As much as most people wanted the pre-patch for Battle for Azeroth to come out, I think it should have waited a week.
The pre-patch came out yesterday, and most people talking about it aren't impressed. Why? Well, it's quite simple.
All Blizzard did in this patch was essentially take things away. Artifacts are drained, many abilities gone, and tuning is a little of of sorts. People generally feel less powerful and can't do most of the things they felt like they could stomp through.
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Instead of being distracted by the new content, there's actually nothing new to do. The balance changes went in while players are left to do the same raids, run the same dungeons, and fiddle with world quests.
The stuff they're adding, like the new story content, catch-up gear stuff, etc., is all coming next week when the Darkshore and main event stuff starts.
I took the time to run around and do a little essence gathering, and to play specs to see how they changed. Honestly, I don't even feel like I got a good sense for that and probably won't until the spec is max level in BFA.
Blizzard did give everyone a free legendary in the form of 1,000 essence in your weekly chest, though. Yay!
I spent yesterday evening -- the 30 minutes I had to play -- looking for things that changed. What I liked most were the new models in Molten Core. The fire elementals look soooo good now. They even give off that shimmer of heat that distorts a bit, and their faces and fire ook really good.
Alas, it appears I'll be dabbling in other games until next week.
Oh, but I did get a really sweet looking new Paladin ram mount! This thing looks AWESOME and comes out when I use my cavalier ability too.
Given the login problems, and changes, some players will use to extra week to adapt to the addon situation and changes to their rotation.
I’m more and more of the opinion that this pre-patch was trash. Over the last two expansions I’ve gone from being a commander of the alliance invasion to the battle lord of a army of titan forged beings now down to whatever this is. I had powerful artifacts and legendary items, giving me so much power hitting in the millions being able to crush mobs with 1 or 2 hits being able to survive over 100 stacks of increased damage from the raid training dummy to, a guy who can’t kill old 10 man raid bosses quickly that are 50 levels under mine, dying to tanking dummies before I can even attempt to get my damage mitigation up because of the GCD, having gear that is worthless because I had to focus on secondary stat priority vs item level and a worthless 2 set bonus.
They even broken invasions as they are all set to 110, you can’t use them to level quickly. Oh, and they broke dungeon completion XP, to make leveling slower, don’t forget the nerf to Kara trash again making the grind from 60-80 even slower.
I feel like they took all these “convenience” items, like the group features, leveling alts just so they could slow everyone down. Blizzard isn’t dumb they know that the more they slow down everything, the less content they have to make. The less content they have to make the more profit they will gain.
Saying all this, I think they have a chance to improve things for sure, most of these things won’t matter in a month after they have started BFA, but as of today… its pretty terrible.