May you explain me why BFA was considered so bad??

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Just making a joke! You are right, of course. Personally I always thought it was something like, the corruption that the previous Archdruid, Fandral Staghelm, started and added to the tree, but then I remembered that it got cleansed in a book when the tree got re-blessed by some of the Aspects. I honestly thought they were gonna say something like, "Oh, they were Azerite-powered catapulpts" or something to explain it, but they never did...

They explain it in the good war short story, it’s arcane fire from mages it burns even on water.

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Ah, sorry, can't be sure in written words.
Yeah, azerite seemed fairly logical, but even then that stuff seems more about a bigget boom and less about fire. But as you say: They didn't try even that little.

Your joke is right in that they just went with a sort of Pokémon-logic that grass=plant=tree means fire is supereffective.

They frame azerite as an all in one enhancer pretty much mix it with any thing and that thing gets better, it making big explosions how ever is pretty much all we see it used for in game.

[The Stormbringer]

They explain it in the good war short story, it’s arcane fire from mages it burns even on water.

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They frame azerite as an all in one enhancer pretty much mix it with any thing and that thing gets better, it making big explosions how ever is pretty much all we see it used for in game.

Ah yes, another explanation for something that you'll find... outside the game. Love it.

I didn't know that though, so thank you.

[LordVargK]

They explain it in the good war short story, it’s arcane fire from mages it burns even on water.

Why was it never used after that? Would have been nice to have super napalm ammunition with a few miles range. It's not like there has been a war after that...



Oh, and another thing:
The Vindicaar was just forgotten. And could have easily decided the whole war. But instead of finding an in-universe explanation for its absence (which honestly would have been super easy, just let it be destroyed after Legion), the writers just flatout admitted that they did not want to use it. Most likely because they knew how asspulled that war was and how insanely stupid it played out. Yeah, now Afrasiabi gets the blame, but honestly: If he was the only one wanting the story to go that way, then just declare BfA non canon and move on. He's gone now. Every story after Legion made no sense whatsoever, since it disregarded nearly and lore set up beforehand.
And besides the content of the lore, the storytelling was just bad: horrible pacing, with the most impactful events right at the start and then a long period of nothing. The warcampaign was far worse than the prepatch events, the raid of Daza'alor had no impact whatsoever on the outcome of the war, since its implications (Horde fleet gone) was annulled right at the start of the next patch in a small cutscence. And in Nazjatar the war somehow just stopped only to be resolved by Sadfang in the next patch's cutscene.
I don't know about Horde players, they might have gotten a better story, but the Alliance got basically nothing. Nothing they did had any impact on the outcome of the war and despite the writers telling us how the Horde constantly lost, this "losing" was not portrayed in the game at all.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Why was it never used after that? Would have been nice to have super napalm ammunition with a few miles range. It's not like there has been a war after that...

Arguably it is used when ever fire mages show up we just don't get the lore view of it's use.

[baskev]

First of, I played Wow until the end of 2018. Meaning that I only played BFA in the first raid tier. I was able to kill Mythic Zul with my guild, and tried the island expenditions, the new allied race, and the warfronts.

I remember that I really enjoyed the expansion, I quit just because I got a new job and wow was very time consuming.

So, I really want to know why BFA was so hated. I have read enough information about why Shadowland was considered the worst WOW expansion, but I havent see much information why BFA was hated too.

Thanks

I can not speak for everyone. This is my own opinion ( opinion, not facts).

But for me its several things ( to know, i have played Warcraft since the first rts. And am a night elf player).


- the alliance felt weak. They have uber weapons ( void portals, dark iron dwarf drills, lightforged space ship) yet we get our asses handed.
- we had some story. But most revoled around the Horde. And its new civil war.
- raids where mostly horde story focussed. You could replace pretty much every alliance boss in troll capitol raid. And the raid and its story would still work.
- alliance zones where more intresting look and side story wise.
- but the alliance side stories went now where. Hell some of it even came up in shadowlands ( the drust) and its still fizzed out.
- allied race also felt ( again felt!) very horde centered. Both factions had wishlists. Horde got a lot. Alliance did not. Do not get me wrong, mecha gnomes and dark iron dwarfs are cool. But the other ones sucked. Bad racials, weird mount or look choices. Bad to no story. Hell even druid forms for kul tirans where weak at best. Instead of being more drust like, or kul tiran animal related. They where just the standard stuff with a skin. And to top it off. lightforged, void and mecha are not even races. 1 is a power infusioned religeon, 1 is a curse that and 1 is adding stuff onto your body.
- also WoD tried ( but also failed) to do both sides well. And horde allied race story made 1 of the few positives about that into a bad thing ( turning the light bad).
- tier sets where ugly

For me the most part was the story , the focus of it, the horde civil war again. That fact that the alliance in the grand scheme of things where just a side part to the story....again.

[Ielenia]

Forest fires do not start with healthy trees, they usually start in dry underbrush, gaining momentum until they have enough energy to incinerate trees in seconds.

They could have made the burning of Teldrassil work, but when neither Archimonde's death throes nor the freaking firelord himself could burn another world tree, then how is burning a seaborne world tree remotely consistent with the rest of the world and its stories?

Don't get me wrong; they could have made it work.
They just neglected to do so.

They did, though.

Teldrassil is nowhere near Nordrassil. Teldrassil didn't have the blessings of the Ancients like the other trees had. Teldrassil was also corrupted and has been since vanilla WoW. Also, the druids themselves were able to fell a world tree, considering they did so in Northrend in the past.

On top of all that, it wasn't simple, common fire that was tossed at Teldrassil, but magically-enhanced fire.

[Playintrafic]

Boring story, Mediocre Raids, Islands were the best way to grind AP, and Raid guilds were requiring you to have a certain neck level. Lots of Raiders hated it because they were braindead content with no fail state. Just aoe all the trash mobs. Boring as shit.

All the crap systems you had to progress on each alt ruined it for people who wanted to play alts.

In older expansions if you wanted to raid on your alt, you had to get geared up.
By the end of BFA, you needed to unlock all the zones, do the "main story" chapters, gear up to Mythic zero, gear up to at least the item level of normal by doing Muh Pluh, level your necklace to around level 80. Grind world quests and invasions to get currency to do visions, grind visions, grind your necklace spells, get the Asserite powers you needed for your class to even function (some classes not all just didnt work right with the BiS asserite power), grind for armors with BiS Corruption, get your legendary cloak leveled up.

I never even got a BiS corruption setup on my main, and my performance suffered because of it. When some piece of gear is doing more damage than your whole rotation, and 4 guys in your raid have 3 of those gears, and you have 1, some people in your raid have none. It feels shitty. So imagine trying to do that whole slog on more than 1 character.

Yeah I dont really play alts anymore, I hate M+, you can't get raid ready easily without doing M+. There is no point in regular, or heroic, or even mythic zero dungeons (m0 especially since you can't just queue them up) anymore. I dont even know why regular and heroic dungeons even exist these days. I haven't used one in 4 years other than leveling alts.

[Exkrementor]

Very simple: It was Legion but without all the fun stuff. Azerite armor was dogshit, warfronts were atrocious, m+ dungeons were just tedious, Islands were a broing snorefest. Classes lost all their cool artifact weapon stuff.

Blizzard revamped alot of shit in Legion but then took it all away with BFA because they were too stupid to plan 2 years in advance. But there is always a bigger fish and that fish is Shadowlands. Fun times.

[Skildar]

It's funny that tgis thread is still going on.
You can use the search options and find multiple posts explaining why is BfA such a "bad experience".

It's not of lack of content as it is one of the most packed. It mostly comes down to lack of player agency, raid quality, writing, time investment, and long term features.

If Battle for Dazar'Alor is one of their best raid, the following ones were filled with very weak boss encounter designs.

Couple this with Heavy farming "requirements" outside of raiding due to the mechanics exosting in open world content (azerite, pearls, corruption) and you exhaust a lot of raiders pretty fast.

There a lot of good things attempted mechanically during ghis expansion. But everything is ponctuated by some of their weakest writing. The story is all over the place. Each of the original zones follow very basic patterns and feel disconnected. Alliance get a satisfying ending with Jaina and gorde gets an interesting one with zul and rastakhan.

Then Uldyr happens and alliance has no business there as the developers forgot to introduce the raid to them while making it a center piece of horde's campaign.

Then Dazar'Alor does a great job and we move back to Old gods business. But at the same time, we want to expose Sylvanas as an enemy to both Horde and Alliance. And we also want to bring back Azshara. But we also want to use Ashvane. And also to suggest that Sylvanas and Azshara could be working together. And so on, and so on.

The game could have had a great ending with Eternal palace raid but they really wanted to showcase nyalotha. The patch is great but the ending is sour.

Of course warfrobts are a huge let down and don't fit with the rest of the activities of the game. Islands were awesome once they patched the hell out of it. Azerite armor are a very interesting designs but were awefully introduced, etc.

Could have been a good expansion, ended up being one of their worst.

[WowIsDead64]

It's funny that tgis thread is still going on.
You can use the search options and find multiple posts explaining why is BfA such a "bad experience".

Dunno. Sometimes I also feel, that all that "Explain me, why xpack is bad" threads are Blizzard-planted, because, you know, ordinal player, who reads forums, would know, why xpack is bad. Yeah we can talk about about "Why WotLK was bad", because may be new generation of players doesn't know about tons of "Paladins are no-brain OP" memes. But BFA is recent xpack. Everybody should know, that only SL is worse than it.

[Sluvs]

I am fully convinced that if they made Warfronts actually hard and treated them like a raid BfA would at least be considered Okay.

[Alkizon]

Speaking of offshoot about art in this thread......

I have repeatedly pointed out both in topics about art and directions of story implementation.

Also, customization's conversation and order of priorities, when you want to do job properly. About plot&appearance coherence here. Animations'(effects) discussions. Also, kind of wish post.

There is difference between "cartoon" and "fantasy", since cartoon is often free to take "taken concept" to the point of absurdity, while fantasy has certain limitations (a fairly narrow band of spectrum/only a cone of common accessible circle, withstand style) because it's designed to receive adequate feedback=impression+perception (and not alert-stupid/sharply hostile near shock/unexpected), and not pile up/mold contrasts of different spectrum and mutually exclusive paragraphs... so that style wasn't cartoonish, it was good fantasy/fairy tale, somewhere scary, somewhere kind and funny, it wasn't caricature, which it began to become with "new direction of art". But beginning wasn't laid in BfA, not at all, problem is in person, who sets style already starting somewhere from end of WotLK. Those, who somehow still remember our previous conversations, remember who I'm talking about, and it was this person, who was/is remembered with unkind word in the first place, when talking about new character models, and since for me this was the last straw, critical change, it was this person for whom (and his team) I'm grateful for that I "found own strength" to stop playing this game. Whether it's good or bad already rather depends on point of view, but to assert that "nothing has changed in this sense" is challenge to rational logic.

And if I can get over something like this example (hyena) with clenched teeth (especially if it's not replacement, but just addition), then with regard to everything related to player character models (including their special forms taken, their color and available mounts), I'm meticulous, categorical and relentless

Such are the things.

ps. But I repeat, it has little to do with BfA directly, as separate expansion. Well, yes - it’s still disgusting and disgraceful, but this is just continuation of what started much earlier.

For the record: I mean specifically models and animations, but not locations or music (I won't exclude voice acting, but rather due to the fact that it didn’t make sense to change something, when they still changed it anyway), since first of latter is highly dependent on geography/style of local area and (in this sense) fantasy is free as cartoon, and second of latter I just never heard (didn't have honor to get full perception)

As for immediate topic, for me, all expansions since Legion (including) are just one blurry uniform spot. I understand that this is quite cynical statement, but I can't help it, this is how things are for me personally.

[Rubim]

this is the most bottom barrel thing to complain about. nothing is "off" with the wow's art direction lmfao. its the same style. except one of them was released in a 2004 game (so, obv, worked on before that, 2001-2-3). While the other was released more modern.

Let me reiterate. The style on the right, IS the style on the left, that was possible back in the day. Since warcraft 3, since before this MMO was a twinkle in Morheim's eye, WoW has always had a cartoony art style. For this OP image linking post to compare a vanilla wow model to "tumblr cartoon" is somewhere between irony and straight ignorance. You're just witnessing the difference in 20 years of technology. There is virtually zero change in "direction" happening here. If you're mistaking the left as "not cartoony", then the real thing is the ugliness is mistaken for art style when really graphics were just ugly back then universally.

I think you're confused about cartoony.

It does not look like an updated asset, looks like an entire new model.

The left picture has nothing to do with the right one.

Now as another example:

[Accendor]

It's funny that tgis thread is still going on.
You can use the search options and find multiple posts explaining why is BfA such a "bad experience".

It's not of lack of content as it is one of the most packed. It mostly comes down to lack of player agency, raid quality, writing, time investment, and long term features.

If Battle for Dazar'Alor is one of their best raid, the following ones were filled with very weak boss encounter designs.

Couple this with Heavy farming "requirements" outside of raiding due to the mechanics exosting in open world content (azerite, pearls, corruption) and you exhaust a lot of raiders pretty fast.

There a lot of good things attempted mechanically during ghis expansion. But everything is ponctuated by some of their weakest writing. The story is all over the place. Each of the original zones follow very basic patterns and feel disconnected. Alliance get a satisfying ending with Jaina and gorde gets an interesting one with zul and rastakhan.

Then Uldyr happens and alliance has no business there as the developers forgot to introduce the raid to them while making it a center piece of horde's campaign.

Then Dazar'Alor does a great job and we move back to Old gods business. But at the same time, we want to expose Sylvanas as an enemy to both Horde and Alliance. And we also want to bring back Azshara. But we also want to use Ashvane. And also to suggest that Sylvanas and Azshara could be working together. And so on, and so on.

The game could have had a great ending with Eternal palace raid but they really wanted to showcase nyalotha. The patch is great but the ending is sour.

Of course warfrobts are a huge let down and don't fit with the rest of the activities of the game. Islands were awesome once they patched the hell out of it. Azerite armor are a very interesting designs but were awefully introduced, etc.

Could have been a good expansion, ended up being one of their worst.

I really would like to know why there are sometimes people who claim BoD was a good raid. It literally is near the bottom of them list of all raids. Completely recycled assets and music. Bosses were either boring, had super strange mechanics or were constantly bugged. Hell, they even designed the Opolus-Fight in an area that did not support the needed camera movement. It also had the worst raid boss ever designed in mekkatourge.
Besides that, as an alliance player you spent the vast majority of the raid as a horde character, since the last bosses take much longer to progress. Also super funtimes fighting 2 of your faction leaders in a war, where you get beaten up all the time anyway.

Shit raid, shit design, shit concept and definitely NOT one of the upsides of BfA.

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I am fully convinced that if they made Warfronts actually hard and treated them like a raid BfA would at least be considered Okay.

Imagine creating warfronts without a PVP option as well.

[Skildar]

I really would like to know why there are sometimes people who claim BoD was a good raid. It literally is near the bottom of them list of all raids. Completely recycled assets and music. Bosses were either boring, had super strange mechanics or were constantly bugged. Hell, they even designed the Opolus-Fight in an area that did not support the needed camera movement. It also had the worst raid boss ever designed in mekkatourge.
Besides that, as an alliance player you spent the vast majority of the raid as a horde character, since the last bosses take much longer to progress. Also super funtimes fighting 2 of your faction leaders in a war, where you get beaten up all the time anyway.

Shit raid, shit design, shit concept and definitely NOT one of the upsides of BfA.

Very harsh criticism but it just seems like we are not looking for the same thing when raiding.
The mechanics clearly were the high note of this raid with mekkatorque being one of the best bosses in my opinion, you seldom get to communicate with your teammates like you do on this fight.

You spend 2/3 of the raid in your faction of choice, while the end bosses are for horde characters, it is completely ok for me as it makes sense story wise.

Anyway you touched a bit faction pride, and I'm 100% with you that whatever the faction you choose to support you will feel disappointed during this expansion. Horde feel like idiots that either support a tyrant or traitorous rebels and alliance only once take the offensive and choose to sacrifice a whole army to kill one faction leader that seems like the less deserving of such an attempt.

[Unholyground]

Battle for Azeroth is as close as WoW has been to a grindy mobile game as it has ever come with it's reward structure.

[Powerogue]

The story was deliberately controversial in a way that got players invested, but then players didn't like where that went, especially redoing several key beats from MOP and putting off Sylvanas's consequences all the way until the end of Shadowlands.

Many of the expansion features just weren't popular, particularly the borrowed power progression of azerite armor causing "upgrades" to require a ton of grinding to unlock all their abilities, by which point after the grind you've gained 3 more "upgrades" with the same problem for that slot. Corruption was overpowered and RNG based to the point where the majority of your dps came from those sources of passive damage rather than your abilities themselves.

And we capped it out by introducing and defeating the last Old God in one patch, which felt a bit anticlimactic to the point my money is still on some old god revival down the line with that missing Xal'atath dagger. N'zoth didn't feel like he played enough role in the earlier patches, but on the flipside of that if he did then we would've had ANOTHER story beat taken from MOP so people would've hated that anyway.

I'm still firmly standing by "the things I liked about it were outweighed by what I didn't like but that still leaves it a firm middle-of-the-road expansion."

If heroic warfronts were the default difficulty from the start, island expeditions were more interesting (more reason to queue for the mythic/pvp difficulty over steamrolling heroic?), and azerite armor was removed in favor of just expanding the later essences concept it would've rated a lot higher in my books.

[loras]

They did, though.

Teldrassil is nowhere near Nordrassil. Teldrassil didn't have the blessings of the Ancients like the other trees had. Teldrassil was also corrupted and has been since vanilla WoW. Also, the druids themselves were able to fell a world tree, considering they did so in Northrend in the past.

On top of all that, it wasn't simple, common fire that was tossed at Teldrassil, but magically-enhanced fire.

Except they cleansed it and got it blessed somewhere down the line.

I would think Archimonde and Ragnaros qualify as magic fire too, in fact a lot more so than any demolisher could ever be ^^'

It's not that world trees are hard to fell, it's that they treat the issue wildlyinconsistently.

[Ielenia]

Except they cleansed it and got it blessed somewhere down the line.

It was never fully cleansed.

I would think Archimonde and Ragnaros qualify as magic fire too, in fact a lot more so than any demolisher could ever be ^^'

And Teldrassil is nothing like Nordrassil. It's much weaker and lacks the Ancients' blessings.

It's not that world trees are hard to fell, it's that they treat the issue wildlyinconsistently.

Except, again, it's not inconsistently.

[loras]

It was never fully cleansed.


And Teldrassil is nothing like Nordrassil. It's much weaker and lacks the Ancients' blessings.


Except, again, it's not inconsistently.

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I recall that differently.

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And Archimonde and Ragnaros are much stronger than some random catapults, with or without magic fire.

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If you shut your eyes real hard things look alije, consistent almost.
I am not a fan of viewing any world like that, especially when judging its internal consistency.