Good Morning Folks! Happy Midnight Official Release Day! I have been playing Midnight since Thursday, when the head start began, because I am a sucker and am willing to pay the premium to get access to things early. There are folks out there with way more self-control than I have… and as a result, I hope you all enjoy your journey into Midnight. This morning’s blog post is going to talk about some of the themes in Midnight, so if you want to go into the game completely unspoiled, this morning be something that you want to come back to later. I feel like it is also important to state that I have been out of the World of Warcraft game for a while now. I very briefly played through the Dragonflight campaign at release and then attempted to come back and play a bit for War Within, and crashed out on the second zone because I was overloaded by the sheer number of quests. So I have been gone from seriously attempting to play World of Warcraft since the Shadowlands expansion in 2020.
The last time I played the game seriously was during Pandaria Remix in 2024, and I am actually maining the character that I played during that event, which is a Dark Iron Dwarf Warrior named Belgraven. There has been a lot of adjusting to the sweeping changes in the game that have happened since I last played, and Remix doesn’t fully count since it was its own thing. First up, I think the User Interface changes are brilliant, and I have managed to play the game without reinstalling any sort of hotbar or nameplate addons. The only thing that I wish I had was some equivalent of the threat bar that FFXIV has where you can see how much threat you are holding on all of the targets that you currently have threat on. This would be amazing, but the base UI seems perfectly cromulent for the role of a tank. I have no clue how good it is for healing, but seemingly it works just fine for DPS, given that after the campaign, I have swapped over to Arms Warrior. I’ve also been using the one button assist quite a bit because I have wanted to completely shut off my brain while playing World of Warcraft. If I do anything serious, I will set my hotbars up properly and care about rotations again.
As far as the campaign goes, I think Midnight is pretty freaking great. It is a massive step up in World of Warcraft storytelling, even over The War Within… which was itself a massive step up over Dragonflight. While I am not feeling the feels that I did during Final Fantasy XIV, they are trying to tackle far more nuanced topics in this expansion than we usually get. The Amani zone and the redemption arc featured within it was phenomenal, and it might go down as one of my favorite World of Warcraft zones, period, from any expansion. Zul’Aman will always have a special place in my heart, and I completely forgot that it was associated with the Silvermoon area… so this was a massively pleasant surprise. Another zone that I did not expect to really love was the rambling mess that featured around Silvermoon, which takes you across all of the Plaguelands as you deal with the sins of the past. It tells a way more mature story about the horrors of war and what it brings people to do than I expected from Warcraft. Blizzard is known for big bombastic hero tales… and significantly less so for dealing with sensitive topics, but I applaud them for trying something new and interesting.
This game, however, continues my tradition of hating the “druid” zone. I am not the biggest fan of Harandar or the Navi… I mean Haranir. I get what they are going for with this zone and this race, and I might actually play one at some point because they have some really interesting druid transformation forms, but this is so not my jam. Harandar, in general, also suffers from the “Heart of Thorns” problem, where the zone uses aggressive verticality that makes waypoints mostly useless unless you have the layout memorized and know without a doubt what vertical tier of the zone the thing you are looking for is located on. I will always love the Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns expansion for the sweeping meta events that it introduced, but I fucking hate traversing these zones… and Harandar is that but for World of Warcraft. It also makes me feel like I need to sneeze the entire damned time because I can always feel the pollen in the air. There are going to be tree huggers out there that love this zone and good for them… but for someone whose favorite zone is Blackrock Depths… this is very much not my jam.
I dinged level 90 on Sunday morning and then wrapped up the campaign about an hour after that. This feels like a pretty good pace for leveling through the content, but I was left in the dust by Kylana and Erixi, who dinged, I believe, sometime on Friday. The biggest frustration that I have with the leveling experience is that you are still going to need about two zones worth of side quests to hit the max level. Go into the leveling process with that in mind and choose which zones you want to grind out completely in order to accomplish this. I personally chose Voidstorm and the Amani zone, and doing all of the quests in one and 90% of the quests in the other, combined with the Main Story quest, was enough to get me there. I did hit a wall at level 95, where I needed to be 96 in order to open up the last zone of the game, so you are better off just pushing through some side quests that are convenient as you are doing the MSQ. I wish the MSQ alone gave you enough experience, but then again, this is a problem that FFXIV has not solved either.
I’ve geared out Belgraven mostly through world quests, which are way less plentiful than when I was doing this in Shadowlands. That has opened up a lot more time to start leveling an alt, and I decided to push up Belgrace, my Horde side Paladin that was my main during Shadowlands. I have two guild families, House Stalwart on the Alliance side and Facepull on the Horde side, and I feel like it is only proper that I alternate back and forth between the two. I was apparently already in Dragonflight when I last played the character, and in theory, I should be able to hit level 80 while doing the campaign over there. I might actually do War Within as well because I would like to actually see the main story quest for that expansion without a multi-year lag between the first parts and then wrapping up rapidly right before Midnight. I’ve swapped up to Retribution because it feels like leveling as a tank is no longer as advantageous as it once was.
One thing that I had forgotten, though, is how much I enjoyed certain aspects of the Dragonflight storyline. While I do not give a shit about the Dragonflights in general… I really enjoyed a lot of the quests involving the races of the Dragon Isles that weave around the larger draconic narrative. I will never not love a Tuskarr storyline, and I really enjoy the tales of the Centaur tribes as well. Probably the worst zone is actually The Waking Shores, and that’s largely because you are so deeply involved in Dragon bullshit, with no real side narrative of the people you are impacting along the way. I feel like the Dragonflight storyline peaked in Northrend, and it has been downhill ever since. That is not to say that I did not enjoy this expansion, because clearly, there are some well-designed zones, and so much of it has an Outland and Northrend revisited vibe to it. The Ohn’ahran Plains is absolutely a rethinking of Nagrand, and large swaths of The Azure Span feel like Grizzly Hills, all of which are huge positives for the expansion in general.
As much credit as I give them for the updated UI, I am back to my old ways of installing a bunch of addons and using WoWUP to keep them patched, specifically the Curse Forge branch. Most of these are just quality of life improvements but the ones that I probably would not want to be without are Better Bags, which gives me similar functionality of having virtual bags sorted by item type, and Waypoint UI, which gives you a giant glowing beacon where the next step in your quest chain leads you to. The latter is especially handy when dealing with the bullshit verticality of Harandar. I am also a big fan of Dialog UI, which gives you a much more readable quest interface that also creates keybinds for all of the dialog options so you do not have to click the screen. Now that I am in the “endgame” and doing World Quests and such I started leaning on Handynotes and RareScanner again, which just are significant quality of life improvements when looking for rares and lootables in the zones. So I feel like all of the addons I am using now are window dressing on what is a completely functional base game, and I could play without them… but simply do not want to.
Are you just starting Midnight today? What are you most excited about for this expansion? Have you played through the expansion already? What did you enjoy the most? Drop me a line below.
The post Midnight Was Pretty Great appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
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.
The post Dragonflight Done-ish appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
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.
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