OK, so I finished it last night, and I've slept on it. Here are my thoughts:
Preface: I am heavily biased against it by 7.3 in general. That has to be taken into account.
a) The new animations, and especially sounds, mean I can no longer enjoy my beloved Frost Mage, who has logged more than double the /played of all my other characters combined. She has suffered much at the hands of vandals already in her appearance and abilities. This final injury makes me not want to log in
so I did this on other characters.
b) The zones of Argus are crap. I find them dull, artificial contrived. I associate pet battles with the wonderful old environments, where I would love to live (or, thinking of Blade's Edge and Icecrown, at least visit and bring back snaps
) - doing this in an environment where
I do not want to be, and which I
do not respect, starts me off with the wrong attitude.
So, right at the moment, I am very disappointed and angry at the game in general. I'll try to put that aside for this purpose, but I know it colours my opinion. I can't help it.
Thoughts: Overall, even taking into account my bias, I find myself disappointed in Family Fighter.
1. Availability: I know I'm in a minority here, perhaps a minority of one, but I can't help but feel that 24/7 Availability was too much. Yes, I also know 24/7 Availability was in place for BoF and TT, but those were much shorter, and not really achievements that required work.
Because of unlimited availability, I never felt motivated to make time to do a session on a challenge. I didn't want to be on Argus at all, and when I was, I didn't want to stop for this. I never needed to do it now; I could always put it off for another time. As a result, beyond doing a few of the pets on a few families as I passed by, I made very little progress. Finally I lost interest altogether, and ended up ticking off the last 6 or 8 pets in one long session, just unthinkingly copying strats from XuFu's, to get it done. Not very fun.
If there had been some level of restriction - not the RNG of the tamers in Familiar, but some reason to actually go to Argus and get a challenge done while it was up - I would not have lost focus so much.
2. Boss battles: Single Boss-type battles suffer from the boss being too strong and too buffed. This limits the approaches we can take, which makes the battle strat-making less interesting.
I remember fondly my first attempts at BoF, when I discovered Howlbomb. It was so much
fun to set up, wait ... wait ... BOOM the bomb goes off.
But Howlbomb became more popular, and used in far too many places, so Howlbomb went bye-bye. That leaves us with only one generic strat to take down legendary bosses - Bleed'n'Stampede. So for each boss, I ask myself: how do I put up the DoT/debuff, and where do I pull the Stampede from?
In theory, this is more a challenge than Howlbomb, because there are multiple possible DoTs to use, and multiple ways to create Shattered Defences, but within a family, that scope is much reduced. Among Aquatics, we have no choice but to use the Gulp Froglet, since it's the only Aquatic that can supply Shattered Defences. In Beasts, Zandalari Raptors are The Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything - sure there are others, but why even bother looking?
So while finding the right Bleed'n'Stampede is varied in theory, in practice it turns out to leave us with little choice of approach, and that little freedom is further limited by having to dodge or absorb the McGuffin of the boss.
Having said all that, it was nice to see Blistering Cold, for Elementals, in the wild.
I think tamer battles have more flexibility to give a more interesting experience than Legendary Boss battles.
