Dragonflight, Roughly a Month In

 In 5 days, we'll have had a month of Dragonflight, World of Warcraft's 10th iteration (9th expansion).

The first wing of the first raid is now on LFR, and things are settling in as the expansion is now in full swing.

So, what do I like, and what do I think they could do better on?

General Class Mechanics:

The new talent system is great. I think this is true for a couple reasons:

The first is that it brings back the sense of incremental progress to leveling. With level scaling as introduced in Legion, the downside was that levels where you didn't get a new ability or talent actually made you feel less powerful rather than more. Your secondary stat ratings would give you less, and even if your overall numbers went up, the enemies you fought would as well.

Now, that's still kind of true. But now, your class gets more complex, and thus more powerful, as you level. I haven't played any low-level characters yet since the 10.0 patch, but at least in the 60-70 climb, while there's the usual dip in power as the epics you had from the end of Shadowlands become less impressive and are replaced by questing greens, by the time you hit the high 60s, your power level seems to climb back as you get more talents to shore up your power.

Secondly, I love that you can just change them when outside of combat. Not only that, but the fact that you can save different loadouts with their own action bars just like you get with different specs makes it very easy to swap between a build that's ideal for solo content, or for blasting trash in dungeons, or for zeroing in on bosses in raids.

Renown instead of Reputation:

So, here I'm mostly positive, though I have a couple quibbles. What I love is that anything that isn't directly tied to player power is account-wide. I realized I didn't have enough Expedition Resources or whatever they're called to buy the black scale options for the dragon mounts on my main after I hit "True Friend" with Wrathion, but I was able to just hop on my Death Knight and fly over there and buy them on him, despite the DK favoring Sabellian.

The fact that renown opens up new types of world quest and other options - which are all account-wide - makes this change extremely welcome.

Dragonriding:

So, I recommend that one of the first things you do on your main is find all the Dragonriding Glyphs. It took me only an hour or two (without a guide, except maybe in one or two cases) and it has made flying around the Dragon Isles very easy. (Again, this is a wonderful thing to make account-wide - finding them once was fun, having to go through all that on every character would be torture).

The only downsides I see with this system are:

A: that the diversity in mounts used in this expansion has plummeted. I swapped by main from Blacksmithing to Engineering back in 2.3 so I could make the Turbo-Charged Flying Machine, and it remains his main flying mount. While the drake customization options (also account-wide) are fun, it does mean everyone's ultimately riding on one of four mounts this expansion.

B: Flying mounts have often served as a "pause" button for World of Warcraft. If I need to go use the bathroom, letting my character hang in the air for a while is very convenient.

But that aside, I'm so happy to see really for the first time since Cataclysm an environment that is built for flying. From Mists through Shadowlands, flying was a "reward" for "completing the world," and was seen more as a way to skip through content than an opportunity for cool environments. But now, you get a zone like Thaldraszus, which is incredibly vertical in nature.

The Evoker:

My Evoker just hit the item level to run LFR, though I haven't taken him in there yet.

As a class, they certainly came up with something new. I remain a little skeptical of the decision to make all Dracthyr have to be Evokers - while I can understand limiting Evokers to them, I feel like in the long run we should see Dracthyr be able to try out different styles of combat.

I also don't like the fact that almost none of your armor shows up on your Dracthyr unless they're in visage form. I get that they have a very different profile from other WoW races (though I'd argue not so much more profoundly different from a human than the Tauren or Worgen).

Rhythm-wise, I think the Evoker runs into some issues with either lag or just bugs that have not yet been worked out entirely. Often it feels like the game doesn't quite register when I press the button for either of my empowered spells, or it will hold the button down too long. And for some reason, the display of how much Essence I've got to spend doesn't match the pseudo-cooldowns of my abilities the way that they do with Death Knight runes - I'll seem to have three Essence to spend but then be unable to cast Disintegrate for another second or two.

Still, I must commend them on making a class that truly feels different than others. The 25-yard range tends not to be too much of an issue until it's a big one - especially with a lot of enemies that have front cones and tanks who... tend not to face them away from the party (and to be fair, often these cones are not obvious, and so as a tank I've often not know to face them away).

Professions:

Ok, this I have very mixed feelings about.

In general, I think they've made professions a lot more interesting. And I think the crafting order system allowing for Bind-on-pickup reagents to be used by other players to make your gear is a great solution to the problem with powerful gear.

But.

The system is barely tutorialized at all.

First, you can apparently never ever get your invested profession knowledge points refunded to reassign. And so, on my main, picking the path of "funky engineering toys" as his main focus to start with became a huge liability. I had to grind materials and cross my fingers to just barely level to 75 Engineering in order to open the category that allows the crafting of actual useful gear (and the secondary-stat-setting components to make a huge material investment worth it).

Furthermore, I only realized today that the Sparks of Ingenuity served to limit how many crafted pieces you could equip at a time, and that we wouldn't just be getting a new one each week. Nowhere are you warned "hey, make sure you want to invest this thing in your helm and not some other piece you might want to have control over."

Also, I kind of hate having multiple qualities of most ingredients. Even with an extra bag slot and a 32-slot bag, I am scrounging for bag space given that I now have almost every profession thing in triplicate.

There's also this open question of how long it will take us to max out our professions. Getting to 75 was an absolute slog, and given that pretty much the only things that level me up are massively-material-intensive goggles and bracers (which use those limited sparks of ingenuity,) I wonder if the only way I'll ever hit 100 is after hitting the Darkmoon Faire quests every month for the better part of a year (I think they skill you up by 3?)

Professions needed a revamp, and I think the philosophy behind this is mostly sound, but we needed a much better sense of what we were getting into, and honestly, it was probably too much to throw at us in a single patch.

The Dragon Isles:

So... The Dragon Isles are pretty, sure. But maybe this is an unfortunate side effect of our access to fast flying mounts early on, but it feels a bit like the Dragon Isles are kind of small. Thaldraszus in particular feels like just a handful of valleys with just a little going on in each. The Azure Span is massive, but I think perhaps they might have hit it too hard on the expectation of nostalgia for Grizzly Hills. The cold and dark vibe to it practically gives me seasonal affective disorder.

The approach here was clearly to go back to more conventional fantasy settings - less otherworldly than the literally otherworldly Shadowlands, and more like a recognizable world that is just heightened. I'll confess my tastes tend more toward the truly strange and bizarre (while it shows its age, I still think Netherstorm is one of my favorite zones in terms of look and feel). 

Story:

So, I think that we get some good character-focused story here. The draconic politics between Alexstrasza, Wrathion, and Sabellian is juicy, especially if they remain committed to the idea that none of these people are bad guys (it would be pretty easy to Baron Sablemane, a name he seems to have totally dropped at this point, to turn out evil, but I think it'd be far more interesting if his conflict with Wrathion remains more complex and nuanced.)

Where I worry is the Primalists. The dragons, sure, were locked up for millennia, but that only happened because of the efforts of the Primalists themselves. And we have zero idea whatsoever where they came from. You might guess they were the remnants of Twilight's Hammer, but we get a quest in Waking Shore specifically pointing out that Twilight's Hammer is a pale shadow of its former self.

I think it's interesting that the Primalists, while definitely evil, believe that the Titans are the real bad guys. While most evil people (some would argue all) think of themselves as the good guys, these seem to genuinely be confused as to why we're fighting to preserve the legacy of the Titans. But again, who the hell are they?

We don't really have a sense of who is leading the Primalists other than Raszageth (and then the Primal Incarnates in general,) though we know that Kurog Grimtotem released her. Now, the Grimtotem did have some ties to Twilight's Hammer, but their matriarch Magatha was sort of playing her own game.

But still, we somehow have this giant cult of elementalists that emerged out of nowhere and are now a major force threatening the world - or at least the part of the world we're focusing on.

I am very curious to see where the rest of the story goes. It could be relatively straightforward and simply build to a confrontation with Iridikron as the likely final boss.

I've suspected the Incarnates might be a red herring, though I wonder to what extent that's simply based on my relative disinterest in them as characters. We don't really have a sense of why they hated the Titans so much and why they resented the Aspects. What were they up to when Galakrond was causing so much trouble?

Now, I'm obsessed with time travel and that kind of stuff, and so the Bronze Dragonflight has always been by far my favorite, and I find the Infinite Dragonflight to be one of WoW's most fascinating antagonists. But could Dragonflight shift its focus entirely to that plot? Or is Nozdormu/Murozond more of a side story?