World of Warcraft: Dragonflight & {Dragonflight and Beyond}

The Game Room
41

I’ve hit a weird one levelling, I think they’ve screwed up the calculations somewhere. There was a hotfix today with all the servers down, so it might have just been today.

I’ve got a pally at 58 who was got there killing the mobs in the pre-expansion earth/wind/fire/water elementals. He had got as far at the quests in South east Bastion, so was going back there to get to 60.

None of the mobs pay an xp anymore (like 0, I checked), killing level 52 mobs at level 58. The XP for a breadcrumbs quest is 90xp, and none of the quest !'s appear anymore, so I can’t find the one which opens up Maldraxxus and hopefully earn some xp from mobs. I reckon only thing I can do to get to the next level at moment is herb and mine for the 1950xp per node.

I went through on my Balance druid yesterday, getting to 57, and the mobs in the south east were paying xp. I did notice a drop in normal xp, either because I was at 57, or recently, where they only paid 1k xp mostly, occasionally 3k, as opposed to the usual 3k/5k. He was seeing the quests !s in Heros rest, and my pally isn’t anymore. Not sure how to set to see those now, the instructions online are from the previous HUD.

I suspect it has bugged out and isn’t planned, I mean, it’s on rails I think, so I can’t get to the area with xp when still in the valid range for that expansion.

Just checked with level 57 druid and he’s seeing the !s still, when I abandoned a quest.

Did a bit of questing down by Temple of courage (the next bit you fly to after heros rest on questline) and the xp is still getting given to the druid at 57.for level 53 mobs.

42

I always take DPS rankings with an enormous grain of salt. Unless you’re at the bleeding edge of progression, the inherent DPS differences among classes are going to pale in comparison to correctly executing a rotation and reacting to mechanics.

After swearing off WOW after Shadowlands (the fucking Maw . . .) like any good addict I’ve come back. I’m taking it much slower than I have in the past. Part of that is life, but also just enjoying the environments and various side quests. I definitely feel less “funneled” into various grinds than recent expansions.

43

I just wanted to repeat Flurb’s point. I’ve been kvetching, but while there are a lot of pains and gripes, so far I’ve been having more fun than not in Dragonflight. It is a lot more open, the dragonflight mechanic gives you an early freedom of movement sadly lacking in prior expansions, and feels absolutely less “on rails” than prior expansions, ESPECIALLY Shadowlands.

I’m not as involved as I was in say, Lich King years ago, but I’m not that person anymore either, and for a game that’s been running for 18 years, WoW isn’t completely out of ability to please. I still wish they’d drop the (increasing!) costs to players for new content when you have a monthly sub, but I know they want to front load their costs against those who play a month or two, then drop until the next big piece of content. :face_exhaling:

But for anyone reading the thread that was turned off by Shadowlands, yeah, it’s probably worth it to try again. It absolutely feels a lot more like WoW than at any point since Legion. And other than the dragon riding experience (which is useful, but not needed much for core gameplay), it’s a lot LESS gimmicky than Legion’s weapon, BfA’s medallion, and Shadowland’s covenants, which is a huge plus.

44

Yeah, though there might be some truth to it levelling wise, I’ve definitely struggled on some classes more than others. However, I do mostly want a class specific experience. I know combat rogue is the top dps and easiest to level with, but it feels no different than say an arms warrior to, I want the shadowstep or stunlock and mutilate time with that one.

And I mentioned before, pull half the area and tank it is by far the fastest of these in the levelling experience. Doing the likes of mage and balance druid and single, maybe double pull some mobs and its so much slower. Its a lot to say that the dot dot tab of the warlock is feeling slower than a prot warrior steaming in and killing all those mobs only at slightly slower dps than an actual dps class. Both are largely untroubled by the chance of death when levelling. Well, apart from with all my characters, I set the dragon mount to a different key then jump off a high mountain using the normal mount, and die from the fall that is…

45

I was filling in some gaps with the little crafting I do, and took tailoring to 65 quite easily, thought enchanting wasn’t selling on much, then I got to alchemy.

With tailoring I think you can get the first 15 points from unravelling cloth, which was selling at 30s on my server, 5 of these, AND you get a bolt for use in later, so 1.5G per point and you can use the output for other stuff.

I guess leatherworking is like that too, with skins being cheap and easy to get in quantity.

Alchemy? I price on my server the matts to go for skill 1 to 2 as 97 Gold. Producing a potion nobody wants. Ye gods, I made money off transmutes a long time ago, but we’re talking 1.5K gold to get the same effect which took 27G in tailoring.

Ok, I realise now its 3 skillpoints, but still.

It’s not even that, I know cloth is cheap, shit wildercloth is also cheap, ore and herbs being more expensive, but its like 8 hochenblume for the first skill point, along with a ROUSING FROST? Blacksmithing and Jewelcrafting will need ore, and Inscription herbs, but do any of them need rousing items from the starting point?

It wouldn’t be so bad if you could auction them off, but my experience of Alchemy is that absolutely NONE of the pots you produce under the raid level are worth anything but vendor price.

I hold with deep cynicism the standard claim that “Blizz has fixed crafting this expansion” every time they claim this, but this is like utterly broken.

46

Skins are ALWAYS cheap and easy to get. That’s been true since vanilla. There are always one or two types that require a bit more effort to get, but for the most part it’s even easier than picking flower.

More like “extremely different”.

Crafting has changed a great deal and thus all the prior habits and tricks are no longer viable, or as viable, as before. This causes frustration.

Personally, I’m not decided on this. On the one hand, I’m finding this an interesting change. On the other hand, change is always problematic.

As for the rest - I’m finding this progression MUCH more enjoyable than Shadowlands, with a nice distinction between campaign quests and the very optional (but fun for me) side quests. I’m clearly going to hit 70 before I even finish off two of the four new regions on my main. And I don’t care. I’m having fun. That’s the whole point, right?

Admittedly, I seem to be more easily amused than many gamers.

47

I am finding it MUCH better playwise, though it does still rely on a whole lot of quests which you effectively kill something but get no xp for it (collect it, pacify it etc) which irks me as an heavy alt player.

Lots of flying about certainly hasn’t bothered me, but the instance which has that has annoyed me so much with all the trash drags and your healer having run out of vigor through a couple of wrong flying choices and sitting half the map away as you all die. Just remove the limits of vigor on that instance.

I rely on rested and usually never finish the campaign unless its something like a requirement for flying (which meant I never saw the covenants last time, I only got a bit into Ardenweald on my main before moving to alts). Maybe this time, eh?

I was in the market for addons for pointing out the glyphs for flying but didn’t locate any, but I didn’t really look that hard.

I might budget out 10K to level some of these professions, if I can work out whatever will make money from it. I found the alchemy cooldowns worth it, but the tailoring not worth more than the matts. Tailoring made money from bags, pretty much all the time. It’s weird how they’ll sell loads of stuff for less than matts price, but on both the servers I use, they seem to allow for a decent (like 100% at least) markup on the bags.

However, I’m not completely sure 10K would be enough to get that far into alchemy levelling…

48

Still on alts here, but it does strike me the massive differences in class survivability and coming into the expansion geared. Pretty much all my tanks, geared or not, have easy moded the initial bit (embassy to the pools), pulling every single thing they can get, on their way to the pools. Even the prot pally, in heirloom gear, but the difference with that one was he didn’t kill the mobs very fast but absolutely no danger of death there.

Pet classes (Warlock and Hunter) never struggled at all, didn’t pull everything but chain pulled more than anything.

Took one of the glass cannons, shadow priest through, geared to 252 from the pre-patch event, and it was fine, not killing lots of things at once, but didn’t die at all.

Now onto the ones I just took up from 50, all glass cannons (assassin rogue, frost mage, balance druid) on heirloom gear and 150ish ilevel additional stuff from the levelling, and man initial part is tough at level 60. Little gear for quest rewards, my mage for instance had to go old school standing at max distance throwing frostbolts hoping for a proc or two to survive killing a single big mob. Three little mobs (the ones just squished on the tank classes) were definitely a near death experience. Once hit 61 I could load up on the discounted 316 gear to boost my ilevel and just then feel safeish to not die on pulling a strong single mob.

However, being after fighting the way up to a local big mob to kill it, it is definitely nice that I can fly out past all those respawned mobs.

I would say I now appeciated the difficulty of some classes coming back for this expansion in last expansions questing gear…

49

Leveling my elemental shaman, which does have some “pet” ability (earth and fire elementals). Even managing to kill some of the quest mobs where 3 toons are recommended, but then I gear up, buffed up, etc. to the extent possible. And I’ve been doing this awhile.

I thought I’d be doing a LOT more crafting but not yet.

Thinking of level boosting one of my major gathering alts to save up mats for when I do start serious crafting work.

My warlock alts are doing just fine (both demonology, so have pets to tank for them).

50

I will probably do this in another week or so. Right now I’m still taking out a dual gatherer (mining herbalism) for an hour and making 4-7 grand on the AH. Of course, the cloth and leather, which aren’t worth as much are still going to my crafters, since all the characters I’m using right now wear leather, mail or cloth.

51

I just tried healing the Ruby lifeshrine instance as a level 64 holy priest for a try.

Man that was a pain. I’d done the instance easily before with the resto shamen and while annoying (all that aoe damage and fire and everything, getting pulled about), it was relatively easy.

Holy Priest, well holy fuck, constant casting, didn’t seem to really heal anyone. How in hell does THE healing caster with THE healing spec end up as the worst healer in the game. No more healing on that one.

Seems as if they’ve also rearranged the spells so its all holy words, rather than the old standard of renew, prayer of healing, heal standard, flash heal emergency. Not as if not using those made much difference.

52

I think there might be something broken on gathering nodes, at least on my server. I first noticed it when looking to assign specialisation points initially on an alt, and my herbing was 28 and my mining was… 3. I’ve played on alts, and mined nodes on plenty of them, so thought maybe just not that one and I’d just been unlucky.

But I don’t think so. I think the fact they make them spawn on top of mesa/platforms then all the low end ore nodes have been gathered, and people (certainly not me) are not going high up to get the ore nodes. With 4 vigour and the faff of controllability on landing on one of those, plus, urk… TREES stopping me, I waste a bunch of time and sometimes run out of vigour and have to wait, what, three minutes to retry.

Plus also there are NO ore nodes on Ohn’ahran Plains, I mean NONE, not seen a single one. There are parts with not much herbs, but not seen one so far. It could be my server being broken though.

53

It could be that, but I’ve noticed DF leans more heavily into the older RNG and many of the specialization points come from picking up the ‘x item of mining / herbalism / etc’ improvement. I have one active miner, 2 active herbalists, 2 active skinners, and while I’m consistently getting my ‘main’ skillups, the differences in points for the specialization are ALL OVER THE PLACE, even between roughly equal levels, zones, and skills.

I will agree with a lot of people on the internet in that the new crafting is very interesting and has a lot of potential, but it sure seems undertested, vastly underexplained in game, and feels only 3/4 finished. And yet despite those points, it’s nearly inexcusable that they don’t put in a mechanic (yet, and probably not for a long while based on the disaster covenant switching was in Shadowlands) to reset those points.

54

Nah, it appears a lot simpler explanation than that… I had the minerals tracking switched off for some reason on that alt! :slight_smile: Doh!

55

Let s/he who has never made a silly mistake cast the first stone!

-says the person who was sure there was a glitch for several hours because he couldn’t find his gathered materials because they were all in the brand-new reagent bag he had bought just an hour before-

56

Ok, I’m calling it. This is the best expansion of Wow since Draenor, perhaps even Wrath. I’m actually enjoying it. ENJOYING IT, for gods sake. I thought that Wow was a compulsion for a long time rather than an actual game. The dragonflight makes the difference, but the quests everywhere helps a lot too (one of my alts found another set off while mining I hadn’t seen before on the waking shores). Mining and herbing makes a packet, one of my alts seems to pick up 3-5 rousing order every other oder every second node making a LOT per hour.

I’m talking from the point of view of levelling all classes, or most of them. I don’t do the end game. But this works well for me, most I’ve played wow for years.

57

so tell me is it possible to start from lvl 1 on wow like the old days or is it like eq 1 where it’s a barely controlled mess?

58

From what I heard a couple of expansions ago they’d streamlined the experience and it was actually quite fun from 1. I can’t imagine the experience now, given there’s been 8 expansions before this, they’d struggle to fit much of it in at all, and I can imagine you wouldn’t even need to visit some of them.

59

Yes, yes you can.

Although it is a different experience than in Vanilla

Start at level one and do your first quests in a starting zone to get started. You can either stay in first two continents and zones will scale with you, or much sooner than in the past you can go to other zones/expansions and continue leveling there. You do not have to visit/go through all prior expansions to get to a high enough level to move into Dragonflight although you get access to some sooner than others. You absolutely can skip entire expansions if you don’t want to run your toon through them.

I don’t start new characters often (I have plenty already) but I’ve done a couple in the past few years. With more zone-scaling it allows for much more flexibility while leveling.

60

Specifically, the game has a feature called “Chromie Time” where at level 10 you can choose to level entirely through one of the previous expansions. The zones and mobs will scale to your level as you work your way through them, so you’ll never outlevel a zone. You can find Chromie in Stormwind and Orgrimmar near the embassy – it’ll be an hourglass on the map.