It is good

 I have been playing the new Shadowlands expansion for WOW for the past week.  The xpac was delayed a lot at the last minute which led many people to worry that the game was going to be a mess.  A big company announcing a delay a month before launch is worrying, no doubt.  The answer is in though, and Shadowlands is good.

Good doesn't mean perfect.  There are bugs here and there, and the heavy population servers are groaning under the load, but by and large things work and are a lot of fun.

The levelling experience is quite narrow and on rails.  You have to play through the campaign in order, visiting one zone at a time.  There are lots of side quests and such to do, and the campaign story is polished and interesting, so I was happy with it all told.  I don't think I would want to play through such a thing twice, but thankfully Blizzard set it up so alts don't have to do so.  The zones are widely varied in terms of aesthetic and style, and I enjoyed the variety of experience.  The visuals are great, and the marriage of appearance and mechanics is consistently good.

In short, if you like WOW, you will like Shadowlands.  It is a strong mix of choice and direction, and could quite reasonably be described as peak WOW from a casual play perspective.

The dungeons are well executed too.  There are tons of unique mechanics and themes, and the dungeons reflect the zones they are situated in extremely well.  They act as the culmination to storylines, and they do this in a way that is satisfying and fun.  The encounters are enjoyable, the difficulty is reasonable, and even though I just spent the week spamming dungeons all day long I am looking forward to playing more.

So how about the numbers?

The numbers are good!  Blizzard had big problems trying to balance things a few months ago.  They wanted legendaries and covenant abilities to be huge and mighty, but they discovered that balancing them across all the classes and specs was impossible.  They resorted to making things much weaker, and I think their final pass got it pretty tight.  I have gone over my legendary abilities many times and they all seem to clock in between 4 and 6 % more damage.  Some favour one style over another, but nothing stands out as being overpowered.  I want to build a whole bunch of them for various specs and situations, which strikes me as a good thing.

I liked the Kyrian aesthetic and abilities, and they suited my paladin class, so I chose them.  It seems both thematically appropriate and powerful.  Still, I can see reasonable arguments for every covenant choice if you aren't trying to min/max those last few %, which is close enough.

As to whether or not classes are balanced I can't say for sure.  I do more damage than everybody else so far, but it is had to know how much of that is gear, how much of that is me, and how much is class balance.  However, I am confident that Blizzard is keeping a close eye on things, and they seem willing to make adjustments to get things in line as necessary.

When the raid opens in a week and a bit we will start getting real data on class balance.  There will always be winners and losers, but based on my experiences in quests, pvp, and dungeons things are in quite reasonable shape, certainly good enough to get a thumbs up for a launch incorporating so many new mechanics all at once.

There are bugs.  Especially the Kyrian flying world quests have some issues, and I am avoiding some of them.  However, if a major launch like this only has 'some optional quests don't work sometimes' as the big criticism, you have to consider that a win.  There needs to be some work done to improve world quest text, direction, and bug fixes but most of them work flawlessly so it isn't a thing to fuss over too much.

Plus I got a new frog mount!  Bugs aside, you gotta respect the frog mount.