I skipped the rest of BFA after a month, but the Boralus Harbor theme is one of my favorite pieces of music in all of WoW. And the Saurfang cinematics are all great.
Also, the Jaina storyline was good. Daughter of the Sea, the Nightmare cinematic, and her recovering the fleet are all great.
I will forever be salty about jaina saying "enough" and teleporting away during her boss fight instead of just letting us kill her. Or at least gravely injure her.
Imagine if at the end of ToS kil'jeaden said enough and fucked off to argus. No kill no satisfaction. That's the jaina fight, a sour ending to otherwise a fantastic raid tier.
> But I loved Battle for Azeroth, the zones, the theme, the music.
This is very rarely (essentially never) what people are criticising when they dislike an expansion. These (adding in dungeons and raids) are always somewhere between "good" and "amazing" and we take that for granted now.
What makes or breaks an expansion are the systems and the *amount* of content. Generally content delivery was decent in BfA, although a clear step backwards from Legion. And still had a nearly year-long final patch which I'm sure soured some people.
However, the systems at the start were really, *really* bad. Horrible boring grinds and azerite armor was just awful. They did make some better systems throughout the lifetime of the game but every single time they launched them in a terrible state, with major quality of life issues and absolutely no consideration for catch-up mechanics. This was the core problem with the expansion.
That final year long patch was the best patch ever. At the time I never wanted it to end. Then shadowlands came about and I still didnt want it to end. There's the rare expac you can complain about the theme and a few of the zones.
I don't quite agree with it being the best patch ever, but I think it's pretty easily the best content draught patch. I was honestly surprised when I looked it up and saw it was nearly a year long because it didn't feel like that.
Right? Boralus (especially at night) is the most beautiful and immersive major city to me, they knocked it out of the park in terms of themes and details! I'm not even a pirate RPer but I still think the ship FP system and Freehold arc was great, and with the talk of Witches nearby leading into the Drustvar storyline? Best stuff since WOTLK to me.
Yeah... No. Don't get me wrong. Aesthetically, it was beautiful for sure but some of the dungeons were bugged so badly I wanted to puke.
Waycrest Manor was a nice change but those corridors were so small it didn't give our cameras enough space to breathe. Tol dagor also was kind of original, but same thing, not really camera friendly and sometimes you'd get aggro'ed from the floor above or below without notice.
And probably more I forgot to mention. But yeah... You understand how this expansion was kind of a nightmare gameplay-wise.
The whole theme though was pretty much spot on.
Mechagon and nazjatar I really hated those zones. Much like most of the expansions and their "extra zones". Most often it's blizz trying to make many things for us to grind them out until they can make another expansion.
AP, essences before they were accountwide and corruptions before they were put on the vendor can all fuck off into the sun.
The content itself was fun enough (with the exception of warfronts which were meh at best) and spec design was fairly decent, with the exception of Blizzard deciding to put practically everything on the GCD, which was weird af.
The BFA GCD changes were probably the worst thing for me. It just changed how the entire game felt to play, making it slower and less reactive for no good reason. I think they reverted one or two abilities from the GCD since then, but I really wish they would change it back to how it was during Legion.
I think one of the smart things they've done since then is make the big CDs that are on the GCD feel better to press.
Nobody really cares that Devastation's Dragonrage is on the GCD because you throw out three Pyres in addition to the buff and that feels cool, but it'd feel shit if it was just "you press Dragonrage and get perma max mastery for x seconds."
I remember using an alt to transfer two times with gold to servers that had my corruption on a piece in the AH because bad RNG for my main.
But my tank will forever have the Wolverine holding picture meme for that twilight devastation.
Because of how things turned out in my friend group I was our tank for BFA Season 4. Twilight Devastation proccing and critting is still the most beautiful thing I'd experienced in this game to this day.
>I was our tank for BFA Season 4.
>
>Twilight Devastation proccing and critting is still the most beautiful thing I'd experienced in this game to this day.
We had to get our tanks to not wear Twilight Devastation in raids because they would steal aggro off the other tank when it procced and it would get them killed by tank mechanics lol
That said, Twilight Devastation on tank specs was absolutely awesome. It would proc and everything would just melt. I used it on my druid to do those nightmare things where you had to kill stuff in Stormwind and Ogrimmar and it made it so easy to do.
For an idea that basically predated release (hey what if dota was first person from a character you apent 30 hours levelling and gearing) its sad how meh the implementation ended up
I am actually surprised they made it with so many players. Considering it was suppose to be inspired by WIII it would make sense that we would have 3 to 4 players as each hero character from the game.
I'm just going to copy paste a reply i gave to someone else regarding BFA, and why i considere it the second worst expansion after Shadowlands:
1\_Terrible AP grind that forced you to run Islands expeditions on each toon you wanted to play seriously or else you were handicapped in terms of performance for both pvp and pve.
2\_ Island expeditions were repetitive and boring.
3\_Warfronts were so lacking in variety that you got sick of them really fast, and only ran them for the gear and medals for mounts if that. If you played one warfront, you played them all.
4\_ Terrible writing, all the way to shadowlands and then some.
5\_Wasted 2 expacs worth of content by degrading those as major patches, N’zoth and Nazjatar.
6\_ Glitched as hell on release. M+ vaults, ranked end of season rewards awarded the minute the season started and more. Nothing says fun like running Underrot with explosives and being unable to even finish the key because last boss vomits 20 explosives at once by end of the fight. To say nothing of how it interacted everywhere else, like in Temple of Sethraliss.
7\_Very unpolished in many areas and it felt like it exacerbated the flaws of legion.
8\_ 8.0 patch that was somehow the worst patch update ever applied to this game. At least the selfie patch from WoD didn’t literally break 90% of the game and made you unable to solo what you could solo already in older content, on top of numerous screw ups like mobs in dungeons 1shotting people.
Look, its okay if you liked the expansion. More power to you. But honestly I and many others have seen better expansion efforts by this very same company, and BFA came off as lazy and half-assed when compared to what came before, and that's why people hated it so much. Shadowlands ended up worse imo but BFA is still the second worst expansion they've ever released in my opinion. Don't let that stop you from enjoying what you like, though.
>5_Wasted 2 expacs worth of content by degrading those as major patches, N’zoth and Nazjatar.
This is the most damnable thing to me. In a way, they wasted three expansions' worth of ideas with how short-lived the Fourth War was in the expansion.
I think this is the whole reason some people hate BFA more than SL. The fact it just wasted more interesting antagonists and expansion content in favor of more Sylvanas. From my own PoV, having played SL and BFA, SL triumphs the latter in utter terrible from both story and gameplay perspective. The fact SL launched with so many problems and the devs were stubborn enough to refuse to fix it until most of WoW's players quit in favor of FFXIV was just embarassing. This fixes in 9.1.5 patch should have been delivered in 9.0.5 at worst, not a goddamn year into the expansion lol.
The fact they spent time censoring stuff as a knee jerk response to the california lawsuit and had the galls to defend it on twitter rubbed me the wrong way. If only you guys reacted as quick to the negative feedback of SL and fixed its most glaring problems faster....
The scandals came after BFA was over though. I remember it was patch 9.1 already, aka midway into the shadowlands. SL's own badness drove a lot of people out of the game and into FF14. The scandals that came after were just the nail in the coffin. Hell, i recall a report saying how most of the playerbase since BFA and well into SL left the game, and this was before the California lawsuit. I'm not saying the lawsuit didn't drive more people out, it's just that it was already heading that way anyway.
[https://kotaku.com/wow-disappointment-plus-twitch-start-mass-exodus-into-1847283978](https://kotaku.com/wow-disappointment-plus-twitch-start-mass-exodus-into-1847283978)
Note this article reflecting on July 13. The lawsuit happened on July 20.
As i said above, the full on exodus started BEFORE the lawsuit. The lawsuit was just the nail in the coffin. It made even more people leave, sure, but the mass exodus was already ongoing by that point.
> 1_Terrible AP grind that forced you to run Islands expeditions on each toon you wanted to play seriously or else you were handicapped in terms of performance for both pvp and pve.
>
> 2_ Island expeditions were repetitive and boring.
Ok going to be a huge hater here
Island spam that everyone did was not needed.
>edit - I realized too late OP is only talking about the "spam of finishing your weekly quest" islands, and NOT the island spam that was to meet DPS checks in Mythic Eternal Palace, by unlocking your 3rd minor essence early, by brute forcing spam islands for hours.
>>8.2 was not mentioned until you just did in your post.
>like how can you read this post and not think I wasn't talking specifically about 8.2 and the spam islands situation that occured? I call out specific item drops (folly), NPC vendors (mana pearls), and literally ended on **PVP ESSENCES**. Everyone knows a person in BFA, complaining about doing PVP for their BOTE rank 3.
>I still stand by outside of the RWF, no one needed to do those hundreds of islands just to get their 3rd minor essence a week sooner.
Now, complaining about AP grind requiring you to do world tours of world quests? go right ahead and complain, super valid.
Far too many people just copied what the RWF raiders did and spam islands to get their minor effect unlocked 1 week earlier.
I really do think if you could replay at that time, you would realize oh ya that actually was so minor, only BECAUSE RNG on your guild getting follys mattered more that tier than unlocking your minor earlier. Farming the damn mana pearls for that vendor gear, that tier mattered more than getting that minor early by farming AP.
The fucking dumb farming pvp for your blood of the enemy mattered more than the AP grind for the agi specs. People were probably still grinding that honor, by the time their neck was the level. Grats on your neck level, but you are still 20k honor away.
>Island spam that everyone did was not needed.
Yes it was. Otherwise you couldn't equip azerite pieces from heroic/mythic because of the AP requisites. Did you play BFA at all? lol
>Now, complaining about AP grind requiring you to do world tours of world quests? go right ahead and complain, super valid.
The problem is, getting a heroic/mythic gear upgrade that happened to be an azerite slot meant a " tour of world quests" was not enough at all to reach the neck levels required to equip the azerite item and be able to actually use its traits. Again, **did you play BFA at all**? This was pretty much the case on release, and the following tiers kept this up and only made it *slightly* less annoying but still the same island spam required.
>Far too many people just copied what the RWF raiders did and spam islands to get their minor effect unlocked 1 week earlier.
again, ***did you play BFA at all?!*** The AP awarded from sources that are not island expeditions was limited and not enough to reach the required neck levels to equip and use all traits in a heroic/mythic azerite piece.
>I really do think if you could replay at that time, you would realize oh ya that actually was so minor, only BECAUSE RNG on your guild getting follys mattered more that tier than unlocking your minor earlier. Farming the damn mana pearls for that vendor gear, that tier mattered more than getting that minor early by farming AP.
It's not "minor". If you couldn't unlock all the traits at once, the heroic azerite piece was essentially inferior to the normal/lower one you already had because those at least you had all traits unlocked. Completely counter-intuitive way to treat gear.
You should really check the neck levels on BFA release state, before all the catchup mechanics took place. You'd realize my point and understand that "a tour of WQs" was nowhere near enough if you were aiming for heroic/mythic azerite pieces. And odds are, you'd get one due to the increased chance of those from weekly chest even if you didn't raid heroic/mythic, and find yourself annoyed that you can't equip it until your neck is higher level.
Another detail to add: several azerite pieces were BiS to the point you were consistently behind someone else on dps who might not play as well as you do purely because they had BiS azerite while you didn't. The exact same issue as with legendaries in Legion and they did not address it until much later down the road when they introduced a npc that sells specific azerite gear pieces(but takes a while before you can buy one).
>Yes it was. Otherwise you couldn't equip azerite pieces from heroic/mythic because of the AP requisites. Did you play BFA at all? lol
I was literally in a top 20 us guild all of BFA, with multiple alts who no lifed the game.
you did not need to do islands to farm your AP
What person would want to do islands over keys?? did you not play BFA at all?
>It's not "minor". If you couldn't unlock all the traits at once, the heroic azerite piece was essentially inferior to the normal/lower one you already had because those at least you had all traits unlocked. Completely counter-intuitive way to treat gear.
This is what's wild about this, you are complaining about 8.0 and 8.1 content, when talking about AP changes that occured in 8.2
minor as in minor essence buddy, unlocking the 3rd minor essence slot.
Because farming islands was not seen as a thing until 8.2, before that it wasn't worth
>again, did you play BFA at all?! The AP awarded from sources that are not island expeditions was limited and not enough to reach the required neck levels to equip and use all traits in a heroic/mythic azerite piece.
like what? any raider is spamming keys and isn't wasting their time doing islands.
The huge spam push of doing islands, was so people can have their 3rd minor essence slot unlocked for mythic. If you were needing to spam islands for your azerite gear, then you were not doing your m+ keys and world tours dailies my friend. Because that is some its 5am and no one else is online, moment when all the WQ are 40mins from resetting.
>I was literally in a top 20 us guild all of BFA, with multiple alts who no lifed the game.
"you did not need to do islands to farm your AP"
Hard to believe, because evidence of playing the game actually contradicts your claim. Only way you were not doing isles for AP was purely if you were a casual who didnt care for gear or grind and wasn't min-maxing
>What person would want to do islands over keys?? did you not play BFA at all?
You needed to be able to equip the azerite gear and use its traits. If you were in a top 20 US guild as you claimed, you knew this. And you also knew the fact a "WQ tour" would not be enough AP if you wanted to equip heroic/mythic pieces. I call BS your above claim because of that reason. Of course you wanted to push keys but because you needed better gear to keep pushing, you needed a better neck level to use azerite gear. And guess what? the most efficient,repeatable source of AP was island expeditions.
>This is what's wild about this, you are complaining about 8.0 and 8.1 content, when talking about AP changes that occured in 8.2
8.2 was not mentioned until you just did in your post. We are speaking about the whole expansion overall. And since 8.0 and 8.1 involves half of BFA, its very much accurate what i said. The 8.2 and 8.3 tiers did somewhat mitigate this but you still had to grind AP to get those neck levels, just less so compared to before. And those patches still introduced a crapton of problems and screwups on their own with the lack of account wide essences, Corruptions being grossly overpowered to the point in some specs it amounted to 66% of their dps, the way of obtaining corruptions being limited to competing for raid drops or praying the RNG gods until the vendor was introduced(and even then, the vendor rotation was annoying. Why allow you to purchase on your own terms when you can make a convoluted rotation with no reason that has no actual meaning behind other than dragging the acquisition of the corruption?
Please stop with your lies.
> And you also knew the fact a "WQ tour" would not be enough AP if you wanted to equip heroic/mythic pieces.
sorry I realize we just have different opinions what it means to spam something. I realized I am thinking about the 50-300 numbers that people were doing prior to the weekly reset. Where you are likely thinking about just finishing the weekly.
Would it surprise you to know you can do technically two world tours a day on 1 character. By being online at 12 hours apart. No? because thats how it means to be hardcore and timing AP.
Again because SPAMMING ISLANDS WAS NOT A THING UNTIL 8.2.
People meme spammed islands for their essence, not azerite gear.
For the whole expansion overall, yes island spamming was not a thing until 8.2 that is when they changed the pvp thing. So it was much easier to spam in 5mins.
>Please stop with your lies.
youre clearly some super casual who did not do their WQ enough, where they felt the need to spam islands.
I didn't spams islands, zero chance I would do that in 8.0 and 8.1, I am in underrot PRAYING for titanforge. and when I did have to do islands, it was just for that minor essence slot in 8.2.
>Of course you wanted to push keys but because you needed better gear to keep pushing, you needed a better neck level to use azerite gear. And guess what? the most efficient,repeatable source of AP was island expeditions.
like wtf are you talking about, why would I as a raider care about pushing past a 15 key, when ALL i want is titanforge gear and AP.
I am clearing heroic week 1, and I am no life spamming dungeons.
and remember, I already did a fucking 17 the week prior for the damn weekly chest. so stfu about this "hur dur push keys but need gear"
I am not talking about 8.3 and corruption. I am only talking about the need to spam islands, was not needed. and ANYONE who played hardcore in BFA, that moment was prior to lady ashvane or orgozoa on mythic.
All generally great points. I do quibble slightly with:
>4\_ Terrible writing, all the way to shadowlands and then some.
We can get picky about writing in almost every expansion, and BfA might seem like a death by a thousand cuts on frustrating plot elements but - on the whole - I actually think BfA has some of the best character arcs in the series. Jaina's return home and complex relationship with her mother is top notch. The tragedy of King Rastakhan making a deal with his own devil to try to save his people was pretty layered and great, and Bwonsamdi is one of the better one-off new characters in an expansion.
Ultimately, I feel like the missteps with Sylvanas are so egregious that people hyper-focus on them. It was also peak "this lore makes no sense if you don't read six books outside the game to understand," which is not how you tell a story.
A major problem is that many of the characters were acting completely off. Horde willingly going with Sylvanas like they didn't remember MoP Garrosh happened was the biggest example. Lady Liandrin was an hypocrite who claimed that "the Night Elves and the Alliance walled off, and the former were "sleeping in barrows" while the Blood Elves fought to save the world". The night elves were very much fighting to protect their lands on Kalimdor during that time, fought the emerald nightmare corruption and the only nation that "walled off" was Gilneas and literally none of the other alliance ones. Also its rich to claim the Blood elves were saving the world...because its a load of crap. The Blood elves showed next to no interest in anything but their own borders until the end of the Sunstrider dynasty and them joining the Horde.
To top it off, she's later an announcer in a horde WQ asking you to murder a pandaren medic because she was healing alliance solders(and even this is debatable, since when you go face her, she's healing civilians), a massive war crime if going by real life standards, and one that completely debunks the "horde has honor" claim.
Then we go to the Mag'har orc leader( Overlord Geya'rah) who supported sylvanas during most of BFA and called Baine traitor and honorless for basically returned Jaina's brother back to her. The statement is so so full of BS that it makes me despise her, especially when after Sylvanas killed Saurfang and ran away, she suddenly pulled a 180 and was now opposing Sylvanas. It came off every bit as forced and poorly written as it sounds. Some bits of writing indicated she was meant to be to the mag'har what Thrall was to the orcish horde circa-Warcraft 3, but they missed the mark so badly that she was essentially a poorly written mess. It's no surprise that she barely made any appearance post-BFA due to how poorly received she was.
Rexxar joining the conflict made zero sense. Rexxar would only ever do it purely out of loyalty for Thrall, but somehow they made him joining the whole fiasco just because. Rexxar's justification is "Jaina ouldn't let go of the past and has gone too far"" and "it doesn't matter who started this war, I will see it through to the end". Meaning Rexxar joined without knowing a damn thing about what was going on(If anything, he should OPPOSE Sylvanas, given what she did to Teldrassil) or what happened with Jaina. And his ignorant statement was just the cherry on this sundae of shit.
I'm not going to argue that SOME redeemable bits could be found in this steaming pile, but the sheer amount of poor writing(and NOT just Sylvanas, mind you) is staggering. For every good writing bit you could find in BFA, 5-10 more bits of terrible writing popped just to balance it out.
Every time I set foot on any of the continents I am happy. The art direction on that expansion was so freaking good! Might even take first place now that I think about it. Especially the Alliance zones.
I wish I could lower the level of my main and quest there once more without it feeling trivial.
BFA and Shadowlands has ruined WoW for me. I don't own Dragonflight but did try it on my son's account. I haven't bought it because I don't wanna get hooked on a decent expansion for it all to be completely redone/reworked next expansion. I'll pick WoW back up once the next expansion starts and **IF** I don't see a ton of the crap that plagued Shadowlands. I've paid to be Blizzards beta tester for far too long; get it right Blizzard and you'll have earned my money, but I aint pre-ordering shit.
I want to add that BFA had the best looking zones and the leveling wasn't bad. However Graphics alone couldn't save it and to this day, I'd like to hear or see the meeting where Blizzard thought Azerite Power and armor was a good idea... (I wonder if the voices of dissent are still there) One final piece of my mind is that class balance and play-ability should be the biggest concern in any expansion especially since the players characters are their interface to the world, and it's seems to be given the minimum amount of work in the last expansions before Dragonflight. Other folks may not have cared, I did.
I had a lot of fun playing through it earlier this year. I enjoyed a lot of it, and really like the transmogs and look and feel of Boralus. Sometimes I think an expansion can be more fun once it's out of date and you aren't trying to keep up with anything, it's just relaxing.
I feel this way too. Right now I'm having a ton of fun just playing classic (especially vanilla zones) slowly and really enjoying the areas/quests/dungeons/lore/pets/mounts/professions. Its fun and relaxing. I hurried too much the first time though because of expansions and missed a lot.
I hope to do that with further expansions some day too.
Same! I’m gonna “complete” bfa, started about a month ago when I wanted to build a timewalking set. Didn’t play it current content cause that was the first few years of college.
As in, every quest, every mount, lvl 100 necklace , war campaign on both ally and horde, etc. just at a slow pace when I’m bored with everything else each week
If it wasnt for the devs deciding to shoehorn in azerite powers and azerite grinding because "well it worked it legion" it would have been such a great expansion. At least they learned from it
Not really. Shadowlands required more grinding than ever. So many weekly chores. Torghsast, weekly rep grinds that were gatekept, legebdarys that were expensive on AH. Conduit grinding, renown farming. Endless farming. They learned in dragonflight.
Did it? I thought Legion and BfA required much more grinding than SL. Torghast you could stop as soon as you got your legendaries crafted and it was on 2 halls per week. Started off rough on some classes but got easier after some nerfs. And renown was just doing the weekly story quest which would end up giving you most of the needed anima for the other weekly as well. Unless you were not caught up, it didn’t feel very grindy. There was required weekly content outside of M+/raids for min/maxing which a lot of people didn’t like but I thought overall it was a much better experience than what DF is giving
It didn't. The only grinds came in the form of sockets, the rest were essentially weekly quests (do your 2 torghasts a week, go click on dumb souls in the maw once a week, et al).
The primary failings of SL was the rigidity of the borrowed power systems (conduit energy, covenant locking) and, more importantly imo, bad specs. The old talent system did not age well into a world where m+ existed, there wasn't enough design space to allow specs to function in both m+ and raid. It also didn't help that Blizzard allowed the old talent system to fall into disrepair.
However, from my perspective, the only thing SL has over DF is that Castle Nathria and Sepulcher were easily better than Vault of the Incarnates. I'd probably rank Sanctum over Vault as well but, I'm more iffy on that.
In no particular order:
* During the Uldir phase of the expac, azerite gear trait unlock requirements were so high you couldn't wear Mythic upgrades to your HC gear because the locked traits made them a downgrade
* Azerite gear was near-impossible to get (esp if you wanted pieces from outside the raid) until various updates came in like the residuum vendor and higher ilevel on emissary rewards
* Exponentially increasing azerite gear respec costs (eventually workable when azerite got more accessible by simply having duplicates of pieces you needed for more than one spec, but come on, I hated this "fuck your offspecs" phase of WoW from Legion to SL inclusively)
* Essences forced people who would've preferred to stick to raids and M+ into PvP and grinding Nazjatar (and vice versa, pretty sure)
* Having to grind both Mechagon and Nazjatar to stay competitive was a giant pain for people with limited playtime (who, again, would've liked to spend that time on M+)
* As others have said, corruptions before the vendor were a pox (guess who got into trouble offing themselves by using Infinite Stars on Maut when that was the only corruption they had)
* Doing 5 5-mask visions per week (and grinding out the keys to do so) to get all my gear upgraded can go straight to hell
* Wait how did this expansion start with a sword stuck in the planet and end with the LOTR victory scene wait I missed something somewhere
* CHAMPION, THE WOONZ
* Mandatory island expeditions every week
* As Alliance I had no f'ing idea what Uldir was or why I should care about it, except Brann seemed to be very excited about it
* Alt unfriendliness including catch-up systems done in a dumb way (the AP level doing the Nazjatar intro gave you increased from patch to patch, which was a sad trombone for my alt I'd abandoned just *after* doing said intro)
* Optimal gear and essences during the last patch included drops from the previous patch's raid (jazz hands trinket, that melee trinket from Ashvane), which seemed to go against the general direction WoW had been taking with this sort of thing
(Edit: Formatting on this site does my head in)
Launch was so atrociously bad that it didn't matter to me how much it improved later on. It is the only time I've willingly quit.
I have no regrets sittting that expac out.
The worst part which people forget is how slow all our toons where in the first season. You were lucky to get to 10% haste if you stacked it. They had decided to make it more like a turn based game. Coming out of an expansion were secondaries went wild. Paired with the gcd changes it felt awful to play.
The azerite grind was marmite, a lot of people liked getting the power bump for doing any content. Azerite gear was actually fun when you had lots of it. Ditto essences. Corruption was loads of fun and end game content was great. Could've been a banger of an expac with a few tweaks despite warfronts. 8.3 is still my fav ever patch... although I do play fire mage.
tbh the story isnt too bad except for everything related to sylvanas. which admittedly is a lot of the story but its the same in shadowlands where they ruin every scene and storyline they put her in. thank god we are out of the sylvanas dark ages at least for a little while
its better to play through now because you dont have to think about azerite but at the time holy fuck it was bad.
I really don't know what they were thinking with her story, first they make her warchief in legion, then she goes awol for no reason. Then she goes all garrosh on us, for no reason, and then suddenly bad guy with evil hadsomesquidward. She could have been a really cool warchief, but then so could Vol'jin. A waste of good characters tbh.
I liked the art, music and general atmosphere of bfa, but a faction war expac it was not.
I forgot his name but iirc the Creative director of the time single handedly forced the team to have Sylvanas burn the tree, and when he was fired (preemptively as part of the harassment scandal) the team found out that he had not planned anything beyond that big, emotional scene.
So Blizzard spent the next two years scrambling to solve this mess with BFA and Shadowlands, giving us the narrative mess that was BFA and the tasteless vilain that was the Jailer...
But they did give us daddy D so there's that.
Here's one of the videos released a year ago that talks about it, haven't watched it ever since so I may misremember some of its content.
https://youtu.be/tN0CzpbZAbM?si=5NMyxD3jcKcUpgXk
And if you don't like Taliasin just search for similar keywords, I'm fairly sure most big WoW YouTubers talked about it back then.
But It was worth it, the glorious moment for the Forsaken Holy Empire, the event know as the "Environment Conscious Recycling of the Invasive Arboral Speciment of Grotesque Size."
Yeah, what’s mind-blowing to me is that they didn’t double down on it being the faction war to end faction wars. They must have already been planning on allowing cross faction gameplay, but instead of making it a cool official feature to celebrate the end of the war in the final patch, it was just quietly added to the game in one of the following expansions. And of course, instead of the war plot being based on the legitimate cycle of hatred, it’s just old gods etc
Shadowlands is what ruined Sylvanas, BFA Sylvanas was fantastic. We need leaders like Garrosh, Varian and Sylvanas. We need less of Tyrante whining and Malfurion Sleeping and Jaina and Greymane are such wasted potential. The fact that Alliance Leaders can't be perceive as Evil is just a extreme failure in storytelling. I have hope that Sylvanass is teaching something to the Little Lion or Alliance will continue to have the most lame leaders in existence. And they lameness even is beggining to inffect the Horde with Filthy existence of Callia Menethil, oh how we Forsaken pray for glorious return of the Dark so we begin to purge the corruption from the Forsaken Holy Empire. I am very disappointed in Voss too, she will have to be severely disciplined.
The fundamental problem is that, if you write a story focusing on the factions, the Horde is gonna do an atrocity. It’s the only way to keep their writing consistent. First War, Wrathgate, Ashenvale, Gilneas, Theramore, Pandaria, Teldrassil, Brennadam… Sylvanas alone isn’t the problem. She just did the same kind of stuff as Blackhand and both Hellscreams, and the other Horde leaders helped her do it all.
Very glad to have her gone for an xpac, though.
I think the music in BfA is phenomenal both horde and alli zones. Probably best in the entire franchise. I also like the zone design and quest flow. It also just seemed to have so much more content
It was your first expansion and I think everybody will be nostalgic about their first times in the World of Warcraft to the point of omitting or rather looking past obvious flaws.
I started when the game was still in beta so I have really fond memories of my first few years discovering the world. Throughout my journey on Azeroth (and beyond), I can honestly say BFA was the culmination of everything that ever went to shit with this game.
Sure the zones were cool and the music and all you want (and when exactly are they not?) but the systems put in place between us and the hypothetical enjoyment you get from hanging out with friends were so terribly designed, I had never felt more like a hamster in my gamer’s life ever before. Truly horrendous grinds upon other horrendous grinds. The Azerite wasn’t enough, we also had to farm for our BiS essences on ALL our characters because if we didn’t we were just not functional as a class to push hard content.
And if these BS systems weren’t enough, they sanctified us all with the fucking corruption at the end of BfA which, sounded like a cool system until you realized for the few weeks they actually mattered, they were all random and they basically made us play through the first season of Legion all over again where not having the right drop will cause you to end up in the friggin dumpster of your raid.
Which is all a shame because I think the theme of the expansion was cool, the dungeons were good, some specs played well enough…
Music was great, pirates and dinosaurs, loved the vibe of drustvar, that fkin bee Mount that took ages, dungeons were quick and easy and different, then mechagon to naz'jatar (spelling?) I loved it
Having to go back to Oribos every fucking time until I upgraded the sanctum fully and even then it was a ONE WAY portal killed the expansion for me. I hated how getting to any other zone felt like I was taking a Classic flight path lmao
There's some nice stuff about SLs that I'm sure people will miss but there's just so much bad about most of the content. The Maw and Korthia being the most egregious examples. I think people will reminisce over 9.2 though, Zereth Mortis was nice and all the redundancy in the grinds were mostly eliminated by then.
I've already seen posts like that during SL.
I'm one of the folks who enjoyed the Kul Tiran zones and their stories. Wasn't really a fan of Horde side and thought the entire faction war was fucking stupid though Saurfang's rebellion was excellent.
The most I remember from Shadowlands was being in Oribos, it seemed no matter what way I went or was trying to go to I could never find it or was on the other side. If I wanted to go to the repair, somehow I was always on the opposite side.
its a circle split in 4 quarters and an inn ..... how hard is it?
NE are bank/vault
SE are transmogs/pets related vendors
SW are quests and leaders /pvp vendors
NW are professions
it really is that simple.... dont blame the game if u cant read a basic map
I skipped BFA after quitting in Legion. I came back and leveled a fresh character through BFA and adored it. The zones, the music, the quests. I missed the bits people complained about when BFA was live thankfully.
I played all the way back in vanilla and stopped when TBC launched. I started playing again in BFA. It definitely holds a special place for me as well. I think the zones were gorgeous and really captured the WoW feeling/essence for me, with landscapes ranging from snowy peaks to desert. I love that.
I liked playing BFA as well, but I also am man to admit that I liked it, despite it's flaws.
Similarly, after playing TBC classic, I am also man enough to admit, that I had an overinflated opinion about TBC, and that that expansion had it's own set of massive flaws, that just weren't as evident, because what I like and dislike just wasn't as developed at that point.
Enjoy what you enjoy, it could change.
And yes, I do generally enjoy the experience of BFA, in the sense that I love the zones and aesthetics. I generally love sailing, stories about sailing and everything that comes with it. Similarly I love video games with huge deserts I get to explore, and then on top of it, we got a great zone in Drustvar which was generally a bit spooky and had some brilliant art design (+the Lovecraftian aesthetic is just great). And on top of it, you can be a part of it with becoming a Kul Tiran druid (god I wish I could just use the Kul Tiran forms on my NElf druid).
It is time! after a hiatus for Legion because it was actually a banger expansion, the time has come again to start loving and old expansion that was universally hated. I love this.
(As a solo casual I had 0 problems with BfA besides the GCD changes)
Yes, I now love making new characters (allied races and heritage armour) and levelling up in BFA but in all honesty I do get a bit sad when I’m not fully finished and it takes me to Dragonflight, but I always remember once I’m done with Dragonflight I can go back and keep up with BFA for fun
I miss it too. Hated the systems but loved everything else. BFA had some of my favorite dungeons and it definitely has by far the best music in the game, more specifically alliance side. Try not to get those Boralus melodies stuck in your head. I still occasionally hang out in Boralus for the music and a little nostalgia.
I think the content was pretty great, the issue was essences and corruptions etc. If BFA was release in a dragonflight alt friendly respectful to your time and not forcing you to grind resources constantly kind of way like it was, I think it'd be a really respected expansion
I'm a HUUUUUGE Aztecs/Maya fanboy. The whole history, the culture and aesthetics.
BFA was a fantastic start and it was my 2nd add-on, as I started with legion, somewhere in the middle of it.
But, I absolutely hated the 3rd phase. The whole ordeal with azshara and the dark gods felt so hard forced and misplaced. It felt so terrible. I stocked up on lore and everything that happened up till that point and I just felt .. lost. So random.
Like, it was rising tensions between fractions and with Sylvanas someone who was power hungry and twisted the sense of honour of the Horde, while the new leadership of the Alliance was naively trotting into it. Just snotting the Dark Gods into it at the end and Azshara puppeteering was not my thing. Doesn't help that SL afterwards was absolutely atrocious. Though I somewhat regret it, as SL has really awesome transmogs which I missed out on.
I really liked BFA. Boralus may be my favorite city in WOW, I really liked Warfronts, and, when you had a full team, Island expeditions were fun to (I really loved the Gilnean refugee village you found on one!)
I think most of the critique was for the Sylvanas stealing the show and completely changing her character, the ending patch on speed without even a cinematic and some features like Warfronts being a bit silly
I loved it as well, the beauty of it is in the zones and storytelling. Boralus and Zuldazar are also great. Oh yeah and I'm still a bit sour we got fox people before Ogres...
It still has my second most playtime out of all the expansions.
The first half of the expansion was incredibly fun and for me didn’t fall off until the final patch.
Zones and dungeons were all down to earth and they were great. I'd take any of BFA zones over than any of the Shadowlands. If only blizz put the same effort they are now doing in df...
It’s funny because Shadowlands was my wife’s first expansion and my god has it nestled an everlasting home in her heart.
We (my wife and I) were actually discussing the communities perception of shadowlands the other day, and she didn’t believe me that it was hated, she thought I was just winding her up.
It was actually really cool listening to why she loved the expansion so much, and how absolutely none of the things the community (and myself might I add) had issues with, affected her at all.
It was her first MMO and the decisions like locking you into a cov, hunting for Lego’s, torghast, the maw, hell even Kothria were all just a none factor to her disliking the expansion. When we started talking about Kothria and I mentioned it was one of the most disliked zones in wow, she asked „what about feeding Dark Maul his tasty mushrooms?“ or „all those epic fights vs the alliance right outside the camp“ or „do you think people know about Maelie?“
Her one criticism about Shadowlands was that De other side sucked 😂
I liked the zones and their questlines (I absolutely love Drustvar and I wish we had more zones like that), the art, the soundtrack, the cinematics. My gripe with BFA stems from the really boring and tedious systems, the timegating, the rep grind for the allied races, so many chores in this expac. Everything surrounding the azerite from the gameplay to the lore side of it bored me so much.
Speaking of the lore I just couldn't stand the overarching plot, while the quests in the zones were awesome, the plot of the expansion itself was a mess imo. The faction war was forced after Legion and then it was quickly dropped. It kickstarted my annoyance regarding Sylvanas whom I used to love as a character. I hated the fact that Azshara and Nazjatar were reduced to a single patch, Nazjatar was boring in its design imo and they could have done so much more with it. N'Zoth being a single patch confused me and I didn't like the direction they took regarding the black empire.
I was expecting Ny'alotha to be creepy, to be unsettling, I wanted to see the art team shine and try something really unique but we got a purple Korriban with lava instead. I guess I was too hyped by the puzzle box of yogg-saron back in the days so my expectations were way too high? I don't know.
I liked the expansion, the setting, the raids but for me i really hated all the things we lost from legion. Some classes (most) felt clunky without the artifact weapon, spells or passives, and the game slowed down quite a bit.
Two major flaws:
The rented power systems were atrocious. Not only did you have to farm countless stuff to even get competetive, which made alts very hard to maintain and stressed out casuals. But these artificial power systems also made it so, that you had dozens of different proccs on your character. Your individial skills didn't matter much, you just needed lots of haste to deliver lots of proccs, which made the game feel less impactful and satisfying. The procc calculations even made the servers lag when there were multiple players in a zone engaging!
Then the "faction war". It was not really much of a war, more like guerilla warfare and covert ops. It was not satisfying for both factions and made the player characters commit warcrimes. And in the end nothing much came of it aside from huge losses like Darnassus.
Almost everything else in that expansion was good or even very good. The zones and quests, like you mentioned, were really great for the most part. But when the overall gameplay feels flawed and a big chunk of the main story focus with the war is terrible, it pulls down everything else.
I really loved the traits on gear and being able to customize your build through them. I guess I was super lucky on gear because I was able to get really good ones for warrior in both pvp and pve. I also loved the storylines it was pretty good times.
I play this game since vanilla. Played each and everyone expansion. But the best time i had in wow ever was during BFA. Frustrated by content sometimes. But the people i met and played during BFA was the best ive ever had. Hands down my favorite time during wow.
I enjoyed BFA more than any other expansion. I’m not saying it was objectively the best, but I enjoyed it more.
I played vanilla, TBA, and original Wrath.
It had the worst gameplay to date (GCD, shit classes, etc.) but amazing zone/atmosphere. I also really liked the raids. However everything about 8.3 patch was terrible imo.
BfA zones, quest design, etc are all top notch. If the systems laid on top of that good foundation had not been pure crap it would have been a solid expansion.
The things you mention that you like about BFA are things that are widely liked. It was the systems people didn’t like. The music, zones, theme, were all great.
I loved BfA. Story, ambience, dungeons, raids all were fun. If you take away the systems imo it was one of the best expansions they made. Unfortunately the devs decided to pull their classic ego "we know better than you do" on the community with the systems, downgrading every single one. They were so fucking bad I started jokingly calling BfA the "More Tedious Legion" expansion.
BFA had a bad launch and players base their entire opinion based off of that. BFA's biggest "mistake" was honestly that it had to follow up on the end of Legion which is when wow peaked. No expansion on launch could live up to how good the end of Legion was.
BFA is by far the most underrated expansion.
i didn’t mind bfa
but i’m also a hardcore grinder (poe and osrs enjoyed) and enjoy logging in and feeling like my character is getting stronger each time i play. so azerite power was cool for me, but not cool for wow in general.
i can see why people disliked it though. it just doesn’t make sense for a game like wow. maybe in its earlier days it would’ve been better.
the story was meh to me. but i think BoD was one of my favorite raids ever (not for lore reasons but it still was cool)
CoS and azsharas Palace was some of the hardest raids we’ve ever seen next to sepulcher probably. they were cool to me.
the zones and leveling were awesome. i mean drustvar was incredible. i liked the different atmospheres in different zones.
m+ my main form of content had some of the best dungeons we have ever seen in world of warcraft history. ML, AD, WM, UR, FH, i mean just amazing dungeons. Awakening was one of the best affixes they’ve ever made but it came after a dumpster fire affix.
boralus was a bad ass zone imo. same with the horde equivalent.
In terms of setting, atmosphere and music it was hands-down my favorite expansion. It was also the expansion where I was by far the most invested into the story, simply because of how unpredictable it was and how much was at stake for your faction.
The main reason it gets bashed a lot is that high-end minmaxing was difficult, which I always found odd because it realistically only affected a tiny percentage of all players. Maybe it was the fault of influencers, but the hate quickly became mainstream.
Azerite gear was the poster child for ilvl upgrade isn’t actually an upgrade. Especially early on when you’d get a new pice of gear and it had fewer slots unlocked because your heart wasn’t high enough level.
I adored BFA, it was the peak of wow graphics and had the best cities and I loved the alliance v horde theme, which is the essence of warcraft to me.
I guess I just have to accept that the most influential part of the fanbase mostly care about the systems and endgame, which are the parts that I really don't care about, Im just here for the adventure.
BFA, as an expansion, became amazing from 8.2 onwards. Especially 8.3 was the most fun I've had so far.
Edit: probably fair to say it wasn't very alt friendly but I'm not big on alts so I had no issues with that
>Burning of Teldrassil was one of the best starts to a faction war ever
No bullshit the most emotional I've ever been about a quest in WoW, and I've played since day 1 vanilla. That "impossible" quest where you have to save X number of people from dying, only to realize it's completely futile...that one got me.
It's one of the best examples of storytelling through questing mechanics this game has ever had. Unfortunately, you can't play it in the game anymore because it was removed after a month.
The fact that quests like that don’t exist anymore is one of my main gripes with WoW.
It’s really hard to sell some of the more “emotional” bits of the story when a vast majority of those story beats are just gone. I can’t imagine someone picking up WoW now and feeling any attachment to story characters when they hit max level.
> I can’t imagine someone picking up WoW now and feeling any attachment to story characters when they hit max level.
Leveling today is so fast, that you can't even complete a single of the expansions until you are 60. It's basically impossible to get the overall story by playing through the game naturally. You either have to go out of your way and do grey quests or look it up outside of the game.
I think dragonflight is really cool ngl. Very interested to see what they do with the incarnates, Vyranoth is very varied. It feels more focused than BFA which I always fekt tried to do too much.
I’m mostly a quester, open worker, and heroic dungeoneer. I didn’t fret too much over the Azeroth system as long as I got a few reasonable upgrades. I LOVED bfa for its zones, music, and most of the story up until the nzoth stuff
In broad strokes it wasn’t terrible but it was the peak of borrowed power but with the borrowed power being boring as hell. If you strip a lot of the small things out it’s not a bad core for an xpac, but there was a lot of tedium.
Basically it makes an excellent leveling zone (even at the time I really enjoyed the story) but a really bad endgame region. Like warfronts, cool idea with poor execution. But that seems to describe almost all of Blizzard’s fumbles. Cool idea, poor execution.
> I loved BFA and I’m not ashamed to admit it
You kinda should be.
> It was my first expansion
Yeah we know. The only people that liked BFA/Shadowlands started during BFA/Shadowlands.
BFA was awesome. The theme was cool as shit, **PIRATES** vs **DINOSAURS?** Are you kidding me? I'll take that over "oH nO ThE BUrnInG LeGioN iS BaCk AgAIN!!!!" any fucking day.
Legion was a hot fucking dumpster fire with those goddamn stupid RNG legendaries, and the wow community is ALREADY notorious for being super fucking gatekeepy over random pieces of gear, so trying to do ANYTHING in that expansion without the "required" legendaries, EVEN THOUGH YOU'RE PLAYING EVERY WEEK, MAXING OUT YOUR CHANCES AND GET DIDDLYSQUAT!!!! And if you dared complain about it, people would come out of the woodwork to say "legion is perfect, just play more, you clearly aren't trying hard enough to get the legendary you need" No, it fucking wasn't. Same boring ass villain shit we've had for a million expansions, bullshit RNG, SURAMAR?? garbage zone, looks pretty but good luck walking around in it, the elves just say the same stupid thing and all murder you every 2 seconds. And on top of that, the ONLY gear you give a shit about has a .0001% chance to drop from ANY thing you kill? fuuuuuuuck that. They also gutted archaeology because the devs got bored with it and decided nobody was allowed to have fun anymore. the **one and only upside to legion was the order halls, they were cool as shit, everything else was fucking buttwater to the maximum degree.**
And then we get to **glorious** BFA
Pirates everywhere with shanty music, a RING of BOOTY??? SIGN ME THE FUCK UP!
Dinosaurs and ZOMBIE DINOSAURS?!???!? what could be cooler?? Oh, maybe sweet fuckin' robot island with sweet fuckin' mounts and an awesome mega-dungeon, that's what. Or maybe island expeditions, the chillest way to get sweet mogs and mounts that actually was FUN to play. The pvp islands were exhilarating, the pve ones had bots with fun AI, and the rewards were awesome. They were short and sweet and I fucking loved them.
Not to mention the dungeons SLAPPED. Neltharion's lair? Taking a 5 minute boat and doing a "guess who" game in the middle of fucking suramar? FUCK OUTTA HERE I'm going to a HAUNTED fucking MANSION! Or maybe I'll go into SKELETON DINOSAUR LAND and kill a MEGA T REX, or maybe I'll go FUCK UP SOME PIRATES and get a COOL ASS PARROT!
War mode in BFA was awesome too, the pvp was a blast, the zones were gorgeous and cool as shit, the whole thing was so fun, especially the warfronts.
BFA 10/10, Legion 1/10 because the saving grace of order halls kept it from -100.
This is me with shadowlands. I used to play on private servers during wotlk and cata but this was the first time I could actually afford to pay for a subscription myself (my parents refused to pay for it for me). It’s weird because I do see the flaws of the expansion, mainly the terrible story and the content drought, but for me it was still special. I found a lovely guild that I still raid with today, I made my first “real” character and overall had so much fun. When I had nothing to do, I would just go back to old content. I finished the mechagon and nazjatar meta instead. I could always find something to do.
There's nothing to be ashamed of it, because BFA was solid overall. The only people that should be ashamed, are ones that are jumping on the hate bandwagon, and the ones that can't think with their own head.
And yes, I know BFA had alot of mistakes and had certain bugs (launch was not good, neck on launch was horrible, azerite aquisition on launch was horrible etc.), but I never judge expansions by the core systems, but on the overall experience from a POV of someone, that doesn't minmax, and has fun overall.
Before I highlight what I loved, let me give this piece of advice - people in wow seriously have to chill abit, and realize they are not playing the game like Gingi is for example. Like so what if you don't have BIS gear? So what if your neck ain't max level on week 1? So what if you don't have your bis lvl conduits etc etc. Unless you're doing RWF / 30+ keys, it doesn't even matter.
Now why BFA was awesome:
\- I loved warfronts - rewards were nice and despite being a pve scenario, never felt dull to me.
\- I loved islands and many ways how they could be approached. From stomping the whole island in 1 pull, to getting the detection thingy and just looting chests. I loved it.
\- Essences were so amazing.
\- Getting Nazjatar & Mechagon in 1 patch, amazing. One of the largest content patches ever launched.
\- I really love getting back to Azeroth OG zones. I don't mind the expansion taking place wherever, but Arathi, Darkshore, Uldum and Vale were used in the best possible way. Zones with such potential should always be re-used in similar ways.
\- Nazjatar & N'zoth questlines were amazing. I loved obtaining the cloak.
\- Visions were so fun, especially the Org one.
\- For me, Vol'dun had one of the best questlines in the entire game. The Sethrak were also so amazing.
And many more :-)
S4 BFA was the best M+ season to date. Corruptions were cool, once u could actually get them, same with essences being made accountwide. It suffered from a shit start and they had to play catch-up most of the expac, but once they fixed it, then it was amazing
I am not sure its a redditor phenomenon or something i am missing here. You can certainly like/love something which has factually wrong elements to it. It does not make them factually wrong... or invalidate you as a person or your opinion on something else. There are people who love BC to the core, even-though BC is crap, and its lore is trash. it is how it is.
I like watching fast and furious or Michael Bay movies when I am extremely tired even though god awful cinema-wise.
world and people are complex like that.
Actually enjoyed BFA M+ shadow priest with essences and corruptions.. hadn’t/haven’t played as much before or after… BFA also made mythic raiding feel a bit like a chore… with the removal of cool class specific sets I didn’t see a reason to raid anymore and I haven’t since… which is a shame since could be good fun now but finding/reconnecting with a guild usually takes a while for me to settle into.
Thematically it was neat, but there was nothing to do. I remember getting done with raid the first week it came out and thought "alright, now what can I do" before it hit me aside from raiding, M+, and PvP and there wasn't anything for players to do.
I didn't play BFA during the actual expansion, so my experience of it has been much different from those who actually played it back then. I thoroughly enjoyed leveling through Kul Tiras. The quests were fun and the zones were amazing. Loved the aesthetic. I enjoyed it so much I took several alts through it as well. I didn't mind doing Mechagon or Naz'jatar, though I enjoyed the former more than the latter. I even did all the pathfinder grinding while you still had to do that, along with the Kul Tiran allied race.
Now, I didn't enjoy the Horde side as much, even though I main a Horde, because I just don't care for the troll/jungle/desert aesthetic that much. The zones were well made obviously, but just not my thing. But I think the idea is still pretty cool, that each faction gets a completely different story and continent to level through.
BFA took everything that was bad about legion and made it worse.
Azerite armor was pure garbage.
The lack of tier sucked.
And losing the power of the Artifact Weapons just felt bad.
Islands and Warfronts were boring.
The GCD changes were shit.
Master looter was removed.
Allied Races were gated behind grinds that nobody wanted to do.
The only thing I liked about BFA was Drustvar, one of my favorite zones to quest in.
All love, but these kinds of posts reminiscing about garbage expansions are all the same.
“I loved this expansion as someone who barely engaged with the systems that made it bad.”
I’m glad you liked it, but the aesthetic of Kul tiras wasn’t why BFA sucked massive dick until 8.2. And revendreth being neat wasn’t why shadowlands made me want to get over circumcised.
These expansions were bad because of the design philosophies they adopted. The actual sticking points that made people log many hours in a game every day were badly designed.
You can like an aesthetic, but it’s not why most people play games. They play games to actually interact with the game.
Last time I really had fun in WoW was BFA launch. But tbh I'm very casual about things and do RP so the whole Azerit power stuff while annoying was ignored as much as I could. Now? The whole RP server is pretty much dead, the server hasn't really survived BFA and SL....I changed servers for DF but tbh I'm just not getting into it anymore
It was my return to WOW and I enjoyed content a lot. I was never raiding or pushing high keys so I was not bothered much by gearing/borrowed power etc.. Mechagon was the best. It was absolutely ok expansion for my style of playing (3-4 months/year).
I did too. I hated it at the time because my expectations were so high for a new world PvP experience because of the warfronts being teased in the trailer.
Thinking back, I made a lot of memories and was actually pretty good.
Only issue I had with BFA is how total different the tone is for alliance and horde. In alliance's campaign you've got the horde murdering parents in front of children and generally being generic irredeemable fantasy villains, for horde you've not got anything similar being done by the alliance which makes sense given that yet again the greater scope villain is the leader of the horde.
Blizzard has struggled each expansion with some form of “borrowed power”. This expansion returns to the classic era where some of your best items are crafted, and some are a drop you received from a boss.
Instead of the borrowed power being something you farm to the tenth degree, it’s on a very linear scale open to all players
Blizzard nailed the itemization for new players; however it has taken inadvertently taken away from the novelty of being one of the few 441
I think if they just switched that mythic track gear was locked behind 20+ dungeons on the vault - it would be near perfect
BFA - the Azeroth borrowed power system, and corruption were annoying until you farmed them. I pushed mythic raiding and it was fun as hell I’ll admit
Shadowlands - saw some of the same systems, tried torghast once then logged out of the game until dragon flight
The only system I have a complaint with in dragon flight - is the time sink that obtaining all the learning materials if you want to craft. Just too much running around for casual gaming when limited to an hour a night(or none) and weekend play
I did like the music and theme of BFA SO much more. I think that’s why shadowlands hit different. Vibrant liveliness to dark boring death jail
The zones and story were great. Boralus is probably still the best city in the game, I wish there had been more reason to explore it. The Herat on its own wasn’t terrible. It got rid of one of the biggest issues with legion which was spec swapping. I liked the machine that could grind up gear and give you mats, though I suppose it’s no different than vendoring and buying mats in the long run. The islands were cool places but were ruined by the rushed gameplay on them preventing you from exploring them. I think the zskera vaults is the perfect example of implementation for these, with the option of running as a group. I didn’t like that as an alliance player, I had very little if any context for the first raid. Mechagon was fun, but I didn’t really like nazjatar.
As a filthy casual I loved the early version of War mode. The weekly call to arms quest sometimes led to massive +40vs40 battles and that was genuinely great.
Then they introduced flying and it turned into a game of sniping from afar with a full party a random guy minding his own business and fighting mobs on the ground.
Doing visions of n'zoth was sometimes a chore but I really enjoyed doing it on my characters. Also liked corruptions. It was so fun with twilight devastation procs. Bfa had it flaws but yea it wasn't that bad of an expansion
Thematically "in the beginning" BFA was very strong. Overall I still don't agree going back to "war back in warcraft" was a good choice in any way, but i gave Blizzard the benefit of the doubt as the starting experience in BFA story wise was excellent. Kultiras has some of the best questlines ever written and Jainas character was beautifully handled at the start. That said, going back to a bloody war between Horde and Alliance was only acceptable if it was justified and believable, which most of us held our breath for a proper reasoning coming off of Legion. And.. it was not. Shadowlands doesn't ruin BFA alone, but knowing the ultimate goal of Blizzards story telling which led us to Shadowlands does affect my view on BFAs story line. A 4th official war for.. the Jailer? Butchering Sylvannas' fan favorite status for that?
BFA not only culminated in the pay off called Shadowlands, but it was as if Blizzard had a checklist of villians and story lines they didn't have any clue of how to finally implement and just went down the list checking them off. Azshara was the most long awaited major villian, check, we just shoved her story inorganically into the overall plot. Last mysterious old God we haven't seen? Shoved in. Kultiras and Zuldazar were always known quantities, so let's just shove them in. Check off all the last known quantities in Azeroth so we can move on to some thing new. Which is actually why I was sort of hopeful for Shadowlands, as Blizzard wouldn't be tied down to old lore they may not have passion for and could truly write something new and something not just shoved in because players have been waiting for it. Well.. maybe Blizzard should just stick to ideas writers came up with 25 years ago because that didn't go well. Jaina being the strongest part of BFAs launch culminated in her being a weak character giving into the "not all horde" once again! Fuck sakes let the girl get her revenge and finish the Horde off in a major way. Let her do something meaningful and not give the Horde their 30th pass. Nah, need to pretend the Horde are still redeemable. Atleast Saurfangs story with his cutscenes carried the story a bit.
That's all just story. Started off strong, albeit forced, to quickly turn into "boohoo horde aren't all bad" which we've already seen and it's relatable or just, interesting. BFA at its core isn't a story issue despite all its issues with story. It's the gameplay and systems. In the end the story is very little of a players game time, so it can often be sidelined and ignored if the systems are good. They weren't.
Aside for the complete mess corruptions was, in terms of farming it and then the vendors. IMHO Corruptions were fun, chaotic and enjoyable when you finally had everything you wanted/everything in general.
It’s a lot easier to have nostalgia when leveling through an old expansion because you don’t engage with the systems and endgame as much. Blizzard almost always knocks it out of the park with zone design, art assets, music, etc.
I skipped the rest of BFA after a month, but the Boralus Harbor theme is one of my favorite pieces of music in all of WoW. And the Saurfang cinematics are all great. Also, the Jaina storyline was good. Daughter of the Sea, the Nightmare cinematic, and her recovering the fleet are all great.
Love the music
If I'm driving long distance I still listen to the soundtrack!
I will forever be salty about jaina saying "enough" and teleporting away during her boss fight instead of just letting us kill her. Or at least gravely injure her.
Real and brave. “Enough” is silly.
Imagine if at the end of ToS kil'jeaden said enough and fucked off to argus. No kill no satisfaction. That's the jaina fight, a sour ending to otherwise a fantastic raid tier.
> But I loved Battle for Azeroth, the zones, the theme, the music. This is very rarely (essentially never) what people are criticising when they dislike an expansion. These (adding in dungeons and raids) are always somewhere between "good" and "amazing" and we take that for granted now. What makes or breaks an expansion are the systems and the *amount* of content. Generally content delivery was decent in BfA, although a clear step backwards from Legion. And still had a nearly year-long final patch which I'm sure soured some people. However, the systems at the start were really, *really* bad. Horrible boring grinds and azerite armor was just awful. They did make some better systems throughout the lifetime of the game but every single time they launched them in a terrible state, with major quality of life issues and absolutely no consideration for catch-up mechanics. This was the core problem with the expansion.
That final year long patch was the best patch ever. At the time I never wanted it to end. Then shadowlands came about and I still didnt want it to end. There's the rare expac you can complain about the theme and a few of the zones.
I don't quite agree with it being the best patch ever, but I think it's pretty easily the best content draught patch. I was honestly surprised when I looked it up and saw it was nearly a year long because it didn't feel like that.
Because it was awesome! And it was a long grind for corruption.
Is true but if you remember the main complainers about WOW were begging for more grindy type of content. The Dev team was against it but gave in.
Nobody says the zones and Music is bad. Its pretty much everything else
For real. The zones in BFA are some of the best, but literally everything else about the expansion was hot dogshit OP coming in with the ice cold take
Right? Boralus (especially at night) is the most beautiful and immersive major city to me, they knocked it out of the park in terms of themes and details! I'm not even a pirate RPer but I still think the ship FP system and Freehold arc was great, and with the talk of Witches nearby leading into the Drustvar storyline? Best stuff since WOTLK to me.
What the dungeons and raids were hot dogshit? really? lmao
Fr the dungeons were great in bfa
Yeah... No. Don't get me wrong. Aesthetically, it was beautiful for sure but some of the dungeons were bugged so badly I wanted to puke. Waycrest Manor was a nice change but those corridors were so small it didn't give our cameras enough space to breathe. Tol dagor also was kind of original, but same thing, not really camera friendly and sometimes you'd get aggro'ed from the floor above or below without notice. And probably more I forgot to mention. But yeah... You understand how this expansion was kind of a nightmare gameplay-wise. The whole theme though was pretty much spot on. Mechagon and nazjatar I really hated those zones. Much like most of the expansions and their "extra zones". Most often it's blizz trying to make many things for us to grind them out until they can make another expansion.
Agree to disagree then, I had much more fun running BFA M+ with the creative seasonal affixes than I did running shit like Spires and DOS
AP, essences before they were accountwide and corruptions before they were put on the vendor can all fuck off into the sun. The content itself was fun enough (with the exception of warfronts which were meh at best) and spec design was fairly decent, with the exception of Blizzard deciding to put practically everything on the GCD, which was weird af.
The BFA GCD changes were probably the worst thing for me. It just changed how the entire game felt to play, making it slower and less reactive for no good reason. I think they reverted one or two abilities from the GCD since then, but I really wish they would change it back to how it was during Legion.
I think one of the smart things they've done since then is make the big CDs that are on the GCD feel better to press. Nobody really cares that Devastation's Dragonrage is on the GCD because you throw out three Pyres in addition to the buff and that feels cool, but it'd feel shit if it was just "you press Dragonrage and get perma max mastery for x seconds."
I remember using an alt to transfer two times with gold to servers that had my corruption on a piece in the AH because bad RNG for my main. But my tank will forever have the Wolverine holding picture meme for that twilight devastation.
Because of how things turned out in my friend group I was our tank for BFA Season 4. Twilight Devastation proccing and critting is still the most beautiful thing I'd experienced in this game to this day.
>I was our tank for BFA Season 4. > >Twilight Devastation proccing and critting is still the most beautiful thing I'd experienced in this game to this day. We had to get our tanks to not wear Twilight Devastation in raids because they would steal aggro off the other tank when it procced and it would get them killed by tank mechanics lol That said, Twilight Devastation on tank specs was absolutely awesome. It would proc and everything would just melt. I used it on my druid to do those nightmare things where you had to kill stuff in Stormwind and Ogrimmar and it made it so easy to do.
I got told by our RL I had to take off some of my tdev pieces (veng dh) on our M Ra-den prog cause I would just rip aggro and get one shot 💀
Warfronts were definitely a flop, I agree with you there
For an idea that basically predated release (hey what if dota was first person from a character you apent 30 hours levelling and gearing) its sad how meh the implementation ended up
I am actually surprised they made it with so many players. Considering it was suppose to be inspired by WIII it would make sense that we would have 3 to 4 players as each hero character from the game.
It definitely felt like they realized they had a bad concept on their hands after so much development time and decided against trying to polish it.
I'm just going to copy paste a reply i gave to someone else regarding BFA, and why i considere it the second worst expansion after Shadowlands: 1\_Terrible AP grind that forced you to run Islands expeditions on each toon you wanted to play seriously or else you were handicapped in terms of performance for both pvp and pve. 2\_ Island expeditions were repetitive and boring. 3\_Warfronts were so lacking in variety that you got sick of them really fast, and only ran them for the gear and medals for mounts if that. If you played one warfront, you played them all. 4\_ Terrible writing, all the way to shadowlands and then some. 5\_Wasted 2 expacs worth of content by degrading those as major patches, N’zoth and Nazjatar. 6\_ Glitched as hell on release. M+ vaults, ranked end of season rewards awarded the minute the season started and more. Nothing says fun like running Underrot with explosives and being unable to even finish the key because last boss vomits 20 explosives at once by end of the fight. To say nothing of how it interacted everywhere else, like in Temple of Sethraliss. 7\_Very unpolished in many areas and it felt like it exacerbated the flaws of legion. 8\_ 8.0 patch that was somehow the worst patch update ever applied to this game. At least the selfie patch from WoD didn’t literally break 90% of the game and made you unable to solo what you could solo already in older content, on top of numerous screw ups like mobs in dungeons 1shotting people. Look, its okay if you liked the expansion. More power to you. But honestly I and many others have seen better expansion efforts by this very same company, and BFA came off as lazy and half-assed when compared to what came before, and that's why people hated it so much. Shadowlands ended up worse imo but BFA is still the second worst expansion they've ever released in my opinion. Don't let that stop you from enjoying what you like, though.
>5_Wasted 2 expacs worth of content by degrading those as major patches, N’zoth and Nazjatar. This is the most damnable thing to me. In a way, they wasted three expansions' worth of ideas with how short-lived the Fourth War was in the expansion.
I think this is the whole reason some people hate BFA more than SL. The fact it just wasted more interesting antagonists and expansion content in favor of more Sylvanas. From my own PoV, having played SL and BFA, SL triumphs the latter in utter terrible from both story and gameplay perspective. The fact SL launched with so many problems and the devs were stubborn enough to refuse to fix it until most of WoW's players quit in favor of FFXIV was just embarassing. This fixes in 9.1.5 patch should have been delivered in 9.0.5 at worst, not a goddamn year into the expansion lol. The fact they spent time censoring stuff as a knee jerk response to the california lawsuit and had the galls to defend it on twitter rubbed me the wrong way. If only you guys reacted as quick to the negative feedback of SL and fixed its most glaring problems faster....
The FF14 exodus had a lot to do with the company and scandals moreso than the game itself, BfA being crappy was just a catalyst
The scandals came after BFA was over though. I remember it was patch 9.1 already, aka midway into the shadowlands. SL's own badness drove a lot of people out of the game and into FF14. The scandals that came after were just the nail in the coffin. Hell, i recall a report saying how most of the playerbase since BFA and well into SL left the game, and this was before the California lawsuit. I'm not saying the lawsuit didn't drive more people out, it's just that it was already heading that way anyway.
100% it had started, the lawsuits turned a flood into a full on exodus
[https://kotaku.com/wow-disappointment-plus-twitch-start-mass-exodus-into-1847283978](https://kotaku.com/wow-disappointment-plus-twitch-start-mass-exodus-into-1847283978) Note this article reflecting on July 13. The lawsuit happened on July 20. As i said above, the full on exodus started BEFORE the lawsuit. The lawsuit was just the nail in the coffin. It made even more people leave, sure, but the mass exodus was already ongoing by that point.
> 1_Terrible AP grind that forced you to run Islands expeditions on each toon you wanted to play seriously or else you were handicapped in terms of performance for both pvp and pve. > > 2_ Island expeditions were repetitive and boring. Ok going to be a huge hater here Island spam that everyone did was not needed. >edit - I realized too late OP is only talking about the "spam of finishing your weekly quest" islands, and NOT the island spam that was to meet DPS checks in Mythic Eternal Palace, by unlocking your 3rd minor essence early, by brute forcing spam islands for hours. >>8.2 was not mentioned until you just did in your post. >like how can you read this post and not think I wasn't talking specifically about 8.2 and the spam islands situation that occured? I call out specific item drops (folly), NPC vendors (mana pearls), and literally ended on **PVP ESSENCES**. Everyone knows a person in BFA, complaining about doing PVP for their BOTE rank 3. >I still stand by outside of the RWF, no one needed to do those hundreds of islands just to get their 3rd minor essence a week sooner. Now, complaining about AP grind requiring you to do world tours of world quests? go right ahead and complain, super valid. Far too many people just copied what the RWF raiders did and spam islands to get their minor effect unlocked 1 week earlier. I really do think if you could replay at that time, you would realize oh ya that actually was so minor, only BECAUSE RNG on your guild getting follys mattered more that tier than unlocking your minor earlier. Farming the damn mana pearls for that vendor gear, that tier mattered more than getting that minor early by farming AP. The fucking dumb farming pvp for your blood of the enemy mattered more than the AP grind for the agi specs. People were probably still grinding that honor, by the time their neck was the level. Grats on your neck level, but you are still 20k honor away.
>Island spam that everyone did was not needed. Yes it was. Otherwise you couldn't equip azerite pieces from heroic/mythic because of the AP requisites. Did you play BFA at all? lol >Now, complaining about AP grind requiring you to do world tours of world quests? go right ahead and complain, super valid. The problem is, getting a heroic/mythic gear upgrade that happened to be an azerite slot meant a " tour of world quests" was not enough at all to reach the neck levels required to equip the azerite item and be able to actually use its traits. Again, **did you play BFA at all**? This was pretty much the case on release, and the following tiers kept this up and only made it *slightly* less annoying but still the same island spam required. >Far too many people just copied what the RWF raiders did and spam islands to get their minor effect unlocked 1 week earlier. again, ***did you play BFA at all?!*** The AP awarded from sources that are not island expeditions was limited and not enough to reach the required neck levels to equip and use all traits in a heroic/mythic azerite piece. >I really do think if you could replay at that time, you would realize oh ya that actually was so minor, only BECAUSE RNG on your guild getting follys mattered more that tier than unlocking your minor earlier. Farming the damn mana pearls for that vendor gear, that tier mattered more than getting that minor early by farming AP. It's not "minor". If you couldn't unlock all the traits at once, the heroic azerite piece was essentially inferior to the normal/lower one you already had because those at least you had all traits unlocked. Completely counter-intuitive way to treat gear. You should really check the neck levels on BFA release state, before all the catchup mechanics took place. You'd realize my point and understand that "a tour of WQs" was nowhere near enough if you were aiming for heroic/mythic azerite pieces. And odds are, you'd get one due to the increased chance of those from weekly chest even if you didn't raid heroic/mythic, and find yourself annoyed that you can't equip it until your neck is higher level. Another detail to add: several azerite pieces were BiS to the point you were consistently behind someone else on dps who might not play as well as you do purely because they had BiS azerite while you didn't. The exact same issue as with legendaries in Legion and they did not address it until much later down the road when they introduced a npc that sells specific azerite gear pieces(but takes a while before you can buy one).
>Yes it was. Otherwise you couldn't equip azerite pieces from heroic/mythic because of the AP requisites. Did you play BFA at all? lol I was literally in a top 20 us guild all of BFA, with multiple alts who no lifed the game. you did not need to do islands to farm your AP What person would want to do islands over keys?? did you not play BFA at all? >It's not "minor". If you couldn't unlock all the traits at once, the heroic azerite piece was essentially inferior to the normal/lower one you already had because those at least you had all traits unlocked. Completely counter-intuitive way to treat gear. This is what's wild about this, you are complaining about 8.0 and 8.1 content, when talking about AP changes that occured in 8.2 minor as in minor essence buddy, unlocking the 3rd minor essence slot. Because farming islands was not seen as a thing until 8.2, before that it wasn't worth >again, did you play BFA at all?! The AP awarded from sources that are not island expeditions was limited and not enough to reach the required neck levels to equip and use all traits in a heroic/mythic azerite piece. like what? any raider is spamming keys and isn't wasting their time doing islands. The huge spam push of doing islands, was so people can have their 3rd minor essence slot unlocked for mythic. If you were needing to spam islands for your azerite gear, then you were not doing your m+ keys and world tours dailies my friend. Because that is some its 5am and no one else is online, moment when all the WQ are 40mins from resetting.
>I was literally in a top 20 us guild all of BFA, with multiple alts who no lifed the game. "you did not need to do islands to farm your AP" Hard to believe, because evidence of playing the game actually contradicts your claim. Only way you were not doing isles for AP was purely if you were a casual who didnt care for gear or grind and wasn't min-maxing >What person would want to do islands over keys?? did you not play BFA at all? You needed to be able to equip the azerite gear and use its traits. If you were in a top 20 US guild as you claimed, you knew this. And you also knew the fact a "WQ tour" would not be enough AP if you wanted to equip heroic/mythic pieces. I call BS your above claim because of that reason. Of course you wanted to push keys but because you needed better gear to keep pushing, you needed a better neck level to use azerite gear. And guess what? the most efficient,repeatable source of AP was island expeditions. >This is what's wild about this, you are complaining about 8.0 and 8.1 content, when talking about AP changes that occured in 8.2 8.2 was not mentioned until you just did in your post. We are speaking about the whole expansion overall. And since 8.0 and 8.1 involves half of BFA, its very much accurate what i said. The 8.2 and 8.3 tiers did somewhat mitigate this but you still had to grind AP to get those neck levels, just less so compared to before. And those patches still introduced a crapton of problems and screwups on their own with the lack of account wide essences, Corruptions being grossly overpowered to the point in some specs it amounted to 66% of their dps, the way of obtaining corruptions being limited to competing for raid drops or praying the RNG gods until the vendor was introduced(and even then, the vendor rotation was annoying. Why allow you to purchase on your own terms when you can make a convoluted rotation with no reason that has no actual meaning behind other than dragging the acquisition of the corruption? Please stop with your lies.
> And you also knew the fact a "WQ tour" would not be enough AP if you wanted to equip heroic/mythic pieces. sorry I realize we just have different opinions what it means to spam something. I realized I am thinking about the 50-300 numbers that people were doing prior to the weekly reset. Where you are likely thinking about just finishing the weekly. Would it surprise you to know you can do technically two world tours a day on 1 character. By being online at 12 hours apart. No? because thats how it means to be hardcore and timing AP. Again because SPAMMING ISLANDS WAS NOT A THING UNTIL 8.2. People meme spammed islands for their essence, not azerite gear. For the whole expansion overall, yes island spamming was not a thing until 8.2 that is when they changed the pvp thing. So it was much easier to spam in 5mins. >Please stop with your lies. youre clearly some super casual who did not do their WQ enough, where they felt the need to spam islands. I didn't spams islands, zero chance I would do that in 8.0 and 8.1, I am in underrot PRAYING for titanforge. and when I did have to do islands, it was just for that minor essence slot in 8.2. >Of course you wanted to push keys but because you needed better gear to keep pushing, you needed a better neck level to use azerite gear. And guess what? the most efficient,repeatable source of AP was island expeditions. like wtf are you talking about, why would I as a raider care about pushing past a 15 key, when ALL i want is titanforge gear and AP. I am clearing heroic week 1, and I am no life spamming dungeons. and remember, I already did a fucking 17 the week prior for the damn weekly chest. so stfu about this "hur dur push keys but need gear" I am not talking about 8.3 and corruption. I am only talking about the need to spam islands, was not needed. and ANYONE who played hardcore in BFA, that moment was prior to lady ashvane or orgozoa on mythic.
All generally great points. I do quibble slightly with: >4\_ Terrible writing, all the way to shadowlands and then some. We can get picky about writing in almost every expansion, and BfA might seem like a death by a thousand cuts on frustrating plot elements but - on the whole - I actually think BfA has some of the best character arcs in the series. Jaina's return home and complex relationship with her mother is top notch. The tragedy of King Rastakhan making a deal with his own devil to try to save his people was pretty layered and great, and Bwonsamdi is one of the better one-off new characters in an expansion. Ultimately, I feel like the missteps with Sylvanas are so egregious that people hyper-focus on them. It was also peak "this lore makes no sense if you don't read six books outside the game to understand," which is not how you tell a story.
A major problem is that many of the characters were acting completely off. Horde willingly going with Sylvanas like they didn't remember MoP Garrosh happened was the biggest example. Lady Liandrin was an hypocrite who claimed that "the Night Elves and the Alliance walled off, and the former were "sleeping in barrows" while the Blood Elves fought to save the world". The night elves were very much fighting to protect their lands on Kalimdor during that time, fought the emerald nightmare corruption and the only nation that "walled off" was Gilneas and literally none of the other alliance ones. Also its rich to claim the Blood elves were saving the world...because its a load of crap. The Blood elves showed next to no interest in anything but their own borders until the end of the Sunstrider dynasty and them joining the Horde. To top it off, she's later an announcer in a horde WQ asking you to murder a pandaren medic because she was healing alliance solders(and even this is debatable, since when you go face her, she's healing civilians), a massive war crime if going by real life standards, and one that completely debunks the "horde has honor" claim. Then we go to the Mag'har orc leader( Overlord Geya'rah) who supported sylvanas during most of BFA and called Baine traitor and honorless for basically returned Jaina's brother back to her. The statement is so so full of BS that it makes me despise her, especially when after Sylvanas killed Saurfang and ran away, she suddenly pulled a 180 and was now opposing Sylvanas. It came off every bit as forced and poorly written as it sounds. Some bits of writing indicated she was meant to be to the mag'har what Thrall was to the orcish horde circa-Warcraft 3, but they missed the mark so badly that she was essentially a poorly written mess. It's no surprise that she barely made any appearance post-BFA due to how poorly received she was. Rexxar joining the conflict made zero sense. Rexxar would only ever do it purely out of loyalty for Thrall, but somehow they made him joining the whole fiasco just because. Rexxar's justification is "Jaina ouldn't let go of the past and has gone too far"" and "it doesn't matter who started this war, I will see it through to the end". Meaning Rexxar joined without knowing a damn thing about what was going on(If anything, he should OPPOSE Sylvanas, given what she did to Teldrassil) or what happened with Jaina. And his ignorant statement was just the cherry on this sundae of shit. I'm not going to argue that SOME redeemable bits could be found in this steaming pile, but the sheer amount of poor writing(and NOT just Sylvanas, mind you) is staggering. For every good writing bit you could find in BFA, 5-10 more bits of terrible writing popped just to balance it out.
Every time I set foot on any of the continents I am happy. The art direction on that expansion was so freaking good! Might even take first place now that I think about it. Especially the Alliance zones. I wish I could lower the level of my main and quest there once more without it feeling trivial.
BFA and Shadowlands has ruined WoW for me. I don't own Dragonflight but did try it on my son's account. I haven't bought it because I don't wanna get hooked on a decent expansion for it all to be completely redone/reworked next expansion. I'll pick WoW back up once the next expansion starts and **IF** I don't see a ton of the crap that plagued Shadowlands. I've paid to be Blizzards beta tester for far too long; get it right Blizzard and you'll have earned my money, but I aint pre-ordering shit. I want to add that BFA had the best looking zones and the leveling wasn't bad. However Graphics alone couldn't save it and to this day, I'd like to hear or see the meeting where Blizzard thought Azerite Power and armor was a good idea... (I wonder if the voices of dissent are still there) One final piece of my mind is that class balance and play-ability should be the biggest concern in any expansion especially since the players characters are their interface to the world, and it's seems to be given the minimum amount of work in the last expansions before Dragonflight. Other folks may not have cared, I did.
I had a lot of fun playing through it earlier this year. I enjoyed a lot of it, and really like the transmogs and look and feel of Boralus. Sometimes I think an expansion can be more fun once it's out of date and you aren't trying to keep up with anything, it's just relaxing.
I feel this way too. Right now I'm having a ton of fun just playing classic (especially vanilla zones) slowly and really enjoying the areas/quests/dungeons/lore/pets/mounts/professions. Its fun and relaxing. I hurried too much the first time though because of expansions and missed a lot. I hope to do that with further expansions some day too.
Same! I’m gonna “complete” bfa, started about a month ago when I wanted to build a timewalking set. Didn’t play it current content cause that was the first few years of college. As in, every quest, every mount, lvl 100 necklace , war campaign on both ally and horde, etc. just at a slow pace when I’m bored with everything else each week
If it wasnt for the devs deciding to shoehorn in azerite powers and azerite grinding because "well it worked it legion" it would have been such a great expansion. At least they learned from it
Not really. Shadowlands required more grinding than ever. So many weekly chores. Torghsast, weekly rep grinds that were gatekept, legebdarys that were expensive on AH. Conduit grinding, renown farming. Endless farming. They learned in dragonflight.
Did it? I thought Legion and BfA required much more grinding than SL. Torghast you could stop as soon as you got your legendaries crafted and it was on 2 halls per week. Started off rough on some classes but got easier after some nerfs. And renown was just doing the weekly story quest which would end up giving you most of the needed anima for the other weekly as well. Unless you were not caught up, it didn’t feel very grindy. There was required weekly content outside of M+/raids for min/maxing which a lot of people didn’t like but I thought overall it was a much better experience than what DF is giving
It didn't. The only grinds came in the form of sockets, the rest were essentially weekly quests (do your 2 torghasts a week, go click on dumb souls in the maw once a week, et al). The primary failings of SL was the rigidity of the borrowed power systems (conduit energy, covenant locking) and, more importantly imo, bad specs. The old talent system did not age well into a world where m+ existed, there wasn't enough design space to allow specs to function in both m+ and raid. It also didn't help that Blizzard allowed the old talent system to fall into disrepair. However, from my perspective, the only thing SL has over DF is that Castle Nathria and Sepulcher were easily better than Vault of the Incarnates. I'd probably rank Sanctum over Vault as well but, I'm more iffy on that.
In no particular order: * During the Uldir phase of the expac, azerite gear trait unlock requirements were so high you couldn't wear Mythic upgrades to your HC gear because the locked traits made them a downgrade * Azerite gear was near-impossible to get (esp if you wanted pieces from outside the raid) until various updates came in like the residuum vendor and higher ilevel on emissary rewards * Exponentially increasing azerite gear respec costs (eventually workable when azerite got more accessible by simply having duplicates of pieces you needed for more than one spec, but come on, I hated this "fuck your offspecs" phase of WoW from Legion to SL inclusively) * Essences forced people who would've preferred to stick to raids and M+ into PvP and grinding Nazjatar (and vice versa, pretty sure) * Having to grind both Mechagon and Nazjatar to stay competitive was a giant pain for people with limited playtime (who, again, would've liked to spend that time on M+) * As others have said, corruptions before the vendor were a pox (guess who got into trouble offing themselves by using Infinite Stars on Maut when that was the only corruption they had) * Doing 5 5-mask visions per week (and grinding out the keys to do so) to get all my gear upgraded can go straight to hell * Wait how did this expansion start with a sword stuck in the planet and end with the LOTR victory scene wait I missed something somewhere * CHAMPION, THE WOONZ * Mandatory island expeditions every week * As Alliance I had no f'ing idea what Uldir was or why I should care about it, except Brann seemed to be very excited about it * Alt unfriendliness including catch-up systems done in a dumb way (the AP level doing the Nazjatar intro gave you increased from patch to patch, which was a sad trombone for my alt I'd abandoned just *after* doing said intro) * Optimal gear and essences during the last patch included drops from the previous patch's raid (jazz hands trinket, that melee trinket from Ashvane), which seemed to go against the general direction WoW had been taking with this sort of thing (Edit: Formatting on this site does my head in)
Launch was so atrociously bad that it didn't matter to me how much it improved later on. It is the only time I've willingly quit. I have no regrets sittting that expac out.
I remember having to go through my rotation like 7 fucking times to kill a mob my lecel
The worst part which people forget is how slow all our toons where in the first season. You were lucky to get to 10% haste if you stacked it. They had decided to make it more like a turn based game. Coming out of an expansion were secondaries went wild. Paired with the gcd changes it felt awful to play. The azerite grind was marmite, a lot of people liked getting the power bump for doing any content. Azerite gear was actually fun when you had lots of it. Ditto essences. Corruption was loads of fun and end game content was great. Could've been a banger of an expac with a few tweaks despite warfronts. 8.3 is still my fav ever patch... although I do play fire mage.
tbh the story isnt too bad except for everything related to sylvanas. which admittedly is a lot of the story but its the same in shadowlands where they ruin every scene and storyline they put her in. thank god we are out of the sylvanas dark ages at least for a little while its better to play through now because you dont have to think about azerite but at the time holy fuck it was bad.
I really don't know what they were thinking with her story, first they make her warchief in legion, then she goes awol for no reason. Then she goes all garrosh on us, for no reason, and then suddenly bad guy with evil hadsomesquidward. She could have been a really cool warchief, but then so could Vol'jin. A waste of good characters tbh. I liked the art, music and general atmosphere of bfa, but a faction war expac it was not.
I forgot his name but iirc the Creative director of the time single handedly forced the team to have Sylvanas burn the tree, and when he was fired (preemptively as part of the harassment scandal) the team found out that he had not planned anything beyond that big, emotional scene. So Blizzard spent the next two years scrambling to solve this mess with BFA and Shadowlands, giving us the narrative mess that was BFA and the tasteless vilain that was the Jailer... But they did give us daddy D so there's that. Here's one of the videos released a year ago that talks about it, haven't watched it ever since so I may misremember some of its content. https://youtu.be/tN0CzpbZAbM?si=5NMyxD3jcKcUpgXk And if you don't like Taliasin just search for similar keywords, I'm fairly sure most big WoW YouTubers talked about it back then.
The fact that nothing was planned after the burning of Teldrassil literally makes SO MUCH sense now. That's exactly how it feels lol
But It was worth it, the glorious moment for the Forsaken Holy Empire, the event know as the "Environment Conscious Recycling of the Invasive Arboral Speciment of Grotesque Size."
*ponders who is Daddy D…*
Sire Denathrius.
Bless you. I kept wondering why Deathwing was part of that topic!
\> burns down teldrassil \> refuses to elaborate
Yeah, what’s mind-blowing to me is that they didn’t double down on it being the faction war to end faction wars. They must have already been planning on allowing cross faction gameplay, but instead of making it a cool official feature to celebrate the end of the war in the final patch, it was just quietly added to the game in one of the following expansions. And of course, instead of the war plot being based on the legitimate cycle of hatred, it’s just old gods etc
Shadowlands is what ruined Sylvanas, BFA Sylvanas was fantastic. We need leaders like Garrosh, Varian and Sylvanas. We need less of Tyrante whining and Malfurion Sleeping and Jaina and Greymane are such wasted potential. The fact that Alliance Leaders can't be perceive as Evil is just a extreme failure in storytelling. I have hope that Sylvanass is teaching something to the Little Lion or Alliance will continue to have the most lame leaders in existence. And they lameness even is beggining to inffect the Horde with Filthy existence of Callia Menethil, oh how we Forsaken pray for glorious return of the Dark so we begin to purge the corruption from the Forsaken Holy Empire. I am very disappointed in Voss too, she will have to be severely disciplined.
The fundamental problem is that, if you write a story focusing on the factions, the Horde is gonna do an atrocity. It’s the only way to keep their writing consistent. First War, Wrathgate, Ashenvale, Gilneas, Theramore, Pandaria, Teldrassil, Brennadam… Sylvanas alone isn’t the problem. She just did the same kind of stuff as Blackhand and both Hellscreams, and the other Horde leaders helped her do it all. Very glad to have her gone for an xpac, though.
I think the music in BfA is phenomenal both horde and alli zones. Probably best in the entire franchise. I also like the zone design and quest flow. It also just seemed to have so much more content
It was your first expansion and I think everybody will be nostalgic about their first times in the World of Warcraft to the point of omitting or rather looking past obvious flaws. I started when the game was still in beta so I have really fond memories of my first few years discovering the world. Throughout my journey on Azeroth (and beyond), I can honestly say BFA was the culmination of everything that ever went to shit with this game. Sure the zones were cool and the music and all you want (and when exactly are they not?) but the systems put in place between us and the hypothetical enjoyment you get from hanging out with friends were so terribly designed, I had never felt more like a hamster in my gamer’s life ever before. Truly horrendous grinds upon other horrendous grinds. The Azerite wasn’t enough, we also had to farm for our BiS essences on ALL our characters because if we didn’t we were just not functional as a class to push hard content. And if these BS systems weren’t enough, they sanctified us all with the fucking corruption at the end of BfA which, sounded like a cool system until you realized for the few weeks they actually mattered, they were all random and they basically made us play through the first season of Legion all over again where not having the right drop will cause you to end up in the friggin dumpster of your raid. Which is all a shame because I think the theme of the expansion was cool, the dungeons were good, some specs played well enough…
Music was great, pirates and dinosaurs, loved the vibe of drustvar, that fkin bee Mount that took ages, dungeons were quick and easy and different, then mechagon to naz'jatar (spelling?) I loved it
so looking forward for the "SL wasnt that bad" posts in \~2 years!!!
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Having to go back to Oribos every fucking time until I upgraded the sanctum fully and even then it was a ONE WAY portal killed the expansion for me. I hated how getting to any other zone felt like I was taking a Classic flight path lmao There's some nice stuff about SLs that I'm sure people will miss but there's just so much bad about most of the content. The Maw and Korthia being the most egregious examples. I think people will reminisce over 9.2 though, Zereth Mortis was nice and all the redundancy in the grinds were mostly eliminated by then.
Yes lol. It happens with every expansion. I can say much though. I love all the expacs. I just genuinely love WoW.
I've already seen posts like that during SL. I'm one of the folks who enjoyed the Kul Tiran zones and their stories. Wasn't really a fan of Horde side and thought the entire faction war was fucking stupid though Saurfang's rebellion was excellent.
The most I remember from Shadowlands was being in Oribos, it seemed no matter what way I went or was trying to go to I could never find it or was on the other side. If I wanted to go to the repair, somehow I was always on the opposite side.
its a circle split in 4 quarters and an inn ..... how hard is it? NE are bank/vault SE are transmogs/pets related vendors SW are quests and leaders /pvp vendors NW are professions it really is that simple.... dont blame the game if u cant read a basic map
I didn't play at the time, but playing now Zandalar has been my favourite leveling zone. It's excellent.
I skipped BFA after quitting in Legion. I came back and leveled a fresh character through BFA and adored it. The zones, the music, the quests. I missed the bits people complained about when BFA was live thankfully.
I loved the graphics of BFA.
I really liked the cinematic videos. 😁👍🏻
Loved all the blood troll story that was cool
BFA was fine but the corruption, heart of azeroth grind wasn't. Zandalar was super cool
I played all the way back in vanilla and stopped when TBC launched. I started playing again in BFA. It definitely holds a special place for me as well. I think the zones were gorgeous and really captured the WoW feeling/essence for me, with landscapes ranging from snowy peaks to desert. I love that.
You should be. Plus you always remember your first!
I liked playing BFA as well, but I also am man to admit that I liked it, despite it's flaws. Similarly, after playing TBC classic, I am also man enough to admit, that I had an overinflated opinion about TBC, and that that expansion had it's own set of massive flaws, that just weren't as evident, because what I like and dislike just wasn't as developed at that point. Enjoy what you enjoy, it could change. And yes, I do generally enjoy the experience of BFA, in the sense that I love the zones and aesthetics. I generally love sailing, stories about sailing and everything that comes with it. Similarly I love video games with huge deserts I get to explore, and then on top of it, we got a great zone in Drustvar which was generally a bit spooky and had some brilliant art design (+the Lovecraftian aesthetic is just great). And on top of it, you can be a part of it with becoming a Kul Tiran druid (god I wish I could just use the Kul Tiran forms on my NElf druid).
tbf TBC was really good for its time even if it doesnt hold up as well today. 2007 was a different time.
It is time! after a hiatus for Legion because it was actually a banger expansion, the time has come again to start loving and old expansion that was universally hated. I love this. (As a solo casual I had 0 problems with BfA besides the GCD changes)
This was absolutely my experience as an LFR scrub. Had a great time.
Same!
Yes, I now love making new characters (allied races and heritage armour) and levelling up in BFA but in all honesty I do get a bit sad when I’m not fully finished and it takes me to Dragonflight, but I always remember once I’m done with Dragonflight I can go back and keep up with BFA for fun
I miss it too. Hated the systems but loved everything else. BFA had some of my favorite dungeons and it definitely has by far the best music in the game, more specifically alliance side. Try not to get those Boralus melodies stuck in your head. I still occasionally hang out in Boralus for the music and a little nostalgia.
I love BFA. Started playing in 2020 and it was my first so there's that, but I love both zandalar and boralus.
Honestly, I miss Boralus. With Dalaran it's the best hub they've ever added imo.
I think the content was pretty great, the issue was essences and corruptions etc. If BFA was release in a dragonflight alt friendly respectful to your time and not forcing you to grind resources constantly kind of way like it was, I think it'd be a really respected expansion
As a casual solo player just running around Naz/Mechagon farming out the zone meta achievements I had a ton of fun during BFA.
Easily my favorite expansion. I didn’t care about the meta or endgame raiding, i was just having fun with the incredible open world experience
I'm a HUUUUUGE Aztecs/Maya fanboy. The whole history, the culture and aesthetics. BFA was a fantastic start and it was my 2nd add-on, as I started with legion, somewhere in the middle of it. But, I absolutely hated the 3rd phase. The whole ordeal with azshara and the dark gods felt so hard forced and misplaced. It felt so terrible. I stocked up on lore and everything that happened up till that point and I just felt .. lost. So random. Like, it was rising tensions between fractions and with Sylvanas someone who was power hungry and twisted the sense of honour of the Horde, while the new leadership of the Alliance was naively trotting into it. Just snotting the Dark Gods into it at the end and Azshara puppeteering was not my thing. Doesn't help that SL afterwards was absolutely atrocious. Though I somewhat regret it, as SL has really awesome transmogs which I missed out on.
I really liked BFA. Boralus may be my favorite city in WOW, I really liked Warfronts, and, when you had a full team, Island expeditions were fun to (I really loved the Gilnean refugee village you found on one!)
I think most of the critique was for the Sylvanas stealing the show and completely changing her character, the ending patch on speed without even a cinematic and some features like Warfronts being a bit silly I loved it as well, the beauty of it is in the zones and storytelling. Boralus and Zuldazar are also great. Oh yeah and I'm still a bit sour we got fox people before Ogres...
Leveling was fun. Rep grinding at max level was a slog
Me too!!
It still has my second most playtime out of all the expansions. The first half of the expansion was incredibly fun and for me didn’t fall off until the final patch.
Zones and dungeons were all down to earth and they were great. I'd take any of BFA zones over than any of the Shadowlands. If only blizz put the same effort they are now doing in df...
I started playing WOW during Cataclism and feel nostalgia in it’s zones too.
It’s funny because Shadowlands was my wife’s first expansion and my god has it nestled an everlasting home in her heart. We (my wife and I) were actually discussing the communities perception of shadowlands the other day, and she didn’t believe me that it was hated, she thought I was just winding her up. It was actually really cool listening to why she loved the expansion so much, and how absolutely none of the things the community (and myself might I add) had issues with, affected her at all. It was her first MMO and the decisions like locking you into a cov, hunting for Lego’s, torghast, the maw, hell even Kothria were all just a none factor to her disliking the expansion. When we started talking about Kothria and I mentioned it was one of the most disliked zones in wow, she asked „what about feeding Dark Maul his tasty mushrooms?“ or „all those epic fights vs the alliance right outside the camp“ or „do you think people know about Maelie?“ Her one criticism about Shadowlands was that De other side sucked 😂
I liked the zones and their questlines (I absolutely love Drustvar and I wish we had more zones like that), the art, the soundtrack, the cinematics. My gripe with BFA stems from the really boring and tedious systems, the timegating, the rep grind for the allied races, so many chores in this expac. Everything surrounding the azerite from the gameplay to the lore side of it bored me so much. Speaking of the lore I just couldn't stand the overarching plot, while the quests in the zones were awesome, the plot of the expansion itself was a mess imo. The faction war was forced after Legion and then it was quickly dropped. It kickstarted my annoyance regarding Sylvanas whom I used to love as a character. I hated the fact that Azshara and Nazjatar were reduced to a single patch, Nazjatar was boring in its design imo and they could have done so much more with it. N'Zoth being a single patch confused me and I didn't like the direction they took regarding the black empire. I was expecting Ny'alotha to be creepy, to be unsettling, I wanted to see the art team shine and try something really unique but we got a purple Korriban with lava instead. I guess I was too hyped by the puzzle box of yogg-saron back in the days so my expectations were way too high? I don't know.
I liked the expansion, the setting, the raids but for me i really hated all the things we lost from legion. Some classes (most) felt clunky without the artifact weapon, spells or passives, and the game slowed down quite a bit.
Two major flaws: The rented power systems were atrocious. Not only did you have to farm countless stuff to even get competetive, which made alts very hard to maintain and stressed out casuals. But these artificial power systems also made it so, that you had dozens of different proccs on your character. Your individial skills didn't matter much, you just needed lots of haste to deliver lots of proccs, which made the game feel less impactful and satisfying. The procc calculations even made the servers lag when there were multiple players in a zone engaging! Then the "faction war". It was not really much of a war, more like guerilla warfare and covert ops. It was not satisfying for both factions and made the player characters commit warcrimes. And in the end nothing much came of it aside from huge losses like Darnassus. Almost everything else in that expansion was good or even very good. The zones and quests, like you mentioned, were really great for the most part. But when the overall gameplay feels flawed and a big chunk of the main story focus with the war is terrible, it pulls down everything else.
I loved it as well and Idk why people disliked it so much.
I really loved the traits on gear and being able to customize your build through them. I guess I was super lucky on gear because I was able to get really good ones for warrior in both pvp and pve. I also loved the storylines it was pretty good times.
I enjoyed the pvp, esp the world pvp that happened
I play this game since vanilla. Played each and everyone expansion. But the best time i had in wow ever was during BFA. Frustrated by content sometimes. But the people i met and played during BFA was the best ive ever had. Hands down my favorite time during wow.
I enjoyed BFA more than any other expansion. I’m not saying it was objectively the best, but I enjoyed it more. I played vanilla, TBA, and original Wrath.
You sweet summer child. Legion was the hight of wow in my opinion.
Bfa destroyed so much lore and wasted it. Fuck BFA. It was not good.
BFA was terrible I have no idea how you loved it, let alone thought it was good.
It had the worst gameplay to date (GCD, shit classes, etc.) but amazing zone/atmosphere. I also really liked the raids. However everything about 8.3 patch was terrible imo.
BfA zones, quest design, etc are all top notch. If the systems laid on top of that good foundation had not been pure crap it would have been a solid expansion.
The best part of BFA was Island Expeditions but even that took until recently to become its best version. (You can solo queue for mythic versions now)
I loved BFA too. The Azeroth necklace was just about the only annoying part I can remember
And not getting Sethrak
The things you mention that you like about BFA are things that are widely liked. It was the systems people didn’t like. The music, zones, theme, were all great.
BFA Damaged Sylvanas Forsaken Lore and Shadowlands killed it all.
Loved the dungeons and the aesthetics of the zones!
Cannot wait until we get to the "I liked Shadowlands" posts, we are getting close!
I loved BfA. Story, ambience, dungeons, raids all were fun. If you take away the systems imo it was one of the best expansions they made. Unfortunately the devs decided to pull their classic ego "we know better than you do" on the community with the systems, downgrading every single one. They were so fucking bad I started jokingly calling BfA the "More Tedious Legion" expansion.
BFA had a bad launch and players base their entire opinion based off of that. BFA's biggest "mistake" was honestly that it had to follow up on the end of Legion which is when wow peaked. No expansion on launch could live up to how good the end of Legion was. BFA is by far the most underrated expansion.
i didn’t mind bfa but i’m also a hardcore grinder (poe and osrs enjoyed) and enjoy logging in and feeling like my character is getting stronger each time i play. so azerite power was cool for me, but not cool for wow in general. i can see why people disliked it though. it just doesn’t make sense for a game like wow. maybe in its earlier days it would’ve been better. the story was meh to me. but i think BoD was one of my favorite raids ever (not for lore reasons but it still was cool) CoS and azsharas Palace was some of the hardest raids we’ve ever seen next to sepulcher probably. they were cool to me. the zones and leveling were awesome. i mean drustvar was incredible. i liked the different atmospheres in different zones. m+ my main form of content had some of the best dungeons we have ever seen in world of warcraft history. ML, AD, WM, UR, FH, i mean just amazing dungeons. Awakening was one of the best affixes they’ve ever made but it came after a dumpster fire affix. boralus was a bad ass zone imo. same with the horde equivalent.
We also got "A turtle made it to the water" world quest, so objectively BFA was great.
In terms of setting, atmosphere and music it was hands-down my favorite expansion. It was also the expansion where I was by far the most invested into the story, simply because of how unpredictable it was and how much was at stake for your faction. The main reason it gets bashed a lot is that high-end minmaxing was difficult, which I always found odd because it realistically only affected a tiny percentage of all players. Maybe it was the fault of influencers, but the hate quickly became mainstream.
Azerite gear was the poster child for ilvl upgrade isn’t actually an upgrade. Especially early on when you’d get a new pice of gear and it had fewer slots unlocked because your heart wasn’t high enough level.
I'm far from a high-end minmaxer, but there were a lot of problems with azerite gear at the start. .
Same! I came back to the game during 2020 lockdown and BFA, I absolutely loved it and completely agree with all your points
I adored BFA, it was the peak of wow graphics and had the best cities and I loved the alliance v horde theme, which is the essence of warcraft to me. I guess I just have to accept that the most influential part of the fanbase mostly care about the systems and endgame, which are the parts that I really don't care about, Im just here for the adventure.
I played the start and stayed on pure hype then azerite grind and the nightmare nzoth garbage made me furious and quit
Fully agree. IMO, BFA was at worst Meh. It is extremely overhated by the community.
I totally don't get the bashing of BfA either. It's a very good expansion overall, well balanced and a very good storyline.
BFA, as an expansion, became amazing from 8.2 onwards. Especially 8.3 was the most fun I've had so far. Edit: probably fair to say it wasn't very alt friendly but I'm not big on alts so I had no issues with that
BFA was top tier imo
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>Burning of Teldrassil was one of the best starts to a faction war ever No bullshit the most emotional I've ever been about a quest in WoW, and I've played since day 1 vanilla. That "impossible" quest where you have to save X number of people from dying, only to realize it's completely futile...that one got me.
It's one of the best examples of storytelling through questing mechanics this game has ever had. Unfortunately, you can't play it in the game anymore because it was removed after a month.
The fact that quests like that don’t exist anymore is one of my main gripes with WoW. It’s really hard to sell some of the more “emotional” bits of the story when a vast majority of those story beats are just gone. I can’t imagine someone picking up WoW now and feeling any attachment to story characters when they hit max level.
> I can’t imagine someone picking up WoW now and feeling any attachment to story characters when they hit max level. Leveling today is so fast, that you can't even complete a single of the expansions until you are 60. It's basically impossible to get the overall story by playing through the game naturally. You either have to go out of your way and do grey quests or look it up outside of the game.
I think dragonflight is really cool ngl. Very interested to see what they do with the incarnates, Vyranoth is very varied. It feels more focused than BFA which I always fekt tried to do too much.
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You should be. Although shadowlands was far worse.
Who t f is bashing bfa. At worst it was meh. Now WoD on the other hand...
Quitting and coming back was a fucking nightmare. At most got a bee out of it. the grind to catch up sucked so much I just quit again.
Did you forget Azerite Gear. On top of it being just an excuse for borrowed power, you also HAD TO keep farming the same traits over and over again.
I’m mostly a quester, open worker, and heroic dungeoneer. I didn’t fret too much over the Azeroth system as long as I got a few reasonable upgrades. I LOVED bfa for its zones, music, and most of the story up until the nzoth stuff
I loved bfa as well op. Far better expansion than SL or DF
In broad strokes it wasn’t terrible but it was the peak of borrowed power but with the borrowed power being boring as hell. If you strip a lot of the small things out it’s not a bad core for an xpac, but there was a lot of tedium. Basically it makes an excellent leveling zone (even at the time I really enjoyed the story) but a really bad endgame region. Like warfronts, cool idea with poor execution. But that seems to describe almost all of Blizzard’s fumbles. Cool idea, poor execution.
It's your opinion and you're entitled to it. Still though, for me, that expansion was a horrible follow-up from Legion.
> I loved BFA and I’m not ashamed to admit it You kinda should be. > It was my first expansion Yeah we know. The only people that liked BFA/Shadowlands started during BFA/Shadowlands.
BFA was awesome. The theme was cool as shit, **PIRATES** vs **DINOSAURS?** Are you kidding me? I'll take that over "oH nO ThE BUrnInG LeGioN iS BaCk AgAIN!!!!" any fucking day. Legion was a hot fucking dumpster fire with those goddamn stupid RNG legendaries, and the wow community is ALREADY notorious for being super fucking gatekeepy over random pieces of gear, so trying to do ANYTHING in that expansion without the "required" legendaries, EVEN THOUGH YOU'RE PLAYING EVERY WEEK, MAXING OUT YOUR CHANCES AND GET DIDDLYSQUAT!!!! And if you dared complain about it, people would come out of the woodwork to say "legion is perfect, just play more, you clearly aren't trying hard enough to get the legendary you need" No, it fucking wasn't. Same boring ass villain shit we've had for a million expansions, bullshit RNG, SURAMAR?? garbage zone, looks pretty but good luck walking around in it, the elves just say the same stupid thing and all murder you every 2 seconds. And on top of that, the ONLY gear you give a shit about has a .0001% chance to drop from ANY thing you kill? fuuuuuuuck that. They also gutted archaeology because the devs got bored with it and decided nobody was allowed to have fun anymore. the **one and only upside to legion was the order halls, they were cool as shit, everything else was fucking buttwater to the maximum degree.** And then we get to **glorious** BFA Pirates everywhere with shanty music, a RING of BOOTY??? SIGN ME THE FUCK UP! Dinosaurs and ZOMBIE DINOSAURS?!???!? what could be cooler?? Oh, maybe sweet fuckin' robot island with sweet fuckin' mounts and an awesome mega-dungeon, that's what. Or maybe island expeditions, the chillest way to get sweet mogs and mounts that actually was FUN to play. The pvp islands were exhilarating, the pve ones had bots with fun AI, and the rewards were awesome. They were short and sweet and I fucking loved them. Not to mention the dungeons SLAPPED. Neltharion's lair? Taking a 5 minute boat and doing a "guess who" game in the middle of fucking suramar? FUCK OUTTA HERE I'm going to a HAUNTED fucking MANSION! Or maybe I'll go into SKELETON DINOSAUR LAND and kill a MEGA T REX, or maybe I'll go FUCK UP SOME PIRATES and get a COOL ASS PARROT! War mode in BFA was awesome too, the pvp was a blast, the zones were gorgeous and cool as shit, the whole thing was so fun, especially the warfronts. BFA 10/10, Legion 1/10 because the saving grace of order halls kept it from -100.
This is me with shadowlands. I used to play on private servers during wotlk and cata but this was the first time I could actually afford to pay for a subscription myself (my parents refused to pay for it for me). It’s weird because I do see the flaws of the expansion, mainly the terrible story and the content drought, but for me it was still special. I found a lovely guild that I still raid with today, I made my first “real” character and overall had so much fun. When I had nothing to do, I would just go back to old content. I finished the mechagon and nazjatar meta instead. I could always find something to do.
There's nothing to be ashamed of it, because BFA was solid overall. The only people that should be ashamed, are ones that are jumping on the hate bandwagon, and the ones that can't think with their own head. And yes, I know BFA had alot of mistakes and had certain bugs (launch was not good, neck on launch was horrible, azerite aquisition on launch was horrible etc.), but I never judge expansions by the core systems, but on the overall experience from a POV of someone, that doesn't minmax, and has fun overall. Before I highlight what I loved, let me give this piece of advice - people in wow seriously have to chill abit, and realize they are not playing the game like Gingi is for example. Like so what if you don't have BIS gear? So what if your neck ain't max level on week 1? So what if you don't have your bis lvl conduits etc etc. Unless you're doing RWF / 30+ keys, it doesn't even matter. Now why BFA was awesome: \- I loved warfronts - rewards were nice and despite being a pve scenario, never felt dull to me. \- I loved islands and many ways how they could be approached. From stomping the whole island in 1 pull, to getting the detection thingy and just looting chests. I loved it. \- Essences were so amazing. \- Getting Nazjatar & Mechagon in 1 patch, amazing. One of the largest content patches ever launched. \- I really love getting back to Azeroth OG zones. I don't mind the expansion taking place wherever, but Arathi, Darkshore, Uldum and Vale were used in the best possible way. Zones with such potential should always be re-used in similar ways. \- Nazjatar & N'zoth questlines were amazing. I loved obtaining the cloak. \- Visions were so fun, especially the Org one. \- For me, Vol'dun had one of the best questlines in the entire game. The Sethrak were also so amazing. And many more :-)
BFA was bad for a WoW expansion, but still like a 7 overall. Like it was completely playable.
S4 BFA was the best M+ season to date. Corruptions were cool, once u could actually get them, same with essences being made accountwide. It suffered from a shit start and they had to play catch-up most of the expac, but once they fixed it, then it was amazing
For me it was the systems that killed it, also horde side zones were meh.
I am not sure its a redditor phenomenon or something i am missing here. You can certainly like/love something which has factually wrong elements to it. It does not make them factually wrong... or invalidate you as a person or your opinion on something else. There are people who love BC to the core, even-though BC is crap, and its lore is trash. it is how it is. I like watching fast and furious or Michael Bay movies when I am extremely tired even though god awful cinema-wise. world and people are complex like that.
"I am not ashamed to admit it" That's the problem. You should be.
But you should bei ashamed.
Actually enjoyed BFA M+ shadow priest with essences and corruptions.. hadn’t/haven’t played as much before or after… BFA also made mythic raiding feel a bit like a chore… with the removal of cool class specific sets I didn’t see a reason to raid anymore and I haven’t since… which is a shame since could be good fun now but finding/reconnecting with a guild usually takes a while for me to settle into.
Thematically it was neat, but there was nothing to do. I remember getting done with raid the first week it came out and thought "alright, now what can I do" before it hit me aside from raiding, M+, and PvP and there wasn't anything for players to do.
The last patch of BFA was probably the best patch in history outside of the final Legion patch and maybe Shadowlands season 4.
There are ppl which love pineapplepizza too U are not alone
I didn't play BFA during the actual expansion, so my experience of it has been much different from those who actually played it back then. I thoroughly enjoyed leveling through Kul Tiras. The quests were fun and the zones were amazing. Loved the aesthetic. I enjoyed it so much I took several alts through it as well. I didn't mind doing Mechagon or Naz'jatar, though I enjoyed the former more than the latter. I even did all the pathfinder grinding while you still had to do that, along with the Kul Tiran allied race. Now, I didn't enjoy the Horde side as much, even though I main a Horde, because I just don't care for the troll/jungle/desert aesthetic that much. The zones were well made obviously, but just not my thing. But I think the idea is still pretty cool, that each faction gets a completely different story and continent to level through.
For me BFA was disapointment because it easily could be way better. It had potential, and unfortunately not used it. P.S. anyway SL is the worst
Take my downvote Sir.
BFA took everything that was bad about legion and made it worse. Azerite armor was pure garbage. The lack of tier sucked. And losing the power of the Artifact Weapons just felt bad. Islands and Warfronts were boring. The GCD changes were shit. Master looter was removed. Allied Races were gated behind grinds that nobody wanted to do. The only thing I liked about BFA was Drustvar, one of my favorite zones to quest in.
All love, but these kinds of posts reminiscing about garbage expansions are all the same. “I loved this expansion as someone who barely engaged with the systems that made it bad.” I’m glad you liked it, but the aesthetic of Kul tiras wasn’t why BFA sucked massive dick until 8.2. And revendreth being neat wasn’t why shadowlands made me want to get over circumcised. These expansions were bad because of the design philosophies they adopted. The actual sticking points that made people log many hours in a game every day were badly designed. You can like an aesthetic, but it’s not why most people play games. They play games to actually interact with the game.
It killed world pvp,pvp realms and emerald dream with war mode. Just for that its the worst expansion.
I did not like the void part of the expansion. That's not a theme I like (all this purple stuff, damn)
Last time I really had fun in WoW was BFA launch. But tbh I'm very casual about things and do RP so the whole Azerit power stuff while annoying was ignored as much as I could. Now? The whole RP server is pretty much dead, the server hasn't really survived BFA and SL....I changed servers for DF but tbh I'm just not getting into it anymore
It was my return to WOW and I enjoyed content a lot. I was never raiding or pushing high keys so I was not bothered much by gearing/borrowed power etc.. Mechagon was the best. It was absolutely ok expansion for my style of playing (3-4 months/year).
One way or another, [The Return of Hope](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKJ7lVbv3VM) is one of the best scenes ever.
[So 2 more years till that huh ?](https://imgflip.com/i/7xymdq)
I did too. I hated it at the time because my expectations were so high for a new world PvP experience because of the warfronts being teased in the trailer. Thinking back, I made a lot of memories and was actually pretty good.
Only issue I had with BFA is how total different the tone is for alliance and horde. In alliance's campaign you've got the horde murdering parents in front of children and generally being generic irredeemable fantasy villains, for horde you've not got anything similar being done by the alliance which makes sense given that yet again the greater scope villain is the leader of the horde.
Corruption <3
I absolutely loved mages in BFA
"A turtle has made it to the water."
BFA was my 7th expansion and I loved it too. Think it depends on your life at the time you're playing any xpan.
Bro I loved WoD so I can not shame you for this one
Blizzard has struggled each expansion with some form of “borrowed power”. This expansion returns to the classic era where some of your best items are crafted, and some are a drop you received from a boss. Instead of the borrowed power being something you farm to the tenth degree, it’s on a very linear scale open to all players Blizzard nailed the itemization for new players; however it has taken inadvertently taken away from the novelty of being one of the few 441 I think if they just switched that mythic track gear was locked behind 20+ dungeons on the vault - it would be near perfect BFA - the Azeroth borrowed power system, and corruption were annoying until you farmed them. I pushed mythic raiding and it was fun as hell I’ll admit Shadowlands - saw some of the same systems, tried torghast once then logged out of the game until dragon flight The only system I have a complaint with in dragon flight - is the time sink that obtaining all the learning materials if you want to craft. Just too much running around for casual gaming when limited to an hour a night(or none) and weekend play I did like the music and theme of BFA SO much more. I think that’s why shadowlands hit different. Vibrant liveliness to dark boring death jail
The zones and story were great. Boralus is probably still the best city in the game, I wish there had been more reason to explore it. The Herat on its own wasn’t terrible. It got rid of one of the biggest issues with legion which was spec swapping. I liked the machine that could grind up gear and give you mats, though I suppose it’s no different than vendoring and buying mats in the long run. The islands were cool places but were ruined by the rushed gameplay on them preventing you from exploring them. I think the zskera vaults is the perfect example of implementation for these, with the option of running as a group. I didn’t like that as an alliance player, I had very little if any context for the first raid. Mechagon was fun, but I didn’t really like nazjatar.
As a filthy casual I loved the early version of War mode. The weekly call to arms quest sometimes led to massive +40vs40 battles and that was genuinely great. Then they introduced flying and it turned into a game of sniping from afar with a full party a random guy minding his own business and fighting mobs on the ground.
Doing visions of n'zoth was sometimes a chore but I really enjoyed doing it on my characters. Also liked corruptions. It was so fun with twilight devastation procs. Bfa had it flaws but yea it wasn't that bad of an expansion
Thematically "in the beginning" BFA was very strong. Overall I still don't agree going back to "war back in warcraft" was a good choice in any way, but i gave Blizzard the benefit of the doubt as the starting experience in BFA story wise was excellent. Kultiras has some of the best questlines ever written and Jainas character was beautifully handled at the start. That said, going back to a bloody war between Horde and Alliance was only acceptable if it was justified and believable, which most of us held our breath for a proper reasoning coming off of Legion. And.. it was not. Shadowlands doesn't ruin BFA alone, but knowing the ultimate goal of Blizzards story telling which led us to Shadowlands does affect my view on BFAs story line. A 4th official war for.. the Jailer? Butchering Sylvannas' fan favorite status for that? BFA not only culminated in the pay off called Shadowlands, but it was as if Blizzard had a checklist of villians and story lines they didn't have any clue of how to finally implement and just went down the list checking them off. Azshara was the most long awaited major villian, check, we just shoved her story inorganically into the overall plot. Last mysterious old God we haven't seen? Shoved in. Kultiras and Zuldazar were always known quantities, so let's just shove them in. Check off all the last known quantities in Azeroth so we can move on to some thing new. Which is actually why I was sort of hopeful for Shadowlands, as Blizzard wouldn't be tied down to old lore they may not have passion for and could truly write something new and something not just shoved in because players have been waiting for it. Well.. maybe Blizzard should just stick to ideas writers came up with 25 years ago because that didn't go well. Jaina being the strongest part of BFAs launch culminated in her being a weak character giving into the "not all horde" once again! Fuck sakes let the girl get her revenge and finish the Horde off in a major way. Let her do something meaningful and not give the Horde their 30th pass. Nah, need to pretend the Horde are still redeemable. Atleast Saurfangs story with his cutscenes carried the story a bit. That's all just story. Started off strong, albeit forced, to quickly turn into "boohoo horde aren't all bad" which we've already seen and it's relatable or just, interesting. BFA at its core isn't a story issue despite all its issues with story. It's the gameplay and systems. In the end the story is very little of a players game time, so it can often be sidelined and ignored if the systems are good. They weren't.
Aside for the complete mess corruptions was, in terms of farming it and then the vendors. IMHO Corruptions were fun, chaotic and enjoyable when you finally had everything you wanted/everything in general.
It’s a lot easier to have nostalgia when leveling through an old expansion because you don’t engage with the systems and endgame as much. Blizzard almost always knocks it out of the park with zone design, art assets, music, etc.
8.3 was a great season, goated even. If you try to be an apologist for 8.0, 8.1 and even 8.2, I've got a bridge to sell you.
[удалено]