I resubbed on Sunday after not playing for 3 months and my experience with 8.2 so far has been ...okay? Haven't checked out Mechagon but spent ~4 hours in Nazjatar last night. The zone looks awesome and the Naga enemies & architecture is a lot more exciting to me than the demon or faction war-centric stuff we've been doing for the last 3 years. I also like the look of the quest gear from the area and it's nice to see some more interesting effects on gear rather than just ilvl/second stats.
On the negative side, it still just feels like more of the same. We've played zones with content designs like this many times before and have diligently done all the daily quests and rep grinds associated with them. We've done our world quests and Island Expeditions and other parts of the AP grind to get tiny bonuses that don't feel meaningful. The new dungeon/raid content looks like it'll be cool but it's also just more of the same and is not particularly exciting with the current class gameplay & design in WoW. The group PvE content also feels less appealing than in years past because nothing has been done to fix the unsatisfying reward and itemization structure for BfA.
Knowing that the full set of Nazjatar gear I got in a few hours through very little effort on my freshly minted 120 druid alt is equivalent-to or in some cases better-than the Heroic BFD raid gear I spent months farming in 8.1 really drives home how bad raid gear progression feels in this expansion. We're getting expansion-pack level gear resets every single patch, or sometimes even earlier than that through much easier sources like WQs, lucky titanforge rolls, or mid-to-low level M+ dungeons. The Heroic boss my current raid guild was stuck on for the longest amount of time in BFD was Mekkatorque and when we finally got him down we ended up disenchanting almost all of the gear we got because everyone already had better stuff from content sources that took way less effort to succeed at. We finished the two bosses after that on Heroic, Stormwall Blockade and Jaina, not because it was going to allow us to earn exciting rewards or further progress our characters, but because we felt obligated to each other to see it through and to continue what had been a 4-5 year streak of earning AoTC for most of them.
That's just not enough though and my current guild will not be raiding in 8.2 and looks dead for the most part with only a peak of 4 players logged in last night for 8.2's release day. The experience I've witnessed in this expansion through seeing 2 raid guilds I was in die or retire is that players either get heavily into M+ dungeons and the gear that comes from that, or they tune out of the game and stop playing. Raiding at anything lower than the Mythic level no longer feels rewarding and for a lot of us it was the core activity that kept us playing with friends and subscribed to the game.
I'll be perfectly honest that when I finished up on Nazjatar for the day on my druid and looked at the WQs that were up on Kul'Tiras and Zandalar to see if there were any ring or trinkets available and saw the sea of Azerite Power and 200g rewards all over the map, my heart sank. 8.2 is still BfA.
I'm still going to check out Mechagon tonight and I'm hoping it'll feel a little more innovative. I also want to give acquiring more Heart Essences a shot and see if the more targeted and finite reward structure of that feels satisfying. Overall though, I'm kind of regretting resubscribing. It feels like a lot of effort went into making the content in this patch that is going to be largely wasted because of core design problems with the game that they either don't actually agree are problems or aren't able to fix without literal years of additional development time and with completely unknown results. Meanwhile 8.2 still has this albatross of bad class and reward design around its neck. It doesn't matter how cool the Eternal Palace raid is if nobody is around to play it.
