Sure BFA is bad, but...

[Skildar]

I was mainly raiding in Wod and it was way more fun for me than bfa.
For starters even though there weren't any dailies or wq to get you out in the world, you would travel in it for the achievements and the scenery. Whereas Bfa zones are not polished or pretty, except for Voldun, the rest of the zones feel like a mess.

Raiding was very nice in Wod because there weren't many requirements to fill outside of raiding sessions! This allowed you to do any activities you wanted to.
While in Bfa you get most of your gear from M+, pvp and outdoor farming. If your goal is to do mythic raiding, you almost forced to spend as much time farming outside of raid than raiding inside.

Wod soundtrack is crazy good and way superior to bfa's.

Unfortunately wod also introduced many flawed features and very little content. I really wished they'd add more story to this expac but nope :'(

[Philomene]

WoD was a terrible expansion but so BfA is, for different reasons though. Actually WoD is only the beginning of that era, which could be the third : WoW / BC / WotLK, Cata / MoP, WoD / Legion / BfA. WoD was bad because they destroyed the classes, they slowly introduced excessive RNG, it's also when they completely made all the crafting and professions irrelevant along with severely damaging the progression systems thanks to the Garrison. It was also bad because of its staleness. Raids were pretty good though, but that's not surprising, no expansions has ever been awful raiding-wise.

The only thing BfA has over WoD is "better" crafting systems (which are still mainly useless thanks to gem sockets being RNG and gear customisation being at its lowest, so this better is still utter trash), better patches and available content. Available content which are basically daily chores you gotta do in order to keep up because there's no catching up or just blasting through it to make it up for a couple of days you won't be able to play. BfA is the pinnacle of the Diablo / mobile game design where everything rewards you a token for the loot / reward pathetic slot machine, with classes that are less that a former shadow of what they once were. While the garrison could've been salvaged with some fixes and a rework, IE and warfronts are just straight uninteresting and a complete failure, just another way to put a token in the reward slot machine. At least they understood this pretty fast and they stopped developing warfronts and just implemented heroic mode which was just getting steamrolled as the normal mode 2 hours after it was pushed to live thanks to the item level increase.

Shadowlands seems "promising", as all expacs seem to be when they're presented during Blizzcon. In the end there's 95% chance it will still be another WoD-era expansion. People liked Legion because WoD was before, but I really think that if Legion was next to MoP, it would have been welcomed pretty poorly as it is such a downgrade in a lot of departments, even if it had good ideas and an interesting story. In the end, it doesn't matter that they remove titanforging or whatever system people have a grief with. They'll just implement something worse as they use the MAU metric. MAU metrics are the main reason why we get that diablo / mobile game systems in game and unless they start using another metric to evaluate the success of the game, WoW will still be in that poor state that some people enjoy, and that's okay, maybe the issue with WoW is that it tried to please everyone.

[Tyrannica]

Shadow was fucking dogshit in WoD because it was the worst-scaling spell caster with the ring due to the lack of a legitimate DPS cooldown. You had to farm trash outside HFC every fucking pull which was a complete drag during progression.

Now, if all you did was the LFR... maybe it was okay? It didn't play terribly but it didn't play very well either.

I was talking about shadow priest pvp in wod, it was the best. People got melted as you got huge and fast burst, and it all got pruned for some tentacle porn. WoD was a great pvp expansion, why would i talk about pve in wod? that one sucked balls.

- - - Updated - - -

I mean its quite simple, people hating on wod are only playing pve. If you did this, of course WoD is far worser than even BfA. There was literally no content for you. On the other side if you did PvP, you were provided with the Gladiator Sanctum to farm some race kills for titels - it was huge fun to say the least and WoDs pvp was fast paced, unlike MoPs it all felt naturally fluent to play.

With less pruning of abilities and cross realm in WoD zones, this expansion could have been a thriller.

BfA had far more content, but not the same quality content you can enjoy for a longer period of time. I mean servant of n'zoth only in the last patch and 10 kills and your are done? Why not even a falcosaur mark of the prey pvp rep like in legion, at the very least?

Devs are very lazy, the other disturbing thing are warfronts, i hoped this feature is the main one in BfA, i thought its a huge thing......and it would have been if those warfronts were pvp warfronts.

Many people were irritated, warfronts were actually pve in a faction addon.Korraks revenge wasn't pve, thus it was a huge success. Imagine it beeing pve....ugh.

PvE only really works in an raiding environment of at least hc/mythic difficulty or its not enganging.

Mythic+ did not work for me, you can get easy gear there, but its all you merely do, if you don't raid with a guild and its all the same all the expansion long.

Warmode is a joke too, you catch 1 Bounty and the next one is nothing worth anymore and people can phase/shard zone away in the middle of a fight, unlike classic.

I can only say, BfA should learn from WoD and Classic, both kept it simple with gear systems and were yet effective in what they did.

Lets face it there is no saving grace for BfA other than the good work of artists and thats kinda confirmed by the game director himself.

Music, graphics, nice designed zones(mmmh drustvar and nazmir :-*) new races.

BfA is just a work of art, not gameplay.

[Sorrowseer]

So comparing something bad to something bad is supposed to what, make it less bad? Go to bed.

[justandulas]

The high end of the game, and rewarding high quality raiders... was better in wod. Unquestionably

In bfa, every patch resets everything like a diablo 3 season and everyone is basically equal. Don’t raid mythic? No problem, some titanforging drop or now corruption drop will equalize the playing field. /eyeroll

Bfa is the only expac I never finished, and it actually made me nostalgic for wod

[Zorachus]

Been playing WoW since launch, only time I unsubbed was WoD.

Garrison's killed the game for me. Made it feel like a single player solo game all alone in your dumb Garrison.

[Not A Cat]

WoD had good dungeons and imo some of the best raids, but that's it. Blizzard put minimal effort into the garrisons so they ended up being a mind numbing chore. The only thing good about them was that I essentially play the game for free because of all the gold I made.

BFA is pretty bad, but not nearly as bad as WoD and Cata, don't even get me started on Cata.

[Beefkow]

I had a blast as an unholy dk.

Soul reaper execute, multistrike was fun! Even though it was just simple numbers popping on your screen, it's an illusion of satisfaction.

Now it's a pimple popping spec and auto attack is your #1 damage, wtf?

[dmitriy138]

I like how you try to make bfa not seem all that bad by comparing it to another bad expansion. Both are really garbage, but BFA is definitely on the more garbage side than wod.

[Jerot]

Toy and tabard storage, crafting from banks and increased stack sizes, no more 10/25 heroic split drama, global flex raid implementation (Still in use today) helped smaller guilds. Ashran was janky but it did a fairly good job emulating old AV, while including some new objectives and mechanics. Garrisons were fun initially, even if they didn't hold up, I'm glad they tried something different.

WoD > BFA

Mythic + and WQ are Legion, BFA doesn't get points for keeping existing features, unless you also want to dock points for class and item design, which was better in WoD by a mile.

[Soon-TM]

WoD's endgame was raiding and sitting on top of your mission table, if you truely think that is better than bfa then theres somethin wrong with you.

This actually poses an interesting question. Is it better to have precious little content with good gameplay, or to have a lot of largely forgettable content with awful gameplay? Is it better being bitten by a lion or by a venomous snake? Would you rather lose a leg or your eyes?

Because that's how I see the subject at hand.

[Nnyco]

This actually poses an interesting question. Is it better to have precious little content with good gameplay, or to have a lot of largely forgettable content with awful gameplay? Is it better being bitten by a lion or by a venomous snake? Would you rather lose a leg or your eyes?

Because that's how I see the subject at hand.

Raiding is good in bfa, just like it was in wod. Mission tables are literally the same but were more lucrative obviously. So we still have all the content we had in wod today and more.

[Soon-TM]

Raiding is good in bfa, just like it was in wod. Mission tables are literally the same but were more lucrative obviously. So we still have all the content we had in wod today and more.

The point is that "more" doesn't necessarily equal "better". So, while BfA has more raids than WoD, that means squat for non-raiders - exactly the same problem that WoD had. If it wasn't for M+ (even with all its associated issues), BfA would have died a horrible death.

Which also leads me to think that WoD would have fared much better had it had M+. Yes, I know that the direct predecessor to M+, aka Challenge dungeons, had been implemented before, but at that time they had zero replay value.

[probert]

WOD:

- better story
- better raids
- garrisons > heart of azeroth (i can't believe i jsut typed this...but its true)
- much more organic activities: achievements; rare bosses and items;
- more zones available to both factions, so you weren't leveling through the same 3 quest hubs ever character
- MUCH better class design
- the last time PvP was fun

WoD is better than we remember, even if there were long content droughts and some of the experiments (garrisons in particular) ended up as noble failures.

BFA is the most cynical and half hearted game design I've seen in a long while.

[xiloclipse]

I think what made WoD so bad, was it was the first truly terrible experience many in the game had. Cata was bad, but MoP imo was a highpoint for how classes felt, the health of the raiding environment, etc. It was the start of the decline.

The only reason why WoD could feel worse than BFA is that folks are already numb to it.

[Nnyco]

The point is that "more" doesn't necessarily equal "better". So, while BfA has more raids than WoD, that means squat for non-raiders - exactly the same problem that WoD had. If it wasn't for M+ (even with all its associated issues), BfA would have died a horrible death.

Which also leads me to think that WoD would have fared much better had it had M+. Yes, I know that the direct predecessor to M+, aka Challenge dungeons, had been implemented before, but at that time they had zero replay value.

I take m+, wq, invasions, hoa, essences, corruption gear, etc etc any day over afking on my garrisons table.

[david0925]

One major problem with WoD and BFA seems to be, ironically, opposite.

WoD there is only 1 way to progress your character: raiding.
BFA gave you so much RNG from titanforging and now multiple ranks of corruption that you feel compelled to grind m+ nonstop, and thus diluting character progression to RNG fest.

There's definitely other issues, but the aforementioned ones are big and somewhat amusing to me.

[Nahrees]

I feel like WoD and BfA are similar in the way they are kinda testing grounds for the next expansion, which sounds like an awful way of releasing content. The only saving grace BfA has is that M+ and raids are good, much like how WoD had some exceptionally good raids as well.

However, the story for BfA is an unexplained mess that was no where near as conjoined like WoD's story was. The Slyvanas story needed to be shown in small cutscenes and not explained after everything she planned happened. If you've played FF14, they do small cutscenes showing off what the villians are off doing, which helps keep the story coherent.

The failures of BfA is that class and gear design. Azerite, like everyone said in the alpha and beta, was a terrible design and essences are frustrating to acquire unless you play all aspects of the game. WoD on the other hand had good class design with zero game play outside of raiding. When some of the main content was sitting in a single place, its really removes the MMO from MMORPG.

To me, I would rather have BfA than a WoD. That being said, I want Shadowlands to be the best of all of the expansions and I'm going to try to add my voice to what we see is going wrong in the alpha and beta.

[Loveliest]

Not sure why we continue to argue of what overall expansion was the worst.
I think WoD is viewed as bad because it didn't offer enough casual content nor enough group content to do in the usual 'downtime' a few weeks after launch or after a patch hits.
And I think BfA is viewed as bad because 1. we don't like the story (even though it's just as bad now as it was 20 years ago, only now we're involved in it) 2. we were told by streamers and big guilds grind is bad - which makes us hate the neck, hate titanforging / warforging, hate the azerite system on gear, hate reps (which we've always had), hate dailies and so on. Sure, objectively they tried to replace legendaries and artifact with the azerite system and that didn't work as well, but it's nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be, using generic expressions that imply "dumpster fire" and whatever is popular to use to say you're unhappy without giving an actual explanation or reason.
As a side note, I like the class / spec I play and I find it fun. Saying that all classes are trash also seems like a generic statement meant to show hate and less an actual pov.

[Daedius]

WoD didn't have the multitudes of layers upon layers of RNG that Legion and BfA brought about.

That in itself makes WoD far better than Legion and BfA, where the latter preyed on player compulsion.