Remember this tweet from Holinka, one month before Blizzcon?
What exactly is he so proud of or excited about? During Blizzcon I haven't seen anything that would warrant this excitement. Not one thing.
- Unpruning classes by giving them back skills they barely use (e.g. Frostbolt for Fire Mages, Fire Totem for Resto Shaman etc.) is a nice fluff but nothing groundbreaking.
- In Shadowlands we don't get a new talent row, it all stays the same with seven rows as we have it right now. This means no new talent row for the third expansion in a row, the last time we got a new row was 2014 with WoD. This means after Shadowlands we played 7 years without a new talent row although 30 new levels were added.
- Class revamps are nowhere near as massive as they were with Legion because they deemed this as "not necessary". For some specs it might be true but many specs play so bland and boring that revamps are even needed more than before Legion (e.g. Shadowpriests, they've been perfectly fine before Legion and then been ruined and only became worse in BfA, the same about Resto Shamans and several other specs).
- Compared to Covenants even Azerite traits look exciting. Covenants are Reputations with glorified Essences plus a pretty useless "fun" ability for mobility or movement; the passive talent trees (Soulbinds) are just boring passives, the main reason why they got rid of talent trees in the first place. It's not bad, it's just completely uncreative and shallow.
So the only thing left to be excited for are self-craftable legendaries, something they only mentioned briefly and didn't even give us an example of an effect. Remember, in Legion most Legendaries were not only class but spec-specific and we had dozens of them for each class. If they do this for craftable legendaries it's huge but based on the effort they seem to put into class and combat design in Shadowlands I'd rather expect Prydaz & Sephus level of class-unspecific craftable legendaries (I know in his example Ion used the Fire Mage bracers yet that might have been just that, an example).
The Ion panel and the deep dive yesterday were incredibly lackluster and shy of - at least - some details, so there might be more to come. But what exactly are the things to be excited about when it comes to the area Holinka is lead designer, combat & class design? I really want to know.
Shadowlands looks like an amazing expansion for customization, the art team is nailing it as it always does,
but when it comes to gameplay - as of now - it looks like it's incredibly lacking.