Even-numbered years for Blizzcon tend to be weird for WoW because generally the happen either right before or not long after an expansion has launched. Every other year (except for weird times like when they announced Legion at Gamescom) we get an expansion announcement, which of course tends to be the most exciting news.
So what we get with these even-year Blizzcons tends to be news about the rest of the expansion, usually the middle patch. I remember that the announcement for Cataclysm actually came out prior to the release of 3.3, and the trailer itself even teased a bit of Icecrown Citadel, while the announcements at the con included stuff like the LFG tool (if you started playing post 3.3, getting any dungeon group at all worked like Mythics now, but without the group finder either. You basically had to sit in trade chat and spam "LFG Shadowfang Keep" for an hour in the hopes you'd find a group and then go there yourself. The Scarlet Monastery run for Alliance characters was pretty crazy.)
Anyway, Blizzard has even posted on their forums that the focus of the WoW news at Blizzcon is going to be what comes after 8.1. Tides of Vengeance (the official title for 8.1) is on the PTR now, and I suspect that it will probably come out within the next month. Given how much of it is already on the PTR, it would be very underwhelming for them to talk about stuff that any player can take a look at already.
As such, we're likely to see a real definitive answer to the question that has been at the center of BFA since it began - is this expansion truly going to remain focused on the faction war or is it going to shift to larger, universal threats?
The Battle of Dazar'alor is going to be the first raid that is fully about the faction conflict. We did see individual encounters in Trial of the Crusader and Icecrown Citadel that pitted us against members of the other faction, but that turns out to be the entire theme of the upcoming raid - such that there are even some encounters that only one faction canonically fights while the other experiences it only as a flashback (giving the player a "flashback costume" as a member of the other faction including different racial abilities.)
I think the big question surrounding that battle is whether it's going to be the big, defining battle of the conflict. On one hand, with the Zandalari unofficially having joined the Horde, this is a grand assault on a Horde (ish) capital that ends with some serious losses for the defenders. But it does not look as if it's putting the conflict to bed the way that the Siege of Orgrimmar did.
Does this mean that we will need to continue our focus on the faction conflict and ultimately spend the rest of the expansion reckoning with Sylvanas' descent into cruel dishonor?
The thing is, there have been big hints throughout the expansion that N'zoth and Azshara have been plotting the entire time. Dazar'alor is not the only raid to come with 8.1, after all - we'll be getting a Naga-themed two-boss raid later on. It would make a certain degree of sense that the Crucible of Storms would signal a change in direction for the expansion, leading into a plot that focuses more on these forces bent on the corruption of Azeroth.
I can imagine two scenarios:
One is that the faction conflict runs parallel to the greater story, and there is a sort of meta-conflict in which the factions might internally disagree about which is the greater threat. It could lead to a very messy fight as we scrap with one another on the way to our fight against Azshara and N'zoth, very much like the later parts of Wrath of the Lich King.
The danger of this scenario is that it might not leave enough space to see this current conflict resolved. To an extent, the Alliance and Horde must always have some degree of opposition between each other, and the level to which the conflict has been escalated would make it harder than ever to get to that "put aside our differences" place we'd need to fight the bigger threat. If we were to see the conflict pushed to the background, might we then be forced to endure it for several more expansions after it? To use Wrath as an example, the conflict that started with the Wrath Gate and the Battle of Undercity didn't really end until the Siege of Orgrimmar two and a half expansions later.
The other possibility I can imagine is that Blizzard misled us when they said Azshara would be the Gul'dan of the expansion. What they told us they meant by that was that she would be the boss of the first major raid (normally I'd say "tier raid" but that doesn't really apply in a tier-less expansion.) That is clearly not actually happening, as the Battle of Dazar'alor will be the raid that serves that function (it's weird that it feels like BFA has been out a long time and yet we still haven't gotten that first major raid. I think it just feels like it's been out for a long time because there isn't as much story content as there was in 7.0.)
So perhaps what they actually meant (or I should say "what her actual role is") is that Azshara will lead us into the next expansion, as Garrosh and Gul'dan did. She could be a raid boss in BFA like Garrosh was in Mists, or she could evade us and instead have us fight her next time like Gul'dan.
For a figure with so much lore, it might be a more appropriate use of her, but I think there are problems with this scenario as well.
For one, it delays stuff I've been really hoping to see in BFA. This is the most nautically-themed expansion they've done, and it seems like we should be fighting ocean threats. I don't want to have to wait another two years before we get to at least see Naz'jatar, and I'm super-excited to glimpse Ny'alotha (which I imagine to be a massive ultra-creepy city, basically Warcraft's version of R'lyeh.)
It also means that other stuff they've been hinting at would be delayed even further. There is so much about the Shadowlands and the nature of undeath in BFA that it seems like a pretty clear hint that we'll be exploring the "Death Domain" in a way we haven't been able to yet. If N'zoth and Azshara are pushed back to the next expansion, it means the earliest we'd get a spooky expansion like that would be 2022.
It's a tricky position that the story of WoW is in right now. There are obviously also a lot of system issues to think about. The Azerite Armor system is going to be with us throughout the expansion, but I imagine they'll iterate on it quite a bit to help it work better and be more enjoyable. I'm certain we'll hear about some of their ideas about how to improve it. But in terms of where we're going, exactly, with BFA, I've made my suggestions. In a few days, we'll find out.
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