First and foremost, howdy. Glad you’re having fun and hope you stick around. More the merrier and all that. Gonna get kind of lengthy with this post - will TL;DR it. But a couple of things first:
- “Current Expansion is garbage, expansion two expansions ago was way better.”
- WoW players generally react negatively to change.
- Blizzard re-invents the wheel often.
- Grinding and timegating are always controversial topics for WoW players.
There is always a crowd of people during each expansion that will claim “the current expansion is a complete and utter dumpster fire, the dev team has no idea what they’re doing, and the expansion two expansions ago CLEARLY was better and the height of the game.” These people will tell you that the game is going to die “soon™” or that another MMO will finally kill WoW. This is something that’s been said since 2008 and probably before and will always be said. So buckle up: you’ll see this in Shadowlands too.
But one thing folks tend to agree on is the cycle of quality for expansions. Granted, this is all entirely subjective, but the general pattern has been that after the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, there’s been this pattern of a good expansion being followed by a less-good expansion, followed by a good expansion, and so on. *“Wrath was spectacular, but Cata felt like a weak follow up. Mists was a better expansion than Cata, but then Warlords was way worse than Mists. Legion was way better than Warlords, so BfA will be worse than Legion.”
Every expansion has flaws. Sometimes some glaring ones that can really tarnish the experience, but as far as features go and the overall feel, Legion was leagues better than Warlords, which…heh, man, you missed nothing during Warlords. Seriously. Because nothing happened. You want to know what a real bad expansion looks like? Imagine if instead of getting Ny’alotha this patch, you got a selfie camera toy with twitter integration, a few updates to the mission table, and that’s all. Imagine if Blizzard gave you that and said “Yep, our work here is done. Good content patch, guys. Bravo.” Because that’s how things were in WoD. So Legion was the good expansion that was loved by many, but given Blizzard’s previous track record, lots of folk were preparing for the worst. Me personally? I was concerned, but when I could play the full version of the game, I was surprised. I was expecting something along the lines of Warlord’s levels of bad, but I still had things to log on and play.
Me, I think it’s alright, but part of that is because I’m playing more casually these days. I usually log in, do my emissary, some other World Quests that are along the way to my goal (love doing things on the road), some dailies, a mythic or two, and then log off. For the player who’s more hardcore, there’s a bit more bogging things down. Like it’s been said in the thread already, the systems get really messy when you try to perfect a character. You have to work on progressing your neck, then there’s getting your right Azerite traits. That used to be it, but then essences came out and while some of those effects were great, you have to have the right rank of the essence which can take weeks to get. Per character. Toss the cloak progression on that and some people feel there’s “too much to do.” It can be a little overwhelming if you’re trying to be your very best.
Here’s something a friend of mine told me when we were discussing the neck grind: I play the game more casually. For my neck’s level, I’ve never been too far behind my friends in regards of what level it is. Now that it goes up continuously, there’s a bit of pressure to keep progressing it, because when you’re fighting a boss and you’re down to the wire, nothing is worse than wiping at 1% , because maybe, just maybe if your DPS was higher, you would have gotten a boss kill, and that’s a pretty crap feeling. To get it that high though, the game requires you to spend hours upon hours each week to have the optimal neck and azerite level. It used to be that all that mattered was the gear that you got from dungeons and raids. There wasn’t any additional pressure to work on progressing something other than getting the highest item level, so the game requires a lot more work now than it once did, and for some people who want to push the highest level content? That can be a major buzzkill.
Some systems are alright at least. It used to be that if you wanted some sweet effects from your gear, you had to raid and hope that your tier set pieces would drop and that you’d win the roll/be given the gear, so you were at the mercy of RNG. Azerite gear was meant to replace that, so now you have a broader selection of options to choose from when picking perks, and it’s not exclusive to raiding. M+ can be just as rewarding.
But speaking of RNG, Corruption. Hooooooo boy corruption. I like the whole balance between risk and reward concept, but the fact that corruption is awarded randomly and so much of your DPS can come from sheer luck isn’t cool.
Essences were a good way to spice things up, but the way to get rank-ups is a bit lengthy. Not so bad the first time, and there is a sense of accomplishment and progression when you finally get that rank 3…but when you realize you have to do it again? That’s when it should really be account-bound.
