BFA is done. Time for your official review

[enigma77]

The results of this survey are extremely predictable. Ask the same again in two years. Everything will change. Exactly like WoD.

Quoting you to tell you how WROOOOOONG you are.

WoD was dog shit and is remembered as such, just like Bfa will.

Again you are WROOOOOOOOOOONG.

[Pawpurr]

I had quit from the end of Cataclysm (Dragon soul + panda announced was my time to yeet out) - And came back for BFA.

I was pleasantly surprised that the game and my class was still largely recognizable. I didn't love the borrowed power systems, as the last time I played the game we still had reforging and classes had more mechanical depth as well.

I agree that the story was disjointed and weird at times; I wish they had done Eternal Palace as the final raid and led us to fight N'zoth properly across a whole expac. But

Shadowlands seems fantastic, and fixes some of my issues returning from Cata era (Like giving holy power back to my specs, thank goodness). I think SL will make me think less of BFA, As playing thru old legion content does, But we'll see.

[Firebert]

Metacritic Score / User Score:

WoW (2004): 93/7.4
BC (2007): 91/8.1
WotLK (2008): 91/7.8
Cataclysm (2010): 90/5.7
MoP (2012): 82/5.1
WoD (2014): 87/5.8
Legion (2016): 88/7.3
BfA (2018): 79/3.0

My review and tier list is linked here.

[Swnem]

I feel like we keep getting this thread.

Anyways, in short, i liked what was there at launch. I didn't like the patches and i didn't like the terrible systems they carried over from Legion, as well as the anemic class design.

I didn't like Nazjatar. Mechagon was funny but had too much bag trash. Essences should have been account wide.
Last patch, all hell broke loose. Corruptions break the game.

I'm personally sick of these temporary power systems. Can we use the dev time for other things? Evergreen systems and content. These short term systems aren't good for anyone or especially fun.

[Easyclassictopkeklel]

I played Warlords of Draenor, start to finish. BfA was worse.

I don't care how little content WoD had. I don't care that BfA was bursting at the seams with content. None of that matters compared to gameplay and systems. When it comes to that, BfA is hands down the worst expansion ever. It's not even a comparison. It's not close to close.

In fact, despite 7.3 being a relatively good patch, I'd still put Legion below WoD as well for the same reasons. The systems design was god-fucking-awful. Content comes and goes. Gameplay is the core of what makes WoW a fun game... and Legion/BfA gameplay was absolute dogshit because of endless chores and RNG, not to mention the piss-poor class design that used borrowed power as a crutch.

oh please, legion was far better than WOD...there is a reason many think it is one of the best or even the best expansion yet.
It's not like that in WOD every class had a good design and fun gameplay...you're biased af. WOD had one of the best raids ever released, but thats about it. Garrions, shipyard, Ashran...pure cancer bro

[loras]

Circumstances: Alliance-side only (so far), just a few months of playing at a time in a given patch (max 2 months in a row), mostly as an arms warrior, pvp-appreciating player without teams, pugger, occasionally seeks out a guild to tag along with (god bless the death of master loot for forcing groups to take the sticks out of their asses with regards to loot).

Story: 5/10, hard to rate as a lot of stuff remains unanswered, however given the way it was all presented it's clunky as fuck at the very least with some significant oversights (giant sword next to the corpse of a known old god anyone? No? Okay...).
Ambience: 8/10, surprisingly good, not like legion where the expansion felt like "Oh no THE LEGION is invading! Anyway let's do some sidequests while nothing of note seems to be happening. In BFA the war campaign funnels directly into the war theme and keeps on going with skirmishes, invasions and more such stuff, i did not like mechagon and Nazjatar but even there the ambience was good.
PvE world/visions: 7/10, liked most quests, invasions, loved visions until they went stale (sometime before getting that title-achievement thingy), wasn't too much of a fan of the mix of dailies and world quests, and world quests seem to fall short a lot more often than in legion, often being more tedious and jarring in their interaction with the general theme of the location (though specific examples elude me).
PvE raiding/mythic+: 7/10, pretty good stuff, pretty fun fights, a lot of it nicely puggable up to and including some mythic bosses without it feeling undertuned.
PvP world: 6/10 , love warmode and it has at least brought back some world pvp, and it's entirely avoidable if you don't want to. However the quests they paired with it do not really encourage enjoyable pvp combat at all. Still, i've had some fun decently equal engagements of one-on-one, few-on-few and even a rare few raid-versus-raid that did not devolve into mindless ganking. I'd consider it a work in progress.
PvP instanced: 1/10, ridiculous "balance", forced to play PvE for proper pvp gear, world quests literally beat the rewards of common pvp. It seems to me that they have somehow forgotten that in player versus player one of the two has to lose for the other to win, they do not award their loot accordingly. Also the inability to reach anything of note while solo-queuing is very annoying, given how understandably picky and flavor-of-the-month-y people get when pugging in team pvp.
Replayability/altfriendliness: 4/10, it has so many stacked systems that need to be grinded that one is put off just by the thought of it, however the many added races did provide undeniable incentive. And with pvp being the main source of replayability in my eyes (after all people are at least mildly intelligent and thus remain interesting to play against regardless of how often you do so) that really ruined the main replayability for me.

General remarks: So much squandered potential with Islands being rush-fests instead of chill exploring and warfronts just being a complete and utter failure that lacked the pvp it obviously needed to be interesting. And i'm gonna have to beat the dead horse of class design once more because truly it was god-awful in the sense that it felt wrong in so many ways; clunky, forcing you to use abilities you don't want to (of all the abilities they could have kept, why did it have to be slam!? ugh i hate slam... though the eye-demon for affli warlocks also comes to mind) and really the whole fantasy of classes and their abilities seems to be completely off (why am i, as a master of armed combat, mostly just using my weapon to "slam"? How does that fit the fantasy in any way? An armsmaster should prepare the perfect strike by i.e. whittling down the guard of his opponent, not slam like some furious retard).

Final verdict: 4,5/10 (due to variously weighted aforementioned results): A lot of unfulfilled potential, a lot of failure, felt too grindy, but most importantly: It just wasn't fun. Too many systems that were meant to make something incomplete seem complete just made it worse. And that's what matters most after all: the gameplay, it's the lens through which you experience all the content.

Parting thought: It seems to me that they design zones better when they design them with flying in mind, even if it may be more of a hassle for them. While the initial questing experience was by no means bad the zones lose a lot of their luster as time passes and it's clear that you've really seen all relevant parts a thousand times already (and if flying makes it all too boring to navigate then add stuff to make it more interactive; gravity to speed you up and slow you down, winds to keep you on your toes or benefit you, etcetera...)

[Uselessrouge]

there have been worse but thank god i had classic to kill time..

i would love to say i want to play shadowlands.. but at this point BC seems more interesting :/


its a shame cause retail has so many improvements over classic/bc but then they screw it up with stupid stuff like leveling a cloak + corruptions + procs + rng + grind grind



i was expecting more since the End of legion was pretty fun for me.. loved the end of legion

[Easyclassictopkeklel]

I feel like we keep getting this thread.

Anyways, in short, i liked what was there at launch. I didn't like the patches and i didn't like the terrible systems they carried over from Legion, as well as the anemic class design.

I didn't like Nazjatar. Mechagon was funny but had too much bag trash. Essences should have been account wide.
Last patch, all hell broke loose. Corruptions break the game.

I'm personally sick of these temporary power systems. Can we use the dev time for other things? Evergreen systems and content. These short term systems aren't good for anyone or especially fun.

agreed, but don't you get why they are trying those systems? It's because a game like WOW shouldnt be around after all those years anymore. You simply can't add new meaningful talents in every expansion, yet people want something "new" so the decision to try those systems is understandable imo.
But I also dont know why they always go completely overboard with it. I mean I would be fine if we just had a lot of craftable legendaries which alter gameplay...but adding covenants and soulbinds on top will just be too much.

[Wangming]

Pros:
- Jaina's BDSM outfit
- Kul Tiras especially Drustvar
- Staggered though it might have been, it had a lot more playable content than WoD
- The last raid tier won't last as long as Siege of Orgrimmar
- More CGI cutscenes instead of ingame eyebleed
- Saurfang is finally dead

Cons:
- Worst writing to date
- Classes were so boring it was a pain
- Nazjatar and Niya'lotha were both huge wastes of potential along with their rules
- Some of the allied races definitely weren't ones people would have chosen.

[Swnem]

agreed, but don't you get why they are trying those systems? It's because a game like WOW shouldnt be around after all those years anymore. You simply can't add new meaningful talents in every expansion, yet people want something "new" so the decision to try those systems is understandable imo.
But I also dont know why they always go completely overboard with it. I mean I would be fine if we just had a lot of craftable legendaries which alter gameplay...but adding covenants and soulbinds on top will just be too much.

I don't agree with that at all.
We have class and talent systems already. If they are worried about too many skills they can have choices, just like the covenant abilities, but under class systems that are long term.
But, honestly, that was a lie fed to us. Pruning would never have been a problem if they were also adding abilities. Theres also more options, like a new skill that is actually an upgrade of an existing skill and replaces it.

But, yeah... some gear effects are fine. Set bonuses and legedaries for example are more than enough.

[klaps_05]

I see a lot of "many problems, blizzard didnt react", when exactly has blizzard ever reacted more than once a patch exactly?

[Marxman]

oh please, legion was far better than WOD...there is a reason many think it is one of the best or even the best expansion yet.
It's not like that in WOD every class had a good design and fun gameplay...you're biased af. WOD had one of the best raids ever released, but thats about it. Garrions, shipyard, Ashran...pure cancer bro

I'm not saying WoD was good. I'm just saying that as a very gameplay-focused person, it was far better than the RNG lottery of Legion. Legion had the potential to be a great expansion, but it completely flopped because of Legendaries, Titanforging, class design, and the AP grind.

[Thetruth1400]

Story:
The initial story was good with the leveling zones. The war story was good too, but way too slow paced / events taking place too periodic to feel like we actually were part of it. Instead it felt like a story from the outside that we were just getting a glimpse of, which didn't make it feel rewarding. The N'Zoth story too just kind of felt like it was pulled out of someone's ass at the last second to add a raid tier on, which also then felt like it was just wrapped up way too quickly.

PvE:
They still can't manage basic balance and at the highest end of the game there is a ~20k difference between the top DPS and the bottom. They need to work on getting that right and consistent, before adding in all these other systems like Azerite or the level of stuff coming in Shadowlands, which are just going to compound the inability to balance issue.

PvE content: The raids were decent, the dungeons decent, but the gearing was a crappy nightmare system yet again that made gearing and progressing not feel rewarding unless you got lucky enough to get the best of several layers of RNG.

A lot of the other features felt lackluster and tacked on as time killers or grinds, not fun to do content.

PvP: I'm not much of a PvP player so can't say much on that front, but the Warmode system made it 100% clear how crappy and imbalanced the PvP is in this game. They made the warmode system which is just not satisfying for anyone. Shards are fundamentally not balancable because the factions aren't balanced. The sides are so lopsided they actually tried to bribe the Alliance back into the content with a 30% rewards buff, but the reality is, that doesn't solve the issue. The numbers and skill are just too imbalanced that a reward is meaningless unless the power and numbers are near equal. A 30% buff, by their own words, means overwhelmingly outnumbered. We don't know exactly what Blizzard's interpretation of that is, but for the common man, it means a lot. A 10% buff means balanced, so anything greater than that means outnumbered, which is essentially a death sentence.

All the players can see it, but Blizzard refuses to see it; the only way to balance it short of force is with extreme rewards, which they can't do because that will just make Horde players cry that they don't get the rewards too.



WoD was a bad expansion, but it was because it was content light. BfA was extremely content heavy, but that content was absolute trash. So after all is said in done, I think it's safe to say that BfA is far and away the worst expansion to date and hopefully they learned from it what not to do.

[Boricha]

Nazmir was an excellent leveling zone. BoD was a great raid. All of the convoluted and boring power progression systems, unnecessary and contrived grinds, bizarre side content, poor base class design, lack of tuning anything across the expansion, obscene amount of bugs, lazy and at times nonsensical narrative direction, and lack of clarity from the devs led it to be my least favorite expansion.

The only I thing I can say I'll miss is reaping flames.

[Usernameforforums]

Trash raids
Trash pvp
Trash transmog
Trash systems

Conclusion: know your place, trash

If i had to give praise, essences were the highlight of the expansion.

At least wod had good raids

[Sharpeh32]

BFA = Worst expansion ever only expac I legit took a break from.

[shadowmatrix]

BFA
A decent expansion, has highs and lows. I've played better, I've played worse. I've played a lot worse.
7/10 Would recommend to my friends who are into MMOs.

[Poppincaps]

BoD is a top tier raid. Zuldazar is a great zone and Zandalar in general was really cool. The systems were horrible though. Better than WoD, worse than Cata.

[Toybox]

Worst expansion ever, & without doubt the longest I've ever been unsubscribed from WoW in my 14 years playing. It definitely has some highlights though...

Pros:
Mechagon is amazing. Probably the best patch-zone added since MoP.
Warmode is awesome. It's not the fault of the Horde that y'all are too scared to turn it on.
M+ is still great. Seasonal affixes were nice additions, & that looks to be continuing in Shadowlands with Prideful.
Zones were as gorgeous as always (except maybe Voldun, but how good can you make a desert look, really). Nazmir & Drustvar my pick of the zones aesthetically.

Cons:
If Legion was a regression in class design in some cases, then BfA was just a straight up execution. Absolutely baffling decisions resulting in many specs just never feeling right.
Some classes remaining borked throughout yet another expansion. Looks like SP finally get some love in Shadowlands, though...
GCD changes
Lackluster new content. Warfronts are forgettable, & Islands, while good for turning your brain off & mindlessly farming, could've been so much more.
Nazjatar just isn't all that good. It's not terrible, but compared to Mechagon?
Azerite. Period.
Everything about 8.3 from the boring zone revamps, questing, corruptions, etc. Visions are probably the exception, although I don't love them, they're decent.
Secondary stat squish from the off-set. Going into Legion, Blizzard said they'd be giving us higher levels of secondary stats because it helps some classes feel "right" & is a lot more fun to play, so why they went against that from the start, only to inflate everything so heavily at the end is beyond me.

So yeah, overall for me? The worst expansion I've played. Sure it had content, but the gameplay behind it was so lackluster that I ended up quitting relatively early & only came back due to Shadowlands looking so promising & raiding with the lads being so fun.

[Doomchicken]

It's a legit tough choice between worst wow expansion or one of the worst expansions. On one hand WoD had nearly nothing to do and of that nearly nothing to do almost none of it was worth doing, and BFA had a lot to do, but almost all of it was absolute shit and not worth doing. Honestly as a subjective opinion I'm not sure which is worse to me.