Another World of Warcraft expansion is in the books. While we prepare for The War Within let’s reflect on Dragonflight, Blizzard’s 10th expansion. This will cover some of my likes and dislikes regarding the story, the content, and new and updated systems.
Overall it is a decent expansion. It’s much better than Shadowlands and, in my humble opinion, it’s better than Burning Crusade and Warlords of Draenor. Wrath of the Lich King remains my favorite of the expansions, followed by Legion and Dragonflight may just come in third. The dragons have always been one of my favorite races in WoW.
Expansion Highlights
I did enjoy the story, it is much better than the Shadowlands. The Shadowlands expansion will be the expansion most people like to forget. Valdrakken felt as vast and immense as a dragon capital city should feel and I was getting lost far less often than I did in Oribos. The problem with Oribos is that everything looked the same so I could never find the right corridor to enter for the Great Vault vs crafting trainers, for example.
The dragonriding and dragon racing was fun, one of the best mechanics ever added to the game. I always felt like Hiccup on Toothless, especially during those dragon races. The one critique I have about dragonriding (now called skyriding) is constantly running out of vigor while farming. Granted, you could switch to a non-dragonriding mount, but your farming will take longer.
I enjoyed the raids. While we did not get Ahead of the Curve on the Vault of the Incarnates, we succeeded on all the other raids. Questing in The Emerald Dream was very cool, that’s something we’ve been wanting to explore for years.
The legendary from Fryakk was fun, despite the 130,000 gold I had to spend to complete it but the damage output was worth it. So much so that I actually got into doing, and enjoying, Mythic+ dungeons. In the next expansion, I plan to do them in my usual tank role but it’s nice to know that DPS is an option if I need to.
The Things That Were “Meh”
Every post I’ve ever written about this expansion expressed my discontent with the changes to the crafting system. My attitude has not changed. I have never felt more overwhelmed by professions in 20 years of playing this game. The Knowledge Point system is daunting, confusing, and cumbersome.
How is it confusing? You really had no idea where to start or which tree you should try to complete first. The moment you picked one tree you would discover that you needed the other tree to get the recipe you needed to gain levels in that profession.
For the first time in, I don’t know how many expansions, I did not max all the professions. As someone who is a bit of a completionist, that bothers me! The crafting order system is kind of nice, especially for gear that requires bind-on-pickup materials but it should have rewarded the crafter with levels or knowledge points for each order filled.
The first patch, which introduces the Aberrus raid, was underwhelming. The story arc for the raid was interesting but the rest was not. Zaralek Caverns and the Forbidden Reach were not interesting. Forbidden Reach was especially bland. Completing criteria for the A World Awoken achievement was the only reason I spent any time out there.
Final Thoughts
Despite the professions and the mediocre 10.1 patch, Dragonflight was still a solid expansion. I can see myself choosing this expansion to level an alt through should I decide to level more alts (which, if I’m being honest, is probably going to happen). I will have a statistical breakdown of Dragonflight in a follow-up post.
What are your thoughts on Dragonflight?
If zombies attack the world, everyone will run and hide. Except for us gamers, of course. We’ve been waiting for this all our lives!