I hate to say it, but BFA looks bad

[Crillam]

"I've seen and read the BFA beta patchnotes and it does not seem that good"

[KayRule]

Nah cause it was different and MoP ended up being one of the best expansions apart from being a bit heavy on dailies early on. But I'd take dailies over world quests after playing legion because at least dailies can end when you want you dont need to grind them all fucking expansion

....The only difference is talking to NPCs directly to get the quests versus them being out in the world. And there was less variety.

[RobertoCarlos]

....The only difference is talking to NPCs directly to get the quests versus them being out in the world. And there was less variety.

nah one ment you could earn exalted and then get the fraction mount/toy you wanted and could stop.

Legion introduced paragon cache system so even the fraction mounts were hidden behind RNG and you had to grind all year

AND legendaries dropped from them as well which they kept adding to the legend drop pool throughout the expansion

[KayRule]

nah one ment you could earn exalted and then get the fraction mount/toy you wanted and could stop.

Legion introduced paragon cache system so even the fraction mounts were hidden behind RNG and you had to grind all year

AND legendaries dropped from them as well which they kept adding to the legend drop pool throughout the expansion

That's not an inherent problem of World Quests, that's the Paragon System. I fucking HATE the Paragon system and fully wish to see it removed and go back to the original "exalted with faction, buy the stuff from the vendor" route. But the WQ system removed from the Paragon System is great. My quest log isn't filled to the brim constantly, and I can see which quests are up without having to hope the Golden Lotus or Halffhill has the quests I want to do today.

It's the Paragon System which fucking blows.

[RobertoCarlos]

That's not an inherent problem of World Quests, that's the Paragon System. I fucking HATE the Paragon system and fully wish to see it removed and go back to the original "exalted with faction, buy the stuff from the vendor" route. But the WQ system removed from the Paragon System is great. My quest log isn't filled to the brim constantly, and I can see which quests are up without having to hope the Golden Lotus or Halffhill has the quests I want to do today.

It's the Paragon System which fucking blows.

yeah i guess, but they kind of come together and its a design choice,

like dailies gave you a reason to log in each day and feel like you were making progress and in a RP way helping out that fraction.

Now you just have sharding tech and you repeat the leveling quests over and over and get a fat wad of rep at the end of it. And you can log on whenever and smash out 3 chests and be done. Which is good and bad, but I feel like we're missing something from the "good ole days" in an mmo where it felt you had something to do everyday but you could also finish when you did put in all that effort

And in the perfect world you would keep meeting new people/fractions to help to keep it fresh and justify your sub fee

[KingSapmi]

"I've seen and read the BFA beta patchnotes and it does not seem that good"

Or, played first hand since Alpha and through Beta.

It feels wonky, and barren.

I still have my hopes up though, I don't know why. Been playing WoW since launch in Norway, which makes it hard to just do like Elsa from Frost, just a whole bunch of good-times memories and such. So yeah I might still get the game and give it a whirl when it's out, but my hopes are truly dim at this point. I'm mentally preparing myself for this to be the "one" expansion where I draw the line and jump off the train and move on to greener fields.

[YorHa-Unit-2B]

Yes, i'm pretty sure you "hate" to say it...

[Selah]

No it doesn't. That's exactly the point.

We lose (most) Artifacts (skills+traits), Legendaries, T-Sets and the only thing we get in exchange is Azerite Armour that's one of the most boring and underwhelming features ever implemented. So we lose 3 (4) things and get 1 (passive) thing as compensation.

I don't know if you've actually looked at the majority of artifact traits and skills, a lot of the legendaries in Legion, or the tier sets, the majority of their bonuses in modern WoW are flat and passive buffs. Maybe Death Coil deals it's damage a second time, maybe you get a necklace that grants you a small bubble every 30 seconds, or perhaps you get a trait that increases the damage dealt by Soul Cleave by 10%. A majority of these raw damage/mitigation/healing boosts you won't notice are gone once you acclimate to the new expansion. Don't misunderstand me, there are some really cool effects split between these three features. I really loved having three charges of Heroic Leap on my Warrior, or having a lava tornado spawn on my Shaman, these are all things I'll miss to be sure.

That said, there is nothing from artifacts, leggos, and tier sets that can't easily be baked into the Azerite gear. Whether it's the passive stat boosts, or the more interesting abilities that influences your game play. On top of that, we get to choose which bonuses we'll get on the gear and can swap between them to boot. There's nothing in the tier set bonuses, artifacts, or legendaries that are so unique that they cannot work in the Azerite gear system. Personally, it almost seems as if the Azerite system is just an attempt at some form of an amalgamation of the three systems.

I have my own personal reservations about the Azerite systems, one big concern of mine is that if the bonuses from the gear are really as boring as the starter piece on the beta is then it's going to be very frustrating for players and it will feel, as you mentioned, that we have been robbed of all this character power progression and given a shoddy imitation. We're going to have to give it time though and give feedback to Blizzard as everything is being developed. There will be plenty of changes made to the system, especially during the infancy of this expansion but more will come too as the patches roll out. How many times did Blizzard change or modify traits? How about adding outright new traits and leggos? One of my favorite additions to the legendary system was getting access to a second talent point, and that wasn't done until... what 7.2?

[Pickynerd]

Yes, i'm pretty sure you "hate" to say it...

Many do hate to say it, because it's a game we loved to play. Just because I am burnt out on Legion, by this time when an xpack is announced, or has alpha/beta I am excited with all the new information and I can't wait to dig in and play.

I just got into beta, I tried it and it is much worse then I expected... I was expecting the GCD to suck, and it does, but beyond that everything else just feels meh; however the art and settings are jaw dropping.

[RobertoCarlos]

Yes, i'm pretty sure you "hate" to say it...

people do actually want to see WoW do well and keep being good. Some changes are mind boggling and they havent done any work on the classes

[plaits]

people do actually want to see WoW do well and keep being good. Some changes are mind boggling and they havent done any work on the classes

I honestly can't believe that the classes as they are now are how they're going to ship. Either there's big class stuff happening between now and August, or BfA classes are safe to say, the worst iteration of class design since TBC (Vanilla is a bridge too far - no paladins on horde, no shamans on alliance, very pigeonholed specs, etc - but TBC easily)

[Nyel]

looks bad and is are two different thing

Not in the case of BfA though.

- - - Updated - - -

Legion numbers already seem to be lower than WoD's. Just saying. And yes, BFA is looking very much worse than Legion.

Well I don't think Legion numbers are worse because Legion overall offered a lot more than WoD in the end. But I fear it will be the case with BfA because... it's bad. Really bad. In most imaginable ways it seems to be worst expansion ever although the setting (Kul'Tiras + Zandalar) is amazing.

- - - Updated - - -

I don't know if you've actually looked at the majority of artifact traits and skills, a lot of the legendaries in Legion, or the tier sets, the majority of their bonuses in modern WoW are flat and passive buffs. Maybe Death Coil deals it's damage a second time, maybe you get a necklace that grants you a small bubble every 30 seconds, or perhaps you get a trait that increases the damage dealt by Soul Cleave by 10%. A majority of these raw damage/mitigation/healing boosts you won't notice are gone once you acclimate to the new expansion. Don't misunderstand me, there are some really cool effects split between these three features. I really loved having three charges of Heroic Leap on my Warrior, or having a lava tornado spawn on my Shaman, these are all things I'll miss to be sure.

That said, there is nothing from artifacts, leggos, and tier sets that can't easily be baked into the Azerite gear. Whether it's the passive stat boosts, or the more interesting abilities that influences your game play. On top of that, we get to choose which bonuses we'll get on the gear and can swap between them to boot. There's nothing in the tier set bonuses, artifacts, or legendaries that are so unique that they cannot work in the Azerite gear system. Personally, it almost seems as if the Azerite system is just an attempt at some form of an amalgamation of the three systems.

I have my own personal reservations about the Azerite systems, one big concern of mine is that if the bonuses from the gear are really as boring as the starter piece on the beta is then it's going to be very frustrating for players and it will feel, as you mentioned, that we have been robbed of all this character power progression and given a shoddy imitation. We're going to have to give it time though and give feedback to Blizzard as everything is being developed. There will be plenty of changes made to the system, especially during the infancy of this expansion but more will come too as the patches roll out. How many times did Blizzard change or modify traits? How about adding outright new traits and leggos? One of my favorite additions to the legendary system was getting access to a second talent point, and that wasn't done until... what 7.2?

Yes, many of them are flat and passive buffs. Exactly what Azerite Armour is. Except the Azerite traits are even worse than what traits and Legendaries in Legion were adding to classes.

Just look at the passives we've already seen from the Azerite stuff. 9/10 are absolutely awful passives like "skill x increases haste by amount y". That's the worst kind of passives and one of the reasons why they removed talent trees years ago because they thought passives like that are adding nothing to the game. And now they're basing an entire system on those passives.

My point is, they are taking away 3 major things (T-Sets, Legendaries, Artifacts) and give us 1 (Azerite). That's no fun. On top of that most classes / specs and their talent rows are almost unchanged (except some talents changed places). So you're not just going to play your already "worn out" Legion spec gameplay for two more years, no, you get ultra boring passives to compensate the loss of most of your class progression to "compensate" that. Who had this horrible idea? I mean seriously.

- - - Updated - - -

I honestly can't believe that the classes as they are now are how they're going to ship. Either there's big class stuff happening between now and August, or BfA classes are safe to say, the worst iteration of class design since TBC (Vanilla is a bridge too far - no paladins on horde, no shamans on alliance, very pigeonholed specs, etc - but TBC easily)

Exactly this.

I mean how ignorant and blind are the class devs at Blizzard when they think the recent iteration of class gameplay is any good?

[sillag]

azerite feels like a system they designed purely because they had to have some gameplay mechanic where you collect points to power yourself up that couldn't be the same as the artifact weapon. however they forgot to make sure it was fun or rewarding or interesting. or made sense at all. why does a necklace power up 3 and only 3 gear slots. is there even an answer.

[rda]

Ahh yes. Wouldn't be MMOC without rda making silly claims that he can't back up.

No he's literally objectively making shit up because official information debunks it from the Blizzard Earnings Call.

"World of Warcraft over-performed versus the prior expansion at this point in time, with higher engagement sequentially and strong community participation with in-game purchases."

Starting with KayRule first. This phrase doesn't mean what you think it means.

I am saying that Legion seems to have less subs than WoD. You think the above phrase contradicts that. It does not. They are talking about an unknown metric, which is quite likely player hours, and it is unclear if they are even talking about performance in absolute numbers compared to WoD or performance in relative numbers meaning "from its Q3 to Q4 Legion lost a lower percentage of players / player hours / alpine chipmunks than WoD lost from its own Q3 to Q4, so Legion overperforms WoD in that sense". There were threads on that, look them up.

On to Siglius. Everything I say I can always back up. Not saying I am always right, sometimes I am wrong and when that's the case, I say so, but I never say anything just because. I don't back up everything I say every time I asked because the posts are repetitive. If I am asked to provide back up for something for the 5th time, I might skip doing that. But today is your lucky day in that I am in the mood, so here's the backing up for Legion subs seemingly being lower than WoDs:

First, let's clarify. I am not saying that Legion is "worse" than WoD. I think Legion is "better" (for most meanings of the word that matter to players). However, there is a natural tendency for WoW to be losing players. It is not enough for Legion to just be better than WoD for the game to switch from losing players to gaining players or becoming stable, Legion has to be much better than WoD to fight the tendency. And it is not good enough for that. It is good enough to tame the rate with which the subs decrease, but it is not good enough to overturn the process.

Now, where specifically can we see that Legion has less subs than WoD after Blizzard stopped reporting sub numbers? There are many proxies. We can look at player activity, we can look at achievement counts, etc.

Here is one such example:

Number of guilds who killed Heroic Kargath (easiest boss in t17, the first tier of WoD): 42070
Number of guilds who killed Heroic Nythendra (easiest boss in t19, the first tier of Legion): 39706

Number of guilds who killed Heroic Hf Assault (easiest boss in t18, the second tier of WoD): 29017
Number of guilds who killed Heroic Goroth (easiest boss in t20, the second tier of Legion): 26655

That's from wowprogress. You can see that the numbers for Legion are lower than for WoD. And this is everywhere. (And I won't even ask you to look into the PVP numbers. They are a complete catastrophe with Legion going like 25-30% of WoD, I kid you not. But that's because they screwed up PVP in many ways ON TOP of the trend of losing players overall.)

And the final point. Even with Legion being not good enough for the game to stop losing subs and start gaining them, it was at least better than WoD. But BFA? It doesn't seem to be better than Legion at all. It seems to be worse. So the process of losing subs will not just continue (which is an absolute certainty), it will quite likely accelerate. How many millions of players do we have now? 4 million? Maybe 4.5? If that. Well, after BFA, we might be talking about 2. That's the big picture.

[plaits]

Number of guilds who killed Heroic Kargath (easiest boss in t17, the first tier of WoD): 42070
Number of guilds who killed Heroic Nythendra (easiest boss in t19, the first tier of Legion): 39706

Number of guilds who killed Heroic Hf Assault (easiest boss in t18, the second tier of WoD): 29017
Number of guilds who killed Heroic Goroth (easiest boss in t20, the second tier of Legion): 26655

I feel like the heroic pugging scene was strong in Legion, stronger than previous (might just be my perception though). What about % of players who killed heroic bosses between WoD and Legion?

I'm pretty sure the number of mythic guilds killing bosses in Legion was down on WoD though. I don't think your analysis is wrong, but I just wonder how much less heroic guild kills are coming from less players sticking in heroic guilds and just going pugging instead.

[Mafic]

Many do hate to say it, because it's a game we loved to play. Just because I am burnt out on Legion, by this time when an xpack is announced, or has alpha/beta I am excited with all the new information and I can't wait to dig in and play.

I just got into beta, I tried it and it is much worse then I expected... I was expecting the GCD to suck, and it does, but beyond that everything else just feels meh; however the art and settings are jaw dropping.

Art A
Music A
Zone design B+
Quests B-
Class design D-

BFA is basically a glorified patch and should not even be called an expansion IMVHO.

- - - Updated - - -

I honestly can't believe that the classes as they are now are how they're going to ship. Either there's big class stuff happening between now and August, or BfA classes are safe to say, the worst iteration of class design since TBC (Vanilla is a bridge too far - no paladins on horde, no shamans on alliance, very pigeonholed specs, etc - but TBC easily)

It is highly like classes will ship like this. They will probably do massive hot fixes post launch for the first month for classes but number tuning can't patch up all the problems of pruning and no new talent grid for a new expansion. I mean prepatch is already around the corner as it is May so expect to see prepatch hit live servers around July.

- - - Updated - - -

And the final point. Even with Legion being not good enough for the game to stop losing subs and start gaining them, it was at least better than WoD. But BFA? It doesn't seem to be better than Legion at all. It seems to be worse. So the process of losing subs will not just continue (which is an absolute certainty), it will quite likely accelerate. How many millions of players do we have now? 4 million? Maybe 4.5? If that. Well, after BFA, we might be talking about 2. That's the big picture.

Since MoP the baseline for subs has been around 4-5 million with each expansion bringing back players to make those sub numbers climb and dip back to the 4-5 million range toward the end of the expansion. What makes BFA different is that unlike WoD and Legion there isn't much of a pull factor to keep players interested outside of leveling Allied Races. Class design is going to really hinder expansion hype as well as an Azerite armor system which is still in a murky territory when launch of expansion is around the corner now. Warfronts obviously needs more time to be worked out, so all in all BFA isn't in a state that should be ready to ship in my opinion. I think BFA is being rushed and like WoD they may end up considering it a sunk cost mid expansion and bail which may cause people to call BFA a filler expansion like WoD.

But that baseline 4-5 million subs will be threatened with the way BFA is designed as it doesn't introduce anything new. So the entire crutch of this expansion relies on a trickle release of allied races to be leveled throughout the expansion by the remaining players.

[Collected]

BFA is basically a glorified patch and should not even be called an expansion IMVHO.

Content patches become expansions when they reach the size required to give people enough content to ding another 10 times. That involves hundreds of quests, a number of new zones, a number of new dungeons and all the other things that go with it.

If Argus were released as an "expansion" then sure, that would count as a glorified patch. But not BFA.

Although IMO they price expansions too high. But hey... Blizzard know they can get away with it.

[Blysto]

Why are people always whining about thing like: Oh this expension does worse then WoD!!. For one get proof first, I am not saying that it does better then WoD, but unless you have proof, do not claim it does worse then WoD. And we'll have to see if the expension's really as bad as all you doomsayers claim it to be tbh. I quite like the look of the expension so far.

[Mafic]

Content patches become expansions when they reach the size required to give people enough content to ding another 10 times. That involves hundreds of quests, a number of new zones, a number of new dungeons and all the other things that go with it.

If Argus were released as an "expansion" then sure, that would count as a glorified patch. But not BFA.

Although IMO they price expansions too high. But hey... Blizzard know they can get away with it.

In previous expansions you actually gained something for leveling in a new expansion. Throw in level scaling and I am not seeing the point of even having leveling anymore. It might sound nice for the devs to make it easier for them. But for players it kills motivation to actually play the game. Azerite isn't that interesting for players to rush to level 120 in BFA. BFA is missing that pull factor like previous expansions had.

[Nyel]

I think BFA is being rushed and like WoD they may end up considering it a sunk cost mid expansion and bail which may cause people to call BFA a filler expansion like WoD.

As I said, they're rushing the BfA release. As you said, Warfronts + Azerite aren't finished at all. They still seem not really more than concepts on paper. I really won't believe that Azerite is the best Blizzard can come up with class design wise. There must be more than that. It's so rudimentary and and bad that I don't know what to say.