WoW: Dragonflight

I haven't seen the release trees for the druid but when they were first announced, hoo boy. I could not make heads or tails of it and the stuff I liked prior to the talent were so nested.

I mean the class has always had an identity crisis so I am not surprised. They definitely should have split the class a LONG time ago into something like a guardian/balance class and a feral/restoration class.

Really, really not a fan of the dragonriding. It’s basically similar to how Guild Wars 2 handled mounts but I was fine with GW2 mounts because it was adding new functionality whereas WoW is just saying “screw all your dozens of faster, more maneuverable, easier to use mounts, use this slow, awkward, stamina-based gliding system instead. Don’t worry that you can’t stay airborne very long, if you collect enough of these obnoxious floating sigils you can unlock the ability to glide for 5 more seconds.”

Dragonriding mounts are significantly faster than the old flying mounts once you get them up to speed. If the terrain is in your favor it's even faster than the flight paths. It's certainly better than walking everywhere for the first 2 patch cycles until the Pathfinder achievement is patched in.

I've been following PC Gamer's guide for finding the sigils. That gets you really close and tells you generally what to look for, but doesn't take all the fun out of actually finding them.

Once I picked up half the glyphs I was able to fly around as much as I wanted and stopped chasing them.

Once you get the hang of dragonriding you can go from one end of the continent to the other in a flash. This is by far much faster than normal flying. This takes a lil time investment to collect sigils so you can regen stamina in the air at top speed.

As a mount collector I get the annoyance with the new mount system, but I also like being not stuck on land mounts until pathfinder comes out many months later.

Love DragonRiding…easily the best system WoW has had in years…going back to regular flying is boring and slow

If you haven’t tried it yet, plug a controller in for Dragon Riding. Bind the flight abilities to bumpers and triggers. Not only does flying feel great with analog sticks, you actually get better control.

Character movement with a controller is different from movement with a keyboard. When you move the stick to the left or right your character doesn’t strafe; they turn in that direction and run forward while the camera stays in place. What this means for flying is you can use the left stick to adjust yourself sideways while still looking in your direction of travel. With a keyboard and mouse you have to turn the camera to make any lateral adjustments.

Funny bug (feature?) about controller support.. the Can't Walk Backwards on the Torghast and SoD raid powers never actually prevented walking backwards with a controller just the digital keyboard walking backwards.

Huh. Yeah, I guess that would be the case.

Though I'll note that if you have a hostile target you do switch to strafe and backpedal like you would with a keyboard. That just never comes up while dragon riding.

Did the new expansion come and go that quickly? I stopped playing WoW 2 or 3 expansions ago but lived vicariously through you guys. While I loved the game and had some of the most fun I've ever had gaming, I realize that my schedule does not allow for the playtime that I used to have. I've come back a couple of times but it was never the same. I still do like hearing about the game though and how it has changed (hopefully for the better!)

Dragonflight is still around. Just not many folks here are playing it.

Dragonriding is fun, though. It's almost worth the price of admission for that alone.

I... keep saying I'll quite WoW... I keep crawling back after 8-12 months because it helps me settle down my anxiety and such. I feel conflicted especially because of the controversies re: blizzard in the last few years, but it calms the brain weasels (and OW) to greater degree than most other games I play.

That being said I love the evoker, and the twist on the old class trees. I never liked the previous system and felt they should have introduced something like this instead of going to just 3 choices.

I’ve been plugging away at it but took a break to play some other games. Still not a fan of dragonriding despite having all but the last row row in the skill tree completed. I miss just being able to fly over stuff instead of having to wend my way across half the map following a valley to get where I’m going. Also miss not having to spend half my time on the ground waiting for stamina to recharge during gathering runs.

The expansion has been fun. Story has been enjoyable. The new profession system is different and professions are in a much better place to be useful and make money than prior so far. The change to M+ where each season has 3 current dungeons and 3 older dungeons has been good. Dragonriding for me has been a huge positive. Being able to zip around the zones quickly compared to normal flying is great. Overall it has been a surprise how well the xpac has been so far. It is still WoW at the core but there is a lot there that changes that refreshes the base game experience in a positive way for me.

I've been playing and enjoying it quite a bit. I just don't have much to say unless y'all want to help me figure out how to Warlock DPS.

Get gud?

Lol j/k

I'm playing Dragonflight right now as well. Yes dragon flying is fun, but what does that do now to the slow and boring flight systems that are in place for the rest of Azeroth? Are we all just riding around in our dragon sports cars now?

The story is good and enjoyable. I'm taking it super slow right now since it's the holidays, and I'm also down a deep Warhammer 40K: darktide rabbit hole.

Budo wrote:

I'm playing Dragonflight right now as well. Yes dragon flying is fun, but what does that do now to the slow and boring flight systems that are in place for the rest of Azeroth? Are we all just riding around in our dragon sports cars now?

Assuming that Blizzard sticks with its normal MO, we'll get flying with 10.1. Will be interesting to see if folks stick with dragon-riding or go back to their usual mounts.

They are giving away a free month sub with purchase so this guy right here is downloading to check out the new race and class

Enix wrote:
Budo wrote:

I'm playing Dragonflight right now as well. Yes dragon flying is fun, but what does that do now to the slow and boring flight systems that are in place for the rest of Azeroth? Are we all just riding around in our dragon sports cars now?

Assuming that Blizzard sticks with its normal MO, we'll get flying with 10.1. Will be interesting to see if folks stick with dragon-riding or go back to their usual mounts.

Old mounts have the benefit of being a pause button of sorts. If you need to afk you just mount and hover and you'll be fine. Dragonriding mounts can't do that.

Outside of hovering, I can't see many people using the old mounts. Those are 400% speed, while the dragons are listed at ~830% and I've heard that if you're good with the momentum you can approach 1500% speed. So if you were wondering why the Dragonflight zones are so big...

First impressions:
Drachyr and their cosmetic customization are pretty cool. It does seem a little mile wide and inch deep.
Dragon flying is fun if a little mechanical. There are parts where it wants to keep being fluid but is held back to gate progress. (i.e. wowified) Another positive is another race gets at will gliding.
The Dragon Isles questing is good. It was awkward at first but that was because it has been well over a year since I've played WoW. I am struggling to understand why it was awkward after such a short time away. That the WoW muscle memory had been replaced so quickly

The not great:
-The fact that my old characters were automatically re-talented in the new talent system begs the question "why?"
-You just wasted all that development time to insert padding that is supposedly meaningful but instead over complicates dependency? You wasted your time to waste our time more granularly in the guise of choice?
-There are tiers of talents that require a number of points to be spent. Then talents themselves seem like they require a separate number of points to unlock. And then there are prerequisite talents. Oh and then you have 2 talent trees to figure this all out with?

Vargen wrote:

Outside of hovering, I can't see many people using the old mounts. Those are 400% speed, while the dragons are listed at ~830% and I've heard that if you're good with the momentum you can approach 1500% speed. So if you were wondering why the Dragonflight zones are so big...

Once I get into farming mode, I'll probably use my old mounts, mostly because it seems easier to control and more precise. But, yeah, if I've got to go from one side of the map to the other, Dragonriding will be the way to go.

fangblackbone wrote:

First impressions:
... the talent trees ...

Yep. It's a level of complexity that *I* don't want (but others do, and that's fine!) Thank goodness there's an option to plop a Wowhead (or Icyveins) prebuilt into WoW.

Talent trees make the leveling game way better than it has been in years. The choices are meaningful but the difficulty is low enough that there's room to experiment.

At endgame things can narrow down a lot because you aren't just measured against the game; your community will judge your choices to some degree.

Icy-veins.com has an "Easy Mode" build for each spec. They're meant to be easy to execute on while still being viable. The quality varies from spec to spec though. The Marksmanship Hunter one has been serving me pretty well. I tried to import the Demonology build and couldn't use it because it had like 13 points unspent; I suspect it's still using an old version of the trees.

Its going to make it a lot harder to balance underperforming specs...
So far my demonology warlock seems... a hair better? I guess granularity does help you split the middle between OP and neutered if I wanted to be generous. (though again, it is easier to tweak numbers on less abilities than on the abilities and multiple dependencies)

If it is largely optional, then why not let those who want less granularity use the old system if it converts well to the new system? Aren't you removing choice from those that don't want to suffer padding and interdependency for granularity that is of marginal benefit to them?

It isn't that big a deal as it seems less than perfect builds, by those of us who are stabbing in the dark with the trees, don't seem to effect regular play much.

Also, why is B4A flying not automatically unlocked?

It’s another attempt by Blizzard to create more flexibility for players and builds. You will always have the best of the best min max builds for every situation but I think their hope was to keep even the best within a few % of any other reasonable build.

It does sorta work in some cases but time will tell. For example you can absolutely still play a Demon Hunter with a momentum build (which I loathe) but you can also do a more stationary build that plays and performs just as well. You can also make a glaive throwing build that didn’t use to exist before.

My biggest annoyance is that the trees feel to big. I think they could have still accomplished what they were going for with less “core” abilities on the trees. Like why is Feign Death now a Hunter talent instead of a core ability.

TheGameguru wrote:

Like why is Feign Death now a Hunter talent instead of a core ability.

Because if I don't click a button to get it, I probably won't know it's there. It took me a few minutes into my first raid as a Warlock to discover that the Soul Well was its own button and not a thing that Create Healthstone did while grouped. And while I'm no pro gamer, I'm pretty sure I'm in the top 50% of all World of Warcraft players for competency.

The talent trees have their strengths and weaknesses, but overall I think they're a positive change. They've got some extensive changes for some specs on the PTR already; these things do really need an active approach to keeping them balanced.

So months into Dragonflight...what do we think?

It's pretty darn sweet. The world is more alive than ever with events and world quests. The raid was good. Crafting has some rough edges but overall it's well done. Dragon riding is quite fun; it's more engaging than the old swimming-through-the-air flying because the terrain still matters. Talent trees are really well done overall, and they have been actively iterating on them to fix problems and improve things.

Vargen wrote:

It's pretty darn sweet. The world is more alive than ever with events and world quests. The raid was good. Crafting has some rough edges but overall it's well done. Dragon riding is quite fun; it's more engaging than the old swimming-through-the-air flying because the terrain still matters. Talent trees are really well done overall, and they have been actively iterating on them to fix problems and improve things.

So WoW finally does it right after I decide I'm never playing again? Jeeeeez

I used to go back every expansion, start a new character to play through all the old content again, and then stop when the gated content hit on the new stuff. I never would go back after that and then rinse and repeat next expansion. Finally said I had enough although I love the days/weeks/years put into it.

The recent personnel changes at Blizzard seem to have done the WoW team some good. For the longest time they were afraid to change too much because they felt beholden to "what WoW has always been." Now they're finally looking at almost 20 years of World of Warcraft the way the original WoW dev team looked at previous MMOs and aren't afraid to question conventions and make changes to the way things have always been done.