Sometimes it's nice to go back and play some classics, sometimes you just want the gaming equivalent of fast food.
Delves will probably be mediocre. This is just another version of the mostly shitty scenario mechanic and their third revision of really trying to make it a core gameplay feature. Islands in BFA were the worst and Torgast in SL, while not terrible, got old fairly quickly.
Well the problem is I want it to be fun and challenging, but they keep making everything competitive instead.
They haven't tried to E-Sportify the scenarios before, but that doesn't mean they wont try now! I'm not thinking there is a very high chance that they will do that; I just doubt they will be able to make the right level of challenging and still able to give any meaningful reward. You will probably get some lame reskined mount and collecting mounts is a bit silly when there are 1000s of them now.
Well the difference I suppose is that in Legion mage tower didn't scale so you could get progressively more gear, but it was still mechanically tight enough that you couldn't fuck up that much (at least for most of them). To me that's reasonable for the highest tier of difficulty.
The timer is one thing, sure. But the dungeons before Legion, in Legion and to a much lesser extent in BFA - They all feel like they were built from the ground up. "This mob will fit really well into this group of mobs and give them a surprise in challenge!" ... Where now, everything is so quantifiable that you get that feeling when you're doing them. Dungeons are only different skin deep. If I had to make a spreadsheet of each dungeon, I could compare it side by side with the others when it comes down to mob density, time to completion, does it have invis potion access, etc. etc. Like a Check List. Fucking boring ass DND GM right fucking there.
Shit is just awful when you dont have a full group of friends to do M+ with. Or worse, you come back halfway into a season and everyones doing 15's and even though the catch up gear has put you up at an item level not too far behind them, no one will take you into their group because your raider.io score is MIA.
The point is no one will bother playing M+ if you can get gear other ways that don't require the logistics of raiding. So it's not going to replace it, but if popularity takes a nose dive then my suspicion will be correct. Of course M+ participation has been declining for some time because it's a retarded concept for one of two permanent PvE game modes.
I was in the opposite boat for the 1.5 months of DF I played. Most of the heroic raid was running 10 or more M+ runs a week to max the vault choices and I was doing maybe 3, since they get stale super fast. I went from first on the DPS meters on week one, to mid-bottom with no hope of closing the gap, unless I wanted to dedicate hours to M+ runs, including slumming it with PuGs.
