Overall my impression of this expansion is very positive. I think there are a few areas with opportunities for improvement, and one area in particular that I think is actually bad.
First the good things so they don’t get lost: I like the story, I like the new zones, I enjoyed the raid a lot. Every spec I’ve played has been the best version of itself I’ve seen.
Now, onto areas of improvement.
Delves
I really like the concept of delves. It’s the first iteration, so I wouldn’t expect them to be perfect.
I raid regularly in a heroic guild, and that gives me 6 hours of social WoW time per week. I can’t dedicate much more time than that to doing structured group content in a week, and pugging M+ is a famously awful. Ridiculously long wait times, high failure rates, high chance of encountering toxic people. Delves are in theory a great way to play some challenging content, but avoiding a lot of that pain. I’ve enjoyed calmly getting a lot of my alts full heroic gear just from solo content. It’s also a great way to pick up new specs without having to immediately go and perform for a group.
Where I think they could improve is really just the quality of the individual delves. We have lots of delves, but it feels a lot more like 4 delves in terms of flavour. They are poorly balanced at the moment - I could do higher delves on my 560 tank than I could on my 610 DPS. Some of the challenges/puzzles are a little bit tedious I find.
But my main criticism would be a lack of top-end skill expression. Players again and again express positive feedback for the mage tower and for visions of nzoth. These were things that could be very challenging or very easy depending on your character progression. They were something you could work towards as a solo player with rewards that helped you stay motivated in the face of failure. Delves don’t feel like that - they feel like a pretty free way to get good loot, which is arbitrarily capped at tier 8.
I really think visions of nzoth were the best solo thing they’ve ever released in this game. It was hard, but not because all the mobs did tons of damage and had tons of health. And it wasn’t hard like M+, because you have infinite casters to kick and mechanics to manage. It was hard because it was unforgiving - the correct plays were clear and very achievable, but it didn’t give you room for mistakes. I think that’s a pretty good angle to approach difficulty from.
Open world
The open world is beautiful. I like it a lot. All the zones are full of flavour and feel great. However, I do find there’s just nothing that compelling there to draw my attention after the leveling process, which these days is very short. This is a really tough one because it goes back a long way and isn’t specific to this expansion, but I think this one has the best shot to address it.
I think the little titan discs that are scattered around the world are a really nice touch, and I think they need to do way more of that kind of thing. There should be reasons to spend time in the world, exploring it. Reasons to get off your mount and have a careful look around. Dangerous enemies that make you wonder what they’re protecting. Precious treasures or mounts that spawn at random locations and times. Little lore Easter eggs scattered around the place. Things that make it feel worth your while to spend time in the world just looking around. World quests that give you 300g or some explorer gear just don’t stay interesting to anyone for very long.
Professions
Another system that I think has improved a lot but has had a few issues. I think the concentration system has had some strengths - it means that all the profits aren’t just swallowed up by a small number of ultra-optimised people. At the same time though… It kind of means there isn’t really much profit to be found in any high quality items. Most of the crafting profits made in this expansion have been from people churning out huge numbers of low quality items at tiny margins, I’d wager. If you take the more satisfying route of optimising a character for making high quality consumables say, you quickly find that you’re basically slightly more profitable than someone who just picked up the profession yesterday, because the only thing that is really valuable is concentration. Being able to craft rank 3 flasks is not really worth much, it’s effectively just a concentration discount. You lose money if you craft these items without concentration, even if you are completely optimised for the task. Perhaps it will change once gatherers are all fully optimised to find rank 3 resources, but it seems doubtful, and it would still be pretty weird.
I’m not sure what the solution is, but I don’t think that’s an ideal place for professions to be. It removes all the roleplaying fun of getting really good at a particular part of a profession (the stated goal of the new system) and instead incentivises creating loads of poorly optimised, faceless concentration alts.
Gearing
Finally, there is one area of the game at the moment that I think doesn’t just need to be improved, but actually overhauled. It actively puts me off of playing the game. And that’s the gear reward systems.
As other people in thread have said, this season has been pretty awful for gearing. You can pretty much get a character to full champion or full heroic gear in a week or two, depending how hard to try. However if you want to max out your heroic gear or push for mythic gear, it’s then an endless slog dependent heavily on luck. The only way around this is to do mythic raiding, which is just not on the cards for most people.
I know some people will say “well why do you need mythic gear if you’re not doing the mythic raid?”. It’s a fair point. But I’ll say because it feels bad in a fantasy role playing game to have your fantasy character’s power limited by real-world logistical constraints, like finding 19 other good players with a compatible raiding schedule. It’s a real downer. Conversely, it feels great when your character is really powerful, and “completed”. Why does anyone else have an opinion about how good my gear should be allowed to get?
I’ve accepted that with my level of dedication to the game and my complete lack of desire to pug M+, my characters are effectively capped at 620 or so - basically full hero gear upgraded up to the runed crest cap. What few gilded crests I get from the last two raid bosses, I’ll put into getting 636 crafted gear. It just feels needlessly ungenerous. There is also absolutely no reason for the valorstone system to exist, in my opinion. It’s just another tax the player has to pay to do what they want.
On the journey to my effective cap of 620, my characters will first rocket to 603 or whatever it is from tier 8 delves. Then I might have some luck from the heroic raid and get some runed crest crafted gear from renown. So maybe I’ll be at around 610 in the first two weeks after hitting 80. Then it’s a slow slog of waiting for vault slots to come in and hope for some luck.
I suspect the purpose of “nerfing” the tail end of gearing is to keep people playing longer because they rely on the vault, but ironically every person I know has basically just stopped playing because it’s not fun to do a bunch of content to see if the reward you get happens to be something you want a week later. Don’t get me wrong, vault day can be a great dopamine hit, especially if you’ve got a whole warband of characters opening juicy vaults. But there needs to be more upfront reward as well - the vault should be more of a bonus in my opinion.
This all feels especially bad considering this is the most alt-friendly expansion ever. For me the gearing experience would be perfect if it took around 1 month to get a character to, say 630, with some final slots to fill in or upgrade over the rest of the season. The way I would play that would be to get my main to 630, then put him on the backburner and fire up my first alt, and work on getting him to 630, and so on for 4 or 5 characters. That loop would probably keep me interested and invested for the whole season. Instead, I played for a month, got my main to 620ish, then got a few alts to 610, realised I’d basically just be doing a bunch of work to play vault roulette once per week, looked around and realised there wasn’t much else to do (profession markets all degenerate, no mage tower, etc.) and just basically stopped playing.
Tl;dr: I think this expansion is really, really good. But there a few unfortunate mis-steps that I think are a real problem. If they can correct those for the next season that would be amazing - then I think they just have to iterate on the already great work they’ve been doing for the next expansion to bring the game to heights it’s never reached before. I’m very hopeful for the future but they really need to look the gearing/vault situation carefully and open up the top end of skill expression for more casual and solo players, like they’ve done in the past with visions of nzoth and mage tower.
