Remembering the BFA dumpster fire start to finish.

[Zig Zug]

BFA started with the Warbringers series, and after seeing Jaina's I knew that I wanted to play Alliance for this expansion. I love the Horde, but I tend to start as one faction, and change somewhere in between - pretty much SOP since Vanilla.

There were a lot of new systems to get oriented with, and of course the process of leveling up and raiding.Exploring the world was fun, Drustvar was an incredibly creepy zone. The other two in Kul Tiras were nice, but felt a bit generic. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that - but just an observation.

Horde Zones I didn't get into until Nazjatar was released. They were cool tool - felt like they drew on Vanilla style themes, crazy desert place, wet jungle with dinos and dark jungle with spooky trolls.

The no raid sets was a much bigger motivation killer than I anticipated. Combine the fact that I had literally zero idea why the hell we're going into the asbestos factory (Uldir), I never felt much compulsion to raid outside of hanging out with friends.

The PvP mode was interesting, but seemed as more of an impediment than anything. I kept it off, unless I was specifically going to work towards PvP goals - which at this point was rare.

Additional zones that were added were, ok. They were too small to be their own expansion - but large enough to merit some regard when released. I did not like differences in the means of completion - WQs vs Dailies vs Spend Currency to solve this etc. There could have been a better, more rewarding balance here.

The stories of iconic figures (N'zoth and Azshara particularly) were wrapped up in one, two boss fights. Everything must end, but really, if we're not Gods at this point, what are we? Adventurers that have slain Gods, Titans, Demon Lords, etc - but still just adventurers?

Didn't like having to grind to be able to unlock the full functionality of my gear. I don't mind the AP system in and of it self, but requiring a non-trivial level of progress to use gear seemed punitive.

Didn't like being told for multiple expacs that "you don't need multiple armor sets anymore" and then having it switched to, "yeah, we want you to have multiple versions of these three pieces, also they're going to vary wildly in their effectiveness."

Legendary was a yawn, honestly, would've rather not had one.

Hopefully things are improved with Shadow Lands.

[Utrrabbit]

With the release of the SL drop date and prepatch hopefully arriving in less than a month please in the replies let me know how BFA helped taint the last 2 years of your lives. (to those people who began in BFA/Legion that are going to tell me if you dont like it dont play, this game has been a part of my life since the 5th grade and I don't like seeing something i love treated so horribly. So if you guys could just go run some more visions to actually make your character perform worse with sockets that would be for the best<3 )

First we have to acknowledge that WONDERFUL launch of BFA. I play on Area 52 myself and let me tell you was I livid that all I could do was watch people literally finishing leveling toons before blizzard implemented a patch at the end of the first and arguably the most nostalgic day of an expansion. I personally love to PvP its what I fell in love with 12 years ago with WoW and it broke my heart watching blizzard literally brush off whatever the community had to say. After the original blizzcon for almost all intents and purposes the devs abandoned PvP and only fixed the issues that made viewing it on twitch for the AWC was a little less mind numbing but not by much. We also cannot forget when they lead players to believe that we would be crowd funding along with blizzard's minimum amount promice to support the AWC and MDI and not just lining blizzards pockets and helping them not have to pay much for either tournament. That move was disgusting and greedy but completely in line with what i've come to expect personally. Im sure those of you reading this probably watch the MDI/AWC so I shouldn't need to discuss the horrible lack of class diversity at the top tier of game play in either "E-sport".

We where told at the end of legion that they ended production early in order to make BFA an A+ expansion but we got..well we got shit and there is no other way to put it. I hope that we aren't being fed the same lie with SL but over the past 5 years im sure we have all learned to take what comes out of their marketing teams mouths with a grain of salt.

I liked ALL of BFA and Legion.

You do not speak for people.

[Arainie]

We where told at the end of legion that they ended production early in order to make BFA an A+ expansion but we got..

I'm not sure if you're intentionally playing dumb or if you actually believe that was ever even indicated.

[Manhands]

High points:
Essences. Generally obtained by doing the content in which they excel (Conflict and Strife being a very notable exception), had a clear finishing point (neck to 80 and rank 3's), and could be swapped in any rest area or with tome. This was the perfect mid-expansion system to add.
Raiding in general. I personally enjoyed this tier for raiding. Finding a stable, great raid team is probably affecting my perception, though.

Low points:
Azerite. This system had everything wrong with it. Traits were imbalanced, acquired via RNG, were expensive to swap for offspec, and had no way to target the ones you wanted. In addition, there was only the illusion of choice. All specs I know of took the same traits and if a piece didn't have your best 2, it was garbage. They eventually added Titan Residuum, and that helped very slightly, but the original implementation was awful. We gave up tier sets for this?
Corruption. So, again, imbalance with no way to target the effects you want made this system feel shitty from the get-go. And the imbalance of rng-driven passive procs (TD, IS, and EV pre-nerf) adds far too much variance in damage from pull to pull. And then the negative corruption effects were rng procs too! Corruption vendor should have been added at the start and IS, EV, and TD should have been scrapped.

[Rendark]

BfA was the first expansion i never even bothered to play, so i don't know how it was game play wise. Story wise however it was the worst yet.

[Eggroll]

It was a live Beta most of the time... Story was shit, World of Sylvanascraft got really annoying...

[kaminaris]

Azerite. This system had everything wrong with it. Traits were imbalanced, acquired via RNG, were expensive to swap for offspec, and had no way to target the ones you wanted. In addition, there was only the illusion of choice. All specs I know of took the same traits and if a piece didn't have your best 2, it was garbage. They eventually added Titan Residuum, and that helped very slightly, but the original implementation was awful. We gave up tier sets for this?.

Eventually? Titan residuum was added in 8.1 so FIRST patch in expansion.
It was possible to target specific ones since they dropped from raid. But yes M+ players were at mercy or RNG.
No, not all specs took the same traits, just head to warcraftlogs and see top players for each spec, you will find variety in there.

Tier sets were garbage because they were static, there wasn't even option to take something different, either your bonus sucked or was super powerful (blizzard used it to balance classes). You didnt even have a chance to get them outside of raids. Tier sets were essentially a dead gear slots.

If azerite current implementation (who cares about original implementation that lasted just one tier) is low, then tier sets were abyssal horse-turd.

[Queen of Hamsters]

I still remember WoD. My gripe with BfA was the gameplay of my class and the huge amounts of RNG.

I still spent most of BfA, in BfA. Unlike WoD where my enjoyment came from farming old content and farming gold using the Garrison. It was an objectively shitty effort, even if it had some rays of sunshine.

Overall I take about 50/50 negative and positive away from BfA.
The way they realized Eternal Palace and the Black Empire feels underwhelming to say the least. BoD was a fun raid, but my class put a dampener on it.

Drustvar is my favorite zone. Ever.

Jury's still out on SL, I cannot test it on Beta due to huge latency...

I miss 5.2.

[Irian]

Worst expansion for me. Sure WoD was flawed but I could see the hints of what they wanted to do in the expansion, which gave it a level of charm. To this day I think about what could've been for Draenor, and it's still absolutely gorgeous.

BfA has forgettable zones, a story that beat-for-beat copied a previous expansion, and otherwise was atrocious and made no sense. Lore figures acted hilariously out of character left and right, personalities were all over the place and they again repeated my least favorite recent Blizzard trend of blowing up a city to try to get people to care about a shitty story.

The class design was also completely awful, not even taking into account the expansion-specific systems. I don't think I've ever enjoyed my main class less, despite the fact that it's spent a lot of time as top DPS this expansion I never even felt the most remote desire to play it because of how awful the gameplay feels. WoW seriously needs to stop trying to ape Diablo and start being an RPG again.

[Venziir]

I dunno, I quite enjoyed 8.0 and 8.1 - even 8.2 was ok (compared to 7.2). 8.3 was, however, the laziest endgame patch ever (yes I even prefered 6.1 to it). So not a perfect expansion, but still better than WoD.

[Nuciek]

I hate BFA because it's the expansion of missed opportunities. It could be one of the best and ended up one of the worst. They failed with decisions on everything that they wanted to introduce as a new feature.

Island expeditions - cool idea, terrible implementation. They got better over time (more gear on players?), but it's not what I expected and I think they could've been really good if there was more thought and time put into them.

Warfronts - as stated by many it's again not what was expected and as many before me mentioned, if it was a PvP RTS-like battleground it would've been amazing. Either that or a raid-like PvE content with comparable difficulty and rewards. Both would work but it was none and got boring really, really fast.

Azerite - I don't miss set bonuses to be fair and I think the azerite system also, once again, could be a good idea but in the end it was bad. Praying for your azerite piece to drop, stacking traits for some insane outcomes that broke the gameplay and being forced to have bag full of Azerite pieces for different situations was tiring. Having to go to raidbots to sim everytime you got an item to see if it's an actual upgrade was exhausting.

Essences - again, could be good but ended up bad. Essences could be a cool perk that you have but ended up more powerful than most of classes biggest cooldowns and were often locked behind content that you weren't even interested in. (PvEers forced to PvP, PvPers forced to raid, everyone forced to grind reps)

Corruptions - One of the worst, if not the worst, things in BFA. I can't even write why, it's just so bad and that couldn't be better and was neve a good idea. One of those things that should never exist in the first place.

PvP gearing - well, RNG again. Being forced to spam M+ to keep up with everyone in an expansion that is all about gear. Forced to raid to get BiS trinkets that you can't play without and almost everyone else has. The worst iteration of PvP gearing system in the history of WoW

[Manhands]

Eventually? Titan residuum was added in 8.1 so FIRST patch in expansion.
It was possible to target specific ones since they dropped from raid. But yes M+ players were at mercy or RNG.
No, not all specs took the same traits, just head to warcraftlogs and see top players for each spec, you will find variety in there.

Tier sets were garbage because they were static, there wasn't even option to take something different, either your bonus sucked or was super powerful (blizzard used it to balance classes). You didnt even have a chance to get them outside of raids. Tier sets were essentially a dead gear slots.

If azerite current implementation (who cares about original implementation that lasted just one tier) is low, then tier sets were abyssal horse-turd.

I'm surprised you disagreed with any of this. Are you saying you liked the implementation of Azerite? You didn't see any of these issues personally?

I said Titan Residuum only helped a little. You could only target traits if you earned weeks worth of Residuum. So whether residuum came out in 8.1 or with the expansion itself, it wasn't enough.
And again, the issue was imbalance combined with difficulty in targeting. For most specs, it was very set in stone the traits you wanted due to that imbalance, forcing you to want to target. I did what you suggested and looked at warcraftlogs rankings for each spec on each fight. I'd need to pump the results into a spreadsheet and work some statistics on the results to prove that there isn't much variance, but honestly, it's not worth the effort. It's pretty monotonic. Can we agree balance could have been better and that it hampered Azerite throughout the expansion?

Tier sets weren't the best, no. I won't defend them. Azerite might even be slightly better as a system overall than tier sets; I'll give you that. But Azerite could have been much better.

[Marxman]

I liked ALL of BFA and Legion.

You do not speak for people.

Can I ask what you do in-game and how long you've been playing? I have legitimately never encountered someone who couldn't find some flaws in Legion/BfA. Even if you defended them as not horrific piles of manure, surely you can see the problems... they aren't exactly hard to spot for anyone who's paying attention.

[Relapses]

Can I ask what you do in-game and how long you've been playing? I have legitimately never encountered someone who couldn't find some flaws in Legion/BfA. Even if you defended them as not horrific piles of manure, surely you can see the problems... they aren't exactly hard to spot for anyone who's paying attention.

Why do people need to validate their fucking opinions to you?

Christ dude. You can enjoy something even if it isn't a pristine, immaculate piece of artwork bestowed upon us by the Gods themselves. Every expansion has flaws, some people are simply more willing to look past the downsides and find things which they find enjoyment doing. It is, after all, a video game.

[Huzzaa]

Didn't like it.
The expansion was bad. It's on equal grounds, tending towards the worst in comparison to WoD. Although green fire annoyed the hell out of me at the end of that expac too.

RNG though, I'm not yet sure about SL.

Covenants look like another...

And they're embeded deep so it's definately not going away. Time will tell.

[Vutar]

I just wonder why would shadowlands be any better? Same people making the same type of content.

[Sunslayer]

Don't worry BfA garbage design will follow in to SL. How can it not? Its the same garbage devs?

- - - Updated - - -

I liked ALL of BFA and Legion.

You do not speak for people.

Sure they do speak for people. BfA was a dumpster fire. Or do you think they released free 6 month store mounts out of the goodness of their black hearts

[Stormbreed]

With the release of the SL drop date and prepatch hopefully arriving in less than a month please in the replies let me know how BFA helped taint the last 2 years of your lives. (to those people who began in BFA/Legion that are going to tell me if you dont like it dont play, this game has been a part of my life since the 5th grade and I don't like seeing something i love treated so horribly. So if you guys could just go run some more visions to actually make your character perform worse with sockets that would be for the best<3 )

First we have to acknowledge that WONDERFUL launch of BFA. I play on Area 52 myself and let me tell you was I livid that all I could do was watch people literally finishing leveling toons before blizzard implemented a patch at the end of the first and arguably the most nostalgic day of an expansion. I personally love to PvP its what I fell in love with 12 years ago with WoW and it broke my heart watching blizzard literally brush off whatever the community had to say. After the original blizzcon for almost all intents and purposes the devs abandoned PvP and only fixed the issues that made viewing it on twitch for the AWC was a little less mind numbing but not by much. We also cannot forget when they lead players to believe that we would be crowd funding along with blizzard's minimum amount promice to support the AWC and MDI and not just lining blizzards pockets and helping them not have to pay much for either tournament. That move was disgusting and greedy but completely in line with what i've come to expect personally. Im sure those of you reading this probably watch the MDI/AWC so I shouldn't need to discuss the horrible lack of class diversity at the top tier of game play in either "E-sport".

We where told at the end of legion that they ended production early in order to make BFA an A+ expansion but we got..well we got shit and there is no other way to put it. I hope that we aren't being fed the same lie with SL but over the past 5 years im sure we have all learned to take what comes out of their marketing teams mouths with a grain of salt.

Overall the 3rd best expansion, and yes the raids are too hard, but what else can they do when mods play the game for people?

Anyways,

Hopefully SL comes in and takes 1st!

[Pohut]

Complete dumpster fire start to finish. Much worse than WoD.

[arkanon]

Complete dumpster fire start to finish. Much worse than WoD.

I played WoD start to finish. Although there were certainly some things i didnt enjoy, i enjoyed the overall game enough to keep playing, keep raiding, and keep enjoying the game. Although i gimped myself by not participating much in the Garrison lottery, i just didnt enjoy it. So i skipped it, for the most part.

BfA was a struggle from day one for me, and eventually it just lost my interest completely. First expansion i have taken a brake without something else to go to (Swotro / wildstar etc).

Granted, it was right at the end of the expansion, but still, the only thing bringing me back will be the pre patch.