BFA is done. Time for your official review

[Lord Pebbleton]

I'm gonna break the cycle of "last expansion is the worst of all" by saying that WoD is still the worst dumpster fire in the history of the game and, to me, this will hold true even if a future expansion is just them cashing the prepurchase money and fleeing with it.

No matter how much an expansion will suck, I will still reliably say "at least it's not WoD".

[kansor]

The worst without a doubt, it's not even close. WoD didn't have ENOUGH content, too much got slashed -- but the content we did get was good, and there were no compulsory chores. And ultimately the decision to abandon WoD paid off in how much content Legion had.

[Huntingbear_grimbatol]

I played on and off for maybe 3-4 months in total, but that was enough for me. It had all the bad things from Legion and only added more bad things. Yes sure titanforging was removed for this final tier ...only to be replaced by something worse...

Since I didn't play throughout the entire expansion I couldn't say that it was the worst expansion ever so I voted "one of the worst", upon seeing the votes from others I see that I'm not alone in my feelings towards BfA.


The major points for me (which were the same for Legion) were that there was too much "forced" grinding, no gear progression path, class identity and fantasy was pathetic (and still is).

- I want there to be a clear progression from leveling -> gearing up in dungeons (normal while leveling, heroic at max level, Mythic 0 for pre-raid BiS) -> raiding/mythic+ for alternate progression path.

- Item Level progression, first of all... fuck Titanforging and Warforging, "item level crawl" should happen through a weekly capped token system like we had in MoP (irrc).
Second of all gear from Raiding and Mythic + dungeon should CAP at the same item level, if raid mythic drops 960 ilvl then Mythic + should drop 960 ilvl. All for the reason to not force people who enjoy raiding to spend time doing something they dislike, which moves me on to the next point.

- Artifact/Azerite Power. Seriously who likes doing the same, easy and boring, content set to difficulty settings lower than what you can do because it's time efficient? The most recent example are the SW and Org scenarios, do people take their time and explore them as we thought people would do with Island Expeditions? NO! People blast through them for efficiency and they got 23 other things they have to do, I used to raid with a guild around world 100 for 7 years- many of whom I still talk with every single day. To get through the chores they've made multiple accounts and are doing daily grinds on their mains and alt(s) at the same time with multibotting or having one character follow the other, the game has become so much like work that players are paying EXTRA to save time. If nothing else in this shit grind to raid system tells you shit is wrong then this surely has to, I quit dedicated raiding in Trial of Valor (Legion) because I got fed up of grinding mythic + dungeons for 7 hours per day for almost 3 months. I loved to min/max and make sure I had everything to beat my friends and be competative with them, when you have to "play the game" (more like work) for 7 hours per day then it's not a game anymore. "It's your choice to min/max, don't be a baby!" ...sure, I and everyone else who have quit raiding over the past 3-4 years are "babies"... see how well the game is doing and smell the truth!

[vsb]

Definitely one of the best expansions along with Cataclysm, TBC and Draenor. At least stark contrast with terrible Legion emphasized that.

[Foolicious]

Bfa is the worst expansion for me personally.
I was one of the stupid people that actually believed that Blizzard really had some great plans with the upcoming lore, but it turns out they just sit in their meetings and congratulate each other how brilliant they are, when the reality is quite the opposite.
Putting out information about characters and retconning it during the expansion is a new low, even for blizzard standard. Also im massively dissapointed that n'zoth got killed basically offscreen so the pretty elf can have an expansion on her own.

Warfronts are a disaster, nothing like the promised wc3 feeling, but a run it down instance. Islands are okayish now that there are crates and some massive improvements have happened in the past.

Classes, azerite and 8.3 are the biggest failures in my opinion. All of it feels lazy and uninspired. Blizzard sadly has catered to the masses and brought us big dps numbers, at the expense of an actally enjoyable experience.
Azerite was doomed from the beginning and should have been canceled in beta.
Speaking of beta. Wow is in a constant spiral of fixing things later, working on that in the next expansion etc. As long as they dont get their shit together and start changing how they work i don't think we will see any improvements.
If you deliver a bad experience to your customer dont expect them to wait two years until you feel like you have some spare time to work on it.

Dont know if i will return for shadowlands. Current timeline suggests a dumpsterfire of a beta again, just like bfa was, which will end in wonky classes that may get fixed some years down the line. Playing since bc and first expansion that i dont plan on buying. But im still open to be surprised by blizzard, maybe they achieve the impossible.

On a positive note i have saved a ton of money and time thanks to bfa

[Amarys]

Leveling/starting content - 9.5/10

Nazmir and the Uldir raid was absolutely amazing in every way. Drustvar and the witch storyline was amazing too.

PvP - 1/10

I generally don't consider 0-3 out of 10 serious and more like reactionary, however I can't imagine how it could be worse at this point.

Gameplay - 3/10

Yes this is my personal opinion but I don't like scaling, huge power leaps, grinding and that most of the specs I liked before.. I don't enjoy playing any more.

Overall 4/10

Second to worst expansion after MoP.

[dacoolist]

Leveling/starting content - 9.5/10

Nazmir and the Uldir raid was absolutely amazing in every way. Drustvar and the witch storyline was amazing too.

PvP - 1/10

I generally don't consider 0-3 out of 10 serious and more like reactionary, however I can't imagine how it could be worse at this point.

Gameplay - 3/10

Yes this is my personal opinion but I don't like scaling, huge power leaps, grinding and that most of the specs I liked before.. I don't enjoy playing any more.

Overall 4/10

Second to worst expansion after MoP.

You're telling me MoP was the worst xpac bro.. Above Cata and Above Wod.. REALLLLLY?!

For me XPAC wise: Wrath>Legion>Mop>TBC>BFA>Cata>Wod

[melodramocracy]

You're telling me MoP was the worst xpac bro.. Above Cata and Above Wod.. REALLLLLY?!

For me XPAC wise: Wrath>Legion>Mop>TBC>BFA>Cata>Wod

People hype MoP because they adored the setting. Really, MoP dungeons were kind of awful, leveling wasnt fun, raids were ok (ToT is terribly overrated). IoT was decent, and TI was fun of course, but that end of expansion drought takes a lot of wind out of the overall score.

Middle of the road expac.

[Amarys]

You're telling me MoP was the worst xpac bro.. Above Cata and Above Wod.. REALLLLLY?!

For me XPAC wise: Wrath>Legion>Mop>TBC>BFA>Cata>Wod

Yep.. MoP was the only expansion I skipped fully. It's not WoW.. it's copy paste stuff from the real world China folklore but with pandas. Not a fan of either.

I don't get the hate WoD is getting cause I found WoD PvP really good, theme was great and I leveled most of my characters during WoD so I didn't really notice the lack of content.

[Ianus]

You're telling me MoP was the worst xpac bro.. Above Cata and Above Wod.. REALLLLLY?!

For me XPAC wise: Wrath>Legion>Mop>TBC>BFA>Cata>Wod

yeah although gameplay wise legion is better than wotlk but lore wise wotlk is better just bc Arthas

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Yep.. MoP was the only expansion I skipped fully. It's not WoW.. it's copy paste stuff from the real world China folklore but with pandas. Not a fan of either.

I don't get the hate WoD is getting cause I found WoD PvP really good, theme was great and I leveled most of my characters during WoD so I didn't really notice the lack of content.

i thought mop will be shit but compared to cata wod and bfa its miles away, one of the best raid tiers ever

[Lochton]

It is not the best, nor the worst in my book. Points are a little higher because I loved Drustvar and Vol'dun. My top three still remain with MoP, Wrath, and Legion (no real order).

Warlords of Draenor lost so many points just by removing out the option of zones for the Garrison, as well as making the Garrison a bit too comfortable.

[Radaney]

I had more fun during WoD.

[Mehrunes]

Middling at best. I don't think it was the worst but lots of people will say so because the current expansion is always "the worst ever". That was true in Wrath even. I doubt that this one will be remembered fondly down the road a few years but Warlords was worse than this. It's unforgivable to leave players with nothing to do. That's not the case with BfA. Many may not care for what there is to do but it's better than nothing at all.

Still, middling expansion at the best. Probably right below Cataclysm and above Warlords.

I mean, by the time of WotLK being current we only had had two expansions so far. Which means that WotLK would automatically have been "the worst ever" to literally anyone who preferred TBC over it. So that's actually not as strong as an example as presented.

@lockybalboa @Mehrunes @unlockedz

You guys voted that this was the best expansion ever, Care to explain your reasoning ?

Now that the story has been finished it has revealed itself as Blizzard's magnum opus as they have foretold in this interview (the last line of the summary).

[Psygon]

Started out fun!

Then scaling sucked, as I got weaker each level. WTH?

Then flying was evaluated as a waste of time. First expack I skipped that!

At least Classic has been a joy.

[Amarys]

i thought mop will be shit but compared to cata wod and bfa its miles away, one of the best raid tiers ever

It's possibly but I hated the theme and pandas way too much and couldn't get past that. Even now I can't make myself to go there to even do loremaster.

But then again yea Cata was bad, I was burned out when MoP got announced and at the time I was like "f$%^$^ kung fu panda, Im done!"

[Accendor]

Ill actually go with worst expansion yet, even WoD was better. Yes, I mean that.

[Noxina]

Hey, get this: I thought WoW was a good expansion when it was current and I still think it's a good expansion today. It's almost like I'm able to construe my own opinions and I don't need some idiotic circlejerk to validate me.

Absolutely, and that's the reason Blizzard will never satisfy everyone. People have different taste, simple as that. I have a couple of friends who love BfA, personally I just can't handle it. At all.

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Wod was not good, but the leveling and classes were much better. that alone makes it better then BFA. Dont give a shit BFA had more content , it was still shit . Shadowlads looks to be just as bad because they are not fixing the classes

I actually enjoyed WoD, mostly because it gave me a bunch of gold, and the raids was pretty decent.

[Easo]

Art, music, the usual - top of the line. Those teams have never let me down. Full CGI cinematics and more than one of them? Oh yes, that was a nice surprise!
But everything else? NO. Story was dumb as fuck predictable cliche, there was no "moral greyness", Sylvanas being OP because reasons lol (and someone in Blizzard bringing his fantasies in the game... You know whom I mean) and the absolutely abysmal ending cinematic, the whole 27 seconds of kamehama+ LOTR was the final nail.
Oh, and bugs. Bugs bugs bugs. There is still shit which was there since beta and it still is not fixed... Yes, I did report them.
Just now, logged in and Vale is incredibly laggy for everyone. Great...

[bullseyed]

BfA started out extremely messy with poorly defined and described story hooks, poor implementation of the Azerite system and lacking content.

Every major patch significantly improved on the lacking content issue, as well as added new gameplay features that helped the Azerite system/BfA unique gameplay as a whole feel better. However, the story continued down very questionable paths and ultimately became... nothing. The War Campaign ending was a gigantic flop and now N'zoth has come and gone without anything significant.

My tldr:
BfA now has a lot of things to do, a lot of things to collect and made some pretty cool changes like allied races, but the story felt even less substantial than TBC's and that's really saying something. I enjoy the class gameplay in both PvE and PvP with multiple specs feeling engaging enough for me to call home, I main switched 4 times this expansion which is more than usual.

I'm at a loss as to how the story ended up this way, I get the sense BfA was meant to be two expansions (War expansion --> Old God expansion following the same story trends as we go deeper into the war, but at some point was decided to be condensed into one expanson. Pure conjecture do not quote me on that)

Edit:
I'm a little bit hopeful that Mythic redeems this somehow. The final phase on mythic reads
"As N'Zoth the Corruptor's tentacles tighten on the Chamber of Heart, Magni and MOTHER begin unleashing the fury of the Forge of Origination to put an end to the Corruptor's plans.

Or, so they hope."

It'd be a fun idea if Normal/Heroic/LFR are considered part of the visions N'zoth puts upon us while Mythic has the true story, but we'll see.

For all we know we're still in a vision in the raid. We could be wandering around empty rooms thinking we're killing monsters.

N'zoth constantly tells us we're part of his plan and we're his chosen champion. And we are, since he did/was involved in the whole curse of flesh thing to create us. Still seems possible that we're part of the plan, "beating" him.

[Villager720]

What exactly makes BC a 7? It had no content outside of extremely simple raids. Dungeons were useless after first tier, etc.. Tedious dailies, always the same ones, and so on. Unbalanced PvP due to people using 4/8 T6 4/5 PvP gear, etc. Oh, and not really any connecting storyline. Boring lore.

Oh sure, BC had issues, but it added and continued to add so many new systems (with flaws, absolutely) and types of content we'd never seen before.
No expansion since has ever expanded the game that much.