World Of Warcraft Archives - Page 3 of 132

Dragonflight Launch Schedule

October 27, 2022 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! I tweet-threaded some thoughts yesterday that I thought I would expand into a proper blog post. As we slide into the launch of the Dragonflight World of Warcraft expansion, I have to admit that I have some complicated thoughts about it. I immensely enjoyed my time spent in both Alpha and Beta testing. More specifically I thought the directed testing that took place prior to the start of Beta was extremely valuable because it set a clear focus for every play session. With those constraints, I set my focus on completing a single zone at a time and each week finished the task on at least one character. As a result at this point, I have largely seen all of the leveling content and enjoyed most of it.

Unfortunately without that direction and drive… when the game effectively turned over control to me, I struggled to find traction. Previously I was playing with a clear mission of testing the content and now that I was left to my own devices, I really didn’t have much forward momentum. I think on some level I just don’t find the World of Warcraft style of gameplay nearly as engaging as I once did. Over the last few years, my personal preferences have shifted more towards action combat and away from more strictly hotbar combat. I think this is also why my whole “level everything to 80” burnt me to a crisp in Final Fantasy XIV and why after finishing the main story there I have not really returned other than the stalk housing properties.

I think this is more a tale of shifts in my own tastes and less a tale of expansion quality. What I was able to experience and play through, makes me feel deeply like Dragonflight is going to go down as one of the better World of Warcraft expansions. I don’t think it will rank up there quite as high as say Legion, which now sits at the pinnacle for me, but I do think it is going to be better than a Shadowlands or Battle for Azeroth. The only thing that still concerns me is that the zones don’t feel anywhere near as intricate. Part of what I liked so much about Legion is that it took everything that Warlords of Draenor attempted and expanded upon them. I like zone events, treasures, and minibosses that all reward good stuff. Maybe there has been a micro objective pass that I have not fully experienced in-game, but last week when I was playing the world still felt very spartan.

I think there are a lot of interesting things happening with the expansion. While everything goes really hard on the whole Dragon thing, and you pretty much have to like Dragons to enjoy that deeply… there are enough fringe world-building things going on that make me wonder about the direction the entire game is going. I’ve never particularly cared about the Dragon Flights, and my interest in them cratered with Cataclysm, and how Alexstraza did not remember us from Wyrmrest temple when we were questing for her in Twilight Highlands. I feel like there are a lot of plot threads once thought resolved… are about to become unresolved again. What World of Warcraft has lacked is a clear story that carries forward from expansion to expansion and I hope this might be the beginning of that.

Mechanically I think the new talent trees are excellent. While they did not give me back my previous gladiator stance, left enough on the table for me to build a really fun protection warrior. I enjoyed Blood Deathknight and Protection Paladin as well, so it was going to be one of those expansions where I had trouble deciding upon a main. I probably would have landed back on the Warrior since it has such a special place in my heart. The bigger challenge would have been to determine if I was going to play the OG Belghast which is a Human, or the more modern Belghast which is an Orc. While I like the general community Horde side quite a bit better, I have to say I will probably always have strong Alliance leanings.

This time around there is this interesting staggered launch, where as of this past Tuesday the pre-patch landed featuring the new talent trees and a precursor questline. On the 15th, in a few weeks the new race/class will be playable. Then the 28th the official launch day happens with the gates opening on the Waking Shores. This all makes me realize that I will not be playing Dragonflight at launch, in spite of largely enjoying myself in testing. I know that with a World of Warcraft expansion there will be a certain measure of FOMO associated with it. My entire social timeline will likely erupt in nothing but Warcraft talk for a few weeks, and honestly, I look forward to seeing everyone geeking out on the game. I also know that it is highly unlikely that I will be joining them.

Even if we push past my complicated feelings about Blizzard, I am just not sure this is the game I want to be playing right now. I have a lot more games that I would rather be devoting my time towards, given that it is very unlikely that I would want to be raiding anyways. I have a long list of things that I would like to accomplish in Guild Wars 2, and I would like to give Final Fantasy XIV a chance to enspell once again with the post-Endwalker story. I am just not really connected to the World and story of Warcraft anymore, and while I have guild families that would accept me back… I also don’t really feel that longing to join them right now. I do know enough people who are wrapped up in the game though that I truly hope this is the good expansion that I think it is going to be for them.

In the short term, I am still deeply engaged with my New World reroll. It features that action-style combat that I seem to be favoring right now, and last night I dinged 60 and started working on gearing. I also ran through a dungeon with the guild which was extremely fun, and I am hoping as folks level we can do some of the interesting outdoor content that is focused on a single team. I think on some level I need to reach a place where it is okay for me to wave from the sidelines as the float goes by. There is a version of me that would absolutely be trying to claw my way up onto the float to keep the excitement rolling… but instead, it is probably way more healthy to set my own interests and my own pace.

So for now as we approach the Dragonflight launch, I will be waving at you all from the sidelines.

Regularly Playing: October 2022 Edition

October 26, 2022 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. It was this morning that I had the sudden realization that I seem to have let one of my long-term reoccurring segments just completely die. For years I have done this thing where I update my blog sidebar with the games that I am regularly playing, and then create a semi-monthly post talking about where I am with each game and the games that are cycling out of the mix. However, the last one of these that I have done was from March of 2021. Some pretty significant things took place last year that derailed a lot of events in my life, but it would be nice to get back in some sort of regular cadence with these posts as there are often games that I am playing but not really actively talking about.

Generally speaking, one of these posts is broken down into subsections:

To Those Remaining – The games that I am still actively playing or at least expect to be playing within the month.
To The New and Returning – The games that I am either dusting off and revisiting or are brand new experiences that I am enjoying.
To Those Departing – The games that I am finally removing from the list for one reason or another.
Ships Passing in the Night – Games that I don’t expect to regularly play but I spent some time with over the month and enjoyed enough to talk about.

Unfortunately given the length of time that has passed I am not sure if any of these really make sense for this “catch-up” post. Instead this time I am just going to talk about the games that I am poking a stick at periodically.

While waiting on the New World patch drop, I found myself in a bit of a doldrum where nothing much sounded good. When this hits, I tend to dive into some sort of open-world game like Fallout New Vegas, Skyrim, or Witcher 3… and more recently Cyberpunk has been in that “nothing else sounds good” rotation. Generally speaking, I tend to play for a few nights and then nothing much comes of it, but this time around I am precariously close to a second complete playthrough. I am also finding a ton of content that I missed the first time around, and I think I am way more attached to femme Nomad V than I was to my original male Corpo V. Judy is without a doubt the best romance option in the game and it ends up being super sweet.

I got a bit of a late start on Season 27, and because most of the conquests are sorta butts this time around… I have yet to finish things up. Essentially I need 3 Conquests to get Set Dungeon Mastery. I need to do this at some point but other things have just been drawing my attention. It is a bit harder than in past seasons because I am mostly soloing everything and don’t have my partner in crime Ace along with me. I need to buckle down and finish things off, but ultimately what caused me to fade for a bit was the severe performance issues that I was having. Hopefully those have passed now.

Another game that I have been poking around for a while now is Fallout 76. I am not playing it super often, but at least once a week I dive down into the world of irradiated West Virginia. Right now the AggroChat folks seem to be going through a bit of a renaissance launched by Thalen’s discovery of the game. I need to figure out a time I can join in, but I am way behind in levels due to a reroll recently. I spent some time fucking around in a custom world and it seemed as though I was gaining levels… but said levels did not carry over to the main game.

If you have been reading my blog lately you will know that I am back in New World and created a brand new character over on Themiscyra to experience the game from level one again. The new player experience is so much better and the leveling and balance are much better than it was at the original launch. I am closing in on level 60 without really trying terribly hard, and my goal is to effectively complete all of the quests in the game. For the moment I am filling all of the various stashes that I have access to with materials and I hope to grind up Armoring and Weaponsmithing to 200 so I will have a good start at the game. At some point, I will need to find the various legendary crafting materials that unlock the 600 item-level weapons and armor, but I have plenty of time.

I’ve wound down the experience of playing Path of Exile Lake of Kalandra league, and I have to say it was pretty frustrating overall. I feel like I chose a bad league to go all in on. I did manage to knock out a number of the achievements and completely unlocked my altas, so I accomplished the things I had set out the do. I am not sure if I am going to be quite so amped to dive into whatever the 1.20 league ends up being, however. I am just not sure if Chris Wilson’s vision for the game fits the sort of experience I actually want to have. I am still interested to see what mobile Path of Exile ends up being like and the 2.0 experience… but my hopes are being tempered greatly by the frustration we experienced with this past league.

I have to admit I am not playing a ton of this yet, but slowly easing into it. I would greatly prefer that it supported a controller and whenever that patch lands, I have a feeling that it will become my primary phone game. The touchscreen controls are not amazing, though probably better than most mobile games. The game seems way less greedy with its mtx or at least the things that you can buy with real-world cash don’t seem to matter that much yet. I need to try some of the other classes but so far I am digging the “not-barbarian” character. I am not playing much of the game on PC mostly because if I am sitting at my PC… I have other games I would rather be playing.

I think I am mostly winding down Tower of Fantasy. While I do enjoy it much more than I did Genshin Impact, I find myself in the old familiar trap of only logging in to collect my freebies and then logging right back out. I am not sure why the experience went flat for me, but I just stopped wanting to play it quite as much. I think maybe around the time I was winding this down is when the Brimstone Sands patch landed on the PTR and re-ignited my love of New World. As one star rises another sets, and as a result, Tower of Fantasy was on the losing end of that equation.

World of Warcraft – Dragonflight Alpha/Beta – PC

I played a ton of this game when I first got into the testing. I really liked the more directed testing phases of giving us a new zone to explore each week. I have to admit I ate that up and completed the quests in each of the new areas. Unfortunately when things opened up more and I was given access to play the entire experience from start to finish… I deflated a bit. I think the biggest frustration is that it seemed every single time I logged in, I had to reset my talent points and the profiles that I saved were getting wiped. There were several times I logged in… stared at the wall of talent points and noped out of choosing them and setting back up my bars again.

As far as Dragonflight itself… the pre-patch has landed and I still do not have a World of Warcraft subscription or own the expansion. While I had a lot of fun playing the test phases, I am not sure if it was enough to really draw me back into the game. I have to be honest… World of Warcraft feels like a really old game at this point. A lot of what I have been focused on of late is more action-oriented games, and Hotbar combat just feels weird. Like I never thought I would get to that point but here we are. I still don’t feel amazing giving Blizzard money either… so I guess time will tell if I get caught up in the expansion launch zeitgeist or not.

Then there are games that are bound by NDA that I can’t talk about other than in the vaguest of terms. One I have access to and is eating up a bit of my time, and another I have created an account but have not received the game client. I am torn on whether or not I like NDAs in general because, on one hand, it keeps the players from getting just completely burnt out and bored with listening to news about the game before launch. On the other hand as a content creator, it sucks having a void that you are afraid to talk about. I get to the point where I am almost afraid to cover even public news of a game for fear that maybe just maybe something that ISN’T public knowledge will slip out.

Titanic Throw Is Amazing

August 18, 2022 by Belghast

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.

Exploring Ohn’ahran Plains

August 10, 2022 by Belghast

It is quickly becoming a regular thing for me to log into Dragonflight Alpha on Tuesday nights and play the brand new build. You can read the full patch notes here, but this week’s test focuses on the Dracthyr Starter zone and Ohn’ahran Plains. Since I have already played my way through the Dracthyr “all casters all the time” zone twice now… It was onwards to Ohn’ahran Plains for me! Unfortunately, I could not take either of my already level 62 characters into the zone and instead had to create a brand new character and then let the NPC level me and transport me to the appropriate zone. Since I played through as a human I figured I would rock out on my normal Orc Femme Horde Warrior.

The zone itself is very Nagrand adjacent with flourishes of the Draenor version of Shadowmoon Valley. Wild and gorgeous and has some really interesting elements thrown through it. I got to experience the ducks for the first time, and thankfully the quest did not involve me killing them… but instead yanking tail feathers out of them which causes them to run away. This zone also has some of the coolest-looking bears that I think every hunter will probably rush out to go tame as soon as possible.

The best feature however is the phenomenal work that has been done with the zone’s skybox. This is legitimately one of the most painterly zones I have played through since maybe Grizzly Hills? There is nothing about the zone that reminds me of Northrend however and it is basically a blending of some of the better elements from Draenor. Again everything feels a little spartan for my tastes, however, I am greatly missing all of the micro objectives that we had in Legion. I am hoping that we are just seeing an early version of the zone that has yet to be populated with those things. I would really hate to have this expansion be absent of all of the interesting world objectives from the last several expansions. For me, at least those greatly improved the exploration aspect of those zones because I was constantly on the lookout for things to interact with. Once again the named gold and silver elites seem not to have drop tables yet, which I hope is remedied before launch.

We got yet another update to the UI, and while there are some massive LUA errors happening at the moment that require the use of “/console scriptErrors 0” to hide, it seems to be coming along nicely. This time around we were able to move our minimap. I hope that over time each of the different UI elements maybe gets a few more options, like the ability to detach the world buffs window from the map and move it around freely. the only negative is that the UI changes were different enough this time that it wiped my saved UI preset from before. It took me a few minutes to juggle things around back into the orientation I prefer. Legitimately we are on the trail of me not needing to run addons anymore. Again it could use a few more features… but it is getting there and I give massive credit to the team working on this.

The central story of the zone centers around the Centaur packs, but unlike Desolace… they actually seem to be genuinely good people. Like in the previous “friendly Centaurs” scenario… they only really liked us because we were actively killing their enemies. The version we get in Dragonflight is much more akin to the story of the various Highmountain Tauren Tribes from Legion. I did not get anywhere near finished with the story, but so far I am enjoying it greatly. Kudos to the folks who worked on the new models because they are pretty phenomenal. I realize it would be way too much to ask to get them as a playable race… but I am going to ask it anyway. They really are extremely cool, and there is even some subtle variation in the way each of the clans looks.

I’ve said it before… but there is potential greatness in Dragonflight. So far I’ve adventures in four zones, and while they are all in a rough state… the only one that I did not really enjoy was the Dracthyr starter area. The other three I would put up against some of the better World of Warcraft zones from history. It is going to be interesting to see how relevant these zones remain once you reach the new level cap. There is not a single one that I would mind spending more time in, and the design of each feels sufficiently unique while at the same time retaining a sort of general visual language for the Dragon Isles as a whole.

I feel like I am beating a dead horse at this point… but my only concern right now is the fact that we have less than four months left in 2022. If this is going to meet a release date in December of this year, then it will need a lot more work. I am concerned that the zones that feel relatively bare-bones currently… will remain feeling that way at launch. The look, feel, and quest structure is great… but it is missing the little details that made Legion questing feel so freaking good. I hope that given time these details can be added to really flesh things out. If they can’t… then I legitimately hope this release date gets bounced into 2023 because it might need it. I hate to think about the level of crunch that would be required to reasonably get this out the door before the end of the year.