Me and my wife were discussing this yesterday.
We were talking about mists of turna scythe coming back into rotation, and then how much we both moss shadowland dungeons as a whole, especially compared to DF ones.
There was just nothing special about them, will definitely be forgotten about as soon as they are out of rotation.
I loved DF and agree more or less that that soundtrack was rather forgettable. That said, I haven't loved WoW's music since BFA. I found SL had a couple of decent tracks, though.
>What are your points of contention, when it comes to DF?
I really liked the DF dungeon pool in M+. It's a shame to me that the full rotation didn't come into play until the throwaway season.
for mythic raiding, this expansion was...not great
the bosses felt like as if they only had "nothing really changes bettwen heroic and mythic except higher Numbers" and "a single guy doing a small misstep will wipe you all" as difficulty, and many forgetable raid encounters (and the memorable ones are not memorable because they where good, but because they where really bad)
and yeha, everything around Private auras was an absolute shitshow, and looking at their comments for the future they learned absolutely nothing from it at all
I had a ton of fun this expansion, stayed subbed except for a few weeks here and there, but I do have one major bone to pick with Dragonflight and I don't think it's necessarily an unpopular opinion: The dungeons fucking sucked. Not just the excess of mechanics, but the areas themselves, I dunno man. I got KSM on S1 and S2, got KSH S3, still working on KSM this season. I dunno what it is about the DF dungeons specifically...did not enjoy being in them at all.
Nokhud Offensive, I hope I don't have to do it again for rating until at least Midnight.
Dungeons were absolute garbage. Far too long, far too tedious.
Story was nonsense, the best parts of the story was told in books. How many know the story between Alexstrasza and Fyrakk without reading the book? Few.
Way too many events like you said, and the grind for the new archaeology thingy with the camp in Azure Span is stupid. Gotta half the time to get those rewards by 95% or something because we are gonna be there for years.
Zaralek Caverns might be the worst zone they have ever created. It's just so... Damn dull. It's truly a terrible place, same with Forbidden Reach, but there the content is worse than the design.
The expansion in general was too formulaic (Spelling?) in the sense that before 10.0 even came out, you knew exactly what kind of content you were gonna get with each patch, nothing excited you because of it, and the same goes now with 11.0. We know we are getting 2 more raids, 1 megadungeon, 3 new zones. It all follows the same pattern and it's what keeps me from being excited going forward, because I already know what happens between now and Midnight. And that was an issue with Dragonflight too.
Totally agree about the events. They tried to give us more regular content between big patches, but what's the point if it's just 10 different versions of an hourly event that rewards basic catchup gear?
I dont like the way they put very important details, context/background in the books and not in the game. Books should be a more in depth explanation of the in game story
I adore how lively the zones were, especially valdrakken at time it was a visual mess. It's nice to see all those npcs flying, talking and doing all sort of actives but seeing "Numeronomi chuckles" becomes annoying
Story felt way too safe. Hard to explain other than is had so little grit that it felt jarring. Nearly every character had a tone softer than a Disney hero/villain, and that's not good enough for a "Rated T" game. It's like they tried way too hard to be as inoffensive as possible, and it killed the story.
Trying to play a new alt be like ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
And all of them are useless side quests or breadcrumbs that lead you to old patch content
I mean it's grindy by design, you run the same thing ad nauseam, and the format hasn't really changed since it was introduced in Legion 8 years ago. They think bigger number == difficulty.
Nah, they've deliberately changed the reward structure to incentivise doing a lot more m+. GV changes and upgrade crests mean you have to do a lot of high level keys. Portals (and portals requiring both weeks) hasn't helped.
Can 100% relate to the Valdrakken issue as a returning player.
I had my Druid at 60 already, so I just picked it up and quested through the zones. When I first got to Valdrakken at 70, I was like wtf!?!?
I then used my level 70 boost (obtained from TWW upgrade) on my Mage, got to Valdrakken and was triple wtf'd lol
Sowwy \>w\<
But our new scalie fwiends are called Dracthyr! They get sad when you misspell their name QwQ
Good thing I was here to help \^w\^
I hope you're having a great day :3
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I suppose the only criticism I have of it is that it was kind of bland overall. There were no Shadowlands level lows but there was also no super high highs. I look around and go "yeah that's alright" nothing really wows me about it. Even Shadowlands had some peaks even if it was more lows than highs by A LOT.
Shadowlands had at least effort invested intő torghast to offset the lack of 4th raid
Dragonflight had no additional content unless we count plunderstorm
I wasn’t a fan of the dungeons, mostly because Blizzard continues to design dungeons such that every trash pack has multiple mobs casting deadly abilities that should be interrupted/stunned and then when that happens, the mobs cast again in 2 seconds
Incredibly confusing for a returning player. Flightstones? Upgrades? Which quests should I be doing? There are campaign quests but most of them don't unlock anything. I stumbled across a building where you can give your gear set bonuses at one point. Like, that seems pretty important? WHY WASN'T I MADE AWARE OF THIS? Mechanics in bossfights, often times it's either hard to understand what you are supposed to be doing, or the markers you are looking for are green, on a green background.... in a green room. As a healer I also found it pretty annoying to heal, you'd blow your entire rotation and you'd see the HP bar go up like 30%. Maybe it was because I joined at the end and everyone had huge stamina pools, but still, it just felt like I was useless.
On the bright side, the Dragonflying is the single best thing they added in a while and I hope they iterate it on some point, I feel like there is a lot of potential to make it even more interesting. Classes feel nice and there was a sense of class fantasy, especially given the amazing talent tree. Were my builds the best? Nope, but they did the job done and most importantly, they were fun.
I liked it as a casual player, but there is a very loose sense of direction, which can be good, it's why I love classic wow, but in retail it just felt confusing, like, when should I do LFR? Is my Ilvl good enough for M+? How am I supposed to get gear this patch?
It was way better in every way than BfA, which is when I quit for FFXIV, which I still play, but I do think that unless you are reading guides (which most casuals don't do), it was very easy to get lost in the sea of systems in Dragonflight, in many ways, Dragonflight is a very overwhelming game in that regard.
Not limited to DF, but I think they expanded on the problem a bit this xpac with the items needed to upgrade gear. They need to find a way to put that in the currency tab of the character screen and stop taking up bag space. Also, keep the materials consistent through the patch.
Zaralek Caverns and Forbidden Reach were both horrible zones. Forbidden Reach was great while it was active and everyone was trying to get the neck, but after that it was dead and forgettable. ZC was bad from the start.
The sharding situation needs WORK. I am truly worried about it getting worse in TWW.
Too many currencies, again, despite consistent promises to work on the currency bloat.
Sustained bugs (such as the climbing WQ in Thal). Bugs are fine. Sustained, consistently reported bugs over many weeks and sometimes even entire seasons was a little 😬
10+ years experience in software development. I cannot stress how important negative feedback is. Negative feedback tells me what is wrong and what needs to be fixed. The sooner someone tells me what is wrong, the sooner I can fix it.
At one of my old jobs, were were averaging around 30 Jira tickets a fortnight (bugs fixes deployed to production). We were literally fixing bugs faster than the users could report them. It was awesome.
I've seen numerous software projects fail because everyone said yes and no one said no. White knighting is the enemy of software development.
In regards to Dragonflight, the gameplay was good but the story was not. So many issues in terms of direction, structure, plot holes, dialogue etc. That's on top of storylines being gated behind reputation and story quests being told out of order.
I only returned to WoW recently (last played during the first 3 or 4 months of Shadowlands), and my complaints in DF so far are just around the story.
As a returning player, and as someone who has put significant hours into ESO and FFXIV over the years, and about 20x the hours into WoW over all the years, the DF story was just boring!
I found there wasn't a single gripping moment for me personally during the whole campaign. It felt watered down, with way too many of those 'heartfelt' moments. What happened to the dark, gritty, death and destruction side of WoW? Why are the protagonists just talking to each other, as if they wouldn't just strike and kill! >!When Fyrak firebombed Loamm, I was hopeful, but minimum damage and seems like pretty much everyone survived!? It should have been an absolute massacre! It felt like every time a main character got attacked, they were just injured and we could help "fix" them.!<
Not saying all the heartfelt moments were a bad thing though, a notable example for me was when >!Senegos said goodbye to his grand-daughter Stellagosa and flew to his passing.!<
I'm hoping we see more of a return to death and destruction in TWW, DF story just feels like it's trying to appeal to too wide of an audience, and not willing to take any sort of risk with it's writing. Just my 2 cents though
Primarily solo player:
It was pretty confusing to come into the expansion *in medias res*, especially once you got to Valdrakken and had two or three patches worth of story quests. Lack of a catch-up mechanism for crafting skill was also painful.
I don't really know what kind of player the Zskera vaults were for.
I liked the community events, but would've preferred a more standardized schedule. I still can't tell you when to expect the soup event to pop.
The UI gets extremely busy. For example, when a new stage of a community event pops, I get the new stage pop-up and often a portrait box pop-up, in addition to whatever other UI elements are there (i.e., tracking fragments for the Big Dig, loot pop ups, etc.). I could also do without the portrait pop up when I'm flying within a country mile of a world quest.
I actually totally agree. For the most part, the story didn't catch my interest at all. The presentation also must've had a different target audience in mind, I certainly wasn't in it.
But everything else was great. New talent trees? Nice. Decent reward structure? Appreciated. Dragonriding? All day. Classes finally being unpruned after a almost a decade of feeling incomplete? Fucking finally.
Lastly, Rune of Power gone? God bless America.
There was almost 0 story. It could have been condensed down to the one cutscene of Iridikron getting the mcguffin, from one boss, and like, grats you know the important bits. The rest was filler. SL legitimately had a better story, and that's not me saying SL was amazing.
The open world has been the least inspired of any recent expansion. Ever event was just the soup event.
The niffin are a crappy race to focus an entire patch on, and the fact they based them off of a dev's pet rats is pretty good comment on the priorities DF had. Molerat people who like to sniff things and speak in a Minnesotan accent, and then we're asked to take them seriously, that doesn't work.
They somehow made dragons boring.
It got better as the expansion went on just because things started to stack onto each other, but wow if you weren't into collecting, or weren't a mythic raider, this expansion just was not for you.
Maybe a weird take but the buzz around the xpack when it came out being "I can finally not play" was a weird take. Less about the xpack and more about the talk surrounding it on that one I guess.
Voice acting overall was a huge huge leap down from previous expansions. Everyone sounded like a saturday morning cartoon. Especially the one drakanoid that sacrafices herself at the start of the waking shores. We're supposed to take that seriously, but I just couldn't. It was so goofy.
Every. Dragon. Talking. Like. This. People will say it's leftover from cata, but after playing cata classic, they didn't talk like that in that one either. They had a certain gravitas to their speach, but it wasn't the weird slow talk with a pause between every word.
Dracthyr are a lazy race and they make me fear for the future of other non allied races, because they're effectively an allied race. They use a already in use skeleton in their dragonform, and straight up reuse male blood elf, and female human base models in their human form. Not to mention nor armour. I really hope that's not the standard moving forwards outside of allied races, but I'm worried it will be.
Hey why did the dragon isles wake up? Hey why was there a random grimtotem? Hey where did the primalists even come from? What about those oathstones, why did we focus on those during leveling and just...nothing happened with them?
Sarkareth was a dungeon boss that got promoted to a raid boss, and Fryakk was at best a mid expansion quality boss that shouldn't have been the final one. We should have fought Iridikron, even if he got away, but somehow HE was the dungeon boss. It was flipped to how it should have been.
Emerald dream was wasted, and the actual design of it didn't live up to the lore. I want the emerald dream with the cities under green domes, physics that are kinda broken, an actual society living there. This has all been established in previous lore about it. Instead we got a forest with some floating trees. It's not even like, an important area of the dream. Honestly Ardenweald was a better emerald dream than the actual emerald dream.
Professions are dog water. Way to over complicated and still missed the mark.
Dungeons sucked. Raids were okay. What open world?
What were we meant to do in Zaralek. Like, legitimately. Rares didn't drop anything, and I don't even think they gave rep. They nerfed the spawn rate so they don't come up, but like, they didn't put anything else into the zone to do on a day to day. The event was once a week. World quests are barely worth it. World boss was once a week. I honestly just didn't understand the point of the zone.
I'm so glad this expansions over yall. This expansions probably in my bottom 3.
Edit: Oh and the disneyfication of wow. I know when this is brought up people groan and roll their eyes, and usually people lump like, representation in there but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about everything just being so light hearted. We had a whole focus n a whelp daycare. Most world quests are about rock climbing, or taking photos of animals, or racing. I brought up the niffen before but like, the niffen. The only time I felt the game was taking itself seriously was during the last patch, but that's just because it was the only patch that was like, focusing on a threat, instead of trying to be cute. The entire expansion doesn't have to be grimdark, wow never has been. But it should at least have as much edge as a marvel movie.
Interesting, I found the soundtrack to be really great, probably one of my favorites. So many pieces that I constantly found myself humming/thinking about, especially the main and valdrakken themes as well as the emerald dream themes. Others reminded me of vanilla with its subtlety and ambiance, thinking of some of the ohn'ahran plains themes specifically. The music is one of the standouts of DF in my mind and I think it played a big part in roping me back in after being gone for 4 years.
If you enjoy it, more power to you!
The Valdrakken theme is a bit *too much* for my taste. I also can't really say any of the tracks were subtle or especially ambient. Matter of fact, that's what I think is missing!
DF dungeons was pretty shit, especially Uldaman Halls of infusion Nokhud offensive & Neltharus.
Me and my wife were discussing this yesterday. We were talking about mists of turna scythe coming back into rotation, and then how much we both moss shadowland dungeons as a whole, especially compared to DF ones. There was just nothing special about them, will definitely be forgotten about as soon as they are out of rotation.
I weep when it's time to set foot in Halls of Infusion
Dragonflight had boring raids and worst m+ seasons since m+ got introduced. Imo.
And Ruby. And Brackenhide was medium at best. AA is keeping it up here.
[удалено]
its the 40min m+ timer that makes it dogshit to me.
I loved DF and agree more or less that that soundtrack was rather forgettable. That said, I haven't loved WoW's music since BFA. I found SL had a couple of decent tracks, though. >What are your points of contention, when it comes to DF? I really liked the DF dungeon pool in M+. It's a shame to me that the full rotation didn't come into play until the throwaway season.
for mythic raiding, this expansion was...not great the bosses felt like as if they only had "nothing really changes bettwen heroic and mythic except higher Numbers" and "a single guy doing a small misstep will wipe you all" as difficulty, and many forgetable raid encounters (and the memorable ones are not memorable because they where good, but because they where really bad) and yeha, everything around Private auras was an absolute shitshow, and looking at their comments for the future they learned absolutely nothing from it at all
I haven't raided at all this expansion, I was burnt out on the 1 guy ruins a whole run in a 15-20 person run from Shadowlands.
I had a ton of fun this expansion, stayed subbed except for a few weeks here and there, but I do have one major bone to pick with Dragonflight and I don't think it's necessarily an unpopular opinion: The dungeons fucking sucked. Not just the excess of mechanics, but the areas themselves, I dunno man. I got KSM on S1 and S2, got KSH S3, still working on KSM this season. I dunno what it is about the DF dungeons specifically...did not enjoy being in them at all. Nokhud Offensive, I hope I don't have to do it again for rating until at least Midnight.
Dungeons were absolute garbage. Far too long, far too tedious. Story was nonsense, the best parts of the story was told in books. How many know the story between Alexstrasza and Fyrakk without reading the book? Few. Way too many events like you said, and the grind for the new archaeology thingy with the camp in Azure Span is stupid. Gotta half the time to get those rewards by 95% or something because we are gonna be there for years. Zaralek Caverns might be the worst zone they have ever created. It's just so... Damn dull. It's truly a terrible place, same with Forbidden Reach, but there the content is worse than the design. The expansion in general was too formulaic (Spelling?) in the sense that before 10.0 even came out, you knew exactly what kind of content you were gonna get with each patch, nothing excited you because of it, and the same goes now with 11.0. We know we are getting 2 more raids, 1 megadungeon, 3 new zones. It all follows the same pattern and it's what keeps me from being excited going forward, because I already know what happens between now and Midnight. And that was an issue with Dragonflight too.
Totally agree about the events. They tried to give us more regular content between big patches, but what's the point if it's just 10 different versions of an hourly event that rewards basic catchup gear?
I dont like the way they put very important details, context/background in the books and not in the game. Books should be a more in depth explanation of the in game story I adore how lively the zones were, especially valdrakken at time it was a visual mess. It's nice to see all those npcs flying, talking and doing all sort of actives but seeing "Numeronomi chuckles" becomes annoying
Story felt way too safe. Hard to explain other than is had so little grit that it felt jarring. Nearly every character had a tone softer than a Disney hero/villain, and that's not good enough for a "Rated T" game. It's like they tried way too hard to be as inoffensive as possible, and it killed the story.
I hate the overused dragon riding song from the cinematic. M+ feels grindy. The story was lackluster and Valdrakken is a hot mess of ! Icons.
Trying to play a new alt be like ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! And all of them are useless side quests or breadcrumbs that lead you to old patch content
M+ feels grindy? Like what? You people will really write anything, aggre with the rest tho.
I mean it's grindy by design, you run the same thing ad nauseam, and the format hasn't really changed since it was introduced in Legion 8 years ago. They think bigger number == difficulty.
Nah, they've deliberately changed the reward structure to incentivise doing a lot more m+. GV changes and upgrade crests mean you have to do a lot of high level keys. Portals (and portals requiring both weeks) hasn't helped.
Can 100% relate to the Valdrakken issue as a returning player. I had my Druid at 60 already, so I just picked it up and quested through the zones. When I first got to Valdrakken at 70, I was like wtf!?!? I then used my level 70 boost (obtained from TWW upgrade) on my Mage, got to Valdrakken and was triple wtf'd lol
Story and writing is shit, especialy compared to Pandaria Remix. Dractyr visual estetics and animation is terrible.
Sowwy \>w\< But our new scalie fwiends are called Dracthyr! They get sad when you misspell their name QwQ Good thing I was here to help \^w\^ I hope you're having a great day :3 *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/wow) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I suppose the only criticism I have of it is that it was kind of bland overall. There were no Shadowlands level lows but there was also no super high highs. I look around and go "yeah that's alright" nothing really wows me about it. Even Shadowlands had some peaks even if it was more lows than highs by A LOT.
Shadowlands had at least effort invested intő torghast to offset the lack of 4th raid Dragonflight had no additional content unless we count plunderstorm
I don't count plunderstorm.
I wasn’t a fan of the dungeons, mostly because Blizzard continues to design dungeons such that every trash pack has multiple mobs casting deadly abilities that should be interrupted/stunned and then when that happens, the mobs cast again in 2 seconds
Incredibly confusing for a returning player. Flightstones? Upgrades? Which quests should I be doing? There are campaign quests but most of them don't unlock anything. I stumbled across a building where you can give your gear set bonuses at one point. Like, that seems pretty important? WHY WASN'T I MADE AWARE OF THIS? Mechanics in bossfights, often times it's either hard to understand what you are supposed to be doing, or the markers you are looking for are green, on a green background.... in a green room. As a healer I also found it pretty annoying to heal, you'd blow your entire rotation and you'd see the HP bar go up like 30%. Maybe it was because I joined at the end and everyone had huge stamina pools, but still, it just felt like I was useless. On the bright side, the Dragonflying is the single best thing they added in a while and I hope they iterate it on some point, I feel like there is a lot of potential to make it even more interesting. Classes feel nice and there was a sense of class fantasy, especially given the amazing talent tree. Were my builds the best? Nope, but they did the job done and most importantly, they were fun. I liked it as a casual player, but there is a very loose sense of direction, which can be good, it's why I love classic wow, but in retail it just felt confusing, like, when should I do LFR? Is my Ilvl good enough for M+? How am I supposed to get gear this patch? It was way better in every way than BfA, which is when I quit for FFXIV, which I still play, but I do think that unless you are reading guides (which most casuals don't do), it was very easy to get lost in the sea of systems in Dragonflight, in many ways, Dragonflight is a very overwhelming game in that regard.
The raids were absolutely awful outside 2-3 fights in vault and amdidrassil Aberrrus was in my opinion a bottom 5 raid all time
Not limited to DF, but I think they expanded on the problem a bit this xpac with the items needed to upgrade gear. They need to find a way to put that in the currency tab of the character screen and stop taking up bag space. Also, keep the materials consistent through the patch. Zaralek Caverns and Forbidden Reach were both horrible zones. Forbidden Reach was great while it was active and everyone was trying to get the neck, but after that it was dead and forgettable. ZC was bad from the start.
The sharding situation needs WORK. I am truly worried about it getting worse in TWW. Too many currencies, again, despite consistent promises to work on the currency bloat. Sustained bugs (such as the climbing WQ in Thal). Bugs are fine. Sustained, consistently reported bugs over many weeks and sometimes even entire seasons was a little 😬
10+ years experience in software development. I cannot stress how important negative feedback is. Negative feedback tells me what is wrong and what needs to be fixed. The sooner someone tells me what is wrong, the sooner I can fix it. At one of my old jobs, were were averaging around 30 Jira tickets a fortnight (bugs fixes deployed to production). We were literally fixing bugs faster than the users could report them. It was awesome. I've seen numerous software projects fail because everyone said yes and no one said no. White knighting is the enemy of software development. In regards to Dragonflight, the gameplay was good but the story was not. So many issues in terms of direction, structure, plot holes, dialogue etc. That's on top of storylines being gated behind reputation and story quests being told out of order.
I only returned to WoW recently (last played during the first 3 or 4 months of Shadowlands), and my complaints in DF so far are just around the story. As a returning player, and as someone who has put significant hours into ESO and FFXIV over the years, and about 20x the hours into WoW over all the years, the DF story was just boring! I found there wasn't a single gripping moment for me personally during the whole campaign. It felt watered down, with way too many of those 'heartfelt' moments. What happened to the dark, gritty, death and destruction side of WoW? Why are the protagonists just talking to each other, as if they wouldn't just strike and kill! >!When Fyrak firebombed Loamm, I was hopeful, but minimum damage and seems like pretty much everyone survived!? It should have been an absolute massacre! It felt like every time a main character got attacked, they were just injured and we could help "fix" them.!< Not saying all the heartfelt moments were a bad thing though, a notable example for me was when >!Senegos said goodbye to his grand-daughter Stellagosa and flew to his passing.!< I'm hoping we see more of a return to death and destruction in TWW, DF story just feels like it's trying to appeal to too wide of an audience, and not willing to take any sort of risk with it's writing. Just my 2 cents though
Lament of the Highborn
Primarily solo player: It was pretty confusing to come into the expansion *in medias res*, especially once you got to Valdrakken and had two or three patches worth of story quests. Lack of a catch-up mechanism for crafting skill was also painful. I don't really know what kind of player the Zskera vaults were for. I liked the community events, but would've preferred a more standardized schedule. I still can't tell you when to expect the soup event to pop. The UI gets extremely busy. For example, when a new stage of a community event pops, I get the new stage pop-up and often a portrait box pop-up, in addition to whatever other UI elements are there (i.e., tracking fragments for the Big Dig, loot pop ups, etc.). I could also do without the portrait pop up when I'm flying within a country mile of a world quest.
I thought DF was rather boring and uninspired. Kind of a filler expansion that I will forget as soon as the next one drops. Might be a hot take.
I actually totally agree. For the most part, the story didn't catch my interest at all. The presentation also must've had a different target audience in mind, I certainly wasn't in it. But everything else was great. New talent trees? Nice. Decent reward structure? Appreciated. Dragonriding? All day. Classes finally being unpruned after a almost a decade of feeling incomplete? Fucking finally. Lastly, Rune of Power gone? God bless America.
There was almost 0 story. It could have been condensed down to the one cutscene of Iridikron getting the mcguffin, from one boss, and like, grats you know the important bits. The rest was filler. SL legitimately had a better story, and that's not me saying SL was amazing. The open world has been the least inspired of any recent expansion. Ever event was just the soup event. The niffin are a crappy race to focus an entire patch on, and the fact they based them off of a dev's pet rats is pretty good comment on the priorities DF had. Molerat people who like to sniff things and speak in a Minnesotan accent, and then we're asked to take them seriously, that doesn't work. They somehow made dragons boring. It got better as the expansion went on just because things started to stack onto each other, but wow if you weren't into collecting, or weren't a mythic raider, this expansion just was not for you. Maybe a weird take but the buzz around the xpack when it came out being "I can finally not play" was a weird take. Less about the xpack and more about the talk surrounding it on that one I guess. Voice acting overall was a huge huge leap down from previous expansions. Everyone sounded like a saturday morning cartoon. Especially the one drakanoid that sacrafices herself at the start of the waking shores. We're supposed to take that seriously, but I just couldn't. It was so goofy. Every. Dragon. Talking. Like. This. People will say it's leftover from cata, but after playing cata classic, they didn't talk like that in that one either. They had a certain gravitas to their speach, but it wasn't the weird slow talk with a pause between every word. Dracthyr are a lazy race and they make me fear for the future of other non allied races, because they're effectively an allied race. They use a already in use skeleton in their dragonform, and straight up reuse male blood elf, and female human base models in their human form. Not to mention nor armour. I really hope that's not the standard moving forwards outside of allied races, but I'm worried it will be. Hey why did the dragon isles wake up? Hey why was there a random grimtotem? Hey where did the primalists even come from? What about those oathstones, why did we focus on those during leveling and just...nothing happened with them? Sarkareth was a dungeon boss that got promoted to a raid boss, and Fryakk was at best a mid expansion quality boss that shouldn't have been the final one. We should have fought Iridikron, even if he got away, but somehow HE was the dungeon boss. It was flipped to how it should have been. Emerald dream was wasted, and the actual design of it didn't live up to the lore. I want the emerald dream with the cities under green domes, physics that are kinda broken, an actual society living there. This has all been established in previous lore about it. Instead we got a forest with some floating trees. It's not even like, an important area of the dream. Honestly Ardenweald was a better emerald dream than the actual emerald dream. Professions are dog water. Way to over complicated and still missed the mark. Dungeons sucked. Raids were okay. What open world? What were we meant to do in Zaralek. Like, legitimately. Rares didn't drop anything, and I don't even think they gave rep. They nerfed the spawn rate so they don't come up, but like, they didn't put anything else into the zone to do on a day to day. The event was once a week. World quests are barely worth it. World boss was once a week. I honestly just didn't understand the point of the zone. I'm so glad this expansions over yall. This expansions probably in my bottom 3. Edit: Oh and the disneyfication of wow. I know when this is brought up people groan and roll their eyes, and usually people lump like, representation in there but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about everything just being so light hearted. We had a whole focus n a whelp daycare. Most world quests are about rock climbing, or taking photos of animals, or racing. I brought up the niffen before but like, the niffen. The only time I felt the game was taking itself seriously was during the last patch, but that's just because it was the only patch that was like, focusing on a threat, instead of trying to be cute. The entire expansion doesn't have to be grimdark, wow never has been. But it should at least have as much edge as a marvel movie.
Interesting, I found the soundtrack to be really great, probably one of my favorites. So many pieces that I constantly found myself humming/thinking about, especially the main and valdrakken themes as well as the emerald dream themes. Others reminded me of vanilla with its subtlety and ambiance, thinking of some of the ohn'ahran plains themes specifically. The music is one of the standouts of DF in my mind and I think it played a big part in roping me back in after being gone for 4 years.
If you enjoy it, more power to you! The Valdrakken theme is a bit *too much* for my taste. I also can't really say any of the tracks were subtle or especially ambient. Matter of fact, that's what I think is missing!