Ok, so I've had an account balance at Blizzard, from selling some game tokens, since I stopped playing retail oh so many years ago. Well, Blizzard just came out with a pre-order for their next expansion to be release at the end of this year and part of the deal is that you get immediate access to all current WOW content. So I used my balance to pre-order the next expansion, paid for a month, and logged in...

I'll say right off it's an easy game now to level, little grinding, it's enjoyable to just play and follow the main story (campaign), they "squished" the levels down to 70 and just following the main quest line (campaign) and doing side quests I had no problems leveling. As part of the squishing they gave each existing toon a full set of gear appropriate for their new level.

Blizzard has really figured out phasing, and you can actually pick the expansion when leveling to 60. All of the zones get scaled to your level while doing that. I picked "Battle of Azeroth" and it was a lot of fun.

The latest expansion "Dragonflight" was a bit more boring with a less compelling story. But they have one HUGE bit of fun... dragon riding. It's very unique and hella fun to do.

I've leveled one of my old druids, Lycanthra, to level 70 as a tank and I'm expecting to put the game back down by the time my 1 month subscription runs out in a couple of weeks. Then I'll pick it up again for at least another month when the pre-ordered expansion comes out at the end of the year (or earlier if I get an itch to level another toon in Legions or Shadowlands... )

I thought I would post an update since my one month subscription is about up.

The game is very different now than it was in the past, the approach to gear is totally different. Instead of specific items that are "best in slot" you now have "tiers" that start at a specific item level/tier and can be upgrade within that tier. Also, even more importantly, the gear changes if you change your specification. So, for example, an item will have Agility/Stamina stats for me when I'm specialized as a Guardian Druid, that same item will change to Intellect/Stamina if I change my specialization to Restoration. No more farming 3 sets of gear. This actually makes gearing up pretty easy, as it's both obvious if an item is an upgrade for you and upgrades are available from many different activities as you're not always chasing one specific item for a slot.

The game is very solo friendly now, I was able to gear up to item level 440 in just this one month (current max item level is 489) pretty easily.

There is a HUGE amount of content in the world. I didn't raid or even group with anyone for the entire month and I didn't run out of content. Of course, it would have been a lot more enjoyable to have a guild like RH with friends.

You can now run (normal level) dungeons with "followers" so if you're solo or in a group with less than 5 people you can fill in the group with AI toons that do an ok job playing their role. I hope they expand this to heroic dungeons and expand the dungeons available to all of the existing ones, right now this only works for Dragonflight dungeons. The biggest issue is that even though all the dungeons scale to your level (70) I quickly geared up beyond them and could solo most of the dungeons on normal difficulty. Even so, they're great if you want to try out healing or learn the dungeon before doing it with other people.

Anyway it was fun, and frankly, as addicting as ever. They really know how to pull someone back into it, I found myself spending hours playing.... chasing the next reward/achievement that was always just a couple of steps away.

Oh, and I started leveling up Gunnerson (my hunter) but, honestly, they've done hunters wrong. It just wasn't enjoyable so I set him back down.

As I said in my first post, I'm not re-upping the subscription for now and maybe not until the next expansion comes out (even though I haven't seen all of the content available now). We'll see.

How in the world did this get over 2500 views?