World of Warcraft

Yesterday I really did not have any firm plans for my evening, so when I saw that there was a new Alpha update for Dragonflight I thought I would spend my night testing that. With this update brought the Warrior talent trees, which shifted my focus to spending the evening on a Warrior trying out the current state of protection. At this point I have played through the Dracthyr starter area twice and then Waking Shores twice: Once as a Blood Deathknight and once as a Protection Paladin. As I have said before the game is in a very rough alpha state but I have enjoyed my experiences so far. With the opening of Thaldraszus I also got to spend some time in Valdrakken, the new hub city of the expansion. The above screenshot is from the central area of the city staring up at the seat of the aspects. As far as cities go, this one feels like a blending of the Shrines from Pandaria and the Guardian Faction Capitol from Rift in that you have a central tower with a bunch of other buildings spread around it forming a larger campus. As far as scale goes think of something about the area of Zuldazar, but this time Dragon Flying helps you zip around various destinations rather quickly. The central tower is accessed through a portal/lift and then can be used as a launchpad to easily use dragon flying to get out to the other zones. So far it seems like a really great hub city, with more than enough room to keep it from feeling terribly cramped as players flood into it.

As far as Warriors go, each expansion seems to be a gamble. There are some times they feel great and other times they feel less so as they sort of vacillating between feeling like a god and feeling like a puny mortal. Right now Protection Warriors feel more on the god-tier spectrum and I had more than enough interesting choices to be made while building out my character. Sadly Gladiator Stance is not bad and my daydreams of returning to being a sword and board dps character have flown out the window. I do however seem to have some of the trappings of that era at least in the form of Shield Charge. Reportedly some of the abilities are currently not replacing other abilities, so I am wondering what the final form will end up feeling like. Right now it feels like I need way more Hotbars than I currently have easy keybind access to. Essentially I had to spend quite a bit of time setting up macros to put shield charge and charge on the same button or to have a modifier swap between thunderclap and shockwave. That is maybe not optimal because I firmly believe that the core of every class should be able to function on a single Hotbar. Maybe this is my great experience with action RPG-style combat flavoring my opinions, but it would be great if your spec narrowed the number of buttons you needed more than it currently does. Essentially I want one Hotbar for active abilities and maybe a second Hotbar for cooldowns… and that is it.

Have you ever heard about a sculptor talking about being able to see the outline of their figure buried deep within the stone? I feel like that with the Dragonflight expansion. There is a lot of rough here currently because it is in this “very alpha” state, but I can see greatness lying there just under the surface. The Thaldraszus zone is legitimately great. I mean I would stack this zone up with some of the better zones that the World of Warcraft team has ever created in the past. I really enjoyed the story… or what I got to see of it in its very unfinished form. I think this is setting up some interesting conflicts for this expansion.

It also seems to be doing a better job of teeing up the first raid than most final zones have done to this point. Sadly there was no party with Captain Placeholder and a bunch of monkeys… but instead, the Thaldraszus quest just sorta died out at the gates of the first raid area. I am very interested in seeing how these zones play out with full cutscenes and dialog included. Right now we are in a state where you are essentially having to talk to Captain Exposition each time you finish a major quest chain that would have had a cutscene sequence in order to get the necessary quest flags to move on to the next step. Like I said “very alpha” but the raw stuff that I am seeing and what I can imagine being there in the final polished version… looks promising.

December is not a very long way off, and that is still the piece of this equation that concerns me. There is so much work that will have to be finished before this expansion ships. However after two “bad” expansions… it feels like maybe just maybe Blizzard is going to pull this one off. If things continue to progress along at the pace that they seem to be… I think Dragonflight might be ushering in a new era for World of Warcraft. I’ve said it before that I was honestly surprised that I was in this alpha given that I have been pretty hard on this game in the past. However, I do think this is a step in the right direction and might be something heralded as the next great expansion. There is so much work to be done but for the first time in a very long time, I have hope about this game. The post Warriors Are Good appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Last night I took a break from my Path of Exile Inquisitor shenanigans and played around in Dragonflight Alpha for most of the evening. Up until this point, the testing had been entirely focused on the Dracthyr and their starting area. As I had said before neither the Dracthyr themselves nor the Evoker class was really my jam and nothing that I could see myself playing seriously. I generally crave playing melee classes, and unless I am doing that… it doesn’t really feel like “WoW” to me. So starting yesterday the Alpha testers had access to a new zone and all of the other classes to test it with. So as a result I took my Death Knight that I created last week to play with the talents and ventured forth into The Waking Shores.

The Waking Shores is pretty large. If I had to give an example of scale I would say something in the range of Draenor’s version of Nagrand. The scale of the zone also feels very large and epic, in part because so much of the architecture was designed for dragons. With the introduction of Dragon Flying as a mechanic, it also has way more verticality than I am used to. The only weird thing I have noticed is that the world feels really spartan. Starting with the Timeless Isle, I am used to WoW maps being populated with a staggering amount of little detail to be discovered in the forms of what I am going to refer to as micro-objectives. There were mini-bosses to kill and chests to loot for interesting baubles, collectibles, and gear. This seems to largely be missing from the design of Dragonflight, or at the very least there has not been a pass of development to populate these doodads and widgets.

The world feels way more “Alpha” than I have come to expect from a Blizzard game some five months from release. I’ve been in a number of alpha testing processes for World of Warcraft and just as an example at this point in Warlords of Draenor all of the classes were effectively complete, and the zones felt more or less “finished”. We still have a number of classes without new Talent trees for example, so I have not been able to check out the Warrior and am leaning back on my Death Knight as a result. Granted if the entire studio does a full-court press, they can get this game across the finished line, but it does feel like it is going to be way more tentative than I am used to. I do wonder if we are going to see an impending delay of Dragonflight into 2024. That would honestly probably not be a bad thing given that I am not sure anyone actually expected this game to be released in 2023 prior to the announcement of the release date.

With this update saw another release of the new UI. This time added to the interface are the player and target frames and some additional options for the existing hotbars. I really like that we can turn on a visible grid while editing the UI. I am hoping that means at some point in the near future we will be able to turn on snapping to the grid. It is amazing how much of a difference having these few additions improve the experience. I’ve said it before but if the WoW UI can get to a point where it is at least as detailed as the FFXIV UI, then it is highly unlikely I will install addons in the future. For me the key things I need are the ability to move my player frame and target frame to the center of the screen, and also have hotbars that are slightly below them. Then finally the main addon that I installed every time was one that unified all of my bags into a single pane… all of which are features now of the default UI. Massive kudos to the team working on this.

There is still quite a bit of placeholder text, for example, I ran a quest and the two NPCs were named Left and Right, and were on the left side and right side of an objective. I laughed entirely too much from this giant dialog of menu options as to WHY we are visiting the Dragon Isles. I specifically like “You tell me. I don’t read quests. I just complete them!” because it clearly sounds like a quest developer taking out some frustrations. I really have not spent enough time with the content to get a feel as to how it stacks up against other expansions. So far it very much feels like a WoW Expansion, and honestly feels a bit more like something like Northrend than it does like one of the more modern expansions like Legion. I am not sure if this was the intent, but I do miss a lot of the small zone details that were added starting with Pandaria. Again I am not sure if this is just a case of it being “very alpha” and not finished, or if this is more of a minimalistic design decision. Right now we are level capped at 62 and I will probably finish out the zone on the Death Knight and then maybe start it again on Paladin so I can test out Protection talents. All in all, it does not feel bad and I am interested to see how this evolves. The post The Waking Shores appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Good Morning Friends! On the list of things that I thought I would be doing this week, I did not include “playing Dragonflight Alpha” but it seems fate has conspired to change that. While I have been in multiple alpha testing processes for World of Warcraft, I did not think I would be getting into this one. I’ve not exactly written the kindest posts about the game and Blizzard as a whole, but I have always tried to temper what I said because I still have several dozen friends who work for the company. I have had a lot of great years playing World of Warcraft, but before I talk about the alpha process there are a few caveats that I need to get out of the way. Firstly I have not actively played World of Warcraft in roughly eighteen months. I bounced pretty early in the Shadowlands cycle and never really looked back so I am out of touch with a lot of things about the game. Secondly, you need to know that I have no real attachment to dragons. I tried to read some of the novels but bounced off them as well. I know roughly the shape of the story arc of the dragons and how at the time of the dragon soul raid they gave up some of their powers to protect us. However, I am not nearly as engaged with WoW Lore as a lot of people are in the community. I used to play a game called Horizon Empire of Istaria, later rebranded to Istaria: Chronicles of the Gifted and it featured fully playable dragons. I had a friend or two who were super into this and stuck around playing a dead game for far longer than they probably should have, just because it fulfilled their player fantasy of getting to be a Dragon. I feel like the Dracthyr and the Dragon Isles, in general, are going to be heavily tailored to this player, the folks who love the dragon flights.

That said the dragons are really rather cool to build and I did my best to craft a character that makes visual sense. Essentially one of the things I have enjoyed about the dragons we have encountered is that when you see Alextrasza in “humanoid” form or in Dragon form… there is a visual sameness to it. You can absolutely see one turning into the other and still maintaining a certain number of visible traits, and this same design language carries through to ALL of the dragons we have encountered so far. So I was pleased that as I built my Dracthyr I was able to more or less carry this same concept forward. I do however wish that horn types for example were more similar between the dragon and humanoid forms. I went with something that matched about as close as I could but I would have liked little elements like that to carry over completely. As far as the Alpha goes, Blizzard seems to be going about it a little differently than in my past experiences. Generally speaking there is usually some sort of forum post asking testers to focus on specific things, or at least tell us which areas of the world are open for testing and which are unpopulated. This time around they seem to be doing focus testing where currently until July 25th we will have access to The Forbidden Reach, which is the Dracthyr starter zone. You can create other characters, but none of the quest hooks are in place to allow you to start the expansion content. I spent a good twenty minutes on my dragon… only to immediately get hit by a game-breaking bug that forced me to delete it and start over.

My second dragon was purely random in order to actually get into the action just in case it happened again. I played through the entirety of the Forbidden Reach zone and now have deleted that character and did my best to recreate my original look and am now in the process of playing through it again. My only real complaint with the starter experience is that the zone is really large, and objectives are spread out from each other. In theory, you have dragon flight in order to get you between the destinations, but this is on a 5-minute cooldown timer. This means that if for some reason you are moving faster than five minutes between objectives… you are going to be spending a good deal of time walking around which feels bad. My theory is that there should be some sort of zone-wide aura that lets the Dracthyr use their dragon flight as often as they want. This would allow for players to spend a bit more time getting used to the mechanics because right now it feels like you pretty much have to nail it immediately or suffer the experience of running everywhere. The other thing that I have noticed is that I feel very weak as a Dracthyr. There are several mob types on the island that are just a bit overturned for my character. I am very much used to starter experiences being something that you can pretty much sleepwalk through, and so far this island requires me to spend a lot of time healing myself.

The other thing that is somewhat awkward is the Evoker class itself. It has been announced as a hybrid between a caster DPS and a healer, and it does in fact do both things. However, remember how awkward druids are for the first twenty levels or so? That is how Evoker feels to me right now. You have a bunch of different abilities that do different things, but there doesn’t really seem to be much synergy between most of them. Living Flame for example is both your primary nuke and primary heal, and it is fine at both of them. Disintegrate is your standard channeled ability that slightly slows things as they head towards you. The most interesting ability you get early on is Fire Breath, which allows you to charge the ability before releasing it… and it deals more damage the longer you charge it. However to get the maximum amount of benefit you need to charge it for quite a while, and it has a 30-second cooldown… so it mostly just feels bad to use. Then there are a handful of arguably melee abilities with Azure Strike and Tail Swipe, that doesn’t really seem to fit in terribly well into the kit. Sure you can rapidly hit multiple targets in front of you with Azure Strike but you are dealing so much less damage than you would if you were casting a spell. Tail Swipe serves as a knock-up… but everything recovers so quickly that it doesn’t really do much to buy you enough time to cast something in the meantime. The lack of active dodge in World of Warcraft also limits its usefulness as well, because I could see hitting it and then rolling out of the way in a game like Guild Wars 2. Similarly, Wing Buffet can be used to knock a target away, but it is on a 1.5-minute cooldown means it is a one-shot ability. I think the problem with coming up with a new class this late in the life cycle of the game is that essentially everything I am seeing from the Evoker is done better in another class that feels more focused.

The real highlight for me however is seeing the early functionality of the new UI. I think over the course of the alpha and beta we will see more of this roll in, but right now we have a new cast bar and the ability to edit hotbars. Currently, I have a layout with one large Hotbar, with two small ones stacked across the top of it, and then to 3 column wide blocks on the right side. Admittedly MOST of why I continued to use mods in World of Warcraft is because I could not stand the default hotbars. Another huge reason why I installed addons is that I prefer a single large bag as compared to multiple small bags, and that is now also just in the default UI as something you can configure.

The other thing that I am interested in is the new talent system. Like I said I rolled a Death Knight and while I can not actually start the new campaign, I did spend some time playing around with talents. I really like that the tree is split between having a more generic class-specific tree that everyone has access to, and a tree specifically for your specialization. More than this I like that they have seemingly put abilities that you would want in both trees, some of which previously defined a specialization like Icy Talons being in the general tree. I think the purpose of a Talent tree is to leave you with the feeling that you wish you had more talents because you could not take everything you wanted. This means there is a reason to ACTUALLY run multiple specs for different reasons and will make it a bit harder for the “one true spec” to arise. I need to create a Warrior and play around with those talents since I miss the days of hybrid tank specs that spend most of their points in fury or arms rather than just everything in protection. Some final thoughts about my experience. I did not get into it as much as I thought I might. Sure there is some nostalgia for World of Warcraft, but it just feels like a really old game design at this point. It might be that I have spent so much time lately playing more action-oriented games, but essentially mentally I am lumping it in the same mind space as I keep Everquest. What I find interesting is that Final Fantasy XIV does not feel nearly as old of a design to me, and I think the key difference is that everything in that game feels tightly designed to work together. Whereas World of Warcraft has always felt like making the best of a bad situation. All of that said after bouncing off both Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands, I am curious if the campaign will ultimately pull me in when we get to test that. The post Dracthyr Initial Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.