What BFA Systems do you consider to be a success?

[3DTyrant]

Too bad I can't pick more than one option, zone design for Zandalar (and the music) and Island Expeditions for me.

[Shelly]

I'd say the only two truly failed systems they had would be Islands and Warfronts.

Everything else wasn't too fun when introduced but once iterated upon became either OK or better.

Despite the addition of Heroic Warfronts and the Dubloon vendors though Islands and Warfronts never really became anything more than chores for the most part.

[Mirishka]

I actually enjoy Warfronts, especially Heroic Darkshore when it first came out.

Oh and Visions - didn't care much about them at first, but I realized they're a lot of fun once I really sunk my teeth into em'.

Expeditions were... okay. But pretty disappointing overall. Won't miss them.

[schwarzkopf]

Success:
- Azerite armour + Essences + neck progression (way better than tier)
- Levelling zones
- Raids and M+

Failure:
- Islands
- Warfronts
- Corruption

Also glad they've kept up the recent no required grind approach.

[Amsden]

I liked the raids. Visions, Warfronts and Islands were fun for like a month. The leveling zones were alright.

[stresskiller]

overal i like the zone design with one minor thing the corupted zones in pandaria and uldum often causes a lot of lag and felt like a cheap solution to keep people bussy

[msdos]

The only thing added in BFA that seemed fun to me were the Islands. The concept of them was great, the problem is the way they were abandoned, not really integrated into the story, the rewards weren't there, the difficulty was artificial, the PVP stalemates aren't backed up by rewards or a leaderboard or integrated into anything else that has to do with PVP in the game??
They just seemed like something from a different expansion that had nothing to do with BFA, then were abandoned half way through when people realized how bad Azerite and the necklace were as a whole.

Everything else was literally an instance on a timer or gear that is so combed and nerfed and leveled into a hierarchy, that there was never a point to change traits unless the next raid tier was coming out. Cool, you use Iris on trash and the thing that shoots a laser every 10 seconds and the thing that gives you the best stat possible that stacks. Wow, that sure isn't predictable and is definitely cool, yippee!!!!!! Finally, Dragon Ball Z borrowed powers!!!!!

Zone design was atrocious, in my opinion. I hated Zul'dazar and Kul'tiras Harbor and Gnomer. Naztajar could've been worse, but they did the wise thing and kept it relatively small.

Raid design is baseline always good, this isn't a "good BFA system", raid design is basically the backbone of this MMO at this point. We won't talk about how chopped up and broken some of the encounters themselves were. The final version of Carapace and N'zoth wasn't the version they intended. Also some classes (DK, ass rogue) weren't ready for the amount of hiking required in some of those fights.

Dungeon design was atrocious. Everything was modeled after Seat of the Triumviraate.

Lore could've been worse. The DBZ cutscene was just laughable, but it did a good job capturing the essence of the essences, stupid death laser beams with no gameplay choice behind them.

[Smokeybones55]

Good things: Zone design, islands, raids, visions,

Zones: very detailed, though I dislike the 'cramped' design of them, how every square inch of a zone needs to have a purpose/mob/quest/object. But that's been the design strategy since Cata and will never be reverted.

Islands: good imo, *after* the changes to them (not having to hunt for certain types of rares/mobs to get certain rewards. Addition of boxes). You feel only 'pressured' to do 3-4 a week to max out your azerite, and you usually will always get a bonus reward, whether that be a pet, mount, or transmog. 3-4 a week was a very reasonable amount, usually 30 minutes. *PvP islands were a missed opportunity. I think 99% of people only ever did a PvP island to get their essence and never did another. It was a pretty lackluster way to get conquest + azerite (greater chance at losing). Conquest being the only additional 'bonus' reward for doing PvP island was not incentive enough to do it over a mythic/heroic island.

Raids: all good to me as a casual heroic/mythic raider. I don't like the reused asset raids, so BDA knocks the expansion down in my eyes. But it also gave us maybe the best boss of the expansion in Opulence. Uldir, EP, Nyalotha were all great.

Visions: great fun for awhile. There was a steady progression through them, and it felt good to finally clear every area. Then full clear with 1 mask, 2 mask, etc. all the way to 5 mask. After awhile with the power curve so steep, visions just turned into an easy, hamster wheel chore to get my weekly corruption level boost.

Meh things: Azerite gear, PvP cache, lore, class balance, war campaign.

Azerite gear: horrible at first. No vendor, couldn't get from M+ runs. Couldn't even use your traits if your neck was too low. Expensive to respec for hybrid classes. Eventually it just turned into another 'cookie cutter choice'. There weren't too many that offered interesting interactions between abilities.

PvP cache: this was new to BfA. I think it was great for top pvpers, but it wasn't really an effective gear avenue for a more casual player like myself. The effort for getting the top reward 2400 rating for 475 item level was *much* higher than just clearing a +15. I am usually an 1800-1900 player, so a 465 item became useless pretty quickly.

Lore: I hated all the Horde v Alliance stuff. Seen it too many times. We pretty much got a Garrosh 2.0. I think there was a reason they ended the faction war in 8.2.5, over a year (and counting) before the expansion was over. Outside of the faction war, I loved most everything else. Azshara, Nzoth, zone stories, Uldir, mechagon. I thought all was pretty interesting.

Class balance: People will always complain about the top 1% class balance. I don't play the top 1%. For what I do, class balance was mostly good. PvE was perfectly fine. Every class/spec was viable for my casual heroic/mythic raider playstyle. PvP was a bit more noticeable. Again, 1800-1900 player, but there were clear superior specs in that environment. I even dropped maining my hunter of 14 years because BM/MM was never viable in arena (not bothering with melee hunter). Destro locks have reigned for a long time now. Stuff like that really sticks out.

Horrible things: warfront, dungeon design, corruption

Warfront: painful missed opportunity. no pvp mode. no challenge at all, even with the heroic mode. lackluster reward. After doing it once, it always felt like a painful 30 minute chore. horrible, horrible.

Dungeon design: Again, mostly casual player. I'm fine doing a few 15s or 16s a week (or 10/11 before rewards were raised). Asthetically, I think a lot of dungeons were great. But I really hate the 'hallway on rails' design style. You're pushed down one path for the dungeon. This has been the case for many expansions now, that's fine. But some of those hallways got really tight/cramped, which i thought worked horrible with some affixes. WM, TD were the obvious abusers of this.

Corruption: I get it, every expansion has that 'end of expansion power curve' that just skyrockets in order to make us feel very powerful. But BfA took it to a whole new level, and that was because of corruptions. It was pretty much a requirement to abuse the versatility ones in PvP to get that 60%+ rating. If you fell behind one or two weeks on your corruption cap, it was noticeable. Playing alts was just out of the question. And there was too much RNG tied to corruptions for a long time before adding the vendor. I'm glad we'll have some prepatch time w/o them. Lock corruptions up and never let them see the light of day again.

No Opinion: M+ cache wasn't a BfA thing. As for benthic gear, I don't even remember it being a factor in any gear choice ever. It was just stuff I sent to alts for catchup gear. Even then, it wasn't worth the effort to upgrade them to 430 when it was much easier to get that from heroic EP/M+. The small bonus features some of the pieces had were never necessary for my playstyle.

[GreenJesus]

Nothing on that list. (Someone that left in 8.1)

0.

Not even the raids saved it this time. And dungeon design felt lazy and cramped compared to Legion. I feel MDI really damaged the creativeness the blizzard team is able to do with dungeons.

Mythic Uldir was a complete mess including the end boss that had the stupid orb carrying gimic, rogues doing lik 5x the DPS of anyone else on Zhul, and BfD forced me to play as an alliance character. What genius thought it would be a good idea to force players to play a characte of the opposite faction in a faction war expansion?

First expansion to make me quit for so long and nearly completely turn me off from the franchise as a whole.

[Video Games]

Its hard to pick cause i dont think any of it was outstanding enough to call any of it a success

[Maljinwo]

Playable Zandalari

[Marxman]

Zones, raids, and dungeons were all fine. I don't think any were stand-out amazing (maybe Waycrest Manor?) but I enjoyed that part of the game enough.

Every progression system (Azerite, Essences, Corruption) was dogshit.
Every new content type (Islands, Warfronts, Horrific Visions) was dogshit.
Every reward system (forced Personal Loot, Titanforging, Corruption, Benthic lottery, M+ cache, PvP cache) was dogshit.
Class design and balance was terrible.
Story and lore was terrible.

[Marakara]

Raids were fun, Corruption was fun once they added a vendor, Visions was fun.

[Scottyjscizzle]

I really wish more had been done with warfronts, they felt utterly detached from the world.

[Not A Cat]

Raids and Dungeons were great, as they always tend to be, but nothing that particularly stood out imo. The zone designs were top-notch. Drustvar is one of my all time favorite zones now. The only zone I didn't like was Mechagon. I really liked Horrific Visions, though I understand the hate for them.

Everything else was pretty terrible imo.

[Selastan]

I like Warfronts. Keep em. Make every patch have one, make rewards entry-level gear for that patch's content, somewhere between the last raid's lfr and normal tier. It's a universal catch-up mechanic, shows the bigger-scale fights of the story, and lets players who didn't raid regularly last patch get gear by working as a footsoldier for their faction.

- - - Updated - - -

Raids and Dungeons were great, as they always tend to be, but nothing that particularly stood out imo. The zone designs were top-notch. Drustvar is one of my all time favorite zones now. The only zone I didn't like was Mechagon. I really liked Horrific Visions, though I understand the hate for them.

Visions seemed fun, but I never did much. I'm curious, how easy was a perfect run? Is it the sort of thing you can do casually with enough rewards unlocked, or is it the sort of thing you need a group and good gear/skill for?

[Bigbazz]

The art and sound is pretty good, corruptions offered a bit of short term chaos which was fun for a little while. Having solo content like the visions is pretty nice, though I didn't like the emphases on grinding it endlessly. I mean all round shit expansion with a lot of mistakes, but it was not all bad. Like for example, it's probably not as bad as Shadowlands is going to be based on my Beta experiences.

[Kyphael]

Allied Races.

[IAmTheLaw316]

Expeditions and visions were fun.

As alliance, I also loved war mode. Lots of bonus experience and a few honorable kills once I hit BFA--otherwise a very fast single player game.

[Kyux]

A lot of these systems were OK. I didn't hate them but they also weren't great. For example, expeditions and warfronts were fun, there was nothing wrong with them but I wouldn't say they were a success. They didn't quite hit the mark and add anything great to the game, but they didn't detract from fun. Horrific Visions, on the other hand, I found really unfun yet I felt compelled to do them.