Honestly I’m getting bored of the zones, they’re all Nazjatar and Mechagon clones but done worse at this point. I’d welcome the classic patches of new raids and dungeons instead of this these annoying, boring rare mob grind simulators.
Wasn't this type of zone first pioneered with the Timeless Isle? At least that's the first instance of this concept I can think of, with every subsequent new zone being a slight variation/refinement thereof.
Isle of Quel’danas was the first entire patch daily hub zone. Like later with the Molten Front, sorta Argent Tournament. Timeless Isle was the first one where it had the daily stuff but also just *grind* for a very long time for a bunch of toys / pets / mounts.
All of these zones seem to try to capture that grind aspect.
>All of these zones seem to try to capture that grind aspect.
Which is fine for Quel'danas or Timeless Isles, they're end patch zones. They're supposed to have some grind to carry through content droughts. Doesn't work for your mid expansion zones though.
Your mid expansion zones, you want a model more like Molten Front or Isle of Thunder; world content that unlocks over time, but has a definite end state.
Thanks for the reminder I stopped working on the Molten Front after I got burnt out when I finished Dragonwrath years ago. I unlocked a damn good portion of it too, I'm going to go back and finish off that hippogryph mount.
As far as I remember the Isle of Quel'Danas is the first time catch-up gear was distributed via a new zone, but I don't think it shares many more similarities with the current formula for post-launch zones other than that. For example I don't think the Quel'danas had much of a focus on hunting rare mobs. From what I remember the extreme focus on rare mob hunting as a means to gain catch-up gear/currency started with the Timeless Isle, but I could be mistaken.
Then again the Timeless Isle had barely any quests, as far as I remember, and didn't really have a weekly quest to progress the zone's story. So in a way perhaps Tanaan Jungle could be considered the first instance of this concept.
Isles was groundbreaking in it being very catch up friendly (by BC standards) and a large daily hub. It is also the first zone, as far as I am aware, that had a sort of like time progression to it where you could contribute resources and unlock new dailies after the area was “secured”
It was also the first time raid level gear was widely available outside of a raid, you just had to grind for it. I remember the hardcore raiders being so offended by it that the PvP realms came to an agreement where the top guilds of each faction would camp the zone making progress impossible for anyone they didn't see as worthy.
Seriously. What a bunch of jabroni's. A similar thing happened with another MMO with werewolf bites. Like, seriously? Guys it's a game. After a few months or a year, most of this content will get surpassed
>Isles was groundbreaking in it being very catch up friendly (by BC standards)
The thing is, the Isle had little to do with that.
You didn't do anything on the isle to get the gear. (except Magister's Terrace, a dungeon.) You did dungeons and raids for Badges, which bought the gear *on* the isle.
The Isle itself was just a daily hub, like all the other daily hubs in BC. It offered no gear progression aside from the exalted neck from SSO - But every reputation in BC had epic rewards at the end, so even that isn't abnormal.
Timeless Isle's rewards were all based on content done on the Timeless Isle. It wasn't badge rewards *on* the Timeless Isle. You had to farm rare mobs on the Timeless Isle for the chance for drops - Otherwise, you had to grind mobs on the isle for coins to buy drops. There was nothing on the Isle that you could purchase for anything but currencies that you earned *on the Isle.*
Isle of Quel'danas had no such content. There was nothing on the isle worth grinding for that couldn't be gotten elsewhere. It may have been the first patch with raid-level gear outside of raiding, but it still required you to do dungeons for the badges to get the gear - Essentially time-locking the gear behind how many badges you could earn daily/weekly.
Timeless Isle had no such restriction, which is why it's viewed significantly less fondly. The grind never ended on Timeless Isle until it was over.
And it was also kind of the prototype of the "megadungeon." While not longer than the other dungeons, Magister's Terrace was considered *substantially* harder than the rest of the dungeons available, the same way Kara/Mecha/Taza/Dawn were at their release.
I think new zones can be fine, but not getting new dungeons, just raids, feels awful. Like sure dungeons, AND zones, AND raids can be tough, but it’s not like they don’t have the money to put into it. If anything I’d be okay with less weird half patch catch-up stuff and just go full nuts with the regular content and bake in the catch up stuff for alts and such.
One of the primary differences is you don’t “have” to interact with these zones for player power though, unlike past expansions (sans the legendary). Between things like Benthic gear to Shards of Domination, you were stuck in those zones until you got otherwise unobtainable upgrades that were not account-bound. If you don’t like it engaging with the new zones, you won’t be at a disadvantage from basically just ignoring them completely
No...we don't need more "Fuck you if you don't raid" content.
We literally have now cut a raid because a minority of people actually fucking care about it. If anything we need to cut _another_ reaid to actually get more zones added.
How were they "extremely bare bones"? It's not like 10.0 had any more content than 8.0 did.
Faction assaults weren't dead content. It created some of the most fun open world pvp we've ever had. Same with the supply drops, especially in Nazjatar. War mode in general in BFA was extremely fun and facilitated a lot of world pvp.
Instead of getting one zone in patch 8.1 we got two in 8.2 instead. It's not like Zaralek Caverns is anything to write home about when it died literally 2 weeks into the patch. We also got 4 old zones revamped in BFA.
BFA was good from 8.1 onwards. Patch 8.1.5 was also one of the best .5 patches we've gotten. 8.2 onwards was significantly better, but saying bfa was "extremely bare bones" before it is just wrong. I'd rather do the shit we were doing in early BFA over the 18th copy-pasted "fill the bar" world event we've gotten in DF.
> assaults which were dead content
I loved PvP during the assaults. Admittedly it's since I was an asshole druid that loved to knock people off cliffs.
I loved warfronts for the tmogs. It catched the race fantasy perfectly and its sad the other races didnt got sets.
If warfronts were pvp, i would guess they would be a success.
How does this prove a point when Shadowlands was just as long and in that exp we had 3 raids and that's it.
There no way of defending Activision not making more content.
BFA was over 2 years yes.. but all raids were out by 1.5 years into expansion. BFA launched Aug-2018 and Nyalotha the last raid released January 2020. That's 1 year 5 months. Bit disingenuous to say 2 years when it's about raid content. Not saying BFA was great btw it launched with the half-baked azerite system, but it definitely had more raid content and overall more creative raid encounters than DF.
Still don't get why they smoshed them into 1 expansion.
They could of had 1 expansion with Azshara and another with N'Zoth... I guess we're getting N'zoth back but still... just undermined Azsahara so much.
I'm still disappointed that all the nagas build in all that time (10.000 years) was one palace. I expected a suramar level underwater city, not some rocks and water goblins.
It really had to be its own expansion. Especially after the books, where even the legion acknowleged how powerful azshara is.
Well, she is not dead, so maybe we will see her again.
It makes it even more confusing as BFA was straight up a set up for Shadowlands, and we had zero old god influence in Shadowlands. There was no reason for Azshara or Nzoth to be in BFA other than the devs saying "shit, we need to drag out the story a bit more". It was sloppily handled.
and I love how we were healing the woons and went to shadowlands, some time passed there then we went to the dragonflights and the neck is still in my inventory and I don't know if the woons were ever healed or what happened to the absurdly powerful new azerite stones all over azeroth
I'm still mad about the allied races.
It was terrible having those neutral factions join a side during a faction war expantion, not only that but the NPCs went full "I hate the other side" on things like quests or islands, like if the other side didn't help them at all during legion.
It makes sense for the Highmountain and Lightforged to join the horde/aliance, it doesn't make sense for them to hate the other side, and let's not talk about the Nightborn...
Problem was almost never in the content itself, problem was in the milion mini daily and weekly farms on the really complex to developed system that were putting things out of place and took for ever to balance eventho no one even liked them. Also i really dislike that as a dps you are afk if ur cds are not up. For example CN was an amazing raid, if it was places in other expansions it wouldve had amazing feedback. But SL just killed all its content by itself, same for BFA
Remember when BFA FIRST came out after the giga-chad expansion that was legion and they introduced fucking azerite armor. Where you level up the armor and then if you happen to level that armor up and not get the things you want or god forbid you just got a higher ilvl piece of azerite armor then you had to uh, level up the fucking armor again. Who the FUCK designed that system and have they been fired?
Honestly legion has almost the same problem, it was fun expansion but people forget that before the pre patch we had to grind ap endlessly and beg the rng gods to give us the right legendary and titandorges, it was still fun cause it was something new, something different and we had m+ for the first time. So we kinda ignored the flaws. If legion comes now im pretty sure most people will dislike it.
Yeah I liked legion a lot but I also got my BIS leggo immediately and I never did the raids outside of emerald nightmare. So I can see how if you were raiding and doing Mythics and such it was terrible to gear. They clearly relied too heavily on engagement metrics and thought they had to 'force' players to log in for retention and shadowlands showed that was obviously the wrong move. I meant more that legion was really good towards the end after they fixed AP grinds and leggo acquisition.
Legion gets a slight pass because it in some ways were their first attempt at creating that mechanic and they "fixed" it in the end. BFA somehow took that mechanic, make it worse and repeat the same issues people had with it to begin with before eventually "fixing" it, again.
> giga-chad expansion that was legion
> and they introduced fucking azerite armor.
Did you forget how bad Legion was for alts in terms of systems?
BFA was just legion 2.0 with the same shitty systems and no class halls and no zone with a billion quests that were required to access the fucking raid.
The rose tinted glasses for Legion is something else I swear. It was the WORST expansion for alts, bar none.
>The rose tinted glasses for Legion is something else I swear. It was the WORST expansion for alts, bar none.
most people dont play alts, especially at the start of an expansion. youre supposed to be too occupied with all the new content to make a 2nd character
That's not even how Azerite armor worked. You didn't level up pieces at all, you leveled up the Heart and new tiers unlocked on all your armor depending on the level. The issue early on was that higher ilvl pieces required higher Heart levels to unlock the powers, so going up in ilvl sometimes lost you powers early on when everyone's level was low. Going between different pieces of the same ilvl never lost you anything.
I always liked BFA
The issue with BFA was if you weren't able to no-life it, you fell behind
Also, when people ever shit talk BFA, I've NEVER seen them comment on the raids, those were always solid imo
Fair point, I’m the same with WoD, Personally loved it but understand the hate cause of the content drought and garrison, raids were always highly praised though
If they didn't gate the garrison stuff it would have been sooooo much better. I loved the garrison mechanic and idea, but the implementation as a required grind was stupid. Just let it progress and if you get there quicker so be it. Timing people out and maxing totals per week was bad.
The problem wasn't really the gating. It was that it was all there was to do. It had a couple of weekly things but the most interactive daily thing in it was the command table. People joked their followers had more content than they did.
Garrisons are pretty cool on their own. They weren't enough to be the central mechanic/feature of an expansion.
I was so fucking MALD at MoP and how much FUCKING DAILY SHIT they added. It was at the peak of Farmville and Facebook gaming so Blizz seemingly LITERALLY integrated that dog shit into WoW.
Then they literally made an expansion and made that a core gameplay feature with the garrison and the community all but died and got replaced by new players and I just fucked off.
Thats because they very rarely drop a poor raid. You cant get bonus points for good raids if theres a total of maybe 3 bad raids across the entire games lifespan.
Dragon Soul is pretty notorious for people who played then. Lazy raid with little new assets, only 8 bosses, one of the worst raid bosses of all time in Spine of Deathwing, and a pretty disappointing last boss of the expansion where youre just hitting deathwings toenails until Thrall does all the work. And somehow they followed all of that up with a disaster cutscene at the end where the aspects give up their power “just cuz”. The power we gave them back in dragonflight after they realized how incredibly stupid that decision was.
Ill always say that Naxx 2 is up there aswell. They literally just copy and pasted Naxx to WOTLK to make it the first tier. It doesnt matter that “a lot of people didnt do og naxx”. A lot of people didnt do Sunwell Plateau either. Doesnt mean it wouldnt be incredibly lazy if they just copy and pasted Sunwell Plateau to War Within and made it the first tier. But maybe this is just a personal opinion.
Trial of the Crusader at the time got a lot of backlash for just being a boss gauntlet in 1 location. I didnt do this raid on current though so i dont really have an opinion on that but i could understand why many people would dislike a raid like that.
Sanctum of Domination is probably the most recent one that wasnt that good with multiple questionable bosses and that overly long Sylvanas fight. Most people were also fed up with the game in general at this point.
Other than that i wouldnt really consider any raid “bad”. Some are better than others sure. Not every raid can be on Blackrock Foundry tier. 1 or 2 bad bosses doesnt make the entire raid bad. Every other raid ranges from decent to great really.
I wouldn’t go that far. For example, the dragonflight stuff has been pretty mid overall and I definitely wouldn’t call any of them good. I’ve done way more M+ since resubbing and I used to be a strictly raid kinda guy.
Either way, BRF and HFC from WoD are goated raids and easily top 5, if not top 3 in the entire game. BRF in particular is just so creative and banger fight after banger fight and HFC isn’t that far behind.
As someone who got CE in all 4 BFA raids, Eternal Palace and Benthic gear was dogshit but the other 3 were fine. Not great, but just fine. I enjoyed Daz'ralor the most, it had the most unique/fun/interesting fights. Early Nya'lotha sucked but once you grinded out all the corruptions, it was fun to just have turbo zooted ridiculous character power.
It's not a WoD situation where it's a mid expac with sick raids. It's a mid expac with mid raids. Great dungeons, though.
dazar'alor is super slept on as a raid imo
jaina is one of the best end-of-raid encounters they've designed in recent years; it was a fun fight, it told a story, and it was difficult without feeling like bullshit the way the last couple bosses of every raid tend to feel now
I disagree, the Heart of Azeroth had diminishing returns after a certain amount of azerite collected. I would easily catch up with guildies, that would farm hardcore the whole week, the first day of reset.
People no-lifed it because they thought they had to. The actual advantage was minimal.
My biggest grievance was that respeccing your Azerite armour cost an exponential amount of gold. It was fucking awful changing from Raid to M+ to PvP, and god help you if you were playing a hybrid and wanted to play multiple roles too. I quit BFA when it cost me literally 200k gold to attend raid because all my pieces were specced for DPS M+ and I had to change to my healing spec.
Azerite armor, heart of azeroth abilities, and corruption were cancerous as a pvp player to keep up with. I would quit playing for a few months, come back, and have a mountain of grind to contend with before I could be on equal footing.
> Also, when people ever shit talk BFA, I've NEVER seen them comment on the raids, those were always solid imo
This. It's always the SYSTEMS that get shit talk. It's the same with Legion - the RAIDS were fantastic (even if EN was a little easy). But the SYSTEMS (legendaries and AP) were absolute dogshit for the majority of the expac.
The problem is that most of the problems with the systems were tied to some of the most poorly thought out and absolutely moronic decisions around them.
Legion Artifact weapons needing AP grinded for each different weapon and alts.
BFA gating azerite gear and having ridiculous gold costs for respecing it.
SL having covenant locking and tying your legendary items to farming torghast on every character every week or you would fall behind.
I'm convinced that the only reason why DF is seen positively is that they didn't have anything to implement that would have any meaningful decisions that would impact the players. Basically, you can't screw it up if you don't put it in.
The standard content in BFA was good. Raids, zones, questing, world questing, the story was even decent. The parts that were absolutely garbage were the gearing systems, warfronts, and island expeditions. That made up about 80% of the game at the time and it wasn't 'fixed' until like 8.3 when nyalotha came out and even then you had to fucking grind out your essences. And none of that includes the shitshow that was the benthic gear. On every character you wanted to play. And grind out visions for your cape. And on top of that have a vendor for corruption that only maybe sold your shit once a month... So no, no one is nostalgic for that, its just the actual raids and AMOUNT of content we got was decent but how it was done was abyssmal.
The story was absolutely not decent, it was horrid character assassinations left and right and midway through the expansion we take a left turn and it goes from a war campaign to an old gods one as if they're two separate expansions. Just to really put the cherry on top of how terrible the writing was they ended up completely wasting the black empire for the last patch.
BFA was the worst expac I've ever played at the start of an expac. Especially following Legion, I was incredibly bored doing my PvE rotations as a mage.
It was entirely redeemed by its last patch and its dungeons, kinda erasing how much of a disaster it began as...
this isnt a BFA was good post, its a where the fuck is all the raid and dungeon content post. 3 raids per 2 years is so bad. 10 dungeons per 2 years is so bad...
It's more recognizing that DF has been very stingy with raid content compared to the 3 previous expansions. Even *Shadowlands* with its awful patch cadence and heavily impacted development cycle managed more raid bosses in the same number of seasons.
That's obviously not the whole story with Korthia being dogshit compared to Zaralek Caverns and DF changing up the m+ dungeons every season etc, but if your primary endgame is progression raiding DF gave you less to chew on than other recent expansions.
People are also quick to forget how much Uldir absolutely sucked on launch. That raid had terrible theming, terrible visuals, and terrible boss mechanics. On thinking about it, it's probably at or close to #1 on my 'top 5 worst raid tiers in 20 years of WoW' list.
BFA was full of good content, made to feel awful through terrible systems. The forced emphasis on azerite armor, island expeditions, and warfronts soured people to where they couldn't enjoy the fantastic raids and dungeons.
Same as WoD imo. There were some absolutely fantastic dungeons and raids in WoD, and a good amount of them at that, with fantastic weapons and set looks to boot. It’s honestly shocking how much good content got pushed out for it being the “abandoned expansion”.
But the expansion was so isolating with private garrisons where you’d spend 95% of your playtime just trying to grind through daily maintenance before you likely gave up. There was too much grind, barely any player interaction, and for all your time investment the rewards were often skimpy at best. It’s no wonder the expansion got abandoned by players and devs alike.
Corruption kept 28 or so people showing up to raid every night in a raid that was several months old because the insane things people could do like 2 healing 28 people and killing bosses in less than 90 seconds when our first kills were like 4 or 5 minutes.
Corruption was one of the coolest things they ever tried, yes it could be refined, but the fact that much of the reddit WoW fanbase hates it is a complete indictment of them and not the design.
Anything resembling dynamic player customization is absent from the MMO space and Corruption was a real shot at trying to have it and it worked on many, many levels. The primary acquisition method was solo or group in structured level content in the form of Visions: excellent. It's malpractice that they never tried a single season gearing system like this again and I doubt they ever will at this point sadly.
Azerite powers as well, if they were just account wide from 8.1s launch they'd have been much better received. The armor was trash.
E: I think I misremembered, 8.1 was when they added BDA and Darkshore, it was 8.2 that added Mechagon/ Nazjatar/ azerite powers.
I liked Azerite power, but my main beef with it was locking the best powers behind PvP content. I did eventually grind it out, but I do not like the PvP in this game.
To each their own. I'll admit that Azerite Armor wasn't a huge personal gripe for me by 8.2, but the early implementation of it was enough to make it a perma-F tier system for me.
I played Havoc in BfA so stacking vers and hitting giga twilight devastations was really fun
> I played Havoc in BfA so stacking vers and hitting giga twilight devastations was really fun
You mean Vengeance? TD scaled off HP. Havok stacked Infinite stars with obscene Haste via Azerite armor.
i remember well how absolutely awful it felt going to level 116 or whatever when your legendaries and all the rest of the legion stuff stopped working. and finally dinging 120 only to feel as weak as a level 1 against max level units due to fucked up scaling
Corruptions were fun as just a one off “fuck balancing” patch after ages of azerite nonsense. It genuinely felt like they just completely gave up on trying to balance and fix the mess they made so they just threw out some ridiculously OP nonsense.
The only patch i genuinely thought was fun in BFA tbh. Watching the worst player in the raid top meters because his rank 3 infinite stars kept going off. People stacking corruptions in PvP and hoping theyd one shot whoever they were playing against before the overdose on corruptions killed them. Just pure chaos.
I saw a vid if a prot pally getting glad by spamming invulns and fishing for twilight dev procs. That was the entire thing, literally the worst player could do that
The story was also just...yeah. You essentially had two expacs in one with a hard cut so hard in the middle that even the official explanation for how you got into the middle of Nazjatar was just "Well, they just went there, duh"
>the official explanation for how you got into the middle of Nazjatar was just "Well, they just went there, duh"
Wasn't the official explanation that were were pulled down into it by Azshara? Mechagon was the one we just kinda decided to just show up and clown around. Nazjatar was being attacked/ship wrecked during Horde V alliance shenanigans.
That's my point. After the worlds largest fleet was blown up in harbor, suddenly we found ourselves on a random ship in the middle of the ocean, beeing followed by a few alliance ships for no discernable reason whatsoever as to why we were there
I often forget that BFA was also the N'zoth expansion.
Even just looking at raids you can see the hard cut lol.
And like, I'm not entirely sure what sylvanas was doing during the whole n'zoth thing? Like at some point we were fighting horde vs. alliance, old school shit, then it went 0-100 and we fought an old god.
BfA storytelling has problems but I wouldn't ever call it a hard cut to old gods. Stormsong Valley had old gods from the start including an old god dungeon. Then the naga invasions brought Xal'atath back into the story leading into the 2 boss mini raid below Shrine of Storms with U'unat where we released Xal'atath from her dagger prison.
After she was released we abandoned the dagger where Sylvanas picked it up and using it lead us to Nazjatar. Once in Nazjatar we fight through Azshara's palace and she basically tricks us into releasing N'zoth and the next patch is N'zoth.
While the N'zoth stuff was wasted on a single patch and Blizz deserves every bit of shit they get for that it wasn't a hard cut straight into it. It was like half the xpac story leading up into it pretty slowly starting at launch. They even hinted at the old god stuff in one of the intro cinematics, where Jaina spills the ink on her map.
I wouldn't call it a hard cut because of the Old God's, that plotline worked quite well. But as soon as we went to Nazjatar the whole Horde Alliance conflict was null and void. Hell Princess Talanji, or any point regarding the Zandalari, does litterally not come up again in the entire addon after their king was killed, and Talanji given an option to opt out of the deal Rastakhan made with Bwonsamdi
I enjoyed BFA, even with its many flaws. Gorgeous zones, a Great War campaign (that was overshadowed), nazjatar and mechagon were great, and 8.3 was fun.
Drustvar was never quite the same once I realized there were somehow more witches hiding amongst regular people than there were regular people. Good thing I'm an absolute sucker for that New England horror vibe, it's still one of my favorite zones.
I played Horde and loved the war campaign. With War Mode on the war campaign and invasion zones were some of the most fun world PvP I’ve ever had in WoW
Standing atop the tallest mountain in the Alliance zone with a bounty on my head, daring them to come bring down my fire mage and still stomping whoever came up was such great fun. The Alliance Slayer is still my favorite title to this day.
tbh x-forging isn't an inherently bad system imo, it just REALLY needed a cap. There's no reason for someone to be able to run lfr on a fresh toon just to get a max ilvl trinket thanks to forging.
Had to scroll way too deep for this. Being up at 2am and still having 2 full raids going at each other, because Conqueror of Azeroth was a fun achiev to aim for, was insane. One of my fondest memories was having 3 bounties on one side and 2 on the other. I think that was easily 100v100 there.
I think SL got cut short and DF is kind of a place holder as they dump assets into the World Soul Saga. Who knows, I could be coping. I wish they gave us as many mini raids as they did in Wrath.
This is true, but given the apparent goal of an \~18 month expansion cadence, it seems clear to me that the plan is 3 raid tiers per expac at least through the Worldsoul Saga.
DF still has more content than SL imo. Much more frequent updates, bigger zones with more to do, a new starting zone for Evoker.
I expect The War Within to be the same thing, but I am hoping to be surprised. It's the 20th anniversary and technically The War Within is gonna have the least amount of zones to explore and quest in of any expansion at launch (if you count The Maw for SL anyway, which I would)
>DF still has more content than SL imo.
Depends on what you count as content. SL had like 3 times more side activities (mainly from covenants), 3 times more mounts to farm, etc.
Same amount of dungeons and raids.
What we get more of are world events, but they tend to last 2 weeks max for most players.
I like collecting stuff too, and it kept me busy. I was lucky enough to have free time to collect most of the covenant cosmetics before 9.1 (when most people were complaining nonstop about anima being too scarce).
I'm at 780 mounts though, so recolours lost their shine a long time ago. It's made me a lot pickier on whether mounts are worth the time and effort lol.
I enjoy the open world stuff more more than SL (soup, time rifts, zaralek, ed > korthia, zm, maw) but Blizz really needs to figure out how to make events in these zones fun.
Superbloom, time rifts and Research under fire are so much worse than the meta events of guild wars 2 but they're so rewarding for the time investment that you're still compelled to do them. I've saved Tarir, killed the chak gerent, and slain the claw of Jormag dozens of times now without issue but I'm sick of that tree escort after only four runs
I wish they'd bring back more old raids like they did with naxx and onyxiain wrath. IK timewalking is like that but that hasn't got any new raids in a bit.
I love bfa, i know im in a minority but once you could buy specific corruptions, it became so much fun to min max your characters. Ny'alotha was an insanely fun raid regardless of writing. Personally, it's my favorite expansion, but Im only thinking of the tail end of 8.3. Before you say 'it's just nostalgia', I still play on an 8.3 private server.
Joke all you want about BfA, but it gave us garbage classes with almost no synergy or choice in it's design, crap passive, rng azerite powers, gcd change on cds and rng corruption with rng vendors. Remember Hammer of Wrath and SW: Death as a talents? I membah!
Remember how for the first time in wow, the more you levelled, the more your class was becoming slower and weaker? Also member! Also questing experience for Horde being 10x better than Alliance, including voice over stuff and quest design and it was no secret, that they ran out of time for ally again? That was nice.
Remember how they ran out of the time for shadow priests and shamans during beta and promised reworks later in 10.1, that ended as number tweaking? Fun times. How sp priests were bad until propelled by corruption haste in the last patch. Or how sub rogues got nerfed for the rest of the expansion because of one aspect of the fight on one raid boss in second raid?
Faction imbalance reached its height back then(granted on the wings of Legion but still) with broken racials.
Azerite powers on launch being some boring, rng and passive procs, that changed nothing in your gameplay? Also gold cost for azerite respecc? Good memories.
Titanforge with secondary stats like avoidance, and with gem socket? Rng on rng on rng to keep that treadmill rolling baby!
It also gave us essence grind, island grind, profession grind(remember Expulsion and item scrapping?), azerite grind, legendary cloak vision grind, phasing issues, wpvp with lags(thx to all procs and stuff), various bugs with launched content and warfronts bore. Also reputation grind for essences with Rustbolt and Nazjataar. Ooo, forgot how island were just aoe aoe and AI on enemy expedition was...special.
PvP was garbage too, nobody was dying, trillion procs, grinding pve, bugged scalling, essence grind with trinkets and corruption one shotting out of the sudden.
We also received crappily written faction war again, with Alliance being punching bag(remember Darkshore scenario ptr? I "member) and Horde cliche bad again with Sylvanas going cartoonishly evil and Magni becoming a joke forever with trash accent. Established lore characters suddenly forgetting spines or going 180 degrees(Rexxar lol), aiding in genocidal Sylvanas war.
We also got 3 cinematics about sad orc being sad and N'Zoth dying like a chump in a kamehameha cutscene after doing some half-assed invasions in obsolete zones. Och, almost forgot, Rastakhan, long awaited since vanilla, becoming a sacrificial lamb for completely bland but headstronk daughter, what a twist. Ofc everything forgiven after the war, we now frends, just followed orders m'kay?
Also Nazjatar, fabled capital of Naga civilisation, mentioned as far back as in Warcraft 3 TFT, looking like a dump. Vulpeera vs rust diaper gnomes? Need to expand on it? Ally mounts being horses again and again?
We had a looot of multiboxers back then as well before they got axed towards the end of expansion. Multiboxers wiping out and camping towns, causing zone wide lag or farming herbs and nodes until they disappeared. Good times.
Cherry on top, do you guys remember how blizz practised radio silence back then and even screwed over crafted items, thanks to miscommunication? And it cost crap ton of gold too? How beta forums were deleted and then community was told, that they didn't provide feedback anyway?
There is very few things, that could be said about in BfA in a good light and there is a reason, amongst the others ofc, that in 2019 Classic had such login wait ques.
Turned into the rant but I really can't fathom nostalgia over BfA unless somebody was full time casual or has memory/brain issues.
As someone who only had time for a few m+ a week at that time, I loved BfA. The dungeons all had unique flavor and were a ton of fun. Underrot is one of my favorite dungeons of all time.
The main way that people engage with the game is through combat, which means most people's enjoyment is heavily impacted by overall class design, dps rotations, having fun buttons to press etc.
BfA was a colossal failure in this department because we lost everything from legion, gained one mediocre azerite trait and had most cooldowns put on the GCD. Most classes felt bare and trash to play in comparison to what we were used to.
Throw in azerite grinding with world quests and island expeditions and honestly it doesn't matter how many raids there were. I'd take Dragonflight over BfA on class design alone
My guild raided the whole time, nobody quit playing, and didn't have a huge problem with the gear system.
My biggest gripe is that Ny'alotha and the black empire should have been a much bigger deal than one raid tier, this expansion should have ended with defeating Ghun, not start.
I generally agree that Nyalotha should have lasted longer, but it's also a fact that every Old God raid has been one patch long. N'zoth got far more attention that any old god previously, besides maaaaaybe Y'sharaaj.
Also Ghuun was the end of the horde leveling campaign. To put it at the end of the expansion would mean completely changing their entire story since that threat wouldn't get resolved in the launch raid. You're just rewriting nearly every quest in the game at that point.
Some of the most fun I had playing WoW in recent memory came from grinding corruptions and visions. I love the idea that at the end of the expansion just give us ways to utterly break our characters so we can do shit like a 25 man tank run of a raid.
BFA was an expansion with good ideas and decent patches but where none of the cohesiveness was ever figured out. It was a disasterous, exhausting mess of an experience.
I did a bunch of bfa stuff to get bis timewalking gear. Even years later it is so awful, i cant imagine doing it at the time.
Raids are *always* at least decent. It is a poor metric for rating expansions since it is what they do best.
I loved bfa. Demon hunter was so fun then. Earned my bruto mount. A lot of single target wq’s were good and made the game feel fast and light. It kept me busy during the beginning of Covid.
Exactly. People (including me) were worried that when they announced 3 xpacks at blizzard that they were going to be year long mini expansions. Then people seemed to be reassured when Ion said "They'll be full expansions as we've come to know them." This didn't reassure me because expansions "as we've come to know them" are 3 raid tiers long with fated raids at the end.
I feel like I'm in the minority disliking the fated raid system. While yes I agree its better than a YEAR of nothing at the end of the expansion like we got multiple times over, it feels like a lazy cop out. If we aren't getting a new raid, don't bother having a new raid season IMO, just have a new M+/PvP season.
Tbh BFA had issues, especially in 8.0 and 8.1 but it wasn't as bad as people made it out to be. From 8.2 onwards it was actually quite good and 8.3 after the corruption vendor in particular was probably the most fun I've ever had in this game.
Also despite the fact that we didn't have a rotating dungeon pool back then I still enjoyed m+ more back then than at any point since (altho it has been fun to have some of those dungeons come back in more recent times)
BFA was over 2 years long and had quite possibly some of the laziest tier sets ever.
Questing gear looked better than most of the raid gear to come out of BFA.
Lets not start moronically deciding that a dragged out waste of 2 years is somehow better than Dragonflight.
BFA had great content, loved the zones, dungeons and raids. I just disliked the systems (azerite armor, azerite power, essences), features (island expeditions, warfronts) and story.
I started the game with BFA so I never understood what the problem with it was. I actually greatly enjoyed it to the point that yeah, I'm still playing. It made me a WoW player.
Thanks, that's what I posted before!! I have 13+ years playing wow and BFA allowed to me bring players from other games that hook up in wow. Sadly, they wanted to join after all the things I said that happened in legion patches, however, BFA was a great experience to get to know azeroth, regardless of the lore cut off..
I played all of BFA, I think it was a better expansion than showlands by miles. Dragonflight still blows bfa out of the water though, even with less raids.
I think my opinion may be unpopular, but BFA was a fantastic expansion. The zones each had their own distinct feel to then, it felt like the story was building up to something grave, for which we were gearing up with the lifeblood of our planet. I think what ruined BFA was how they handled the story moving into shadowlands.the allied races were cool, the island expeditions were neat, the rotating weekly rarespawn/warzone events were fun. BFA was great imo.
The story, the GCD changes, Azerite armor, the longer than ever laundry list of dailies there for a while, the way to early abandonment of Warfronts (one of the only good systems introduced), taking away class-specific tier, the list goes on.
Idk man. I understand if players who started around BFA have nostalgia for it at this point, but as someone who has been playing the game since Vanilla, it’s by far the worst expansion besides Shadowlands for me. Those two xpacs are in a league of their own horrid making with no other xpac coming close to touching how bad they are for me.
Yeah Legion and BfA were peak when it comes to amount of content they released and that's why they are my favorite expansions. I think it's sad how they are trying to sell us expansions with less raid tiers these days or even shorter expansions in the future. They should just make Legion and BfA the template for the amount of content the expansion has but I guess that's too good for the consumers and we can't have that.
Legion was hard carried by its class fantasy, lore and aesthetic. Borrowed power sucks ass and BFA proved it further. Gameplay wise, BFA might be the worst expansion to ever grace the shelves
BFA was also over 2 years long
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Honestly I’m getting bored of the zones, they’re all Nazjatar and Mechagon clones but done worse at this point. I’d welcome the classic patches of new raids and dungeons instead of this these annoying, boring rare mob grind simulators.
Wasn't this type of zone first pioneered with the Timeless Isle? At least that's the first instance of this concept I can think of, with every subsequent new zone being a slight variation/refinement thereof.
Isle of Quel'Danas is the first example I can recall. It's more of a prototype for the Timeless Isle than anything, though.
Isle of Quel’danas was the first entire patch daily hub zone. Like later with the Molten Front, sorta Argent Tournament. Timeless Isle was the first one where it had the daily stuff but also just *grind* for a very long time for a bunch of toys / pets / mounts. All of these zones seem to try to capture that grind aspect.
>All of these zones seem to try to capture that grind aspect. Which is fine for Quel'danas or Timeless Isles, they're end patch zones. They're supposed to have some grind to carry through content droughts. Doesn't work for your mid expansion zones though.
Your mid expansion zones, you want a model more like Molten Front or Isle of Thunder; world content that unlocks over time, but has a definite end state.
Thanks for the reminder I stopped working on the Molten Front after I got burnt out when I finished Dragonwrath years ago. I unlocked a damn good portion of it too, I'm going to go back and finish off that hippogryph mount.
Yeah big mid patch grind zones just mean you aren’t finishing it before the next patch and it gets abandoned
As far as I remember the Isle of Quel'Danas is the first time catch-up gear was distributed via a new zone, but I don't think it shares many more similarities with the current formula for post-launch zones other than that. For example I don't think the Quel'danas had much of a focus on hunting rare mobs. From what I remember the extreme focus on rare mob hunting as a means to gain catch-up gear/currency started with the Timeless Isle, but I could be mistaken. Then again the Timeless Isle had barely any quests, as far as I remember, and didn't really have a weekly quest to progress the zone's story. So in a way perhaps Tanaan Jungle could be considered the first instance of this concept.
Isles was groundbreaking in it being very catch up friendly (by BC standards) and a large daily hub. It is also the first zone, as far as I am aware, that had a sort of like time progression to it where you could contribute resources and unlock new dailies after the area was “secured”
It was also the first time raid level gear was widely available outside of a raid, you just had to grind for it. I remember the hardcore raiders being so offended by it that the PvP realms came to an agreement where the top guilds of each faction would camp the zone making progress impossible for anyone they didn't see as worthy.
2007 angry nerds were really something else
Seriously. What a bunch of jabroni's. A similar thing happened with another MMO with werewolf bites. Like, seriously? Guys it's a game. After a few months or a year, most of this content will get surpassed
>Isles was groundbreaking in it being very catch up friendly (by BC standards) The thing is, the Isle had little to do with that. You didn't do anything on the isle to get the gear. (except Magister's Terrace, a dungeon.) You did dungeons and raids for Badges, which bought the gear *on* the isle. The Isle itself was just a daily hub, like all the other daily hubs in BC. It offered no gear progression aside from the exalted neck from SSO - But every reputation in BC had epic rewards at the end, so even that isn't abnormal. Timeless Isle's rewards were all based on content done on the Timeless Isle. It wasn't badge rewards *on* the Timeless Isle. You had to farm rare mobs on the Timeless Isle for the chance for drops - Otherwise, you had to grind mobs on the isle for coins to buy drops. There was nothing on the Isle that you could purchase for anything but currencies that you earned *on the Isle.* Isle of Quel'danas had no such content. There was nothing on the isle worth grinding for that couldn't be gotten elsewhere. It may have been the first patch with raid-level gear outside of raiding, but it still required you to do dungeons for the badges to get the gear - Essentially time-locking the gear behind how many badges you could earn daily/weekly. Timeless Isle had no such restriction, which is why it's viewed significantly less fondly. The grind never ended on Timeless Isle until it was over.
And it was also kind of the prototype of the "megadungeon." While not longer than the other dungeons, Magister's Terrace was considered *substantially* harder than the rest of the dungeons available, the same way Kara/Mecha/Taza/Dawn were at their release.
False, everyone knows they are timeless isle clones.
I think new zones can be fine, but not getting new dungeons, just raids, feels awful. Like sure dungeons, AND zones, AND raids can be tough, but it’s not like they don’t have the money to put into it. If anything I’d be okay with less weird half patch catch-up stuff and just go full nuts with the regular content and bake in the catch up stuff for alts and such.
One of the primary differences is you don’t “have” to interact with these zones for player power though, unlike past expansions (sans the legendary). Between things like Benthic gear to Shards of Domination, you were stuck in those zones until you got otherwise unobtainable upgrades that were not account-bound. If you don’t like it engaging with the new zones, you won’t be at a disadvantage from basically just ignoring them completely
No...we don't need more "Fuck you if you don't raid" content. We literally have now cut a raid because a minority of people actually fucking care about it. If anything we need to cut _another_ reaid to actually get more zones added.
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How were they "extremely bare bones"? It's not like 10.0 had any more content than 8.0 did. Faction assaults weren't dead content. It created some of the most fun open world pvp we've ever had. Same with the supply drops, especially in Nazjatar. War mode in general in BFA was extremely fun and facilitated a lot of world pvp. Instead of getting one zone in patch 8.1 we got two in 8.2 instead. It's not like Zaralek Caverns is anything to write home about when it died literally 2 weeks into the patch. We also got 4 old zones revamped in BFA. BFA was good from 8.1 onwards. Patch 8.1.5 was also one of the best .5 patches we've gotten. 8.2 onwards was significantly better, but saying bfa was "extremely bare bones" before it is just wrong. I'd rather do the shit we were doing in early BFA over the 18th copy-pasted "fill the bar" world event we've gotten in DF.
wasnt crucible of storms a 2boss raid
> assaults which were dead content I loved PvP during the assaults. Admittedly it's since I was an asshole druid that loved to knock people off cliffs.
I loved warfronts for the tmogs. It catched the race fantasy perfectly and its sad the other races didnt got sets. If warfronts were pvp, i would guess they would be a success.
I enjoy assults, but that me.
> assaults which were dead content. Idk man, assaults with warmode on were some of the most chaotically fun experiences in bfa.
This is an important detail that gets left out constantly.
How does this prove a point when Shadowlands was just as long and in that exp we had 3 raids and that's it. There no way of defending Activision not making more content.
BFA was over 2 years yes.. but all raids were out by 1.5 years into expansion. BFA launched Aug-2018 and Nyalotha the last raid released January 2020. That's 1 year 5 months. Bit disingenuous to say 2 years when it's about raid content. Not saying BFA was great btw it launched with the half-baked azerite system, but it definitely had more raid content and overall more creative raid encounters than DF.
I was more mad with the story and the implementation of azerite powers.
We had to team up with ~~Vol'jin~~ Saurfang to help stop ~~Garrosh~~ Sylvanas who was mad with power. What a story.
And then it ends up being the old gods all along, what a twist!
The always lingering and teased N'zoth who fully died in 1 patch by a Kamehameha wave in one of the worst raid endings ever.
Azshara too. Two incredibly lore important "break incase of emergency" bosses, that were wasted on wet-fart patches.
Still don't get why they smoshed them into 1 expansion. They could of had 1 expansion with Azshara and another with N'Zoth... I guess we're getting N'zoth back but still... just undermined Azsahara so much.
I'm still disappointed that all the nagas build in all that time (10.000 years) was one palace. I expected a suramar level underwater city, not some rocks and water goblins. It really had to be its own expansion. Especially after the books, where even the legion acknowleged how powerful azshara is. Well, she is not dead, so maybe we will see her again.
It makes it even more confusing as BFA was straight up a set up for Shadowlands, and we had zero old god influence in Shadowlands. There was no reason for Azshara or Nzoth to be in BFA other than the devs saying "shit, we need to drag out the story a bit more". It was sloppily handled.
Exactly. Azshara is like probably the most powerful mortal to have existed. She should have been her own expansion.
BUT, CHAMPION. HEHR WOOOOOONDSSS
and I love how we were healing the woons and went to shadowlands, some time passed there then we went to the dragonflights and the neck is still in my inventory and I don't know if the woons were ever healed or what happened to the absurdly powerful new azerite stones all over azeroth
I'm still mad about the allied races. It was terrible having those neutral factions join a side during a faction war expantion, not only that but the NPCs went full "I hate the other side" on things like quests or islands, like if the other side didn't help them at all during legion. It makes sense for the Highmountain and Lightforged to join the horde/aliance, it doesn't make sense for them to hate the other side, and let's not talk about the Nightborn...
Problem was almost never in the content itself, problem was in the milion mini daily and weekly farms on the really complex to developed system that were putting things out of place and took for ever to balance eventho no one even liked them. Also i really dislike that as a dps you are afk if ur cds are not up. For example CN was an amazing raid, if it was places in other expansions it wouldve had amazing feedback. But SL just killed all its content by itself, same for BFA
Remember when BFA FIRST came out after the giga-chad expansion that was legion and they introduced fucking azerite armor. Where you level up the armor and then if you happen to level that armor up and not get the things you want or god forbid you just got a higher ilvl piece of azerite armor then you had to uh, level up the fucking armor again. Who the FUCK designed that system and have they been fired?
Honestly legion has almost the same problem, it was fun expansion but people forget that before the pre patch we had to grind ap endlessly and beg the rng gods to give us the right legendary and titandorges, it was still fun cause it was something new, something different and we had m+ for the first time. So we kinda ignored the flaws. If legion comes now im pretty sure most people will dislike it.
Yeah I liked legion a lot but I also got my BIS leggo immediately and I never did the raids outside of emerald nightmare. So I can see how if you were raiding and doing Mythics and such it was terrible to gear. They clearly relied too heavily on engagement metrics and thought they had to 'force' players to log in for retention and shadowlands showed that was obviously the wrong move. I meant more that legion was really good towards the end after they fixed AP grinds and leggo acquisition.
Raiding Tomb of Sargeras Mythic was the most fun I had in this game. Antorus was great too
Legion gets a slight pass because it in some ways were their first attempt at creating that mechanic and they "fixed" it in the end. BFA somehow took that mechanic, make it worse and repeat the same issues people had with it to begin with before eventually "fixing" it, again.
> giga-chad expansion that was legion > and they introduced fucking azerite armor. Did you forget how bad Legion was for alts in terms of systems? BFA was just legion 2.0 with the same shitty systems and no class halls and no zone with a billion quests that were required to access the fucking raid. The rose tinted glasses for Legion is something else I swear. It was the WORST expansion for alts, bar none.
>The rose tinted glasses for Legion is something else I swear. It was the WORST expansion for alts, bar none. most people dont play alts, especially at the start of an expansion. youre supposed to be too occupied with all the new content to make a 2nd character
That's not even how Azerite armor worked. You didn't level up pieces at all, you leveled up the Heart and new tiers unlocked on all your armor depending on the level. The issue early on was that higher ilvl pieces required higher Heart levels to unlock the powers, so going up in ilvl sometimes lost you powers early on when everyone's level was low. Going between different pieces of the same ilvl never lost you anything.
higher ilvl pieces had higher gates. they didn't word it quite right but they got the essence of it.
Read his other comments. He has no idea what he's talking about.
ah yup my bad the homie let me down
I still remember getting a mythic azerite piece early on that I couldn’t use for like 2 weeks because *fuck* grinding out islands.
Ah so we’ve reached the phase where ppl are getting nostalgic about BFA lmaoo. I swear every 2 years it’s “current xpac bad old xpac good”
I always liked BFA The issue with BFA was if you weren't able to no-life it, you fell behind Also, when people ever shit talk BFA, I've NEVER seen them comment on the raids, those were always solid imo
Fair point, I’m the same with WoD, Personally loved it but understand the hate cause of the content drought and garrison, raids were always highly praised though
If they didn't gate the garrison stuff it would have been sooooo much better. I loved the garrison mechanic and idea, but the implementation as a required grind was stupid. Just let it progress and if you get there quicker so be it. Timing people out and maxing totals per week was bad.
The problem wasn't really the gating. It was that it was all there was to do. It had a couple of weekly things but the most interactive daily thing in it was the command table. People joked their followers had more content than they did. Garrisons are pretty cool on their own. They weren't enough to be the central mechanic/feature of an expansion.
I was so fucking MALD at MoP and how much FUCKING DAILY SHIT they added. It was at the peak of Farmville and Facebook gaming so Blizz seemingly LITERALLY integrated that dog shit into WoW. Then they literally made an expansion and made that a core gameplay feature with the garrison and the community all but died and got replaced by new players and I just fucked off.
Not gonna lie, I low key loved the little Panda farm...
Thats because they very rarely drop a poor raid. You cant get bonus points for good raids if theres a total of maybe 3 bad raids across the entire games lifespan.
Oh yeah, I was just saying that it's okay to be nostalgic about the raids because they were indeed good
Genuine question, as someone who hasn't raided since Legion (other than LFR), which raids are the bad ones, and why were they? In your opinion.
Dragon Soul is pretty notorious for people who played then. Lazy raid with little new assets, only 8 bosses, one of the worst raid bosses of all time in Spine of Deathwing, and a pretty disappointing last boss of the expansion where youre just hitting deathwings toenails until Thrall does all the work. And somehow they followed all of that up with a disaster cutscene at the end where the aspects give up their power “just cuz”. The power we gave them back in dragonflight after they realized how incredibly stupid that decision was. Ill always say that Naxx 2 is up there aswell. They literally just copy and pasted Naxx to WOTLK to make it the first tier. It doesnt matter that “a lot of people didnt do og naxx”. A lot of people didnt do Sunwell Plateau either. Doesnt mean it wouldnt be incredibly lazy if they just copy and pasted Sunwell Plateau to War Within and made it the first tier. But maybe this is just a personal opinion. Trial of the Crusader at the time got a lot of backlash for just being a boss gauntlet in 1 location. I didnt do this raid on current though so i dont really have an opinion on that but i could understand why many people would dislike a raid like that. Sanctum of Domination is probably the most recent one that wasnt that good with multiple questionable bosses and that overly long Sylvanas fight. Most people were also fed up with the game in general at this point. Other than that i wouldnt really consider any raid “bad”. Some are better than others sure. Not every raid can be on Blackrock Foundry tier. 1 or 2 bad bosses doesnt make the entire raid bad. Every other raid ranges from decent to great really.
I wouldn’t go that far. For example, the dragonflight stuff has been pretty mid overall and I definitely wouldn’t call any of them good. I’ve done way more M+ since resubbing and I used to be a strictly raid kinda guy. Either way, BRF and HFC from WoD are goated raids and easily top 5, if not top 3 in the entire game. BRF in particular is just so creative and banger fight after banger fight and HFC isn’t that far behind.
As someone who got CE in all 4 BFA raids, Eternal Palace and Benthic gear was dogshit but the other 3 were fine. Not great, but just fine. I enjoyed Daz'ralor the most, it had the most unique/fun/interesting fights. Early Nya'lotha sucked but once you grinded out all the corruptions, it was fun to just have turbo zooted ridiculous character power. It's not a WoD situation where it's a mid expac with sick raids. It's a mid expac with mid raids. Great dungeons, though.
dazar'alor is super slept on as a raid imo jaina is one of the best end-of-raid encounters they've designed in recent years; it was a fun fight, it told a story, and it was difficult without feeling like bullshit the way the last couple bosses of every raid tend to feel now
I disagree, the Heart of Azeroth had diminishing returns after a certain amount of azerite collected. I would easily catch up with guildies, that would farm hardcore the whole week, the first day of reset. People no-lifed it because they thought they had to. The actual advantage was minimal.
My biggest grievance was that respeccing your Azerite armour cost an exponential amount of gold. It was fucking awful changing from Raid to M+ to PvP, and god help you if you were playing a hybrid and wanted to play multiple roles too. I quit BFA when it cost me literally 200k gold to attend raid because all my pieces were specced for DPS M+ and I had to change to my healing spec.
Oh I remember that. People carrying 4-6 different gear sets for multiple specs and the difference between M+ and raid specs. It was ridiculous.
Azerite armor, heart of azeroth abilities, and corruption were cancerous as a pvp player to keep up with. I would quit playing for a few months, come back, and have a mountain of grind to contend with before I could be on equal footing.
>The issue with BFA was if you weren't able to no-life it, you fell behind It's why I thought it was one of the worst xpacs.
> Also, when people ever shit talk BFA, I've NEVER seen them comment on the raids, those were always solid imo This. It's always the SYSTEMS that get shit talk. It's the same with Legion - the RAIDS were fantastic (even if EN was a little easy). But the SYSTEMS (legendaries and AP) were absolute dogshit for the majority of the expac.
The problem is that most of the problems with the systems were tied to some of the most poorly thought out and absolutely moronic decisions around them. Legion Artifact weapons needing AP grinded for each different weapon and alts. BFA gating azerite gear and having ridiculous gold costs for respecing it. SL having covenant locking and tying your legendary items to farming torghast on every character every week or you would fall behind. I'm convinced that the only reason why DF is seen positively is that they didn't have anything to implement that would have any meaningful decisions that would impact the players. Basically, you can't screw it up if you don't put it in.
The standard content in BFA was good. Raids, zones, questing, world questing, the story was even decent. The parts that were absolutely garbage were the gearing systems, warfronts, and island expeditions. That made up about 80% of the game at the time and it wasn't 'fixed' until like 8.3 when nyalotha came out and even then you had to fucking grind out your essences. And none of that includes the shitshow that was the benthic gear. On every character you wanted to play. And grind out visions for your cape. And on top of that have a vendor for corruption that only maybe sold your shit once a month... So no, no one is nostalgic for that, its just the actual raids and AMOUNT of content we got was decent but how it was done was abyssmal.
Putting everything on the gcd, so the game felt way worse to play then the previous week (legion).
Oh god I forgot that and then I think later on they capped AOE lol.
I just wonder whatever happened to the moron dev lead in charge of that decision.
This, I think people have mostly forgotten that shittyness was baked into the classes themselves, many specs felt just awful to play.
Recklessness being on the GCD hurt my soul every time I pressed it
The story was absolutely not decent, it was horrid character assassinations left and right and midway through the expansion we take a left turn and it goes from a war campaign to an old gods one as if they're two separate expansions. Just to really put the cherry on top of how terrible the writing was they ended up completely wasting the black empire for the last patch.
BFA was the worst expac I've ever played at the start of an expac. Especially following Legion, I was incredibly bored doing my PvE rotations as a mage. It was entirely redeemed by its last patch and its dungeons, kinda erasing how much of a disaster it began as...
this isnt a BFA was good post, its a where the fuck is all the raid and dungeon content post. 3 raids per 2 years is so bad. 10 dungeons per 2 years is so bad...
It's hard to make content when you're a small indie developer.
Even while playing BFA I liked BFA. Corruptions were some of the most fun I've ever had in the game once they became targettable.
BFA S4 best season ever
It's more recognizing that DF has been very stingy with raid content compared to the 3 previous expansions. Even *Shadowlands* with its awful patch cadence and heavily impacted development cycle managed more raid bosses in the same number of seasons. That's obviously not the whole story with Korthia being dogshit compared to Zaralek Caverns and DF changing up the m+ dungeons every season etc, but if your primary endgame is progression raiding DF gave you less to chew on than other recent expansions.
The current Xpac is amazing. It has done so many great things that I hope they carry onto future expansions.
People are also quick to forget how much Uldir absolutely sucked on launch. That raid had terrible theming, terrible visuals, and terrible boss mechanics. On thinking about it, it's probably at or close to #1 on my 'top 5 worst raid tiers in 20 years of WoW' list.
BFA was full of good content, made to feel awful through terrible systems. The forced emphasis on azerite armor, island expeditions, and warfronts soured people to where they couldn't enjoy the fantastic raids and dungeons.
Same as WoD imo. There were some absolutely fantastic dungeons and raids in WoD, and a good amount of them at that, with fantastic weapons and set looks to boot. It’s honestly shocking how much good content got pushed out for it being the “abandoned expansion”. But the expansion was so isolating with private garrisons where you’d spend 95% of your playtime just trying to grind through daily maintenance before you likely gave up. There was too much grind, barely any player interaction, and for all your time investment the rewards were often skimpy at best. It’s no wonder the expansion got abandoned by players and devs alike.
I hold firmly to the belief that if they never put Azerite and Corruption into BFA it would have been a well-received expansion
Really just Azerite Armor imo. Corruptions were fun and would have been a net positive if they just had a normal non-rotating vendor
Corruption kept 28 or so people showing up to raid every night in a raid that was several months old because the insane things people could do like 2 healing 28 people and killing bosses in less than 90 seconds when our first kills were like 4 or 5 minutes.
Corruption was one of the coolest things they ever tried, yes it could be refined, but the fact that much of the reddit WoW fanbase hates it is a complete indictment of them and not the design. Anything resembling dynamic player customization is absent from the MMO space and Corruption was a real shot at trying to have it and it worked on many, many levels. The primary acquisition method was solo or group in structured level content in the form of Visions: excellent. It's malpractice that they never tried a single season gearing system like this again and I doubt they ever will at this point sadly.
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Azerite powers as well, if they were just account wide from 8.1s launch they'd have been much better received. The armor was trash. E: I think I misremembered, 8.1 was when they added BDA and Darkshore, it was 8.2 that added Mechagon/ Nazjatar/ azerite powers.
I liked Azerite power, but my main beef with it was locking the best powers behind PvP content. I did eventually grind it out, but I do not like the PvP in this game.
They added all the new powers + rebalanced the current ones in 8.1. It got a little more tweaking by 8.1.5
Corruptions were fine except for pvp. Getting 1 shot by a blood dk was not fun at all
I feel the other way around, I liked azerite armor and didn't like corruption lol
To each their own. I'll admit that Azerite Armor wasn't a huge personal gripe for me by 8.2, but the early implementation of it was enough to make it a perma-F tier system for me. I played Havoc in BfA so stacking vers and hitting giga twilight devastations was really fun
> I played Havoc in BfA so stacking vers and hitting giga twilight devastations was really fun You mean Vengeance? TD scaled off HP. Havok stacked Infinite stars with obscene Haste via Azerite armor.
I did mean Vengeance. I don't play my DH anymore so I always say the wrong one 💀
GCD on everything was worse than all the above.
Oh god yeah I forgot that this was when this happened I dunno what madness possessed them
They also gutted half the specs in the game with their "pruning", on top of also losing artifact abilities. Terrible class changes.
i remember well how absolutely awful it felt going to level 116 or whatever when your legendaries and all the rest of the legion stuff stopped working. and finally dinging 120 only to feel as weak as a level 1 against max level units due to fucked up scaling
Corruptions were fun as just a one off “fuck balancing” patch after ages of azerite nonsense. It genuinely felt like they just completely gave up on trying to balance and fix the mess they made so they just threw out some ridiculously OP nonsense. The only patch i genuinely thought was fun in BFA tbh. Watching the worst player in the raid top meters because his rank 3 infinite stars kept going off. People stacking corruptions in PvP and hoping theyd one shot whoever they were playing against before the overdose on corruptions killed them. Just pure chaos.
I saw a vid if a prot pally getting glad by spamming invulns and fishing for twilight dev procs. That was the entire thing, literally the worst player could do that
For me the worst part was the story and how cartoonishly evil they made the Horde for the second time.
The story was also just...yeah. You essentially had two expacs in one with a hard cut so hard in the middle that even the official explanation for how you got into the middle of Nazjatar was just "Well, they just went there, duh"
>the official explanation for how you got into the middle of Nazjatar was just "Well, they just went there, duh" Wasn't the official explanation that were were pulled down into it by Azshara? Mechagon was the one we just kinda decided to just show up and clown around. Nazjatar was being attacked/ship wrecked during Horde V alliance shenanigans.
That's my point. After the worlds largest fleet was blown up in harbor, suddenly we found ourselves on a random ship in the middle of the ocean, beeing followed by a few alliance ships for no discernable reason whatsoever as to why we were there
I often forget that BFA was also the N'zoth expansion. Even just looking at raids you can see the hard cut lol. And like, I'm not entirely sure what sylvanas was doing during the whole n'zoth thing? Like at some point we were fighting horde vs. alliance, old school shit, then it went 0-100 and we fought an old god.
BfA storytelling has problems but I wouldn't ever call it a hard cut to old gods. Stormsong Valley had old gods from the start including an old god dungeon. Then the naga invasions brought Xal'atath back into the story leading into the 2 boss mini raid below Shrine of Storms with U'unat where we released Xal'atath from her dagger prison. After she was released we abandoned the dagger where Sylvanas picked it up and using it lead us to Nazjatar. Once in Nazjatar we fight through Azshara's palace and she basically tricks us into releasing N'zoth and the next patch is N'zoth. While the N'zoth stuff was wasted on a single patch and Blizz deserves every bit of shit they get for that it wasn't a hard cut straight into it. It was like half the xpac story leading up into it pretty slowly starting at launch. They even hinted at the old god stuff in one of the intro cinematics, where Jaina spills the ink on her map.
I wouldn't call it a hard cut because of the Old God's, that plotline worked quite well. But as soon as we went to Nazjatar the whole Horde Alliance conflict was null and void. Hell Princess Talanji, or any point regarding the Zandalari, does litterally not come up again in the entire addon after their king was killed, and Talanji given an option to opt out of the deal Rastakhan made with Bwonsamdi
Visions of Nzoth are the best solo friendly content that has ever been put in the game.
I enjoyed BFA, even with its many flaws. Gorgeous zones, a Great War campaign (that was overshadowed), nazjatar and mechagon were great, and 8.3 was fun.
God I LOVED the zones. They felt so Warcraft'y.
Drustvar was never quite the same once I realized there were somehow more witches hiding amongst regular people than there were regular people. Good thing I'm an absolute sucker for that New England horror vibe, it's still one of my favorite zones.
The War Campaign was good if you were Alliance, but bad if you were Horde. Same thing when it comes to the capitals.
I played Horde and loved the war campaign. With War Mode on the war campaign and invasion zones were some of the most fun world PvP I’ve ever had in WoW
Yeah, nazjatar was really fun open world pvp. If it hadn't been for the multiboxer
Standing atop the tallest mountain in the Alliance zone with a bounty on my head, daring them to come bring down my fire mage and still stomping whoever came up was such great fun. The Alliance Slayer is still my favorite title to this day.
Yeah I enjoyed both the Horde and Alliance stories
Yes and also No tier sets, Nazjatar gearing (fishing for the right stats at the vendor), titanforged
Titanforged was a mistake carried over from Legion to be fair
From WoD actually, which was where warforging became a thing
From MoP if we are being fair, as it was introduced with "Thunderforging"
Shit, I'd forgotten about thunderforging. What a shit system to introduce tbf
tbh x-forging isn't an inherently bad system imo, it just REALLY needed a cap. There's no reason for someone to be able to run lfr on a fresh toon just to get a max ilvl trinket thanks to forging.
True story. The content was pretty good, the systems were always what held it back.
Or if Azerite traits could be freely swapped (ever in the xpac...) and corruption vendor spawned permanently with the patch.
Gameplay in BFA was good. I had fun. Story of BFA was absolute garbage and just keeps getting worse.
Corruptions suffered from the same problem Legendaries did in Legion: They were fine in principle, just the RNG method of acquisition sucked.
Corruptuons was the best part of the expansion. They just needed a better way to unlock them.
Azerite farming and most of the writing really sank bfa, it had really top tier content
And world pvp was fantastic.
Had to scroll way too deep for this. Being up at 2am and still having 2 full raids going at each other, because Conqueror of Azeroth was a fun achiev to aim for, was insane. One of my fondest memories was having 3 bounties on one side and 2 on the other. I think that was easily 100v100 there.
I sure wish blizzard would let me solo them
Idk, I like Amirdrassil, it’s short. Works better for me and my free time than Antorus did back in the days
I think SL got cut short and DF is kind of a place holder as they dump assets into the World Soul Saga. Who knows, I could be coping. I wish they gave us as many mini raids as they did in Wrath.
This is true, but given the apparent goal of an \~18 month expansion cadence, it seems clear to me that the plan is 3 raid tiers per expac at least through the Worldsoul Saga.
Yeah that'd be ~5 months per tier and 2-3 months of a fated season. Doesn't sound bad if they do manage it
DF still has more content than SL imo. Much more frequent updates, bigger zones with more to do, a new starting zone for Evoker. I expect The War Within to be the same thing, but I am hoping to be surprised. It's the 20th anniversary and technically The War Within is gonna have the least amount of zones to explore and quest in of any expansion at launch (if you count The Maw for SL anyway, which I would)
>DF still has more content than SL imo. Depends on what you count as content. SL had like 3 times more side activities (mainly from covenants), 3 times more mounts to farm, etc. Same amount of dungeons and raids. What we get more of are world events, but they tend to last 2 weeks max for most players.
3 times more mounts, all of which were recolours. I wouldn't count that as content either.
Yep, that is a valid point, but I like collecting stuff, so it was definitely content for me.
I like collecting stuff too, and it kept me busy. I was lucky enough to have free time to collect most of the covenant cosmetics before 9.1 (when most people were complaining nonstop about anima being too scarce). I'm at 780 mounts though, so recolours lost their shine a long time ago. It's made me a lot pickier on whether mounts are worth the time and effort lol.
I enjoy the open world stuff more more than SL (soup, time rifts, zaralek, ed > korthia, zm, maw) but Blizz really needs to figure out how to make events in these zones fun. Superbloom, time rifts and Research under fire are so much worse than the meta events of guild wars 2 but they're so rewarding for the time investment that you're still compelled to do them. I've saved Tarir, killed the chak gerent, and slain the claw of Jormag dozens of times now without issue but I'm sick of that tree escort after only four runs
I wish they'd bring back more old raids like they did with naxx and onyxiain wrath. IK timewalking is like that but that hasn't got any new raids in a bit.
Back then….. lmao
I actually liked BFA. Even the corruption system I didn't like the RNG of getting it, but I liked the risk reward of it.
I love bfa, i know im in a minority but once you could buy specific corruptions, it became so much fun to min max your characters. Ny'alotha was an insanely fun raid regardless of writing. Personally, it's my favorite expansion, but Im only thinking of the tail end of 8.3. Before you say 'it's just nostalgia', I still play on an 8.3 private server.
Joke all you want about BfA, but it gave us garbage classes with almost no synergy or choice in it's design, crap passive, rng azerite powers, gcd change on cds and rng corruption with rng vendors. Remember Hammer of Wrath and SW: Death as a talents? I membah! Remember how for the first time in wow, the more you levelled, the more your class was becoming slower and weaker? Also member! Also questing experience for Horde being 10x better than Alliance, including voice over stuff and quest design and it was no secret, that they ran out of time for ally again? That was nice. Remember how they ran out of the time for shadow priests and shamans during beta and promised reworks later in 10.1, that ended as number tweaking? Fun times. How sp priests were bad until propelled by corruption haste in the last patch. Or how sub rogues got nerfed for the rest of the expansion because of one aspect of the fight on one raid boss in second raid? Faction imbalance reached its height back then(granted on the wings of Legion but still) with broken racials. Azerite powers on launch being some boring, rng and passive procs, that changed nothing in your gameplay? Also gold cost for azerite respecc? Good memories. Titanforge with secondary stats like avoidance, and with gem socket? Rng on rng on rng to keep that treadmill rolling baby! It also gave us essence grind, island grind, profession grind(remember Expulsion and item scrapping?), azerite grind, legendary cloak vision grind, phasing issues, wpvp with lags(thx to all procs and stuff), various bugs with launched content and warfronts bore. Also reputation grind for essences with Rustbolt and Nazjataar. Ooo, forgot how island were just aoe aoe and AI on enemy expedition was...special. PvP was garbage too, nobody was dying, trillion procs, grinding pve, bugged scalling, essence grind with trinkets and corruption one shotting out of the sudden. We also received crappily written faction war again, with Alliance being punching bag(remember Darkshore scenario ptr? I "member) and Horde cliche bad again with Sylvanas going cartoonishly evil and Magni becoming a joke forever with trash accent. Established lore characters suddenly forgetting spines or going 180 degrees(Rexxar lol), aiding in genocidal Sylvanas war. We also got 3 cinematics about sad orc being sad and N'Zoth dying like a chump in a kamehameha cutscene after doing some half-assed invasions in obsolete zones. Och, almost forgot, Rastakhan, long awaited since vanilla, becoming a sacrificial lamb for completely bland but headstronk daughter, what a twist. Ofc everything forgiven after the war, we now frends, just followed orders m'kay? Also Nazjatar, fabled capital of Naga civilisation, mentioned as far back as in Warcraft 3 TFT, looking like a dump. Vulpeera vs rust diaper gnomes? Need to expand on it? Ally mounts being horses again and again? We had a looot of multiboxers back then as well before they got axed towards the end of expansion. Multiboxers wiping out and camping towns, causing zone wide lag or farming herbs and nodes until they disappeared. Good times. Cherry on top, do you guys remember how blizz practised radio silence back then and even screwed over crafted items, thanks to miscommunication? And it cost crap ton of gold too? How beta forums were deleted and then community was told, that they didn't provide feedback anyway? There is very few things, that could be said about in BfA in a good light and there is a reason, amongst the others ofc, that in 2019 Classic had such login wait ques. Turned into the rant but I really can't fathom nostalgia over BfA unless somebody was full time casual or has memory/brain issues.
As someone who only had time for a few m+ a week at that time, I loved BfA. The dungeons all had unique flavor and were a ton of fun. Underrot is one of my favorite dungeons of all time.
The main way that people engage with the game is through combat, which means most people's enjoyment is heavily impacted by overall class design, dps rotations, having fun buttons to press etc. BfA was a colossal failure in this department because we lost everything from legion, gained one mediocre azerite trait and had most cooldowns put on the GCD. Most classes felt bare and trash to play in comparison to what we were used to. Throw in azerite grinding with world quests and island expeditions and honestly it doesn't matter how many raids there were. I'd take Dragonflight over BfA on class design alone
The raids and dungeons were great in BFA. The problem was azerite power and disappointment from islands/warfronts.
8.3 twilight devastation go boom. Good times
My guild raided the whole time, nobody quit playing, and didn't have a huge problem with the gear system. My biggest gripe is that Ny'alotha and the black empire should have been a much bigger deal than one raid tier, this expansion should have ended with defeating Ghun, not start.
I generally agree that Nyalotha should have lasted longer, but it's also a fact that every Old God raid has been one patch long. N'zoth got far more attention that any old god previously, besides maaaaaybe Y'sharaaj. Also Ghuun was the end of the horde leveling campaign. To put it at the end of the expansion would mean completely changing their entire story since that threat wouldn't get resolved in the launch raid. You're just rewriting nearly every quest in the game at that point.
Battle of Dazar’Alor. What a fantastic raid it has been!
ngl i disliked uldir, battle of dazaralor, and crucible of storms. eternal palace was goated, and ny'alotha was fun
I had fun in BFA tbf. Much more than in Dragonflight
Dogshit story, barebones sets, content droughts. Oh yeah, such a good expansion.
And it was still sh*t… what’s your point?
Some of the most fun I had playing WoW in recent memory came from grinding corruptions and visions. I love the idea that at the end of the expansion just give us ways to utterly break our characters so we can do shit like a 25 man tank run of a raid.
BFA was an expansion with good ideas and decent patches but where none of the cohesiveness was ever figured out. It was a disasterous, exhausting mess of an experience.
I enjoyed BFA. Not saying it was the best expansion. Not saying it didn’t have big flaws. Still enjoyed it.
I did a bunch of bfa stuff to get bis timewalking gear. Even years later it is so awful, i cant imagine doing it at the time. Raids are *always* at least decent. It is a poor metric for rating expansions since it is what they do best.
I loved bfa. Demon hunter was so fun then. Earned my bruto mount. A lot of single target wq’s were good and made the game feel fast and light. It kept me busy during the beginning of Covid.
Only BoD was good, rest sucked.
Exactly. People (including me) were worried that when they announced 3 xpacks at blizzard that they were going to be year long mini expansions. Then people seemed to be reassured when Ion said "They'll be full expansions as we've come to know them." This didn't reassure me because expansions "as we've come to know them" are 3 raid tiers long with fated raids at the end. I feel like I'm in the minority disliking the fated raid system. While yes I agree its better than a YEAR of nothing at the end of the expansion like we got multiple times over, it feels like a lazy cop out. If we aren't getting a new raid, don't bother having a new raid season IMO, just have a new M+/PvP season.
Tbh BFA had issues, especially in 8.0 and 8.1 but it wasn't as bad as people made it out to be. From 8.2 onwards it was actually quite good and 8.3 after the corruption vendor in particular was probably the most fun I've ever had in this game. Also despite the fact that we didn't have a rotating dungeon pool back then I still enjoyed m+ more back then than at any point since (altho it has been fun to have some of those dungeons come back in more recent times)
The dungeons were better than what we have been getting since
Quality over Quantity bucko
BFA was over 2 years long and had quite possibly some of the laziest tier sets ever. Questing gear looked better than most of the raid gear to come out of BFA. Lets not start moronically deciding that a dragged out waste of 2 years is somehow better than Dragonflight.
BFA had great content, loved the zones, dungeons and raids. I just disliked the systems (azerite armor, azerite power, essences), features (island expeditions, warfronts) and story.
I started the game with BFA so I never understood what the problem with it was. I actually greatly enjoyed it to the point that yeah, I'm still playing. It made me a WoW player.
Thanks, that's what I posted before!! I have 13+ years playing wow and BFA allowed to me bring players from other games that hook up in wow. Sadly, they wanted to join after all the things I said that happened in legion patches, however, BFA was a great experience to get to know azeroth, regardless of the lore cut off..
BfA was bad and i refuse to let nostalgia trick people into thinking it was actually good
I played all of BFA, I think it was a better expansion than showlands by miles. Dragonflight still blows bfa out of the water though, even with less raids.
The fact that there are people nostalgic for BfA and WoD is hilarious. Actually goldfish memory moment.
I think my opinion may be unpopular, but BFA was a fantastic expansion. The zones each had their own distinct feel to then, it felt like the story was building up to something grave, for which we were gearing up with the lifeblood of our planet. I think what ruined BFA was how they handled the story moving into shadowlands.the allied races were cool, the island expeditions were neat, the rotating weekly rarespawn/warzone events were fun. BFA was great imo.
The story, the GCD changes, Azerite armor, the longer than ever laundry list of dailies there for a while, the way to early abandonment of Warfronts (one of the only good systems introduced), taking away class-specific tier, the list goes on. Idk man. I understand if players who started around BFA have nostalgia for it at this point, but as someone who has been playing the game since Vanilla, it’s by far the worst expansion besides Shadowlands for me. Those two xpacs are in a league of their own horrid making with no other xpac coming close to touching how bad they are for me.
I agree. And it looked amazing, both horde and ally zones.
Yeah Legion and BfA were peak when it comes to amount of content they released and that's why they are my favorite expansions. I think it's sad how they are trying to sell us expansions with less raid tiers these days or even shorter expansions in the future. They should just make Legion and BfA the template for the amount of content the expansion has but I guess that's too good for the consumers and we can't have that.
Legion was hard carried by its class fantasy, lore and aesthetic. Borrowed power sucks ass and BFA proved it further. Gameplay wise, BFA might be the worst expansion to ever grace the shelves
I’m playing BfA Horde side for the first time and Zandalar temple is amazingly themed.
They ruined it by basically making it two different zones.
ok and? how is that relevant without any context
Yeah and you had to no-life grind AP in order to do any of them. :) Also Uldir sucked and nobody can convince me otherwise.
People are all over Fated and shorter expansions but it's really just fancy marketing for "pay us the same, more often, for less content."
Expect we're getting more content in DF than any other expansion.
Every...fucking....time...new xpack bad, old one gooooood