The only well designed idea this expansion is War Mode. Everything else is pretty awful. The RNG on top of RNG with azerite gear is horrific, having to hope for a drop and then HOPE that the actual traits are good. You could have a 370 piece drop and actually be WORSE than a 325 if one has good traits and the other has bad ones. That's a 45 ilvl difference. Absolutely insane. Sometimes you'll even get a piece of azerite gear that would be better, but it's gated behind an arbitrary number that you have to grind WQs for, so you have to grind for that drop to actually matter. What?
The azerite system itself is terrible, very few abilities are actually interesting, most are just passive things that boost damage/healing/survivability. Keep in mind, this is the system that is suppose to replace item set bonuses, artifact powers and legendaries. They removed a truckload of class flavor and abilities with the artifact system, real baby with the bathwater scenario. For a lot of specs, generic traits are the best. There's always a statistically superior trait, and stacking that x3 is always the best thing to do. It's the entire reason they removed the (fantastic, deep) talent tree system after WotLK, and they just implemented it. The only time it might get slightly more interesting is in PvP, where things flow much differently than PvE and thus some traits have a lot more value. Even there it's less "Oh wow, this trait would be good for PvP" and more "Hmm, this trait would actually be awful for PvP, better use something else".
Warfronts are horribly boring because of a couple reasons. First reason is that you can't actually lose them. Well, I guess technically you could but you'd have to have the entire raid afk, because one person can win the entire thing given enough time. You can spend the entire time just running around collecting resources for like 15 minutes and then fight for 2 minutes at the gate and win. This would be tolerable, except that you can get geared for Uldir if you farm this for a couple days. Literally doing nothing. Mythics are at the very least challenging, and you aren't even guaranteed a piece from running one. Warfronts give you a 370 piece (mine titanforged into a 385) for doing one the first cycle, and then mythic equivalents every time. Guaranteed. Broken system, obviously.
Island Expeditions...oh god. They introduced a Diablo 3 style map system with none of the reasons people play Diablo 3. People are doing 5-6 of these for the weekly azerite in like an hour and then ignoring it until it resets. My god is that hour the most boring shit you've experienced.
That's it. I've listed the new features of this expansion. War Mode is great, the rest is abysmal. You could even say there are zero good things this expansion, if you don't like world PvP. It makes a great first impression with the leveling (just like WoD did, hmm) and then once you hit max level and start getting into the end game, you realize how horrifically shallow and poorly done it all is.
My sub runs out on the 25th. I'm not renewing.
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