EU maintenance was planned during 3 a.m. – 11 a.m. By a good Blizzard tradition, I was able to successfully login at 8 a.m. :)
First of all, the login screen. I hated the initiate sharp Legion tune chords, so I was happy to hear the new, softer one beginning of Battle for Azeroth. BfA music pieces are pretty cool, and anyways, it’s a welcome change of tune. The picture is also changed, and unwelcoming demons turned into Azeroth battlefield. If I may say so, it’s a lot more Warcraft-ish, RTS menu screens coming to mind.
Interface – it’s yay! I quickly got used to bag and system buttons in the right bottom corner. I will only need to use shortcuts more instead of clicking.
The new action panels are cool, most of the abilities were conveniently sorted out already, although I did a re-adjustment nevertheless. Mostly with convenience buttons like ranged aggro for non-tanks, warlock’s health stones, travel speed buffs etc. My main rotations remained untouched.
More or less, my action panels are now arranged this way:
The major thing is that there are still 3 options for core action panel. This is vital. Take Aurinko the Priest: her default core action panel is healing, one click switches her to DPS mode, and yet another grants her fishing on key 1. The fishing option is also used for quests with extra button like TBC bombing dailies.
Class talent changes are plenty. The choices were made, I tend to choose the passive abilities to make it a minimum of buttons. I am not a fan of having 5 extra cooldowns to remember about. Yet passives are pretty powerful, so it doesn’t look like compromise at all.
All in all I am pleased to say that all options are really great now, and offer a drastically different gameplay. I didn’t spot any useless ones throughout 12 classes. So it all comes down to the style of gameplay you prefer. Hardcore raiders will scrap out the smallest DPS crumbs out of the “best builds”, but who are we to judge them, right?
I’m not sure about several options yet, but I just need to try them in battle. Conveniently the emissaries are reset, and Army of Light is up, so I expect a very productive evening of class changes trial.
As for rotation changes, there are not many. Affliction Warlocks and Marksmanship Hunters got drastic overhauls, that needs to be tried and tested. As far as I get, Marksmanship will be focused on build-spend calmer gameplay rather that frantic clicking based on procs – this is good, and this serves class fantasy better.
There is an unpleasant talent change with Frost Mages: dismissing a Water Elemental and my favorite instant nuke are on the same tier now, so I can’t get both. I still go petless, and there is some channeled freeze ray instead of nuke which looks awesome. We shall see how it will work in the field.
My resume is: the changes were long expected and very welcome. Now on with field tests.
Gnomecore 
Sounds exciting! I am in the US and the servers were pretty much down all day yesterday. I was able to log in for about 20 minutes maybe.
It gave me enough time to test out the new Demonology, well I only tested one set of talents need to see how the rest feels. But the one set I did try felt so much better than legion. No more demonic empowerment, no more life tap! It flowed so well and the demon summons are all right next to you, except for the melee demons of course. I love it so far! I plan to test out affliction and destruction today if the servers are willing.
I’m like you in that my alts are only single specs. My mage is frost and I share your suffering in leveling up frost haha. Ray of frost is my favorite spell in the mage’s spellbook. I liked combining it with rune of power cause it made me feel like powerful caster. I do favor pet classes so I tend to play the ones that summon them; frost mage, unholy death knight, beast master hunter. I can’t wait to see what the rest if the classes feel like now!
I had no idea the ui changed either! I use an addon that moved my bars around. Thing is from the sound of it. The default ui is basically the same as what I used addons to make my ui look like anyway, so definitely gotta check that out
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I’m quite the opposite, I always pick an option without a pet if there is one :)
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I love the Frost mage updated elemental :D
I will start using it now (Hoping we get some glyphs to make it look like the other updated models with different colours :p)
Things seem exciting and fun, and the only glitch I’m getting is not having my proper honor level, but hopefully that will be fixed soon :)
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The merry water blob was kind of yes/no for me :) Generally I dislike every pet, but I may try to add him again to my company.
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The pet “AI” needs an improvement, generally speaking. Also, I would really like that there was a radius around the player character where the pet doesn’t go (ex: always 5 steps or more distance). Otherwise Im questing and feeling like the guy who was interviewed with his cat climbing on his head xD
Also, for pet specs, an option to decide if pets were on the left or right would be a good idea.
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Cat metaphor is funny, thank you :)
Also I had a blog post about assigning your pet to your left or right hand by choice. I think technically it’s a minor change, but for me it’s big.
Old etiquette rule says that a man should walk on the left side of his companion – this way an oncoming passerby will accidentally push you, not your companion (a girl or a kid). I got so used to it IRL that I simply feel uncomfortable with anyone hanging by my left hand, all companions should walk by the right hand! It may be the reason why I dislike pet specs so much – the pets tend to be at the left hand area.
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I’m excited. I didn’t get to see much at all yesterday but I did have a good book on my shelf.
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I know! That interface is so great! I always go into a new patch addon free- sometimes it makes me delete addons, because of improvements, that feeling is great.
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If you use the twitch app, you can update them with a click, a lot of them were already available to update to 8.0 before the patch hit :)
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Oh, thank you :) I just meant, I like deleting addons. The more functions in WoW without AddOns the better :)
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The twitch app was recommended to me by a raider friend who told me it was quite good because you can update and delete with a single click, no worrying about putting things in the right folder and whatnot. All automatic :)
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Ahh, I see. Yes super handy :)
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Love hearing your thoughts about the music! It’s such an overlooked part of the game, but affects every moment of our play. I’d finally had to just turn off all music in Legion – looking forward to experiencing the game music once more in Battle!
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