling us far less content for more money, and acting like it's justified. Just give us like... 7 or 8 new zones and three starting raids for fuck's sake.
• From a lore perspective, the drakes you get access to don't even make sense. Didn't we literally drive the Black Dragonflight to near extinction in Cataclysm? Isn't Wrathion the only surviving Black Dragon left in Azeroth? So why aren't we getting Azure and Bronze drakes but rather two Black Drakes?

Dude, just quit at this point. You are doing the worst possible read on what they said.

[Farora]

who is the enemy ?

Probably a white man.

[joxur]

we asked for big changes and we got more of the same. class/race restriction still forces us to play what they want us to play. dragonflight wont work with all of our hard earned flying mounts, guaranteed. we still have to trudge through the leveling process and nothing about the new profession hints looks compelling. the best we can hope for is a return to core gameplay, that the talent system revamp is legit (and it might be) and that it WONT take until the end of that expansion to finally get balance. please find new leadership for the game.

[Mahcake]

Evoker: Mage in mail armor that can heal.

Who the hell asked for this anywhere?

Why not one of the classes people have been asking for since forever you know: Tinker, Dark Ranger?

Nah let's go with EVOKER the most bland and boring trash they could find, holy community disconnect.

Tinker and Dark Ranger wouldn’t be able to have purple-pink-green hair. That’s why.

[KainneAbsolute]

Your wallet.

Elementals and giants

[Chilela]

Evoker: Mage in mail armor that can heal.

Who the hell asked for this anywhere?

Why not one of the classes people have been asking for since forever you know: Tinker, Dark Ranger?

Nah let's go with EVOKER the most bland and boring trash they could find, holy community disconnect.

In all fairness, Blizzard has always tied new classes into the general expansion theme (DKs with WotLK, Monks with MoP, DHs with Legion), so given the dragon theme, this was pretty expected. Dark Ranger has more of a "Hunter reskin" feel to it, whereas Tinker would have worked perfectly, had the expansion been more focused on Goblins and/or Gnomes.

[Weilyn]

true but at the same time we have no clue on this expansions big bad, so maybe it is filler maybe it isn't, it isn't really known right now until we kind out more about the story.

It's weird that this is the 3rd filler xpac in a row. Last main xpac was Legion.

[Compher]

Elementals and giants

Ragnaros 3 confirmed?

[Doombringer]

Amazing.

It's almost as if they took all that energy, all that churn, they previously put into disposable new systems that only last a patch or at best an expansion ... and sunk that effort into revamping some of the most core, consistent systems that have been in the game from the jump. Like talents. And professions.

Thank you.

I don't want to gather Dragon Points for Dragon Armor I'll stop wearing in patch 10.2 or at best 11.0.

I do want to enjoy Professions more, and create Talent builds that may not be optimal but are fun for me.

[rrayy]

its not a great slogan "the same (small) amount of zones as the addon before, if we dont count the worst one".
how about we try to make it better than the last one and make a huge fucking world for once.

I was joking with that. OF course there were 5 zones.

- - - Updated - - -

You can look up a mountain of data showing that WoW's average sub base has been dropping every year by quite a big amount. Every time new content or expac comes out, less people come back and people don't stay as long.

That "data" is all speculative since Blizz does not release sub numbers for the past several expansions. We do not know what their actual sub numbers look like.

- - - Updated - - -

Just because YOU don't like it doesn't mean it isn't a fit. There's a fairly large contingent of players who'd love something like it in WoW. As it would/should be entirely optional you can just choose to ignore that part of the game.

A vocal minoroty does not = large contingent. And if it were optional, what would the rest of us have to do? Gong by everything you all want, that means there will be no other content in the game as all the resources would have to be given to player housing.

They should be focusing as they are on getting people to go out and adventure, not play house.

[Recovery]

I mean... I wasn't really expecting much out of this reveal.

First of all, the positives, of which there are only three...

• Talent trees are BACK, sorta. Never thought that Ion's greatest achievement would be to undo Ghostcrawler's worst fuck-up as class designer. If these trees are present throughout the whole levelling experience that'll be great.
• Profession rework looks decent. If it makes professions actually relevant in endgame then I'm all for it.
• UI rework. New UI looks quite clean, but I can't help but feel that nobody's going to use it since addon usage is the norm now. They'd have to add a lot of baseline features like raid boss alerts, functioning threat and DPS meters, etc to wean people off of addons.

And now... the many negatives

• Dracthyr? Fucking really? They look and sound like something you'd see in a subpar Warcraft fan-fiction written by someone who really loves dragons. To be fair, everything in the game's lore since BFA has screamed shitty fan-fic. Also... they stick out like a sore thumb amongst the other races in the WarCraft universe, even the Dragons themselves.
• Evoker... The class itself is incredibly lame too, being effectively locked to the Dracthyr race like a symbiotic duo. It's impossible to take a ranged DPS spec seriously when they do melee slashes and somehow hurt their foes from 40 yards away. Also... fire breath? Brewmasters can do that already, it's nothing special. Preservation looks like a straight-up remake of Restoration, and it doesn't even make lore sense for anything other than a Red Dragonflight Dracthyr to be able to cast healing magics...
• Dragonrider skill - Imagine if Covenants and Pathfinder hate-fucked and produced an unholy abomination. That's what I envision Dragonrider becoming. It genuinely looks like people are going to buy into another one of Ion's convoluted character progression systems because "look, you can glide like Spyro the Dragon!" I am almost willing to put money on stat boosts and combat abilities being locked behind your choice of drake, and on some sweaty nerd with an Excel spreadsheet min-maxxing every drake/ancient glyph choice to determine what's BiS and what's going to get you booted from every single group.
• I hate how four zones and one raid has become this standard for each new WarCraft expansion. It's like Blizzard are genuinely selling us far less content for more money, and acting like it's justified. Just give us like... 7 or 8 new zones and three starting raids for fuck's sake.
• From a lore perspective, the drakes you get access to don't even make sense. Didn't we literally drive the Black Dragonflight to near extinction in Cataclysm? Isn't Wrathion the only surviving Black Dragon left in Azeroth? So why aren't we getting Azure and Bronze drakes but rather two Black Drakes?

The answer to your last 2 questions are No and why?

[Supertoster]

New gnoll model looks better than new race, tbh

[rrayy]

Evoker: Mage in mail armor that can heal.

Who the hell asked for this anywhere?

Why not one of the classes people have been asking for since forever you know: Tinker, Dark Ranger?

Nah let's go with EVOKER the most bland and boring trash they could find, holy community disconnect.

Not caving in to a vocal minoirty does not = community disconnect. Dark Rangers and Tinkers do not fit this expansion at all.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

"Since WC2"

So the start of the franchise?

Well no that would be WC1 but that’s besides the point.

Every instance of red dragon fire other then one has had it burning up people it’s been used on not healing them.

- - - Updated - - -

Tinker and Dark Ranger wouldn’t be able to have purple-pink-green hair. That’s why.

Um gnomes can have all of those Colours and would Obviously be tinkerers.

[Orby]

It's weird that this is the 3rd filler xpac in a row. Last main xpac was Legion.

the price of having a lack of big bads I guess... although if this is considered a 'new chapter' then yes its gonna be a filler. Mainly because they got to start developing enemies and big bads for the future.

Xal'atath is still out there somewhere though.

[crusadernero]

Looks cool. Bit of an adventure!

[mauserr]

MoP had 6 zones + Isle of Thunder and Timeless Isle. We may get more than this trailer revealed but it's smaller in comparison with the information we have right now

I don't care about the zones, I care about raiding and now M+.

Without systems, with tier sets being back, with flying being unlocked soon (hopefully, but I see this dragonflight as secondary feature point of the xpac with the flying mechanics etc), raiding looks like it's going to be amazing without these dogshit grinds (ap, essences, covenants, renown etc). Raidlogging might be back on the menu so again skill >>>>>>>> time invested.

A better skilled player should never be outplayed by somebody who just grinded more AP or some other dogshit mechanic. Skill should always be the only determining factor, not how much of "no life" you have available at your disposal or how lucky you get with your first 2 (4 hard capped, Legion flashbacks) legendaries...

[Ethas]

Looks bleak and completely off. A bunch of SJW ruin the game you can see it online.