20170131: The Return. Comments on changes, part 1.

The Return. Comments on changes, part 1.
I first started WoW in 2007, after The Burning Legion (2nd expansion) was released.
I left WoW in August of 2013, while Mists of Pandaria (4th expansion) was still current.
Since I left, two new expansions came out, Warlords of Draenor (5th expansion) and Legion (6th expansion).

1.  What did I miss most?
1. Flying.  Yes, it's a video game, but I love flying in WoW.
2. Exploring: seeing new areas, or finding nooks and crannies I missed before is great fun.
3. Running dungeons: free armour, defeating nasty monsters, seeing other players in combat action.
4. Questing: another source of armour, a great stimulus for exploration, gaining familiarity with the new material.
5. Raids: My level 90 characters had mostly raid armour, which let them be competent for most tasks in the game.  
6. The armour iLevels here were around 476 to 522; this includes some high-end quest and reputation based armour.


2.  The changes I've seen with Warlords of Draenor include:
1. Draenor as a separate planet, and a new large area to explore and quest in.
2. New dungeons peculiar to Draenor.  These all seem serviceable, and provide a supply of armour upgrades.
3. Garrisons.  Hm, both pluses and minuses here.
4. Raids: I've pretty much missed the boat on WoD raids, since Legion is already out and established.
5. Armour iLevels up into the 500s, 600s, and the 700s.
6. Crafting levels had a ceiling of 600 in MoP.  In WoD, this was raised to 700.


3. The changes I've seen with Legion include:
1. The Broken Isles as a new land mass in Azeroth, the base planet for WoW.
2. The Demon Hunter heroic class for Night Elves and Blood Elves only.
3. Armour iLevels up into the 900s.  Oi.
4. The character GUI widget (press C on keyboard), has added lists of attributes the character needs most in the top-down proper order.  This beats looking it up to make decisions about what armour to pursue.
5. Dalaran was moved from the Crystalsong Forest region in the continent of Northrend to the Broken Isles.  When a character reaches level 98, quests take the character to see this move.
6. New dungeons for Legion.  I have made a new Demon Hunter character, which has progressed from level 98 to level 101.  I have not done any dungeon runs yet.  I'll likely start with this character.
7. New raids for Legion.  I have not started this cycle either.  My DH qualifies, but just barely.  I'll need to do some reading to see the pitfalls for the various raids.
8. Crafting levels had a ceiling of 700 in WoD.  In Legion, this was raised to 800.


4. Adjustments.
1. My good and competent level 90 characters from MoP, despite all their raid experience, could not qualify for a single dungeon at first.
2. I had to get the armour average levels up over 500 to even get started in dungeons, then rise to 520, 540, 560 to progress in the WoD dungeons.
3. Garrisons take a lot of effort for paltry returns.  Perhaps I'm not doing it right yet. I have more garrison work to do with my eight lead characters, so I might change my mind on this issue.
4. I used the 'elevate an existing character to level 100' feature from buying Legion to change a level 34 paladin to a level 100 paladin.  The changes in armour, weaponry, and spell set were rather impressive.
5. I have a fair number of characters in the 80s levels.  Moving them up to 110 is going to take forever.
6. I changed my Restoration Druid to Balance Druid to make questing and dungeon runs easier and more enjoyable.
7. I changed my Blood Death Knight to an Unholy DK for the same reason.
8. I used the attribute order in the character GUI for my Windwalker monk (Agility > Critical Strike > Haste, and so on) to improve the character's effectiveness.
9. I have a reasonable familiarity with the Warlords of Draenor material, but I have barely found my footing with the Legion material.