It’s been about a month since I posted about WoW’s latest expansion, Dragonflight, and at the time I was pretty positive about the whole thing.  I’m actually still quite positive about it!  It’s a little less metaphysical than the Shadowlands expansion, which was all about the afterlife and redemption and uh…

I’ve mostly forgotten really.  There were some delightfully wicked little fairies in it and then we went off to discover that all of the various afterlives were actually constructed by some sort of spiritual Magrathea and then the big evil guy of the expansion turned out to be a construct himself and honestly I doubt they are ever going to come back to this storyline ever.

And that’s truly a shame because the expansion included the Best NPC ever, voiced by Aysha Selim, and I desperately want to know what her Whole Deal was.

Dragonflight is much less abstract.  There are some good dragons and there are some bad dragons and the bad dragons drop loot and that’s all I need to know.

…well, that’s all I usually need to know.  For some reason I got really into running around and actually doing all of the side storylines and got my first “Loremaster” achievement since 2016’s Legion expansion.  This is an achievement you get for walking up to literally everyone you can find with an exclamation mark over their head and doing whatever they tell you to do.

Most of the side quests are pretty enjoyable and my only quibble with them is that a couple of them send you into my least favorite instanced dungeon in the entire expansion.  This is very unusual for Loremaster achievements, as I understand, since the achievements in previous expansions have largely been doable without grouping.

I elected to get around the requirement by being overgeared and a tank and doing the dungeon solo.  This took longer than doing it the “right way” would have, but I enjoyed being able to set my pace and not being responsible for leading a group, which is an experience roughly equivalent to trying to herd four kittens all chasing different laser pointers.

The whole questing experience is also made considerably nicer by the dragon riding system.  The last few WoW expansions have disabled flight at the beginning of each expansion, which is (a) a way for the developers to make you actually ride around their carefully-crafted areas on foot so you can really appreciate the work they put in on them and (b) has the side effect of slowing you down quite a bit so you can’t chew through everything the expansion has to offer in the first week.  Being able to fly to and from quest objectives has made getting around an absolute joy by comparison.

I actually have another post I’d like to write talking about how the loot system in Dragonflight is also a considerable upgrade, but that’s going to be boring and full of numbers.  I’ll leave off here for now.