I’ll admit that my expectations were pretty high, because dragonflight was really damn good: DF story was immediately awesome, DF was incredibly immersive, a world worth exploring and captivating…
Lies and exaggeration
Right out the gate with TWW, Blizzard lying or over exaggerating about everything. They said we would get a bunch of new features, and we have none of them yet. We have half of them. They were supposed to add account-wide reputation, they gave us 10% of it, just for one expansion. This is the first expansion they’ve given us a new expansion feature, that they haven’t fully delivered on. So we don’t even have that. Transmog changes, again, not finished. We were supposed to have the ability to collect all transmog across all of our characters, there are certain parts of it that are still not done. They also said we would get exciting sky riding which is like dragon writing, it’s not the same thing. It’s honestly a little bit slower, there’s no areas in the sky where you can recharge your stamina for flying, so it ends up being annoying and frustrating to use, kind of a slog.
Early access is completely bullshit.
Having to pay for early access in a game that you’re paying $15 a month for, and you’re buying the DLC for 40 to $50, what the hell is that? That’s crazy! Early access in a game that you already paid to play to begin with? What? What sense does that make?
The content so far is horribly boring
The story is so mediocre, it does not feel like a true expansion like dragonflight did. This feels like another Shadowlands style boring fanfiction cookie cutter slog of content that is going to be completely uninteresting the entire time. When you are thrown into it it just doesn’t feel like you’re given anything worth caring about, it’s just here is this really silly mediocre story, have fun, good luck. Thanks for giving us money bye. But I’m only 6 hours into it. The writing is just really bad, there’s no hook. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was AI written or generated tbh
Class design is terrible
Just before launching TWW, they nerfed a lot of classes in a way that makes no sense at all. Incredibly stupid way. For example, cat druid was completely nerfed into the ground to the point where every single major source of information and guides for casual players on what to play doesn’t advise using cat dread for PVE at all. It’s listed as D tier. The absolute worst DPS in the entire game, yet again How is it always the bottom DPS? It’s literally unusable now!!
Plus, hero talents are stupid. Just plain stupid. Why did we need another set of talents, literally another talent tree? It makes no sense! They added a middle talent tree when we already had one on the left and one on the right. For nearly 15 years, this game had one talent tree going top to bottom. They added a second one, now we have a third one! What the hell is this?
They can’t write good stories any more, don’t expect good main story, just good side quests.
It still feels like this expansion was too early (as usual) and many classes could have done with more time in the oven (druids and rogues)
On the talents - they realised that they can’t just keep giving us stuff, so they have switched to having some kind of ‘borrowed power’ that gets taken away after the expansion - I think the hero talents are another example of this? Some are shit though and I imagine it’s going to be balance hell (rip boomkins too lol), as they never seem to learn with this stuff.
It’s the endgame group content that actually sells wow for many people (me), so as long as that works and it’s ok balance wise (or alts can be leveled easily) then it’s probably ok for quite a few people though.
Disclaimer: have not got early access, have bought the expansion, but left it really late to decide.
Hot take: WoW never had a good story in any expansion. Just a few good moments scattered around like islands in a sea of grind.
The closest they got to a good cohesive story was Legion, but that was only if you were playing from the beginning and got to see everything develop live before they just started shoving people into catch up points that made no sense without context.
I mean, my understanding is that they fired half of their story continuity team, resulting in a published (physical) lore book that makes no sense.
So now I don’t think they are even trying
I mean, would you? The whole damn playerbase basically goes ‘lol read quest text? watch cutscenes? no time, need purps!’.
If I were Blizzard, I’d probably stop caring about story too because the player base doesn’t care all that much either, and the ones that do aren’t going to quit over a shitty story at this point: if they were going to, they already did in Shadowlands.
Didn’t DF kind of get rid of borrowed power model? I assumed the Hero Talents were just the extension of the talent tree and would be added to next expansion, not something that would be removed in 2 years. They’re still just talent points