I personally hate it. I think this is going to be a sleeper expansion for me. They simultaneously have nothing to do while obsessing over making sure the things you can do, you don’t do too fast, which just results in milling around waiting for nothing.
Worst starter PvP season in a while and the fact they let some specs - let alone entire classes - just go mostly unplayable until a month before it ends is a huge joke on the “We care about PvP this expansion” comments.
War Mode is boring. The only time there’s any action is when someone from WrA or MG manages to drag a 40 man Tichondrius raid or something to our shard after dying, and dying, and dying and being so bad they need Off Worlders to save them.
Uldir has no narrative hook for me and the color palette puts me to sleep.
Dungeons were clearly designed with spectator events like the MDI in mind and got old fast.
Island Expeditions are surprisingly the most fun for me, but that’s because they remind me of old Challenge Rifts in D3.
Allied Races means nothing to me because I main two Death Knights.
Tanking on any class other than Blood DK feels like an exercise in self-directed penance and so they’re nerfing Blood DK without actually improving the others. While we already have one of the most crippling tank droughts for casual / semi casual content in a long time.
Warfronts were good but replayability isn’t there at 340 items. Hopefully Heroic actually is worth running.
Not having any control over the forward progression of my character other than the occasional +2 item level on my neckpiece is utterly ignorant game design. No combination of Exalted reputations or professions allows you to give yourself a leg up above 340/few 350s which has already become the epitome of the welfare item level. They’re barely rectifying this in the next patch (professions) and just collecting your weekly “Ohh, better luck next time!” currency like they did for Legendaries towards the end to buy items off the upcoming vendor wasn’t fun then and isn’t fun now.
Azerite equipment is the same traits, single spot perks, artifact abilities, and talent points they’ve torn out of the game, re-wrapped and handed back to us going “This is new!”
Recruiting “Doers” on the Alliance side is a nightmare and more and more guilds are slowly, quietly going off life support when it comes to larger group content.
I’m interested to see how they walk back from this one. I’ll believe them when they say they aren’t deliberately driving the game into the ground because I think that would require a degree of ruthless intelligence and end goal I don’t think they’re capable of, but I do genuinely believe the World of Warcraft team is being horribly mismanaged either from a middle management or upper management level that only cares about MAUs to show investors to get just one more year of salary than “We make games we want you to want to play.”
Bonus, I’m also just sick of Sylvanas. I never found her to be this amazingly complex character from playing the games and she was right up there with Illidan on “Parts of WarCraft 3 I Hated” and to basically have her skirt ‘we killed better characters for less’ over and over was confusing until the last interview where Afrasiabi practically rolled his head back and moaned thinking about how great she is to write. Now I just know she’s not going anywhere for awhile and probably never will just slowly grinds down any hope that the story is going to get better. So it’s just a gameplay game. Except the gameplay is getting pretty stale to me so…