In order to give everyone a fair chance and prevent a mad dash for the end-game, Blizzard has locked away most of the competitive features for the first few weeks of the Battle for Azeroth expansion. As you might expect from the title alone, those locks have now finally been broken, meaning that the Uldir raid, numerous Mythic Keystone dungeons, first PvP season and Warfronts are all now fully available.
The only features still being held back are the substantially easier Raid Finder versions of the various Uldir bosses, as well as the ultra-competitive Mythic raid difficulty. The first wing of the Raid Finder will be released alongside Mythic difficulty on September 11th, with each following week unlocking a new wing filled with bosses for Raid Finder players to tackle. A little bit too slow in my eyes, but I suppose Blizzard doesn't want 'standard' raiders feeling like they're forced to do Raid Finder content over and over again in an effort to gear up their characters.
As for the quality of the raid itself, I must say I'm quite pleased so far. The bosses were fairly interesting both in terms of visuals and mechanics, so while the first few may have been a touch too easy, I certainly can't complain about jumping in there completely blind and slowly puzzling things out. The one thing I can complain about, however, is the Azerite Armor system.
The thing I feared the most in my review has come to pass - looting raid quality Azerite Armor is a massive downgrade because unless you farmed Artifact Power 24/7, you simply don't have enough levels to unlock the DPS-boosting traits. So even though you may have a 380 item sitting in your bags, chances are you're going to stick with your theoretically inferior 340 one because you can actually use its traits. This has been a wildly criticized 'feature' ever since Battle for Azeroth first launched, so here's to hoping Blizzard will see all of these complaints and do a bit of a rework of the whole Azerite Armor system.
Besides the Mythic Keystone dungeons which are pretty much the same as in Legion, I have not had the time to experience the rest of this update. So if you're interested in what exactly the PvP season brings in terms of improvements, as well as what the Warfronts are even all about, you should head on over to the official website. And just for good measure, allow me to leave you with the newly posted "Developer Insights" video highlighting the Warfronts. Enjoy!