May you explain me why BFA was considered so bad??

[mrgreenthump]

I don't really want to re-live BFA, but here it goes. From my own experience ofc.

• Azerite Power, not that Artifact Power was good either, but would've hoped they'd learn from their mistakes
• Removal of Legion systems without compensating them
• Outside of raids and M+ you did only world quests, there was no other activity
• War mode was dead most of the time and bugged out the rest the time
• Azerite armor rerolling got more expensive with each reroll
• Content was slower than Legion
• World quests were slower to complete than Legion
• The grindiness of their new design introduced in Legion started to get old
• As a raider, you spent more time preparing for the raid than raiding at times
• Corruptions were RNG at start, when vendor got introduced it was on a rotation for no reason
• Azshara's font and double trinket shenanigans
• Story was meh
• No casual content(still a problem in SL)
• Azerite Armor traits were locked behind Azerite Power levels that you couldn't get before raid released and the grind was silly. Think it was only fixed in last patch
• No bag space to be had(azerite armor took it all)
• Specifically Fire Mage in the end, which didn't work unless you had Font+Bracers+max mastery corruptions.
• Constant lag fests. First day I couldn't do anything for 2 hours, because servers kept crashing and it didn't get better all expansion when huge events were going on
• Islands were boring and you only did them for AP. Even as a Mage you could pull the whole Island and not die.
• Warfronts were also pretty underwhelming, you basically couldn't loose and we never got PvP warfronts
• There weren't many positives to the game. Raid were good. M+ was worth doing past 10 weekly runs.

But at least it wasn't as bad as SL so far, which outside of raiding and PvP was just dead content till 9.2 pretty much when we at least got some content to do outside raiding and PvP. Not to mention the content gaps.

[Iain]

For me, it was a problem with hyped content proving to be quite tepid, and abandoned instead of iterated upon. They tried several new things but seemingly refused to (or were unable to) take them a step further to make them more enjoyable, they just "nerfed" them.

This must be why I enjoyed BfA more. I didn't think Islands and Warfronts were going to be interesting when they got announced. The concept failed from the outset. That way I could just enjoy the levelling for what it was without planning to do much more. Only thing that disappointed me was warmode. I expected that to be more fun. I still think it has potential but there's so many moving parts to account for.

[Cosmic Janitor]

While true, living trees are also soaked with water inside, so lobbing a few balls of fire from a catapult isn't gonna be enough to make a giant tree like Teldrassil catch fire.

They could of course have made shamans use magic and have it be superfire but they didn't so it looks silly.

Let's also not forget that these were ICBM catapults that somehow managed to hit teldrassil from the shore of ashenvale. They got their own scale so wrong, it hurts. In fact it was so wrong, that people wildly speculated about inside jobs and blowing up the tree due to azerite stockpiles and stuff, because people couldn't make sense of this nonsense plot before they released the rubbish scenario.

[fenixazul]

Wow, I created this thread tonight before sleep, and now after I wake up I have 5 pages of responses. Thanks for the response guys, I will try to read all of them

BTW: I played actively wow since Cataclysm, Legion and MoP are my favorite expansions so far. And I started to raid in a guild group in Firelands

[Aydinx2]

I love her redemption arc - it made up for the shit we had to endure with BfA.

And yes, I'm glad we got the heroic Sylvanas back with 9.2 instead of whatever Afrasiabi created during BfA.

What redemption arc? What heroic Sylvanas?
There was literally 0 arc. She just had some moments of doubt and then betrayed the Jailer at the last minute, literally seconds after she was a major raid boss.
As for heroic, she does literally nothing but advise the actual heroes.

The biggest problem? Any character development she is going to have in the Maw will be invisible to us until she pops out again. Again, no arc or growth.

[Nathreim]

It was a rehash of MoP without any of the charm. The war story was done way better in MoP trying to redo that story in itself is bad cause it ruins all the progress the Horde made. Sylvanas should not have gone evil we already did the evil warchief expansion a better story would be when Nzoth rises he takes over the Void Elves and Sylvanas wanting to save Alleria calls for a end of hostilities to fight Nzoth and free her sister only to die in fighting the Old God. Burning Darn was just over the top and unnecessary the Alliance should have been the aggressors in the war stopping the development of Azerite weapons is more than reason enough.

Warfronts should have had a PVP mode and seasons so new gear with higher Ilvl would be added every tier not better than raid tier but close to offer a catch up. Islands were made into a chore take the Azerite reward out and people would have done them anyway for the mounts, mog and pets(as they still do). Make them more like Scenarios were.

Azerite power was inferior to Artifact power it felt like it was a much more annoying grind.

[Tiwack]

Largely it's because Island Expeditions were the fastest and most efficient way to level and get azerite... So even though it was a pretty boring feature the majority of players frequenting the forums ie. super serious gamers, felt forced to run them regardless and thus voiced their discontent near and far rather than play the game in an enjoyable way.

For the average players BfA was pretty great, but for the only gripe everyone shared: so many loading screens to pass through just to meet-up with magni to advance campaign-story... which looped back to him what felt like endlessly.

[Accendor]

I love her redemption arc - it made up for the shit we had to endure with BfA.

And yes, I'm glad we got the heroic Sylvanas back with 9.2 instead of whatever Afrasiabi created during BfA.

Once again, we got nothing "back".
The Sylvanas we have now has NOTHING to do with the Sylvanas from Warcraft 3 till BfA.
It is not the same person in any aspect. That is simply an objective fact.

I am also fundamentally disagreeing on the quality of her so called "redemption arc" because of exactly this, but ofc THAT is subjective and if you liked it - fair enough, good for you.

[Feitori]

I think the biggest issue was that BFA looked really cool, had interesting plot hooks, interesting new mechanics and features, but all of it was unfinished and the expansion ended up feeling very underwhelming. I personally still had a lot of fun playing it and don't hate it, but damn... the things that could have been...

[MatthewOU2015]

Titanforging before it was capped I had worldquest gear as BIS for my toon

[Khaza-R]

1. iLvl squish + artifact removal left + GCD changes a lot of classes feeling awful in the start of BfA. Wasn't really until Essences came along that classes started to feel better. And that was a very long 11 months for those that stuck around.

2. Story was highly divisive right out of the gate. BfA managed to make both factions feel bad. For the Alliance it was another expansion of being the punching bag and for the Horde is was another "crazy Warchief" story

3. Extremely returning player and alt un-friendly. BfA hands down was the most alt unfriendly expansion to date. Imagine many people coming back for 8.3 because of COVID just to have to grind their HoA, Essences, Corruption and the cloak. Doing it on one character was exhausting, very little people had to the stomach to do it multiple times. It was eventually fixed but not after months of frustration.

Those are really the main 3 reasons I saw resonated in most complaints. Overall though I still liked BfA and enjoyed 8.2 and 8.3. It wasn't my favorite expansion but it wasn't nearly as bad as some people make it out to be.

[Delever]

I love her redemption arc - it made up for the shit we had to endure with BfA.

And yes, I'm glad we got the heroic Sylvanas back with 9.2 instead of whatever Afrasiabi created during BfA.

Well.... at least theres one other person in this world that loves Steve Danuser other than his mother.

[Gigantique]

Umm. Youve abviously never been around a forest fire when it gets going. It does not matter if it is dead or alive. It burns the same. Also you need to remember a lot of the buildings were made from wood. Dead wood that was cut up.

Keywords being 'once it gets going'. Forest fires start with dry/dead underbrush, not living trees. And IIRC the catapults hit dead on the tree itself, not up in the crown or base where the buildings would be.

It's an easy enough experiment, try setting up a campfire with freshly cut wood, you'll have a bitch of a time getting it going, even more so if you do the scale of Teldrassil's trunk compared to those flimsy little catapult-shots.

[Nymrohd]

It was a rehash of MoP without any of the charm. The war story was done way better in MoP trying to redo that story in itself is bad cause it ruins all the progress the Horde made. Sylvanas should not have gone evil we already did the evil warchief expansion a better story would be when Nzoth rises he takes over the Void Elves and Sylvanas wanting to save Alleria calls for a end of hostilities to fight Nzoth and free her sister only to die in fighting the Old God. Burning Darn was just over the top and unnecessary the Alliance should have been the aggressors in the war stopping the development of Azerite weapons is more than reason enough.

They could have had N'zoth's cultists instigate the war to weaken us. Or if they were dead set on Shadowlands, have Bolvar be the villain (that we would not find about until the end) that sets the entire war up; would have been much more interesting after Legion's build up. Instead of campaigns about Sylvanas kicking dogs we could have had something like the Legion Rogue campaign trying to find what caused the war to escalate.

[ChairmanKaga]

Min/maxers hated Azerite and then the Corruptions at the end but Min/Maxers hate everything in game so it's hardly news.

[Relapses]

Min/maxers hated Azerite and then the Corruptions at the end but Min/Maxers hate everything in game so it's hardly news.

Min/maxers hated Corruption at first, mostly because of the lack of control; but they loved the system when you buy specific Corruptions off the vendor. I don't think the game ever has (or ever will again) allowed players to so fully optimize their character's power. It was absolutely insane how much power you could eke out of the the Corruption system, it's the kind of stuff min/max'ers have wet dreams about.

[Makaloff]

First of, I played Wow until the end of 2018. Meaning that I only played BFA in the first raid tier. I was able to kill Mythic Zul with my guild, and tried the island expenditions, the new allied race, and the warfronts.

I remember that I really enjoyed the expansion, I quit just because I got a new job and wow was very time consuming.

So, I really want to know why BFA was so hated. I have read enough information about why Shadowland was considered the worst WOW expansion, but I havent see much information why BFA was hated too.

Thanks

essentially it was the borrowed power that was the major issue. massive grind for the neck piece, benthic grind in 8.2 in nazjatar and grinding the neck uppgrades ontop of that. 8.3 got even worse with corruptions (worst borrowed power ever implemented). was lovely when you had 3 things from beyond spawning ontop of you in the time of 5 seconds and killing you.

Not to mention they got the brilliant idea to remove class and tier sets and justified it with "we will add more sets instead", those sets ending up being recolored firelands gear that dropped from island expeditions.

All in all, it was the systems and the poor raids that ruined the expansion, the zones themselfs and the music was very nice thought.

[Zantera]

I didn't think BFA was that bad for me personally. It had some flaws like most expansions and it had that 'systems trying to cover up for other systems' between patches but at the end of the day I had more fun with the dungeons and raids of BFA than I did with the ones in Wotlk and Cata for example.

[Revamp Man]

Forced personal loot
Mythic plus gear lock
Devs telling players that they are wrong and don't understand the game
Removing Tier sets for gear that only had 1 out of every 10 traits that effected game play that you had to regrind for every tier
Nerfed gear acquisition
Loot trading restrictions
Narrative shift to pleasing the players that aren't effected by the changes while blaming the players that were with lies about trials not getting loot and making little Jimmy think that since they can't swap gear he's no longer going to get rejected from that +5

[enigma77]

Pruned classes (we lost all legendaries and artifact weapons) leaving classes in a very bad state
Islands & Warfronts replaced Dungeons as the primary way of farming AP and they both sucked
Instead of farming AP for cool weapons we farmed AP for trash Azerite Armor, with a few boring traits