The new raid released this week—though "only" the first eight bosses—and so far we've gotten rather decent progress in. To be fair, being the first week, it's heroic and not mythic, but with the apparent state of the bosses I'm fairly content with how far we have gotten, that being progressing on Anduin.
As for the raid itself, it really is a welcome change from Sanctum of Domination and so far a lot more fun as well. Though part of that is surely the novelty, it still just somehow feels better to me in a nebulous hard to specify way—aside from the rather ridiculous amount of trash, which luckily has been rather possible to skip so far.
What has been personally more interesting to try to pinpoint however, is how I feel at the moment in regards to World of Warcraft in general, since I have been in something of a low point concerning the game for a somewhat long time at this point. What I'm noticing is perhaps not a direct return to form or overabundance of excitement towards the game—which I do also think would be very difficult to build at this point in time—but I am distinctly more interested in playing now than I was, say, at the beginning of the last tier. It just feels like the reduction of more-or-less mandatory content to do along with a raid I am actually somewhat curious to see is creating something of a spurt of motivation towards the game. I do still think I will end up taking it slow, as the situation feels somewhat precarious at the moment, but it does feel encouraging to see at least a slight uptick in interest once more.
Now what remains to be seen is just how the week ends up working out for our progress in general—as I'm writing this we're only halfway through on our progress days, Sunday and Tuesday still to go—as well as how and if my feelings change next week with the last bosses in the raid that we know very little about so far as they weren't available for testing.
Another confounding factor is the potential to actually be playing both priest healing specs in the raid again, as I've been running holy so far for our progress which usually hasn't been the case. I've, surprisingly, actually kind of enjoyed the opportunity to do so again especially since it has given me the chance to try out a new covenant along with getting to experience their campaign for the first time which was nice. The "new" system of being to change covenants more freely is certainly a welcome change for all of this at it allows me to actually prepare both specs to a decent level for the raid, though it is still somewhat clunkily implemented and it always feels a bit weird to get berated when changing back to Venthyr—though I guess the whole humility and remorse thing fits with their theme.
That was a long and winding path of thoughts, but I hope they made some sense. I think I better stop before it gets even worse.