The last World of Warcraft expansions started with a tight script, packed with stories and a little disturbing on the rails. Dragonflight seems to have remembered that it is an MMORPG and I am I need to decide what kind of adventures I want to go on. Right from the boat to the vast and beautiful Dragon Islands, you’ll encounter only minimal hand-holding and four huge and exciting areas to explore. But at the same time, Dragonflight feels like a creative step back from the experimental—though not always successful—spirit of Shadowlands.
There is no denying that the new areas are really amazing. The contrast between volcanic wasteland and verdant river valleys in The Waking Shores is a breathtaking introduction to the expansion. And those places feature some of the best side writing I’ve seen in WoW in a long time. One of my favorite missions involved sitting and listening to a red dragon, transformed into a humble dwarf, talk about all his regrets and the pain of being banished from his homeland for 10,000 years.
Another one I liked involved a slow ride, on foot, with a centaur tribe to their sacred meeting grounds, with a stop for a hunting contest. These kind of heartfelt and memorable moments are truly World of Warcraft at its best. They seem to be here to with love It will blow you over the head and remind you to take your time, just exist in this beautiful world for a moment.
Unfortunately, these hand-crafted experiences will dry up after a week or two, and you’ll be repeating the same daily tasks, over and over waiting for the next patch, so it’s hard to give them too much credit. WoW has generally done a very good job in most expansions making the journey to max level memorable and exciting. And if that was all it had to be, the Dragon Plane would knock it out of the park. But as a living MMO, WoW consistently struggles to maintain that level of engagement for me in the weeks and months to come, and Dragonflight is no exception.
to the sky
Where Dragonflight really tries to spread its wings, figuratively and literally, is in the design of the new Dractyr Evoker class. And I have to admit they are pretty cool. With an ability and racial signature, dragon-themed attacks like Deep Breath allow you to come screaming out of the sky and wash your enemies in fire before they even know what hit them. this is simply amazing. However, both the damage-dealing Devastation spec and the healing-focused Preservation spec suffer from too many combat abilities for niche use and can feel very chaotic and confusing to play. Especially compared to WoW’s last hero class, the incredibly simple Demon Hunter, Evokers are just too underdesigned.
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However, where the Drachthyr can glide, the new dragon riding system allows all your characters to soar. Zooming across the landscape at up to three times the traditional WoW “flying” speed, I feel like I can’t go back to this old system. It feels amazing as you soar, bank and dive with a palpable sense of momentum and physicality that WoW usually lacks. Dragon riding challenge courses with cosmetic rewards for best times were easily some of my favorite parts of this expansion. Although I found it a bit too easy to get gold on all of them, leaving me with no reason to go back.
However, I’m not a big fan of how these dragons control the mouse and keyboard. They seem to be begging for Becker’s support, which has long been rumored but never materialized.
dance of dragons
The main story, so far, hasn’t exactly wowed me as much as the side quests. If you haven’t followed all the out-of-game lore leading up to Dragonflight, you might be a little confused as to why you’re even here in the first place. There’s some tension between the great good guys, but it rings pretty hollow. The new baddies, the ancient dragons and their human counterparts, the Primalists, have yet to make an impression as particularly complex or interesting villains. At least there seems to be some kind of succession crisis brewing within Black Dragon Flight that has the promise of providing interesting stories down the road.
The eight new dungeons are relatively simple and unremarkable, with the standout being the Stunt Assault, where you use your dragon-riding skills to soar and engage in a battle that takes up a huge chunk of, say, the Onahern Plains region. They seem to have been designed to avoid the problem of pickup groups insisting on crazy routes that skip most of the trash fights by taking advantage of level geometry, which was a big problem in Shadowlands. But overall, these dungeons are just kind of…uh. On the bright side, the new season of Mythic+ brings back four legacy dungeons from Mists of Pandaria. Keeping things fresh by letting you revisit some of the best content from WoW’s 18-year history is a no-brainer, and I hope they keep it up.
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The first raid, Vault of the Incarners, still didn’t exactly take my breath away either. There are some interesting and satisfying mechanics to learn: one encounter involves a council of elemental wizards that must be killed almost simultaneously in a nod to Molten Core’s classic Core Hounds battle, while another involves a giant rock elemental that must be tricked into destroying its noxious towers with an explosion attack. The complexity of the battles is almost normal, and the visual design of the bosses is quite strong, but I didn’t find the vault itself all that interesting in terms of its art or general theme – especially when compared to something like the first Shadowlands raid, Castle Nathria. Nothing particularly noticeable in any of the personal arenas and I don’t even know who most of these morons are! It should be noted at the time of writing that I have yet to see the final battle with Razageth.
Harder, better, faster, stronger
The new crafting system is probably the best it’s ever been in WoW history, with different qualities of materials and different outcomes for finished products based on your skill level and progression choices. When I make myself a pair of Tier 5 leather pants, I know that every stat on those bad boys is as high as it is, because my leatherworking skills are so much higher than the recipe calls for, because I specialized in leather pants specifically, and because I chose to use only the best butts of The bears in their production. Although I suspect, since you’ll eventually be able to max everything, that specialness will diminish the longer the expansion lasts.
The problem is that it is still very grindy. Dragonflight tried to respect our time more by giving us fewer daily tasks to do, with even standard “daily” tasks resetting once or twice a week instead of every 24 hours. But for crafters, you’re still expected to farm the same world monsters for dozens of hours just to craft one piece of epic gear, plus the fact that the new Spark of Ingenuity item only lets you craft one per week anyway. This would be the perfect place to put together something like Shadowlands’ Maw area or random solo dungeons in the vein of Torghast. Or make them a reward for completing recurring dragon riding challenges! Anything Skill based, instead of farming the same unchallenging mobs forever like I am in Purgatory. Come on Blizzard, I’m begging you. It’s not 2004 anymore and it’s not a good game.
I can hear the cries of, “Churghest!” already. But there has to be a happy medium here somewhere. Mostly solo players like myself should be able to have features like this available to us without making players who don’t like them feel obligated to do them all the time. Blizzard could allow us to use our progress in what I’ll call “advanced solo content” as a substitute, not in addition to other ways to increase our weekly vault earnings, for example. You can run this random Hades-style dungeon with temporary power-ups to collect or Do Mythic+, but no one Must do both. It sounds like a win-win.
Or, even better, they could make it an efficient way to farm like Awakened elementals, as a replacement for clearly worse Gameplay of uploading a podcast, zoning and farming a whole world or flying around looking for piles of dirt for hours on end. Things like Torghast, in particular, made me feel like I was being listened to as a type of player that isn’t usually a priority in the difficult balancing act, though, Blizzard has to play to cater to so many players. Did it need more iteration? of course. But Dragonflight definitely suffers in my eyes for not providing a parallel. Cutting out things like Covenant Sanctums, the quest table, and having to keep track of 200 different currencies was smart. But they cut too much Here.