By now I'm rather convinced Legion is the last xpac.
Artifacts.
It won't make much sense to replace them with anything, especially after the whole trait farm. They have a sense of finality. A strong sense of finality. Either you keep the same weapon for the next N xpacs, or this is it. If anything sounds any worse than "this is it", it's keeping a maxed out Legion artifact for the rest of your WoW days. A short questline to "absord the power of your artifact" and effectively keep the talent tree but free the weapon slot - now that would be so cheesy I'd rather hope even Blizzard would do something else instead.
Zones.
As I have already said on MMOC: each levelling zone of the Broken Isles, perhaps with the exception of Highmountain, is a scrapped xpac. Light's Heart's content is another, scrapped, Titan xpac.
Caving in but keeping grudges.
Blizz gave up on a lot for Legion. So now everyone gets an Ashbringer, a Doomhammer, a Felo'melorn. Level scaling is finally in, years after better game developers showed us how it's done. Shared tagging of common mobs is finally in, years after better game developers showed us how it's done. The first promisingly orcless xpac is finally in.
Every piece comes with a lot of Blizdev butthurt copiously expressed in details.
So everyone gets a Doomhammer. Which is an Enh weapon while Ele gets some claws. Some dev must have creamed his pants when he got that past QA.
Pallies get the Ashbringer, death knights get some anonymous shit. To be allowed to gather shards of Frostmourne, frosties get locked into DW style but with playstyle revolving around the all-time 2H favourite, Obliterate. Wut.
With the artifact attunement, pre-Panda talent trees are back. Because they should never have been removed and even Blizdevs were made to see it. Oh, but you'll have to level each of them separately while completion of class questline seems to require obtaining every last one, even if, like my GF, you have no interest whatsoever in some of your class' specs (in her case any non-Resto shammy, fortunately she doesn't give half a fuck about Doomhammer while myself I think I'll be getting all of them shammy weapons).
Level scaling got implemented in a way which makes it half a blessing and half a curse with stat scaling and xp-scrooging that makes every zone compulsory for every alt and playstyle progressively less rewarding as you give up the HFC raiding gear piece by piece and finally break the sets. Hopefully non-raiding folks don't get this sense of levelling up making them progressively weaker.
Shared tagging got introduced to the game about 6 years too late. Compare behaviour of players in GW2 and in Legion and you'll get my meaning. I think the most enjoyable aspect for Blizdevs is skinning and skinner-trolling, so popular among the faithful WoW playerbase and already gloated about on the good old MMOC. As if converting skins to drops that require Skinning skill was particularly difficult. Once again, Blizdevs do get forced to acknowledge superiority of mechanics used as a matter of course by better MMO makers, but when they do finally ape it, they do their best to poison the begrudged gift as virulently as possible.
Garrisons 2.0 also show a lovely mix of good and plain sucky. Devs clearly dumped a long shitton of time into their WoD version, with all the expanding and upgrading and pimping up. They forgot that their most apologetic fanbase sections are ways too sociopathic to ever appreciate a major feature completely preventing them from most of the griefing. Every single newbscrub got his own mine and his own herb garden. Unforgivable. The hate boiled, with the surface excuse of empty world where people sat in garrisons because they were forced to. As if they had any incentive to go out. Also, before the release, garrisons were implied to be customizable to great degree including location and so on.
So now we have new and better garrisons: each in a different place and accessed in different ways. DKs can go to directly their order hall at will, others... not so easily. Garrison campaign is finally actually mandatory by gating the third relic slot, but we're no longer all alone in our garprisons. Now that you're the world leader of paladins, clearly indicated by the legendary Ashbringer slung across your light-worshipping back, you go to your garrison table surrounded by 30 other world leaders of paladins with identical Ashbringers slung across their backs. The level of interaction and socializing between the world leaders is exactly the same as between The Generals in Garrison 1.0, just rubbed in the critics' faces con gusto. However - it doesn't seem like you're getting the resource nodes, so you can fully appreciate another flightless xpac. Finally, forget the free gold factory. Har, har.
In short, in almost every aspect of mechanics there is a huge cave-in and a huge middle finger. As if making the final "reconciliation" with the playerbase by fulfilling all the wishes in a way that makes people wish they never wished. That final, all-encompassing have your toys and now fuck off forever.
This is The End.
Also, the sky is falling.
Infracted