Sure BFA is bad, but...

[shise]

BfA is good, not one of the best imo, but is not all that bad. Problem with it is the experimenting that is going on, but without it, we wouldn´t get good new stuff (and we need new stuff). I am betting that Shadowlands will be a pretty epic expansion, cause now they got plenty of systems and errors to try out their new ideas.

Problem with WoD is that they compressed a size 10 feet in a nr 7 shoe. WoD would fit best in the time span of 2 whole expansions at least, it is a huge part of the whole Warcraft universe.

[azka]

I don't think WOD and BFA were bad. But I'm just a raider, what could I know about this game.

[Rustedsaint]

It’s a tough choice between a turd sandwich or a 4 course turd meal.
WoD had little content but the classes had some semblance of fairness and it was less of pain on alts since you only had to worry about the damn ring. Imo fuck time travel storylines.
While bfa had a lot more content in it, the Azerite grind,the cloak grind,the essence grind are just fucken brutal. The whole fraction war was retarded and ended in a stupid way. The old god was wasted aswell as the naga city. The mostly recycled content is annoying

[Fkiolaris]

As a casual who enjoys pvp as much as I enjoy pve, WoD was miles better than BFA. Why? Two simple reasons:

1) There were still classes/specs that were fun to play. All the content in the world is irrelevant if I don't enjoy the means through which I experience it
2) The best pvp-gearing systems this game ever had. Honour gear > non-raid pve gear of same tier WHILE DOING PVP, ditto for conquest and raid gear. Honour gear was a week-long effort at worst and if you didn't go to Ashran, while Conguest was slower but you could get there relatively quickly (again, with no Ashran). With Ashran the times were lower. Oh, and did I mention that you knew exactly what piece you were buying and with what stats etc on it?

[Coldfrostzero]

I've quit playing the game for about 3 months on average an expansion since Cataclysm. They were usually during content patches that offered nothing in the way of raids or dungeons, but eventually the new big patch would pull me in.

BFA has been completely different. I quit BFA in August and while I am playing Classic, if I log into BFA I quickly find myself saying "there's no point as I don't want to grind for weeks for artifact power." I did a Korrak's Revenge which nobody was even doing that part of it seemed so I quickly got bored of that as well after 2-3 instances. I have very little interest in Shadowlands as it looks like it has nothing to offer new which is a first for me to not be excited about an expansion at all.

My opinion on BFA systems are as follows:

Warfronts sounded amazing as I love WC3. Quickly you realize how unorganized and easy they are. They are nothing more than a way to get a piece of gear every week or so on an alt if you can get them gear through other means so they can meet the minimum for the Warfront.

Islands were touted as this completely new tech where the AI was as reactionary to what you do. Essentially, they just try to run away when they have low health. They aren't a challenge and they are a chore to fill your weekly AP meter.

Uldir raid was okay. I think G'huun was completely overtuned for a first tier boss. BoDA was better with more even amounts of difficulty throughout the raid. Mechatorque fight (with an organized group) is one of the best fights they've ever done.

Mythic+ makes dungeons mandatory every patch to get the highest item level of a trinket/item you've had for the entire expansion. Alternative gear paths are great, but they make Mythic raiding and the highest level of PVP only rewarding in a cosmetic way, if even that as they took away cool looking tier sets and now all gear types look the same.

World quests went from a nice added bonus in Legion when you needed some extra gold/mats/rep to having trinkets that are so good that not only do you need them to pop up so you can get it, if it doesn't titanforge at least a Heroic raid level it's probably going to be garbage and is disappointing.

Titanforging and tertiary bonuses make not getting them to happen unrewarding as much as getting them in lower content make them rewarding. If I do a boss on Normal and it drops a Mythic level or max ilvl item yay, but if that happens and I've been killing or attempting to kill that boss for weeks, now why would I care? I've seen the argument that Thunderforging/Warforging felt better and I can say I don't disagree completely, but it's still dumb when you start playing an alt and have extraordinary luck and your best gear drops and rolls forging+tertiary and suddenly your alt has better gear than the character you've been spending months on. I had to switch mains in Legion because my priest got the legendary belt when my paladin got the shitty ring because of how Mythic raiding works.

Artifact power is the worst player progression system in a long time. It should have never gone past BoDA. When you grind out your neck to max level and then they keep making more levels, it becomes unbearable. Then they add a bunch of unlockable bonuses that make some gear completely useless.

Can't comment on the neck unlockable stuff and the Corruption gear as I can't be asked to grind that shit out anymore. Seems like more and more nonsense RNG that makes lower ilvl gear better than higher item level gear which adversely affects getting in groups as they look at item level over anything and if you don't have your best ilvl gear on you, you're not likely going to be invited. Yes, you can make your own group, but that isn't ideal all of the time.

[Powerogue]

BFA was terrible compared to Legion, leaving it somewhere around average. WOD was...uh...

[Talrath]

WoD was bad, because they scrapped it very quickly. The storyline with quests was far more enjoyable than BFA. 3 zones had an epic end cinematic while bfa had 1 epic cinematic and that was from the alliance side.

The rotations were more fun,
In WoD because they didnt change alot from Mop.
This resulted that Arena went better and PvP and pve became more fun.

Raids, well yes, here they dropped the ball. Highmaul was meh. Black rock foundry was actually fun with blackhand. Hellfire citadel was fun as well.

World quest were a pain but you werent obligated to do them, since if you quested you became exalted very easy. Only 1 reputation had to be farmed for flying and thats it. In BFA you were forced to do tedious world quest to rank up your necklace and put a high level slot in it.

The garrison was a nice touch but they didn't executed it the right way. They went way overboard that you can get mythic gear for using the mission table.

Professions were still decent while in bfa most professions were useless.

The trinkets in WoD were more fun, look at the trinket for ferals in hellfire citadel. It said the duration of berserk was 250% longer and it also reduced something else, cant remember what. You had ravage, which had more chance to crit on enemies above 80% health. Combine that with the ring and other trinket for absorbing dmg and give 20% extra dmg and you got a fun thing happening on dps meter. In Legion if you started with those gears, every boss wouldnt get dmg and suddenly would die instantly. With you doing 70% dmg. That was fun to see.

For me WoD wasn't that bad, even though only 2 patches came out. For me cataclysme was worse .The entire zone change was fun but the rest was bad. BFA really disappointed me and has become the worst game I've played.

[Kiri]

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.

Well, statistically, the latter, obviously. Because, well, things like 'fun' and 'entertainment' are highly subjective. If you enjoyed WoD's content, then you were just starved for it. But if you didn't enjoy it, then you basically had no reason to play at all. If you didn't raid back then, you had absolutely nothing. I personally lived through that and if it wasn't for garrisons passively generating so much gold that I could just stay subbed, I would have been out during that time. Couldn't raid due to timezones, so I just had nothing to do.
BFA in contrast has a lot of stuff, so chances are most people find something enjoyable and entertaining. And if they don't like some content, they usually don't have to do it. Unless they are the kind of person that needs to do everything in order to maximize what they can get, which I feel might be at the core of all this. During both Legion and BFA I never really went out of my way to grind AP hard or anything like that. And I enjoyed myself well enough, even dabbling into mythic raiding. But people who want to at least try to be at the cutting edge, it is probably different.

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.

I think the latter part really is only an issue for people that feel the compulsion. Blizzard kind of preys on those, sadly. For people that can say "I could, but I don't feel like it" the game is more enjoyable, but they also play less. In common parlance, that is often called 'casual' in a derogative way but to be honest, if people enjoy themselves it really doesn't matter. People should just be introspective and maximize their fun. If they find that they can only do that by maximizing their player power, then they might probably be better off playing something else. And that's not me being snide. If someone doesn't like the way the game currently is, then stopping to play is a valid strategy. They'd probably have more fun anyway and it is also the only way they can actually signal Blizzard that what they do does no longer cater to them. Much more than posting in threads like this, tbh. It might be more cathartic, but it really doesn't do much aside from potentially spreading the unhappiness as they quickly devolve into people trying to convince others that they should not be having fun.

[Rantgod]

I think the most important thing is gameplay and enjoying your class. WoD had little content but gameplay was fun.

[Zenfoldor]

Yes, bad content is better than no content. However, the rather small amount of content that WoD did provide was good content. So I think it's pretty close.

[KrazyK923]

Outside of Gorgrond, which wasn't bad but just unfinished, leveling was fantastic in WoD.

Compared to BfA, where I kind of hated every zone except maybe Zuldazar in some parts. Filled to the brim with tedious nonsense sidequests that went on for way too long and seemed irrelevant to any plot, let alone the zone or even the expansion story.

I'll take WoD having fun leveling but a shit end game to BfA having bad leveling and a grindfest endgame 100 out of 100 times.

Its also funny that people are defending BfA by saying at least its not as bad as the expansion that the community calls the worst one ever. Not a very high bar lol.

The only thing I liked more about BfA than WoD were the cinematics. In a weird way even the shitty facebook game table in WoD was better than BfA's, because at least you could work toward something every day, the one in BfA seems completely tacked on and entirely unnecessary. But they didn't remove it because...I don't even know why.

Not having one at all is the best case scenario but if you're going to include it, at least make it useful for something (Since they nerfed the shit out if it as a gold maker from Legion too). In the end the table just became ANOTHER way to gate content with certain essences tied to it.

Shadowlands might be hot garbage, who knows at this point, but goddamn at least we won't be in BfA anymore. I can't wait based on that fact alone.