An other question: Do I have to buy every expansion that has been released over the last few several years? It has been at least six or seven years since I have played.
Just last week Pandaria has been added to the base game.
So if you have no old account, you need to buy:
1) the base WoW game. This includes classic, TBC, WLK, Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria. Price is $20.
https://us.battle.net/shop/en/product/game/wow
You might be able to get it even cheaper via some webshops. Buying from Blizzard directly is always the most expensive option.
2) the new expansion. This includes just WoD. Plus one free boost for a character of your choice to level-90. Requires the base version of the game. Price is $50. You can probably buy it at other places for $30-$40. If you buy from Blizzard, you can use your free boost right now. If you buy it somewhere else, you need to wait until the release of WoD before you can boost a character.
If you do have an old account, you only need to buy WoD.
And of course, you always need to buy a month of subscription. (It is not included in WoD).
How is the game these days for people that want to primarily solo? Are you still kept from getting end game gear if you don't RAID or do group instances?
There are several levels of play that reward different gear. This has always been the case.
1) Rewards for solo quests. Usually greens, with a few blues.
2) Rewards for group and dungeon quests. Usually blues. These used to be good long time ago. Nowadays this level of gear is considered garbage.
3) Drops from normal 5-man dungeons. Blues. Easy to acquire.
4) Drops from heroic 5-man dungeons. Harder to acquire in the first weeks. After the majority of the playerbase has decent gear, you'll be carried when signing up via LFD.
5) Reputation gear. Some blues and some purples. Will require a few weeks of grinding reputations with different factions. Can be done solo. Doing 5-man dungeons (via LFD) will probably speed it up.
6) Crafted gear. Usually some blues, nothing special. Maybe one purple BoP item for your own profession. Same kind of gear as the reputation gear.
7) Purple gear that drops in LFR-raids. Endgame gear for half or more of the playerbase. You use the LFR-tool to sign up, you play with 20-30 strangers. Not always a pleasant experience. But overall less bad than what people say.
8) Normal/heroic/mythic raid gear. The first months you'll probably need a fixed group for this. Like a raid-group in a guild. Once people are properly geared and start playing alts, there will be pugs for normal-level raids. Having fun in these pugs is something that will vary from "hell" to "great".
The answer to your question depends on what you think is endgame gear. If you want the best (mythic raiding gear), you need to make friends, invest time, and be an above average player. WoW has always been like that. If you want "full purples" you can do that solo.
In MoP, when the last major patch was done (Sept 2013) there was an island with "catch up gear" to get you ready for LFR of the latest raiding tier in 1-2 weeks. Gearing up has never been so easy.
WoW was a game where you had to be in a guild and had to have friends to get anything done. That has slowly changed over time. Looking-For-Dungeon tool has trivialized heroic dungeons. Looking-For-Raid tool has given access to everybody to epic gear that is just a few item-levels below the best gear. The game has automated tools for people to create and/or join groups. For about everything.
As an example, my guild didn't have a spot for me in their heroic raiding group. (I started playing MoP very late, this January). I raided a bit Flex with my guild. Then played with a pug via OpenRaid.org. In the end, I had almost full heroic (now mythic) gear. Just missing 3 items. I killed 8/14 heroic. I thought this would be impossible in a pug, but we did pretty good.
So in conclusion: if you don't want to commit to a guild or raid-group, you can get pretty good gear, all epic. It'll require some time. It'll require you to play with others (in LFD or LFR), but it won't require you to commit to a group. If you literally only want to solo, you'll have access to only gear which is considered "base-line".
I am thinking about playing again to see the graphical enhancements in Warlords of Draenor. I mainly played a Beast Master Hunter.
As far as I understood, the models have been updated. And I assume the new world (Draenor) will be slightly higher poly-count than the current game. But for the rest, there are no visual enhancements. In fact, Blizzard has downgraded the Anti-Aliasing (from MSAA to some vague blurry variant of FXAA).
On the other hand, if you haven't played in MoP, you might be pleasantly surprised. I thought MoP was a pretty good expansion. Pandaria looked great, had a nice atmosphere, decent stories. If WoD is just as good, that'll be great. Unfortunately, I think MoP was made by the same team that made WLK. And WoD will be made by the other team, the team that made Cataclysm. Cataclysm was terrible in almost all aspects. So if I were you, I'd wait until WoD is released, and see what people think.
Hope this helps.
Gryz. Recovering WoW junkie. Stopped playing 2 weeks ago.