What exactly makes some people say Legion was good but BfA is bad?

[shise]

Legion was great and gave a lot of uniqueness. The map is one of the best ever in this game, quests were great and the lore going on as well.

BfA, as I always said, is a filler expansion.

[Soon-TM]

BfA, as I always said, is a filler expansion.

Although I agree on the "filler" part, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be a bad xpac. After all, MoP was also a filler xpac, a time to take the proverbial chill pill after two ongoing apocalypses (Scourge, then DW/Twilight Hammer), and it was a quite decent expansion. BfA would have also been the time to "relax" somewhat after THE (averted) apocalypse, time to fight pirates and more "down to earth" things. But here comes Sylvanas, who felt more of a threat than the Legion ever was. Of course, writers went full retard with their morality lessons, about how war is bad (in a franchise named WARcraft, none the less), and how the right thing to do is to hold hands together while singing kumbaya, under the benevolent gaze of a 18 or so years old. In the meantime, big names such as Aszhara and N'Zoth went sent into the meatgrinder, with little to no care for their respective stories and backgrounds.

Gameplay wise, everything felt like a downgrade from Legion. We had awesome and cool artifacts, they were exchanged for a bland necklace. We had nice class halls, each with their own class campaign, which were exchanged by GenericShip #2523985. We had fast, exciting gameplay, and we got GCD shoved down our throats, a change that was made to placate PvP'ers, which however hasn't prevented PvP from being all but dead in BfA.

Classes had been pruned into oblivion in Legion prepatch to make room for artifacts' skills and passives, in BfA we lost those and (in most cases) we got exactly nothing to replace those with. Not only that, classes were pruned even further, in the hopes that even a caveman would be able to play DD specs. We lost class themed sets in exchange of generic armour type sets, which look all ugly af except maybe the warfronts ones.

Speaking of warfronts... man, what a waste of dev time. I doubt anyone would have ever bothered with them, if it wasn't for the fact that you got top quality (at the time) gear for AFK'ing hardcore. And Islands might have been way more interesting than "gather all mobs and aoe them down fast". There was nothing to explore, you were put on a !#$%ing timer, which killed every sense of exploration.

[Blupparen]

For me Legion had better classes, better dungeons (bfa have a few good ones though), better raids and better lore. Sure legion had its flaws but it was way better than bfa.

[Mojo03]

I enjoyed the story in Legion far more.

I enjoyed the artifact system more than Azerite and essences.

Class halls, artifacts, and campaigns were fun. Gave a reason to level alts.

Armor and weapons were farrrrr better looking in Legion overall. Reasons to do content for me.

Classes felt better. BFA went backwards somehow.

Questing was overall better in Legion. Especially Suramar. It felt more formulaic and bland in BFA.

BFA honestly was great on paper, but it fell short in pretty much everything in practice, which means most likely they just didn't have enough time to finish it. It needed more iteration. It needed like 3 more months of development time.

It's also sad they didn't get to do Nazjatar right and had to scrap the 8.3 Nzoth area. Could of been pretty cool.

[Flurryfang]

Artifacts....

[FlubberPuddy]

BFA honestly was great on paper, but it fell short in pretty much everything in practice, which means most likely they just didn't have enough time to finish it. It needed more iteration. It needed like 3 more months of development time.

Yup, definitely needed more iteration. Azerite traits should've literally been more impactful than Leggo gold traits, because we're amped by Azeroth. Island Expeditions should've been a loot finding/exploring mini-game - shouldn't even have combat or have the 'vehicle'/'transformation' type combat where you're givin a few abilities 1-4 or w/e to help you navigate an island and find loot. Warfronts should have literally been a WC3 mini-game kind of like how they sorta ported Pokemon in through Pet Battles.

For comparison, Torghast actually feels good to a lot of players in the alpha precisely because it is emulating roguelikes within its foundation - the base is good and Blizzard just needs to polish it.

Islands just felt like a 'kill to cap points asap' and warfronts feel like a slow forgone conclusion where again you're mostly just killing shit, but not getting/doing unique enough things aside from that.

Warfronts should've had spots to build bases/empowered creeps to kill for bonuses/its own mini level up system (say 1-5 or something)/purchaseable items to give you unique effects/more abilities/consumables from specific buildings.

Islands should've not had combat at all and been about digging around the isle/maybe a treasure detector that emits noise the closer you get etc or if it does have combat then the islands should have few but larger deadlier enemies (worldboss like) keeping hoards. But focus should've been treasure hunting.

BFA was definitely an example of lots of great ideas, executed poorly, and not given enough time.

[Harbour]

TONS of content
epicness
interesting quest chains
alot of customization
M+ was interesting new activity and dungeons design suited it mostly well
WQ were good enough with auto-grouping