EDIT: Well, I now wonder if this is available to everyone, because when I tried to hearth on my Dracthyr to Valdrakken, I showed up only to be booted back to Stormwind for being "out of bounds." Just as well, I'll try this out when the expansion itself comes out.
To no fanfare or email, I realized yesterday that my Battle.net launcher happened to have the Dragonflight beta available.
Now, there are a few things that seem a little fishy here - I can't seem to access a character-copy option, and while I was able to roll up a Dracthyr Evoker, he just gets dumped in Stormwind with all his talents already assigned (not that I can't reassign them) but no, like, starting experience or prompt to accept a quest to go to the Dragon Isles.
I'm sort of ok with that - I think I'm actually pretty happy to experience the expansion with fresh eyes.
Figuring out how the Evoker players has been... challenging. It's not really easy to get all your abilities all at once and try to make sense of a rotation. I mean, having 16 years of experience with the original WoW classes, it's very easy for me to understand that, say, Cone of Cold is not a core part of the Frost Mage rotation.
Also, reading through all your abilities can make you miss certain things. For instance, I saw that there was a Bronze-themed ability that reduced cooldowns for your party or raid and assumed it was some kind of cooldown ability itself, only to notice, hey wait, this has an hour-long duration. It's a buff!
I'm eager to see the Evoker through a starting experience that gradually introduces abilities, much as the Demon Hunter did.
After ten years with the simplified Mists of Pandaria talent system, the reconstruction of the Vanilla-through-Cata-style system will take a bit of getting used to. Mainly it's about knowing what a good build looks like and how to sort through the chaff.
The Dracthyr approach to customization and armor is a unique one, and one that I'm not sure I'm totally on board with - essentially, you pick out cosmetic armor as part of character creation, and the armor you actually wear only shows up on your humanoid "visage" form. I might be tempted to go fairly minimalistic with my Dracthyr's armor in that case.
Also, the big conundrum: blue is my favorite color, and I almost always prefer to make characters that have some kind of blue theming (in D&D, two of my longest-played characters are a Blue Dragonborn and a Triton). On the other hand, the Bronze Dragonflight is by far my favorite in the Warcraft setting. So, do I make my Dracthyr blue or bronze? These are the questions that plague me.
I'm given to understand from most impressions that Dragonflight is looking like a good expansion. Obviously, we'll need to see their patch releases to really know if it goes down as one - Shadowlands' initial patch was fantastic, and honestly, I think it suffered mostly from having a weak middle patch and too-large gaps between content releases.
I'm always a little bitter toward people who balk at the heightened, out-there high fantasy of, for example, an expansion that takes place in the realm of the afterlife, though I think that in the case of Shadowlands, it might have been that the ambition of such a premise could never be fulfilled in a single expansion.
Indeed, I find a growing appreciation for the D&D approach to the afterlife, as the Outer Planes, where most mortal souls go after they die, aren't just there for the dead, but are complex worlds in their own right for whom the spirits of the dead are just one category of their many denizens.
Nevertheless, I'm hoping that Dragonflight really succeeds at giving us a cool dragon-themed expansion that Cataclysm never really lived up to being. I almost feel like in a lot of fantasy games, dragons had become kind of de rigueur, but that some recent efforts to revitalize these quintessential fantasy creatures (such as D&D's Fizban's Treasury of Dragons) are getting me to love the big flying flame-lizards once again.
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