World of Warcraft: Dragonflight & {Dragonflight and Beyond}

The Game Room
61

One additional comment - many allied / new races and classes start at a level higher than 1 these days. Various ‘hero’ classes (DK, Demonhunter, Evoker) have higher bases, and most of the allied races added in the last few expansions (Dark Iron Dwarves, Void elves, Mechagnomes, etc) start at level 10.

I generally figure that at level 15 or so you’ll be able to fulfill your base role in a group, but level 25 is when you have unlocked most of your ‘kit’ as it were. For going on your own though, the leveling experience is so fast these days you’ll be 10 in no time at all and be able to do your content without any major hurdles. Of course, if you have a ton of legacy heirlooms, it’ll go a bit (but not much) faster, but they’ve been rescaled to be a lot less overpowering than in past editions.

62

I’m enjoying DF more than I thought I would. More than Shadowlands, and I more-or-less enjoyed SL.

But I tend to play “backwards”: level up, gear up, and then go back and beat up on prior content that I can solo now. And I discovered that a mediocre-geared level 70 can solo Shadowlands world group bosses*, so that allows me to grind out drops that I missed out on because group content is the poop.

The new profession system is needlessly complex for no appreciable gain, and it’s hella expensive to level up, which offends me. But I’ll get there in time.

*As distinguished from world raid bosses, which I haven’t had an excuse to try solo.

63

As the guy who started this trend of a new thread for each expansion, way back when, I want to say that, for the first time since 2008, I found myself simply not caring about a new expansion. Shadowlands finally killed the game for me.

In every previous expansion, some of which I loved to death and some not so much, I enjoyed the questing at the very least. I always found that part of the game well done and fun. But the questing in Shadowlands just felt like a chore to me. And then, upon reaching max level, there was the new chore of having six (I suspect I exaggerate) new currencies to start grinding out. Completely unrewarding World Quests, relative to their difficulty.

I got seven classes to max level in Cata, nine in MoP, and then at least one of every class to max in WoD, Legion, and BfA. I got one character to max in SL before throwing in the towel, because it just wasn’t fun any more. Too much unnecessary (IMHO) artificial difficulty in just the basic stuff that tended more toward “frustrating” and “tedious” than toward “challenging”.

I’m pretty much sticking with the resurrected City of Heroes over at Homecoming.

The story there: I started WoW 2-4 weeks after the launch of Wrath. Loved the hell out of that expansion. Only maxed three characters: my human ret paladin main, my draenei fire mage, and my blood elf ret pally.

Cata came along, and I was one who loved the revamp to the questing that made it more solo friendly. But then, at max level, and being a non-raider, I found there just wasn’t much of anything to do besides making the same circuit of daily quests every day. I got seven alts to 85, and just doing the same round of dailies on all of them every day got boring. I was also irritated that Blizzard seemed intent on forcing everybody who played a hybrid class to switch to tanking and healing. My shadow priest replaced my fire mage as my main spellcaster, because the changes they made to fire completely wrecked my preferred playstyle.

I expressed some wish on here that there was some other MMO out there that would run on a Mac, as I was a Mac user at the time. Somebody pointed me at City of Heroes, so I headed over there and signed up. I fell in love with it quickly, and canceled my WoW sub almost as quickly. Alas, NCSoft decided to completely shut the game down just a year or so later.

Fortunately, the shutdown coincided roughly with the release of Mists of Pandaria, and I ended up loving the hell out of that expansion. Fun from beginning to end.

Warlords of Draenor started out tons of fun, then dropped off quickly, but I mostly enjoyed it to the end.

Legion was, for me, insanely fun. And the announcement that Blizz was going to finally end support for OpenGL with the launch of BfA finally forced me to upgrade by switching to a new Windows gaming PC. I’d been playing from 2008 to 2018 on the same iMac, having to lower my graphics settings with every new expansion to keep the game playable.

I mostly enjoyed BfA. But I was really annoyed with the way professions worked, particularly being forced into dungeons to advance freaking gathering professions. Oh swell, I have to kill several dungeon bosses in order to learn a better method for picking flowers. Blizzard introducing new things that I totally loved (warfronts), only to discontinue them because the hardcore raiders complained about them. I think the same thing happened to scenarios in previous expansions.

Then came the surprise announcement that, somehow, City of Heroes was back from the dead. I instantly unsubbed from WoW and made a Homecoming account in May 2019. I played the hell out it, loving every minute. Then came the 2020 Covid lockdowns, leaving me stuck at home with nothing much to do except play CoH for hours and hours (and also buying a new electric guitar and relearning how to play it, after being almost exclusively a bass player for the previous 30+ years). I ended up getting a bit burned out, largely because I was rolling tons of alts which meant that I was playing the same low-level content over and over and over. So I took a break and re-subbed to WoW in order to see the end of BfA and the beginning of Shadowlands.

A couple months of Shadowlands was all it took for me to finally throw in the towel on WoW. Went back to CoH, and haven’t looked back. Homecoming gives me 1000 character slots (per server!), so right now I’m up to 127 completely unique alts, and counting.

64

What’s funny is that in many ways I moved in the opposite direction. I was in CoH from the Beta, and absolutely enjoyed the hell out of it. But it had many, many unanswered flaws (especially the 3 quest cap and no way to delete them) and once my friends and I had reached the cap, just a shortage of things to do. So we ended up switching over to WoW (Vanilla) which the majority of our friends were playing at the time. And I wasn’t willing to pay a monthly sub for multiple games. :man_shrugging:

Stayed in WoW up until just prior to WoD, and just was done with it at that point. Spent several years playing Rift and Star Wars the Old Republic as FtP options, but Rift was getting less and less material over time, and Star Wars seemed to be heading into heavy Pay to Win territory, when friends asked us to come back for Legion. So I probably survived BfA and Shadowlands due to a comparative long break.

I had heard that CoH was vastly improved in terms of leveling experience and options with the creation of City of Villains, and considered going back but to do so alone would have removed the reasons I even play MMOs most of the time. And of course, it no longer being an ‘official’ thing made it moot, although I have read much of the life on the private servers.

It’s just as a darn adult, I don’t have the time to play multiple games, and much of my time in WoW is spent paying for it in-game. Still, I remember CoH as my favorite game for building characters, just not always as much fun to PLAY.

65

Homecoming has made some nice changes to the game. They’ve activated some of the new mission content that the original devs had been working on at the time of the shutdown. There’s now a whole new story arc in Kings Row that is fun, although there was supposed to be a later continuation of it that the o-devs didn’t have the chance to complete. They have also created some completely new content, in the form of mission arcs specifically for Vigilantes and Rogues. They’ve also introduced a new archetype, the Sentinel (a slightly weaker Blaster with scrapper/brute secondary powersets, so much higher survivability at the cost of a bit less offense). Several new powersets have been introduced, some of which the o-devs had been working on, and a couple completely new ones.

All costume options are now available immediately, including all of the stuff you previously had to pay for. Quite a few NPC costume pieces are now usable by players (my reformed Gold Bricker hero can finally use the Gold Bricker jetpack!) Lots of NPC weapons are now usable as well. The Kallisti Wharf zone is now accessible, though there are no missions there yet. They’re working on that, or so I’ve heard. There’s a brand new max-level story arc in Cimerora, though I haven’t played it yet.

And, happily, they’ve been working on fixing some longstanding bugs, but the spaghetti code is making that slow going.

66

I’m definitely with you about Shadowlands. That expansion ended up becoming the culmination of the “borrowed power” style of game development whereby each expansion introduced one or more new systems that you had to grind endlessly in order to be competitive – and that would disappear at the expansion’s conclusion. In Legion you had artifact power and legendaries, BfA had Azerite and essences, and Shadowlands was the worst, with having to grind for renown, anima, conduits, soul ash, etc.

To be fair, Dragonflight has clearly been designed from the bottom up to address this complaint – successfully, in my opinion. And I’m not trying to convince you to come back, gaming time is short and it’s awesome that you’re having fun with CoH! Just know that Blizzard can change, even if it takes a player revolt to make it happen.

67

I don’t think many liked Shadowlands. I have been revisiting early parts on my alts taking them to 60 to go to Dragonflight. It’s still a crap levelling experience.

I was pretty much done with wow after that. How they could put out such a bad expansion after all these years was almost like impossible, I thought. But I got a monthly subscription to come back, and I’m glad.

This one is definitely a lot lot better, the flight along, account bound, means that you can take alts across and if one of your chars has flown about and got all the glyphs then they all have now, and can fly for a long time.

I guess by fixing things, you can actually get to realise what was broken. For instance, all my alts go and visit the the Auction house and buy up a few decent items to start levelling with. This is because they actually made some decent recipes for gear with cheap mats at the start. I can’t remember ever doing that before. Gathering makes a fortune and gives you xp, ideal. I don’t know, they’ve got a balance there working.

Quests are actually fun too. And if split into different areas, you just fly to them.

68

Yes. That is why I’m leveling my alts to 60 in BfA.

69

WoD is IMHO best for alt leveling, build a garrison and you have free-ish crafting resources - not to mention employable allies and other perks. :slight_smile:

But it’s pretty dull in many areas.

70

Oh, I forgot to mention the rage-inducing surprise I got when I took my break from CoH to play out the last part of BfA:

Equipping a gear upgrade, dumping my old piece into the woodchipper (whatever that thing was that reduced your stuff to dust, can’t remember what it was called), only to then find out that my new gear was actively trying to kill me, and that I had to do content I didn’t want to do to neutralize those effects.

Yeah, I hadn’t bothered to read up on the latest patch before I dived back in. So I’d slap on some new gear, head out to do world quests, and suddenly things would go purple and I’d die for no apparent reason. Infuriating!

71

Eh? Whatnow?

72

I assume he’s talking about the “corrupted armor” you could get in the last patch of BfA. Each piece had a benefit but also a penalty that increased the more such items you had equipped.

73

Yeah, the corrupted stuff.

74

Ah, I only came back 2 weeks before Dragonflight, so missed all that crap. Sounds shitty.

75

It was. Corrupted gear was absolutely one of the shittiest WoW ideas i can ever recall

76

So it’s going well, mostly. 3 x 70s (warrior, warlock, shadow priest), a few approaching (69 hunter, 68 dk, 66 shaman, pally, 64 mage, 63 rogue and boomkin). I was enjoying levelling as a prot warrior but killing harder mobs was getting slow, so I moved to fury warrior and I’m just as unkillable and a lot faster killing em all. So fun that I’m doing the full questline on that, when I usually would use the hunter, but the hunters playstyle is frankly boring in this (which was same as shadowlands).

A few things. Transmogs seem broken, pay your 200g and then get off your mount and you’re back to… Some other sort of transmog which wasn’t the one you’d actually chosen.

Instances are awful in this one, or at least the first two, and Dragonflying one will rate as the worst instance I’ve ever played in. It’s like they took the sadistic motherfucker who did levelling on shadowlands and stuck him on instances to keep him busy. The Dragonflying one is a masterclass in shittiness. I thought it just showed up how holy priest was crap, but I went in with the best healer class, resto druid and it is still a shit show. You’re just getting loads of interrupts, spell locked out and that doesn’t count the imprecise landings of flying dragging in other trash. I stopped trying them past 65 and now don’t bother at all. It does make the end game seem bleak if its that sort of instance type.

It is incredibly striking the ease of levelling on some classes versus others. Warrior, Warlock, Hunter, DK, Pally, farted their way through the levelling. Some definite plateaus of difficulty entering new zone, my warlock got arse handed to him when pulling too much murlochs on the plains, my shadow priest was rolling fine till hitting Azure span, and had to go into single pull, watch out for adds, but got there in the end.

Some were doable with care, like the mage, but the boomkin is a broken class which will likely only reach 70 as cat or bear. On reaching the Flashfrost enclave at the start of the Ruby Life Pools section, he died like a dog if 2 mobs got on him, if a strong one is pulled then its close to death sometimes. Reading icy-veins I thought I’d missed something but nope, that’s the playstyle.

Still the game is keeping my interest and once I hit the next subscription renewal I’ll be considering levelling the monk and demonhunter and perhaps even try the new class.

Crafting, well, tailoring continues to be the one gem of my three non gathering classes. Subsidised the expensive enchanting levelling, and still up 50 odd K afterwards. Enchanting a bust, Alchemy makes a small profit off a bit of transmuting, but even at that, not enough to do it daily. I’d be interested if anything else makes decent coin apart from gathering.

77

Interesting thing I’ve noticed recently, like in the last reboot. When I came back pre-patch, it seemed as if the levelling was ok, I got a few up through Bastion etc and got them geared via the pre-patch event. Quest rewards seemed pretty much standard at each level so quick to get up and going.

When I started up again with the 50ish level alts, it seemed as if they’d introduced level based reduction of XP from quests. Quests which gave 6K xp at level 52, gave 300XP at level 58. It made the last few levels of some of my bastion alts a bit boring because I’d outlevelled the quests in the area, and if you skipped some of the main quests, the whole breadcrumbs stopped working.

Having got now 4 chars to 70 in Dragonflight, I noticed that they’d sort of done the same, though not quite as extreme, you’d get about 9-10K for a lot of the plains quests when there at 65, but 3K when doing those at 69.

Today I’ve come on and I think they’ve reverted to standard questing XP, it does not degrade according to level now (been working the 64-66s and the 68-70s in the last week). So this may be of interest to the alt-players like me.

In other notes, the fact that I noticed this means I’m playing that game far too much. Which is a sign of a good quality WOW expansion.

78

Heh. I agree, it’s a good expansion, and well geared to doing a lot of content and exploring solo.

I also forced myself to do a few instances, and it confirms that the LFG and group play experience is, and will likely be, nothing but toxic. I know that various skill-based mechanics have a bad reputation in ‘modern’ WoW, so the last 2-3 expansions keep removing those elements. Thus all groups are about nothing but Big Pulz and require overgearing in the extreme to deal with what should be normal content. In the average run, 2-3 people die per Gigapull and we’re waiting for the run back 3-4 times PER INSTANCE. Which of course, makes it slower on the whole.

I just don’t get it, but obviously those of us from the early expansions are likely playing the classic Flavors and pointing our pointy sticks at them young folks (or playing retail and saying ‘back in my day’).

79

Yeah, pulling as much trash as possible at the start of Ruby Pools was one of the delightful ones which I quit from. The trash has lots of aoe, interrupts, knockbacks and its impossible to heal with those all happening sequentially again and again.

80

Well, that’s my fifth one to 70, and it shows the survivability of some classes versus others. The Blood Deathknight only died once (apart from falling to death via wrong mount, or the herb which sends you flying off the top of a mesa), about 5K xp from 70, when he pulled about 12 mobs when I was sitting playing one handed because the cat was on my lap and I was fussing him at the same time.

Too much damage, and me in wrong position so I wasn’t facing the mobs to use my self heal meant I couldn’t survive. When the cat moved, I went back and killed all twelve at once when I had both hands.