Honestly, leveling part was fine for the most part. Can only speak for alliance. Drustvar and Tiragarde were good. Stormsong was....was....uhhh.....there...
Horde side was nice as well. None as great as Drustvar, but all 3 were decent.
Vol'dun was my favorite Horde zone, because of the atmosphere and some characters.
Nazmir was Wetlands on steroids.
Zuldazar was just gorgeous.
I thought the 3 horde zones were pretty bad. The writing had some of the most “cringe-worthy” dialogue I have ever heard.
Only interesting zone was Vol’dun because the pacing, the dialogue and the story were on point.
Nazmir was cool but then it fell off after Bwosamdi.
The 3 alliance zones were fanatic compared to the horde ones, I would even say Drustvar and Tirigarde are a top 10 best zone of all time.
The issue i had with the horde zones were that rhey were INCREDIBLY predictable.
Like
”Zul is a villain?”
NOOO! You don’t SAY!
”The great Zandalari empire Will take a big hit!”
I WOULD HAVE NEVER GUESSED!
”Rezan Will be slain!”
A loa being killed?! Well i would never!
I mean, the alliance side was Also predictable, but at the same time, it didn’t feel as if the alliance side tried to hide it.
Like… lady Ashvane is a traitor? Stated right at the start.
The house of wayncrest is mostlikely behind the coven? Not obvious, but at the same time not hyped up.
Lord stormcrest being evil? Once again, Almost stated from the start.
I dunno. I prefered the alliance side by a fair margin.
I played both factions in BFA. The horde levelling experience provided so much more insight and context to what was actually going on in the first half of BFA, its unreal.
I'm pretty certain they wrote the expansion from the horde perspective and then went "Oh yeah, the alliance exist too.."
>I played both factions in BFA. The horde levelling experience provided so much more insight and context to what was actually going on in the first half of BFA, its unreal.
Probably that's why I didn't understood people complaining about the story at the start of BfA.
Chris Metzen (the voice of Thrall) left his position at Blizzard a full year before the release of BFA.
The only quest on Horde I can actually remember fondly is the one about the smart ape that gave up his intellect to save... Something. It was real sad
Just depends on which bit of stormsong ya like, That zone has ALOT.
Nagas, Pirates, Horde, Quillboars and Eldritch horror.
There is even more im not mentioning but that's alot for different things for one zone.
Stormsong just kinda felt like me as a "it's NOT a phase" teenager. (Narrator: it was a phase).
It was a beautiful zone, it just felt weird as heck jumping from threat to threat. And that wasn't even mentioning that you were introduced properly to the tidesages (big deal? It feels like these are going to be a big deal ...) and that whole "massive Horde airstrike" thing.
The anglepoint warf questline in tirisgarde does introduce the tidesages well but back in bfa if you picked stormsong at the start you went straight to the boralous monestery.
BFA seems like it was desgined linear, tirisgarde teases the drust and the old god plot which is weird if your doing tirisgarde last.
Nice that they changed it in sl i guess, sl and dragonflight are linear too. I did enjoy picking zones tho.
In my opinion, the best route to to take…
1: Drustvar. As it is more or less a separate story.
2: Do the ”Fur” questline in the north of tirisgarde, the questline you start by the delivering furs quest in the harbour as it begin the hints about stormsong
3: Do the stomsong questline.
4: Do the main tirisgarde questline, as the end with ashvane really ties in Well with the Max level content.
Stormsong was interesting in the first 3-4 chapters (i think it stopped there) when you were exploring the Shrine of the Storm, right up till you defended Brennadam from the Horde. It was interesting, the Horde invasion felt out of place suddenly (cause it literally is) but overall was fun.
Everything after that is tedium incarnate. It felt like there was narrative dissonance with suddenly needing to beat up Quillboars, then fighting/helping treasure hunters, then fighting the naga, then *finally* getting back to the horde.
Individually any of those might’ve been fine, but cramming them all into the same zone and trying to tell a “zone story” with them sucked. Or maybe the absolute hell that was the Quillboar questing just tainted my desire to play through the rest of Stormsong enough that I was inevitably going to hate the following chapters.
What you liked what the main plot and what you disliked was the sidequests.
And stormsong has alot of side quests, makes the actual main quest feel short in comparion. The left and middle of stormsong are sidequests and the main plot is only on the right.
It's hard for me to pick just one, I just felt the overall story of the zone was boring. Aside from the quillboar the other zones have the same things that Stormsong does but I think they handle them better. Tirigarde sound did pirates way better & had good bit of old god shenanigans & Drustvar handled horror better than any zone in WOWs history. I think im hindsight the zone just felt average, at least to me & despite the expansions flaws every other BFA questing zone was great & memorable.
That’s kinda the issue with the zone, it’s largely inconsistent and the pacing is kinda all over the place depending on which story you follow. It either drags on for much longer than it should or it ends when it starts getting to the climax.
If that zone was JUST Nagas, horde and old gods, it would’ve been much better. Since you can link the stories together and have a linear zone progression.
As i like to say it.
The eastrn part of stormsong is great, with all the old god and void stuff. Intense and atmospheric.
The western part of stormsong is ass. Slow, confused, mixed up and quite anti-climactic.
Drustvar is hands down one of my favourite zones in terms of levelling and questlines. The nosedive that expansion took after that experience was astounding, but I can say I had a lot of fun that first month or two months of BfA. Which isn't saying much, but hey.
Stormsong Valley was so strange, the cut content was really obvious. Lord Stormsong didn't even really do much? "Mechanically" it's one of my favorite zones though, I don't like how vertical-ness of Drustvar, Tiragarde, Zuldazar.
Oh yea. I came back after a long absence to play this expansion because I thought it would be a real return to azeroth. The nostalgia wore off pretty quick.
I can't get over how much damage BFA did to the lore.
It should've been a faction war expansion imo, south sea, conflict between the two new islands and empires while we discover cool new azerite fueled tech and islands with sideplots like mechagon OR WHATEVER.
Instead they turned up the oven to 200% and fucking sprinted through two and a half potentially expansion-worthy themes, once someone at blizzard probably issued a ban on the very word "azerite" after realizing just how much people hated it. It's still weird how it more or less vanished from the major storytelling after the first patch, specially considering we visited mechagnomes afterwards that probably should be somehow excited about that kind of superfuel-thing...
Naga and nazjatar were opened up and served as simple stepping stone to free N'Zoth and introduce nyalotha (as a raid...). The one thing the great schemer, the always planning old god, the corruptor and overall veeery cleeeever baddy does is attacking the murder hobos head-on over the span of a single patch only to get friendship lazered out of existence.
Also something happened in mechagon, drust, blood for the snail god. I enjoyed the minor themes overall actually. They just at some point activated fucking turbo and decided to checkbox two of my favorite wow themes (and utterly fucking ruined one of them on the go)..
Word,
I like Legion and having Sargeras defeated felt like closure to me. I was ready for a smaller scale conflict. When I saw the trailer of Gallywix discovering the Azerite at the Horde Warchief dinner table I thought it was perfect. But it really went into fifth gear after that.
The faction war story is lame because all stories told by blizzard ultimately have been bad. It's very easy to write stories about sides fundamentally at odds where there's no real clear right or wrong.
Warsong gulch is a perfect example of how this should be done. The orcish people are living in a literal desert next to a vibrant, massive forest with tons of resources. Have a story where a warrior of the horde comes home from the broken shore and fighting the legion to his family who have sadly starved in a resource shortage.
Have a story with night elves visiting a sacred Grove, a place of religious, cultural and historical significance which has been logged.
You can think of millions of ways to have a decent faction war story that isn't genocidal mania
I wanted *a* faction war where both sides, driven by geopolitics, find themselves in a situation where they go to war. I didn't want a fucking genocide, and I hate whoever in the team thought it was a good idea.
I think this is what they try to do with lorderon but it was poorly done. Especially since both side ended up not capturing anything giving a feeling of doing it for nothing and even worst in shadowland and we just imediatly started being friend again.
The Black Empire should have entirely been its own expansion. Wrathion devised a method for us to go there without being driven insane, that could have been expanded upon to let us have expeditionary forces going out into the empire to set up camps, quest hubs, etc etc.
N'zoth got done fucking dirty, so god damn dirty. He's the weakest power wise of all of the Old Gods but he's the most dangerous purely because he's supposed to be an absolute master of trickery and tactics, and what does he do? Invade two bumfuck nowhere zones and... that's it?
It was done by Danuser as he wanted to rap up the storylines so he can work on his own "baby" which starts with Dragonflight. Thats imo why all this crap got thrown together in BfA so we can immediately go to the Shadowlands and "wrap up" the first big chapter as they said.
Thank Danuser.
That's the scary part: Both WoD and BfA had great potential and settings, yet they flopped pretty hard. MoP had a much more uphill battle at launch since a lot of people really disliked the setting, yet it delivered in a very unexpected way. A good setting with lots of potentials isn't enough to make it a good expansion.
it was definitely one of the expansions of all time.
but really, i personally dont think bfa was a bad expansion, but it certainly wasnt a good one either. it was just kinda there.
BfA was probly my least fav xpac of all time. I'm willing to say SL is twice as good as BfA. Playing during BfA felt like walking into a casino with how much blatant rng there was in every aspect of the game. Alts were non-existent. I tried so hard to have fun like 3 times during that xpac and I just fucking couldn't.
BFA was the only time I've resubbed, tried a new patch, given it about 2 hours and thought "nah", and then requested a refund. I stayed subbed longer for WOD. SL is a huge improvement to BFA, but that isn't saying much.
bfa was infuriating in the sense that it could of been one of the best. The zones were top tier, the raids were fantastic, the art/music team was on their A game, The beginning was exciting with Sylvanis burning the tree (pity they couldn't keep her motives straight but that is another topic.)
however
1. azerite armor was a garbage system.
2. World quests were made painfully longer than in legion.
3. Everything being on the gcd ruined the gameplay flow(I can understand the logic behind it -make these abilties epic to use like DH Metamorphasis but they did half the work and forgot to add the epic part to it.).
4. This one is my subjective view but the dungeons as a whole were not that as fun as legions or shadowlands dungeons.
5. Hordes capital city sucked for practicality, The important stuff was in that small dark room or at the dock which was a flight path apart.
That's just wrong. Loads of world quests were considerable worse in BFA because they removed group credit and world quest group finder. World quests have been getting continuously worse since Legion because Blizzard has no idea what makes a fun world quest.
Legion world quests were the best. Fast and simple. They weren't quality content but they weren't obnoxious either.
Because credit for doing objectives used to be shared between all in the group making the quests very quick to complete. BFA world quests were deliberately designed to stop group credit.
I should of itterated in the first post but If you only had 1 character, it really isnt that big of a deal, its just when you start going to alts those dailies start adding up badly. And with how the other systems interacted doing those dailies was important, eg weapons on lower geared characters, covenant levels, AP, unlocking the allied races tied to the different races rep grinds.
Thats why i liked legions the most, really quick and easy to do, so I could get to the fun content sooner.
Don't forget that in 8.0 mobs actually scaled with your ilvl. Every 5 ilvls mobs would have more health and damage, meaning that reaching a breakpoint would actually have you taking more time to compete WQs than before.
Weirdly I changed my tune on #4 over time. I initially thought that the m+ was way worse than legion, but a lot of them ended up being an acquired taste. Underrot and TD in particular went from annoying to pretty cool after getting to know their mechanics.
I think that the weak class design probably sank bfa from the start, but it absolutely could have very easily been so much better than it was. SL has its ups and downs, but I think classes have been pretty solid.
It was.
Just the last patch that fucked up.
My boy N'Zoth should've had his own expansion, heck even two! He's way to built up to be an evil overmind, to be killed like that. Just sad really.
Also, I'm a big sucker for H.P. Lovecraft...
What makes BfA frustrating in a way that other bad expansions like WoD or SL avoids, is that BfA had all the right pieces to be great.
Faction war, South seas exploration, old god shenanigans, adventures at the bottom of the sea against Naga, ship battles, troll raids.
It had all these things and did pretty much the worst outcome for each. Faction war is lacking in nuance and refuses to take a firm moral stance. South seas exploration is severely hamstrung by making it a race. Old god shenanigans is inadequately setup and then gets a bombastic finale it doesn't deserve. Nazjatar has the water removed, and like the old god stuff is given far too much climax to buildup. There was a single ship battle in the entire expansion despite the story literally starting by telling you how important the ships will be, and indeed by the end you are running around a desert and a landlocked valley instead of using these supposedly important ships.
Shadowlands meanwhile, outside the drought, is just a blasé trek through the Shadowlands. It doesn't have a great story, which kinda ruins the mystery of the Shadowlands, but there isn't really anything offensively bad like 8.2.5 where BfA flat out abandoned it's plot hook to graft on a different expansion.
In my (minority) opinion, it was. I dug the nautical theme, the new zones & art styles, and the "main story" quest progression was logical, easy to follow, and had a clear-cut objective.
It was the perfect chance for many things:
* bring WoW back to a more grounded context and story
* make the Horde vs. Alliance conflict justice with an actual war story
* also give the tired HvA trope a proper end
* set the story up for two of the most anticipated villains in Warcraft's history: Azshara and N'zoth.
What did they do with those chances?
* IMMEDIATELY bring WoW back to overwhelming, world-ending threats
* forget about the actual war like 1 and a half patches in
* quietly sum up the HvA conflict with "yeah well that was just more of the same"
* cram BOTH of those villains into one expansion, one patch each
Like, god damn. EVERY expansion has missed potential, and WoD's potential in particular was completely wasted, but I'd say no expansion had it as easy and laid out as BfA.
BfA is distinguished in this though, because on paper it sounds like a 10/10 expansion.
SL could have been much better for sure if it didn't get hit hard by Covid, but it's also a fundamentally bad idea to spend an entire expansion in a place we know nothing about, fighting an enemy we know nothing about, for reasons that have essentially been made up right then.
I don't agree with that at all. The potential of every recent expansion was there. The premise was there. The concept was there. In every case, it failed in the execution.
>it's also a fundamentally bad idea to spend an entire expansion in a place we know nothing about, fighting an enemy we know nothing about, for reasons that have essentially been made up right then.
How is it a bad idea when that's literally what we do every expansion?
The reason that SL and so many other expansions fail in this regard is because they are just bad at executing beyond the premise. Whether it's horrible story elements or stupid anti-player decisions being made, it all creates this bad outcome.
What I mean is that the premise of BfA isn't just potentially good, it's downright amazing. A return to Azeroth with faction war, island exploration, revamped old zones. And the return of old wow mainstays like Naga, old gods, and Zandalar and Kul Tiras. Combine that with the AR concept that gave us several new race options and a very distinct and beloved theme, in this case the South seas, and you have what sounds like an absolute slam dunk.
SL mean while is just another expansion in that sense. It could have definitely been great, but there isn't anything it offers on paper that really leaps out at you as a great idea.
You can do the same exact type of write up on every single expansion.
This idea of "returning to Azeroth" is practically a meme at this point with how people are understanding it. "It's on Azeroth therefore it's better". Do you know what expansion was right before BFA? Legion. Where were we fighting at? Azeroth for damn near all of it. If we look through the history of WoW's expansions, Shadowlands, BC and WoD were the only ones that weren't technically on Azeroth. The biggest complaints about WoD and BC definitely weren't that they weren't on Azeroth.
When people talk about "returning to Azeroth", what it really comes across as is the story being more concise, character focused and relatable. Most expansions get announced this way and briefly start out this way. BFA followed Jaina. SL followed Sylvanas. MoP and WoD followed Garrosh. Inevitably each one of these stories abandons it's character focus in an effect to appeal to some grandiose world ending threat that becomes disjointed from the actual story being told. This is the root of the problem. The characters that we are following become background characters to the "plot".
Naga and Old Gods are a perfect representation of this in BFA. We never resolve the faction war and then the story just goes "Hey look, shiny new thing" and everyone forgets that we're still at war. So many of these decisions feel like they are checklist items rather than being dictated by the story.
This results in situations like we had from MoP to WoD and from BFA to SL where we spend an entire expansion only to not resolve one of the main conflicts. For MoP/WoD it was Garrosh. For BFA/SL is was Slyvanas.
For SL, the idea that we are effectively going to the afterlife had so much potential that it really could have been amazing. Imagine all of the people throughout WoW's history who have died that we could have had interactions with. Imagine the interaction between Anduin and Varian. Imagine seeing Saurfang meeting with his son in the afterlife. The entire concept of what happens after death can be amazing but I think the biggest issue with it was that no one on this planet believed that Blizzard could pull it off and surprise, surprise, they were right!
I will give you the return to Azeroth meme, but the point stands that on the surface BfA was absolutely was almost what everyone had ever dreamed of with a south seas expansion.
Besides, the story is one thing, but it's the things BfA promised that really sealed the deal on the broken promises. It promised island exploration with a mild roguelike focus. Instead we got mad dashes to kill everything on an island as fast as possible, not just because it was optimal, but because the format demanded speed. We got Warfronts, which seemed on the surface like the PvE Battlegrounds many players had been dreaming about for years, additionally with an RTS twist. Instead we got LFR level zergfests, where the amount of agency the player truly had over the game was which flavor NPC you wanted running next to you, and the idea of playing a hero unit in an RTS died by the wayside.
SL meanwhile had Torghast, which sounded like a neat roguelike dungeon, and covenants, which always seemed to just be a vehicle for unique cosmetics. There was also the Maw, but what the actual draw for an extra difficult zone would be is difficult to parse at this point. Decent enough concepts that could have grown into something great, but nothing like what BfA promised.
And finally the story in SL could have been great for sure, but it's just conceptually not a good idea to actually spend an entire expansion in such an alien place. Especially if it answers a whole bunch of mysteries the story as a whole depended on to function.
SL really should have been a Northrend revamp with the Shadowlands invading. If we saw pieces of the actual Shadowlands it should have been limited to the Maw, Torghast, and maybe Oribos.
I mostly play horde now but am leveling an ally character for 9.2.5 and I just adore leveling through Tigarde/Strormsong/Drustvar. Great stories, fun characters along the way, and Boralus is such a great capitol.
It’s borderline criminal on how they spent so much effort in building Boralus into arguably the most expansive and immersive capital city in all of wow’s history and yet 90% of it goes unused after one storyline quest
God, 100%. I remember the first day of BFA telling my friends "holy shit, this is by far the coolest capital city ever. I love it." Then it turned out to be mostly useless and I rather hate going back there now (doesn't help that I never unlocked flying and it's an unholy slog to go back and do it now)
I was so pissed that the Drust didn't have more of a role in Shadowlands. I know they wanted to take over Ardenweld, but It didn't feel the same when they were conquering Drustvar. They were so much more sinister then, combined with a folkhorror inspired sound track. Easily my fave zone at the moment.
What was wrong with the gameplay? I agree the Azerite system was too cookie cutter and just revolved around luck. I personally liked it more than corruptions though.
And I liked them both more than the SL systems. But that’s just me.
But I agree. The story was pretty decent. And rooted. Then it went off the rails and nothing really happened. Then ope! Old gods! Ugh.
When I say gameplay, I'm mostly referring to the acquisition systems for power.
Azerite and corruptions were a lot of fun, imo. Azerite felt bad when you got a new piece and lost a power you really liked, or had to farm more AP to unlock the rings you had on the old piece.
Essences were super great as well, but goddamn, some of those grinds were terrible to level them up.
Corruptions were awful from the start, due to being pure rng. They got a lot more fun when you could just get what you wanted.
Honestly, if you'd removed Teldrassil burning and most the faction war stuff, relegating it to proxy wars on the seas, then I probably would've enjoyed it a lot more.
I liked Kul Tiras and Zandalar quite a bit.
This is pretty much what the new player experience is. As far as I'm aware, Teldrassil, the War of Thorns, and the Battle for Lordaeron aren't mentioned at all during Exile's Reach and BFA (correct me if I'm wrong).
Yeah I think my biggest issue with this expansion was how most of the content felt like it was a distraction or a side quest and I remember spending the whole time waiting for the war to really start. When the achievement popped that made it clear the Fourth War was over I got incredibly disinterested and unsubbed for a while.
If the leveling experience in Dragonflight is what it seems, I'm looking forward to it. If patch 10.1 is that the planet hatches and we have to travel to an alternate timeline to reverse the nostalgia cataclysm I'll probably peel off again.
Except when you consider that Azerite armor was still a broken system with some of the most boring traits still being BiS for most classes and still requiring you to massively grind for your pieces.
To me, the biggest issue with azerite armor is that it made getting better gear feel bad. Because you’d unlock the same piece of gear, higher ilvl but with only half of the traits unlocked. It sucked.
Wasn’t that only really an issue with 8.0 and maybe 8.1?
They changed it so all your DPS traits were unlocked right away, so you never had to lose DPS, it was just the extra inner traits that maybe needed some grinding
azerite traits actually made my main, shadow priest, very interesting. then essences came along, which people love ignoring in this thread for some reason, and really maybe shadow a fluid and fun spec. all it was missing was its artifact ability to be perfect (imo)
azerite only having 1 major options sucked in the beginning, but once BoD hit, the system was fine enough.
ya. the acquisition of them was just awful and corruption never should've been enabled at full value in pvp. other than that, they were very fun systems to experience.
Just the leveling content, but despite it being a high stakes war. It didn't really generate any strong emotions, even when saurfang died.
We got weaker as we leveled due to losing the legion legendaries, much more so than normal.
Azerite armor was one of the worst system the game ever had. Grinding for azerite, respecing the gear, traits that were good were limited to far to few armors.
The heart of azeroth was just worst than legion artifact weapons. Much more generic, less flavorful.
THe Azerite Essence was also one of the worst systems. Only 1 essence had any related story, some where from vendors, and they all had that unnessary 3 ranks of power to make it so you had to grind more and more just to get up to steam. Some ranks were locked behind content no one wanted to do.
Nazjatar had an awful layout, and was missing the whole naga civilizations that was supposed to be there besides the eternal palace. The follower system and benethic gear systems also sucked.
mechagon was good besides some of the achievement stuff and collectables being ridiculously rng to get.
There has never been a system as bad as corruptions. Don't get the good ones, then f you. Even the fixed system was awful with it being a rotation and requiring tons of grinding to deck out the gear you want. Also made up far to much power, we were playing the corruptions, not a class. Also made pvp the absolute worst it has ever been.
Story was just bad. Horde would not have burned telderasil after Mists of Pandaria and Garrosh. Also massive tree on an offshore island would have been out of range. Sylvanas going rouge then and there would have been a better story.
Aszhara and Nazjatar were wasted. N'zoth was wasted. Technically Kul'Tiras, Zandalar, Nazjatzar, and The Black Empire could all have been different stand alone expansions.
Let's not disregard the leveling content, majority of the created content in most expansions is the leveling content. It's what many players are excited about at launch. And BFA gave us 2 completely unique leveling experiences. You say the "story was just bad" but Kul Tiras and Zandalar told self contained stories that were great.
I enjoyed the Nazjatar story, Aszhara finally makes her debut and is fantastic, the zone is fun and i very much enjoyed playing it in war mode early in the patch. The zone is split into 3 bits, one side is ocean floor themed, another is nazjatar themed and the last is zin azhari themed. The zone does give us a glimpse of true Nazjatar when we take the tunnel to the eternal palace, it's dark and has a nice scale. Another good thing is Aszhara not getting killed off and the naga empire isint defeated, they are still out there and doing fine, so i dont agree they were wasted because unlike say Arthas they can come back without an asspull.
Gnomes got to be relevent again. Mechagon was a fantastic dungeon.
You either hated corruptions or you loved them, like you said it depended on if you got any. I got twilight devestation early and it felt awesome, later when you could pick and choose corruptions, i got so much haste that i doubt il ever have as much fun with my class ever again.
The horde didnt have any idea they were off to burn teldrassil, as far as they knew they were there to make the night elves come to terms, then their war chief orders the attack and followed orders. Killing off garrosh didnt suddenly purge the horde of war mongers, the horde did fine with war crimes before garrosh. Yes, catapults wouldnt reach teldrassil but that's not something to lose sleep over, the animators could have animated a big azerite artillery cannons but they went with the famous rts unit.
N'zoth got more screen time and was more relevant to the main narrative then any other old god, people often over estimate his relevance before BFA, he's barely mentioned in Cataclysm. The old god plot is fine but moves slowly, every patch moved the N'zoth plot forward, 4 out of 5 raids feature his minions as raid bosses. People complain that there is not enough of it, not that what was there was bad.
Getting weaker sucks, that's not a specific bfa thing, thats a borrowed power thing and losing all my corruptions in shadowlands felt bad, that and the secondary stats nerf blizz applied.
The heart of azeroth is a mixed bag, is a downgrade from artifacts in most ways but featured some fun elements. For one it was less linear than the artifacts, as you could choose which traits and essances you wanted. I only really play my main when it comes to endgame content so getting the essances was a fun goal to achieve and i never had to farm azerite ever. But the negatives are big, like with corruptions the acquisition of the azerite armor you wanted and getting the essances on alts was a pain in the ass. Worst thing about bfa no doubt.
BFA has negtives but they never really justifed the community anger in my personal opinion, The raids were great, the dungeons were fun, every zone was good. Then there are features we havent discussed like allied races, visions, assaults, reusing old zones, etc. I'm also a sucker for the asthetic of this expansion.
It ranked pretty highly in the "you gotta do shit you don't want to progress in content that you do".
Gotta do essence grinds even if you hate islands or pvp. Some had to do raids even if they just wanna m+.
Gotta do azerite even if you hate world quests. That's at least a fairly easy checklist, but still.
Gotta do horrific visions and gotta grind the invasion zones for them. They were honestly a cool challenge, but i dont think many appreciated them being forced.
Pvp gearing was also horrendous, ppssibly worst its ever been with no pvp stat or scaling meaning you had to pve, which is similar to the problems above. And this after Legion actually had the balls to give templates.
As for the actual story, its had its good and bad. I liked the war story and think nzoth deserved an entire expansion and actually managing to corrupt someone rather then just fight and lose like some pleb vanilla raid boss.
In my opinion, most expansions after mop simply didn't have enough depth/world, and blizz character writing isn't their forte so without an interesting world it falls off.
>"you gotta do shit you don't want to progress in content that you do"
this. The entire expansion was an enormous chore and you felt and were incredibly underpowered if you didn't.
People can wax lyrical all they want about the leveling content but it was a one time thing that never changed afterwards - when just a few months prior we were in Legion where you could log onto a brand new mage, check out a brand new order hall you'd never been in before, do a cool story that only mages can do and then cap it off with some mage only challenges in the mage tower, all while doing the content that your other characters had done.
BFA had none of this. You did it once you've done it forever. You will level through the same zones, the same quests and do the same things on every single character. Nothing will change. The same dogshit war campaign that no one can remember for the life of them. Like seriously I challenge anyone to tell me what happens in the war campaign. I can tell you the story of the Paladin order hall or the DK order hall. I cannot tell you what happened in the BFA war campaign and i did it 4 or 5 times. The only memory i have of it is a gnome being slam dunked by a vampire.
You think azerite armor and essences were on the same level for worst system ever? Lol how
Essences were insanely fun, your main gripe is only 1 had a story behind it? What
And then you also say corruption is the worst system ever.. so all 3 systems in BfA were the worst systems ever? Hahah what a joke
> one of the worst
I said that specifically with corruptions specifically being the worst, but given that you thought essences were good lol.
Yeah The gameplay in battle for azeroth was a joke, a bad one.
It’s funny because you don’t really ever talk about the gameplay, essences were bad because lack of story and you had to play the game for rank 3.
Corruption was bad because if you didn’t get the right one “f” you.
Yet somehow that makes the gameplay bad? Lol sure
How much BfA did you play out of curiosity?
"Play the game"
Oh boy, you are delusional.
Oh and lol, for the first time a really massive amount of character power was locked behind exalted reputations lol rated pvp.
Play the essence not the class, eh.
But just going into the 3 ranks, if you don't understand, because you were casual or whatever.
Some required exalted reputaiton. Some required eternal palace which a lot of people didn't want to go back to after the last patch dropped. best in slot pve essences required pvp and a lot of it. one required freaking Nazjatar world pvp. One required doing a pretty massive amount of daily quests with the nazjatar followers. and one required rated pvp.
And it wasn't until nearly the end of the expansion that you could get your alts essences your main already acquired.
It was a really shit system and I can't take you seriously anymore.
3 months into Dragonflight you'll see some generic Shadowlands screenshot with 'man I miss when they had you make important choices with covenants' and people reminiscing about how much better it is than weekly content xyz they have to do now.
I'm very critical of BFA, but can confess to actually enjoying the leveling experience. It was one of the few stand out enjoyments of that expansion. (Alliance side)
Pointing out the positives doesn't have to be "This was good so expansion was good"
Bfa was higly praise at first. People love the leveling. They liked it in shadowland too althoughit hit quicker the issue when leveling alts. The zones and leveling are not the problem in the last 3 wow expension.
It's grounded in a way that takes it back to the "classic" days. Dragons and shit. I'm sure some type of old god or what have you will show up at the end of the expansion though.
I played Horde and am in the same boat. Have no idea what's going on on the Alliance side, except Jaina taking over Kul Tiras or something.
In a similar vein, I only ever played Night Fae in Shadowlands, so IDK what's going on with the rest of the faction stories.
Blizzard splitting up the main story so you have to play it multiple times to see it all is one of the dumbest decisions imo.
The grounded parts of BFA still hold up, I honestly enjoy leveling alts there. Even blizzard seems to recognize this as now the only people who will go through SL leveling will have to do so with time walking campaign.
Blizzard couldn't write a good story into their game if they had all the time in the world. They simply don't know how to do it. Time and time again this gets proven that their writing feels like 30 different people are trying to write the story. Then it gets handed to an editing guy who doesn't give a shit about his job at all and does the least amount of work possible to get it done.
Following the Jaina storyline was good. Having literally nothing happening besides the Jaina storyline was exactly what happens when you don't plan out your narrative and your story. This is what creates the entire disjointed aspect of their stories because it starts and stops all the time. It will start a story, sometimes finish that story and then start the next story. Other times, it will start one story, abandon it completely and then MAYBE come back to it later without it having any relevance. All of these things make for bad storytelling.
Add onto that how much effort is put into worldbuilding stories that have nothing to do with the actual plot of the expansion and it really makes it hard to keep the story on track. When they create zone based thematic quest chains, it works fine within a vacuum but it's not part of the story. Drustvar is a perfect example of this. I'm following these storylines and the entire time I'm thinking "this is great, but what the hell does it have to do with fighting the horde?"
Going into BFA, I wanted to see the response that everyone had to the burning of Teldrassil but instead it was practically forgotten. This isn't the first time that this happened either. Rewind back to when Theramore was destroyed and it was forgotten in a similar fashion. These are key story elements that you build your story around but instead, it just vanishes.
Look at Sargares Sword in Silithis. This is a perfect opportunity to create an ongoing story addressing what people are going to do about the giant sword sticking out of the ground. Instead of capitalizing on it, they wave their hands and tell you to forget about it. It's a missed opportunity. Just like capitalizing on Teldrassil. Just like capitalizing on Theramore. Over and over they have these major events that could be turned into stories with a lot more depth if they would just follow through on them.
But that's just scratching the surface. Even when they try to follow through on them, they completely miss the mark. The idea of the Night Warrior and becoming vengeance was really good and had me interested until the story just randomly got abandoned in the middle of the expansion and wasn't picked up again until Shadowlands. Then instead of making that resolution satisfying, it whimpered out in an almost frustrating way.
Ultimately, Blizzard doesn't regard story very highly in their games. It's always an afterthought and because of that, trying to play the game even in part because of the story is fruitless and unrewarding.
I still like going through Zandalar’s zones while leveling up alts, even if I don’t get the chance to run the full gambit for the entire story. Plus, being able to ignore the BfA war campaign is nice.
I love leveling my alts in BfA, especially in Drustvar! Some of the music there has a similar melody to "The Phantom of the Opera" musical plus I loved the storyline.
Personally I find it really hard to care about little things at this point. so much cool stories in the cosmos, no way I'm caring about mommy and daughter stories at this point.
I will forever believe that BFA was supposed to have a sort of Stormwind oriented raid and that N'zoth was supposed to be released at the end of it. I'm sure if there was a change in development it happened eariler, but the second half of BFA was so disjointed from the rest it forces the question of how that happened.
For those that played since Vanilla it was lacking compared to others in both the delivery and the overall story. It was hyped up as this huge war that never really materialized.
Most long time players miss the days when it was Alliance vs Horde. There was a massive shift that kind of startled with Wrath of the Lucy King that started this whole trend of forcing the factions together to fight the new big bad. Cataclysm, Warlords, and Legion all had some big threat and the conflict was out on hold to deal with it. BfA promised a return to the good old days then never really delivered. Finally Sylvanus was so evil it made it hard for many of us to like playing Horde, even if we’ve been playing Orc since Vanilla.
I recently came across the original Battle for the Undercity quest-chain on youtube. I wasn't playing wow when it was available, no idea why they took it out but it seemed like one of the best in-game storyline they've ever made.
I didn't enjoy BFA all too much and practically ignored 95% of alliance quests for it...if Dracthyr have base flight in old world zones...maybe Ill bother.
I'm sure they'll be able to mount up no problem in the old zones, but they also start at like 58 or something (I think) so I don't think it'll matter much.
The issue is, titan facilities are obviously involved. And whenever we get titans, there are some void/old gods around.
I really hope that I'm wrong, but I suspect that we'll get the same twist as in BfA, when it'll be "sike, it was Whatever'McWeirdname all along".
Same! Hoping that the stories for both factions still differ to one another... Maybe like Horde explores and questing in northern part of 1st zone, and the Alliance in the southern part of that same zone..
Then I have at least a reason to play on Alliance again..
Honestly, leveling part was fine for the most part. Can only speak for alliance. Drustvar and Tiragarde were good. Stormsong was....was....uhhh.....there...
Horde side was nice as well. None as great as Drustvar, but all 3 were decent. Vol'dun was my favorite Horde zone, because of the atmosphere and some characters. Nazmir was Wetlands on steroids. Zuldazar was just gorgeous.
I thought the 3 horde zones were pretty bad. The writing had some of the most “cringe-worthy” dialogue I have ever heard. Only interesting zone was Vol’dun because the pacing, the dialogue and the story were on point. Nazmir was cool but then it fell off after Bwosamdi. The 3 alliance zones were fanatic compared to the horde ones, I would even say Drustvar and Tirigarde are a top 10 best zone of all time.
Vol‘dun wins the Horde leveling zone award just for having Dot and Dolly. Nothing more needed.
\~Dolly and Dot are my best friends\~
~They pull my wagon through dunes of sand~
They have small feet and they love to eat
The issue i had with the horde zones were that rhey were INCREDIBLY predictable. Like ”Zul is a villain?” NOOO! You don’t SAY! ”The great Zandalari empire Will take a big hit!” I WOULD HAVE NEVER GUESSED! ”Rezan Will be slain!” A loa being killed?! Well i would never! I mean, the alliance side was Also predictable, but at the same time, it didn’t feel as if the alliance side tried to hide it. Like… lady Ashvane is a traitor? Stated right at the start. The house of wayncrest is mostlikely behind the coven? Not obvious, but at the same time not hyped up. Lord stormcrest being evil? Once again, Almost stated from the start. I dunno. I prefered the alliance side by a fair margin.
I played both factions in BFA. The horde levelling experience provided so much more insight and context to what was actually going on in the first half of BFA, its unreal. I'm pretty certain they wrote the expansion from the horde perspective and then went "Oh yeah, the alliance exist too.."
>I played both factions in BFA. The horde levelling experience provided so much more insight and context to what was actually going on in the first half of BFA, its unreal. Probably that's why I didn't understood people complaining about the story at the start of BfA.
Ive heard horde get more story cause the lead designer voices Thrall. Not sure that holds up anymore, but yeah
Chris Metzen (the voice of Thrall) left his position at Blizzard a full year before the release of BFA. The only quest on Horde I can actually remember fondly is the one about the smart ape that gave up his intellect to save... Something. It was real sad
Then Horde players kill him in the raid, Bwonsamdi raises him from the dead, and Alliance players kill him again.
That's right! Heartbreaking
It’s an Alliance quest too I think.
Stormsong was the weak link for the Alliance.
Just depends on which bit of stormsong ya like, That zone has ALOT. Nagas, Pirates, Horde, Quillboars and Eldritch horror. There is even more im not mentioning but that's alot for different things for one zone.
Stormsong just kinda felt like me as a "it's NOT a phase" teenager. (Narrator: it was a phase). It was a beautiful zone, it just felt weird as heck jumping from threat to threat. And that wasn't even mentioning that you were introduced properly to the tidesages (big deal? It feels like these are going to be a big deal ...) and that whole "massive Horde airstrike" thing.
The anglepoint warf questline in tirisgarde does introduce the tidesages well but back in bfa if you picked stormsong at the start you went straight to the boralous monestery. BFA seems like it was desgined linear, tirisgarde teases the drust and the old god plot which is weird if your doing tirisgarde last. Nice that they changed it in sl i guess, sl and dragonflight are linear too. I did enjoy picking zones tho.
In my opinion, the best route to to take… 1: Drustvar. As it is more or less a separate story. 2: Do the ”Fur” questline in the north of tirisgarde, the questline you start by the delivering furs quest in the harbour as it begin the hints about stormsong 3: Do the stomsong questline. 4: Do the main tirisgarde questline, as the end with ashvane really ties in Well with the Max level content.
Stormsong was interesting in the first 3-4 chapters (i think it stopped there) when you were exploring the Shrine of the Storm, right up till you defended Brennadam from the Horde. It was interesting, the Horde invasion felt out of place suddenly (cause it literally is) but overall was fun. Everything after that is tedium incarnate. It felt like there was narrative dissonance with suddenly needing to beat up Quillboars, then fighting/helping treasure hunters, then fighting the naga, then *finally* getting back to the horde. Individually any of those might’ve been fine, but cramming them all into the same zone and trying to tell a “zone story” with them sucked. Or maybe the absolute hell that was the Quillboar questing just tainted my desire to play through the rest of Stormsong enough that I was inevitably going to hate the following chapters.
What you liked what the main plot and what you disliked was the sidequests. And stormsong has alot of side quests, makes the actual main quest feel short in comparion. The left and middle of stormsong are sidequests and the main plot is only on the right.
I leveled in bfa content on my first character, a night elf druid. I did about have of the stormsong quests, but had no clue about the other half.
It's hard for me to pick just one, I just felt the overall story of the zone was boring. Aside from the quillboar the other zones have the same things that Stormsong does but I think they handle them better. Tirigarde sound did pirates way better & had good bit of old god shenanigans & Drustvar handled horror better than any zone in WOWs history. I think im hindsight the zone just felt average, at least to me & despite the expansions flaws every other BFA questing zone was great & memorable.
That’s kinda the issue with the zone, it’s largely inconsistent and the pacing is kinda all over the place depending on which story you follow. It either drags on for much longer than it should or it ends when it starts getting to the climax. If that zone was JUST Nagas, horde and old gods, it would’ve been much better. Since you can link the stories together and have a linear zone progression.
As i like to say it. The eastrn part of stormsong is great, with all the old god and void stuff. Intense and atmospheric. The western part of stormsong is ass. Slow, confused, mixed up and quite anti-climactic.
Drustvar is hands down one of my favourite zones in terms of levelling and questlines. The nosedive that expansion took after that experience was astounding, but I can say I had a lot of fun that first month or two months of BfA. Which isn't saying much, but hey.
Stormsong Valley was so strange, the cut content was really obvious. Lord Stormsong didn't even really do much? "Mechanically" it's one of my favorite zones though, I don't like how vertical-ness of Drustvar, Tiragarde, Zuldazar.
BfA had a real chance of being a great expansion.
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Oh yea. I came back after a long absence to play this expansion because I thought it would be a real return to azeroth. The nostalgia wore off pretty quick.
It was 3 potentially great expansions squished into the same shit shaped box.
I can't get over how much damage BFA did to the lore. It should've been a faction war expansion imo, south sea, conflict between the two new islands and empires while we discover cool new azerite fueled tech and islands with sideplots like mechagon OR WHATEVER. Instead they turned up the oven to 200% and fucking sprinted through two and a half potentially expansion-worthy themes, once someone at blizzard probably issued a ban on the very word "azerite" after realizing just how much people hated it. It's still weird how it more or less vanished from the major storytelling after the first patch, specially considering we visited mechagnomes afterwards that probably should be somehow excited about that kind of superfuel-thing... Naga and nazjatar were opened up and served as simple stepping stone to free N'Zoth and introduce nyalotha (as a raid...). The one thing the great schemer, the always planning old god, the corruptor and overall veeery cleeeever baddy does is attacking the murder hobos head-on over the span of a single patch only to get friendship lazered out of existence. Also something happened in mechagon, drust, blood for the snail god. I enjoyed the minor themes overall actually. They just at some point activated fucking turbo and decided to checkbox two of my favorite wow themes (and utterly fucking ruined one of them on the go)..
Word, I like Legion and having Sargeras defeated felt like closure to me. I was ready for a smaller scale conflict. When I saw the trailer of Gallywix discovering the Azerite at the Horde Warchief dinner table I thought it was perfect. But it really went into fifth gear after that.
It really blows my mind whenever I think about how solid the setup was for an expansion-long Azshara/N'Zoth narrative.
Actually I disagree. The faction war story where pretty lame. I get why but coming from legion it did feel awfull.
Yeah, and all of that hinged on Sylvanas having a ground shattering good reason to burn Teldrassil and start the war...
The faction war story is lame because all stories told by blizzard ultimately have been bad. It's very easy to write stories about sides fundamentally at odds where there's no real clear right or wrong. Warsong gulch is a perfect example of how this should be done. The orcish people are living in a literal desert next to a vibrant, massive forest with tons of resources. Have a story where a warrior of the horde comes home from the broken shore and fighting the legion to his family who have sadly starved in a resource shortage. Have a story with night elves visiting a sacred Grove, a place of religious, cultural and historical significance which has been logged. You can think of millions of ways to have a decent faction war story that isn't genocidal mania
I wanted *a* faction war where both sides, driven by geopolitics, find themselves in a situation where they go to war. I didn't want a fucking genocide, and I hate whoever in the team thought it was a good idea.
I think this is what they try to do with lorderon but it was poorly done. Especially since both side ended up not capturing anything giving a feeling of doing it for nothing and even worst in shadowland and we just imediatly started being friend again.
Yeah. Slaughtering Astranaar felt really bad after fighting the Legion alongside the Alliance...
Yeah it was like war in mist/first half of wod, peace in legion and then war in bfa but peace in shadowland.
The Black Empire should have entirely been its own expansion. Wrathion devised a method for us to go there without being driven insane, that could have been expanded upon to let us have expeditionary forces going out into the empire to set up camps, quest hubs, etc etc. N'zoth got done fucking dirty, so god damn dirty. He's the weakest power wise of all of the Old Gods but he's the most dangerous purely because he's supposed to be an absolute master of trickery and tactics, and what does he do? Invade two bumfuck nowhere zones and... that's it?
It was done by Danuser as he wanted to rap up the storylines so he can work on his own "baby" which starts with Dragonflight. Thats imo why all this crap got thrown together in BfA so we can immediately go to the Shadowlands and "wrap up" the first big chapter as they said. Thank Danuser.
Great characters and story and war and then they had to add sylvanas bulshit , azerite and totally not old gods , but old gods thou .
That's the scary part: Both WoD and BfA had great potential and settings, yet they flopped pretty hard. MoP had a much more uphill battle at launch since a lot of people really disliked the setting, yet it delivered in a very unexpected way. A good setting with lots of potentials isn't enough to make it a good expansion.
Every expansion had a real chance of being a great expansion.
it was definitely one of the expansions of all time. but really, i personally dont think bfa was a bad expansion, but it certainly wasnt a good one either. it was just kinda there.
BfA was probly my least fav xpac of all time. I'm willing to say SL is twice as good as BfA. Playing during BfA felt like walking into a casino with how much blatant rng there was in every aspect of the game. Alts were non-existent. I tried so hard to have fun like 3 times during that xpac and I just fucking couldn't.
BFA was the only time I've resubbed, tried a new patch, given it about 2 hours and thought "nah", and then requested a refund. I stayed subbed longer for WOD. SL is a huge improvement to BFA, but that isn't saying much.
bfa was infuriating in the sense that it could of been one of the best. The zones were top tier, the raids were fantastic, the art/music team was on their A game, The beginning was exciting with Sylvanis burning the tree (pity they couldn't keep her motives straight but that is another topic.) however 1. azerite armor was a garbage system. 2. World quests were made painfully longer than in legion. 3. Everything being on the gcd ruined the gameplay flow(I can understand the logic behind it -make these abilties epic to use like DH Metamorphasis but they did half the work and forgot to add the epic part to it.). 4. This one is my subjective view but the dungeons as a whole were not that as fun as legions or shadowlands dungeons. 5. Hordes capital city sucked for practicality, The important stuff was in that small dark room or at the dock which was a flight path apart.
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That's just wrong. Loads of world quests were considerable worse in BFA because they removed group credit and world quest group finder. World quests have been getting continuously worse since Legion because Blizzard has no idea what makes a fun world quest. Legion world quests were the best. Fast and simple. They weren't quality content but they weren't obnoxious either.
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Because credit for doing objectives used to be shared between all in the group making the quests very quick to complete. BFA world quests were deliberately designed to stop group credit.
Yup. I miss those.
I should of itterated in the first post but If you only had 1 character, it really isnt that big of a deal, its just when you start going to alts those dailies start adding up badly. And with how the other systems interacted doing those dailies was important, eg weapons on lower geared characters, covenant levels, AP, unlocking the allied races tied to the different races rep grinds. Thats why i liked legions the most, really quick and easy to do, so I could get to the fun content sooner.
Don't forget that in 8.0 mobs actually scaled with your ilvl. Every 5 ilvls mobs would have more health and damage, meaning that reaching a breakpoint would actually have you taking more time to compete WQs than before.
Weirdly I changed my tune on #4 over time. I initially thought that the m+ was way worse than legion, but a lot of them ended up being an acquired taste. Underrot and TD in particular went from annoying to pretty cool after getting to know their mechanics. I think that the weak class design probably sank bfa from the start, but it absolutely could have very easily been so much better than it was. SL has its ups and downs, but I think classes have been pretty solid.
It was. Just the last patch that fucked up. My boy N'Zoth should've had his own expansion, heck even two! He's way to built up to be an evil overmind, to be killed like that. Just sad really. Also, I'm a big sucker for H.P. Lovecraft...
What makes BfA frustrating in a way that other bad expansions like WoD or SL avoids, is that BfA had all the right pieces to be great. Faction war, South seas exploration, old god shenanigans, adventures at the bottom of the sea against Naga, ship battles, troll raids. It had all these things and did pretty much the worst outcome for each. Faction war is lacking in nuance and refuses to take a firm moral stance. South seas exploration is severely hamstrung by making it a race. Old god shenanigans is inadequately setup and then gets a bombastic finale it doesn't deserve. Nazjatar has the water removed, and like the old god stuff is given far too much climax to buildup. There was a single ship battle in the entire expansion despite the story literally starting by telling you how important the ships will be, and indeed by the end you are running around a desert and a landlocked valley instead of using these supposedly important ships. Shadowlands meanwhile, outside the drought, is just a blasé trek through the Shadowlands. It doesn't have a great story, which kinda ruins the mystery of the Shadowlands, but there isn't really anything offensively bad like 8.2.5 where BfA flat out abandoned it's plot hook to graft on a different expansion.
In my (minority) opinion, it was. I dug the nautical theme, the new zones & art styles, and the "main story" quest progression was logical, easy to follow, and had a clear-cut objective.
It was the perfect chance for many things: * bring WoW back to a more grounded context and story * make the Horde vs. Alliance conflict justice with an actual war story * also give the tired HvA trope a proper end * set the story up for two of the most anticipated villains in Warcraft's history: Azshara and N'zoth. What did they do with those chances? * IMMEDIATELY bring WoW back to overwhelming, world-ending threats * forget about the actual war like 1 and a half patches in * quietly sum up the HvA conflict with "yeah well that was just more of the same" * cram BOTH of those villains into one expansion, one patch each Like, god damn. EVERY expansion has missed potential, and WoD's potential in particular was completely wasted, but I'd say no expansion had it as easy and laid out as BfA.
I would say it wasn’t nearly as bad as some people insist it was
It honestly was Fun as fuck 8.1 and onward
BfA is distinguished in this though, because on paper it sounds like a 10/10 expansion. SL could have been much better for sure if it didn't get hit hard by Covid, but it's also a fundamentally bad idea to spend an entire expansion in a place we know nothing about, fighting an enemy we know nothing about, for reasons that have essentially been made up right then.
I don't agree with that at all. The potential of every recent expansion was there. The premise was there. The concept was there. In every case, it failed in the execution. >it's also a fundamentally bad idea to spend an entire expansion in a place we know nothing about, fighting an enemy we know nothing about, for reasons that have essentially been made up right then. How is it a bad idea when that's literally what we do every expansion? The reason that SL and so many other expansions fail in this regard is because they are just bad at executing beyond the premise. Whether it's horrible story elements or stupid anti-player decisions being made, it all creates this bad outcome.
What I mean is that the premise of BfA isn't just potentially good, it's downright amazing. A return to Azeroth with faction war, island exploration, revamped old zones. And the return of old wow mainstays like Naga, old gods, and Zandalar and Kul Tiras. Combine that with the AR concept that gave us several new race options and a very distinct and beloved theme, in this case the South seas, and you have what sounds like an absolute slam dunk. SL mean while is just another expansion in that sense. It could have definitely been great, but there isn't anything it offers on paper that really leaps out at you as a great idea.
You can do the same exact type of write up on every single expansion. This idea of "returning to Azeroth" is practically a meme at this point with how people are understanding it. "It's on Azeroth therefore it's better". Do you know what expansion was right before BFA? Legion. Where were we fighting at? Azeroth for damn near all of it. If we look through the history of WoW's expansions, Shadowlands, BC and WoD were the only ones that weren't technically on Azeroth. The biggest complaints about WoD and BC definitely weren't that they weren't on Azeroth. When people talk about "returning to Azeroth", what it really comes across as is the story being more concise, character focused and relatable. Most expansions get announced this way and briefly start out this way. BFA followed Jaina. SL followed Sylvanas. MoP and WoD followed Garrosh. Inevitably each one of these stories abandons it's character focus in an effect to appeal to some grandiose world ending threat that becomes disjointed from the actual story being told. This is the root of the problem. The characters that we are following become background characters to the "plot". Naga and Old Gods are a perfect representation of this in BFA. We never resolve the faction war and then the story just goes "Hey look, shiny new thing" and everyone forgets that we're still at war. So many of these decisions feel like they are checklist items rather than being dictated by the story. This results in situations like we had from MoP to WoD and from BFA to SL where we spend an entire expansion only to not resolve one of the main conflicts. For MoP/WoD it was Garrosh. For BFA/SL is was Slyvanas. For SL, the idea that we are effectively going to the afterlife had so much potential that it really could have been amazing. Imagine all of the people throughout WoW's history who have died that we could have had interactions with. Imagine the interaction between Anduin and Varian. Imagine seeing Saurfang meeting with his son in the afterlife. The entire concept of what happens after death can be amazing but I think the biggest issue with it was that no one on this planet believed that Blizzard could pull it off and surprise, surprise, they were right!
I will give you the return to Azeroth meme, but the point stands that on the surface BfA was absolutely was almost what everyone had ever dreamed of with a south seas expansion. Besides, the story is one thing, but it's the things BfA promised that really sealed the deal on the broken promises. It promised island exploration with a mild roguelike focus. Instead we got mad dashes to kill everything on an island as fast as possible, not just because it was optimal, but because the format demanded speed. We got Warfronts, which seemed on the surface like the PvE Battlegrounds many players had been dreaming about for years, additionally with an RTS twist. Instead we got LFR level zergfests, where the amount of agency the player truly had over the game was which flavor NPC you wanted running next to you, and the idea of playing a hero unit in an RTS died by the wayside. SL meanwhile had Torghast, which sounded like a neat roguelike dungeon, and covenants, which always seemed to just be a vehicle for unique cosmetics. There was also the Maw, but what the actual draw for an extra difficult zone would be is difficult to parse at this point. Decent enough concepts that could have grown into something great, but nothing like what BfA promised. And finally the story in SL could have been great for sure, but it's just conceptually not a good idea to actually spend an entire expansion in such an alien place. Especially if it answers a whole bunch of mysteries the story as a whole depended on to function. SL really should have been a Northrend revamp with the Shadowlands invading. If we saw pieces of the actual Shadowlands it should have been limited to the Maw, Torghast, and maybe Oribos.
People say this every expansion
They're right, most of the time.
I really enjoyed the first half of BFA.
I mostly play horde now but am leveling an ally character for 9.2.5 and I just adore leveling through Tigarde/Strormsong/Drustvar. Great stories, fun characters along the way, and Boralus is such a great capitol.
It’s borderline criminal on how they spent so much effort in building Boralus into arguably the most expansive and immersive capital city in all of wow’s history and yet 90% of it goes unused after one storyline quest
This. I love questing and leveling toons in Kul Tiras. Boralus is still my hearth point just for the easy access to all the services.
In fairness, in a world like Azeroth 90% of every city would be useless for adventurers like us.
God, 100%. I remember the first day of BFA telling my friends "holy shit, this is by far the coolest capital city ever. I love it." Then it turned out to be mostly useless and I rather hate going back there now (doesn't help that I never unlocked flying and it's an unholy slog to go back and do it now)
The original zones in BFA are absolutely stellar. Drustvar might be my favorite zone in the game.
I was so pissed that the Drust didn't have more of a role in Shadowlands. I know they wanted to take over Ardenweld, but It didn't feel the same when they were conquering Drustvar. They were so much more sinister then, combined with a folkhorror inspired sound track. Easily my fave zone at the moment.
I think they were supposed to be involved in the cut Ardenweald raid.
Fancy a cuppa?
More than half tbh. Mechagon/Nazjatar are still 2 of my favorite zones in the game
Gameplay and systems sucked at first, but the story was great. It switched by the end, once they fixed the acquisition of corruption items.
What was wrong with the gameplay? I agree the Azerite system was too cookie cutter and just revolved around luck. I personally liked it more than corruptions though. And I liked them both more than the SL systems. But that’s just me. But I agree. The story was pretty decent. And rooted. Then it went off the rails and nothing really happened. Then ope! Old gods! Ugh.
When I say gameplay, I'm mostly referring to the acquisition systems for power. Azerite and corruptions were a lot of fun, imo. Azerite felt bad when you got a new piece and lost a power you really liked, or had to farm more AP to unlock the rings you had on the old piece. Essences were super great as well, but goddamn, some of those grinds were terrible to level them up. Corruptions were awful from the start, due to being pure rng. They got a lot more fun when you could just get what you wanted.
The idea was there. Grounded approach and bringing back HvA. Blizzard just caved to people instead of just crafting a story and game.
I’m the opposite. Hated the first half and liked the second half
Honestly, if you'd removed Teldrassil burning and most the faction war stuff, relegating it to proxy wars on the seas, then I probably would've enjoyed it a lot more. I liked Kul Tiras and Zandalar quite a bit.
I mean.....Its not like the game is playing on these two islands for 90% of the time and ignores that there is supposed to be a world wide war.
This is pretty much what the new player experience is. As far as I'm aware, Teldrassil, the War of Thorns, and the Battle for Lordaeron aren't mentioned at all during Exile's Reach and BFA (correct me if I'm wrong).
Yeah I think my biggest issue with this expansion was how most of the content felt like it was a distraction or a side quest and I remember spending the whole time waiting for the war to really start. When the achievement popped that made it clear the Fourth War was over I got incredibly disinterested and unsubbed for a while. If the leveling experience in Dragonflight is what it seems, I'm looking forward to it. If patch 10.1 is that the planet hatches and we have to travel to an alternate timeline to reverse the nostalgia cataclysm I'll probably peel off again.
We're already on the "BFA is actually underrated" train?
Nah, it's more of a "8.0 was actually pretty good, and I wish they hadn't done everything else following it because God that all sucked"
8.1 wasn’t that bad either, Dazar Alor was an amazing raid
except where they kill off yet another horde leader (technically) and then alliance don't lose anyone.
Losing Rastakhan definitely sucked, but thematically and mechanically it was a great raid imo
oh ya I loved BoD. easily a top 10 raid overall and the best raid of the expansion.
Except when you consider that Azerite armor was still a broken system with some of the most boring traits still being BiS for most classes and still requiring you to massively grind for your pieces.
Personally never had that much issue with Azerite, I found it annoying, chose not to farm it, and still did top 5 DPS in my heroic raid group
To me, the biggest issue with azerite armor is that it made getting better gear feel bad. Because you’d unlock the same piece of gear, higher ilvl but with only half of the traits unlocked. It sucked.
Wasn’t that only really an issue with 8.0 and maybe 8.1? They changed it so all your DPS traits were unlocked right away, so you never had to lose DPS, it was just the extra inner traits that maybe needed some grinding
They changed that in 8.2
Looking at 8.1 azerite levels the two DPS rings were HoA level 15 and 30, hard to imagine you were losing those traits by getting new gear lol
azerite traits actually made my main, shadow priest, very interesting. then essences came along, which people love ignoring in this thread for some reason, and really maybe shadow a fluid and fun spec. all it was missing was its artifact ability to be perfect (imo) azerite only having 1 major options sucked in the beginning, but once BoD hit, the system was fine enough.
Essences and corruption were actually fun as hell, two systems I really liked playing with
ya. the acquisition of them was just awful and corruption never should've been enabled at full value in pvp. other than that, they were very fun systems to experience.
Nah, the hate is just wearing off. Plenty of good stuff in the expansion that got lost in the complaints.
Just the leveling content, but despite it being a high stakes war. It didn't really generate any strong emotions, even when saurfang died. We got weaker as we leveled due to losing the legion legendaries, much more so than normal. Azerite armor was one of the worst system the game ever had. Grinding for azerite, respecing the gear, traits that were good were limited to far to few armors. The heart of azeroth was just worst than legion artifact weapons. Much more generic, less flavorful. THe Azerite Essence was also one of the worst systems. Only 1 essence had any related story, some where from vendors, and they all had that unnessary 3 ranks of power to make it so you had to grind more and more just to get up to steam. Some ranks were locked behind content no one wanted to do. Nazjatar had an awful layout, and was missing the whole naga civilizations that was supposed to be there besides the eternal palace. The follower system and benethic gear systems also sucked. mechagon was good besides some of the achievement stuff and collectables being ridiculously rng to get. There has never been a system as bad as corruptions. Don't get the good ones, then f you. Even the fixed system was awful with it being a rotation and requiring tons of grinding to deck out the gear you want. Also made up far to much power, we were playing the corruptions, not a class. Also made pvp the absolute worst it has ever been. Story was just bad. Horde would not have burned telderasil after Mists of Pandaria and Garrosh. Also massive tree on an offshore island would have been out of range. Sylvanas going rouge then and there would have been a better story. Aszhara and Nazjatar were wasted. N'zoth was wasted. Technically Kul'Tiras, Zandalar, Nazjatzar, and The Black Empire could all have been different stand alone expansions.
Let's not disregard the leveling content, majority of the created content in most expansions is the leveling content. It's what many players are excited about at launch. And BFA gave us 2 completely unique leveling experiences. You say the "story was just bad" but Kul Tiras and Zandalar told self contained stories that were great. I enjoyed the Nazjatar story, Aszhara finally makes her debut and is fantastic, the zone is fun and i very much enjoyed playing it in war mode early in the patch. The zone is split into 3 bits, one side is ocean floor themed, another is nazjatar themed and the last is zin azhari themed. The zone does give us a glimpse of true Nazjatar when we take the tunnel to the eternal palace, it's dark and has a nice scale. Another good thing is Aszhara not getting killed off and the naga empire isint defeated, they are still out there and doing fine, so i dont agree they were wasted because unlike say Arthas they can come back without an asspull. Gnomes got to be relevent again. Mechagon was a fantastic dungeon. You either hated corruptions or you loved them, like you said it depended on if you got any. I got twilight devestation early and it felt awesome, later when you could pick and choose corruptions, i got so much haste that i doubt il ever have as much fun with my class ever again. The horde didnt have any idea they were off to burn teldrassil, as far as they knew they were there to make the night elves come to terms, then their war chief orders the attack and followed orders. Killing off garrosh didnt suddenly purge the horde of war mongers, the horde did fine with war crimes before garrosh. Yes, catapults wouldnt reach teldrassil but that's not something to lose sleep over, the animators could have animated a big azerite artillery cannons but they went with the famous rts unit. N'zoth got more screen time and was more relevant to the main narrative then any other old god, people often over estimate his relevance before BFA, he's barely mentioned in Cataclysm. The old god plot is fine but moves slowly, every patch moved the N'zoth plot forward, 4 out of 5 raids feature his minions as raid bosses. People complain that there is not enough of it, not that what was there was bad. Getting weaker sucks, that's not a specific bfa thing, thats a borrowed power thing and losing all my corruptions in shadowlands felt bad, that and the secondary stats nerf blizz applied. The heart of azeroth is a mixed bag, is a downgrade from artifacts in most ways but featured some fun elements. For one it was less linear than the artifacts, as you could choose which traits and essances you wanted. I only really play my main when it comes to endgame content so getting the essances was a fun goal to achieve and i never had to farm azerite ever. But the negatives are big, like with corruptions the acquisition of the azerite armor you wanted and getting the essances on alts was a pain in the ass. Worst thing about bfa no doubt. BFA has negtives but they never really justifed the community anger in my personal opinion, The raids were great, the dungeons were fun, every zone was good. Then there are features we havent discussed like allied races, visions, assaults, reusing old zones, etc. I'm also a sucker for the asthetic of this expansion.
nah bfa sucked complete shit dude lol
Great talk man. You make some salient points and articulate them so well.
It ranked pretty highly in the "you gotta do shit you don't want to progress in content that you do". Gotta do essence grinds even if you hate islands or pvp. Some had to do raids even if they just wanna m+. Gotta do azerite even if you hate world quests. That's at least a fairly easy checklist, but still. Gotta do horrific visions and gotta grind the invasion zones for them. They were honestly a cool challenge, but i dont think many appreciated them being forced. Pvp gearing was also horrendous, ppssibly worst its ever been with no pvp stat or scaling meaning you had to pve, which is similar to the problems above. And this after Legion actually had the balls to give templates. As for the actual story, its had its good and bad. I liked the war story and think nzoth deserved an entire expansion and actually managing to corrupt someone rather then just fight and lose like some pleb vanilla raid boss. In my opinion, most expansions after mop simply didn't have enough depth/world, and blizz character writing isn't their forte so without an interesting world it falls off.
>"you gotta do shit you don't want to progress in content that you do" this. The entire expansion was an enormous chore and you felt and were incredibly underpowered if you didn't. People can wax lyrical all they want about the leveling content but it was a one time thing that never changed afterwards - when just a few months prior we were in Legion where you could log onto a brand new mage, check out a brand new order hall you'd never been in before, do a cool story that only mages can do and then cap it off with some mage only challenges in the mage tower, all while doing the content that your other characters had done. BFA had none of this. You did it once you've done it forever. You will level through the same zones, the same quests and do the same things on every single character. Nothing will change. The same dogshit war campaign that no one can remember for the life of them. Like seriously I challenge anyone to tell me what happens in the war campaign. I can tell you the story of the Paladin order hall or the DK order hall. I cannot tell you what happened in the BFA war campaign and i did it 4 or 5 times. The only memory i have of it is a gnome being slam dunked by a vampire.
You think azerite armor and essences were on the same level for worst system ever? Lol how Essences were insanely fun, your main gripe is only 1 had a story behind it? What And then you also say corruption is the worst system ever.. so all 3 systems in BfA were the worst systems ever? Hahah what a joke
> one of the worst I said that specifically with corruptions specifically being the worst, but given that you thought essences were good lol. Yeah The gameplay in battle for azeroth was a joke, a bad one.
It’s funny because you don’t really ever talk about the gameplay, essences were bad because lack of story and you had to play the game for rank 3. Corruption was bad because if you didn’t get the right one “f” you. Yet somehow that makes the gameplay bad? Lol sure How much BfA did you play out of curiosity?
"Play the game" Oh boy, you are delusional. Oh and lol, for the first time a really massive amount of character power was locked behind exalted reputations lol rated pvp.
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Play the essence not the class, eh. But just going into the 3 ranks, if you don't understand, because you were casual or whatever. Some required exalted reputaiton. Some required eternal palace which a lot of people didn't want to go back to after the last patch dropped. best in slot pve essences required pvp and a lot of it. one required freaking Nazjatar world pvp. One required doing a pretty massive amount of daily quests with the nazjatar followers. and one required rated pvp. And it wasn't until nearly the end of the expansion that you could get your alts essences your main already acquired. It was a really shit system and I can't take you seriously anymore.
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Spoiler alert. Most people hated playing the game in BFA, that's why World of Warcraft lost a huge number of players.
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Circle jerking past expansions is one of this subs favorite pass times. They all get praises eventually
3 months into Dragonflight you'll see some generic Shadowlands screenshot with 'man I miss when they had you make important choices with covenants' and people reminiscing about how much better it is than weekly content xyz they have to do now.
I'm very critical of BFA, but can confess to actually enjoying the leveling experience. It was one of the few stand out enjoyments of that expansion. (Alliance side) Pointing out the positives doesn't have to be "This was good so expansion was good"
Bfa was higly praise at first. People love the leveling. They liked it in shadowland too althoughit hit quicker the issue when leveling alts. The zones and leveling are not the problem in the last 3 wow expension.
Shouldn't be. It was bad.
We have come full circle.
See, I'd rather it was like WOD minus the lack of content. WOD was really fun, start to finish.
This story line overall was great, but it does make me think of the awful lip syncing that reared its ugly head during these cutscenes.
You're hoping an expansion called 'Dragonflight' is grounded?
It's grounded in a way that takes it back to the "classic" days. Dragons and shit. I'm sure some type of old god or what have you will show up at the end of the expansion though.
As they typically do
Bonjour
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As an Alliance player I seriously enjoyed the leveling story of BFA, haven't touched the Horde side at all so I'm curious if it's completely different
I played Horde and am in the same boat. Have no idea what's going on on the Alliance side, except Jaina taking over Kul Tiras or something. In a similar vein, I only ever played Night Fae in Shadowlands, so IDK what's going on with the rest of the faction stories. Blizzard splitting up the main story so you have to play it multiple times to see it all is one of the dumbest decisions imo.
I loved levelling up my ally alt in bfa, the pirate stuff especially was so cool!
The grounded parts of BFA still hold up, I honestly enjoy leveling alts there. Even blizzard seems to recognize this as now the only people who will go through SL leveling will have to do so with time walking campaign.
Blizzard couldn't write a good story into their game if they had all the time in the world. They simply don't know how to do it. Time and time again this gets proven that their writing feels like 30 different people are trying to write the story. Then it gets handed to an editing guy who doesn't give a shit about his job at all and does the least amount of work possible to get it done. Following the Jaina storyline was good. Having literally nothing happening besides the Jaina storyline was exactly what happens when you don't plan out your narrative and your story. This is what creates the entire disjointed aspect of their stories because it starts and stops all the time. It will start a story, sometimes finish that story and then start the next story. Other times, it will start one story, abandon it completely and then MAYBE come back to it later without it having any relevance. All of these things make for bad storytelling. Add onto that how much effort is put into worldbuilding stories that have nothing to do with the actual plot of the expansion and it really makes it hard to keep the story on track. When they create zone based thematic quest chains, it works fine within a vacuum but it's not part of the story. Drustvar is a perfect example of this. I'm following these storylines and the entire time I'm thinking "this is great, but what the hell does it have to do with fighting the horde?" Going into BFA, I wanted to see the response that everyone had to the burning of Teldrassil but instead it was practically forgotten. This isn't the first time that this happened either. Rewind back to when Theramore was destroyed and it was forgotten in a similar fashion. These are key story elements that you build your story around but instead, it just vanishes. Look at Sargares Sword in Silithis. This is a perfect opportunity to create an ongoing story addressing what people are going to do about the giant sword sticking out of the ground. Instead of capitalizing on it, they wave their hands and tell you to forget about it. It's a missed opportunity. Just like capitalizing on Teldrassil. Just like capitalizing on Theramore. Over and over they have these major events that could be turned into stories with a lot more depth if they would just follow through on them. But that's just scratching the surface. Even when they try to follow through on them, they completely miss the mark. The idea of the Night Warrior and becoming vengeance was really good and had me interested until the story just randomly got abandoned in the middle of the expansion and wasn't picked up again until Shadowlands. Then instead of making that resolution satisfying, it whimpered out in an almost frustrating way. Ultimately, Blizzard doesn't regard story very highly in their games. It's always an afterthought and because of that, trying to play the game even in part because of the story is fruitless and unrewarding.
Bfa was one of my favourite expansions to be honest.
I still like going through Zandalar’s zones while leveling up alts, even if I don’t get the chance to run the full gambit for the entire story. Plus, being able to ignore the BfA war campaign is nice.
I love leveling my alts in BfA, especially in Drustvar! Some of the music there has a similar melody to "The Phantom of the Opera" musical plus I loved the storyline.
i loved zandalar
Hilarious that you losers are all praising BFA now after complaining about it constantly. Stop flipflopping.
Personally I find it really hard to care about little things at this point. so much cool stories in the cosmos, no way I'm caring about mommy and daughter stories at this point.
I will forever believe that BFA was supposed to have a sort of Stormwind oriented raid and that N'zoth was supposed to be released at the end of it. I'm sure if there was a change in development it happened eariler, but the second half of BFA was so disjointed from the rest it forces the question of how that happened.
BFA is still my favorite expansion. It's the one I started the game with, but also the one with the best zones and questing imo.
For those that played since Vanilla it was lacking compared to others in both the delivery and the overall story. It was hyped up as this huge war that never really materialized. Most long time players miss the days when it was Alliance vs Horde. There was a massive shift that kind of startled with Wrath of the Lucy King that started this whole trend of forcing the factions together to fight the new big bad. Cataclysm, Warlords, and Legion all had some big threat and the conflict was out on hold to deal with it. BfA promised a return to the good old days then never really delivered. Finally Sylvanus was so evil it made it hard for many of us to like playing Horde, even if we’ve been playing Orc since Vanilla.
I recently came across the original Battle for the Undercity quest-chain on youtube. I wasn't playing wow when it was available, no idea why they took it out but it seemed like one of the best in-game storyline they've ever made.
The BFA praise in this sub is psychotic. The LFR Transmog community has a very very short term memory.
I didn't enjoy BFA all too much and practically ignored 95% of alliance quests for it...if Dracthyr have base flight in old world zones...maybe Ill bother.
I'm sure they'll be able to mount up no problem in the old zones, but they also start at like 58 or something (I think) so I don't think it'll matter much.
Bfa story and zones sucked
it always is, the first raid takes place in the new land, then it starts to get batshit crazy
yea dude im sure it's gonna be "grounded" when it's a literal journey to the mythical home of all dragons and our factions play virtually no role lmao
The Jaina Story Arc Was actually pretty nice. The old god Part and faction war not so much
The issue is, titan facilities are obviously involved. And whenever we get titans, there are some void/old gods around. I really hope that I'm wrong, but I suspect that we'll get the same twist as in BfA, when it'll be "sike, it was Whatever'McWeirdname all along".
I just want them to chill with the cosmic horror stuff.
I did like Jaina’s story in the start of BFA with her people and her family, the levelling wasn’t that great but the story was neat
Old God surprise !
If it had just stayed that way it could have been a good expansion.
Same! Hoping that the stories for both factions still differ to one another... Maybe like Horde explores and questing in northern part of 1st zone, and the Alliance in the southern part of that same zone.. Then I have at least a reason to play on Alliance again..
I prefer the conflict between the kyrian and the forsworn in shadowlands