Thanks, everybody, for the suggestions. Any suggestions for east coast servers?
Stormrage is actually east coast. Sargeras is central time. But on sufficiently populated servers the time zone doesn't have really have much of an effect - you should be able to easily find guilds doing stuff more or less all throughout the US prime time on any "mega-server". Finding a guild that fits with what you're interested in doing is the most important thing. Whether that's raids/PvP/whatever.
I still think they fundamentally forgot one of the reasons vanilla Wow made you learn new spells at different levels, and why you got talent points every level. Because it made levelling something you wanted to happen. That gave you a button to press or something to signify you got stronger.
I'm hardly the biggest fan of vanilla Wow. But that is one thing the original game got and the current game completely fails at.
Yeah this is one of the major problems with BfA. Legion gave a lot of tools/toys to players and BfA took them without any replacement — Azerite was supposed to essentially cover legendaries, artifacts, and tier sets at the LEAST and it clearly does not. And you can't even necessarily say Legion was "bloated" either since the height of class complexity overall was probably Mists of Pandaria.
So we're just left with these kind of husks of classes. In the same vein, it's kind of particularly bad because there's not even much overlap between specs within a class anymore. This is good and bad in some ways, and was more solidified in Legion with the spec specific artifact weapons, but they really leaned in to "spec fantasy" over "class fantasy" — there are essentially 36 classes now with how it has shaken out, so the devs are probably stretched a bit thin and that's likely why most specs feel pretty blah. Not to mention we have no idea if there are dedicated class developers anymore, or how many there might be if they do exist.
But the other part of the point I meant to make was that just Azerite as hardly a sufficient replacement for the systems lost, ON TOP of not having any new core abilities or talents between what 100 and 120 now(?) is just awful. Having consistent progression can sometimes be very compelling as the talent points in the old trees or the artifact traits were.
Now it sounds like they finally realized the mistake(s) and will be turning things around with the redesign in 8.2, but that's at least something like 5 months off from now and they've kinda pissed enough people off at this point where it's likely too little too late for quite a large segment of the player base. It's seems unlikely that too many of those people will come back for a patch, if at all. Certainly they'll be able to hook a decent amount with the allure of a completely new expansion, but for now BfA has already killed pretty much all momentum it had 5 months in through numerous failures, certainly outweighing the successes. And to reiterate — some people are probably gone for good more or less, which is disastrous when WoW is very likely not attracting nearly enough new players to make up for those losses.
Anyway that went on a bit longer than I anticipated so I'll stop there for now — not TOO much more you could get out of me than you've already seen on a Reddit manifesto. Though I do have a couple more specific theories about the state of the game that I've been kicking around my head and haven't seen posted anywhere.