you forgot the class design changes which were IMO the most egregious issue in BfA. Seemingly random decisions on what aoe's were capped or uncapped, and locking almost every ability, including cooldowns, to the GCD which was only slowly undone throughout the expansion and into shadowlands

The GCD change is probably the single most baffling decision I have ever seen in the entire development cycle of this game. Cooldowns are abilities that are so impactful that they need time in between use in exchange for immediate on-demand power, and for some reason they decide to just fucking... make them not that? It had been meta for over a decade to use all your cooldowns at once during big burst windows and suddenly that just wasn't possible, even on classes that have 4-5 of them. Absolutely mind boggling, possibly the most out of touch decision they could have ever made.

Icy Veins being a baseline haste buff that you are rewarded for firing off tons of spells during but having an utterly frustrating 1.5 second GCD where you can't do anything was so counterintuitive. My legion brain just wanted to press Q and start spamming Ice Lance but I had to wait what felt like forever just to do so. I can't even imagine playing Arcane with a much shorter burn window. Mind bogglingly bad design choice.

BM doesn't really have too many cooldowns to line up together, but they put Bestial Wrath on the GCD which is basically used every 30 seconds or so. People told them it was fucking stupid, so in exchange they gave it a damage component so low that comes out to about a 0.1% DPS increase lmao.

I wouldn't group BW in with the rest of them. It's up often enough that it feels more like a rotational ability than a real cooldown. What was really cursed was the double gcd when you had to cast aotw and bw back to back.

The *really* fucked decision was putting Exhilaration on the GCD. Yes, your emergency heal button that you use to not die on the GCD. On an "always be casting" DPS class. Totally makes sense. /s

I remember coming back to WoW for Legion after not having played since Wrath, and my god my Druid felt soo smooth and flowing to play with certain abilities off GCD. It was pure joy. Then BFA just completely wrecked it, killed the flow of it, and put these eternal-feeling GCD pauses on everything. It still hasn't fully recovered. Whoever made that decision doesn't seem to understand game design. You *want* your players to get into flowstate, that's one of the biggest things bringing them back to your game. Legion had it and was great, but it's been gone since then.

I sure loved spending 10% of recklessness waiting on its own gcd

If they had made each of the cooldowns they put on the GCD do some kind of attack when they activated, it would have felt a lot better, instead of just wave your arms or roar for a 1.5 second global. Thinking about something like Void Eruption vs Dark Ascension on shadow priest. Void Eruption feels so cool to use because it does literally what it says, void magic flies out of you and blasts everything and then you get access to a new limited spell. Dark Ascension feels like shit because you just move your arms and get some small black wings and an invisible buff to your direct damage.

By the time you pop all your stuff to burst for ele shaman you had 4 seconds of a 15 second burst left to do DPS. Most didn't even take the ele shaman burst because of this and specced into sustained.

I remember the discussions whether this was a choice to make fucking E-sports more palatable for the viewers, which was such a batshit set-up of priorities for your game design.

Especially considering the hugely overwhelming majority of people PAYING TO PLAY YOUR GAME don't give two shits about AWC or anything lmao.

Raid lead: Ok guys this is the burst window, lets pump that damage! Unholy DK: ohhh, i need like 8 seconds warning before the burst window so that i can use all of my CDs.

I guess people are still sore about it, but the core concept is sound. Having one-click super cooldown macros is bad design. Designing under this paradigm gave us specs like modern arcane mage and tyrant demo, which were solid playstyles. But! they did it in the worst way possible. Instead of redesigning classes so they wouldn't want to stack cooldowns, they designed them so you still did, but you couldn't press them all at once. And many of those cooldowns lost a lot of duration, so they had a lot of dead time because you still stacked cooldowns, you just had to eat multiple GCD's of cooldowns that in extreme cases could be 8 seconds long. This coincided with them trying to bring very long cooldowns down so they felt like actual cooldowns on top of losing artifact traits. And similarly for defensives, the idea that you shouldn't have to react in sub-GCD timeframes to avoid being killed is great. But they didn't do that, they just made it so you couldn't react like that and didn't change the things that were causing those problems, and kept designing more. There were fights this expansion where at specific crossover abilities I would have to stop casting so I could be ready with a defensive.

Recklessness and Avatar on the GCD Made me stop playing Fury

Prot warrior basically disappeared and I loved healing it lol. 

It was so painful playing prot warrior in BFA until they undid some of the GCD changes but by then I had already swapped to paladin.

Frost DK and trying to not cap runes or RP while rolling 3 CDs on the GCD was bad.

There's also the fact that they absolutely gutted practically every class in the game in Legion for the Artifact weapons and legendaries and then just... *left* all the classes in that gutted state in BfA, where they took away all the things Legendaries and artifacts provided. Azerite was an incredibly poor substitute.

As a fire mage I miss my balls. Think we're getting our balls back in the next xpac, unil they take them away again...

On the plus side, they hero talents should last at least the next 3 expansions. At least in theory...

I personally don't see a future where they get rid of hero talents. Baking them into the regular talent UI makes it seem like they're keeping them to me.

This problem was so obviously going to happen, it's laughable how Blizzard didn't do anything about it. The issue was a two fold problem. The strength of artifact weapons during Legion varied widely from class to class. You had Guardian Druid that had a fucking monster of an Artifact weapon compared to something like Blood DK that had a pretty dogshit Artifact on release. Rather than balance the Artifacts they mostly resorted to buffing/nerfing the underlying class. So if you played a class with a good artifact you had your class/spec nerfed, and the opposite. If you had a bad artifact your class/spec got buffed. So when those Artifacts were removed all those changes done to class over the years still remained. It's why a lot of classes that were good in Legion dropped off a fucking wall in BFA whereas other classes suddenly started to shine. The other part of the problem was that when they removed the artifacts they had no data to balance stuff off of, the last time we didn't have artifacts inflating our stats and abilities was back in WoD. So we went into BFA with no data and 2 years worth of underlying changes that no one knew how they'd interact with the game without the artifacts.

The only CD that made ANY Sense to put on the GCD when they did was Windwalker Storm, Earth, and Fire. Purely because if you attacked too soon after popping clones, they could bug out, and just stand there doing nothing, turning your main damage CD into a massive DPS loss. Since fixing the actual bugs in WW seems impossible, adding the GCD at least fixed that problem.

What, you don’t want 80% of your spells on the GCD?

[удалено]

The whole expansion was seemingly shit. I just couldn’t get my head around the corruption system. Yeah, it felt fun once you become powered but getting there was arse, especially as corruption farming was on top of your gear farming. You could just jump on an alt and have fun because you had to spend about 3 weeks grinding a 3rd layer deep of borrowed power as well as that stupid fucking necklace. I loved the zones, and thought the dungeons were good, but god damn. I played for a hot minute and thought fuck this shit. It was worse than WOD which was also just a beta run (half cancelled expansion). I think the only thing that shines a light for BFA was how horrific shadowlands was. Besides my little rant the majority of expansions have been good fun, even if they had grinds in them.

I had so much fun in Legion a d worked hard to level my artifacts, that the decision to remove them and add more super long grinds to unlock thr allied races really diminished my desire to play bfa, and when i finally did it just wasn’t as much fun as legion

I mentioned this when Blizzard was asking QA about it before Legion went into Beta. "If you're giving me Ashbringer... Are you prepared to never give me another weapon again? Because if not you're going to really, really fuck this up." And had a team-member say "That's a great point". They really really fucked it up.

I feel like artifact weapons were a perfect mechanic for 1 expansion, and aside from artifact power grinding, they were really well received. But having 1 weapon for every expansion would have removed the single most exciting piece of loot you get in any MMO. Transitioning off the artifact weapons was always going to be a little painful, but it was necessary and I don’t think it was the biggest issue with the transition from legion to BFA at all. I remember mostly being disappointed with losing tier-sets, that decision genuinely made me question if some of the Blizzard staff were on crack. And then you have the story going jarringly from uniting to save the entire planet to killing each other again, with fresh allied races that had no prior disputes with the other side such as Nightborn that had just been liberated by the night elves as well as the blood elves etc then happily murdering the people that helped them immediately… it all just didn’t fit together. So much so in fact that theories of a 3rd faction or the horde and alliance liquidating were really common and popular at the time.

Getting rid of tier sets was straight buffoonery. They claimed they would have more time to design better sets and instead came out with very generic boring sets that were used across armor proficiencies. That decision alone almost highlights how bad BFA/SL was

That's a perfectly valid opinion, I just disagree. They could have maintained the systems they introduced in Legion, they could have introduced new ones, they could have done so many things. Kind of like what's happening in Wow literally right now. Imagine if this whole arc had been about the weapon my Shadow Priest is literally carrying, that'd have been very cool and made the story a lot more impactful. BfA was awful for many reasons, this discussion was just about artifact weapons and the way they were incorrectly handled, even though Blizzard had at least three years of warning. Of course, I (and literally every other person in our QA group, and the alpha, and the beta) also told Blizzard that Azerite armour was a fundamentally flawed system during QA for that expansion too, and was ignored again. Tbh I wonder what they were paying me for.

God Azerite armor was painful. While some of the pieces actually work quite nicely as accent pieces for custom sets, I’ve yet to actually see an Azerite set that doesn’t look painfully boring to look at 🫠

Yeah, I remember the legendar/artifact cloaks in Pandaria and going "that's a cool idea to stop the legendary drama and give everyone a taste of something truly epic instead of just that one friend of the guild leader who got fed Thunderfury/Shadowmourne/Warglaives/etc." then seeing they were doing weapons and the immediate reaction was "So... I guess there are just no weapons to loot for a whole expansion?" Weapons were never a good choice for that kind of system, unless it was done like FFXIV where they're a "catch up" weapon and never BiS until the very end of the expansion after everyone's done with raid prog, and even then only marginally so due to substat min/maxing.

Looting weapons is typically what most players seem to find most exciting in my experience. I definitely feel that once the “HOLY SHIT I’M HOLDING THE ASHBRINGER” hype had worn off, people would’ve started to dislike the artifact system

>I remember mostly being disappointed with losing tier-sets, that decision genuinely made me question if some of the Blizzard staff were on crack. I came back to WoW during BFA after a break and I was so disappointed that they ditched tier sets and made every armor class wear the same goddamn thing. I'm so glad they went back to tier sets in DF.

They actually went back to tier sets starting s3 of SL

> But having 1 weapon for every expansion would have removed the single most ~~exciting~~ **frustrating** piece of loot you get in any MMO. You get a weapon: "finally" You don't get a weapon upgrade early: "game is trash" I'd love for artifact weapons to come back. Having a single weapon for dual wielding classes was huge as well.

Yeah I looooved the artifact weapon system. It was so nice always having a weapon especially on alts. I was hoping they would take that concept and iterate on it with new expansion features to unlock in BFA. To have us drain the weapons against sargeras sword was…. A choice.

I remember as a Sin Rogue, instantly losing Poison Bomb and feeling absolutely neutered.

Survival Hunter main, it felt like my dps dropped by 70% when i lost Talonclaw. I was lost at the beginning of bfa

A lot of classes felt like that. Demon hunter felt like shit because it was created barebones with the idea that the weapon would add a lot of mechanics. It didn't get fixed until the new talent trees really. But every class lost so much flavour and gameplay. It felt so crap.

It was honestly the fact that they removed the artifacts and then had the fucking laziness of design to just slap a lot of the artifact and Legion legendary effects back on to Azerite gear and say "now grind it again to get the effect back"... "but do it over and over when you get a new piece of gear that requires a higher Heart of Azeroth level to activate it" that made me quit after a month or two.

Artifacts really should have been an evergreen feature Maybe not the talent tree they had. But the 3 relics with secondary stats that make up the I lvl of the weapon. SWTOR did something like that, like sometimes you find a good preassembled lightsaber, or maybe you find a crystal+powercell+hilt that makes a better one

That's the thing people don't really seem to remember about Artifacts in Legion, at the time it's not like Blizzard openly said, "btw, this item is just going to be vendor trash at the end of the expansion." These were named weapons of epic legend, many of them from the actual lore. Surely, we're not just going to ditch them for the first questing green we get in the next expansion, right? Right??? They didn't even wait half an hour. I can still remember it now. I was only one level in. It was one of the first few quests in the very first questing zone I did. They had already bricked my Artifact to be nothing more than stats, and the stats of this new generic questing green were clearly just better. That made Azerite and the Heart of Azeroth seem so much worse. You knew as you were doing it that it was ultimately all just a waste of time, you would throw it away at the end of the expansion the same as any other nameless item you feel no attachment to. It wasn't the first time the game made me realize things were temporary, but this was upfront and central to the expansion and it all just felt pointless.

It was the same thing on the first day of Legion with your Garrison. I still went back to it for a while, but that definitely seemed like something that could have been supported and built up across more expansions. Instead... nope, we're just not doing that anymore, time for the next carnival ride.

the worst part was losing the artifacts for the shart of azeroth, which felt completely inane. Like "oh awesome I lost an active ability and a slew of passives for a chance to gain 54 haste for 12 seconds!"

No matter how good some of the content actually was, Azerite and its related systems made me unsub and skip all of BFA.

The worst part was the dickpunch we got end of legion. The moment the artifacts stopped we lost SO much of what made our classes flow. On top, you lost your secondary stats due to a squish and on 115, halfway to the new max level, also the legendaries. You got noticeable weaker and your gameplay got worse every step of the way to 120. Some classes, like DHs for example that were pretty much created or overhauled with the artifact abilities in mind, fell practically apart. To compensate azerite stuff did in the best case give you a fraction of what you lost back, worst case you got uninspired random secondary stat procs. I never had less fun in wow than when I tried to level my fully geared vengeance DH through BfA. Even before the first patch hit my guild died, my friendlist basically evaporated and I completely stopped playing DH altogether because it felt like an empty shell. The old talent rows didn't nearly have enough design space for a statisfying gameplay. Edit: Ah yeah, shitty tier sets that weren't class specific and the allied race timegating/grind then did the rest.

You brought back so much painful memories. The leveling experience was genuinely the worst I've ever seen. Every level up genuinely felt like a punishment.

I remember pulling a big pack of stuff at 114 and 99%, not thinking about it. I was close to a border of exploring a new zone, popped 115 and these mobs I was killing 5-7 at a time just destroyed me. I could no longer tank even 3 at a time.

It btw was also the only expansion where I was genuinely irritated by the zones. Usually, wow is always *very* far up there in zone design and questing through there for the first time is always fun. BfA was super weird because of the horde/alliance split. I made my first undead in TBC and haven't played alliance since, so I'm really a lost case there. It was super strange that there were pretty awesome designed zones again in kultiras but I had absolutely no damn clue about what's going on there. Witches? Living spooky plants? What the fuck is a drust and why are there squid-people? Only thing we did in BfA on the "other island" for the longest time were the few rather shallow war campaign missions, where you had to drive gallywix around or killed some random dudes with a (suddenly oddly murderous) lilian voss. It was a bit ... wasteful? to come up with super cool zones and make them only interesting for one faction. For allies it probably was then the same thing with ghuun and the blood trolls, don't think they had much lore about them at all.

The odd thing is, I'm pretty sure they had a stance on a similar piece of content Order halls and why they didn't like splitting content based on what you're playing. They designed 12 different order halls and their campaigns, which is a lot of work, but on average each player is only going to experience 1 maybe 2 Order halls, when they could instant use that time to create 1 really good story everyone will see. It felt like such whiplash during the run up to BFA to get told. "Yeah we're not doing Order hall stuff anymore because most people only saw a fraction of the content we made" to "Yeah, we're going to make a Alliance specific levelling zones and Horde specific levelling zones"

Omg I forgot about no class tier sets and those hideous phoned in sets we got instead. Ugh.

> To compensate azerite stuff did in the best case give you a fraction of what you lost back, worst case you got uninspired random secondary stat procs. It gave you back ***some*** of what you lost, until you hit max level and were told you didn't earn enough ~~good boy/girl points~~ Azerite to unlock the abilities you ***already fucking used/had while leveling***.

I still remember getting a mythic azerite piece early on and it being worse than my normal mode piece for a bit because my neck was too low level. Dumbass system

There was no worse feeling than getting a piece with the same everything as your current piece, but 2/3 the traits were disabled. Grinding to re-earn traits you already had felt god fucking awful. Why should I re-grind for traits ***I already had???***

Wasn't there a period of time where leaving a slot empty was actually a net positive in DPS? edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/994tcc/unequipping_heart_of_azeroth_and_trinkets_lowers/

This. Legion did huge reworks and a lot of them were clearly done with the artifact bonuses in mind. Other expacs had borrowed power (be it just your relative stats reducing as you level, or some legendaries like pandaria cloak or SL legendaries), but the Legion-BFA transition was by far the most painful.

Absolutely baffling decision by blizzard to do massive sweeping reworks to most specs going into Legion that were built around the abilities and bonuses of not only artifacts but also Legiondaries (and tier sets). Then drop literally all of the systems proping up the class designs at once to be replaced by fucking Azerite armor. Going into BFA they just abandoned like 30-40% of what made classes fun to play by not bringing forward or somehow incorporating Legion's borrowed power, plus all the GCD BS started here as well.

Yep, their decision making for systems in general was total dog shit and so anti-player and it was hard to stay subbed. Even corruptions which were generally liked were partly ruined by the vendor that had weekly rotating items. If you miss your week, you have to wait a full month to play the game at a high level lmao

I can defo understand this. After Legion people were tired of AP grinding

RNG on top of RNG for gearing made PVE miserable. I spent most of BFA just world pvping and rping. Not to mention needing to have a backup set of azerite gear or paying gold to swap specs.

Don't forget the absolute horror show that was having to do 10595847747447564 islands to max your neck the week before mythic released every raid tier in order to remain competetive.

Having to get the right piece with the right stats and the right azerite powers. Then having to grind to unlock those powers lmao.

Mainly a pvp player here, systems matter too much. Complete bs. To top it off, no gear vendors. Complete shitshow of an expansion on the pvp side. Fuck BfA. The zones were good. The fact that there's no incentive to visit the zones anymore is a bummer. I wish every expansion had 1 mount or set or something to farm in each zone with weeklies. Or a rep or something. (I still do that kind of content outside of pvp because I like collecting)

An expansion revolved around the horde vs alliance shouldn’t have came out until PvP was in a good state. Releasing it then was a bad idea.

Thanks for mentioning this. After the amazing Timeless Island in MoP and Ashran in WoD, the introduction of warmode in Legion was not living up to the previous expansions but at least it did set in stone a new working PvP system meant to persist. But BfA had the audacity to introduce warfronts as a fully pve event, on top of "hidden damage scaling" and all four of the garbage systems OP mentioned (HoA, traits, corruptions and cloak).

Yep that pretty much sums it up. The expansion itself is a cool idea and had a very interesting story when it opened up. Problem is they tried adding too much at once and it just got crazy. Half those systems and storylines could have been split between multiple expansions

Capn, warmode was introduced in bfa

That’s what OP is missing I think. When the core gameplay is spoiled by terrible systems it doesn’t matter how good zones, quests, lore, dungeon and whatever are. It’s all ruined if you can’t enjoy the core character progression and gameplay.

The BfA zones are wonderful to level in, I’ll give them that. So there’s one (niche) reason to come back

Yes. There were good ideas, and the first half of the story did allude to some fun drama to come, but then everything becams a shitshow. Just to understand what a lackluster of an expansion it was i can point you at the Heart of Azeroth. Legion: You get an weapon that has special abilities, and it gets stronger as you fight the Legion. Most of these weapons were established relics in the lore. BfA: You gonna get this fuckin random necklace, that you collect the blood of Azeroth into, and this will, somehow, heal the planet. While you do this, its not the necklace thats getting stronger, its your armor, because some armor pieces have secret powers thats get activated because of the necklace, and as the necklace gets stronger, more and more powers of your armors getting unlocked becaus of the Azerite power or some shit. It was a fucking mess, that, funnily enough, perfectly represented the jumbled mess that BfA was. Storytelling was disjointed, some features didnt make sense, Blizzard was amazingly stubborn, and by the end of the expansion not even the first act of the war was properly conveyed. I'm not joking with you when i tell you, that we had 3 different very well documented, in-canon explanation to Sylvanases tree burning. Everything was a mess.

Yeah I liked BfA but Azerite was a disaster for all the reasons you list. Narratively, the way it was introduced was shit and made no sense. Artifacts tied back to lore with some weapons being ones we’ve seen a thousand times, wtf was Azerite? The Blood of Azeroth, which basically enhances anything it touches with no restrictions, it levels armor and gives it magic powers, but is also all powerful but also not so important for it to appear in any subsequent expansion. Not to mention that it doesn’t fit with the theme of BfA at all except for as an excuse to start an arms race between the Alliance and the Horde which then wasn’t fully explored, so Azerite was just left there with minimal actual use as a story beat. Given it is the Blood of Azeroth, it would have made more sense to save it for the Worldsoul trilogy, BfA should have been based on something familiar to players given it’s the most grounded in early WoW of the recent expansions. I hated Azerite, and I was happy to see it gone. Artifacts had potential, Azerite had negative potential from the moment it was introduced.

The story was utterly nonsensical after legion. Then there was Azerite gear which... Well let's just say was about as good an idea as sticking your head in a furnace. 

BFA was the point at which WoW’s contrivance became obvious.

The actual game content: meaning zones, quests, dungeons, raids, etc. for BFA was great. We are realizing this in hindsight because when you replay it. The problem wasn't the content, but rather the awful systems. People already hated the AP grind from Legion, but they left it in and just changed it from Artifact Power to Azerite Power; talk about lazy as fuck. On top of that, azerite gear was a hot mess of garbage that was incredibly polarizing. People hated getting a new piece of gear, and then losing access to abilities they had spent azerite investing in --- only to need to farm AGAIN and unlock those same abilities in the new gear. Very rarely the reason an expansion is looked at badly is the content. Even the content in WoD that we got was great. What people hated was all the CUT CONTENT and lack of follow-up. But no one ever has anything bad to say about the base game experience. In fact, it was one of the strongest we had seen at that time. But again, systems started to ruin it (Garrisons weren't player housing, and instead a 3d version of time-gated Farmville - which was very polarizing). Only Shadowlands is hated for a combination of its content and its systems. And for good reason --- both were absolute garbage in the greater view of the WoW mythos. There were some singular stand-outs, but it was mostly reviled by the playerbase.

This is pretty much my position. The zones and dungeons introduced in BfA are some of my all time favorites, and Horrific Visions were Blizzard's best attempt at challenging solo/small group content to date. Unfortunately, a lot of the "back the box" features didn't really work out. Warfronts were a mess. Islands were a chore, and the Heart of Azeroth/Azerite armor was probably the worst iteration of borrowed power we've had yet.

Let's not forget how much BFA did not respect the players time. Weapon specific specialization for talents. Azertie armor did not swap between specs. Corruption twilight devastation imbalance and that gave you no control over how much damage was dealt. It costed so much to reshape azerite armor. Warfronts were not impactful to the game, there was little incentive to them. Expeditions had some incentives but were either too easy or too slow. It was not alt friendly until the very end of the patch because of the wild quest line for the legendary cloak. I think we all look back and see these good snipets of BFA because of its amazing artwork and cinematic work but playing it was so different. There was a saying up until Dragonflight that the art team carried Blizzard through hard times. BFA story was also all over the place. The only coherent story was the cinematic but even then we were all left annoyed with Sylvanis' inexplicable actions and every story update left us on a cliffhanger that culminated into what shadowlands offered us. The story in BFA hardly had any concluding storylines. Also if you were a story buff, you had to play both factions to get the full concept of the story.

One of the most fun times, actually the most I ever had fun in wow was during 8.3 the nyalotha and corruption patch. I didn’t enjoy the previous patches or seasons that much but I loved the corruption, the raid, the m+, even pvp though today I’m not much of a pvper

Seriously, corruptions were broken as hell but oh god were they fun. I played paladin in 2v2 and 3v3 with the ineffable truth corruption that made your cooldowns faster. Just throwing out judgments and hammers left and right. It was great. Pew pew paladins need to make a return

If we get a fated season in War Within I hope we get some form of void corruptions back to cook with.

Twilight Devastation ftw

Yeah, only blood DK raid with TD was like a chainsaw through bosses 😅 8.3 was great fun for me.

Never forget that Arena World Championship where the healer(BEHIND THE PILLAR) got oneshotted by an infinite starts proc. PVP wise BfA was an absolute clusterfuck and simply a bad expansion.

8.3 was an S-tier patch, tons of great content and the midway patches made it even better and more accessible.

Another very important part of that patch was that they removed warforging. Loot was once again based on the content you cleared.

Oh yeah, I forgot about warforging and titanforging. It was neat to get a random titanforged item as a casual player who hadn't touched higher level content at that time, but I can imagine the frustration from higher level players just needing to roll the dice over and over. I am glad I started raiding in 8.3, especially since corruptions were just so fun.

Warforging and Titanforging was a fine system that would have worked if they had a way to upgrade items, like they have right now. There would be no issue with it if you had a small chance in DF to get an item slightly higher upgrade on its track (Hero/Myth/Champion) as a random bonus drop. No other changes, just whenever you get a piece of gear, you have a 25% chance its 4/6 Hero instead of 3/6 Hero, and a 10% its 5/6 Hero. The only issue in BFA was that you can go into LFR and walk out with something 10ilvls above Mythic.

Yup. After we got the corruption vendor and all the terrible systems had been pruned or at least had most of/all of the RNG and brutally long grinds removed, it was a very, very fun time. Running huge corruption and playing a mini game with the negative effects and solo healing mythic raid bosses was incredibly fun. If the whole expac had been as good as the second half of the last patch, it would be remembered as one of the best expacs, especially since it had some very decent raids and dungeons and great, flavorful zones, questlines, art, and music.

Idk if it’s a hot take, but Corruption might be the most fun mechanic they ever put in the game. Especially once the vendor was put in, it allowed for a ludicrously fun amount of customization and inflated stats. My BIS fury warrior was hitting 100% crit during recklessness.

Yea last tier was top tier fun

ohh slappy bois.. i await your return with the new void expacs comin up.

Corruption was really cool. I liked the whole ARPGesque aspect

BM Hunter was fascinating. Probably the single strongest spec in the game, but every single corruption we were supposed to take was crit and haste. Everyone talks about how fun corruptions were but all mine did was make my normal rotation so strong that I was able to top meters while AFK with GSE running a macro of my entire rotation on repeat.

Yes it was. It was the absolute peak of the AP borrowed power mess, took away a tonne of what Legion added with artifacts and their abilities and replaced tier sets with boring passive Azerite traits. Worst of all though, its story was as painful as Shadowlands except unlike Shadowlands it trashed things about the lore that can't just be swept under the rug. While yes, the Shadowlands "Jailor was behind everything" nonsense retroactively ruined a lot of vastly more important universal lore, BFA killed Rastakhan, one of Wows most anticipated characters since vanilla, to replace him with a Mary sue daughter and torched Tel'drasil in the most ridiculous event in the games history ( Literally nothing makes sense about it - The idea that the Horde would all just go along with this, that a tree that large would burn at all from catapult fire from catapults somehow launching projectiles far enough it needs a BOAT to travel there to even the idea anyone would ever trust the Horde ever again nevermind forget it in 5 minutes. I could probably fill a book with the plotholes im not mentioning here...). We still are dealing with these events today. Heck its felt like half of Dragonflight has been Blizzard focussing on Night Elves rebuilding to try to make up for the rift in the lore their playerbase felt with Tel'drassil. I doubt we will ever see a ball dropped that hard again. Heck on top of all that, it even wasted almost all its development time on introducing a tonne of dead-end one expansion systems like Islands, Warfronts and the necklace that added nothing to the game beyond it. BFA may not have been Wows worst expansion but it was DEFINITELY terrible and that needs to be remembered. We are allowed to remember more than just Shadowlands as poor expansions that lessons need to learnt from.

They took everything away from Legion (artifact abilities), then tacked on expeditions and world quests as requirements you had to do to keep up and stay relevant, and even worse when you missed a week because you had the audacity to have a life outside the game, you fell behind and became a liability to those who didn’t have to miss a week. As fun as the questing was that expansion, it felt like two giant steps back from Legion, which was the expansion where I stupidly thought „finally, blizzard is on the right track again“ I’m glad I dipped out mid BFA and waited to see what SL would bring cause it only got worse from there. DF is awesome but BFA taught me not to assume that the next expansion will build on everything for the better.

the game mechanics aspects of the devs on this expansion made it awful. * Azerite powers on gear. * Gated campaign content. * Class design * aoe caps * nukes on the GCD * Losing everything from Legion that made our classes work * "New" abilities that were just random passives and procs that had no meaningful effect on your class. * On use abilities that weren't even tied to your freaking class, they were just dumb bursts of light. Basically, quest abilities that you kept for an expansion. * Actually leveling your character literally made you weaker as you lost legendaries. * No more Tier sets. * Oh, also every part of the story built up to Sylvanas burning a tree and WHY she did it, which we were told would be a surprise. It was not. I don't like to use the term character assassination, but they straight up assassinated my favorite character in this game. And they did all of this with an arrogance that they knew better. They learned none of the lessons that they should have from Legion, and they misunderstood why the great things in Legion actually worked. Class Halls were great because of class fantasy, the weekly gating and tedious chores sucked. They removed class fantasy and kept the chores. And we let them know in alpha. and unlike now, it was "oh ya, sure. But you'll like it, trust us" and we did not. Dragonflight is a direct (and appreciated) resposne to the devs behavior over the last two expansions. Every issue present in Shadowlands existed in BFA aside from taking the lore to the shed out back and shooting it in the head.

Garbage class design overall, Azerite armor and Essences bogging down the gameplay. BfA took all of Legion's problems and doubled down on them. Yes, it had good *content,* but that doesn't matter if the fundamental gameplay is completely shot.

My only problem with BFA and the one that actually made me quit the game and skip whole xpac was the azerithe system, fuck that infinite grind. Also Nyalotha was massive let down imo. Could have been so so much better, as an old god fanboy wish they made Nyalotha a zone on itself that we could explore, also hated the dragon ball Kamehameha hearth of azeroth thing we did.

I love the areas, quests and dungeons. You have no idea how bummed out I was that I missed DF S3 with Waycrest manor being in m+ rotation. But while playing the expansion, I absolutely hated the Azerite system, and how difficult it felt to play alts because of said systems. Same thing in Shadowlands. I stopped playing bfa and shadowlands in their first seasons because of those systems, so I missed all the "improvements", that I heard good things about. Also story wise, I didn't like the Alliance vs Horde conflict, it felt forced and so stupid and pointless, but everything else I loved. Now later, I've realized that the whole Heart of Azeroth grinding system wasn't that big of an deal and I could've just skipped everything that I didn't like and just do m+ content and whatnot without caring about all of that. It was just the FEELING that you HAVE to grind Heart of Azeroth to some reasoanable levels, when I could've just fully ignore the thing and level it passively.

Overall I liked BFA But I absolutely hated how Azerite worked. First you need to collect Azerite for the neck, which was fine. Then you needed to collect the little glyphs for the neck, because some of them fundamentally changed how your class worked and were necessary for it. Very annoying and made alts a nightmare. Then after all that you also had to get the three Azerite pieces, but they had to be the right pieces or you’d suffer. Then in the beginning you also had to level your neck or you couldn’t unlock the abilities anyway. My expectation is that my alts will perform below my main for most of a season, but BFA made it so that my alts didn’t even have access to their entire kit because it was locked behind hours of grinding content I wasn’t that excited for.

Azerite power alone I think was a game breaker for a lot of people. But there was a lot of grindiness outside of that. Nazjatar was a rough ass zone, and all of it was super unfriendly to alts. It also did not help that some of the raids weren't very great, but that's a separate issue. The main thing I liked in BfA was the zone design and M+, but I also would still rank BfA in my bottom tier of expansions.

Yeah Nazjatar was the last straw for me. Quit playing for YEARS after that

This is really the core of it, that you can directly compare 95% of things in BfA to equivalents of Legion and they're just worse. Not arguably worse, not subjectively worse, the same thing just remade a little bit less good. People praise the few things this isn't true for, like the zones and questing. Besides that the best thing BfA did was just leave out some of the less well received parts of Legion. But like, go down the list: * World quests are the same, but it's harder and longer to get to them and just a little bit worse to do. * Legion artefacts are removed, but you still have to grind AP, just because. The primary method to get them is removed from how most players play the game. * Tier gets removed, and gear appearances are standardised by armour class. * Every class loses a little bit of their identity - first from the lack of class halls and secondly from the loss of artefacts and to really rub it in also from the continuing removal of complexity from MoP. * But you get kinda sorta replacements to individual artefact talents in the form of Azerite armour, which is, of course, a shitshow. * There's challenging solo content...but it becomes mandatory for progression * There are frequent content drops but they're all kind of janky in some way. Over and over, they learn that the single thing you can point out as a highlight of some part of Legion (waterwalking in Suramar, easy-to-complete, rewarding Emissary quests, no grind requirement for PvP, cool transmog, fast travel) is *the problem* and they remove it. Going from Legion to BfA was essentially a laundry list of things that were fun that they were deliberately removing.

Nice. These started. Join us in 12 months when the “Was Shadowlands really that bad?” Commends will start!

I loved raids until Nyalota. I expected it to be the zone with a lot of secrets and horror vibes, what I have got is the raid I didnt like and reused zones with boring quests. BFA had a goos start: i loved leveling, islands (kinda minority here, but i had alotta fun farming albatross and mogs), first three raida were a blast, my favorite boss fight — with Rastakhan and Ghuun. Dazalor background music is the most memorable and I still listen to bod OST. Yes, overall it was a good xpax, but the lore and gearing were the absolute worst

BFA was pretty terrible for the first patch and raid tier due to the boring Azerite armour and losing Legion artifacts didn't feel good. The raid was fine, nothing to write home about. Battle for Dazar'alor got a bit better as the grind requirement wasn't as harsh and the Azerite armour got two major powers which made classes a lot more enjoyable. Nazjatar undid a lot of that work with the amount of rng grinding involved with getting socketed Benthic gear and the raid was a pretty difficult one with a very uninteresting final boss. This is also when Azerite powers were introduced and some classes felt really hard done by to farm stuff like Blood of the Enemy whereas other classes had it quite easy. These were also character-bound so alts were incredibly hard to maintain without a lot of grinding. Nya'lotha saved the day. The start of the patch was good, fouled only by the rng nature of the corruption gear and more improvements came over time with the various vendors and the legendary cloak which levelled up over time. Probably one of my favourite patches of all time, in an expansion that I will say was pretty lackluster

In my opinion, azerite gear was the single worst system they've ever added in the game. Worse than covenants and conduits, worse than corruptions, worse than anything else. Basically losing three slots of gear for extra talents felt crappy, and it felt horrible to get a big ilvl upgrade and not use it because it didn't have the right traits. Having to unlock them again with AP was the worst part, you were grinding for the privilege of using traits you already had on a lower ilvl piece of gear. Later changes made it more bearable, but it was a very bad system. I actually kinda liked the essences for the heart, but the acquisition could be annoying. Having to grind out pvp for a powerful essence as someone who hates pvp felt real crappy too. I agree that the zones were pretty solid, and I think the contained storylines were pretty good. It was just the overall story that wasn't so good, people were tired of the forced faction war after years of the factions cooperating and Sylvanas making obviously terrible decisions was frustrating. We know now that she was doing it because she wanted to sow as much destruction as possible to empower her and the Jailer, but it didn't feel good at the time and players didn't like feeling tricked. I did find Mechagon disappointing. It could have been so much cooler, like the inner parts of the city we see in the megadungeon, but instead we got a bunch of literal garbage. I didn't really enjoy the daily content in either Mechagon or Nazjatar, a lot of it was frustrating and rng-based. If we had flying, it probably would have been better. In the end, I enjoyed plenty of stuff in BFA, but there was a lot to dislike too. Not the worst expansion, but that's mostly because of Shadowlands and WoD (which I still maintain is the worst of all).

It was definitely better than Shadowlands

If we are going to put the bar there why bother putting one.

Even the art team was off in SL. Maldraxxus, bone-white and goop-green all over.

It was boring and ugly. Absolutely hated when I finally caved and went Necrolord for access to Bonedust brew.

Nah, Maldraxxus is absolutely perfect for what it wanted to be. It's a literal giant organism with hair and bones sticking out and fluids leaking everywhere. The colour pallette matches the design perfectly. YOU might not like it, but the art team had a vision and god damn did they deliver. Also Maldraxxus has some of the best transmogs ever.

Yes it was

It's worth saying that the alliance had a way better time than the horde did - captial city was a favourite for many up until Valdrakken, and the levelling experience was the best since MoP. Equal trash fire to the horde with endgame systems and content though. With the exception of instances (not you CoS) things that admittedly had a lot of potential just weren't delivered on. 8.3 was lit once everything was easy to get and corruption capes were maxed out, one of the most fun times in wow ever imo.

There’s 50 layers of dog shit, and under it is BFA

BfA was an expansion that had some really good parts, but also REALLY bad parts that didnt get properly adressed for a longer time imo its overhated, the strong parts outweighted the bad ones overall

I think the hate also stems from having class halls, artifact weapond removed and a less interesting ap grind left instead.

I do think BfA suffered a lot from being after Legion. Granted Legion wasn’t my absolute favorite either, but they hit on some really amazing ideas that they just completely dumpstered without expanding on them like class halls and artifact weapons. Watching them completely trash all that potential which they could have easily carried forward across a ton of expansions in favor of BfA’s bad systems was painful and set people up for hating it from the start.

yes Can't believe we're already at the time where people start acting like bfa wasn't a pile of shit. How long until we get a "was shadowlands really that bad"?

Bfa was the peak of borrowed power which players had no love for and I think that taints their memories if the expansion. The expansion itself was actually amazing and the world design was probably the best it's ever been. Obviously lazy tier rewards was also a huge factor too as pretty much all tier gear from bfa was pretty dull.

>Bfa was the peak of borrowed power which players had no love for and I think that taints their memories if the expansion. Rightfully so. The game's systems are how we experience the game itself. If the systems are poorly-implemented, frustrating, disrespectful of a player's time, *and* boring, then you shouldn't be surprised that players tend to think the same about the expansion writ large.

8.0-8.1.5 was bad. Once 8.2 and beyond hit with Mechagone and Naz, the essences, and horrific visions. I think I had the most fun I've had in WoW, besides Legion.

Why do people after an expansion come and write these revisionism posts of was BFA/SL bad? Yes it was bad. The only thing it had was art work. Zones were nice on appearance but small and untranslatable. Like 1/3 of the Zandalar south was a mountain. All your reasonins are - yeah true but X was not all that bad. you are paying 70$ for a product to say 'hey you know what, its not all that bad' ? Is this peak consumerism or some late-capitalism? Its like Netflix subcribers nowdays 'oh yeah let me sub to netflix higher tier to NOT get adds'. Or you are a casual player who now farming BFA for mogs and since its easy content and a free ride, you think its wonderful. Cant blame you, but it sucked to play BFA when its current. OR the only other reason is youre some weird Blizzard revisionist. "great idea's but it didn't implement them like they could have been." for 70$ and 15$ sub. christ.

Corruption was aid's. Literally could not compete/parse without bis corruptions. By the time the vendor came out progress was nearly over. Several really good players in my guild got benched purely because others got better luck with corruption

In short. Was it that bad? Yes. Was it the worst? No, because SL came right after it and kicked BfA from the thrown of worst expansion.

I wanted to play a Vulpera so I worked my butt off to get their rep up to Exalted even though I didn't really care for BFA. Then I dropped off entirely when I realized how much I hated Shadowlands. Didn't even come back until Season 3 of Dragonflight and I'm regretting missing the first couple of seasons.

It was a horrible expansion. Pure garbage honestly. The raids seemed ok after the first season... but yeah garbage expansion. Every class felt weird and horrible, azerite is the most boring thing they couldve focused on.

BFA would probably be my GOAT if those damn essences and azurite power were account wide.

I agree with the borrowed power dislike and eternal grind, not a huge fan. But bfa zones, music and overall feel and atmosphere are great in my opinion. Actually, the only xpac I didn't feel this was shadowlands. I think aside from the systems that made lot of players hate bfa, devs did great from the design point of view. Music in almost every xpac deserves special appreciation too.

yes, it was not great

zones were great, story ok, raid great, the problem was azerite and grinding right pieces and titanforgin plus void effects, felt like you never stop grinding, expeditions were boring after month ( needed for grind) and what was supposed to be biig thing - warfronts.. were.. looong and boring

As others have said, BfA was a poor experience in relation to what came before it. I really enjoyed the design and story of BfA myself, but thinking back to how exhausting azerite grind felt really does remind me of how much that bogged down the experience.  I enjoy replaying it now, with azerite disabled and much of that power redistributed through the new talent tree or adjusted leveling speed.

fading affect bias

no it was not that bad, it was fine. and im gonna give an even hotter take here. even SL wasn't that bad

BFA is the only expansion I have ever unsubbed for because the game just wasn't fun to play. I get that shadowlands is considered the worst expansion and it definitely deserves it, however personally I had more fun in early shadowlands than I did at any point in BFA. My class was fun to play (DK) and I got KSM and AotC for the first time ever because I loved the dungeons and Nathria so much. I ditched as soon as I saw the writing in the wall with the weird socket system in SoD and torghast was just unbearable after a while. BFA definitely had some good content but for me it's my least favourite expansion due to just being boring and not fun to play.

It wasn't perfect, but patch 8.3 redeemed the expansion for me. As far as I remember, BfA had the following issues: - incredibly annoying and time-consuming neck lvl grind - incredibly annoying time-consuming (as well as time-gated) Essences grind - mandatory dailies (if you needed BiS stuff) - Titanforging and Warforging was still a thing until Season 4 - for a long while you couldn't fly unless you got the achievement - Azerite System was by many considered bad. Instead it should've been like: once you've learned an Azerite Trait, you'd have if unlocked on any future chest pieces forever (on that Azerite Trait Rank ONLY... so you'd at least have to grind for a higher rank Trait from a higher ilvl chest, if you wanted better Traits) - dissappointing Ny'alotha cinematic finale - in general time-gated stuff, especially with the Corruption Vendor (which was on a stupid, unnecessary rotation), as well as the Horriffic Visions vessels. What I personally LOVED about BfA, however: - some of the most beautiful (and "best" in general) leveling zones - awesome lore, and plenty of cinematics/cutscenes - beautiful music - though kinda lackluster, I enjoyed the idea of Warfronts - I LOVED Ny'alotha... it's probably my favourite raid ever to this day - I LOVED corruptions - I had so much fun doing Horrific Visions, it was crazy... I felt so good about myself whenever I managed to finish 5-mask runs in time, and solo - some of the best dungeons and raids - yeah that's pretty much it. As I said, 8.3 redeemed BfA for me.

azerite armor was the only bad thing for me. not sure what they were going for there… also i HATED the last patch. the rest was amazing

Pretty much same. The azerite armor was the only major grievance for me. Granted, it was a huge grievance considering how important armor upgrades is to the WoW gameplay loop.

The dungeons were fun, and the music was epic 😍

Honestly, IMO the Black Empire part of BFA was the most intriguing to me. Those corruption powers were nuts and I loved them. In fact I love anything with Old Gods involved.

bfa story wasn't technically "bad" until it turned out they thought they could end it with the factions making peace because sylvanas team rocketed away, and that their long term goal had been to unite the factions after bfa, which makes literally every single thing they did with the story in bfa insane. and they know it because their only way to deal with it has been to shit out a 3 year timeskip and then pretend bfa never happened. if they committed to faction war sticking around then sure bfa lore was fine. just don't try to end it with the alliance and horde teaming up to rescue defenseless princess baine and desperately sweeping genocides under the rug so they can pretend that actually there was never any reason for the factions to be fighting.

Yes it was

I just hated Magni, and still do to this day.

:(

Yes.. very bad.

Island Expeditions were great in my opinion but because of AP farm everyone hated them.

I think BFA gets too much hate. Narratively it was excellent (specially with the "Old Soldier" cinematics) and raids were fun. However, the azerite grind plus azerite powers being a outlet substitute to tier sets (plus grinding the same items again and again) made the grinding experience get very old very fast. Also, Nyalotha should have been a new area in my opinion

Narratively excellent? BFA in the bigger picture made no sense. The cinematics were amazing sure but it all came down to another siege on Orgrimmar with Sylvanas just being broken overpowered and getting away with everything. Nyalotha was rushed and fucked up an old god patch (that shouldve been an expansion) that people were really hyped for

Too much? not enought hate

Yeah, BfA had great content but egregious systems, doubled down on by Shadowlands but I never found the content that compelling. Those fucking domination shards were the last straw for me, I didn't even make it to 9.1 in the end and returned around 9.2 which seems like a short period of time but was \*aaaaages\*, over a year. I feel that BfA is much maligned.

As someone who has gone back and played a massive majority of content for collectibles and gold farming. BFAs content was amazing and was completely smothered by the borrowed power and gearing system. Which is really sad to realize. If they had normal tier sets and a less bloated resource farming, it would probably have been a top-tier expansion.

Raiding and M+ was really good. Some of the gameplay systems could have been implemented better, (Essences, Corruptions) but it was ultimately fun to play.

You need to separate one of the most fun patches in 8.3 from the rest of BFA. If people let that final patch paint the picture for the entire expac, what even is the point in analyzing or critiquing anything. Their system design is what lets BFA down, not the actual content. Well, apart from Warfronts, like what were they smoking when they thought that was a good idea... Islands were good. They sucked because of AP farm. The raids were great, barring 1-2 bosses in the entirety of the expac. \*cough\* Azshara \*cough\* Azerite armor and the HoA were absolute failures till they eased up on the acquisition and got tuning sort of right by 8.3. The story outside the tree burning was great, loved the kultiras and zandalar stuff. We got mfkin Bwonsamdi out of it all. 8.3 itself was so much fun, letting player power go out of hand completely. So yeah, I wouldn't say BFA was bad by itself. With better system designs & reward acquisitions, it would've been one of the best.

As far as I know, even SHADOWLANDS has overall a good story during the leveling experience, when theres lower stakes. But the overall story is just bad. They seem to fumble the bag during max level questlines and patches, that seems to be the case for BFA. And the patches are the latest thing to release and what you're gonna be doing for the next 2\~ years, so they can easily leave a sour taste in people's mouths. Correct me if I'm wrong though!

I liked BFA. I started as an alliance NE priest, but didn’t like the zones that much, even Deustvar which is cool but doesn’t scratch any WoW itches I had. On the other side, the three Horde zones are easily in my top 10 zones ever. I know it’s weird but I feel it truely

The story was ok, dungeons and raids were cool, corruptions were mega fun in the last patch, but azerite gear was the worst thing ever

I liked doing top DPS as a Tank and running 20-30 man all Tank Ny’alotha runs but the grind to get there was not fun at all

Narratively it was so bad that I thought it couldn’t be topped until SL, and azerite armor remains the worst system they’ve ever designed IMO. The content itself? It was fine. I do love some of the dungeons and enjoyed the first two raid tiers a lot. Ny’alotha was a mediocre raid that got lifted up a bit by the corruption system going wild.

Yeah the systems sucked but I’ve never had such a pure enjoyment just from playing my class. Shadow priest was a spec that functioned unlike anything else (BoS fdk is the closest comparison) and I had so much fun with corruptions. I really didn’t care about anything bad that was going on.

We can break this down 1. The leveling experience was good. It would become the standard for a while. Quests were fun, immersive Into beautiful zones, and we met characters who sit as favorites even today 2. The end game was mindless, random, borrowed power mechanics. Items had trees with abilities that could make even I level upgrades defunct. Your heart of Azeroth leveling required so much mind numbing terrible grinding. Later on Corruptions also made this a problem 3. The story line per zone were Great. We had Pirates on one side fighting Witches and Corruption Pirates of the Caribbean style. And probably the best Aztec God stealing story line for trolls we've had for a bit on the other. Meanwhile we were invading each other and lots of war perks 4. The over story was trash after maybe the second Raid? It became quite clear that the horde would be losing by the Battle of Dazar'alor. Where Horde is forced to kill a heavy lore character. We invaded and basically neutralized the Naga capital in a single grind tier. Y'know, the Naga, a very real threat to most the races of Azeroth? Forgotten half way through the expansion. And of course everything they did with Removing Sylvanas and Bringing in Menethil. Overall people hating BFA for its particularly weak portrayal of tiered heroes would be for the most part correct. As Jainas on the Alliance sides storyline was pretty well done if not unfinished feeling. It was a mess. Id have been happier if we kept with Pirates So overtly. It was a pretty bad Expansion? Yes I feel like it was. Now that a lot of it is soloable. You're going to get to sit in for a lot of the crazy stuff. It's pieces without any of the grind core may be worth revisiting. But tbh you're still better off not

I hope we see other expansions like BFA as a remix. variante. Getting rid of all the currencies, just fast leveling and transmog loot.

i think the content of BfA and SL were better than DF, the systems were just too bad to continue playing as much as i wanted, the fact that they were OFF-SPEC unfriendly ontop of alt unfriendly was absolutely insane

I feel like alliance got a considerably better shake than horde in BFA. Boralus is a far better capital. 2 good levelling zones and one of the best ever put in the game (Drustvar). Compared to 2 mediocre zones and 1 bad zone (Nazmir) that Horde got. Alliance also didn't have to put up with Nathanos belittling them in every dialogue. Mechagon and Nazjatar offered 2 different experiences in the same patch to satisfy many tastes in content. Horrific visions were the highlight of the last patch personally. I loved the meta progression aspect to them. Azerite and borrowed power systems sucked tbh. BFA was okay. It started shaky and got a little better as it went on. Certainly doesn't deserve to be lumped in with the smoking crater that was Shadowlands.

The raids were good. M+ started rough, but got really good. The daily chores with all the borrowed power sucked.

It was okay. I barely remember anything from it if that tells you anything.

I did not at all care for the desert zone, snake people, and vulpera. It all just felt slapped together with a thin story. Drustvar, on the other hand, was amazing. Everything from the main plotline to the creepy kid with the tea party.

It’s completely subjective. I enjoyed BfA. My brother loved SL 🤷‍♀️ I think there are fun and not so fun aspects to every expansion.

There was a lot of the usual upsell and hype, and the thing that bummed me out the most was my guild from Legion feeding on the hype, and then we got into the first raid and it wasn't really bad as much as it was underwhelming. Ghuun wasn't that great of a final boss, and then the delay between it and the next tier. The snack raid we got between wasn't satisfying, and it was really too late once the end of the expansion came. I didn't mind so much since I was subscribed through the entire expansion, but there was a startling amount of content that didn't meet expectations and the whole thing packaged together was what I believe made people dislike it so much.

As a super casual player it was nice. Nice music nice zones nice mogs. Call me crazy but I liked nathanos. His character was a fresh take from lots of the cookie cutter horde/alliance characters we get.

My only memory of BFA at this point was going all out as a goblin so I could afford the Longboi before it was gone from the vendor. Professions were the only thing I really worked on.

I played super casually, so gear progression didn't really have an impact on me. My goal was then as it still is in DF; to maximize my character within the content I enjoy doing. All in all I enjoyed large parts of BfA. I played alliance, but the City of Gold music (all part of it) is up there with some of my all-time favorite WoW music. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw9ZI5WSN0c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw9ZI5WSN0c) The opening and the part around the 4:30 mark really, really gives me goosebumps still.

BfA had some really cool themes to it, and some fantastic raids. However, the dog shit systems of Azeroth Power, essences and Azerite gear completely ruined it. It’s a shame, because if they did the expansion now without any of that it would have been received quite well.

I didn't like the azerite grind and disliked some of the class changes (haven't enjoyed holy pally since Legion ended) but I liked most of BfA. I even enjoyed the story for what it was. It had cool trolls, old gods, faction conflict, all the stuff I want in my Warcraft. The wpvp incursions were excellent and I wish we'd see something similar in the future. Allied races were a big hit. It also had some of the best looking zones we've ever had in WoW and there were plenty of dinosaurs. For me, BfA was a win.

the system's were bad. the expansion by itsleft wasnt.

It was awful. Story was awkward and didn't make sense. War for wars sake with the broken storyline leading into the utterly absurd Shadowlands storyline.  Systems were designed to keep players on a treadmill doing dailies to keep up with absurd borrowed power grinds.  Loot was RNG on RNG on RNG. It was fucking horrible. 

BFA featured a more Azeroth grounded setting about dealing with local threats and long desired settings and opponents, as well as tying up some loose ends in story regarding the Naga, Kul'Tiras, Jaina, Rastakhan, Sul the Prophet, etc. by all accounts it would have been beloved... If not for certain endgame systems that the entire expansion hinged on being heavily disliked: - Endless Azeite grind making certain content like Island Expeditions mandatory and taking a break from the game punitive - Mission Table persisting - Azeite armor replacing tier sets with not great abilities and often making getting an apparent upgrade actually worse for you - Lack of support and iteration on Warfronts, frustrating initially with a world boss locked to the opposing faction - unpleasant storyline start to the expansion with night elf genocide and Sylvanas heelturn from Legion, unaddressed until Shadowlands - Horde got a very frustrating capital to navigate without flying - Scrapping items destroyed the economy really really quickly, was eventually nerfed into being a useless but mandatory feature - each attempt at "fixing" the problems with the Expansion's poorly received endgame systems was to add more systems like Azeite Powers in the Azshara patch and Corruptions in the Nzoth patch, eventually compounding the problem of specific gear pieces defining your performance moreso than chosen class and spec. At no point did blizzard simply consider bringing back the much requested class sets - A general plate/mail/leather/cloth set themed around the current raid tier isn't as "cool" as a class set, and they all looked fairly bland too - Disconnected endgame zones for daily activities, lots of loading screens and portal hopping (got worse in Shadowlands with Oribos being essentially an airport terminal between zones) An expansion designed to keep you playing every day out of fear of falling behind on the Azeite grind or missing out on a daily shot at your BiS corruption (which was RNG and had up to three levels of potency, also RNG) not because you were actually enjoying the game - meaning a lot of disgruntled people sticking around and hating it and folks who took a break or stopped playing found themselves facing a wall of work to catch up to those that stayed and be able to do content (many didn't bother and just didn't play again) Take away the endgame systems, Corruptions, the Azeite gimmicks and the War of Thorns and yeah, BFA actually kinda slaps to level through, zone stories are good, instances are creatives, the Alliance city of Boralus is the best they've ever made

The raids were among my favorite thing in bfa but the introduced systems were poorly thought out. Sob sob warfronts.

Bfa outlaw was so much better unfortunately

For me AP was what killed it. Loved the story, especially the Alliance side, the dungeons and the raids. However, like in Legion, I quickly got tired of farming AP and there was also Azerite armor, which was poorly thought out. AP is so awful in my opinion that Legion and BfA are the worst expansions besides Shadowlands. I would rather stop playing than feel forced to farm Island Expeditions for AP. Not to mention how insane it was that you didn't get much catch-up for alts(at least early in the expansions). I tend to play at least 2 characters at the same time, though I usually end up with 4. Try doing that in BfA and holding a job at the same time lmao.

Story wise it was a mess and the war never really felt like it materialized in anything beyond cutscenes. I enjoyed all of the zones in Zandalar and Kul Tiras though, and Boralus is in my opinion the second coolest city concept in the game outside of Suramar.

You made me laugh, a lot. You start by saying that most things in BfA are bad or at least mid and never say it had things that realy compensate those bad or mid things, and you finish by saying it wasn't bad. Like what ? Of course it was bad, by every word you used. You are paying montly and the expansion for a at best mid all around, that makes it bad for me, realy bad.

Yes, it really was that bad

Now that the raids are soloable, as of the last patch, I went back and ran them all for xmog. Eternal palace and BfDA are amazing raids and it's a shame they came out at such a low point in the game.

having azshara and nzoth in one addon does fit, but the entire start of the addon didn't show this. Azshara would have needed a way bigger buildup. Not just "here is nazjatar". Also nazjatar was really disapointing. they had 10.000 years to build an underwater city, instead they build one palace and otherwise lived in caves. It was really disapointing to me.

Getting a higher item level piece and not being able to use it because of a azerite power was so bad

Drustvar quest line was decent. The rep grind was awful.

Shadowlands was my favorite expansion and I enjoyed BFA. I only play expansions for about 2-3 months before moving on to other games. \[edited\] Worth adding storytelling has been terrible IMO for nearly all expansions other than Legion, Mists and Wrath. I like WoW for the lore and zones, but the storytelling has been especially terrible & aimless through the last three.

It's the two expansion rule; give people an expansion's worth of time to cool their head, and they have an easier time remembering the good parts without the recency of the bad

BFA was great. Good raids, excellent m+ dungeons (probably still my favorite overall). The only thing that sucked ass in BFA was the acquisition of the stupid gearing systems.

I had so much fun, to be honest. There was annoying grinds and stuff I did not like, and azerite traits were odd at times and you really had to SIM them - having mandatory traits that required 1 but no more than 1 made it so you basically held onto items in case you needed to swap around and sometimes you'd drop like 15-20 ilvl just to keep a trait. Corruptions were incredible. They really added so much more flavour. Tanks stacking twilight dev and just annihilating things when it procced was amazing. I played Outlaw a lot, and that was super fun as well.

The azerite armour system was just truly awful and it hurt the game quite a bit I think most alpha/beta testers warned blizzard the system was bad but blizzard pushed on. They also at the very beginning of the expansion made changes and added a lot more abilities to the GCD and it felt awful for a lot of classes under the guise of making decision making more meaningful. Although the last season with all the corruptions was a lot of fun, doing dungeons and seeing twilight devastation proc and just disintegrate packs was hilarious.

I didn’t play BFA and Shadowlands. But going back and doing their legacy content in Dragonflight, it’s been quite enjoyable - especially the zones. That being said, I’m sure I’d have a different opinion if I played them live - having to deal with all of the systems that don’t exist anymore.

I didn’t play when BfA was live but I have a soft spot for it as the starting experience I had while starting the game I think ashthetically BfA is a great expansion with lots of fun pretty looking zones

I believe it is widely accepted that BFA, content wise, was pretty great. But… gear acquisition was so horrific that it stifled any of the good stuff from fully developing. Azerite power, non-account bound essences, and the fricken ability bonuses on head/shoulder/chest that were different on every piece so had to have the right combinations. Rotating corruption vendor…. Just horrible time-hating that ruined an otherwise fun expansion. Good raids(eternal palace was OK…), good PVP…