WoW is currently trying to appeal to a wide audience rather than a specific group of players that something like a pure skill system would require. They've buil

WoW is currently trying to appeal to a wide audience rather than a specific group of players that something like a pure skill system would require. They've built in their time sink grinding that is always there but they've also doubled down on the lore and immersion while breaking content into chunks that are designed for players of different skill levels, time constraints and interests. You can see this with the inclusion of much more voice acting, artifact knowledge research, artifact weapons that grow with the player. There are normal, heroic, mythic and looking for group dungeons and raids all of which have different levels of difficulty and mechanics to overcome. For those players looking for a skill based challenge without the time sink of raiding the mythic + dungeon system is also new. In this system there are keys which unlock a dungeon at a specific difficulty. As the level of the key increases the difficulty of the dungeon increases and something called affixes are added. These affixes change the way the dungeon operates from decreasing healing to increasing mob difficulty overall or depending on how many are engaged at one time and several others. Additionally as you move up the difficulty you go from no affixes up to three affixes at once. For the first time in a long time I find WoW to actually be compelling and worth spending time in game. I'll likely only play through each of the classes to max level and all of their story lines while experiencing the raid dungeons from the very casual looking for group version but everything is accessible and can be done at my own pace. Not all of the story lines are well done and I think they need to consider if they are giving equal writing time to each class but that's never been the strongest suit for Blizzard.