Most recent World of Warcraft expansions started with a tightly scripted, story-heavy, and somewhat bothersome on-rails scenario. Dragonflight seems to have remembered that this is an MMORPG and I should be deciding what kind of adventures I want to go on. Right off the boat onto the expansive, beautiful Dragon Isles, you’ll be met with only minimal handholding and four huge, exciting zones to explore. But at the same time, Dragonflight feels like a creative step backwards from the experimental – though not always successful – spirit of Shadowlands.
There’s no denying that the new zones are downright gorgeous. The contrast between volcanic wastelands and verdant river valleys in The Waking Shores is a breathtaking introduction to the expansion. And these locales feature some of the best side quest writing I’ve seen in WoW in a long time. One of my favorite quests involved sitting and listening to a red dragon, shapeshifted into a humble dwarf, talk about all his regrets and the pain of being banished from his homeland for 10,000 years.
Another one I loved involves traveling slowly, on foot, with a centaur clan to their sacred meeting grounds, complete with a pit stop for a hunting competition. These kinds of heartfelt, memorable moments really are World of Warcraft at its absolute best. They seem to be here to lovingly bonk you over the head and remind you to take your time, simply exist in this beautiful world for a moment.
Unfortunately, these handcrafted experiences will dry up after a week or two and you’ll be repeating the same, rote daily quests over and over waiting for the next patch to drop, so it’s hard to give them too much credit. WoW has generally done a very good job in most expansions making the journey to max level memorable and exciting. And if that’s all it needed to be, Dragonflight would hit it out of the park. But as a living MMO, WoW consistently struggles to maintain that level of engagement for me in the weeks and months to come, and Dragonflight is not really any exception.
To the Skies
Where Dragonflight really does try to spread its wings, figuratively and literally, is in the design of the new Dracthyr Evoker class. And I have to admit, they’re pretty freaking cool. Having a racial soar ability and signature, dragon-themed attacks like Deep Breath let you come screaming out of the skies and bathe your enemies in fire before they even know what hit them. It’s simply awesome. However, both the damage-dealing Devastation and healing-focused Preservation specs suffer from having too many niche-use combat abilities and can feel very chaotic and disorienting to play. Especially compared to WoW’s last hero class, the delightfully straightforward Demon Hunter, Evokers are just a bit overdesigned.
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Where the Dracthyr can glide, however, the new dragon riding system allows all of your characters to soar. Zooming over the landscape at up to three times the speed of WoW’s traditional “flying” mounts, I feel like I can’t ever go back to that old system. It feels incredible when you’re soaring, banking, and diving around with a palpable sense of momentum and physicality that WoW normally lacks. Dragon riding challenge courses with cosmetic rewards for the best times have easily been some of my favorite parts of this expansion. Though I found it was a bit too easy to get gold on all of them, leaving me with little reason to go back.
I’m not a huge fan of how these dragons control on a mouse and keyboard, though. They seem to be begging for controller support, which has long been rumored but never actually manifested.
A Dance of Dragons
The main story, so far, hasn’t exactly wowed me as much as the side quests. If you didn’t follow all of the out-of-game lore leading up to Dragonflight, you might be a bit confused about why you’re even here in the first place. There is some tension between the major good guys, but it rings kind of hollow. The new bad guys, the primal dragons and their humanoid minions, the Primalists, haven’t yet made an impression as especially complex or interesting villains. There does at least seem to be some sort of succession crisis brewing within the Black Dragonflight that has the promise of delivering interesting stories down the line.
The eight new dungeons are relatively straightforward and unmemorable, with the standout being The Nokhud Offensive in which you use your dragon riding skills to soar around and intervene in a battle that takes up a huge, instanced portion of the Ohn’ahran Plains zone. They seem to have been designed to avoid the problem of pick-up groups insisting on wacky routes that skip most of the trash fights by exploiting the level geometry, which was a big issue in Shadowlands. But overall, these dungeons are just kind of… meh. On the bright side, the new Mythic+ season is bringing back four legacy dungeons from Mists of Pandaria. Keeping things fresh by letting us revisit some of the best content from WoW’s 18-year history is such a no-brainer, and I hope they keep it up.
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The first raid, Vault of the Incarnates, hasn’t exactly taken my breath away yet either. There are some interesting and satisfyingly difficult mechanics to learn: one encounter involves a council of elemental sorcerers who have to be killed almost simultaneously in a nod to Molten Core’s classic Core Hounds fight, while another involves a giant rock elemental who must be tricked into destroying his own damaging towers with a smash attack. The complexity of the fights is just about right for normal mode, and the visual design of the bosses is pretty strong, but I didn’t find the vault itself that interesting in terms of its art or overall theme – especially when you compare it to something like Shadowlands’ debut raid, Castle Nathria. There’s nothing particularly notable about any of the individual arenas and I don’t even know who most of these jerks are! It’s worth noting at the time of writing that I haven’t yet seen the final fight with Razageth, though.
Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
The new crafting system is probably the best it’s ever been in WoW’s history, with varying qualities of materials and different results for finished products based on your skill level and progression choices. When I make myself a pair of Tier 5 leather pants, I know every stat on those bad boys is as high as it is because my Leatherworking skill is so much higher than the recipe calls for, because I specialized into leather pants specifically, and because I chose to use only the finest bear asses in their manufacture. Though I suspect, as you can eventually max out everything, that this specialness will diminish the longer the expansion sticks around.
The problem is, it’s still very grindy. Dragonflight has tried to respect our time more by giving us fewer daily chores to do, with even standard “daily” quests resetting once or twice a week instead of every 24 hours. But for crafters, you’re still expected to farm the same overworld monsters for dozens of hours just to make one piece of epic gear, on top of the fact that the new Spark of Ingenuity item only lets you make one per week anyway. This would be the perfect place to plug in something like Shadowlands’ Maw zone or randomized solo dungeons in the spirit of Torghast. Or make them a reward for doing repeatable dragon riding challenges! Anything skill-based, rather than farming the same unchallenging mobs forever like I’m in Purgatory. C’mon Blizzard, I’m begging you. It’s not 2004 anymore and this is not good gameplay.
I can hear the cries of, “Choreghast!” already. But there has to be a happy medium here somewhere. Mostly solo players like me should be able to have those kinds of features available to us without making players who don’t like them feel obligated to do them constantly. Blizzard could let us use our progress in what I’ll call “high-end solo content” as a substitute, not an addition to, other ways to boost our weekly vault earnings, for instance. You can run this randomized, Hades-style dungeon with temporary, collectible power-ups or do Mythic+, but no one has to do both. It sounds like a win-win.
Or, even better, they could make it an efficient way to farm stuff like Awakened elemental materials, as a replacement for the plainly worse gameplay of putting on a podcast, zoning out, and farming overworld mobs or flying around looking for dirt piles for hours on end. Stuff like Torghast, in particular, made me feel listened to as a type of player who usually isn’t a priority in the admittedly difficult balancing act Blizzard must play satisfying so many players. Did it need more iteration? Of course. But Dragonflight absolutely suffers in my eyes for providing no equivalent. Cutting stuff like Covenant Sanctums, the mission table, and having to keep track of 200 different currencies was wise. But they cut too much here.
