Why is BFA hated ?

[Matthias]

Normally when there is a bad expansion we can scapegoat Activision for greedy budget cuts.

Cataclysms biggest issue was the massive content drought after launch - even with that you tell Blizzard were trying their best.
Warlords of Draenor issue was the massive content drought.....and Blizz pretty much just gave up on it to focus on Legion.

Battle for Azeroth isn't just on Activison, rushing expansion is on them most likely, but the design choices from Blizzard just border on apathy for the community.

• I don't know how Azerite Armor got off of the drawing board. It's literally like the game is fighting against you.
• Islands are just Scenarios once again, that no one ever enjoyed in MoP. Visions work better because they aren't freebies.
• THE GLOBAL COOLDOWN CHANGE. WHY WHY WHY!?
• Removal of Tier sets....why? We like Tier
• Heart of Azeroth grind forces you into Content you don't enjoy, Legion you could grind Weapon power anywhere, but Blizzard insisted that you do there precious islands.
• We all seemed to get weaker with the loss of Artificats more ability pruning and dungeons becoming more difficult.

With all that said I have come back in 8.3 and it seems they've gotten a better handle on things. Game is way over systemized though. I keep having to double back to guides to see what Corruption, Essences and Azerite Traits I should be using. Corruption has bad implementation but I can appreciate the idea and I actually do like Essences

[Kalisandra]

Islands are just Scenarios once again, that no one ever enjoyed in MoP. Visions work better because they aren't freebies.

I liked scenarios. They were great for chilling with a couple of friends who had no interest in being geared for cutting edge content. Islands fail miserably at this because they are all gogogogo!

[kaminaris]

• I don't know how Azerite Armor got off of the drawing board. It's literally like the game is fighting against you.
• Islands are just Scenarios once again, that no one ever enjoyed in MoP. Visions work better because they aren't freebies.
• THE GLOBAL COOLDOWN CHANGE. WHY WHY WHY!?
• Removal of Tier sets....why? We like Tier
• Heart of Azeroth grind forces you into Content you don't enjoy, Legion you could grind Weapon power anywhere, but Blizzard insisted that you do there precious islands.
• We all seemed to get weaker with the loss of Artificats more ability pruning and dungeons becoming more difficult.

Azerite armor is one of the absolute best systems ever made in WoW.
It's literally configurable tier sets available not only from raids, that has a vendor both random and specific and is not taking up to 6 slots of your gear making it esentially dead - just 3 and you still sometimes swap it
Islands are optional, and islands are just a nice change of pace, you dont farm it if you don't want to.
Global cooldown was explained 100000 times, those spells should not have been taken off GCD in first place
We did not like tier sets, it was way worse than azerite gear. If you are talking about lack of VISUAL sets then blizzard should have implemented ensembles.
You don't grind HoA. There is absolutely no need to grind it, not to mention you don't have to grind islands lol.
Becoming weaker was fault of Legion. It was pants on head retarded idea to put so much power into a single item including class stuff.

[Recovery]

Wrath's heroics didn't need the insane amounts of CC that BC's did, largely because of the 'bring the player' philosophy meaning that you couldn't assume that a heroic 5-man group would have at least two mages/hunters/rogues to CC the hell out of it. They still needed a fair number of kicks though, which did mean having classes that could interrupt, or working round the lack by having pallies stun stuff as an 'interrupt' and then burning it down before it could cast again (which didn't work on bosses, of course).

The thing that made LK heroics 'easy' (they weren't really until Tier 8 (Ulduar) was that even Naxx had two tiers of gear, and Ulduar had 2-1/2 (allowing for hard modes), and the heroics were tuned to do doable without needing even full Naxx-10 gear. BC heroics, when they were new were sometimes rougher than Kara, and rewarded worse gear. The end result was that by the time TotC came along the original LC heroics were as badly out-geared as BC heroics were by people in full sunwell gear, and hadn't been tuned as hard to start with. Also, those LK dungeons that were hard were mostly hard in ways that gear would fix, whereas BC dungeons were hard in ways that it took a lot of gear to fix, like pulls that unless they were cc'd properly would have you running all over the dungeon in fear, and so on.


I suspect it has a lot to do with the class you played, and the guild you were in.

Early Cata raids were a lot rougher to get into than early LK raids, and because they decided 10 and 25 man would be worth the same, with the same loot, they tuned the 10 mans higher than they had been in LK. In fact, they tuned some of the fights harder than they were for 25 man raids. Also, they made the lockouts shared. This made things a lot harder for smaller and more casual guilds, and the shared lockouts made alt raids harder to do and pretty much killed the PUG raid communities on many servers. So what sort of guild you were in would colour your memory of (early) Cata. Dragon soul and LFR finished the killing of PUG raid groups.

Then there was what class(es) you played. The first tier of raids were not melee friendly. The class balance was terrible. Some specs plain didn't work. This was fixed, but the first tier wasn't a lot of fun for Ret Pallies (and Holy had issues too), and Shamans.

The first toon I levelled in Cata was (as always) my Paladin. At the middle of the levelling I moved to Vashj'ir (so the second starting zone) and swapped to Prot because Ret was proving so slow. My next was my Elemental Shaman, which was better. I didn't level my other alts until Firelands, and by then things had been greatly cleaned up and it wasn't so bad, but those first two were awful. The best levelling I've seen was WoD.
It was good in guild groups, but bad for pugging. And again, early on you'd find yourself saying "Sorry but I can't heal [X dungeon heroic] unless everyone is geared and on their A game" because your healer was the wrong class, which sort of sucked. At least my Pally had an interrupt for the first time ever.

Thats weird.. I played holy paladin the first tier of cataclysm.. It was amazing. Never oomd.. Did the most healing by far.. Not sure why you remember something so incorrectly. lol. Holy paly in BOT and BWD was literally amazing. lol

[Tiev]

Too much grinding, rng with loot and the feeling that I can't log in an alt or I'd miss out on main progress is what caused me to unsub (thus what I dislike about BFA). Currently I'm cautiously optimistic about Shadowlands.

[Sansnom]

Hello.

Why is BFA so hated ? Sometimes more than WOD.

There are always people who hate the XP. BFA is making the most noise because it is the latest.

All previous XP had their haters.

[Wildpantz]

Its not its just same who says the same thing every exspansion

[Kalisandra]

Thats weird.. I played holy paladin the first tier of cataclysm.. It was amazing. Never oomd.. Did the most healing by far.. Not sure why you remember something so incorrectly. lol. Holy paly in BOT and BWD was literally amazing. lol

I never said Holy oomed. I said it had issues. Like an AoE heal that had to be charged up, had a really odd shape to it, and required careful aiming, and (in early Cata) was pretty weak, and for which Holy paid by not having the amazing single-target healing it had in LK.

Resto Shamans' issue was that their heals were undersized, their Mastery sucked, and they went oom all the time. The initial fix was a buff to heal size. The proper fix for Firelands was changing the Mastery (to what they still have today), and giving them a more active mana regen system (shoot bad guys with Lightning Bolt, get mana back).

As for Ret Paladins, they did sod-all damage because their finisher relied on Mastery and the whole thing just didn't work. Things were much better after they changed Holy Power and Mastery to something much more like what it is now.

[Recovery]

I never said Holy oomed. I said it had issues. Like an AoE heal that had to be charged up, had a really odd shape to it, and required careful aiming, and (in early Cata) was pretty weak, and for which Holy paid by not having the amazing single-target healing it had in LK.

Resto Shamans' issue was that their heals were undersized, their Mastery sucked, and they went oom all the time. The initial fix was a buff to heal size. The proper fix for Firelands was changing the Mastery (to what they still have today), and giving them a more active mana regen system (shoot bad guys with Lightning Bolt, get mana back).

As for Ret Paladins, they did sod-all damage because their finisher relied on Mastery and the whole thing just didn't work. Things were much better after they changed Holy Power and Mastery to something much more like what it is now.

But it did have amazing single target healing.. lol.. I literally topped HPS by far for the entirety of BOT and BWD. I have no idea what youre talking about. I mean radiance is def what made us good, but you make it sound like pallys werent tied with druids for best healer. lol

[Aliven]

Azerite armor is one of the absolute best systems ever made in WoW.
It's literally configurable tier sets available not only from raids, that has a vendor both random and specific and is not taking up to 6 slots of your gear making it esentially dead - just 3 and you still sometimes swap it
Islands are optional, and islands are just a nice change of pace, you dont farm it if you don't want to.
Global cooldown was explained 100000 times, those spells should not have been taken off GCD in first place
We did not like tier sets, it was way worse than azerite gear. If you are talking about lack of VISUAL sets then blizzard should have implemented ensembles.
You don't grind HoA. There is absolutely no need to grind it, not to mention you don't have to grind islands lol.
Becoming weaker was fault of Legion. It was pants on head retarded idea to put so much power into a single item including class stuff.

To be fair the IDEA of Azerite gear is great. The implementation is not.

And guilds did grind islands in the early days of BFA because it gave most azerite for time spend. Problem with islands is that they are just aoe nuke fests and on a timer. Your cant explore really, you cant play solo. Just go go go before time runs out.

Azerite armor should NEVER be tied to lvl of necklace. And azerite power should never be tied to boring activities.

Problem with GCD change is the class design. It is not a big deal when you have one big cooldown, it is a problem when spec has like 3+ which are on GCD. And more often than not they are boring cd to begin with like flat + x% to a secondary or primary stat.

[Lightning-]

I didn't enjoy all the grinding, the randomness on azerite armor, everything was alt unfriendly, pvp gearing, and corruption was just too much.

I like azerite armor, but if you get some bad traits constantly it just sucks.

[mickybrighteyes]

Normally when there is a bad expansion we can scapegoat Activision for greedy budget cuts.

Cataclysms biggest issue was the massive content drought after launch - even with that you tell Blizzard were trying their best.

I thought Cataclysm's biggest issue was how much effort was spent on the level revamp and world design that otherwise would have gone into end game content.

Warlords of Draenor issue was the massive content drought.....and Blizz pretty much just gave up on it to focus on Legion.

I think WoD had more of an issue of being unable to focus on any single thing, trying to do so much that wound up as cut content. Like another raid tier of fighting orcs swapped out for legion forces for some hairbrained reasons.

Battle for Azeroth isn't just on Activison, rushing expansion is on them most likely, but the design choices from Blizzard just border on apathy for the community.

• I don't know how Azerite Armor got off of the drawing board. It's literally like the game is fighting against you.
• Islands are just Scenarios once again, that no one ever enjoyed in MoP. Visions work better because they aren't freebies.
• THE GLOBAL COOLDOWN CHANGE. WHY WHY WHY!?
• Removal of Tier sets....why? We like Tier
• Heart of Azeroth grind forces you into Content you don't enjoy, Legion you could grind Weapon power anywhere, but Blizzard insisted that you do there precious islands.
• We all seemed to get weaker with the loss of Artificats more ability pruning and dungeons becoming more difficult.

Honestly. Like YES we love teir armor sets for their appearance and collection farming.. but we also dislike tier because of the possibility of being stuck in a set for the bonus. (not unlike dislike towards lower grade corrupt pieces being better than significantly higher grade pieces SOLELY because of the effect (looking at you infinite stars). Now looking at Azerite gear from the "bonus effects" stand points, they are actually filling the same niche as tier sets of old and doing so in a way that alleviates needing to hunt down [insert number] pieces to get the effect.

Scenarios from MoP, I don't think those were ever a detriment to the game and I wouldn't call islands a blemish... their implementation was rather awkward though and I know I largely ignored them except for the world vein bullshit and extra reputation from weekly.

one thing:

Heart of Azeroth grind forces you into Content you don't enjoy, Legion you could grind Weapon power anywhere, but Blizzard insisted that you do there precious islands.

Maybe I missed soemthing... but aren't we able to find azerite sources from as many places as we did AP? Maybe I'm missing something but I farmed to 80+ on my necklace and didn't touch the islands outside the early honorbound rep for weekly quest. I dropped island farming largely cause I saw little point in hunting down cosmetic rewards though in favor of seeking gear/etc elsewhere.

I mean I do world quests and stumble through thousands of azerite. I get it from dungeons and raids and mission board tasks... Maybe I'm remembering needing WAY more AP after a time because those little pops you'd get form literally any WQ in legion didn't matter (or were wasted because we all capped out in the end anyways so they turned into vendor trash)

[last1214]

BFA is a perfect game. Idk what you all are on about.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

• Awful story in an expansion that was billed for its story.

• The zone questlines were forgettable and I just wanted to move on and do other things, but I was forced to sit down and slog through them in order to unlock world quests.

• World quests are not a replacement for proper quest hubs. BFA reputations are awful.

• Unsatisfying Azerite grind for borrowed power that is revoked at the end of the expansion..

• First WoW expansion with rather meh music (exceptions being key Kul'Tiras tunes). Dustin Brower seems to have only done music for the prerendered cinematics.

• Bad dungeon design and mob placement (tediously wading through enemies every 5 feet without a chance to breathe)

• Classes aren't fun to play.

• No flying.

[kaminaris]

To be fair the IDEA of Azerite gear is great. The implementation is not.

And guilds did grind islands in the early days of BFA because it gave most azerite for time spend. Problem with islands is that they are just aoe nuke fests and on a timer. Your cant explore really, you cant play solo. Just go go go before time runs out.

Azerite armor should NEVER be tied to lvl of necklace. And azerite power should never be tied to boring activities.

Problem with GCD change is the class design. It is not a big deal when you have one big cooldown, it is a problem when spec has like 3+ which are on GCD. And more often than not they are boring cd to begin with like flat + x% to a secondary or primary stat.

Implementation of azerite gear is still faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar better than tier sets implementation.
Yes 8.0-8.1 it was shit because there was no vendor and it could randomly drop from weekly chest.

Yes it would be perfect if AG wasn't tied to neck level. However requirements are so low you actually dont need to farm anything to unlock every meaningful ring.

GCD change was necessary, people are complaining about class design. I can actually agree with that because instead of having
generic-push-to-increase-stats-button to something that does damage by itself, it would be much better to play.
For example demo lock demonic tyrant is example of good cooldown.
Dark soul instability is example of dogshit cooldown that just increases your damage.

- - - Updated - - -

I didn't enjoy all the grinding, the randomness on azerite armor, everything was alt unfriendly, pvp gearing, and corruption was just too much.

I like azerite armor, but if you get some bad traits constantly it just sucks.

Azerite gear has exactly zero RNG. You know you drop specific pieces from raid right? Plus you can buy specific pieces from vendor.

[Sansnom]

Battle for Azeroth isn't just on Activison, rushing expansion is on them most likely, but the design choices from Blizzard just border on apathy for the community.

• I don't know how Azerite Armor got off of the drawing board. It's literally like the game is fighting against you.
• Islands are just Scenarios once again, that no one ever enjoyed in MoP. Visions work better because they aren't freebies.
• THE GLOBAL COOLDOWN CHANGE. WHY WHY WHY!?
• Removal of Tier sets....why? We like Tier
• Heart of Azeroth grind forces you into Content you don't enjoy, Legion you could grind Weapon power anywhere, but Blizzard insisted that you do there precious islands.
• We all seemed to get weaker with the loss of Artificats more ability pruning and dungeons becoming more difficult.

I think the Azerite Armor was an attempt to give the player a choice in choosing some utility that were not part of their normal skills. It is something that some players has asked for. Some choice. Problem is that when it actually arrived, people were only interested in bigger numbers. It was an experiment that did not work.

The Global Cooldown. Who knows. Maybe it is improve the underlying game engine, better performance etc.

[Celestraza]

Reasons I quit BFA:
- Awfull story / lore. Couldn't be worse.
- Generic and bland classes, might as well bring WoW to console
- Locked into playing a spec instead of being able to play a whole class
- Too much forced unfun content to be competitive
- Boring rep grinds gated behind time

It honestly feels like I am forced to play an incomplete class while is forced to do unfun and boring content like warfronts and islands for an unsatisfactory AP/Ilvl grind.

Man the game got bad....

[Kalisandra]

Honestly. Like YES we love teir armor sets for their appearance and collection farming.. but we also dislike tier because of the possibility of being stuck in a set for the bonus. (not unlike dislike towards lower grade corrupt pieces being better than significantly higher grade pieces SOLELY because of the effect (looking at you infinite stars). Now looking at Azerite gear from the "bonus effects" stand points, they are actually filling the same niche as tier sets of old and doing so in a way that alleviates needing to hunt down [insert number] pieces to get the effect.

I think the problem was that over time the set bonuses became very strong, rather than being a couple of percent each. Also, they became a tool to fix a spec without having to officially change the spec itself. As a result they went from something nice to have, hopefully better than non-tier, to must have, and 'only get rid of when you have 2pc+ of the next tier, and then only if that's good'.

- - - Updated - - -

But it did have amazing single target healing.. lol.. I literally topped HPS by far for the entirety of BOT and BWD. I have no idea what youre talking about. I mean radiance is def what made us good, but you make it sound like pallys werent tied with druids for best healer. lol

Using a fairly strict rotation to ensure maximum Holy Power generation, and really, compared to LK Holy's single target healing blew. Holy was at that time propped up by beacon (a fairly common state of affairs). I grant that if you think it's okay for healers to have rotations and have a build-spend cycle, it wasn't so bad. Me, I thought it stunk on ice. In Dragon Soul Radiance was insane and they were as good as Resto Shamans at stacked raid healing (which was huge in Dragon Soul), and the Shamans had to work a lot harder.

- - - Updated - - -

Problem with GCD change is the class design. It is not a big deal when you have one big cooldown, it is a problem when spec has like 3+ which are on GCD. And more often than not they are boring cd to begin with like flat + x% to a secondary or primary stat.

It's also a problem when you have one big cooldown, but it's quite short (like Arcane Power), because it feels crappy losing a big chunk of your CD's duration to the GCD.

[kamuimac]

BfA is hated because its finally real mmorpg expansion - with ton of grinds and people who time invested more are rightfully stronger

but majority of people on forums and streamers dont want to play mmorpg

they want to play dota style lobby based instance symulator.

thats why they hate BfA because they cant only log in for raiding and mythic +

[Kalisandra]

I think the Azerite Armor was an attempt to give the player a choice in choosing some utility that were not part of their normal skills. It is something that some players has asked for. Some choice. Problem is that when it actually arrived, people were only interested in bigger numbers. It was an experiment that did not work.

The basic rule of designing systems like this and talent trees, etc., is that you do not put damage increase choices opposite utility for DPS specs, nor make healer choose between healing and utility, and so on. It makes the utility a non-choice for the vast majority of content unless it's incredibly strong (and even then players will resent having to give up damage to take it).

Even the current Warlock talent row that puts a survivability trait alongside mobility choices (note they had both previously, which is yet another reason to dislike BfA if you're a 'lock player) is questionable and it only works as a choice because mobility is survival in a modern raid.