Battle For Azeroth is becoming more favorable as people look back

[TheramoreIsTheBomb]

As this is expected with any product but for BFA specifically what do you think of this?

(THESE ARE NOT MY OPINIONS)
The top 3 things I've seen were:
The story was great. Varok, Jaina, Bwomsamdi, and Talanji stories carrying. [Outside of Old Gods, Sylvanas 4d Chess, and Ashara]
Beautiful and easy to navigate questing zones.
Fun Mythic + dungeons and raids.

My opinion of BFA remains unchanged. I personally think it's one of the worst expansions ever released as it slammed the story and left it almost beyond repair and then Shadowlands came and I need not to say more..
I hated Azerite armor with a passion and all these systems on top of systems inside of systems requiring a system to be triggered by a system to obtain that system's benefit within that system.

How about you?


[Fucked up on one of the poll options there.]

[Myradin]

It might be skewed by the current leveling experience.

I technically skipped BFA and came back for a bit in the SL prepatch, and I found BFA's leveling experience, story, and dungeons to be great. The systems were already somewhat paired back and not a big deal because SL was coming out soon. The max level stuff did seem of considerably less quality in places, but I'd be lieing if SL prepatch BFA was some of the most fun i had in years.

[Gimlix]

I never understood why BFA was hated upon, BFA was prettty good even when it was current content.
Only expansions i generally dislike is Shadowlands and Warlords of Draenor.

In terms of theme i massively hated legion.

[Echeyakee]

BFA had a great (as alliance, or an ok as horde) leveling/early story and the best "pre-endgame" gearing process (I mean pre raid/m+/rated pvp). But that does not make a good expansion.

[Zardas]

The story was great.

it slammed the story and left it almost beyond repair

I'm not sure to understand here

[erifwodahs]

I have always said that 8.2 was a good patch and that 8.3.5 (where you could buy alt stuff + corruptions) was actually fun because of how broken stuff was. Didn't enjoy stuff before 8.2 and hated 8.3 because of how insanely broken shit was which was also pure RNG.

[Noctiphobia]

I think that the biggest problem with BfA was that it was just more of the same ("Legion 2.0") with a different story that people didn't love. If BfA released after WoD, I think it would have been received much more favorably.

[loras]

The gameplay sucked, most classes outright didn't feel functional.
The story sucked ass in several senses, primarily the Sylvanas part of it.
Nazjatar and Mechagon felt empty and incomplete.
HoA and azerite sucked ass.
The zones were nice initially but later felt exceptionally dead and disjointed.
Having only half of all zones truly available sucked ass, you missed so much of the other zones that it was heard to remember why you bothered.
Azerite sucked ass.
Warfronts and island expeditions were failed abandonware.


But there were many upsides too:
The artwork and music was the best it has been in a long time now, even if some of the "claymation-style" models started seeping in back then already.
There were a lot of interesting mechanics in the dungeons, raids and even the world had some neat stuff, the city siege raid was the best i've seen in a long time.
Visions of N'zoth were awesome.
Corruption was neat at the start, allowing us to balance drawbacks with benefits.
Boralus is still the single best city they've made so far, imo. It was criminally underused and could have easily served as a subzone in itself.


So all in all it's still bad in hindsight in spite of the tremendous effort they put into it, mostly because the morons kicked out the gameplay designers after they were like "Oh it's good now in Legion? Then we don't need you anymore.". Peak manager logic.
You can make the best content ever (it wasn't) and it would still suck if the means to experience said content sucked.

Even Shadowlands being yet worse couldn't save it.

[Revamp Man]

There were constant complaints about zones iirc
The m+ scene was painful for the prison and the witch dungeon especially with the garbage affixes
Story wasn't terrible though

[enigma77]

Bfa was a massively inferior version of Legion.

[Julmara]

champion the wounds !!! omg the WOUNDS !!!

[hulkgor]

Loved BFA and despite some early issues, it got to a very good state very fast.

Some amazing dungeons (Freehold, Waycrest Manor and Underrot for example), great raids, an amazing m+ seasonal affix in Reaping, and so, so much more.

It also went complete overpower-land with corruptions at the end for those who enjoy it.

The story of the expansion might not have been great, but the gameplay side of it was phenomenal.

10/10, would play again.

[Murlocos]

Huge miss for me. It's common for the side stories to outshine the main plot, but everything to do with the Fourth War was obscenely bad. Virtually every new system they introduced outside of Essences were a complete bomb: Azerite armor was a headache that took both artifact weapons and tier gear and made them a constant chore to keep track of, island expeditions were nothing content, Warfronts are something that are conceptually interesting but the total lack of a fun factor should have been noticed right away in internal testing.

I think my opinion's actually lowered even more seeing as the main pitch of the expansion was essentially thrown out to segue into Shadowlands, and the writers want nothing more than to move on from BfA. It's just Shadowlands: Part 1.

[Shadowferal]

Sylvanas expansion was great?

[ONCHEhap]

Early BfA levelling was good, the rest was a mess. It was also probably the worst the game got in terms of m+ gearing outclassing everything else by an absurd margin, took two expansions to roll it back to a less insane degree.
Story past levelling was also straight up bad with all the sylvanas nonsense.

All BfA accomplished was not being as bad as Shadowlands. But it takes genuine effort to put out something that's as bad or worse than shadowlands. Besides, story wise BfA was literally just used to justify shadowlands existing, it was a prequel to Danuser's not so divine comedy

[erifwodahs]

I think that the biggest problem with BfA was that it was just more of the same ("Legion 2.0") with a different story that people didn't love. If BfA released after WoD, I think it would have been received much more favorably.

Pretty much - by the end of Legion AP grind was boring tedious even for people like me who loved it at the start - it really felt like "max level leveling" for me and it was great, so we enter BFA and we get more of the same - not great. We also had much less to do, lost a considerable amount of power/class fun due to legendary items/artefacts being removed and have been given another RNG fiesta to grind - Azerite Armor. It was really like worse version of Legion AND they undid several fixes which Legion had sorted out by the end of it.

[vizzle]

I'm not sure to understand here

Read his post again, slower.

[TheramoreIsTheBomb]

I'm not sure to understand here

Look above the story was great.

- - - Updated - - -

The gameplay sucked, most classes outright didn't feel functional.
The story sucked ass in several senses, primarily the Sylvanas part of it.
Nazjatar and Mechagon felt empty and incomplete.
HoA and azerite sucked ass.
The zones were nice initially but later felt exceptionally dead and disjointed.
Having only half of all zones truly available sucked ass, you missed so much of the other zones that it was heard to remember why you bothered.
Azerite sucked ass.
Warfronts and island expeditions were failed abandonware.
Even Shadowlands being yet worse couldn't save it.

I agree with all of this especially on Sylvanas. It should be criminal how they dealt with her character.

[shise]

BfA was bad, but better than DF (for now) and obviously better than SL, anything was better than SL. SL was not wow...

But BfA had a great thing coming for it.. content. It had a LOT of content.. problem with it was the way they released it, make the previous patch completely irrelevant. But at least there was a lot of stuff to do.
Systems were bad, raids where good... leveling was bad (too fast) but fun and good maps. A very mixed expansion which ranks very low in the overall of expansions, but definitely the best of the last 3 (again, so fat, DF is still in early days).

[Nathanyel]

I liked the story per se, just didn't like the pointless return to the faction conflict. I can see that now as one of the last influences of Afrasiabi, but that's an explanation, not an excuse.
Just like I think WoD could have worked in broad strokes without the time travel/alternate timeline (Warlords would be descendants/imposters/resurrected [the latter especially for Gul'dan, to lead into Legion] and Gorian Ogres/High Arakkoa come from Outland shards floating back) you could have had some animosities via the Kul Tirans mistrusting the Horde over Daelin, and the Zandalari being too proud to forgive old slights by the Alliance races, while not having a full-blown global war, with the threat of N'Zoth becoming more and more clear, leading to a tentative truce to fight the Old God's forces invading Uldum & the Vale.

I didn't raid during BfA so I wasn't bothered by the Azerite grind (I barely did any islands) but I can understand how people felt like they had to do that.

Patch cadence took a dip there already, probably as resources were moved to the development of Shadowlands (which then in turn took a broadside by the Pandemic) and that's not great even as a then-casual player.

So overall my opinion hasn't changed much, the expansion does rank very low on my list, but to me it was rather a stumble than a fall, a good expansion overall with great additions like the ARs and the Zandalar story in general, dragged down by bad aspects.