The Queue: It’s all butterflies from here

My very first day in Dragonflight I found an item in the Waking Shores that, when clicked spawned butterflies around me. The butterflies kept spawning around me, in multiple colors, fluttering around, for a half hour. I’ve never found the item again — it isn’t where I originally saw it. It was one of those small, delightful surprises that seems to permeate the Dragon Isles.

Dragonflight feels like a whole new game.

Let’s talk about it.

Honestly, I think they’re trying.

Blizzard has often kept to its own advice, taking feedback slowly. Which, I grant, is sometimes a good course: players have experiences which don’t always correlate to the facts. I always think back to the endless claims that Onyxia deep breaths more, or the fact that every player is sure their class needs buffs and another class needs nerfs. To an extent, developers have to look at the data to gauge balance, engagement, etc.  You can’t always take the immediate feedback from players and make sweeping changes. It has to be considered.

But Blizzard certainly went too hard in that direction. Player feedback can be well-considered, based on both facts and experience. Maybe not every piece of feedback is good, but developers should monitor feedback, evaluate it, and make changes based on reasonable feedback.

Here’s an example. I’ve long thought that Retribution Paladins were extremely squishy, and players have been saying so for quite a while — asking for Divine Protection, a short cooldown damage reduction that other specs get. When Dragonflight rolled out, Ret had a choice between getting Divine Protection (new to the spec) and Shield of Vengeance (which they previously had). It gave them what they asked for, but didn’t actually add survivability. But in 10.0.7 the spec is getting a redesign. When Blizzard announced this, they mentioned survivability as one of the spec’s problems, saying that Retribution Paladins have some of the highest death rates of any class or spec.

Basically: what players had been saying already.

So in this case, Blizzard heard player feedback, made a small change (adding the option to get Divine Protection), continued to get feedback about low survivability, and is now making big changes to the spec. The changes haven’t rolled out in full, but it looks like Ret will be getting more damage — one survivability problem is that Ret has to choose between doing damage and doing healing — as well as some self-healing. I’m looking forward to seeing how this turns out, because I can say for a fact that my ilevel 400 Paladin is more fragile than my ilevel 350 Warlock when out doing world content. (I’m fairly sure Warlocks just can’t be killed. They even light themselves on fire for fun!)

I think Blizzard has learned that it isn’t infallible, and this seems to at least in part correlate with the bombshells about sexual harassment and “bro culture.” We’ve seen the company strip out negative content and locker-room tone sex jokes — such as the “love rocket” which is now the X-45 Heartbreaker, or the Sons of Hodir daily quests which were a string of juvenile jokes. These are the sorts of things that never would have been added in the first place if Blizzard listened to the feedback of the women on their own development staff.

Now, Blizzard has started listening to everything. And not just listening, but taking action as well. Maybe they don’t always act as quickly as we think they should. Maybe there are more bugs than we’d like because they’re rapidly iterating on game features. But I believe Blizzard is trying. Trust issues aren’t unjustified after all these years, but I really think they’re trying.

I want some cool shields. I feel like shields is a place where transmog options are limited… or at least transmog options I like. So give me some awesome shields.

Especially shields that work with the Blood Elf Heritage Armor set.

But I’ll take any interesting shields.

If you haven’t been following the latest updates to the Paladin class, Divine Toll is being removed from spec trees and added to the class tree. That means spec trees will be changing, but we don’t quite know how. I’d like to have another Divine Toll to get a second charge. I think that would be amazing and give a big boost to my AOE healing power — Holydins aren’t great AOEers, as we only have one one AOE other than Divine Toll, and it costs Holy Power. Let’s get another AOE we can cast without having to build Holy Power first… and one that gives us Holy Power to charge up for another heal. That would be excellent.

I don’t know if it will happen. But it would be great.

Regardless, I’m very curious to see where we’re going from here.

I hope this isn’t just the setup for another redemption arc. Warcraft loves redemption arcs, and we’ve had a hell of a lot of them over the years… most recently with Sylvanas, who regained her soul, aided us in saving Anduin and defeating the Jailer, and remains in the Maw saving souls.

I don’t object to that story, but I hope we don’t jump right back into a redemption arc. Neltharion drew from dark powers in order to, perhaps, save Azeroth from the Incarnates — and he (all of us) paid the price for his choice. Let’s not just walk all of that back. Sometimes bad guys can just be bad guys. We don’t need to find a way to redeem all of them.

His head is slightly too big for his body. That increases his adorableness by at least 80%.

And that’s all today. Take care everyone, pet your dogs, hug your loved ones, and have a good weekend. I’ll see you again next week, friends.