The last time I had played World of Warcraft was when the last expansion came out. I found that the systems it added to the game (garrisons, more tough enemies in the world for you to get special resources and loot from, more story-driven quest lines) was a step in an interesting direction. With this new edition of yet another grinding session, WoW tried to keep piling up more of the same on top of a core game that was filleted down to the thinnest it can get before becoming more of a button mashing contest than a proper MMORPG.
When you get to level 98, the game tells you to go do some invasion quests where you'll go through a big story beat with other players in order to stop the burning legion, invading once more. It was a neat distraction, and the offered loot to do so surpassed all of my gear by orders of magnitude. After a few more quests of the same style, the game sent me to the broken isles, where everything is scaled to your level so you can play the zones in the order that you want. This was nice, but after a very short while of getting new gear, everything was a joke. Either I could defeat a ton of enemies at once, or kill tougher foes by spending my cooldowns, either I could simply run away, I didn't die once during my whole time with Legion. It's nice to scale things around the player, but don't flatten the difficulty so much as to make it irrelevant.
You quickly find your Order when you get to the new expansion, a gallery of characters from your class that you might recognize and care about, and this is where you'll pick up special quests, send followers to missions - identical in mechanics to the garrisons of Warlords of Draenor - and research upgrades. It's a nice thing, world-building wise, but it became annoying really fast to go back to this secret place every time I wanted to move on with my order. Using the mobile app allowed me to send followers on missions remotely from anywhere in the world, so I'm not sure why I couldn't do that in-game. The big deal here is your artefact weapon, a legendary arm that levels as you do, unlocking a new skill tree of sort for your character, with class-appropriate abilities.
Which is a good thing, since they've watered down WoW so much from it's old days where now you have the bare minimum number of options and abilities. Your stat panel is barren, where before it contained plenty of stats, some more useful than others, now you barely see anything, and there are only two or three stats that the game even bothers to surface. It's the same for talents, you get one choice at each 15 level and all of your other skills are trickled down really slowly. Having the artefact gives you at least a few choices of passive stat bonuses and special situational skills that you level by collecting artefact power from quests and lootable items.
But besides this new thing, this is still world of warcraft. It's no better or worse than it was in the previous expansion - and in some ways, it's a bit worse now because I feel like they just doubled down on systems by adding layers on top of them instead of creating new stuff, or just expanding what was already there. Why not add tiers to the Garrison instead of creating this new class hall? Why add special research that takes weeks to complete - besides the obvious scheme to keep players committed - what are they going to do with the artefact weapons come the next expansion?
I didn't even get to the maximum level, I got too bored after two months of steady play. At this point, you probably know if you enjoy WoW or not, and I certainly did at the beginning. But were they to announce a new expansion soon, I wouldn't be too excited, and maybe think twice about sinking time and money into it.
