BfA just was a better setting. When an expansion has got such a strong theme going for itself the rest becomes tolerable.
BfA was better just because there was far more content.
Obviously, the art and aesthetics win in Shadowlands, best thing since Legion. Expansion theme... they were very different. I´d say Shadowlands wins.
Problem with SL is... there is so little content.. it is all basically focused on a bunch of shit systems that keep you busy building them to ditch them a patch later..
I have a soft spot for BFA as well as it was the expansion which finally brought me back to wow after coming back every expansion since cata only to leave the game within a month. Having now played SL and BFA, i liked BFA so much more form an rpg standpoint as in immersive zones, quests, reading their little plights in their little worlds, the dungeons totally clicked with me, the raids, i dunno as i only started raiding in wow in SL.
I honestly really didn't get all the negative feedback i would always read while playing bfa, that was until i played SL, it was the azerite, and visions blew, where in SL i feel the gear or maybe just minus corruption i dunno, i prefer SL over bfa. Everything in BFA was so much more immersive, lots of quests, and i now roll alts just get back to that, get my rpg fix, i just don't get that in SL, bfa is just better than sl in that realm.
Raids though in SL are so good, and it's not like i hate the content in SL, in weird ways i like the to do list content, you know what you gotta do, jump in and start killing shit and i love that, but as in a rpg immersion there are nights i race through that so i can get on an alt and get back to bfa.
looking out of my lonely room day after day
The lack of zone connection in SL is a giant fail IMO, heck you could theoretically wanna do a couple WQs on an alt, you could literally spend half your time on the flight path or the In Between oribos pass thru.
It's really terrible design and I'm shocked to this day it's still a thing. Blatant unmitigated time wasting.
I pretty much got around this by setting my hearthstone to Oribos (or my Covenant Hall, after I unlocked the portal to Oribos). Between my hearthstone and the three guild capes (that port you to SW/Org, which then take you to Oribos)), I basically avoid the time it takes to get to the central hub (Oribos) from any zone. Really minimizes travel time.
I think everything about BFA was better than Shadowlands. But I'm also one of the few people that liked islands and warfronts.
BfA had better zones and alt gameplay.
That is it. Both have seen me stop playing over extended periods of time, something that not a single expansion prior managed.
BfA vs Shadowlands boils down to shitty vs a little bit less shitty. I never expected to say this, but compared to Shadowlands BfA had the better story. On the other hand Shadowlands has the better main system (Covenants). But again, both expansions are the lowest points in WoW‘s history yet, even outdoing WoD in that regard.
Congrats, I guess? At least I think the next expansion can’t get any worse than this.
MAGA - Make Alliance Great Again
BFA was fine up until 8.3, which was probably the worst end-expansion patch so far. SL is clearly not finished yet, but I've yet to enjoy any part of SL as much as I enjoyed even small parts of BFA.
Amazing sig, done by mighty Lokann
I was one of them. But right now I cannot make up my mind on how they possibly could make the next expansion worse. I just can’t think of a way how they would achieve that. Even shittier systems than Shadowlands? Even shittier story than Shadowlands? Man, it’s hard to imagine.
MAGA - Make Alliance Great Again
I just want devs to stop being stubborn assholes with inflated egos
I also want to see the game systems to make sense and the problems they “fix” to not appear as a result of the system they say is the fix
I think they are both middling expansions. In school grades just between a C- and a C+.
I never cared for BfA's topic but the content was better than I actually expected. I don't really know what to make of Shadowland's story. I don't much care for it. I like Torghast well enough if I have a friend along.
I never thought of either expansion as the end of WoW or the start of anything good. If you add Warlords and Legion to these two that's really 3 out of 4 as a miss for me. I don't expect Blizzard to put out C- to C+ grade content. Well, I didn't. I think maybe that's become the norm.
I'll admit that I'm one of those been-around-for-years veterans but I don't play a lot—maybe a couple of times a week for an hour or so—so consequently it's easier to keep me engaged. I have things to do but outside of Torghast I don't especially anticipate doing them. My bias about Torghast is that I've been playing Roguelike games for over 20 years and just find them fun. Torghast is essentially a roguelike just dressed up pretty.
My main problem with the game these days is less the content which I think is average but the systems that support it which I feel are severely over-engineered and exactly what I would expect from someone who is not especially creative but loves to tinker around with spreadsheets.
"...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."
The most difficult thing to do is accept that there is nothing wrong with things you don't like and accept that people can like things you don't.
I'd take BFA and SL over Wotlk/Cata personally in terms of personal enjoyment. IMO the things that matter the most to me (like raids and dungeons) they have delivered on IMO. But I wouldn't rank either BFA or SL among the very best expansions. There's a lot of systems we could do without but ultimately I don't feel the systems are big enough annoyances that they drag everything down. It's like getting a burger where the bun is dungeons, the meat is raids and both taste good but then there's some mustard you didn't ask for which is the systems. It doesn't derail everything IMO but it's something we could do without.
Instead of having covenants or domination shards in SL for example, we could have a stronger class fantasy focus (like Legion) and tier-sets. It would make the expansion better IMO.