One of the worst expansions
One of the badder expansions
Meh
One of the better expansions
One of the best expansions
No opinion/Haven't played yet
Won't be purchasing
These posts back-to-back are so interesting. The shift in view between someone who seems to want to raid-log and another person that wants to play an immersive game is so stark. One person loves that there's nothing "required" to do besides raid/M+ and the other laments that there's nothing to do.
Well, dear doctor - in a way you're right - they could have made the in-game onboarding a bit simpler. It's very hard to suss out quickly without external reading.
But as a PhD, you're more than well accustomed to that grind - and there is plenty of material to read.
As the 'bro' before mentioned, it's not actually that complex. We're not talking about CRISPR Cas9 here.
You most certainly don't need PhD to understand it, but they could make it a bit more user friendly.
I do think it's intimidating for casual user and some choices are questionable and probably will be reworked or eased up. For example orders system certainly could use more work, such as ability to specify rank requirement for public order or add insight/polish reagent.
The crafting itself could use less ranks for mats, maybe instead of 3 ranks for something like draconid ore - there can be one rank and some sort of generic-ish refinement item/reagent made by gatherers, so your bags won't be exploding with shit.
Finally - there really should be some respec there, because some sub-specs are absolute traps while may be looking good for uninformed - such as JC trinkets for example, 60 points of dead waste for me.
Is it really though? There are some quirks like disenchanting spec but If the goal was to let professions be more than "skill to 100 in 5 minutes and be done like everyone else" they've done a good job.
Now you need to put some time in to advance your progression, so a quality and quantity based solution is a ok in my book.
how is it over complicated and convuluted?
it is literally just a few major things
Gear
Stats
quality
specialization
You craft/get gear which gives stats which gives quality enhanced by specialziation
it is literally just that, that one fucking line.
want a good gun? well get good engineering gear, with lots of stats, then use high quality goods and focus on gun making spec, and boom.
depends on your definition.
relative to the abstract and innumerable intricacies of the universe? certainly not.
compared to crafting for the last 10+ years in wow? yeah, a bit.
i'll admit that even as someone who does read tooltips and does try to plan ahead, it's easy to the point of vexing to paint yourself into a corner with the creation professions.
just as an example: i was chugging along with tailoring, picked up the 'general' tab and the 'armor' tab with the glut of early knowledge points, before finding myself at a brick wall wherein i can't skill up to unlock the tab that gives me access to new cloth types to make, because i need the cloth types i can't make to be able to skill up.
(well, ok not technically true as i could be blowing absurd amounts of primal chaos for another 15 skill points, but 'need' in terms of an even remotely efficient skill up grind)
the creation professions all have this problem to varying degrees (tailoring being the worst IMO), where you're just kind of chugging along until you hit about 50 skill and then you realize that any more progression requires being balls deep in a specialization tab that up until that point seemed blatantly unneeded.
i'm also finding prospecting to be rather abhorrent, with the gem output you get feeling incredibly unsatisfying for the amount of ore it requires.
draconium and khaz'gorite feel entirely too sparse, and the need to constantly be crushing existing gems feels like i'm constantly sacrificing my own profession for the sake of my profession.
and let's not even get started on the issue of "skill to make reagent X requires 5 of item Y and every source of that item comes in varying quality so your bags are all jammed with three different versions of every reagent that you can't do anything with because you don't have an even (or odd) numbered stack in adequate quantities.
and finally, they have attempted to really push profession interdependence, but only sometimes (for example, both alchemy and jewelcrafting) and only in ways that require absolute shit-tons of either rousing or awakened elements... which, see point above.
on my BS/JC toon i have literally three 34 slot bags full of nothing but a mish-mash of reagents half of which i can't actively use because i don't have 5 of them, and the other half i can't use because i need to skill up 15 more times to unlock a tab to be able to get the sub-spec to even make a thing.
anyways TL/DR: it's not the worst thing in the world, i'm sure 90% of the annoyances come from the fact we're only a few weeks in and once it's been 6 months and we're all drowning in ores and elements it will be back to the tedious game of whack-a-mole mailing shit from one alt to another that crafting has always been.
but right now, it's that on top of a bunch of changes and recipe dead-ends that were introduced in a system that didn't have that before and so we weren't really prepared for.
Last edited by Malkiah; 2022-12-25 at 07:58 PM.
World is amazing, lots of stuff to do and nothing feels pressured. Dragonflying is okay, I'm too old for the races, too fast and all. Dungeons are solid, the raid is good, trade skills, well yes, clumsy, bloated and inefficient. A system where the buyer needs to bring mats and stuff, nah, that wasn't their best idea. All in all solid expansion but I can see the dragon isles getting boring really fast. Let's see what they come up with as content patches.
Edit: one thing that I really hate is how they gate the rares. I mean you can only get loot once per day and several hours respawn was already pretty frustrating and punishing, but just have a selected few spawn every day is dogshit, sorry.
Last edited by Apatrida; 2022-12-25 at 08:58 PM.
Would be good if there was weekly task or tasks for solo players to do so they could access the vault and get some nice gear.
Also, now getting a bit tired of spammers in Trade Chat selling Mythic run boosts to get 400 ilvl plus gear.
But since Trade Chat is only visible in capital cities , it does prompt me to leave Valdraken and do something out in the Dragonflight world
But otherwise enjoying it.. Especially the fishing , the Zepplin drops and PVP