Dragonflight's Seeds of Renewal patch has been out for a few weeks now, but with my casual involvement in retail, I don't always get to see all the new stuff right away. In general I've really enjoyed the way Blizzard has been releasing these "minor" patches between the major ones though, adding new gameplay and story every so often even when there isn't a new zone or raid to be explored just yet. Seeds of Renewal is another interesting example of that.
First of all, Dragonriding is now enabled everywhere where you're able to fly, and it's great. Characters don't even need to have been to the Dragon Isles to be able to mount one of the special mounts, though you might still need to have the Dragonflight expansion at least, I'm guessing. Normal/old flying still has its place, but if you're just trying to quickly get from A to B, hopping on your dragon and going super fast definitely feels great.
They also retooled the dracthyr racial Soar to work like normal Dragonriding instead of an extremely limited version of it, which means that I can now be my own mount and just fly around using my own wings. Again, this feels great! It's not quite as smooth as a druid's flight form, as you get thrown out of "flight mode" the moment you touch ground, so it's happened to me that I kind of clip the edge of a cliff and then fall off because I'm no longer flying... but at least dracythyr always have Glide to save themselves. As there's been talk of giving druids a "Dragonriding mode" for their flight form, I wonder whether that'll also mean that dracthyr will eventually be able to fly the old-fashioned way as well.
There's also a new temporary Dragonriding race event, the Outland Cup. With my love of the Burning Crusade, you'd think I would have loved that too, but... eh. I think now that we can just use Dragonriding everywhere, the novelty of being able to do so in the races isn't quite there anymore. Plus each course is quite predictable at this point in that I'll be able to get gold on the normal race easily, but both reverse and advanced are so tightly tuned that it doesn't feel worth re-doing them over and over again just to eke out something better than bronze. I thought it was interesting that they changed the quest related to the event to actually require you to do all courses now instead of just three, while also significantly buffing the reward. This meant that for the first time, I was able to afford all the prizes after completing everything once instead of having to get on alts to earn more currency.
There's this new thing called the Azerothian Archives, which is a quest chain with some mini games vaguely related to archaeology - the concept that is, not the in-game profession, before anyone gets their hopes up. The quest line was enjoyable enough and I thought it was clever that it included visits to the Forbidden Reach and Zaralek Cavern, presumably in an effort to bring some life back into those mostly abandoned patch zones. As far as I can tell it seemed to work, because I could see that people were actually bumping off rares and picking up chests while they were there.
The mini games themselves all felt a bit weird though, like they were trying to put a new spin on archaeology by making it more complicated. As someone who quite likes archaeology as it is, I wasn't entirely convinced. I guess the proof will be in the pudding as to whether I'll spend any time on the world quests this unlocks. (So far it's just made me miss normal archaeology enough that I went on a bit of a surveying binge the next day.) There's also a new world event tied to all this, where everyone runs in circles as a giant crowd trying to tap mounds of dirt. Again, a bit weird.
There's also a quest chain to reclaim Gilneas, and while it's a nice enough quest by itself, the contrast between everything the night elves got to make up for the loss of Teldrassil (which only happened two expansions ago) and the way the worgen get Gilenas back after more than thirteen years is pretty stark. Basically, Gilneas has just kind of been taken over by the Scarlet Crusade somewhat randomly - so they could kick the Forsaken out, but we couldn't? Yet in turn the Scarlets are really easy to defeat as well, and it's basically all over before you've killed fifty mobs. And while Bel'ameth is clearly being built up to become a proper city with portals etc., the reclaimed Gilneas is just big and empty except for an innkeeper and a repair guy. A bit of a letdown, comparatively.
Story-wise, I thought it was kind of funny that my husband commented while we were doing this together that we'd never really seen much of Tess Greymane outside of worgen-specific quests, and then the cut scene had her telling Genn that while it's understandable that he's still mourning Liam and wanted to take Anduin under his wing, he does also have a daughter, you know... burn!
Also, is it me or did they change Genn's voice actor? I saw others bring this question up online but couldn't find confirmation either way. He definitely sounds very different at least.
Finally, this was also the patch that introduced follower dungeons, something I mentioned only briefly in my post about retail dungeoneering the other day. I've given at least one of them a try since then, which resulted in my husband getting regaled with a lot of live commentary mixed with delightful squealing and giggling. Honestly, I'd take these NPCs over a pug of real people any day. They're so polite, even waiting for me when I want to hang back to skin. The devs apparently tried to give some of them little quirks too, as I noticed that the resto druid NPC was bouncing around like a maniac throughout my entire run. That and the AI is just generally pretty good - I think I even saw Captain Garrick do a corner pull or two? Though she's not perfect, mind you, as was evidenced by her going off to day-dream during the last boss fight, just kind of standing around for a bit doing nothing while I tanked the boss as dps, until being hit by an AoE effect seemed to spur her back into action. Either way, I can highly recommend this mode. It doesn't give a ton of XP, but for pretty much every other purpose - seeing the dungeon, doing quests, getting loot - it seems far superior to doing normal dungeons with random people. And that's coming from me as someone who's not generally averse to pugs, but as I said previously, the normal dungeon experience in WoW is just too unattractive at this point.
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