I updated my night elf survival hunter’s transmog with a small tweak. I like her scale mail look a lot, but, befitting Dragonflight, I wanted a bit more of a dragon-y look.
Three updates created the biggest change: the headpiece is now mogged to Suffused Coif, the shoulders to Bequeathed Spaulders, and back to Anachronistic Wrap.
While the old chest looked ok, I wanted to tweak the colors ever so slightly and went with Trailblazer’s Scale Vest. That left the boots, which also ever so slightly disagreed with the new pieces, so after dinking around I chose Masterwork Boots. The darker color fits the rest of the new set better, I find.
We’ve been in Dragonflight for about a year, and we now know that the next World of Warcraft expansion is about a year away, so it seems like a good time to reflect on what we like and don’t like about this expansion.
Erik
I have been very happy with this expansion overall. I enjoy a lot of things about it, and I will be quite content to spend the next year or so in and around the Dragon Isles.
The only thing I really dislike about Dragonflight is dragonriding. I learned how to use the system effectively to get around, and it doesn’t bother me very much any more, but I have never enjoyed it. I find it over-designed and unengaging. It’s nice that, in the right terrain, it gives you a faster way to get from point A to point B, but it doesn’t give me the thrill that it gives a lot of other people. I accept that I am in a small minority with this opinion, and I am happy for everyone else who is enjoying dragonriding, but I’m delighted to be able to go back to the old, regular flying, even if it is slower. The rest of you can zoom and swoop ahead of me as much as you like; I’ll get there when I get there.
I love the Dragon Isles zone design. The artwork of this expansion is beautiful and bold. Every zone has its own identity while also feeling like they belong in the same space together. Having the four main zones in contiguous space, even though separated by cliffs and ridges, is also something I appreciate. The Shadowlands zones were well designed, but the fact that they were all separate from one another at times felt claustrophobic. I don’t much care for Zaralek Caverns, but I can mostly ignore that zone and still have plenty of things to do elsewhere.
I like that this expansion has taken a different approach to quests, dialog, characters, and their stories than we have seen in most of previous WoW. After a year of living with the story of Dragonflight, I think I can put my finger on what makes this expansion different: it is about the nuances of how we respond to trauma. Dragonflight is full of characters living with and reacting to histories of trauma, but different characters respond to that trauma in different ways. I know some players have been frustrated with the Dragonflight story and are annoyed that this expansion is less about Dragons Having Awesome Fights and more about Dragons Having Feelings and Talking, but I really appreciate an expansion that takes seriously the idea that the things we experience can inspire feelings other than rage and reactions other than violence. The last time World of Warcraft tried to engage with the trauma of war and the power of emotions was Mists of Pandaria, which lacked subtlety and came off as shallow and preachy. Dragonflight feels like the Warcraft writers’ room is finally staffed by people who have an adult understanding of life, and I hope that this is a change that sticks.
In terms of systems and gameplay, there has been a lot of good development in Dragonflight. I was a fan of the new talent trees from early on, and my fondness for them has not wavered. Now that I have had some time to play with the new crafting mechanisms, I am mostly happy with them—they sometimes feel overly complicated, but I largely enjoy exploring the new options that the crafting system has opened up. Once I got used to the flightstone/crest gear upgrade system, I’ve found it quite workable, and I really appreciate getting to collect tier sets without having to raid. The proliferation of world quests and events in the open world has sometimes felt bewildering, but for the most part, I appreciate always having something to do.
Eppu
Unlike Erik, I LOVE dragonriding! It’s perhaps my most favorite single thing in Dragonflight. Don’t get me wrong, it was a learning curve, and I still stumble occasionally (especially if my ageing mouse decides to act up). Optimally, I’d like a multi-character dragonriding vehicle (like the Sandstone Drake), so that when we play together I could ride us around and Erik would get the benefit of faster transit without the bother.
I do agree with Erik about the zone design. It’s an absolutely gorgeous expansion. While Zaralek Cavern is not a favorite zone, per se, I quite like the cave-ish-ness of it, for the lack of a better word. Deepholm was already an impressive, underground-cavern-like-enough space with multiple levels of quest areas and subzones. ZC takes the fully matured terrain design to its logical conclusion with an absolutely, breath-takingly amazing underground space that is somehow at the same time huge enough to allow dragonriding between areas and claustrophobic enough to feel constricting. Hats off to the design team from me!
I also agree with Erik on collecting some tier gear without raiding. I have quite enough on my plate at the moment without that particular time sink.
However. Am I the only one who’s driven to distraction by the [multiple expletives removed] constant resetting of talent trees? Sheesh! While I’m all for tweaking and re-tweaking certain aspects of one’s life to one’s satisfaction, a computer game character’s talents isn’t one of them, and certainly not over and over and over. Perhaps I should just go with the suggested talent builds instead, even if it means losing some individuality.
I still find that the world quest refresh rate doesn’t work for me, and events don’t make up for that lack. Because I’m dealing with a more limited gaming time IRL, the last thing I want is to have to track game events’ start times and schedule my playing accordingly. Bleah.
Another aspect that currently doesn’t work for me—and for exactly the same reason as above—is the writers’ room’s penchant for ending campaign quest chains in a dungeon. Although, it sounds like Blizzard is about to change that radically with the new Follower Dungeons coming soon-ish(?) in patch 10.2.5. (In short, the idea is that players form a dungeon group with 1-4 characters and the game generates NPCs for the remaining slots.) I’m rather looking forward to being able to run a leveling dungeon privately, without risking a random jerk (or two or three) with a Looking For Group run.
The new customization options for druids at the barber shop are great fun.
What kinds of thoughts do you have on Dragonflight thus far? Chime in!
My Highmountain Tauren hunter is a jewelcrafter, so I’ve given her a transmog with a suitably gem-studded look. The cool colors of the gems are set off against gold and silver metalwork.
Maybe not a very practical set of garb for stealthily prowling the wilderness, but, eh, what’s fantasy for?
At the end of Shadowlands, I was planning to retire my holy priest. He’s the first character I ever played, so I’m never going to delete him, and he will always be holy specced, but I don’t do group play any more where a healer would be needed, and leveling up a holy priest has been a slog for a long time. I put together a nice transmog for him to wear and was thinking about where I was going to leave him to enjoy his retirement.
Then the talent changes in Dragonflight made leveling as a holy priest pretty okay, so he’s come back out of retirement after all, but I thought I’d share his transmog anyway. Here you go!
Since the Dragonflight expansion has some major differences from previous World of Warcraft expansions, I decided it was time for a major change in my main toon’s transmog.
Erik often has a conceptual approach to his mogs. Unlike him, I tend to start from a particular piece and build an outfit around it, or choose a color and go from there. This time it was more or less a combination of the two: I wanted to include the whimsical wings in Sprite Darter’s Flutterers—because why not—and chose the rest of the colors to highlight the shoulderpiece.
So, I chose the unassuming Black Swashbuckler’s Shirt and Black Tuxedo Pants. The Chestguard of Insidious Desire was also reasonably subdued. Gloves and belt were a little difficult, but Frostcarver Grips and Stygian Belt went well enough with the chestpiece. Conveniently, one of the options on Scythe of Elune had purple glow; that choice was easy. To round the set off, the helm, cloak, wrist, and boots are hidden. (Gosh, the ability to hide pieces is such a great change to the transmog system!)
Dragonflight, the newest World of Warcraft expansion, has been out three months now. Here are some initial opinions.
Eppu’s thoughts
Let’s get the negatives out of the way first:
The world quest cycle seems too slow. Way too slow!
The climbing-related world quests seem to have inordinately many glitches. (I stopped doing them for quite a while, in fact.)
Positives:
Playing Horde and Alliance together outside of dungeons as well seems to have been enabled (at least for world quests) even before Dragonflight launched properly. Yay!
It’s so nice that the Horde don’t continue to embody only awful-looking designs. In the earlier expansions—speaking very roughly, of course—Alliance areas and characters looked normal and nice, whereas Horde ones were full of spikes and angst. In the past Blizzard has introduced nods in the direction of changing it (Blood Elves, Pandaren, Vulpera), but then they eventually slide back to the dark/awful-pretty/shiny divide (e.g. Maldraxxus and Revendreth vs. Bastion and Ardenweald in Shadowlands).
Dragonriding (which I’ve started to call gliding as opposed to flying with regular flying mounts) is fun!
The druid pink paw buff is back—hooray! I’ve so missed having Mark of the Wild.
Among the background sounds, there are chickadees! While they’re nothing I grew up with, they’re nevertheless similar enough to some childhood favorite birds that I appreciate having them. (As a rule, I also appreciate including actual northern biomes into any story. There’s little enough of the real north in mainstream media that isn’t ridiculously exaggerated—seriously, it sounds like people think we live on the planet Hoth from the Star Wars universe.)
I’d like to retain player choice with regard to dungeons: that, like Torghast, you can choose to faceroll or challenge yourself. However, I’d also like to get actual loot reliably, like a normal dungeon. (Haven’t been in one yet due to life getting in the way.)
Taking into account the story, environment and sound design, talents and professions plus the mechanics thereof, and the personal gaming experience (as nebulous as that can be), I’d say Dragonflight is the best WoW expansion so far.
Erik’s thoughts
I really only have one negative, so I’ll get it out of the way up front.
I didn’t like dragonriding at first. I really didn’t like dragonriding. I was physically cringing every time I had to do it. Figuring out how to turn off the screen-distorting effects at high speed made a big difference, though, and now I can use it just fine. I still don’t enjoy it, though. It’s useful if you’re starting somewhere high up and want to go somewhere far away and lower down (and you don’t care very much about where exactly you land) but otherwise I miss the reliability, pausability, and accuracy of regular flying. If we get regular flying later in the expansion, which I hope we do, I’m just going back to my old flying mounts and won’t touch dragonriding again.
Now, on to the positives.
What beautiful environments! I have a hard time picking out a favorite zone, but Azure Span delights me every time I go there. Unlike Maldraxxus and Revendreth in Shadowlands or Drustvar in Battle for Azeroth, there’s nowhere in Dragonflight that I don’t enjoy spending time in.
I’m really enjoying the new talent system. It probably still needs some tweaking, but I like being able to make choices that really affect how I play my characters.
I hope that Blizzard continues on the path laid out in Dragonflight for Alliance-Horde relations. It is a relief to finally have an expansion where it just doesn’t feel like it matters what faction you play. Now if they would continue this to let Horde and Alliance characters communicate, group up, and play every part of the game together, that would be great.
This one is a little harder to define, but quests feels more meaningful this expansion. It feels as though we are addressing real problems, not cleaning up after someone else’s emotional tantrum, which describes too much of Shadowlands. I rarely get to the end of a questline in Dragonflight and think to myself: “This could all have been avoided if some people had just gotten around a table and talked to each other.”
I still don’t quite feel like I have a handle on the new crafting systems, and there are aspects that I don’t like (like having to be near a designated crafting table to make a lot of recipes), but I enjoy the fact that crafting is now more complicated, and I can specialize different characters in different aspects of the same profession.
Anything else come to mind that we didn’t think of? Please share in the comments!
In these waning days of Shadowlands, with nothing much left to do except wait for Dragonflight to come out, I decided to dip my toe into World of Warcraft Classic. I started a Night Elf druid, since that’s what I play as a main in the current game. I didn’t get very far into the game before deciding that this is not for me.
I did enjoy the nostalgia. It brought back warm memories of days long past when I experienced Azeroth for the first time. But I also missed the many, many quality-of-life changes that have come to the game since then. Questgivers didn’t show on my minimap. I couldn’t mouse over a mob and tell if I needed to kill one of them or not. I couldn’t even track all my quests on the screen. The highlight of my evening was getting a six-slot bag drop off a random boar.
The nostalgia was also soured by facing the reality of 18-year-old graphics and zone design. My Night Elf was not a savage and wild descendant of an ancient race but a lumpy sack of potatoes with a mustache. Teldrassil felt like an abandoned strip mall, not a magical world tree.
I know that there are a lot of people who enjoy playing Classic, even those for whom it is the only version of the game they play, and I am deeply, genuinely happy for them. After dealing with years of stonewalling from Blizzard, I’m delighted that they got the game they wanted. It’s just not the game I want in 2022, and I know that now.
All of you Classic players, I salute you and I wish you the very best of adventures, but don’t expect to see me around any time soon.
In less than a week we will say farewell to Shadowlands and move on to the next World of Warcraft expansion: Dragonflight. In anticipation, the two of us reflect on what we hope the new expansion learns from the successes and missteps of the old.
Erik: The biggest thing I hope Dragonlifght builds on from Shadowlands is Torghast, specifically the great flexibility the Torghast dungeons had in how many characters they were for and how difficult they were. Torghast was great for us to play together just the two of us or to do solo when we felt like it. The biggest weakness of Torghast was that it had no rewards beyond materials for legendary crafting. My dream is an expansion where every dungeon adjusts to any size group, from one to five (or even more) and scales its difficulty appropriately. What about you?
Eppu: Agreed! (This is literally the first thing I wrote down, too, when drafting my thoughts for this post.) While it’s fantastic to play through a dungeon that’s adapted to your gear level, getting no proper loot sucks.
The other big thing I hope for is convenient and comfortable flight. You had a few more thoughts about that, didn’t you?
Erik: Yeah, I’m excited that we get flying early in Dragonflight. While I haven’t minded the way Blizzard has handled flying in the past few expansions—starting out on the ground and earning flight by playing through the game on one character—I like the idea of flight being unlocked right out of the gate.
At the same time, I’m a little worried that we’re going to see a classic Blizzard overcorrection and they’re going to turn flight from a convenient method of getting around into some overdesigned, unfun “gameplay” like what happened to mission tables in Shadowlands. Are there any features from Shadowlands you’re hoping won’t make a return next expansion?
Eppu: One, and they already took care of that in the new crafting interfaces. I seriously hated the info box for the marks that you can add onto other crafted items. It was so fecking clunky; I’m really glad it’s gone!
I’d also love to see professions improved. These days whenever you have the mats to make something, your character has already leveled past it. You could always craft items for auctioning, of course, but I find additional management like that annoying. It’s not what I come to WoW for. The crafting orders sound like those who want to dink around with auctioning now will have that opportunity. It will remain to be seen whether the rest of us will have anything useful to craft. How about you?
Erik: I’m interested to see what’s going to happen with crafting, too. I’m right with you on that infernal info box on the crafting interface!
As for things I hope don’t come back, the scarcity of anima was a theme in the lore of Shadowlands, but it also affected the gameplay of the expansion too much. I never explored even half of what the covenant sanctums had to offer just because I never had enough anima to do anything. World quests felt unrewarding for the level of time and effort they required. I hope we don’t have the same scarcity-based design in the next expansion.
But enough about the negative. What are you looking forward to the most in Dragonflight? Blizzard keeps blowing me away with the art design of their zones, and Shadowlands was the best yet. I can’t wait to see the art and design in an expansion focused on dragons and elemental powers.
Eppu: You’re right, the anima scarcity wasn’t satisfying at all—haven’t we done the grind for, what, 18 years now? It’s also true that the art has improved a lot since Draenor (if not Pandaria). But I’m not quite sure what you mean by best art design yet. Would you elaborate?
Erik: I think what I’m trying to get at is this: Each of the main zones of Shadowlands has a clear aesthetic that looks pretty simple at first: Bastion is peaceful fields and clear skies, Maldraxxus is carnage and gore; Ardenweald is a dreamy fairy forest; and Revendreth is crumbling gothic ruins. But the longer you spend in each zone, the more you discover. Bastion is less peaceful than it appears, but the dangers are hidden from sight like the forgotten memories of the Kyrian. The very land in Maldraxxus is made of skin and bone and hair, like the corpse of some gigantic creature. Ardenweald is full of swirls and circles, hinting at the cycle of death and rebirth that it serves. In Revendreth different stories about a corrupt elite and the gnawing discontent from below play out at the higher and lower levels of the of the zone. There is a tighter connection between story and design in Shadowlands than we have seen in most previous expansions. (I’d cite Drustvar from Battle for Azeroth as another excellent example.) I hope we see more of that in Dragonflight, zones that are not only beautiful to play through but where the art and the story inform one another so deeply.
Eppu: Yes! It would be great if the story and art supported each other. So far it’s impossible to say, but I’m cautiously optimistic. The expansions certainly have gotten better and better over the years. Incidentally, my all-time favorite is Battle for Azeroth. Do you have a favorite expansion?
Erik: Hard to say, but I think Legion. I enjoyed the class storylines, and we got a whole new kind of Tauren to play! But there are things I’ve loved in every expansion, and I look forward to finding out what those will be in Dragonflight.
My main WoW toon these days is my balance druid, so I was surprised to realize I’ve kept her transmog appearance broadly speaking the same for over three years (here she is in a January 2019 post). Time for a final tweak before the end of Shadowlands!
I still like her vest plus shoulder combo (Tribal Vest and Bonechewer Shoulderguards) combined with her purple hair, so when I found a matching weapon (Avowed Arcanist’s Staff) I decided to only fiddle with the rest of the outfit.
For a change, the helmet, gloves and boots are off. Ghostclaw Leggings are one of my favorite designs from the earlier expansions, and the Mighty Girdle goes with them well. Oddly, the Shardhide Leather Bracers make the lower edge of the White Swashbuckler’s Shirt sleeves bulge, as if the shirt had puffy sleeves, so I decided to treat that as intentional.
Co-Geeking 