Remembering the BFA dumpster fire start to finish.

[munkeyinorbit]

Torghast is 100% going to suck. I've done it on Beta, it's boring and just a chore to get your Soul Ash. There is literally nothing good about it.

I would say that getting your ash is a good thing about it. So literally nothing good about it is just hyperbole from someone that just wants to hate.

Bfa sucked because the classes weren't fun anymore and loot was too easy to get. When you jump in alts to discover that raids don't actually give you any real upgrades then that's a problem. So instead of having fun on alts, they became pointless and I unsubscribed till later.

[Gref]

It was ok I guess. I had good times in raids and dungeons. I had fun doing campaign. following sylvannas was fun but ending sucked. same with keeping nzoths eye. I still did not remove it. No idea if there is anything for it. So yeah writing sucked a little.

But screw that randomness on both for azerites, chest and corruptions.
i am not saving 50k residium to buy the right azerites. screw that.
I am not doing visions 23048234 times to buy corruptions either.
got 5 mask achievement on both pretty early. then stopped altogether.

island? i maybe did it 3 or 4 times. never touched again. tooo boring. still could unlock all 4 slots on my neck really early. i do not do world quests either but still could unlock so early. I do not get why people complain about farming neck. You do not need to at all. it comes naturally.

warfronts? did once for scenario then a few times for the gear and never again.

for me it was like 5/10. Right in the middle. Not good not bad.

[Doffen]

I know people think WoD was raider paradise, but 2 raid tiers in 2 years was very weak.

Spot on, it was lacking even in the raid department. I think that when you love raiding, you actually want more raids to progress through, not farm for more than a year. Sure, the raids might have been good, but they were few in numbers. Not to mention how long the last raid lasted. The least amount of raids in any expansion, so WoD was lacking there as well.

[MrLachyG]

Still way better than WoD. And based on the beta and other things blizzard has talked about for Shadowlands, it's going to be as god awful as WoD.

Oh definitely. All WoD had was raids. Say what you want about BfA but at least it had people going out and about in the world

[Dazmalak]

Aside from PvP taking 20 steps backwards, there were several things a lot of people hated that I didn't quite mind. Azerite traits didn't bother me, and honestly if they focused on them instead of adding more systems on top of them, they might have turned out much better. With the addition of essences and then corruption, though...the problem was magnified. Conceptually, I really liked warfronts and island expeditions. I think making them more rewarding and more challenging would be the way to go; and those rewards don't necessarily need to be flat gear upgrades. No, they weren't perfect, but I'd like to see them return in some capacity with some more fine tuning.

What really killed the expansion for me was the bait and switch with the faction war and the promise of a morally grey story that quite immediately took a straight up good vs evil plot that involved the character assassination of several Horde characters in order to (once again) bludgeon over our heads how evil and bad authoritarianism is...because we're apparently too stupid to realize that on our own and WoW is real life somehow.

[Sanguinerd]

My biggest gripe with BFA is how all the villains were essentially wasted imo. The story just wasn't all that interesting. I mean it had some interesting tidbits here and there but they were setups for Shadowlands(and beyond). Azshara gets wasted twice but apperantly we're going to see her again (yay..)

N'zoth the Dissapointment, the first Old God to be truly released from his prison, even if he was "the weakest" of the lot he was still the only one to be truly free and.. nothing a big ol' bag of NOTHING. He "invades" two zones but doesn't do much else to the world. People in Winterspring, Stranglethorn or anywhere else on the planet don't even have a single flippin' clue one of the Old Gods is free. He along with his Empire fall without leaving anything memorable behind.

The worst thing about BFA imo is that nothing about the entire expansion would give people that missed out a reason to feel bad about not playing it, it just didn't matter. It wasn't a faction war expansion at all, that storyline didn't matter for shit.

And thats without even mentioning how horrible PvP and the whole Azerite armors/necklace and has been.

[Soluna]

This thread is why the forum community should never be taken seriously. Imagine making a thread like this with the new expansion on the horizon and ppl getting hyped. How about you make a thread about things that actually were fun in BfA? And if there weren't, maybe quit the darn game.

[Kyphael]

This thread is why the forum community should never be taken seriously. Imagine making a thread like this with the new expansion on the horizon and ppl getting hyped. How about you make a thread about things that actually were fun in BfA? And if there weren't, maybe quit the darn game.

Pretty well said. No matter what the game gets right, people always zero in on the negative.

[Lindon]

The expansion was fine. Not bad, not great but good.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Good art and decent enough zone stories spoiled by an incredibly dumb overarching narrative and even worse gameplay systems, that actually got worse as time progressed for some reason. Culminating in corruptions.. the most broken system yet. And for all the great promises of finally putting the faction war stuff to rest and have the horde go retarded every couple of years we gained absolutely bugger all out of the whole ordeal so far - which leads me to believe we won't gain anything out of it later either. If anything I have the suspision that they feel the need to make the alliance go retard every couple of years now..

[goldlock]

Calling them "gimmicks" is just dishonest, they were marketed as new gamemodes and simply sucked.

They are expansion specific content, and just looking at dungeons and raids leaves a lot out of the picture.
There's no expansion that was criticized for its dungeon or raid design, besides perhaps it being too hard / easy.

True but its what I care about... even torghast now that they nerfed it into tedium isn't a big loss for me. So long as the raids and dungeons are decent im good.

[Borgmore]

Seems like all the other expansions to me. Grind away for rep, levels, gear, flying, pets , mounts, achs....nothing better or worse.

[heef]

I think this sums up half of the recent expansions. Legion had shit legendaries and unbalanced artifacts at launch, and BFA had... well, too many things to bother talking about.

Funny how WoD was the exact opposite. I only raided back then, and can say with full honesty that it was the best expansion for me since TBC. Too bad there was nothing else to do.

Weird - did you skip Wrath and MoP?

[Swnem]

I still say the expansion was fine. What failed were the patches. They were trying to make up for beta mistakes and spoiled the broth with too many cooks.

[bitterwinter]

When BFA was first announced I was quite excited. I know it is an unpopular opinion but I genuinely like the faction conflict; it's core to the game and the franchise.

Anyway, I believe that BFA could of indeed been much better than what we got..but it was a casualty of rushed development. Somewhere down the line, I feel, they saw the money Legion was making (rightfully so, a good expansion should make money) and thought it could work the same with BFA due to the consumers newfound confidence in Blizzard.

Of course that's just speculation on my part, but that's what I have personally thought of for a while. It'd explain quite a bit, and also, I am quite bothered there isn't really a resolution to the Sword of Sargeras stuck within the planet. Yeah, we defeated N'zoth etc but that's quite a glaring issue. Does Magni think we have healed Azeroth enough to stop her dying? Are there Azerite eruptions etc? So many unanswered questions in an expansion that had way too many overlapping themes.

[Swnem]

I think this sums up half of the recent expansions. Legion had shit legendaries and unbalanced artifacts at launch, and BFA had... well, too many things to bother talking about.

Funny how WoD was the exact opposite. I only raided back then, and can say with full honesty that it was the best expansion for me since TBC. Too bad there was nothing else to do.

Honestly, i agree.

WoD at least nailed the basics. Classes were fun and raiding was fun. I also like Draenor/Outland better than Azeroth for some reason.
Also, it had the only form of housing in the game so far, and i liked it. Just annoying to have had gameplay tied to it. But, yeah, i like how there was no BS power system. Just set bonuses. Good times.

[ydraw]

Why are you attacking him and looking at his post history? Then you suggest he needs a psychologist? You're post is the definition of an ad hominen attack....
The guy is just saying threads like these are purely opinions with recycled garbage reasons why BfA was a bad expansion. I liked BfA, the raids were good as always and I even played arena and got my highest rating this expac. So I enjoyed it.
But you have to attack him for rightly complaining about how these threads are really always just circle jerks about why you're all unsubscribed and the game is dogshit yet continually posting on a wow forum.

The raids were good. Having to spend 15 hours a week doing insanely boring island expeditions in order to prepare for raids wasn't.

BFA raid design and boss encounters are probably the best the game has ever seen. But the other systems (azerite grind, essence grind, corruptions, islands, warfronts) were complete ass and it's not wrong for people to say that.

Thankfully they got raids and dungeons right.

People complained about AP grind in Legion and they were right. But at least in legion you could grind AP while doing challenging PvE content (M+). BFA forced you into islands, which were basically challenge-free world quests, in order to cap AP.

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This thread is why the forum community should never be taken seriously. Imagine making a thread like this with the new expansion on the horizon and ppl getting hyped. How about you make a thread about things that actually were fun in BfA? And if there weren't, maybe quit the darn game.

The thing is I did quit the game over 6 months ago, and the reason that I quit was absolutely BFA systems that made it impossible to keep up with the game only playing a few hours a week (I don't have time to grind essences, AP, corruptions etc. I have time to raid and do M+, and that's it).

If shadowlands gets rid of these pointless grinds then I will be able to play again. So that's hypeworthy for me, and a lot of other people too.

[Kehego]

I can't wait till tier comes back so people can complain about being forced to raid to get powerful gear.

[BeepBoo]

BFA Dumpster start to finish:

0) Prepatch. As part of a new design philosophy, they decided it was a good idea to add a metric fuck ton of stuff to the GCD and slow the GCD down. The exact opposite of what I want out of gameplay. In addition, they decided to nerf the shit out of resource gathering and increase the amount needed for crafting a consumable. This esentially drove prices to the point where you HAD to buy tokens with money and sell on the AH for gold if you wanted to raid log, because everything was so expensive.

1) Leveling. As soon as you hit mid-leveling you lost all your legendaries and got shit on by stat scaling fiasco, so you get shafted and feel horrible compared to how you used to.

2) AP. Not to be confused with legion's AP. Or Netherlight crucible endless grind. Nope, entirely unique and special "endless grind" mechanics! Fuck these systems in their entirety.

3) Azerite gear. Work your ass off to get AP doing a bunch of meager abysmal content you should have graduated from just so you could unlock talents, only to have the next patch release and have to repeat the same stupid fucking grind all over again. The patch they decide to "fix" this, they also introduce something else that is just as bad.

4) Benthic armor. NJ was an alright zone. Nice to experience once, but blizz again fucks it up by sticking things you definitely want for raid behind a metric ton of RNG and busy work. It was fucking stupid how many pearls you had to farm if you wanted the best of the best, which is what got you the best parses. Again, fuck this system and anything like it. They decide to take this concept and run with it to the Nth degree in the next patch, in typical blizzard fashion where they just double down on bad fucking choices.

5) The ultimate in retardation I have ever seen from this company, way worse than even LEGENDARIES in legion: fucking corrupted gear. This shit is the absolute worst possible designed gear in the game. Hugely RNG, huge impact on performance, huge swing factor depending on if your guild could even support your dumbass wearing ~100 corruption before resist got up to par; huge big slap in the face all around.

There were a bunch of other "little" incidents in there. Letting us complete the flying quest, but not allowing us to use that in either of the two newest zones. Ret being bottom tier in pvp. All the good, fun shit stuck in PvP talents. Their failed attempt at world pvp, whereby they felt the need to offer stupidly unfair rewards to one faction to coerce them into participating. Warzones being throwaway, half-baked content. Islands being boring, half-baked content. Etc.

The game was fine in terms of the zones. The dungeons were fine. The raids were fine. The armor had one of my personal favorite armor sets of all time. But, all of the good things weren't enough to outweigh the very bad things, because those bad things impacted what is most important in a combat game: the actual combat.

BFA made me quit the game, and I've been quite happy, recognizing shadowlands is just a setup for the same dumb shit to start all over again.

[cparle87]

Well I made the positivity thread (https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads...itivity-Thread) so we might as well have an inverse, as if we needed another.

All my gripes were mechanical, except two, being my horde pandaren giving Sylvanas the dagger being the single biggest idiot ball moment of the game's entire history, and N'zoth's defeat not addressing the sword problem. Don't like those. The rest of the expansion's story and visual/audio design I am one of the only celebrators of, and I'd put it at second only to Legion.

But the mechanics, oh boy. Azerite armor is possibly the worst thing they've ever designed. Every upgrade isn't an "upgrade" so much as "maybe possibly an upgrade...if I level up another 20 azerite levels...and the perks are good...but usually you get strong dps perks but worthless survival ring perks, then the mobs scale to your higher level so the azerite gear makes you weaker, rant rant rant. Nothing good came of it.

Island expeditions were a neat idea but I felt no motivation to try the harder versions when the main reward was most easily done by just queuing for heroics and breezing through them with no effort. Boring.

Warfronts were literally so undertuned it took a dedicated raid group with everyone doing their part to lose. (It HAS been done!) Heroic warfronts were OK though. They are what warfronts should've been from the get-go. I like the armor appearances though, top tier. Customizable detail levels that still match needs to be a thing on more gear.

Corruptions. All the weaknesses of titanforging with RNGesus with none of the strengths where you'd gradually build up ilevel to get past stupid player-created barriers of "you need the ilevel of the content to do the content." And even though I don't pvp, it completely broke pvp. What were they thinking with this one? Yet the worst part, and this is super petty, is that the purple goop all over me ruined my transmogs. Unforgivable 0/10.

Well, since we don't know where the dagger storyline will go yet I think it's too early to pass judgement on it.

As for the sword, assuming you're talking about Sargeras', I'm of the opinion it's as fixed as it can be. The fel poison has been drained and the internal bleeding has been stopped. The last of the Old Gods is dead so Azeroth is parasite-free for the first time in most of her existence. Anyone with medical knowledge knows you don't remove a bullet, dagger, or what have you from a wound until you're prepared to deal with the massive bleeding and other issues that would bring. Which I don't think there's any power the people of Azeroth has that would be able to do that. So I'm of the opinion leaving it there is the right idea.

Needing neck levels to use azerite gear wasn't an issue. I played casually and by the time Uldir came out there was nothing in the game that I wasn't a few more levels from getting the +5 trait for. Are you arguing there shouldn't have been any defensive perks, but offensive ones? As for scaling, it's not nearly as big an issue as you're making it out to be. You gain 1% power, the most gains like 0.2%. Your killing speed will remain pretty much unchanged, we just won't hit things like we did at the end of MoP when you could pull 500 mobs and kill them in 2 swings.

Agree with you on islands.

They said when they first came out that warfronts were designed to be all but unloseable, it's working as intended. Heroic Stromgarde was fun, I didn't even see a difference with heroic Darkshore.

I'm not sure what you mean about the weaknesses with none of the strengths, can you clarify? As for pvp, we've always had absurdly overpowered, overtuned things in the last patch of expansions. Remember the soul mirror/legendary ring combo from HFC? That's why the OP things of the past had "this effect is diminished as you level beyond X" otherwise you'd still be using them xpacs later.

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Content is always better than no content
WOD and Classic were probably the most horrible versions of the game since there was no content between raids. At least WOD had good challenging raids, Classic raids are easier than LFR, literal loot piñatas.

Except for the raidloggers who are upset that there are methods of character progression outside raiding. The amount of salt of being "forced" to grind neck levels when casual play got you to your +5 trait nearly as quickly as grinding and making them hate themselves are sad.