Alright, I’ve hit 80 earlier today on my main and did various max level stuff.
I also made a little bit of a start on this character (but not much yet).
The good:
I loved the campaign whilst leveling. It was fast paced, had plenty of cutscenes and I actually found the vast majority of it interesting.
I love the Isle of Dorn and Hallowfall. Both are very thematic and I very much enjoy their aesthetics.
I’ve liked or loved basically every character they’ve introduced here. I won’t go into detail because of spoilers, but I was pleasantly surprised.
The EA itself is going very smooth. Hardly any issues (see below for a bit more on that).
The bad:
I’m not a fan of the other 2 zones; The Ringing Deeps and Azj-Kahet, but honestly that’s no big surprise to me. I do dislike Azj-Kahet even more than I had anticipated and find the zone very oppressive; so much so that I’m contemplating just skipping any events and WQs there because (and that brings me to my 2nd ‘bad’) …
Renown is pretty worthless. There’s not much there, for me at least, that I find worth grinding for. So I won’t do that except for the Arathi, because that armor set is simply gorgeous. But basically everything else is just not that interesting to me.
Some of the voice acting sounded extremely sub-par to me (no details at this time because of spoilers).
The ugly:
For some weird reason The Ringing Deeps has been lagging like crazy, while I’ve not had any issues in the other zones.
I had to do an ‘unstuck service request’ because my character fell through the world when I used the teleport from Azj-Kahet to Dornogal and I couldn’t log in anymore as I got auto disconnected every time. Not a big issue because it’s easily resolved, but a blemish on an otherwise near perfect launch for me.
And lastly I want to address the elephant in the room:
Delves.
Yeah. I don’t dislike them. BUT… I dislike some of the mechanics used.
And I think they’re a teensy bit overtuned; I did some today and did them at the recommended difficulty level for my ilvl.
Now; don’t get me wrong: It wasn’t hard. It was just tedious.
Stuff took ages to die and this made the delve take way too long for my taste; I was in there for 30-45 minutes sometimes. That’s not the experience they’ve been selling us - which was; bitesize experiences of 15-ish minutes.
My feeling at the moment is that they’re too much hassle for what they reward.
I can do a normal dungeon in less than 20 minutes and have a far more relaxed gaming experience at this time.
Doing delves was genuinely quite taxing compared to the type of endgame I’ve been experiencing for the last decade (that being; heroic dungeons and LFR mainly). And I think that’s an issue with tuning. So in that regard, I’m just not convinced it’s worth doing them for me (unless I completely overgear it, but that then completely defeats the purpose).
And keep in mind: All of this is from the viewpoint of a BM Hunter.
I’m sure there’s classes who have it much much worse.
I’m looking forward to getting full access to things; The EA is a bit limited in some ways - and that’s understandable. But after 1 day I’m already thinking about just leveling my first alt (this character) because there’s not a whole lot to do (not that I’ve done all the sidequests in all the zones yet, but I’m spreading that out; making sure I’ll have stuff to do for a while).
