World of Warcraft: Dragonflight Alpha Impressions – Dipping a cautious talon into scalie magic

As with me playing any other MMORPG that isn’t Guild Wars 2, I must disclose beforehand that I am not the least familiar with World of Warcraft‘s systems. As such, I will merely give my view on the things I experienced in the World of Warcraft: Dragonflight Alpha Realm which may already be old hat, but were points I considered worthy enough to note.

For further reading, check out our interview with Ion Hazzikostas here, and an earlier one with Patrick Dawson and Laura Sardinha here.

DRAGONFLIGHT?

Should you happen to be unfamiliar with Dragonflight, this is the latest World of Warcraft expansion that follows Shadowlands and that expansion’s final major update, Eternity’s End. In quite the large departure from the realm of the dead, Dragonflight gives off the impression of being a “return to basics”, so to speak. The dragons are returning to their role of the caretakers of mortals as their ancestral home in the Dragon Isles have been lifted from the fog: quite literally as it would seem.

I got the opportunity to fumble around in an alpha build which is definitely missing a lot of things, so let’s just go through whatever pieces I get my plebian hands on.

HOW TO MAKE A DRACTHYR

The expansion introduces a new race in the Dracthyr, which themselves are locked exclusively to the Evoker class as the first race / class combo. The Dracthyr’s racial traits allow them to fly, punt fools around with their wings or tail and seem generally superior to mere mortals in many ways. In making a character, you can design both their draconic and mortal form – known as your Visage – and freely switch between them. The game warns me that the Evoker is an advanced class and recommends me to start with something else for the tutorial, which is kind of them, really.

Aesthetically speaking, both the draconic forms and Visage forms don’t look that different between the male and female options prior to the customization which I like. I don’t know how uwu the dragon can really get in the full thing, but as you can see here, you can see the options for colours, facial structure, accessories, then you can fiddle with markings, spikes, fins, all that good stuff. Some of these details are carried over to your Visage, because yes, you are indeed assuming a more “regular” fleshy form to fit in with the puny beings.

HAVING TWO LEFT WINGS

The faux Prismatic Dragon gets flung into Azeroth much bemused to get started on a specific questline known as The Azure Span. I wanted to get familiar with the basic movements first though, and quietly balking at the two hotkey bars, I tabbed through the various menus first. Honestly, the Adventure Guide having so many pages felt quite daunting already even if I wasn’t going to be heading into any of them.

I did quite like the fact the whole “class / race” fantasy thing is there from the get-go, since as mentioned, you’re free to swap between your forms anytime you want. I shot off into the sky and bumped into a roof as I had absolutely no clue what I was doing but at least I didn’t fling myself off a cliff by accident. With that in mind, I perused the mounts section, noting the “Mount Equipment” slot. I’m not a good mount driver by any means, but yolo, right?

Once I’m done with the basic menuing, I finally got myself boosted to level 65 – out of the new 70 cap – to start on the prescribed quest. Dragonriding is not available in the vanilla towns as far as I can tell, so getting dropped into this forest area is the first time I got to try out a wyvern. The blue diamonds represent “Vigor”, a resource utilized for Dragonriding skills. You’ll be able to either surge forward or climb skyward, with the actions changing your flying speed.

Unfortunately, this current iteration of Dragonriding just does not feel good to me as it doesn’t feel like it has “weight”. I compared it to throwing a frisbee, as in, me feeling like the frisbee flying through the air, looking speedy but not “much”, if you get what I mean. I’ll hope for this part to be tweaked in full release because riding a dragon / wyvern / whathaveyou and controlling your momentum should feel “more”, is what I think. Once we actually get the complete experience, I’m down to try again.

Incidentally, no, you cannot be in your draconic form when you try Dragonriding. I’d hope to be able to fish in dragon form though, or will that scare the fish? I figured crafting was going to be too much for me so I opted to cha cha real smooth out of that. I did at least take a peek at the dizzying array of Stuff that’s possible to make which basically make no sense to me. H-hurray!

As for the talent trees, I list them down below, so for now, have a look at how the UI looks like at present. In the interest of checking out the crafting, I also took a peek at the UI for the non-Dracthyr talents for a comparison view.

I gave the HUD Edit Mode a little try, which much like most things in the alpha, is a work in progress. I messed around with resizing the action bars since I felt like I was getting motion sick with all the empty space and just enlarged the icons like I needed reading glasses.

Not that it helped me much in combat. The skills look really cool in motion, even if the whole casting and such feels too slow to me. I concede this is a matter of taste and also needing more time to acclimatize to it, so I won’t pick at this too much. Unfortunately, this was also about the point where the quest bugged out for me, stalling my progress. At the very least, thanks to the handy indicator, even someone like me can shoot at drakes in a sky barrel.

It feels like the Devastation (DPS) specialization would feel extremely easy to execute while the healers (Preservation) have a higher skill ceiling due to the timing. I would cede to veterans to give their opinions though, since this isn’t a combat system I’m used to after all.

Now, from my rudimentary understanding, the Kirin Tor have been relatively neutral and have been protecting Azeroth, and Khadgar himself is here to protect us from the Primalist army as we set up our initial defenses so that Kalecgos will arrive… how far reaching has good ol’ Neltharion’s legacy been, really?

At least checking out the talent trees don’t need story progression, so tarry forth!

WHERE DO MY DRACTHYR’S ILEVELS GO

I’m sure it goes without saying the numbers and effects would be subject to change, but as a “veteran” MMO player, I’m quite familiar with the fervour of theorycrafters and their build plans. Here’s what I noted down for the brand new race / class combo:

GENERAL

EVOKER

Black boxes indicate where a particular skill line ends.

SPECIALIZATION: DEVASTATION

Black boxes indicate where a particular skill line ends.

SPECIALIZATION: PRESERVATION

Black boxes indicate where a particular skill line ends.

HERE BE DWAGON?

With only a small piece of Dragonflight under my belt, I’m not going to claim anything about its progression system and how it might work until a more complete PTR becomes available to obtain feedback from. As for myself, I like dragons even if my MMORPG career has seen me kill a lot of them, and there’s no denying that Dragonflight so far looks gorgeous.

Will this expansion truly be the grand return to the “classics” in modern World of Warcraft? Time will tell.

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