Titanic Throw Is Amazing

Good Morning Friends! Yesterday we got a new Alpha patch for World of Warcraft Dragonflight and the single most exciting thing about it… is the line about all of the zones being open for testing. Up until this point, we have been focused on a single zone at a time per week, and I am hoping that this is signaling a bit of stability in our ability to progress through the zones. It had been a few weeks since I had last stepped foot in the Waking Shores, but already a lot of elements are starting to feel a bit more polished. I noticed that a number of the formerly silent NPCs have suddenly gained vocal dialog. It is still exceedingly eerie for me personally given that I love in-game music and the zones currently have none. I might have to throw together a World of Warcraft music playlist to use for leveling and testing the content.

I did not make it terribly far into testing last night because I was suffering from a pretty debilitating bug. Essentially my Talents were not saving, and that meant if I needed to log out or got disconnected… my hotbars were wiped back to the default mostly empty state and I had to reconfigure my talents. The positive is that I have become real freaking sure of my path through the tree… but the negative is that it felt like I spent most of my evening reconfiguring things. Ultimately I reported the issue, logged out, and then hoped that it would be fixed quickly. As of this morning, I have successfully reset my talent points, logged out, and logged back in with them still set. Progress! I mean this is the sort of thing that you have to take into account when alpha testing any product, but also there comes a time when you should just walk away for a bit.

I have really focused on playing the Warrior as there are a bunch of fun interactions happening. We had a pretty big shuffle of things on the talent tree between the last patch and this most recent one. If you want to check out the full list of changes… then here are the patch notes. I would simply copy/paste them but they are rather significant. Basically, I love the direction that the Protection Warrior is moving in and I just hope that it doesn’t shift too much before launch. Right now it feels good for questing and seems like it would feel great for dungeons… though I have yet to step foot into any of those. I need to get over my grouping mental block and queue up for some of the new dungeons and see how that feels. I also need to work on my keybinds a bit in order to work rend in maybe as a shift modifier to thunderclap since I mostly only care about rend if I am going to spread it. If you want to look at everything I am currently choosing then here is a link to the WoWHead Talent builder for Alpha.

Mostly it just feels really good to run around as a prot warrior and I can shift into “world tank” mode where I charge packs and tank stuff for other people. The real winner though is Titanic Throw, which is a direct replacement for Heroic Throw. The two class-defining features of a Paladin for me personally are the Captain America shield throw and the Steed Charge. Titanic Throw is essentially a shield throw for warriors, with the difference being instead of bouncing between targets… you just sort of yeet up to five throwing axes at different targets within range of each other. This feels so damned good to use in practice and while the animation currently looks a little goofy… I find I am using it way more often to pull my next pack because with an improved heroic throw I can use it to apply deep wounds to my targets. This is going to be amazing in dungeons because it creates an initial threat lead on ranged targets.

I am in this weird position that I have not been in a very long time. Firstly I am loving the state of Warriors and pending nothing changes in the way that they feel… I will absolutely be “maining” one if I return for Dragonflight. Secondly, I find myself really excited about the prospects of this expansion. I am not sure if you can fully understand what a difference that is, because generally speaking, I have played WoW Expansions because that is just the thing I have always done. I think the last expansion that I was genuinely excited to play was Wrath of the Lich King. A lot of why that expansion felt so good to me is that there were some mechanical changes in the way that Warriors worked that I really enjoyed. Similarly, I am loving the class design so far for the Protection Warrior, and I guess I need to spend some time checking out Arms and Fury to see what I think of those as well. I’ve never really liked Arms, to be honest… but Fury has been my jam in the past and I should at least give it a test run.

I am very interested to see if I maintain this level of enjoyment and excitement as testing continues. I still have complaints honestly, but the core enjoyment of being a warrior is overriding them. Right now the world design feels extremely sparse, and I am hoping that over time this will be fleshed out. I am greatly missing all of the doodads and micro objectives in the zones like treasure chests and mini bosses. The few silver elites that do exist, don’t seem to drop anything meaningful at all. It is in part because of this that I am hoping we just have yet to get a pass populating these objects. Similarly, I’ve stumbled across a few nodes, but trade skills in general seem to largely be disabled. I tried to train mining last night and got a “to be determined” prompt on the dialog. So clearly there is a lot of work that needs to happen before this is ready for launch.

However like I said before I am already seeing signs of progress and zones I have leveled through before are starting to tighten up a bit. My caveat will still be that it seems like the game has a lot of work before it can meet a reported December release date. I worry for the team and the amount of crunch that will be required to meet that, and I hope that honestly, the date moves to next year. However like I have said before, I have a lot of hope for Dragonflight and what it will do for the future of World of Warcraft as a franchise.