This site makes extensive use of JavaScript.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser.
Live
PTR
10.1.7
PTR
10.2.0
Patch 10.2: Guardians of the Dream Interview with MMORPG
PTR
Posted
15 days ago
by
Archimtiros
Video game news and review website
MMORPG.com interviewed
Lead UX Designer Crash Reed and Assistant Lead Encounter Designer Taylor Sanders, discussing our journey into the Emerald Dream and Season 3 updates in Dragonflight Patch 10.2!
We've summarized some of the more interesting talking points, but feel free to check out the full interview below.
Patch 10.2 Interview with MMORPG.com
The Emerald Dream
We're only traveling to one small part of the Emerald Dream, but in a more complete way than we have in the past.
It's vast and would otherwise encompass multiple zones, though the part we visit is roughly the size of the Ohn’ahran Plains.
Lead UX Designer Crash Reed
“I am super pumped. Playing WoW since the beginning, even in Warcraft III, just all the discussions of the Emerald Dream and how cool it can be. My wife plays a Druid; it’s all she ever talks about. It’s just one of these amazing experiences, that I think we are lucky to be able to share with the players right now. With that, it’s gonna come with some really cool things for the player to do. Like, diving into protecting both the world tree and helping it to grow, depending on what event you are participating in.
Players will help Druids in the new Superbloom public event, in which a wandering ancient named Sprucecrown will assign various activities to complete. While fighting off Druids of the Flame and helping nurture the growing tree, players will gain temporary power-ups to make them feel much more powerful than normal.
Players will obtain a
new Faerie Dragon dragonriding mount
early in the campaign.
While saving Amirdrassil from Fyrakk, we’ll also work on the new renown track with the Dream Wardens, similar to the Niffen in Zaralek Cavern. No confirmation if this will contribute to the Valdrakken weekly renown quest, but it doesn't sound like it.
Storylines
One storyline in 10.2 involves Vyranoth and Wrathion "forming a kinship with one another, this feel of they are almost misfit dragons, you know they don’t necessarily fit in, so they form this really nice bond with each other” as they reach out to new allies in the Thorignir Storm Dragons of Stormheim and the Netherwing of Outland - two groups who also remain apart from the primary dragon flights.
Season 3
The fledgling tree Amirdrassil serves as the setting for the new raid, which will include
dragonriding elements during one of the raid encounters
.
Assistant Lead Encounter Designer Taylor Sanders
“It was only natural that a portion of the raid focuses on and around the tree. We have a really cool dragonriding encounter where players will be able to fight one of our coolest characters; he’s a druid of the flame named Tendral Sageswift. Players will be zooming around the boughs of Amirdrassil using their dragonriding mounts during the encounter. So players will see a lot of Amirdrassil during the raid.”
In addition to various dragonriding skins, there will be a mount from the final raid boss:
the Fire Owl
is an entirely separate and standalone
Mythic only
mount - the first non-dragon mount to use a new “dynamic flying” system.
No plans to update any Mythic+ affixes for Season 3, but devs will be looking at PTR testing of the
new dungeon rotation
to gather more information.
The
Revival Catalyst will become available at the start of the Season
, rather than several weeks in.
Get Wowhead
Premium
$2
A Month
Enjoy an ad-free experience, unlock premium features, & support the site!
Show 23 Comments
Hide 23 Comments
Sign In to Post a Comment
1
2
Comment by
Lautner
on 2023-09-15T16:10:40-05:00
keep the bland and annoying m+ the same for 10 years now, lmao can't even be bothered to put dev time into the game
I hope this is a joke. Each M+ season does take dev time, as well as each new raid and zone.
Meanwhile, solo players get absolutely no new features or endgame progression despite the past three expansions offering so much. When M+ is removed entirely, you can talk.
Go play a SINGLEPLAYER game then sorry to tell you but solo experience should be the LAST thought on anyone’s mind about wow and the last things added there’s so much stuff that needs fixing to actually help the game survive and prosper by fixing the three areas of end game content once they handle that then they need to work on player/guild housing and it’s is way easier to get geared now as a solo player than ever before you won’t be the most geared and you shouldn’t be if your just playing solo stuff you don’t need to be anyways
If you want the game to survive, protecting the solo player's experience is as important as the raiders'. They make up a larger proportion than you think, and tend to be among the most loyal subscribers - enough so that Blizzard themselves said in pre-DF interviews they wanted to make the game better for solo players as well as the other groups.
They're just failing at it so far, thus the commentary from solo players.
how are they failing? what do you want exactly? time rifts, dreamsurges, mage tower, torghast, class halls, garrison, mission boards, world quests, professions, pet battles, alts, old raids etc. there is so much and many solo player activities in this game! like what are you wanting to do besides housing. plz tell us
I'm just talking about this expansion. Past recent expansions were pretty good for solo players. The issue is they opened DF with interviews saying they had a new world content team whose philosophy was to give solo players more stuff to do with better progression. The better progression part has panned out, but they're failing in the 'giving solo players stuff to do'.
The majority of new world content added in Dragonflight, beyond the traditional world quests, is group content, not solo content. "Just use the group finder" only works for the most recently-added new public event; once a new patch comes out the vast majority of people move onto that because it's new, or because they don't want to miss out on getting it done while other people are doing it. As a result, most of the world events and systems added mere months ago are either impossible to do solo or take so long you could get a whole dungeon done, queue and all, in the time it takes to complete them. No one's doing hunts, the feast, the siege, primal storms, the storm on the Forbidden Reach, any specific rare spawn in pretty much the whole expansion outside of whatever's Dreamsurged, the Primalist Future... even Researches and Time Rifts are seeing far fewer people the last month and I don't even know the state of Fyrakk Assaults. It was difficult getting bodies to kill the boss in those almost two months ago if you played later than reset day.
It's not more content I want, it's to be able to do that content without having to rely on a playerbase so spread out across 15 different parts of the world, in other countries, throughout the entire week. Past expansions had less world content but you could do the majority of it at any time of the week without a schedule. This expansion you either play to the schedule early after reset, or you miss out and can't do the stuff you want to do. THAT'S the failing of the world content team.
Group content should be dungeons, raids, PvP, world bosses and the odd public event or rare, not everything in the outdoor world outside of world quests, leveling quests and profession grinding. It spreads people way too thin and it inhibits solo players actually being able to do stuff. And yes, I know, "it's a massively multiplayer RPG" - even if everything outside of dungeons/raids/PvP could be done solo that wouldn't stop it being an MMO. It's still a shared world with many players in that world. You can still interact with a large amount of people out in the world. Being an MMO has nothing to do with the idea that everything in it has to require multiplayer to achieve results. There are already three main pillars of the endgame that do, just leave the outdoor world as a fourth pillar that doesn't. That's what most non-instanced players want.
Nah, solo players have more stuff to do now than in any expansion before and they have ways of keeping up gearwise.
Comment by
Athenamonica
on 2023-09-15T17:50:10-05:00
keep the bland and annoying m+ the same for 10 years now, lmao can't even be bothered to put dev time into the game
I hope this is a joke. Each M+ season does take dev time, as well as each new raid and zone.
Meanwhile, solo players get absolutely no new features or endgame progression despite the past three expansions offering so much. When M+ is removed entirely, you can talk.
Go play a SINGLEPLAYER game then sorry to tell you but solo experience should be the LAST thought on anyone’s mind about wow and the last things added there’s so much stuff that needs fixing to actually help the game survive and prosper by fixing the three areas of end game content once they handle that then they need to work on player/guild housing and it’s is way easier to get geared now as a solo player than ever before you won’t be the most geared and you shouldn’t be if your just playing solo stuff you don’t need to be anyways
If you want the game to survive, protecting the solo player's experience is as important as the raiders'. They make up a larger proportion than you think, and tend to be among the most loyal subscribers - enough so that Blizzard themselves said in pre-DF interviews they wanted to make the game better for solo players as well as the other groups.
They're just failing at it so far, thus the commentary from solo players.
how are they failing? what do you want exactly? time rifts, dreamsurges, mage tower, torghast, class halls, garrison, mission boards, world quests, professions, pet battles, alts, old raids etc. there is so much and many solo player activities in this game! like what are you wanting to do besides housing. plz tell us
I'm just talking about this expansion. Past recent expansions were pretty good for solo players. The issue is they opened DF with interviews saying they had a new world content team whose philosophy was to give solo players more stuff to do with better progression. The better progression part has panned out, but they're failing in the 'giving solo players stuff to do'.
The majority of new world content added in Dragonflight, beyond the traditional world quests, is group content, not solo content. "Just use the group finder" only works for the most recently-added new public event; once a new patch comes out the vast majority of people move onto that because it's new, or because they don't want to miss out on getting it done while other people are doing it. As a result, most of the world events and systems added mere months ago are either impossible to do solo or take so long you could get a whole dungeon done, queue and all, in the time it takes to complete them. No one's doing hunts, the feast, the siege, primal storms, the storm on the Forbidden Reach, any specific rare spawn in pretty much the whole expansion outside of whatever's Dreamsurged, the Primalist Future... even Researches and Time Rifts are seeing far fewer people the last month and I don't even know the state of Fyrakk Assaults. It was difficult getting bodies to kill the boss in those almost two months ago if you played later than reset day.
It's not more content I want, it's to be able to do that content without having to rely on a playerbase so spread out across 15 different parts of the world, in other countries, throughout the entire week. Past expansions had less world content but you could do the majority of it at any time of the week without a schedule. This expansion you either play to the schedule early after reset, or you miss out and can't do the stuff you want to do. THAT'S the failing of the world content team.
Group content should be dungeons, raids, PvP, world bosses and the odd public event or rare, not everything in the outdoor world outside of world quests, leveling quests and profession grinding. It spreads people way too thin and it inhibits solo players actually being able to do stuff. And yes, I know, "it's a massively multiplayer RPG" - even if everything outside of dungeons/raids/PvP could be done solo that wouldn't stop it being an MMO. It's still a shared world with many players in that world. You can still interact with a large amount of people out in the world. Being an MMO has nothing to do with the idea that everything in it has to require multiplayer to achieve results. There are already three main pillars of the endgame that do, just leave the outdoor world as a fourth pillar that doesn't. That's what most non-instanced players want.
Nah, solo players have more stuff to do now than in any expansion before and they have ways of keeping up gearwise.
What? The only solo content Dragonflight offers is a small selection of world quests that offer mostly rep, gold, or the absolute lowest ranks of Crests and gear. You are going to get bored very quickly and only be at last Season’s gear levels.
Compare this to previous expansions where open world content such as invasions, world quests, and emissaries were completely soloable and allowed solo players to obtain raiding level gear. Better yet, major game features such as Torghast and horrific visions actually scaled to solo players.
If something like Torghast or Mage Tower had come out during Dragonflight, I can guarantee you the developers would design it to not scale to single players and the content would require groups to complete. They design content to be the complete opposite of solo content yet somehow expect to “convert” solo players.
This would be like an expansion that came out without M+ dungeons, and developers said that they created raiding for the M+ players to group up and do. Bottom line: Public events are not for solo players.
Comment by
Soeroah
on 2023-09-15T20:56:55-05:00
keep the bland and annoying m+ the same for 10 years now, lmao can't even be bothered to put dev time into the game
I hope this is a joke. Each M+ season does take dev time, as well as each new raid and zone.
Meanwhile, solo players get absolutely no new features or endgame progression despite the past three expansions offering so much. When M+ is removed entirely, you can talk.
Go play a SINGLEPLAYER game then sorry to tell you but solo experience should be the LAST thought on anyone’s mind about wow and the last things added there’s so much stuff that needs fixing to actually help the game survive and prosper by fixing the three areas of end game content once they handle that then they need to work on player/guild housing and it’s is way easier to get geared now as a solo player than ever before you won’t be the most geared and you shouldn’t be if your just playing solo stuff you don’t need to be anyways
If you want the game to survive, protecting the solo player's experience is as important as the raiders'. They make up a larger proportion than you think, and tend to be among the most loyal subscribers - enough so that Blizzard themselves said in pre-DF interviews they wanted to make the game better for solo players as well as the other groups.
They're just failing at it so far, thus the commentary from solo players.
how are they failing? what do you want exactly? time rifts, dreamsurges, mage tower, torghast, class halls, garrison, mission boards, world quests, professions, pet battles, alts, old raids etc. there is so much and many solo player activities in this game! like what are you wanting to do besides housing. plz tell us
Snip
Nah, solo players have more stuff to do now than in any expansion before and they have ways of keeping up gearwise.
You mistake "take far longer to do the same amount of content" with "have more to do than ever".
I've played outdoor content all expansion and I can assure you, I've never had this degree of difficulty doing outdoor tasks as a solo player, including group content. In BFA it was relatively easy to get groups for rares, because only a few needed them. In Shadowlands there was only one or two rares you needed groups for during a patch, and in ZM they even gave us so many borrowed power mechanics we were able to solo most of the things anyway. I struggle to think of a time outside of the Maldraxxus slime pool or the Maw that I felt truly frustrated as a solo player using only gear obtainable through solo play.
Contrast to Dragonflight: it now takes me 30 minutes to do a grand hunt, assuming I don't get a boss I can't kill, I couldn't HOPE to do Primalist Tomorrow because that explicitly needs a group to even make the boss attackable, Time Rifts are drying up such that if I don't get into the one group active five minutes before the event actually starts I may as well skip that hour, the Forbidden Reach is a living tomb of content I can't do anything but a few dailies in because the rares are all tuned for a group or a raid, the ZC rares are *also* tuned for groups so most of my characters can't kill them, those that can take 10 minutes to do so, and getting a group for any single rare in the zone is near impossible at this point, particularly late at night or late in the lockout period, Researchers is down to one group and completely unsoloable otherwise (my realm is dead, by the way), Dreamsurges seem fine, Primal Storms are basically a way of the game telling me to ignore the area for an hour or two... I feel bad for anyone who wants the Feast rare for any reason because lol. Oh, and Fyrakk assaults: something a group can get done with in about 5-10 minutes, and is impossible to do without one because the boss is stronger than a world boss and has less incentive for players to kill, especially next patch.
There's a lot more content that a solo player can engage with than ever before, yes. But there's a lot less content, proportionately, than previous expansions that a solo player can successfully do on their own schedule, regardless of whether or not other players just so happen to feel like doing the exact specific thing you want to do. The gearing up system, yes, is fantastic, no complaints other than it'd be nice to be able to send crests to alts once a main is done with them. But the actual solo content in DF is very lacking. It's basically story quests, most world quests, and then the rest either needs a group or gear that's out of reach of the average solo player.
So... yes, we have reason to criticise the world team for failing its goals. I don't blame the people *behind* the team, but I do want them to know how solo/world content players actually feel about how it's going, because they can't fix it otherwise.
1
2
Post a Comment
You are not logged in. Please
log in
or
register an account
to add your comment.
Previous Post
Next Post
