Today is the launch of WoW’s newest game expansion, Dragonflight. After looking at the changes made by the company, not only to their internal culture and equity, but also to their game philosophy, my hubby and I bought the expansion and played through some of the pre-patch content to prepare. I am cautiously, curiously optimistic about the game for the first time in a long time. One immediate and welcome change was that the currency you gained in this pre-patch event could be shared across your entire account. That meant I could play any of my alts and gear up almost everyone with new reagent bags and better gear for my level 60s. If this level of alt friendliness is reflected across the expansion, it may resolve some of my biggest issues with the past few expansions.

I enjoy raiding with a large group of friends. The path to raiding over the past few years has been extremely frustrating for me. I want to do the activities in game that I find fun and enjoy, without feeling like doing those is keeping me from being raid ready. Some of the things I’ve heard about for Dragonflight give me hope that I can avoid the constant Mythic dungeon cycle (that I do NOT enjoy), and still be able to gear up to raid and feel like I can contribute to the group. Time will tell if they actually stick to their guns on this, or how grindy the alternate gear paths are, but I look forward to finding out. For the first time in a long time I look forward to playing WoW content. I’m cautiously optimistic that the crafting changes will make me want to do crafting again, especially engineering. My main engineer never made it past level 25 in Shadowlands. 

Check back later to see if these hopes have been fulfilled, or if I’m back to being disillusioned. I really hope I have a lot of fun and enthusiastic things to write about in the coming weeks. It has been such a long time since I was enthusiastic about WoW.