Dragonflight Done-ish

Whelp friends… I have finished the main story campaign in Dragonflight and for the most part, I enjoyed it. I think it might be one of the better World of Warcraft expansions as a whole, but I also think that maybe my tastes in games have shifted a bit. I ran into this a bit when trying to ease into Final Fantasy XIV as well… my brainwaves seem not to flow along the traditional MMORPG patterns as much these days. Guild Wars 2 scratches the ARPG itch so that I can flow seamlessly between it and something like Path of Exile. World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV are so much slower-paced than I am used to now that I had to keep trying to make the combat more active than it was to stay engaged. I think the design pattern of the MMORPG feels a bit dated, and I still wish that someone would come along and create the Destiny of MMORPGs with tight action combat with really enjoyable feedback. I am looking for Arcade gameplay, whereas too many people seem to be leaning into the more slow and prodding Dark Souls feel.

I think what makes Dragonflight really stand out is the world design. The Waking Isles are phenomenal and have these nostalgic ties to so many other “favorite” World of Warcraft zones. There are also just some really cool visual setpieces like this cave full of spiders that were frozen in the state of descending. The team that created the flow of these zones deserves some massive credit because leveling through each area felt extremely enjoyable. So much is focused on the narrative story… but the mechanical flow through zones is super important and often treated as an afterthought in games. Dragonflight created this enjoyable ride from the moment you set foot on the docks of your capital city, to the moment you arrive in Valdrakken for the first time. Technically the expansion had three zones, but it feels like each zone is multiple zones at once with a lot of regional biome shifts and cultures.

Every time I have complained about Shadowlands, I get some diatribe about playing it at launch… I did play it at launch. I still did not really enjoy the experience at launch. The Shadowlands feels like a number of disconnected content islands that have radically different themes to them. Dragonflight instead feels like a place you could actually visit with a natural feeling flow to the transitions between zone boundaries. Shadowlands instead felt like a bunch of post-launch patch zones where narratively they did what they needed to do… but structurally were a bit of a mess. I am hoping that this same cohesion flows through to Dragonflight’s post-expansion zones because I know at a minimum at some point I will be stepping foot into the Emerald Dream. Now I just need to figure out what I need to do in order to get some starter gear. The transition from leveling to endgame has never been as smooth as it was during Legion, and I’ve not really seen much in the way of world events yet so I am wondering what I need to do in order to unlock those.

I think I am going to spend some time burning down the backlog of quests that I have sitting in assorted zones. I’ve reached the point where I can no longer accept quests and exclamation points are screaming in my face everywhere I go. I need to reconcile all of the junk that is in my bank as well so that I can figure out what I want to do with it. I should probably just Auction House the bulk of what is saleable. I kinda hate the WoW Auction House system and wish it was something more akin to FFXIV or GW2 where you could list an item and forget about it. I always sell items in those games because it is so painless… but I really hate managing failed auctions and the fees that rack up with them. I get that this is a flippers game and for “financial pvpers” but it sort of feels miserable for someone who wants nothing to do with that nonsense and just wants to convert “bag bloat” to liquid currency. I mean it is better than it used to be, but it is still pretty far off from what I would consider ideal.

Last night I bounced though after dinging 100. There was just too much to do and no real sense of purpose where I needed to start. Instead, I finished out the evening doing Delve in Path of Exile. I’ve gotten my Righteous Fire Chieftain to the point of comfort down in the mines. I still need levels so that I can socket in a bunch of jewels into my tree but I have managed to gather up three or four that will work beautifully. This is a far cry from how comfy RF Juggernaut felt, but it isn’t half bad. I’ve got two items that I have been trying to get linked… a Lightning Coil that I am going to swap to for this character and a new Lightning Arrow bow that should almost double my damage output. For now, I have been trying to link the bow because it will help me farm Sulphite more efficiently, but in either case, I just need a bajillion fusings to make this happen.

I am still shocked at just how fast the leveling goes in Dragonflight because I started on the 30th and now on the 4th I have effectively gone through two expansions. I just need to sort out how best to gear my character. I might throw myself at the LFG system and try and knock out some dungeons for gear. I am not sure if this is the case… but the community of begging for private loot gear really turned me off during Shadowlands so I am hoping that is less of a thing than it was then.

Reevaluating Azeroth

Good Morning Folks! Hopefully, this morning’s post is going to be what I intended to write yesterday… a general rundown of my thoughts upon returning to World of Warcraft. I’ve been back I think four days now, and in that time I pushed through enough of Shadowlands to hit 60, and then immediately swapped over to Dragonflight. First I have to say that one of the best decisions that I made was accepting the Gear Upgrade that appears to be available for all of my old characters. This did a few things… firstly it made sure I had a vaguely competent item level for the content I was about to be starting. Secondly, it whisked away everything that was not absolutely needed from my inventory… mailed those items to me… and then made sure I had a good set of bags. Now on that last step… there seems to be no logic applied to that process because it removed much larger bags than the ones that it gave me so I had to fish those out of the mailbox.

This tells me that the WoW Team has done some research in what can make a player bounce from the game. For me… it is absolutely the sorry state of my bags when I last played the game. I’ve been gone from these characters for at least three years, and I have no clue at all what half of the stuff that was rotting in my inventory is even used for. Having all of that painlessly shoved into my mailbox… where I have over a hundred days to deal with it before caring… was the right choice. This allowed me to focus on what was good and interesting about the game and not on inventory management… the part of any game that I enjoy the least. Now there are folks who said not to take the gear upgrade, so maybe the shift between Shadowlands and Dragonflight is less valuable but for me… who last played the character I decided to play in Battle for Azeroth, and even then only half-assed it… it was very much a needed step.

Another thing that I have greatly enjoyed upon returning is the Dragonflight talent system. I admit I was a Talen Point system enjoyer, or at least I was prior to the great watering down of talents to a series of three choices… one of which was almost always the correct choice. The new system feels like I can more closely tailor a character to the way that I want to play it. For example, I loved Shield Charge during the short-lived Gladiator stance days of Warlords of Draenor, so I was super happy to see that I could in fact get that back and since I love charging all over the place it essentially gave me a second charge button. I love Paladin Shield Bounce for pulling mobs and Titanic Throw turns my existing Heroic Throw into something very similar where I lob five attacks at mobs in a cluster and can pull entire packs. Both of these are purely optional things and someone who doesn’t quite have the fondness for either can easily pick around them. The best part of all of this is how easy it is to change this up, because anytime I am sitting in a town I can fiddle with my talents to get rid of the things that didn’t work out the way I wanted them and try something new.

The big feature that everyone seems to be in love with is Dragonriding, and on some level, I agree with them. Having access to a flying mount on day one of a new expansion in World of Warcraft is pretty amazing. I love the customizability of the mount itself and being able to swap up the appearance as you find new unlocks out in the world. However the mechanics of Dragonriding itself… I am sorry folks but I am going to be that guy. Dragonriding is just a universally worse version of the Skyscale from Guild Wars 2… specifically, my key complaints are that it takes about three times too long to summon your mount and similarly takes about four times too long to regenerate stamina for doing things with it. I am so used to having almost instant mounts from Guild Wars 2 and the flight pattern of a Skyscale where you take a pause on a cliff for a few seconds and are back to where all of your stamina is regenerated again. Like it is a good system, and completely revolutionary for a game like World of Warcraft… but the Skyscale is still much better.

Another system that I find interesting upon coming back is the Trading Post and the World of Warcraft loyalty currency the Traders Tender aka colloquially “Tendies”. I was surprised at how shockingly easy it was to rack up a decent number of these while doing random stuff in the game. I am sure at some point I will have collected all of the low-hanging fruit but then having the ability to choose what I want to buy from the shop is also pretty great. I can see this as being anxiety-ridden for the “gotta catch em all” players out there… but for me, there are only a handful of items that I am actually interested in. I think a lot of the stuff on the store looks not great… but I am waffling on whether or not I need this giant shield with a scarab on it.

Shocking to no one… the first things that I went for are the mounts. I am by no means a completionist, but mounts are at least something I will enjoy using on all of my characters. I went for the cute copper scarab with pink wings as my first choice. It wiggles its butt while you run, which is adorable. It also gives me a Scarab that works outside of Ahn Qiraj which is sorta cool. I also picked up the other mount which is one of those giant Pterodactyls from BFA. The contents of the store rotates every 30 days, so that seems like enough time to gather up tenders to pick up the item you want. You also have the ability to save a single item that you are trying to save up for that will not rotate when the shop inventory does. All of this seems pretty cool for a loyalty system designed to make players log in and engage with the game every day.

As far as Dragonflight goes… I really enjoy the zones. The first zone while interesting is a bit of a wet blanket, but the second zone is very Nagrand-inspired which wins some big points for me personally. Nagrand in both forms was one of my favorite zones in the game. The third zone seems to be taking notes from Grizzly Hills in Northrend, which again… is a favorite zone of mine. I’ve found myself caring about the Dragonflights way more than I have since Wrath of the Lich King. There was a moment in WoW storytelling that bothered me more than any and really soured my interest in larger themes. We did so much work with the Dragonflights in Wrath, and then interacting with Alextrasza in Twilight Highland and her treating us as someone who has not already saved her bacon more than once… annoyed the fuck out of me and made me stop caring about dragons. Shadowlands restored a bit of that faith when Lady Vashj made specific references to me having killed her… and so far that same attention to detail seems to be carrying forward with Dragonflight.

I think more than anything though I am mechanically enjoying the Warrior. I’ve had the freedom through the talent system to tweak it and create some of my favorite features on the same character. I will always be a sword and board enthusiast and being able to feel powerful as a tanky character is great. I love charging into entire packs and slowly whittling them down with my PBAOE and Cone-based attacks. The other thing that I have found interesting is just how damned fast I am leveling. At this point, I am just about to hit 69, so I will be 70 WELL before I run out of content by a relatively huge margin. WoW has done this for a while but I appreciate that they have begun to focus on clearly outlining what are the main story quests and what are filler fluff… because as I go deeper into “overtime” I can see myself probably dropping some of the side quests to focus on the MSQ entirely. Though to be fair… the quirky side quests are often the best aspects of World of Warcraft.

All in all, I am enjoying myself quite a bit. I’ve not engaged with any other players in any fashion yet… but I figure at some point once I have finished leveling I might actually do that. One minor annoyance that I am dealing with is how limited the tradeskill system is in this game. I hate that harvesting abilities are not universal… which means that leveling trades on the character I happened to choose to play is a pain in the ass. Belghast as a raid leader and as a result I chose professions for reasons other than fun… I was an Engineer because at that time it gave me access to the best tanking helms in the game. I was an Enchanter because it was really handy to have your master looter be someone who could disenchant gear and then dump the materials into the bank. This means I am an engineer with no means of harvesting the materials that I need to level that profession. So that means if I care about professions I am going to have to level one of my other Alliance characters next that can then feed resources to this character. I just greatly prefer the Guild Wars 2 methodology of timed node spawns that everyone can harvest, and the ability for EVERY character to harvest EVERY resource.

I will say though that I find myself in a scenario where I have far fewer complaints about World of Warcraft than I have at any point in the past. Like that might not sound like a resounding positive but it really is. Hell, if you are curious go back and read any of my rants about this damned game from the past… almost all of those issues have been fixed. Faction no longer matters and everything is effectively cross realm… and with the upcoming systems with War Within everything is going to largely be account-based not locked to single characters. Talent points are interesting and character respecs are free and easy to do allowing you to try out some wild ideas and then shift back to something comfy if they don’t work out. Leveling is fast and painless and so far it seems like gearing might be as well… and the story appears to be improving greatly. So my greatest hits list of complaints are being narrowed down to… Tradeskills still suck and Dragonflight doesn’t feel as good as the system it copied. That is an overwhelming net positive for this game in my eyes, and it really is in a much better state than it has been at legitimately any other period in history.

It feels like the devs have listened to complaints and have pivoted really freaking hard to being far more pro-player than they used to be. I am on board. I am not sure how long I will actually play this time, but I am trying very hard to remove the bitterness that I have always had when discussing this game. I like it folks, and the team has done a really good job with it.

Returning to Old Haunts

This is one of the last screenshots that I took from World of Warcraft around the launch of the Shadowlands expansion. It is dated 12/9 of 2020 and represents the last time that I played World of Warcraft in either Retail or Classic varieties. It was shortly after this that I canceled my subscription and started the longest period of time I have ever not played WoW since the launch of the game. While I spent some time helping with the alpha testing of Dragonflight, I’ve been gone from the game for roughly three years and in that time a lot of things have changed. Honestly, I am not sure if it was the Shadowlands expansion, the game as a whole, or my general dissatisfaction with Blizzard as a company. So much came out to tarnish those memories I had built up over the first decade of Warcraft and I was not really certain I could ever get back to the state of joy that I found in the game in those heady days prior to the launch of Cataclysm.

When I tested Dragonflight, I remember saying that the game felt better than it had during Shadowlands and that while I never got to see it start to finish… testing was divided up into little single-zone vertical slices without any music or cutscenes… that I thought it would be a much better World of Warcraft expansion than we had seen since Legion. The thing is… as good as it seemed it just was not enough to get me over the hump of angst that I felt towards Blizzard as a whole. I never would have played Diablo IV had someone not graciously gifted me a copy of that game, and my good friend Ace has still not played the game since its launch. I had said though that if Bobby Kotick finally left the company, I would take that as a sign to lay down my pitchfork and torch and give World of Warcraft a proper revisiting. I had heard enough from friends at the company that the culture did in fact seem to be changing bit by bit… but I wanted the figurehead gone as well before I would feel like maybe things COULD change permanently.

Bobby Kotick’s last day at ActiBlizz was the 29th, and on the 30th I was firing back up World of Warcraft. I took advantage of one of the bundles that purchased The War Within expansion and included a copy of Dragonflight as a result. Since I had been gone so long… I decided to give the game a shot with fresh eyes on my BC/Wrath raid main… the original Belghast, my Human Warrior on Argent Dawn US. This is still the character that I identify with the most in Warcraft and it seemed like the best option for a comeback. I’ve grown to love The Horde, but it never felt as true for me personally as playing the Alliance did. I love my Horde family however, and now that factions really do not matter in the least I figured it didn’t really matter which side of this server I played on… since Argent Dawn and Scryers are connected and all of my Alliance characters are on AD and all of my horde on Scryers.

House Stalwart is a guild in World of Warcraft that I founded with some friends on November 23rd, 2004. I will always regret the fact that our guild charter no longer says that date because I got hacked in the middle of Wrath of the Lich King and said hacker nuked the guild before transferring me off the server. I still think it was a personal attack, to be honest, but I have no clue who it might have been. While my time in Stalwart represented some of the best times I had in this game or in gaming in general… I also suffered quite possibly from the worst depression I have ever had while trying to lead this guild. I feel like I have been running away from it for years, scared to touch it for fear that it brought me back down to those deeply negative lows. While suffering… I made decisions that I am not proud of and struggled with the need for the guild to transform and change without me. The thing is… this group of folks never forgot who I was and even have this dumb note calling me out as “The Real GM”.

I need to forgive myself and realize that my downfall was not caused by the guild or any of the people in it… and that I have grown a lot since that time. I am hoping coming back and commiserating with the same folks will help to close those wounds a bit and maybe let them scab over. I apologize to Elnore, Rylacus, and Kylana for not always supporting them fully… and in the case of Elnore outright attacking her for the decisions she felt needed to be made. I should have fully supported your decisions when I stepped down, and been less of a flake when I picked up the mantle again during Pandaria. So similarly I apologize to Rylacus for unceremoniously dumping this mess in his lap. I apologize to Kylana for never really supporting him fully or telling him how much I appreciate the way he just ran with the guild and tried his best to keep the same sort of spirit. I also apologize to House Stalwart as a whole for never really being there for them even though they have offered me nothing but support through all of the bullshit phases that I have gone through over the years. They’ve always welcomed me back… even though there are I am certain a lot of people now who have zero clue who the hell I even am. I was always so careful to keep one foot out the door so I could run away again… and that was not cool.

This blog post has somewhat developed a life of its own. This happens sometimes when I start writing and is if nothing else proof that I really don’t script these ahead of time. I was going to talk about my adventures and instead, I have devoted this post to dealing with the anxiety and depression of the past. Talking about why I am enjoying Dragonflight and why I still really did not enjoy Shadowlands is a topic for another day. I hope you all had a great holiday break if you managed to get one. Today is my first day back so I need to wrap this up and actually start with some proper work. To any Stalwart folks that might be reading this… thanks for being chill and not overwhelming me as I start trying to figure out how the hell this game works. Huge thanks to Errya and Bleddwen for trying to welcome me back and letting me know that I was more than welcome to join in the activities. I appreciate you both greatly, but I am not quite there yet to where I can even think about doing any sort of activities, I might start joining yall on voice every now and then. I also appreciate Kylana for warning folks that I might be showing up once the deed was done, because that seems to have halted a lot of the “whoa, what the heck” moments.

If you’ve made it this far in the post thanks for reading, and thanks for always being here for me as well no matter what level of nonsense I am getting up to. If you are reading this and from Facepull my Horde home… I still love you all and I am certain my next character with be a Hordie. I just needed to stretch my legs this time on the original Belghast.

BlizzCon 2023 Thoughts

Good Morning Folks! I have to be honest… I had every intention of writing a post on BlizzCon this past Friday as the event was going on but that never quite came to fruition. For those who do not follow such things, this past Friday and Saturday was the first in-person BlizzCon since 2019. I know a ton of friends who were very happy about the return of the event and made plans to travel to Anaheim for it. I’ve always wanted to go, but tend to have a fairly fraught relationship with Blizzard games in general. I feel like it is probably a good idea to get this out of the way, but I have not actively played World of Warcraft since December 2020, though I have followed from afar and did some alpha testing for the latest expansion Dragonflight. I’ve grown apart from the fandom and Diablo was really the last vestige that I clung to.

If you are so inclined, you can watch the full uncut presentation for Blizzcon 2023 here.

All of that said… I am shocked to say that I thought this year’s BlizzCon was almost universally positive. I found it extremely interesting that within 10 minutes of the event starting, we had a speech from Microsoft’s Phil Spencer. He said all of the right things, but I find myself wanting to believe them. As someone who has been a Windows programmer for most of my career… I have a fraught relationship with Microsoft as a whole. That said… I can’t see that Microsoft has done wrong by any of the companies they have acquired. They have most definitely been a steadying force for Mojang and Minecraft. The one strike that I could throw against them was Redfall, but who knows precisely how that mess unfolded because it was a game so far out of the comfort zone of that studio. As compared to the reign of Bobby Kotick… I have to imagine that Microsoft will be a positive force for Blizzard as a whole.

Another thing that I have to admit is that there is a lot of presentation that I just did not care about at all. Overwatch is a setting that seems interesting, but I am not going to engage unless they shift gears and turn it into a looter shooter. Hearthstone is something that I did care about for a while… but now that Magic that Gathering Arena exists and is relatively enjoyable… I have a good representation of the game I actually care about and don’t really need the Blizzard clone. Rumble is outside of my wheelhouse especially now that my aging phone seems to have trouble running any modern games that are not the most simplistic of 2D graphics. So essentially for me… BlizzCon was a show about World of Warcraft and Diablo, both of which got some interesting announcements.

Based on the schedules that came out ahead of the show, I fully expected that we would not get a Diablo IV announcement this year. I am pleasantly surprised that we did and it is going to be set in the area of the world from Diablo 2 Act 3 the Torajon Jungles. This should in theory be southwest of Kehjistan in the current Diablo IV areas. They were pretty limited on their information but did drop that we are going to be seeing a new class that has not existed in the Diablo franchise before. Data mining leaks ahead of the show indicated that this was some sort of nature-based class. More important than all of this however is that they released some information about more endgame content going into Diablo IV starting this week and continuing into Season 3 in January. There is also going to be a winter holiday event which might be interesting for a bit. Unfortunately, the new endgame content starting this week is going to be gated behind the season’s journey, which means it is really only for folks who are languishing at level 100 and doesn’t do much to solve the problem of running out of an interesting reason to grind further after about level 80.

In the realm of “why does this exist” we get to World of Warcraft and more specifically “Classic WoW”. Apparently, the classic servers are updating to Cataclysm… which seems really weird to me given that the sweeping changes to the old world that came with Cataclysm were the impetus for many of the unofficial emulator servers that eventually coalesced into the official “Classic” product. Does anyone actually want this? I am hoping that they maintain some Wrath servers for the folks who did not want to move forward into Cataclysm. Maybe there is someone out there who missed out on the first decade of World of Warcraft and is now interested in reliving it at a rapidly increased pace. It is however spawning a number of memes around this having to happen so that they could launch World of Warcraft Classic Classic. I have specific negative feelings towards Cataclysm as this is when I first broke from the game as a whole.

The other classic project however seemed really interesting. “Season of Discovery” is sort of a re-imagining of World of Warcraft with unique talent trees and class changes designed to make playing it wildly different. They specifically name-dropped Tanking Warlocks and Mage Healers as mutations available during this game mode. The irony here is that we absolutely had a Warlock Tank in Ahn’qiraj, and I myself tanked as a PVP geared Boomkin…. so this might be something that interests me in the long run. One of my favorite eras of World of Warcraft is Gladiator Stance and being able to dps with a sword and shield as a Warrior. If they bring this back… then they probably have me at least for a bit.

The big news however was the announcement of a change in practice towards expansions in World of Warcraft and while they did not elaborate on this… a shorter time frame between them. Not only did they announce The War Within which comes out next year, but also Midnight and The Last Titan as a trilogy of expansions with shared themes. We’ve learned that they always worked on multiple expansions at once from the fallout of Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands… but I do feel like this would probably improve the narrative experiences of the Warcraft universe. Final Fantasy XIV was only as good as it was because it was a cohesive narrative that evolved over a decade rather than what felt like a serialized villain of the week type gameplay that we have had in Warcraft. My hope is however that they can be nimble with the mechanical side of the game because having the narrative be something that is building over time is good… you need to be able to adjust to changes on the ground when the player base is not reacting well to something like the “borrowed power” systems.

I think this is going to be the World of Warcraft expansion that wins me back. Almost everything about it seems to specifically cater to my interests. I love underground areas and this seems to be an entire expansion where we are diving deeper below the surface. I am very much dwarven-influenced, and I am all about tunneling through the earth to find interesting things. When I plan Minecraft I almost always start by digging a giant shaft to bedrock and see what I find along that path. I am also super interested in the Warband system as I have always wanted to be able to share more benefits from my Alts, given that I tend to be an Altaholic by nature. Almost everything that they announced seemed universally good and I am super interested in the Delve system which seems to be a dungeon-like experience that scales between 1 and 5 players.

I think more than anything… there was just a different energy in the air for this show. Gone was the “we know better ” attitude that surrounded a lot of the discussions from past BlizzCons and it was replaced by what seemed like a genuine unbridled excitement over what they were showing off. The vibe was just better than it has been in probably a decade or maybe even longer. Blizzard felt like a different company, and while we had the return of Metzen… he didn’t necessarily overshadow the other folks who were presenting things to the players. I want to see Blizzard thrive under Microsoft not in small part because I still know more than a handful of folks who work there. I want to play these games without having a bad taste in my mouth and feel like I am betraying my core principles.

This is the first time in a very long time that I have had hope for World of Warcraft as a franchise, and Blizzard as a company. I watched Diablo IV evolve from a complete shit show at launch to being a rather enjoyable if not somewhat temporary game with Season 2. Blizzard seems to be saying the right things and I just hope that they can back up those words with actions over the next few years. In the new year, I am probably even going to poke my head into the Dragonflight expansion and see what it has to offer. This is the best I have felt coming out of BlizzCon weekend in a very long time. Good job all… now keep that momentum going into the next few major launches.