Well, 8.1 dropped and by the next day I'd finished all of the new content (except the pet battle dungeon). Take that as you will. Along with a ton of bug fixes, Blizzard released:
- a new warfront, which was a re-skinned version of the first one. If you already have 340+ gear, once you've played it once, you're just a glutton for punishment.
- two new island adventures
- a continuation of the war storyline…to a point. Only 3 of the four mission series are playable currently and the fourth will be available late next month.
- added new recipes for professions (the initial ones were seriously lacking diversity)
So for now, no new dungeons or a raid until the second half of January. There's supposed to be world incursions to fight, but I haven't seen one in a couple of evenings of playing.
Everything else is them playing with dials to try to improve things. They've increased the rates at which you earn artifact power (azurite) and gold a bit. They've lowered the xp requirements for leveling up characters pre-BFA considerably. They've increased the rewards for letting your Alliance self get ganked over and over again in world pvp from 10% to 30%, but it's all uninspiring.
For excitement, I enabled "war mode" on Strev and found out 3 things:
1. People don't want people with war mode on in their questing groups, even if it is just to kill a world boss
2. I seriously suck at world PvP. (To be fair I knew this one already.)
3. By making them significantly more frustrating, World PvP actually makes finishing world quests more engaging.
Spent a little time on Spindizzy and leveled her up to WoD territory. She's now 91 and going strong. I skipped a lot of WoD content when I started Legion. Consequently, no flight and it is slower going. Still a lot of fun, even if she dies more often than Strev & Anyth-- not having an escape button like invisibility or feign death results in higher repair bills.
I may block out some time with Strev just to go back and earn the "Pathfinder" flight rewards for the place.
