It's Shit
It's lit
Levelling felt a bit fast but that was good considering a lot of it were the same old quests formats.
Enjoying the less busy work approach. Torghast is fun, yet to do dungeons
“My philosophy is: It’s none of my business what people say of me and think of me. I am what I am and I do what I do. I expect nothing and accept everything. And it makes life so much easier.”
― Anthony Hopkins
The zones are all pretty awesome, it's nice to see the art department let loose with full on, ultra-high fantasy settings. I also really like the concept, exploring the afterlife is really cool even if it's existentially terrifying from an RP perspective.
Questing has been quite fun, more on rails than the last few expansions but not quite as bad Cataclysm. There's a lot of walking-and-talking to get exposition and I find myself sometimes interrupting NPCs when they're about to give some more background info. When it works it works to improve atmosphere but it isn't perfect.
Only done a couple of dungeons but they seem alright so far, strike a nice balance between players needing to pay a bit of attention to mechanics but they don't wipe you instantly when you mess up.
+ disc feels good so far, shadow has never been so fun to play, FINALLY they gave up on the shitcluster voidform
+ artworks are wonderful, even green questing gear looked great on my character
+ Torghast is pretty fun, layer 3 endboss was fairly challenging as disc
+ storytelling is great
- professions... they sounded good, but once again everything interesting is put behind timegates or rep grinds, turning many of the options like item level boost pointless
- questing experience is SOOO ON RAIL, there is zero replay value, I'm already afraid of playing alts, all these unskippable RPs and escorts are going to kill me
- all the dungeons were meh or just plain annoying/boring so far
- some WQs are just too long
I haven't bought it yet either (doubt I will), and I get the same impression. Its just not there. Not surprising, however. WoW has taken a major down turn since Cataclysm, with a small exception nod going to MoP (perhaps Legion? I dunno). One thing I wouldn't do is look forward to 'next xpac' to bring back WoW to its former glory.
As of now, WoW needs move to purchase to play mode, and not purchase AND pay a sub fee. It's gotten far too linear and watered down to demand both expansion purchase price and sub fees.
I recall the days when people used to flock to buy the new expansion, and gladly paid the sub fee. The general excitement was off the chart (ala TBC, Wotlk, even cataclysm). Sad really, what WoW has fallen to.
The world revamp dream will never die!
It's not too bad. Atleast the storyline/leveling. Starting to get a little old for me already at the end game. With titanforges gone, made it harder to reach the heroic queues. They added alot of content, but took away any convenience (have fun being chased by annoying trash everywhere).
About the best part was going though the entire 10 levels without swapping out nearly any gear.
Exactly what i'm feeling. WQs feel pretty terrible, with really bad rewards. The covenant sets have a crazy low base ilvl, it's like we're back to only doing dungeons and raids (or PvP) for gear, which is fine in a way, but maybe they should just remove the gear rewards from world quests if they are so extremely low.
Of my 8 friends still playing , 3 have already quit because classes still feel like shit and they hated the on rails leveling. The other 5 are mixed. 2 think it's it just so so but better than BFA. The rest are bored at 60 and hate Torghast and the Maw . But they all say the artwork is great , except the gear
Non nobis Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam
It's lit, BUT - I can't say how much: we have to wait some time to find out. You can't judge an xpac by week 1, talk to me week 10
The artistry has always been fairly well done. Although some of the ingame cinematics seem more cartoonish these days.
It depends on how you liked BfA
There’s no constant grind
Gear has BiS instead of TF lottery
Professions are useful even inscription
Weekly quests like dungeons
No flight whistle
No “kill this one mob” dailies
Longer WQ
Fewer flight points
No mount in the maw unless you get the drop
My only complaint right now is the flight whistle being gone. I'm hoping the upgrades we get to the travel networks will at least alleviate that some.
It's really too early to say how good the expansion is. Overall, I've been enjoying myself with it so far, but it's all new stuff. The question is can it remain enjoyable, something that BFA, for example, struggled with. But if you want "snap" takes:
The Good
The questing feels a tad more varied this time. There seems to be more breaks in the "2-3 quests, involving some combination of kill X mobs/kill a named mob/collect X items" pattern that Blizzard has become increasingly reliant on over the past few xpacs, usually with some sort of vehicle-based quest. It still does feel a bit formulaic, but not as much as BFA was.
Atmospherically, they did a solid job on the zones. Even if almost everything is thematically recycled (e.g. Maldraxxus being basically a modernized Plagueland zone), it's all done well enough where I can excuse it.
The randomness of Torghast feels like what IEs should have been. Even if RNG can only do so much, the floors in the tower are much more varied than the island maps, where only the mobs and clickables where altered on every different run of the same map. Apparently it's also a blast with friends, but that's just word-of-mouth from guildies .
Gear crafting professions are actually worthwhile again, after being basically dead for at least 2 expansions.
Speaking of gear, the lowered amount of RNGforging was a step in the right direction, even if it cost a lowered amount of drops.
And speaking of steps in the right direction, the Great Vault is a big upgrade from the Challenger's Cache of the past 2 expansions. I can at least say that without having touched one.
The Night Fae covenant theater quest is 11/10, and is more proof that Blizzard is at their best when they're poking fun at themselves (See also: The 2006 and 2010 April Fool's patch notes, before they started leaning more on WHACKY pop culture references)
The Bad
While this isn't at all the fault of this expansion's design, the economy has effectively become completely busted thanks to the increasing prominence of boosting communities. Great news for gatherers, but bad news for anyone intent on leveling crafting professions.
While I generally don't mind the thematics or mechanics of the new dungeons, they feel a bit trash-heavy compared to the past few expansions. Like Blizzard saw Motherlode and thought "Yeah, that's a good dungeon model". I have a feeling it was a choice made with M+ in mind, but I still can't say I'm the biggest fan.
WQs feel more "sloggy" than BFA's did. While part of this can be explained with poorer gear not allowing for huge, quick pulls, or flying being a thing, it feels like, even accounting for that, they just take a whole lot longer in general.
The Ugly
The number of systems, hoo boy. Even if someone goes into this expansion fresh, there's an obscene amount of things to soak in, especially this early on. It's probably on par with 8.3, and that was at least several months into BFA. I feel bad for new players just stepping into this xpac.
Staying power is a huge concern. Just because something's enjoyable early on, doesn't mean it will still be enjoyable weeks, if not months out. BFA's features suffered particularly badly from this, and why the early ones were more or less abandoned mid-xpac. The biggest concern in this regard is Torghast, which will be a central point of character progression for a long time to come.
All in all, a good start, with some room to keep things that way. Get back to me in a couple months.
Arcane Mage ... it is just the last boss in floor 6/difficulty 3 that is unbeatable.
Up to the boss is hard, but I got to it in around 90 minutes... with 5 deaths available, but not a chance in hell of getting him down.
- - - Updated - - -
Been replaced by other systems ... no issues so far with that.
Challenge Mode : Play WoW like my disability has me play:
You will need two people, Brian MUST use the mouse for movement/looking and John MUST use the keyboard for casting, attacking, healing etc.
Briand and John share the same goal, same intentions - but they can't talk to each other, however they can react to each other's in game activities.
Now see how far Brian and John get in WoW.