Probably 2.5?
I only played it since 9.1 so I can’t comment on the early months but there’s a fair few things that I dislike and there’s also a few things that I think are really good, or steps towards something really good. I’ll try to sum it up, even though no one really cares what I think.
The Bad:
Legendaries. I think it’s silly that a crafted item is so impactful when it comes to character power, and that (depending on class) you may need from 1 to 5+ legendaries if you want to play all aspects of your class. Some classes can use one “all purpose” legendary for nearly all of their content while others will need several legendaries for a single spec - they might need a single target legendary, a cleave legendary and an all out AoE legendary. Then there’s legendaries needed for off specs. It’s also an issue when it comes to alts - the first thing you need to do when you get a fresh 60 alt is basically buy two 291 legendary base items for your spec legendary and Unity. Then farm ZM for Cosmic Flux (luckily there’s several “one time” treasures that give 200 flux so you can basically use these to get at least both your 291 legendaries crafted which is nice) even though I have more flux than I’ll ever need on my main toons.
The Story: Obviously, the story is quite weak. It all feels like it doesn’t matter, with the minor exception of the Sylvanas arc. That is almost entirely the only “meaningful” (and that’s using generous language) part of the story. Everything is happening in a realm created this expansion, with a villain who was created and destroyed within this expansion. And unlike MoP which did the same thing (well, there was SOME lore I think regarding the MoP stuff I think? But I certainly wasn’t aware of it the same way I was about Illidan, Arthas, Deathwing, N’zoth, Azshara etc) at least that was on Azeroth and felt more grounded. I also feel like if they were going to take the whole afterlife route then we should have had a larger amount of dead characters from past expansions etc as dungeon/raid bosses and interacting in the story. I know there was some, and this is entirely subjective. I liked the thing with Ysera and Draka, but I just think it was a bit of a missed opportunity. Also, I truly truly expected Varian’s soul to help break the binding on Anduin but the little cutscene we got of his “spirit” or whatever wasn’t very satisfying. It seemed like it was all in his head, whereas I think it would’ve been neat to have him actually appear.
Some aspects of Covenants, namely the difference in power between them for some classes and how some combinations are essentially mandatory (Hello Venthyr and Demon Hunter). I believe Covenants should have been 99% cosmetic/story based.
The huge amount of overlapping systems and borrowed power. It’s too much, and your class essentially feels lacking without them. With Covenant abilities, two legendaries, two tier set bonuses, soulbinds and conduits… it’s just too much of our toolkit locked up in temporary systems. It seems like they are cognizant of this and willing to address it in Dragonflight though, so I’m cautiously optimistic.
Also I just realized that this post is gonna get LONG if I start listing everything so I’ll just move onto a couple of things that I did enjoy.
The Good:
Titanforging, or the lack thereof. I hated Titanforging for several reasons. One of the things that I enjoy in RPGs is getting the absolute best possible stuff for my character and maxing them out. This was essentially impossible with Titanforging. And even if you can’t get full best-in-slot for everything, titanforging just felt bad. Because you’d kill that boss and check the corpse and OMG, the item you were chasing for weeks finally dropped! But… it didn’t warforge, or titanforge, or even proc a socket! So it’s rubbish. People can argue that it gave an incentive to run content or help friends with lower difficulty stuff because of the potential for upgrades but as someone who was trying for CE throughout most of BFA it just meant that you felt obligated to spam every possible difficulty of certain activities. Doing LFR Ashvane every week hoping you’d get a Coral that would Titanforge to Heroic or Mythic level was stupid.
The Great Vault. Big improvement on the weekly cache. Not much else to say.
Raider dot io type score being added was cool. It’s a much better indicator of competency than item level, but it could definitely do with some expansion. Stats like number of keys run, timed, etc etc. You could have a pop-up window or tab in their inspect window where it gives a bunch of their dungeon stats. Things like keys completed between x difficulty, keys timed between x difficulty, keys left before completion, best run of each dungeon, etc etc.
Some aspects of Covenants. A lot of the cosmetics were neat, and it’s obvious a lot of work went into making the covenants and their respective zones feel fleshed out and unique. I also quite liked how certain covenants would give a small bonus in dungeons located within their home zone.
Reasonably generous catch-up/alt friend mechanics. While there’s still a fair way to go in terms of being truly alt-friendly (account wide rep, I’m looking at you. That and Legendaries, of course) it’s nice to be able to hit 60 and be able to deck yourself out in crafted gear or ZM account-bound anima gear (or a mix, usually) and then jump straight into current content. You can kill ZM rares for small upgrades initially, and upgrade your Cypher console for up to 252 gear eventually. You can then hop straight into LFR and low level Mythic dungeons, and the Creation Catalyst allows you to get your tier set bonuses as quickly as you can acquire an item from Season 3. Also the Sandworn Relic gear serves as a good ‘bad luck protection’ system where if you can’t get a certain tier slot to drop then you can save up over a week or so and get a 246 item to convert to tier. Once again though, it’s frustrating that I have about 1500 relics on each of my toons that played 9.2 early and I have absolutely zero use for them. Maybe making them account-wide would be over-powered but maybe if there a 3 to 1 cost? You spend 3 relics to buy 1 “account bound” relic? I don’t know.
Anyway, I could go on for another few pages but I’ll stop there. I think I’ll actually change my score to a 3 out of 5. It’s worse than BFA (which I thought wasn’t as bad as people say, although I definitely had my issues with it - BFA had great content but awful systems essentially, and burned through story WAY too quickly) but it’s not terrible. I know no one is going to read this but it was actually quite helpful to get some of my thoughts out on this expac.