The biggest thing I hated about BFA was how rushed a lot of the plot points were. Nazjatar and Azshara should've had an entire expansion about them, not a patch.
100% agree. We're going to see Azshara again for sure, but Nazjatar was so storied and anticipated. Vashj'ir seemed to set the tone for what it could potentially look like, and whilst I loved Nazjatar and had a good time with it, it deserved so much more. I would have loved an Azshara expansion.
THIS!!! And the story just didn't make any sense at time. We didn't know about the Jailer so everything about Sylvannas didn't make sense (but the reveal was even worse in SL so....) and we basically had to play both factions to understand everything (which no one did, it was hard enough to have a reroll)
@@lilyx77 I agree. The fact the dots weren't connected and when they finally were, we got what we got with Shadowlands and it just felt....rough. You make a good point about the campaigns too. It was different with Class Order Halls in Legion because they were relative to your class, but having to do both Alliance and Horde to see the full scope on the narrative was harsh.
@@briangregory8223 I think weaving and connecting storylines is something that has been encouraged from the success and growth of FFXIV. I believe that's why we're getting the Worldsoul Saga. I agree though, it made zero sense and coming off the back of the greatest threat we've ever faced in the Burning Legion, it was just odd to jump back into faction wars.
Legion introduced a new gameplay cycle of levelling -> world quests> mythics/raids. But the moment a player reaches mythics, the world itself becomes irrelevant. All those newly designed zones and creatures are all a temporary part of the game, even though that's the main selling point. WoW could be so much more if they kept the world-content going into the end game.
That is very true. I often feel like players can be quite desensitised to the world and adventure that WoW offers now due to this striving for gear/raider.io score and just generally blasting the game so they can achieve their goals as quickly as possible. I really love Legion, but it did change WoW forever. It's a huge gripe of mine that Blizzard create systems just to abandon them after an expansion ends. I talk about it in more detail in my 'Island of Irrelevancy' video.
almost every issue that bfa had can be boiled down to either "blizzard thought they were smarter than the playerbase" or "blizzard ignored feedback" so many things were problematic from the start and players literally bombarded them with feedback and all they did was ignore it
Very sad but true. I think we can apply that to Shadowlands too with the Covenants and 'pulling the ripcord'. Time and time again Blizzard have said 'We hear you', but nothing was done. I think they got lost in the success of Legion. They saw how well received everything was, but doubling down on it was just exhausting.
@@edd_TV imo shadowlands had a completely different problem, that one just starved to death from what i know, the drought between the first and second patch was the biggest ever in any expansion (8 months iirc) yes they also refused to listen regarding a lot of things in shadowlands, but the biggest problem was that they did NOTHING, bad/mediocre content is always better than no content
@@Marunylos The first patch was outrageously long, yeah. And it was so rough because players spent so long in The Maw just for 9.1 to be entirely based in The Maw. It was very rough.
Despite how bad some of the expansion might have felt. I can not deny how incredible the art design and direction were. The zones and raids were actually so good in BFA. Shout out, Drustvar, incredible zone. And Ny'alotha was such an amazing raid to just look at. It looked so alien and like nothing we've seen before
@@edd_TV The Saurfang cinematics they made for BFA are some of my favorites that Blizzard has created. They captured everything so perfectly. And Boralus has remained my favorite capital city of any expansion because of the soundtrack for that city alone.
@@TheeGoober Agree on both counts! Boralus really felt alive and the theme was everything BFA needed it to be. Some of the music that features in BFA is long forgotten about, but I had a fun time selecting tracks to use from the expansion for this video - there is a lot of slept on pieces.
1:49 Yeah to Daelin the Horde had just murdered their way out of camps the alliance had been overly kind to build instead of killing them all in the first place. The Horde and ran through stormwind and into the northern kingdoms in a genocidal wave, and been spared an equal reprisal when they lost. Then they chose to kill their way out and leave to rebuild. (Keep in mind, an Orc is fully grown at like 15, and bigger than most adult humans at 12, he had reason to fear the Horde bouncing back FAST if given a whole continent to multiply on.) There's an interesting alternate Post-TFT custom campaign where he meets Jaina FIRST and she manages to get him into a less mass-murdery mood. Only for the Scourge to come back to Kalimdor chasing the Illidari.
Agreed! The very first Mak'Gora we see is Thrall disciplining Garrosh in the Wrath pre-patch, it's not to the death, Thrall and Garrosh are both in full armor (Garrosh wielding two weapons, and Thrall wielding both magic and the Doomhammer). The one-weapon(Or I guess magic and no weapon) fight-in-loincloths thing was just the rule for Garrosh's era.
When I recall BFA I have nothing but disdain. I resented so much of the expansion and how it felt like work, and my refusal to step away likely led to my burnout which only got worse with shadowlands. That said, now that you mention it, I went hard in BFA, and despite all the negative my most treasured achievements all came from BFA. My “Horde Slayer” title from getting HKs with an active bounty on my head, my completion of the solo 5 mask runs, mechagon hm, and the one where I killed 10 allies as a servant of N’zoth in world PvP. I forgot these were all the same expansion wtf. This expansion just had too much.
I tried to go hard too with BFA, until it got to a point where it just wasn't sustainable. I think maybe Legion might have had something to do with it too; I went REALLY hard at Legion. Maybe back-to-back was just too much, but the amount of chores and jobs in BFA was exhaustion. I think you're right. There is a lot of negativity (which is all valid) that blinds us from any prestige we may have achieved in the game, or any shining lights/fun we may have had. It can be difficult to remove emotion sometimes. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feelings!
So glad to hear you enjoyed it! I have a Legion video too if you are interested in checking that out. I do have plans for a Shadowlands one in the near future and then I'll probably backtrack with Warlords! Thank you for your support!
I will say, as someone who started playing WoW for the first time ever in season 2 of BfA, I loved it. I know it's not for everyone, and it didn't live up to legion for a lot of people, but the M+ dungeons were awesome and 5 of the six zones (sorry vol dun) were really interesting. Mechagon and naz stayed around for just the right amount of time too. It wasn't a perfect expansion, but I had hundreds of hours of fun in it!
It's good to hear you had a great time with it. I think it's always surprising because BFA is so consumed by hate and resentment, it blinds people to any good elements this expansion had, and they DID exist, so it's great that you had a good time with it. I know I did with Season 4. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feelings.
I’m with you on this. Although, I began during season 3, and basically did the story backwards (N’zoth, Nazjatar, the war campaign/horde vs alliance). Heck, the LAST thing I did in BFA, getting pathfinder aside, was the whole thing with Sylvanus abandoning the Horde. Even now, I kinda forget that N’Zoth came after that because he sure didn’t in my game! But yeah. BFA was the first time I got into max level content (hasn’t played since Cata, and never hit max level back in the day), and given it was the middle of the pandemic, I had hours to spend grinding endgame. It was definitely a great time. Does the fact that I didn’t play prior expacs at max level help, as I have nothing to compare it to? Maybe. But I still acknowledge parts of BFA that I didn’t enjoy, even with no comparison.
@@silverwolflucky It's insane that the narrative is such an afterthought for Blizzard most of the time that you can just complete the story and patches in any way you see fit. They really should heed FFXIV's approach on this. It must have been very confusing for you. I talk about story woes and narrative struggles in my 'Island of Irrelevancy' video, which I'm sure you will relate to. I think you definitely had a better time than most due to not having anything else to compare it to, but that doesn't make your experiences or opinion any less valid. Fun is fun, and if you had fun then the game has served its purpose. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feelings!
Island Expeditions had the potential to be small group or solo content that was engaging. The only problem that I feel existed was that in the end the expedition became a resource race against the opposing faction. While it was neat to have an enemy player group on the island with you, the rush to get azerite power completely diminished the exploration and fun aspect of the island expeditions. There were a lot of really neat things to see, like magical portals that spawned after you gathered certain items to take you to an elemental plane or a tomb with powerful monsters imprisoned.
That is very true. I wasn't sure what to think of the feature when it was announced and I didn't know how to feel about it, but I was definitely filled with feelings of adventure and exploration. I didn't know about those magical portals! I think I was probably in the mindset of 'Let's just get this done so I can get my reward'. I think this mindset is a great failing for a lot of players. I talk about it in another one of my videos 'Why Some Players Aren't Having Fun Anymore'. I think if I just appreciated Island Expeditions for what they were and not as a means to an end, I would have probably enjoyed them more. I would like to see them return in some fashion in the future. Depending on how Delves goes we will likely see more evergreen systems too, so I definitely think there's a chance for something like Expeditions and Torghast again! Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
I have fond memories from the expansion. It was my first time back since Cata and I played it with two friends from work, one I still work with and play together. But I'm sure my fond memories are from that, and I think I started halfway through the expansion.
I think that's a good point nevertheless; I often think expansions can be defined by the people we play with, and also our lifestyle. Everybody's experience is different. I'm glad you enjoyed it!
One little correction when mentioning where Wrathion was: He wasn't in the Dragon Isles, rather he was trying to find it. Because when the Dragon Aspects left there, their memories were wiped of it's location.
I unironically liked BfA. At least until Crucible. That’s as far as I played retail WoW. I thought azerite traits were excellent just poorly implemented, but had really strong potential for making creative builds. The story was interesting and felt like a continuation of MoP; world threats mixed with faction war, multiple character spotlights with their own arcs all coming to a head with each other in a capstone raid. Did it fall apart? Yeah. They killed PvP servers and War Mode was a band aid that didn’t last. They chickened out of the faction war too quickly, and Jaina finally growing a spine was undone almost immediately. Warfronts should have been a PvP event like WG. Islands were cute but ultimately useless. The background stories for the mission table gave a good glimpse of how the war is going around the world, but there was no reason we just got to read about it instead of playing it, would have been a perfect use of the MoP scenario tech… so many ideas that just never materialized beyond half-baked efforts... But at least up to the point I played, I enjoyed it well. Yeah, I know I’m in the minority. But I’m not alone! There are dozens of us! _Dozens!_
You are right, there are definitely a lot of BFA enjoyers out there! I think they just feel too afraid to say it. I think you have been very fair with your thoughts on BFA. I think for me I just wanted more with things like Nazjatar, Ny'alotha and N'Zoth. They felt so important and anticipated that to be done with them so fast felt really flat to me. I'm glad to hear you had fun with it though! Thanks for watching!
@ Haha oh man! When my friends told me the next raid was Nzoth I was like lol wait wasn’t Azshara just revealed on the last patch? Is that over already? Do you actually kill Nzoth? I couldn’t understand how they burned through an expansion’s worth of lore in two patches! Pretty wild stuff.
@@HCSR2 It was kind of up in the air for a while. I think players truly didn't want to believe he was bested so easily after being anticipated for so long, but Blizzard did confirm that he is dead. Such a waste. I agree, it's mental how they got through such storied characters with the click of their fingers. Azshara IS coming back though, so there's a shot at the redemption there at least. N'Zoth is definitely history though :(
i quit during battle for azeroth, the only other time i did this was cataclysm. but i returned for mop. BfA was so bad i left until the end of DF which i was pleasantly surprised at how much the game had improved. glad to be back, and great vid
I think I quit BFA more than any other expansion. I would always come back just to get burned out again. I'm glad to hear you're back and enjoying yourself again! Thank you for your kind words, and thank you for watching!
The algorithm randomly suggested you and I'm quite glad because this was a great video. BFA was one of the last expansions I played seriously and ended up quitting for many years after that. Seeing the story again and catching the things I'd missed when playing through it was nice. Edit: First thing I did after finishing this video was going to your channel to see if you had more videos showing the entire story of the expansions like this. I would certainly watch more!
Quick summary of PvP in BFA: There were no PvP vendors and the only way to get PvP gear by Blizzard's designed systems were to complete weekly quests, which awarded base level (M0 equivalent) that could only be upgraded via tokens that were obtained at a rate of 1 upgrade per month. The only other way to get better item leveled items was through the weekly vault which provided the same randomly stated versatility items that could not be upgraded. This system was so bad that players had to PvE for almost ALL of their PvP gear, which included raid trinkets because there was no PvP trinket set bonus at the time or nerfing of PvE trinkets in PvP. These were odd decisions considering that BFA was when blizzard undid the changes made in Legion regarding PvP stat templates which made gear effectively not matter outside of item level. So for the entirety of the expansion Players were forced to fully gear PvE to be able to start gearing PvP, in addition to needing to obtain azerite powers and azerite armor with not much help in the way of alt friendly game design to make this any less of a burden. Not to mention that the scaling of gear in PvP sometimes caused upgrades to make your character weaker or do less damage (which was theorized as some messy residual code from Legion's reworking of PvP). The final insults to injury was that there was no new PvP content in an allegedly PvP themed expansion (which in reality hijacked and sacrificed the theme/motif to hype people up for a PvE-Old Gods story) and in any circumstance where PvErs were asked to pay a "PvP tax" the decision was nerfed by over 50% meanwhile the "PvE tax" to PvP increased season after season. A good talking point regarding this is warmode, which seems like an overall PvP feature, but in reality served as a unique way for PvErs to obtain PvP essences without really PvPing. Some people world PvPed for the fun of it, but because PvP gear didn't really exist and world PvP provided no gear progression there was no reason for PvPers to really engage with the system. It turned into feeling like doing world content with Honor talents that made some specs MUCH stronger, while most players opted to not PvP while in warmode. It just made the entire community feel like an actual after thought, and caused enough of a wave in response to cause several major changes felt today: 1) PvP vendors returned, 2) Honor and Conquest gear returned to scale up to Heroic and Mythic item level equivalencies in PvP combat, 3) world PvP received set bonuses and upgrade systems that had bleed-over into instanced PvP (which is a current part of early season PvP gearing), and 4) PvP and PvE gear have become almost completely isolated from each other with most PvE items being nerfed by 50%+ and PvP trinkets having a pretty massive PvP only set bonus.
Wow, that sounds horrendous! I do feel this often seems to be the case with PvP. It so often feels like an afterthought. I do feel sometimes Blizzard have had really solid methods in the past, be it valor points, the badge system from TBC and wrath, or like you say the PvP vendors returning. 'If it isn't broke, don't fix it' comes to mind so often, but they insist on trying to reinvent the wheel for whatever reason. Thank you so much for sharing this!
I find there's a recurring issue that isn't just isolated to BFA, but even the "good" expansions. In Legion: Big Bad is here, huge invasion, world is literally ending, and what do we do? Go spend countless hours finishing story zones that had next to nothing to do with the invasion half the time. In BFA: Horde vs Alliance War. You're immediately shipped off to a remote island to do storylines that have very little to do with said war, just so that you can win over the locals. Like, time and time again, you're sold on a premise and then we go and do something that feels entirely unrelated. It makes the start feel so slow to me, every time.
That's very true. It's getting very jarring that this is the way stories have been told and hopefully The Worldsoul Saga can attempt to break that mould. I think the thing that felt very odd to me with BFA is that Azerite was used as a plot device to initially spark the faction war, and then was barely a footnote in the storyline. This is a great comment. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feelings!
From Wotlk to WoD the story was very much interconnected with the threat. Legion lost the script a bit with Val'sharah and Highmountain, but the other zones made a lot of sense. BFA and onwards I agree.
Honestly I believe that BfA was as bad or even worse that we remember. Legion hyped me into oblivion that I bought it right away. When prepatch came out I lost my artifact and my spec felt way worse to play. Later came a boring story, kinda bland zones, very very badly designed warfronts and island expeditions and of course the grind. Wow there was so much grind it was unbelievable. The prize for braving all of it was boring armor sets. I felt betrayed.
Understandable. Your feelings are very valid and your opinions are shared by many players. It was disheartening and oppressive and unforgiving if you wanted to play alts. I think it's important to revisit these things though and attempt to remove emotion if possible and see that BFA did have some good elements to it; the dungeons, the raids, horrific visions for example. The bad absolutely outweighs the good though. You hit the nail on the head with the loss of the artifact weapons and the Legion legendaries too. Levelling in BFA was horrid.
You're very welcome. I can't imagine how difficult it must be for you to piece things together. There is so much content on RUclips to help you get by and understand better, but I really wish it was all in the game for the player too! Thank you for watching!
Oh golly where to begin. Commenting before watching so my thoughts are for sure my own and not influenced, I’m going off of memory here CLASS DESIGN: going from Legion to BfA was the worst gameplay downgrade in WoW history. Losing the artifacts and legendaries made the leveling experience awful (everyone remembers the level 116 cutoff where it all stopped working), and the scaling at the time didn’t help either so playing your character just felt flat out bad. Sure some legendary effects and artifact abilities/traits became talents but now you had to choose between different things instead of having it all in Legion. On top of all that, BfA was when literally almost every ability got put on the GCD so not only did we lose so much of the fun gameplay from Legion, what we were left with just felt even worse to play. I can’t remember if the AoE cap came with BfA or SL so I’ll mention it here since that also isn’t too fun. Every class and spec became significantly worse to play and the replacement stuff wasn’t nearly good enough to make up for it which leads us nicely into . . . AZERITE ARMOR: everything about this just flat out sucked. You had to grind your neck level up to just unlock the abilities. The abilities themselves were pretty much all just so boring and uninteresting especially compared to what we got in Legion. So many content creators at the time during the alpha and beta went into greater detail about the specifics of why it was bad so I’ll refer to them since I’m struggling to gather my thoughts here. Just basically nothing about azerite armor was interesting or good and opened to the door to the grind . . . CONTENT/SYSTEMS: back in legion you got AP from doing literally everything. Yeah there were degenerate farming methods (Maw of Souls over and over again) but world quests (which were way more fun in Legion than BfA), M+, raids, it all gave relatively comparable AP so you could do whatever content you wanted and were up to date. In BfA that all changed so if you wanted to get your azerite you were forced to do every single magni world quest every day (needed the rep too), and then there were island expeditions, which in my opinion are the most mind numbingly dull bad content they’ve ever introduced. Everyone hated islands, everyone knows how bad they were. I’m in the minority in that I never hated warfronts but they definitely could’ve and should’ve been much better. I see what they were trying to do and what warfronts were supposed to be but it just turned into an afk fest. I think the dungeons and raids were good though. Seasonal affixes were a good idea even though 2 were not fun (the ghuun worms and azshara people) but the other 2 were great (reaping and nzoth minion portals). Battle for/of Dazar Alor is a top 10 raid for me, there were so many fun creative bosses, and Waycrest Manor might be a top 5 dungeon, the atmosphere is incredible. But that’s just the launch, what about the patches . . . PATCH CONTENT: essences were fun to unlock the first time but not having it be account wide from the start was baffling. Grinding it all again on multiple characters was awful. Mechagon was fine, not for me since I’m not a ravenous collector but those who are seemed to enjoy it from what I remember. Nazjatar is 1 of many examples of locations and stories that should’ve been an entire expansion launch content, not relegated to a single patch. The benthic lottery grind was just another terrible addition to the ever growing list of chores we had to do just to keep our power level at the bare minimum of what’s considered decent. Horrific visions were better than islands and warfronts for sure but still another thing you had to do over and over again to stay relevant. Corruption sucked, the pieces were acquired through rng, had rng levels it could be, and the effects were boring. Just because it made our characters insanely powerful doesn’t mean it was good. Having most of my damage be from a random proc on my gear that I have no control over is not good design. Infinite stars, twilight devastation, all insanely powerful, insanely boring, and frustratingly out of my hands for how much it did on the meters (but when it procced it was a high percentage of your overall dps so people liked it). Yes they eventually added a vendor but it didn’t really help fix the problems since it was on a rotation. STORY: I actually enjoyed the story quite a lot. I wanted a faction war when speculation was going crazy about what the new expansion would be and that’s what I got. The burning of Teldrassil was awesome, it’s just a shame it wasn’t done as well in game but the 2 novellas they released about it make the whole pre patch events very good. The character work and writing for Jaina and Saurfang was outstanding. I enjoyed the stories leveling up and also the max level war campaign. Where it loses me though is 8.3 since I hate how N’zoth was just offed like that. Nyalotha and old gods is another setting that should’ve been its own thing not a single patch. All in all I think BfA is the worst expansion ever released. Yes I think it’s worse than SL. Comparing the 2 in a vacuum I think BfA as a whole is slightly worse than SL, SL just feels worse since it came after BfA and we were already at wits end with the game.
I admire your passion, and I agree with so much you have said in this comment! It's really great to see people engage with the videos and put together their thoughts and feelings. I think Shadowlands is worse than BFA personally; in terms of the narrative, Blizzard's reputation and just overall life struggles during that period of time, but BFA probably isn't too far behind it. There are some shining lights in BFA, but the bad overshadows the good so dramatically, it's so easy to forget. Thank you for leaving such a detailed comment, it was a great read! And thank you for engaging with the video. I hope you enjoy.
BfA was a rough time. I still have difficulty to synthesize how overwhelming and lackluster it was, at the same time. The devs had hundreds of ideas that, on themselves, could be the foundations to their own expansions. But they not only putted everything into the mix, but also never really developed anything. To start with the elephant in the room, the entire idea of making a faction pride themed expansion and reignite the war is absolutely flawed, from the get go. It was already a bad idea to go back with this conflict in Legion (Stormheim's questline with Gen and Sylvanas was a giant filler), but escalate this with the burning of Teldrassil was just insulting. The writers who took Metzen's place didn't learn from their horrible storytelling mistakes in the previous expansion, so they kept doubling down in BfA. Any possibility, any form of potential, or originality, all those ideas could end up in the story they just refuse to develop or elaborate. Afrasiabi interrupted whatever the previous writer had in mind for Sylvanas back in Cata, by making her Warchief in Legion (one of the dumbest ideas ever), just for do an 180 on her and fundamentally committing character assassination. The entire ceasefire back in MoP's ending, and the coalition they did in WoD and Legion, got ruined right in the pre-patch and they NEVER contextualize the new conflict in-game, making every single peace time between factions worthless. This was a HORRIBLE time in WoW (from Legion to DF) for Lore enthusiasts, because all the information was fragmented. To have any form of basic understanding of what was going on you have to, basically, do homework and read several books, comics, see short videos like Harbingers and Warbringers, and so on. The narrative was all over the place, and when you add the fact that the writing was only getting worse, off course people would be pissed. No one cared about the Zandalari's internal politics, or the Kul Tiras plotline with the Drust, for example. Everything was so... disjointed, even on itself. I remember clearly, back in Stormsong Valley, most of the questline was just filler and I was constantly wasting my time fighting the Horde and the quilboar, literally stealing the spotlight of the main plot instead of being just side quests, and when finally came the moment to START to uncover what the hell the Tidesages were doing, IT ENDED. All that Tidemother cliffhanger, all that bs with the naga (clearly setting up Azshara), all led to NOTHING. And when this storyline came back with the Crucible of Storms raid, they didn't connected the dots, it's all past now. This happens with EVERY SINGLE story in this expansion. Nothing is even thematically cohesive, even when it was clearly leading up to something. I just quit the game for the first time, in 8.2. DECADES setting up Azshara just for her being featured in only one patch, repeating 7.3 all over again. That was the moment when I stopped caring. This, combined with Steve Danuser LYING to all the player base at BlizzCon, saying that the Chronicles is told by the Titans' perspective, pissed me off. This main problem completely overshadowed the rest of BfA. I mean, the soundtrack, the art direction, the level design (for the most part, Nazjatar was horribly lazy), were a huge improvement over Legion's excessiveness of uniforming its own "main" antagonist (the old colorful BL from WC3 and TBC, and even WoD, became just a giant blob of GREEN and BLACK 😑). There were some good characters here and there, like Bwonsamdi. The zones were bigger, I genuinely felt like Zandalar was huge, in comparison to the "Broken Isles" where it was all overcondensed, tiny (looking at you, Azsuna). Even the raids weren't that bad, I actually really liked Uldir, its art style etc. But all the central ideas, the intentions, everything in between, all ruined everything this expansion could offer, from the beginning. If it wasn't clear for people back in Legion, it became crystal clear in BfA, and it only got more... explicit, to say the least, in SL and DF. I still think Legion was the absolute worst, in terms of breaking the Lore, but what I think that made people sorta wake up in BfA was that... they weren't even pretending. The higher ups stopped caring, they saw that recycling everything and not doing their homework in Legion didn't get any "riot" level of criticism, like in Cata days, so they were just doing what they wanted.
You are so right. Everything that happened in BFA could have been told and executed over several expansions. It was crazy to me that they just threw it all together and hoped for the best. It was such a waste, and like you say what was the actual payoff? It was just tainted so much mystique. Azshara and N'Zoth were both so anticipated and neither were written well. Nazjatar needed to be a continent. I can't believe it was simply one zone. Don't get me wrong, I liked it, but both Nazjatar and Ny'alotha had potential and acclaim to be the continents for their own expansions. It is MYSTIFYING to me that this didn't happen. I agree with so much of what you have said. I personally enjoyed Legion but it's important to recognise that we had to go through WoD to get there, and when you throw in Warlords and timey-wimey stuff, that becomes really difficult for me to accept. I did really love Suramar personally, but I know some people are quite iffy with Argus. Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and feelings. This was a really enlightening read and I really appreciate your passion! You are somebody who clearly cares about the lore, and I love it too but I'm not an expert by any means! But I do feel your pain. I'm still feeling it now. I haven't even bought The War Within yet because I just feel quite defeated with it all. Shadowlands really hurt me. I think you're right in the cracks showing in Legion, ABSOLUTELY BFA and then by the time Shadowlands rolled around it just felt absolutely soulless.
@@edd_TV Thanks for noticing. Sorry to show up now, after... What? Months, since my comment in your video about Legion KEK (this was a busy year 😅). Not only did it feel soulless, this era of WoW we got fully into the devs' terms the entire time. Like, the pathfinder stuff being shoved since WoD bc the new team probably never liked flying, or the azerite armor feature and the saturation of RNG in every single facet of the game, even the zones. Nazjatar and Ny'alotha, just like Argus before them, kinda felt offensive. I mean, I felt like the devs didn't want to put those zones in the game, at any capacity, so they just brought one single small area with some unique reskins and sold it as "new content". It's like they knew players were expecting those zones to be in the game, so they ruined it on purpose. And this applied to the characters too. Sure, the biggest offender of it was Sylvanas bc her writer, Alex Afrasiabi, straight up despised her and defenestrated her. But the rest of the crew wasn't that much different. Take Anduin, for example, his entire time in Legion was to put his grieve aside for a minute to lead the Alliance, and he does NOTHING afterwards, and when he reappears in BfA he is just the same insecure guy we knew back in Pandaria, and he STAYED at this state all the way until 9.2. Or Saurfang, all that setup of giving him more depth, taking his storyline in WotLK as a foundation, giving him a sidekick, showcasing his journey as different as possible to Vol'jin back in MoP... only for him to die for NOTHING, just like Vol'jin. Even Thrall's comeback is pointless, because his "retirement" in Legion was already pointless and they treated this like an afterthought. In hindsight, all those choices were... just idiotic. Why rushing all those different plotlines, ideas and so on? Why shoving everything into one single expansion, if it could have been more lucrative for them to make an expansion for every single one of those ideas? Even with the writing sucking, it would be less damaging to the game and they could easily get away with this by explaining everything in a condensed way in books (just like Chronicles, and they managed to shit on them too). And now, the game is in an unfortunate position, where it NEEDS to correct those mistakes (and if necessary, REMOVE the "grease") in order to make it somewhat cohesive. It didn't need to come to this at all, but... it happened, and no matter how they'll handle this in the future (or not), the damage was already done and the game paid for it. SL didn't flop just because, people were already warning those mistakes back in 2016, even 2014, and Blizzard chose to not listen.
Sylvanas story is a strange thing, you wouldn't think on the surface that it would be a detriment to a characters story if the people making the decisions are fans of the character, and yet the result is the absolute abomination that we got.
I remember there was a lot of uncertainty around the character and her direction post Legion. I think Alex Afrasiabi was primarily responsible for the burning of Teldrassil arc and ushering Sylvanas onto that dark path. Then the reins were handed to Steve Danuser, who whilst gets a lot of flak, was thrown into the deep end and ultimately out of his depth; both with the story of Sylvanas and the narrative generally. I agree though, and I also think it's a reason why the game suffers sometimes. People often ask the question 'Do the devs actually play the game?' because of some of the bizarre decisions they make.
Yeah, that was an utterly bizarre decision. It's something I never really took the time to think about either as an Alliance player. I was always of the mindset of 'the Horde are the enemy' so them being the bad guy just felt normal to me, but it must have felt so awful for Horde players to have no say in the matter.
@@edd_TV I've played a Blood Elf paladin as my main since Wrath when I started just at the end of high school, minus the huge break until recently. I always imagined he leaned into the lore they had for TBC Sin'dorei: ruthless in protecting his people, but not a monster. But as far as a roleplaying perspective, especially on the heels of Legion, he would have never ever agreed to something like that. They paralleled Sylvanas and Arthas too hard, it was too close to the Scourge destruction of Quel'thalas. Absolutely zero chance that he'd have gone for it. It became impossible to reconcile the lore they gave us with who he was as a character. And as a player on an RP realm, that made it very hard to feel connected anymore. The systems on systems on systems of BFA carrying into Shadowlands was my true breaking point, but the lore damage they did in BFA and Shadowlands was what kept me away for so long. I feel like I'm only really "back" because Dawntrail has been iffy and I ran out of content until 7.2 comes out.
As someone who didn’t play during BFA or Shadowland, I’ve really loved your videos on third expacs. Playing BFA after the fact (leveling up and doing old content in Dragonflight/TWW), I loved a lot of this expac since Zuldazaar is one of my favorite zones in the entire game (that music just hits) and Zandalari trolls are such an awesome allied race.
Thank you my friend. I really appreciate that! I think Mists of Pandaria is the next stop and then I'll follow that into Warlords! I agree with you that Zuldazar is a banger! I think they really did well with these zones in BFA. They really felt like Warcraft! I also think BFA has sone of Warcraft's best music. It's just gorgeous. I'm also in agreement with you on the Zandalari, they are badass!
This is an odd thing for me, because personally, I actually enjoyed BfA more then legion. The games expansions fall into 3 sets for me, the really good (Vanilla, Wotlk, Mop, DF), the okay (BC, Cata, Legion, BfA), and the bad (WoD, SL). BfA sits at the top of the okay set for me. Now I know taste has a good chunk of sway in anything, but it really seems that people completely handwave the rocky bits of Legion all the while dunking BfA for some justified and some odly petty or insignificant reasons. Do people really not remember the shit show that was 7.0? - Legendaries making or breaking some specs - RNG hell with legendaries - the "soft" cap making it nearly impossible to get more legendaries - exploiters of the Legendary system being ignored - the lore brakes that Legion flants around. - The Legion being stuck on the island "But trust us, it's a battleground out there too". - Nightfallen rep timegated to hell. - Emerald Nightmare being a complete joke in terms of difficulty. - Not being able to respec your artifacts, leading to some people being stuck with a really underpowered artifact until their knowledge allowed them to catch up. - Artifact knowledge being a pain to gain AND being per character - the return of the dreaded WoD mission table - only 5 zones - AP clogging your bags to hell all the time. - Some classes just flat out better by a pritty large margin - some pritty big winners and looser with artifact abilities -Maw of the infinite AP runs All that, and I'm sure I missed a few, just for patch 7.0... get into patches 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3, and it keeps going. Yet now we never hear anyone bring any of that up, but ohh no if you ran heroic Uldir the first week it opened, you may have not yet unlocked your last ring of marginal buffs... completely unacceptable!! expansion ruined!!...
Everything you have said here is absolutely valid, and I do think Blizzard are notorious when it comes to elements of a storyline that were considered to be important to not even be a footnote; look how irrelevant Azerite became in the storyline for instance. I love Legion, and I can solemnly say it was one of my favourite times in WoW, ever. But I do acknowledge everything you have said here and I agree with you.
Little pretext before I say this. I played from Classic to BFA 8.2.5. When BFA launched I started as Alliance. I was doing the witch hunt quest at lvl 83, first day of the expansion and as I chased a greasy pig around I stopped. Literally stopped. I stopped playing WoW, on an expansion launch. I wasn't having fun, the entire experience up to that point had felt AWFUL. Like what the hell is this. First we're ultra serious mode, then we're doing this prison break comedy, then we're being toured, then we're back to serious. Don't even get me STARTED on the facial animations for Humans. Mother of God. How can I take flap jack over here seriously? I took 2 weeks off... Came back till 8.2 and gave up.
That's a really great point, and it's SO talked about now with Dragonflight I feel. I talk about it in my 'The Mourned Identity' video about the radical change and tone in direction with Warcraft's story in the modern day, and just who is Blizzard's target audience these days. You are absolutely right though, it felt akin to Disney Star Wars at times with just misplaced humour and what felt like mood swings in the tone.
I think if you had been playing longer, you’d realize this is a pattern in wow. I didn’t even realize classic was out during BFA, I thought it was shadowlands.
Due to playing on a RP Realm, the Xpac reveal had me hyped beyond belief. Once I saw the eagle shot of the battle for lordaeron I thought "No way... they're actually doing it." I was fully expecting an xpac, that would upset the status quo of the setting, deliver interesting stories for the main characters and side characters. And we got that somewhat. Lot's of minor characters got time to show themselves in Warfronts, Faction War World Quests, the Questing and Raids. And then it all just fell flat on it's big nose. They wanted to go full Cataclysm levels of world changing events and got wet feet one third into it, leaving a underdeveloped mess. They blew it. But I still enjoy the xpac. It made the world feel bigger, with Kul Tiras and Zandalar.
I think I really take for granted how the narrative changes the game for roleplayers. A lot of people were saying in my Shaodwlands video that Shadowlands really spoiled a lot of elements of RP for them, which is so sad. I think it's amazing that you can tell your own stories with your own character, but such a shame that they felt so much damage too. I regret not getting into it when I was younger. I can remember feeling very hyped too, and off the back of Legion I had serious high hopes for BFA because Legion was so great for me. Admittedly it felt a bit iffy going straight back to the Faction War after going to Argus, but it felt familiar and it felt like Warcraft so I was happy to let it slide at the time. And similarly to you, seeing Lordaeron was a real 'Oh my God' moment. I agree with you in regards to certain characters getting some moments, and of course an introduction to some other characters too like Flynn and Taelia! (who they could still definitely do more with!) I thought Saurfang was just fantastic too! Regardless of how people may feel about BFA, he was brilliant. Like every other WoW expansion there was huge potential here but for some reason they wanted to tell 3-4 different stories all at once. They would repeatedly remind us that BFA was about 'the faction war', even though everybody knew N'Zoth was lurking around the corner and the hints were constantly there. I'll always reiterate personally that I would have loved both Nazjatar and Ny'alotha to have been their own continents in their own expansions! I would have even settled for Azshara being the final boss of BFA which could then lead into a Black Empire expansion afterwards. It just felt like we had two really big anticipated antagonists that were just shoehorned in. They absolutely blew it, I agree. I really enjoyed both Kul Tiras and Zandalar too. They felt like Warcraft zones. Also the soundtrack of BFA is absolutely gorgeous! Sorry for such a long response! Thank you for watching and sharing your thoughts!
@@edd_TV Don't worry about the long response. It was a special time and like you, I have allot of mixed experiences with BfA. But for RP? It was just amazing. Participating in RP PvP campaigns. Roleplaying out your character in this World Conflict and interacting with the other faction under that premise was a very fond experience. The Backdrop for all that RP created the opportunity for some of the most immersive and memorable character interactions I had in over a decade worth of Roleplay experience. It just hit's different to Roleplay an Orc and talking about Blood and Thunder and then having to actually live that in RP.
@@hansgerman3437 I totally get what you mean. As an Alliance player I can imagine what a big deal something like Arathi and Stromgarde would be. And honestly that's what it's all about, right? The game may have had glaring issues but you still managed to make the best of it and you have positive experiences to look back on. Hold onto them! Thank you for sharing your memories! I hope you're still having fun with WoW today!
[sperg out warning] i remember the day BfA was announced and i was extraordinarily disappointed. i started playing in WoD and had just come off the heels of Legion, so can you imagine how schizophrenic a faction war seemed at that point in the story? Mists of pandaria was the last time there was any terrestrial-stemming conflict on Azeroth, and it concluded with the Alliance pretty much winning the faction war, and Varian threatening total extermination of the horde if it ever attempted something as blatantly malicious as Garrosh's horde again. The horde and alliance proceeded to work together for two expansions straight, with at worst, some poorly justified skirmishes here and there (Stormheim's forced conflict and random faction war related world quests). it was done. there was zero plausible reason for it to happen again. basically BfA's entire premise is overtly contrived garbage that was written because steve danuser saw some a twitter comment complaining about how world of warcraft doesnt feature enough war based on conflicts from 20+ years ago in-universe. yes, i am being that guy. the faction war is a terrible plot device that has been dead since warcraft 3, and has been painfully revived for trivial reasons over and over again throughout WoW's history. alliance have always been in the right, they were defending their world from literal alien invaders than happened to bring a storm of calamity alongside them. the Orcish invasion caused ner'zhul to end up as the lich king on azeroth which created the scourge and in turn made the forsaken as well as blood elves. literally the only horde race with any innocence are the tauren, who have done literally nothing wrong. all of the other horde races could have easily just remained neutral or more realistically have joined the alliance. its such a terrible conflict to center the universe around, and putting the fundamentally flawed conflict back in the spotlight should have been avoided at all costs.
I do agree with you. I think putting the 'main scope' of the story on the faction war was quite left-field, and it seemed like they were trying to stoke the nostalgia fires in a weird way because that's what Warcraft was all about in the past, despite the fact the two factions often team up in the end to take down the bigger threat. I talk about the factions a bit in my 'Mourned Identity' video, but you are right. It's contrived, it limits gameplay and it limits social experiences. There's no place for it anymore in the modern game. The most frustrating part of it all for me was, it didn't serve a purpose. They tried extremely hard to sell the faction war but I think most players knew that N'Zoth and the Old Gods were the serious threat. It was just really odd and I don't think they knew what they wanted to do. I admire your passion. Thank you for taking the time to type this up!
Thanks for this retrospective it brought back some great memories! Regarding Corruptions, I think their power annoyed me because it felt like my gear was playing the game instead of my character. When you opened up details and over 50% if not 70% of your damage was coming from a RNG affix on your pants it was a pretty feelsbad moment
Thank you for watching! You are absolutely right regarding corruption. It was definitely polarising and I know it upset a lot of people. I had a lot of fun with it personally but I know it was a horror story for a lot of people too!
Considering that Legion ate parts of wod and bfa's betas and resources it makes sense. There was no redeeming factor in BFA. Even the seldom fun systems at 8.3 made you miserable the rest of the time and completely made you forget what and alt is and what a transmog without purple poop on top of you is.
To be fair I'm not even entirely sure that when they started working on BFA they were sure they were gonna do the Jailer retcon. That probably came late.
I don't think so either, certainly not whilst Afrasiabi was writing anyway. I think it all likely began to take shape (for better or worse) when Danuser took over. Like it's not good backstory by any means, but it does provide some context. Like you say though, I think it could come across as a bit disingenuous because there is no way we knew this at the time and there was no guarantee this is where things would potentially lead. It's really difficult to envisage what they wanted to do or where they wanted to go. And considering how fast they laid waste to characters like Azshara and N'Zoth, I'm not sure they really knew either.
As a mainly Horde player I just pray that Alliance would not fall victims to the blizzard’s favourite writing trope and that none of the Alliance leader would become “Garrosh 3.0”. As much as I think of unjust writing “horde is mostly bad in a major plot, alliance is only sometimes bad but in minor and forgettable side quests” stuff, it is such a disgusting fate that I just hope the alliance players won’t have a taste of it ever
I think we almost got close with Jaina. I think towards the end of MoP and with Legion it definitely could have happened. I'm not sure when the whole Dreadlord theory started cooking up originally, but I think something could have been there if they wanted it, definitely. I still think it will happen in the future, I would say likely Turalyon. The thing is, I don't think many will care. I like Turalyon but he doesn't really have the weight or gravitas of characters like Garrosh and Sylvanas. I will admit as an Alliance player and maybe even from my days of Warcraft III I was led to believe the Horde and more particularly Orcs were bad. I always remember the quote Uther says to Arthas: "Vengeance cannot be a part of what we must do. If we allow our passions to turn to bloodlust, then we will become as vile as the orcs." I was obviously quite young at the time then though! I do think the Horde have been royally shafted for years now. It's unfair. Thank you for watching and sharing your thoughts! Love your username btw!
The content that we got was phenomenal, but the 2 main issues were the insane amount of dailies/weeklies that forced you to make WoW a second job and the azerite pieces that forced you to get rid of your abilities to focus on iLvL. Like... Island expeditions? Yea, they sucked but imagine not being rushed to do them in 5minutes or less to be efficient and instead just taking your time hunting rares for mounts and other cosmetics. BfA has phenomenal content, but you couldn't slow down and take the time to appreciate it. -4 great to amazing and unique raids -memorable dungeons -just a single "bad" zone (deserts are usually empty and boring) -the most power costomisation we've ever had (azerite pieces, azerite necklace, mechagon trinket, corruption equiments, etc) -"turtle made it to the water" -gang banging Jaina -great zone stories
Great comment. There is some strong elements in BFA that are marred by poor systems, an inconsistent tone with storytelling and just exhaustion from activities. You raise a very good point with the whole 'Gotta-go-fast' philosophy, and I think that has been showing a lot in recent years with WoW; it's not a coincidence they have decided to remove the timer in Mythic+ for season 4. It's not a great foundation for gameplay. I'm glad you were able to appreciate things in BFA, and you have hit the nail on the head brilliantly with this comment. Thank you for taking the time to watch the video and for sharing your thoughts and feelings.
i was forced into playing bfa for leveling when i rejoined during shadowlands. put together like this the story actually makes sense, i had no idea at that time what the hell was going on and who all those named characters around me were - yet alone why everyone called me a champion
That's true, BFA was the starting point for new and returning players! I believe it's Dragonflight now. I highly recommend watching my 'Island of Irrelevancy' video if you're a new or returning player! I talk about this A LOT. I think it's insane that they think new players can have titles such as Highlord, Azeroth's Champion and Maw-Walker and just accept them at face value. They have no idea what's going on!
2:53 She was punished for the atrocities she committed after getting her freedom. The torture of captured farmers to test New Plague/Blight on. Of course she probably wasn't TOLD that. And just took a "Woe is me, punished for things outside my control" stance on it that the Jailer was more than willing to nurture. (I hate this retcon as a whole, but I kinda like the psychological angle of it)
Loved it! Nyalotha our guild killed 11/12 myself stopped after 10/12 but came back one night to stand in for one of the guildies who were sick and had to go midway through the raid and then we got the kill on carapace. That was truly a great feeling! But i must say my by far favourite raidboss in wow is in there, Ra-den. Its such a massive fight with alot of responsibility aswell as awesome loot along with the difficulty bump compared to the earlier bosses. (We went Ra-den as the 6th boss after hivemind and the dog) and o boy after 150-200 pulls we finally did it! It was truly an amazing feeling and i felt like the guild really levelled up with the confidence and improved as players. Nyalotha was amazing in my eyes with the difficulty being just a step easier every week cause of the cloak.
Adding to this, the 8.3 was amazing and all the corruptions was quite fun. I remember we did as a 4 man squad a 4 masked run the first week. It was truly on the hair that we made it but we had to skip on the reducing max sanity since the other stuff was more of a skill issue if we didn't make it. It was truly a good system with the visions although maybe after a while it became alot like a chore. None the less I really enjoyed them! I played both dk and dh in this patch and they didn't have any issue what so ever to deal with alot of mobs or survivability.
@@Ranzoepwns It's always super refreshing to me when I hear people say positive things about BFA. I think a lot of people have such resentment for the expansion that they struggle to find positives within it, and there definitely was some! I'll be the first to admit that BFA had faults, from the narrative to the systems. I still found joy in it though at times, and it's great to hear you did too! Thank you for sharing your experiences and thanks for watching!
The scenario makes so much more sense when summarized and narrated in 20 minutes. Even the retcon thing. But in my opinion it didn't quite work in the context of the actual game...
I think that seems to happen quite a bit, especially when important things are getting told through books. It goes over so many players heads that important things or events have taken place inside a book, so when it's put into the forefront of the MMO some players are just like 'Well this is random'. I think everything needs to be told inside the game, I've always been of that opinion. I think they were in a 'Jesus, take the wheel' situation with BFA and Shadowlands because they were changing writers and stuff. I agree with you though, some of it felt really out of place.
For me, BFA had some of the best levelling and art design. Everything felt choppy/rushed, and i wish they expanded on certain themes throughout, like N'zoth and Azshara. Instead of doing the whole Naga and Old god patches, unless they were going in depth from the get go,wish they went in on exploration and had us explore new islands and cultures to secure alliances for the war. Mechagon was a good example of this.
I really disliked the levelling experience personally as I just felt my character getting weaker and weaker. In terms of art/zones/soundtrack though, absolutely phenomenal. I agree that it was super choppy/rushed and the tone changed so drastically; it was faction war, it was Naga, it was Black Empire. The pacing was all over the place and they really breezed through a lot of very important lore. I think you're absolutely right in regards to how they could have handled both Azshara and N'Zoth. It's such a shame, but hopefully there is a chance to rectify some of this moving forward. We are definitely going to see Azshara again, and I think the Black Empire now lives on through Xal'atath, so let's see how that goes! Thank you for sharing your thoughts and feelings!
I'm leveling through the zones in an alt right now and they are god-tier. They're so good, I'm gonna lock my level at 70 so I don't have to leave chromie time and just gonna get loremaster on them before I continue. I'm guessing it really was azerite armor and islands/warfronts and the peak of mobile "you have to log in every day" crap that made it bad, but the content is sublime from what I've seen.
Glad to hear you're having a blast! I remember being blown away by Drustvar. I think Boralus is one of the best cities EVER too. I wasn't too hot on Nazmir or Vol'dun personally, but I thought Zuldazar was amazing. It's definitely where the focus and triggers go, absolutely. If you say 'BFA' people will instantly react with Azerite, the Heart of Azeroth, the grinding etc. It's like if you mention Warlords everybody will automatically say 'OMG THE GARRISON!'. The gripes with BFA were a lot more valid than the Garrison in WoD though. I do agree with you, some of BFA's stuff was really great and that's why I wanted to make this video. I think retrospection is important and if people can put their emotions aside, maybe they too can look back and think 'Do you know what? There actually WAS some good stuff in BFA'. Definitely a lot of bad...but some good! Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Things I remember about BfA: - Island expeditions were practically unlosable and rewarded you with Azerite, which was a pointless imh as I didn't see any kind of significant improvement on my char despite the grind. - Leaving your artifact weapon and replacing it with a system I didn't like at all. - Warfronts were lame, provided no challenge, no rewards, they were awful. - A turtle made it to the water.
Been watching your videos these last few days and as a veteran Wow player got to say I love them! You clearly put a lot of work into these and absolutely deserve more subs! And I think I just became your 3000th subscriber! Keep up the good work mate!
Aww thank you so much my friend. If you were number 3000 then that's a great milestone and certainly a name I'll do well to remember! Thank you so much for your kind words and support. I really appreciate it!
I remember leveling with war mode on and killing hordes who were even 5 levels above me due to the mentioned power regression. That thing just wasn't handled very well at the start of the expac. Leveling up was equal to being weaker
It was the weirdest levelling ever felt. Gaining levels and losing power? it was just such a bizarre experience. I think the artifacts (and all the QoL they gave us) and legendaries were going to be difficult to replace or match, but yeah you're absolutely right. We were just penalised the higher level we were. It felt like a strong example that they don't really play their own game because it was a really crap experience, and I know levelling has changed quite dramatically these days. Long gone are the days where you level in Vanilla and it feels like an adventure and journey. Levelling is just a means to an end now, but when you were sapping players of any sort of power, that felt really bad. Thank you for watching and sharing your thoughts!
War in nazjatar was peak internet issues and it was so funny to me. Never had any other experience more memorable than this. Loved warlock havoc rune and mortal coiling 40 players at once.
The story for BfA honestly isn't bad for a lot of it, but it's so horribly presented and, as you mentioned, tries to tell multiple stories at the same time all over the place, that while I was playing BfA from 2018 to 2020, I rarely had a full grasp on the story. Even after it finished, I tried to look back, both on my own and with synopses written up by others, and it still felt like drunk history. It wasn't until that reddit post you shared that the story actually felt cohesive. Unfortunately, it's hard to look at the story of two years of a game, that concluded almost four years ago, in retrospect and go easy on how the story was presented as a player at the time. On top of that, BfA was the only time I really felt lost in the plot because it more or less required playing both Alliance and Horde (or doing a deep dive outside of the game to get the perspective of the other faction) to understand the story. It didn't feel like you were getting a full story playing one faction, with the opposing faction getting a different story; it felt like you got a fraction of the story. On paper, it doesn't sound so bad when labeled "a return to Alliance vs Horde," but in practice, it felt terrible. Not to mention Alliance and Horde only have three zones each with real quests for that faction, with nothing of note to do while leveling(except for normal mode dungeons, maybe) on Kul'Tiras as Horde or Zandalar as Alliance. I agree wholeheartedly that BfA has one of the worst leveling experiences of any WoW expansion - which I find pretty ironic that since Chromie Time was introduced for leveling, BfA is the default expansion for 10-50 or 10-60(whichever it is) for a brand new player. Shadowlands was also pretty bad, and both of these were expansions where you _lost_ power while leveling up to avoid power creep from your endgame gear from the previous expansion, but regardless, it feels terrible either way. It feels even worse when you hit the level cap and not only are you weaker relative to PvE enemies at the new level cap than you were at the previous endgame, but you're also weaker _compared to yourself at the beginning of the xpac._ I didn't experience this in BfA because I re-rolled going from Legion to BfA, but I did more DPS as a warrior during the SL pre-patch, after corruptions were disabled(I think around 2.8k ST) than when I hit level 60(was doing around 2.2-2.4k ST IIRC). I did play with people who experienced a DPS decrease between level 110 and 120 in BfA, and that just feels awful. Honestly, it's really hard for me to critique a lot of aspects of BfA from a less subjective standpoint, as I was pushing for CE every tier & achieved such, but I never felt as much pressure placed upon me, to log in and do chores every single day, as I have in BfA. Maybe I wouldn't be as low on M+ if I didn't feel the need to spam King's Rest every tier to get a high-ilvl Get'ikku(or two, since I was playing fury in 8.1 and 8.2), or if it didn't feel necessary to bring a rogue for shroud or invis pots to time a high-level key by skipping a bunch of trash that, if it were Legion, you'd just kill almost all the trash in a dungeon to get enough percentage to even complete the key. Maybe I wouldn't be as low on the borrowed power systems if I didn't feel the need to sink so much time on RNG items. Maybe I would like some raid fights I don't like or vice-versa if I felt like I was playing a game, not playing my WeakAuras and DBM. What I _can_ say, though, is that the positives didn't outweigh the negatives for me, after two years, to give it a thumbs up. It felt like the expansion that had the *least* respect for your time, by far, and the constant feeling of either needing to micromanage every aspect of time in the game, or the constant feeling of _wasting_ your time made almost every "feature" of the expansion feel crappy. tl;dr: Video was good, agreed on some parts and disagreed on other parts, and, at least in my opinion, it _was_ as bad as I remember, because it felt like it had zero respect for your time.
I think that's the main problem, and it's not even your fault. Why should players be punished for striving to be the best they can possibly be, and wanting to participate and beat the hardest content? You discuss pushing for CE, and it's so awesome you achieved those goals..but at what cost? It reminds me of Gul'dan: 'What must be given in return?' '....Everything.' The game should NEVER have been like that and the barrier to entry for Mythic was incredible because so much time was required of you, and if you weren't prepared to put in the hours or perhaps get a bit lucky with RNG/loot, you were out the door. You are bang on the money with your comment here, and I do agree with you. There are some good elements of BFA but they are totally overshadowed by the darkness of BFA in its systems, time commitment and sheer randomness. Thank you for watching the video and putting together such a detailed response. It was a pleasure to read and I love to hear peoples thoughts and feelings.
I have mixed feeling for BFA, I was so hyped for the Faction War due to the Warcraft Commercials building up to the Expansion's release. I really loved the Questlines for Zandalar and Kul Tiras, the Lore was so rich and had me wanting to learn more about both Locations, I liked both Island Expeditions and War Fronts and was left pretty sad they both ended up dropped. I did not like the Burning of Teldrassil, mainly due to I knew logically their was no way the Horde could be forgiven for committing Genocide and it'd left me bitter that Blizzard has never taken the true serios ramifications of this action and just smoothed over it. I also did not like the Heart of Azeroth, it made my Character feel so weak no matter what I did I kept dying to mobs if I pulled too many. This Expansion also made me realize how Blizzard wasted Lore, Nazjatar and Azshara could've been their own Expansion and instead of N'Zoth been endgame. They could've used G'huun while letting the Faction War continue with G'huun's influence spreading from Zandalar to Kul Tiras which could've led to both Factions uniting to fight him and have him being the one responsible to have corrupted Sylvanas. Poor Sylvanas who was completely ruined, I don't hate her I do feel real bad for her Character. Like starting the Fourth War to help empower Zovaal? How does that make sense when after the Third Invasion Azeroth had just been devastated by the Burning Legion, who's Fel Magic destroyed Souls or used for fuel for Legion Technology, after the Third Invasion you wouldn't think there wasn't enough forces for the Alliance and Horde to start a War. But ignoring that, I think it would've been better if Sylvanas used those souls to empower G'huun, making him stronger to make him a bigger threat. But you know who also got ruined to me? Anduin and Tyrande. He was so weak, like he actually told Tyrande she was being unreasonable after her race was genocided, I felt so bad for Tyrande it felyt like was being victim shamed. After Nazjatar I had to take a break from Warcraft because playing BFA felt like such a chore.
I was SUPER hyped for BFA after how good Legion was. It definitely felt out of place returning to the faction war, and now we know why with everything that happened in Shadowlands and such, but I digress. I loved both Zandalar and Kul Tiras too! I thought Islands and Warfronts were nice ideas but just executed poorly and eventually left to rust. They deserved so much better. That is so true. Not having both Ny'alotha and Nazjatar as their own expansions and continents was CRAZY to me. They just ham-fisted them both into the same storyline and called it a day. It was infuriating to me! I think I came back right as Nazjatar/Mechagon dropped, so I had a great time with them! But I can understand the people who had been slaving away for months were just exhausted at this point. BFA was overwhelming and Shadowlands was underwhelming! Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
I really do hope they continue to develop the warfronts. IMO this has the most potential. Someone said that the future of PVP should be objective based. And warfronts seem like the perfect playground.
I think with delves looking at introducing evergreen content, it's a really strong opportunity to reignite some of the forgotten systems. I agree with you, I think warfronts could be a great asset for PvP and provide something different! It was really unfortunate how it went down and it deserves better.
@@nikroth I think it will depend solely on execution. I think similarly with garrisons (and a lot of other ideas) it was great in theory. It just depends on how they want it to function within the game and what it hopes to achieve. If they tie power to it, it'll be a disaster. If it can be a fun PvP mode? I think there's actual hope for it.
- bfa issues (as a casual) - long world quests, cf everyone having turtle ptsd - warfronts and expeditions were bold experiments but them not working out left a gaping hole in the expansion - turned out, there were no breadcrumbs on alliance side to go do uldir, so i waited too many months before realizing & then it was too late to do it in LFR - if you did nazjatar months later, the quest where you level up followers actually slams the breaks on everything, 1 entire week, massive bottleneck - yeah going back to war ressources, command table, etc after doing that for 2 expansions was definitely getting a bit tedious, but not horribly too bad yet - them keeping borrowed power around was definitely kinda grating. Legendaries stopped feeling special a while back already but I do mind it getting worse with every passing expansion. - bfa pros - the zones were incredibly pretty, i did a ranking of expansions based on zones recently (vibes only), and BFA came up S tier (with mop and tbc in front) - how rich the world was felt kinda bonkers tbh, the size of boralus & dazaralor, the amount of niche jungle areas in zuldazar & nazmir... - I've always had something for how fake vs how organic the /road layouts/ are in the game, and they specifically nailed it in BFA. Super organic & believable. - the raw amount of cutscenes, story moments, plot developments was honestly super cool in BFA. - I don't remember struggling with the story, but i'm one of those lunatics that... reads... quests. Unheard of apparently. - the tortollan voice acting is like, half the expansion. - Drustvar & Nazmir are 2 of the only zones in the entire game where anything felt actually creepy/scary and we could see the potential WoW had for darker stuff. - Raids were really good, period. - overall: most of the downsides of modern wow, with most of the benefits of modern wow, but before shadowlands put a crater in the game lol, and not too much worse than legion, so still quite solid overall :)
This has been an incredibly fair and balanced comment and I agree with a lot of what you have said. Thank you for taking the time to watch the video and typing this up! I really appreciate it.
This may be an unpopular opinion but I think the story of BFA is better than people give it credit for. I saw a lot of complaints that Azshara and N'zoth came out of nowhere, but they both appeared in Azshara's Warbringer short, were responsible for 60% of the problems in Zandalar and Kul Tiras, got a bunch of focus and voice lines, so I felt it was pretty clear they were gonna be fought in BFA. For reference, I am pretty sure Azshara has more voice lines in BFA than Kil'Jaeden did in Legion, if not all of WoW. I think the biggest problem with BFAs story (other than 8.3 being really underwhelming) was that it tried to be a story about Azshara and N'zoth, Pandaria 2.0, and a prelude to Shadowlands all at the same time and didn't juggle the three storylines very well so all the good parts of each storyline were undercut.
I would say it's probably unpopular but no less valid! We all have different views and opinions and I'm interested in hearing everyone's thoughts! I think it would be very naive if people thought we wouldn't be seeing Azshara and N'Zoth, as per the Warbringers you suggested. I actually believe you regarding Azshara and Kil'Jaeden! I think you have summed it up wonderfully with this comment. I didn't 'hate' them, I was really interested and invested but the juggling of all of these narratives just felt too rushed. I imagine that BFA could have honestly been akin to the worldsoul saga in a sense. It could have began with the faction war and then bled into an Azshara/Nazjatar expansion and then finally concluding with N'Zoth and Ny'alotha. I would have genuinely loved that so much. Luckily we can have another chance with Azshara and if she doesn't show up in Midnight, I'll eat my own hat! As for the Black Empire, that's going to have to continue with Xal'atath for now and we'll see what happens! Thank you for sharing your thoughts. A very enjoyable and balanced read!
Azerite armor was such a bad system, even worse than the legion legendaries and the RNG to get them. Also the scaling respect fee was beyond insulting. The Heart of Azeroth was fine until they made essences, all except 1 were stupid grinds. They promised essences would have story tie ins, only 1 did. Legion was already too grindy, but BFA double it. BFA removed group finder world quests and cut world quest rewards literally in half. Quadruple the work, half the reward for world quests. Azerite was only plot important Trisgard sound story line and a foot note in the other 5 zones. Not even a major plot point in Naga Area and all but forgotten in the nzoth Uldum and Eternal Blossums. Characters blindly joined the war, with poor motivations. Many were much more willing to work together lorewise than actually go to war. Such as Rexxar. Most characters acted out of character.
That's actually such an important point you have raised, the importance of Azerite in the storyline. It was hugely prevalent in Tiragarde Sound like you said and then just an afterthought. You are absolutely right with everything you have said. Character motivations at this point is something I try not to dwell on, as I have felt for sometime now the writers don't simply understand the characters. I talk about this in more detail in my 'The Mourned Identity' video. It feels like some of the people who work on World of Warcraft now struggle to understand certain personalities, and it makes characters feel completely foreign to what the players were used to. Thank you for watching and sharing your thoughts and feelings. I appreciate it!
BFA content was fun for me to go back to during Shadowlands since I didn't play during BFA and it provided many useful things to get for what became my favorite activity and that was making Timewalking sets. Timewalking wasn't really hard at all but it was worth the effort since it let me deal 60-80% of my random dungeon finder groups damage at time and that was all that mattered to me. It definitely seemed like it would have been miserable to do while current though.
I started my Journey of becoming a WOW player in Battle for Azeroth. and i loved everything about this Expansion. The System, The Dungeons. The Powers you get and the things you can experiment with. it was Fun and ended in Corruption. a System that was fun and brought so many fun builds i tried and played and i quickly did my first +22 Keys in the End of BFA while also Mythic Raiding. I loved it. BFA was my Reason to keep playing WoW and finding friends and love.
That's really refreshing to hear! You're absolutely not alone with that either. I think the expansion you begin your journey in WoW is always going to be hugely important, and the reason most people dislike BFA is because of everything that preceded it and how much the game has changed over the years. Players didn't feel that their time wasn't being respected. Having this fresh experience will give you a completely different stance on the game, and you will take in the world like other players used to! Glad to hear you had such a blast with BFA, and thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences!
For me as someone that first started playing retail at the end of WoD, I'm of the opinion that BfA itself wasn't "shit" like some people would say. There are valid reasons players didn't/don't like it, but there are also a lot of reason to have liked BfA. For me the music, zones and the cinematics and even some parts of the story were top tier, even in comparison to Legion. The biggest downfall for BfA objectively was the faction war, it just didn't make sense after an expansion like Legion. The reason it started also felt so weird, of course we know why Sylvanas burned down Teldrassil, and in the end it was the cause for not one expansion being received bad but two (shadowlands could've worked if we got there for different reasons). The patches in Bfa also felt mostly boring, 8.0 was dead on arrival imo and was the first time I took a longer break, going into 8.1 I felt a bit better than 8.0 but it still wasn't that interesting, 8.2 for me was the best patch of BfA, adding two very interesting zones with good music, and cool lore, and then there is 8.3 which for me was worse than 8.0, the borrowed power was actually fun, but the content felt rushed, Ny'alotha should've been a zone and the raid wasn't that interesting imo, the mechanics were ok but the raid got super stale after 2 or 3 clears.
The music and cinematics are genuinely some of the best in WoW, for sure. I think it's easy to hate on BFA because there was so much fundamentally wrong with it, but it did have some strong elements to it. The bad just sadly overshadows the good, and there was so much bad. Thank you for taking the time to watch and write this. I appreciate it.
I will argue the point that "Nyalotha could have been a whole expansion". It definitely needed to be more than a raid though, if it had been a patch zone like the Emerald Dream in DF I think we'd remember it more fondly than spending a whole expansion in and of itself. In theory I appreciate reuse of previous locations, but I'm very sure that the N'Zoth assaults were a poor implementation, given they had given us 2 pretty decent patch zones in 8.2. Even if they wanted to keep horrific visions I would have rather collected Coalescing Vision in Nyalotha than N'Zoth assaults. All of the Old Gods were dealt with in one patch, and making Nyalotha the final tier of BFA is more than C'Thun or Yogg-Saron got. I don't want a full expansion in the Black Empire, but I want a full patch in the Black Empire.
Yeah, that's fair. A zone could have been nice, on the same levels of Argus in Legion maybe; 3 zones in a little continent. Like you said, it all felt like a 'wham-bam-thank-you-maam' and I think it deserved better. Maybe an expansion is a bit far-fetched or hyperbole, but the Black Empire definitely deserved better than what we got. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and feelings, and thanks for watching!
@@EloquentTroll Even if you did disagree, I'm always very interested to hear players thoughts and point of view, so don't ever be afraid to disagree with anything I say! Thank you for your kind words. I really appreciate your engagement with the video.
@@edd_TV I'm just finished the video, and I agree with you on Benthic gear, but I will add that Dragonflight actually evolved that system in a manner I consider positive. It's really neat that I can get an alt to max level and do all the patch stories and once it's finished I can upgrade my gear to more than ready for normal raids, and for my main (Holy Priest, healer solidarity!), getting upgrade mats from an M+ run is reasonable consolation prize if I don't get a gear upgrade, and the ability to turn my vault reward into one of those currencies is very nice. And I will add that I hope corruption comes back in a future final patch. My main may be a Holy Priest but my first alt is a Destruction Warlock, and I deeply enjoyed watching Twilight Devastation reap it's toll.
@@EloquentTroll That's a good point! I do feel that Dragonflight has done some serious damage control with both BFA and Shadowlands. It had to put out a lot of fires and I think it's done a pretty good job. It would be pretty fun to see corruption make a comeback someday, but I think people would doom too much over the thought of any sort of elements of borrowed power again. It was great for its time and I agree, Twilight Devastation was very fun.
If Sylvanas and The Shadowlands stuff wasn’t hanging over the expansion, I think people would have liked it a lot more. I mean we had both Old Soldier and The Pride of Kul’Tiras in the same expansion. Both were fantastic. BfA failed story-wise because they were trying build up a mystery about Sylvanas and her true motivations. The payoff wasn’t good enough, Shadowlands was a mess.
I think so too. I think the fact BFA was a precursor to Sylvanas' power and the Shadowlands stuff, it could have been easier to enjoy or maybe forget about? I think it's quite difficult to leave things behind that are canon, it's why I struggle with the Star Wars sequels so much. It's frustrating to me. You are very right about both Old Soldier and Kul'Tiras, there is so much good in BFA but it really is tainted by the bad. Great comment!
Amen on Naz/Mechagon saving the expansion. My guild had already fallen apart in Uldir and I tried my best to pug through BoD but eventually fizzled out. Having two pretty good zones packed with content kept me playing and vaguely gearing until I could pick back up in season 4. Edit: I wish I could like this video twice. Its such a fair and balanced take on BFA.
Thanks for summarizing the story line, I'am thinking on getting back to the War Within after leaving in Legion and it helps a lot to have the lore and the game growth summarized. Looking forward to the shadowlands and Dragonflight :D
You're welcome. I think it's important that people can understand the story regardless of how good/bad they perceive it to be. I think The War Within will be a great opportunity to get back into the game, I just hope they are able to bridge the stories so people who have been out of the game for sometime can understand what's happening! Thank you for watching!
Thematically BfA had everything - South Seas, Faction War, Azshara and Nazjatar, Nzoth and Nyalotha. Narratively, they fumbled every single one of them except Kul Tiras and Zandalar. I have no idea how anyone would have green lit that script if it was written from start to finish in one go. Sylvanas Warbringers came out before BfA launched and it was one of the biggest shitshow in the WoW community I have ever seen. Soured the expansion before it even started, first of its kind. Worst part is, Nazjatar and Nzoth felt like they were forcefully wrapped up so the new writing team at Blizzard could move on to tell their own new stories, except Shadowlands and Dragonflight storytelling were not great either. BfA, SL, DF all felt like their stories were cut, rewritten, and served half-baked. I still love these expansions visually, because god damnnit the zones are just so beautifully crafted. I still walk around Ardenweald on ground and log off my character there because I'm just that enthralled by the place. Like you, I fucking loved Horrific Visions and Corruption, they were thrilling and had my adrenaline pumping throughout. I'm glad they are revisting Visions in 11.1.5 after Undermine. I foresee people will complain again about "recycled content". TWW was already continuing the leftover plot from BfA - Xalatath, the Sword, the Goblins. Siren Isle was originally made for an Island expedition. Now Visions, another BfA feature returns. The community is 100% going to whine about TWW being a recycled BfA that plays like DF. I could care less about TWW thematically because it feels so all over the place, but as long as the gameplay feels good, that works for me. My eyes are on Midnight. Who knew an expansions centered around Quelthalas and the Void could generate so much anticipation. I get the impressions from Blizzard that they are hedging their bets on Midnight too. It's Metzen's idea as well. That man is overhyped since people forgot all about Cata, WoD, SC2, D3, but he sold me the idea, now I just want to see the execution.
I agree. I think the execution of both Kul Tiras and Zandalar was great. They felt like real Warcraft zones! The themes were wonderful and familiar. You really have summed everything up masterfully. It felt like the ingredients were there for BFA to be something special but they were telling so many different stories all at once. It was just never going to work. For me personally I would have maybe settled for Azshara as a final boss of BFA which could have followed up into a Black Empire expansion. But on the other hand I would have loved a fully fledged expansion that took place on Nazjatar too. I think both Nazjatar and Ny'alotha should have probably been their own continents in their own expansions rather than what we got. It just felt very wasteful to me. I think you're absolutely right too. These were hugely anticipated antagonists and it felt like Blizzard wanted to just sweep them aside for whatever is coming next. And that's always a very frustrating thing for me, even more so with Shadowlands because it caused so much damage narratively, but now it's time to forget about that expansion too because 'The Dragon Aspects are here now!'. It feels like a theme park in that respect. We're just bouncing around and nothing is woven together as well as it should be. The art team are superb. It has to be said. No matter how dark WoW gets or whatever poor decisions are made, you know they will deliver! The music, the zones, it's all just so magical and it gives you a feeling no other game can. I have read they are revisiting the Horrific Visions, which sounds brilliant! I can't speak for The War Within at the minute as I still haven't picked it up but as the days go by, I'm getting closer and closer to pulling the trigger. I miss it. I've seen bits and pieces on Siren Isle, all I know is it's an unused zone from BFA and it's centralised around some sort of ring. I can understand why people might want to moan about it, but I think any content is better than none. It gives me Forbidden Reach vibes from Dragonflight a bit? I think you're right. Midnight is going to be immense. I think my only fears with Midnight will be the return of Sylvanas, which seems inevitable. I don't know how they can put her back in a favourable or acceptable light with the audience. It's going to be interesting, but I do strongly agree with you. I would bet the house that Midnight is going to completely steal the show! I love Metzen, but I will absolutely acknowledge (with the examples you have given) he is far from perfect. And I think he owns that. I think he does admit when he fucks up, and that's the bare minimum I want from him, and everybody else at Blizzard. If it's shit, if it's bad, if it's wrong, just be honest and tell us. It really annoyed me that Shadowlands was swept under the rug and never talked about again. We never understood the execution, why it failed, why the product delivered was what it was etc. We deserve transparency. I want to trust Chris. These worlds are so important to him and I think this is his and WoW's redemption arc. I really want to believe that. Sorry for such a long response! I really enjoyed reading your comment. We share so many similar thoughts and feelings. Thank you so much for sharing them!
@@edd_TV I really enjoyed reading your comment too, and I've been loving your channel, so I'm glad to help with engagement. Plus I love discussions. I agree with most of what you said, but I'm on the fence about an entire expansion based on Nazjatar. The environment could run the risk of being too samey to make 5-6 launch zones without causing player fatigue. However, BfA at the very least could have done Nazjatar like Argus - give us 3 zones for the final patch. That would have been amazing. 8.2 could instead focus on Mechagon and the Faction War. The story going into Nazjatar will have to do more heavy lifting with Ashvane and Sylvanas' deal with Azshara. What we got was a wasted potential anyway, but at least this wouldn't have been too different from Argus in Legion, and we would still have Nzoth and Nyalotha for another expansion. I agree that Metzen is admirable for owning up to his faults. I would love to see a post mortem of BfA and SL by Blizzard someday, like that making of Vanilla WoW book by John Staats. So much went wrong with those 2 expansions narratively and gameplay design wise that I think the player base would love to hear what happened behind the scenes that caused such a mess. As for TWW, I don't think you missed much as of right now. The story isn't fantastic by any means, but it is neatly wrapped up in one patch. However, if you only follow cutscenes on RUclips, you miss out a hecka lot. They have added so much "stay a while and listen" dialogue that it's very obvious when someone complains about TWW story, you know they skipped everything and paid zero attention. It does feel like a family therapy session instead of Warcraft, but I like the heartwarming vibes. Gameplay wise, it's just DF + Delves. So if you enjoyed DF S2 and S3, you would enjoy TWW gameplay too.
@@Ryan-sn3uo Thank you for saying so. I really appreciate that! Me too. I'll do my best to respond to everybody because I love hearing everybody's thoughts and opinions! You do make a very good point with Nazjatar. It makes me think of Vashj'ir which potentially could have been the precursor to something like a Nazjatar continent and you're right, it is all very samey. It would be hard to give zones their own flavour like that. I think 3 zones like you're suggesting would have been better, because I thought Argus was cool as hell! I think somebody mentioned in my Shadowlands video that a former member of Blizzard did come out and talk about Shadowlands. I think it's in a book but I never got around to actually looking for it. I would be more interested in hearing from the real higher ups at the time though. People like Ion, J.Allen Brack and those kinda guys. Shadowlands is tricky because you can't really erase it. Once you pull back the veil on the afterlife, it's here forever really. They could retcon it if they really wanted to, but it does just further admit failure. I think they would rather never discuss it again, but I would love to know what happened. Not even from a place of anger. It's just so obvious the product we got isn't what they wanted to give us. "Stay a while and listen" moments are always good, so I'll look forward to that! I'm very open to the idea of heart-warming and emotional stuff too. I do think they need to have more of a balance with it. I think Dragonflight exposed that a lot, but there's absolutely a place for it! I think we all want to be moved in all forms of media: TV, film, music etc. Video games are no different. We just need balance and execution. I think it's only a matter of time for me. I had a look at Undermine(d) and honestly it looks great!
After a bit of time in Legion without owning Legion, and 10 years of WotLK in private servers, BFA was fucking awesome for me. I joined in 8.2 and loved every second of it.
That's great to hear! I always find it super refreshing to hear people had a blast with BFA because it's spoken about so negatively. A lot of people just assume that it's universally hated and it's not true at all. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
I like that you pull bits of info from past and future expansions to explain their relevance in the plot, even if they're not outright explained in this exact expansion. I feel like a lot of gripes people have tend to forget that you're not meant to have every single question answered in the current expansion. BFA was definitely an expansion I played less than most, but I enjoyed the time I spent playing it. My main issue was the dripfeed of content. However, coming back at the last patch, I feel the expansion was in a genuinely good spot. Fun solo content. Fun raids. Fun dungeons. Even for the less-banger wow expansions, there's always something to remember fondly. Even SL had a couple bright spots amid the controversy.
I can't take any real credit for that as I was just reading off the Reddit post, but I agree, it's a lot better when there is some perspective and actual answers and connections; it's just the overarching shadow of the jailer that really upsets players, and I get that. Thanks for watching and sharing your thoughts and feelings!
I haven't played much WoW until BfA, so I may be biased as it was my first time really playing, but I absolutely loved BfA's art, both Kul-Tiras and Zandalar were unbelievably aesthetically pleasing. Also I didn't understand the downsides people are talking about here, so basically I loved BfA strongly.
There's nothing wrong with that. I think regardless of when players start in WoW, it can be a very special and important feeling, and I know you're not alone with that. A lot of people feel that same affinity with BFA due to the same reasons you do, and I think that's nice.
Siege of Boralus was pretty bad for horde players. The start of the dungeon was different and worse/harder. When i swapped to alliance it was mind blowing how much better it was. Great video and hello fellow crab mount enjoyer 👍I would love to see a shadowlands video, as I enjoyed that xpac despite a lot of bad stuff. Especially the dungeons and zone designs.
I never thought about Siege of Boralus from a Horde perspective! It's coming back for Season 1 of The War Within. Thank you for your kind words, and Shadowlands is definitely something I'm planning on pursuing down the line!
Just stopping by to comment my own experience with soccer/Xan'esh fight! Nya'lotha was my first time doing real raiding since wotlk (which I was in elementary school for) so it has a pretty special place in my heart. Though I was a half blind (irl) death knight who was assigned to do soccer, which, as you can guess, made for some pretty funny moments in where I was set up, ready to hit the ball, only for my sight to have LIED to me and it passed right next to me while my teammates were crying out in dismay! Or I was WAY too slow to catch up to the ball since DK's movement options were, um, not great XD. It was all in good fun though, I usually hit it well :) though I have yet to learn, I still always volunteer myself to do the trickier mechanics in boss fights even if my class isn't really suited for it.
Oh no, haha! It's great that you're still up for it and willing to throw yourself in the deep end and take responsibility and learn mechanics! I think it's great that you have people who are really understanding too, as WoW can sometimes have a notorious reputation for being toxic. That must have been challenging, even just the DK part like you say! That's a funny story, thank you so much for sharing and watching the video! It's nice that people can watch these retrospective videos and think back to some of their favourite/memorable times in the game!
I was only interested in BFA for Kul Tiras, a city-state that was finally included in this expansion. Overall it was gorgeous and I loved the art style and theme. Other than that BFA was nothing more than bantha poodoo
@@edd_TVoh absolutely. I managed a roleplay guild centered entirely around Kul Tiras so you could imagine the excitement in our guild when finally after 10 years we were finally included.
I was wondering why I look back on BFA pretty fondly and realised it was because I did my 1 month of free then came back in 8.2 (essences and binging the story I guess). Makes total sense now
8.2 honestly saved BFA for me, for sure. The game initially felt so drab and it's no wonder everybody called it 'Beta for Azeroth'. There were definitely consistent problems with BFA, but 8.2 really did a lot for it.
It's not nearly as bad as people claim. The azerite system was unfortunately the biggest issue that prevented a great expansion. I genuinely loved the zones and raids. The weakest patch was by far the final N'Zoth tier. The raid was really good but everything else fell flat.
I agree. Whilst the bad was really bad, I think it's very easy to latch onto negative things, for example people go crazy over the garrison in WoD, but it was hardly the biggest offender. It was just the scapegoat, and because people spent all their time in it because of a lack of content, it's the first thing players think of.
@@edd_TV Agreed, and the fact that we recognize these things later down the line has me pause a bit before being too hard on any expansion. Current or otherwise. Criticism is good and useful but not blind hatred honestly. There IS nuance to positive and negative things.
@@SirCalebEvans Yeah, that was important to me when making this video. I think it's fine to be critical but understanding is also key, and I think attempting to provide solutions rather than blind hatred as you say is always the healthier option. It doesn't have to be so black and white. BFA very clearly had good elements to it, but poor execution and a lateness to much needed changes sealed its fate with a lot of players.
BFA had a lot of good ideas that were executed poorly. Azshara and N'Zoth should've been in a standalone expansion, but the narrative with what the hell Sylvannas was doing demanded attention while also still being shrouded in mystery. She went from being one of my top favorite characters to the least with how the Jailer's character basically stripped her agency away from her, while also never being fully explained himself. I still have a lot of good memories from 8.3 for a lot of the reasons you listed, but man talk about wasted potential with N'Zoth being sidelined into a single patch.
Hard agree. I tried my best to be invested in both Azshara and N'Zoth with BFA, but this expansion just felt like a slap in the face considering how anticipated both of these characters were and what we got. They absolutely deserved to be in the spotlight in their own storylines. It is genuinely devastating how far Sylvanas has fallen, and whilst I do think she'll be a lot easier on the eye when she eventually returns, I do wonder if some of the fanbase will ever forgive what has happened to her. I hope so. I think the Black Empire just has to live through Xal'atath going forward at this point. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and feelings!
i am soo up to the next one about shadowlands! and the dragonflight one might be needed soon too! your takes are very thought out and not really emotion-based
I'm glad you enjoy them! I do my best to be objective when making these videos and try and view things as fairly as I can. Thank you for your kind words, and thanks for watching!
There was nothing wrong with the story. The problem was the gearing system, it destroyed a ton of guilds. You were constantly updating Azerite gear because you wanted certain abilities. Some abilities were just far superior to others, and you wanted a combination. The gearing system is what destroyed this expansion. Raiding became a horrible chore. In the end of the expansion it was pretty much fixed, mostly by making all the azerite abilities the same. And making the neck give the more powerful abilities that you could CHOOSE to put on yourself. But at this point the damage was mostly done. Most guilds had just fallen apart at this time.
I would disagree regarding the story personally, but if you enjoyed it then that's great! The systems in BFA were very poor, agreed. I felt like the barrier to mythic raiding was becoming a lot more apparent too with everything that was expected of you.
@@edd_TVHaven't started the video(have a few minutes left on a podcast before starting this), but as someone who got CE every tier for BfA: I think every system besides Essences were absolutely HORRIBLE for mythic raiding, and I would wager it's because Essences were the only borrowed power system in the expansion that you could directly target and acquire right from their introduction. Azerite pieces, Corruptions, Titanforging sockets onto gear, etc., all were _introduced_ as pure RNG. I lost my raid spot in 8.3 and had to join a new guild because I was playing arms warrior(which stacked the hell out of haste corruptions) and I could not, for the life of me, get haste corruptions on random drops to save my life, and corruptions were so strong that I was replaced halfway through Ny'alotha by an arms warrior that was recruited solely because of having a ton of haste corruptions. They corrected course later on in the patch by adding the vendor, and I finished the xpac with over 90% haste because of whatever the rank 3 haste corruption was called on every piece of gear I could have it on, but outside of Essences, every borrowed power system in BfA created anywhere from annoying to MASSIVE barriers to entry upon introduction due to being completely reliant on RNG for weeks or months. Anyway, podcast has finished; will now watch the video.
@@Unregistered.HyperCam.2 You're absolutely spot on with everything you say. I completely agree with you on Essences, they needed to be in the game on launch. I'm sorry to hear you lost your raid spot in 8.3. BFA was very unforgiving in the sense of commitment and devotion needed for your character and it honestly came down to blind luck sometimes, and that just feels so, so bad. Thank you for taking the time to write this up, and thank you for watching! I hope you will enjoy.
I’m quite partial to BFA and I actually thought it was one of the better expansion’s that I played. I quit wow back during WOTLK and didn’t return until the very start of BFA so I had missed nearly a decade of WoW. BFA felt so different than how I had remembered WoW from all those years back and I had a lot of fun playing since then.
That's such a long break! The game must have felt SO different by the time you picked it up again. That's really great that you came back and still had a good experience. It's quite rare people tell a story like this. Most people come back and find the game unrecognisable and tend to drop off relatively quickly, rather than persevering and see how the game has changed. Do you still play?
It was even worse at the time too because we didn't know about The Maw or the Jailer or anything like that. It just felt like an excuse for war. They obviously tried to tie in with Sylvanas' drastic gains in power but I agree, it felt bad for a number of reasons. It feels like Night Elves have had the shit kicked out of them for years now, it painted the Horde as serious villains and it just wasn't needed.
That's super refreshing to hear. I think people can be so prone to spewing hate for expansions like WoD and BFA, but they are absolutely favourites for some players and we all have a personal preference. This is what fascinates me about people who make WoW tier lists; there is no right or wrong answer. If you love BFA, that's awesome as far as I'm concerned! Thanks for watching.
I agree. I think after what we got with Vashj'ir in Cataclysm, it really set the tone and whet the appetite for a lot of players of what Nazjatar could have potentially been like. I still had fun with Nazjatar, but it was very underwhelming to what I had envisaged it to be.
@@Frankthegb I think maybe if we had sections similar to Vashj'ir or Argus, one of them could have been a fully underwater area. They probably considered it, but Vashj'ir was such a polarising zone and considering how integral Nazjatar was to the endgame of BFA, it would have ruffled a lot of feathers I think. Vashj'ir was different, it was a levelling zone and if you really hated it that much you could just do Hyjal instead and not have to worry about it. It would have offered a lot of problems, no doubt.
My favorite part of BFA...TWILIGHT DEVASTATION! I felt like BFA was done by a completely different group of people who were hellbent of shifting the entire world to their version of WOW which was only waved by the art and music.
Twilight devastation was just so nuts, haha! It's crazy thinking back that we actually had something like that in the game. It was just wild! I don't know what BFA was supposed to be to be honest, from the narrative to the systems. It felt like a crazed experiment. I will say the art team absolutely cooked though. The zones were fabulous and I genuinely think BFA has one of the best OSTs in WoW's history!
Corruption was the most fun part of WoW in a long time. With everything being simmed down to the decimals, corruption gave those "what if" situation that gives gratification or "that was worth it" feel even if you lay dead on the floor. It's like PoM Pyro you build your character to be a one trick pony. And if 2 mages in classic PoM Pyro'ed each other I'm pretty sure both are laughing out loud behind the screen.
It makes me happy to see that others had a great time with it too. I can remember there was so much noise about it, and I do understand why that was. It definitely wasn't a 'one size fits all' system and it was clear the issues that became prevalent in PvP and such, but from a PvE perspective I genuinely loved it. It was a breath of fresh air for me as opposed to the horrid titanforging we had in the past, and knowing this was thematic and likely wouldn't move with us past the final patch of BFA made it feel more acceptable to me. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
The zones were good, especially horde ones. Patches were very solid and feature rich. Nazjatar was great, the mech island, Nyalotha, visions. It also had plenty of disappointing things but I did not really care about those as a casual. I'm not going to bother farming gear anyway so I care very little about the best azerite traits. The powers from the visions being on a rotation was dumb. Warfronts, islands and azerite armor really set a negative tone at the start that people never got over.
I was definitely more than casual so I felt the real brunt of it, but you have hit the nail on the head. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feelings!
I'm still upset that my horde guild had a more aggravating set of trash between bosses 2 & 3 in that capital raid. My guildmates also hated it. But that's more for the joke I made every week while Jaina rained down ice on us. After all, the cold doesn't bother her anyways.
I was a big fan of BFA despite recognizing its flaws. I do have to say, a lot of people often bit off more than they were required to. I was a mythic raider and was often confused about my normal and heroic friends complaining about needing a BiS neck at all times which just was absolutely not at all the case. I hardly ever grinded m+ or islands, I didn’t have bis essences, corruptions or the like. All things people said you NEEDED in order to just PLAY. My guild had no complaints about me when we finished CE: Nzoth; it was a made up problem by the casual playerbase who thought they needed to have everything. Anyway, Jaina didn’t have a personality change up randomly either. She was 4-5 years past her trauma and was proven right. She showed up smug and smiling because the rest of the alliance finally agreed with her.
It's very true. A lot of it comes down to pure mindset. People have a desire to be the best and in BFA it wasn't easy to achieve. It took a lot of energy, luck and time. Players can so often be their own worst enemies without realising. Glad to hear you had such a great time with it. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feelings!
@@edd_TVthank you man. I know BfA gets a bad rap but in hindsight I had so many great memories playing it with my friend, but as grown adults and not kids, so it's very special to me
@@lordfizzz I honestly think that's what it's all about - friendship and community. I'm very much of the belief that you can make anything fun with the right people. It's hard to believe but there will be people out there who loved Shadowlands! Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and feelings. I really appreciate it.
BFA was the peak of WoW from Art perspective - zones, music and cinematics were incredible. So sad, that there were so many bad systems and the story felt rushed
I agree with you. When I was making this video, it was genuinely a joy to be able to take in certain music tracks. ALL of the 'Sky Night' tracks are just so lovely. The cinematics were genuinely fantastic too. I feel like The War Within could offer something very similar, as the reveal was incredible. It is a massive shame what we got from BFA narratively (and systematically) when the art team go above and beyond, time after time.
i've gotta say after thinking about years after the fact i actually did enjoy my time in bfa, i found the story somewhat interesting despite not being as compelling as previous expansions and did engage a looot of the game content. the grinding drove me nuts, especially the reputation stuff which i think peaked at its worst in bfa moreso than any other expansion. but the allied races were cool, war table stuff was cool, the special alliance v horde stuff was very cool, bwonsamdi was awesome and even the nature of world quests sort of having a theme of "being behind enemy lines" just felt great given the backdrop we played in. i bet you'd be hard pressed to find many people who consider it to be their favourite expansion but there are probably a surprising number of players who will look back on it and have a similar sentiment to myself about bfa.
I very much agree! I even surprised myself with how much positive stuff I wanted to say about BFA. I think it's really easy to hone in on negative stuff with expansions. I feel like the most polarising expansions often have beacons or landmarks you can attach them to, to just incite hatred WoD: Garrisons BFA: Azerite Shadowlands: Sylvanas, Jailer, Anima, Covenants, Torghast, take your pick really. I hope people do look back on BFA and think similarly to you: okay, the grinds were brutal BUT....they did have some good stuff going for them. That's certainly how I feel anyway! I think we could carve out good and bad with any expansion if we took the time to think about it. None are perfect, and like you say BFA was definitely off in the deep end with grinds and such, but all expansions have things people dislike. This was a refreshing comment to read! Thank you for taking the time to watch the video and sharing your thoughts. I appreciate it!
Compared to Shadowlands it was fun but overall bad. I like it, i think Zandalar is the best thing about it. the PvP was ok, Azerite sucked. I liked N'zoth towards the end. I am blinded by it because its pre-covid nostalgia kicking in lol
I would agree. I think BFA (through all its faults) is infinitely better than Shadowlands. When I took the time to write the script, I did have to cast my mind back to how the world was at the time and just how important WoW was for me. It doesn't forgive BFA for its misgivings, but there was definitely some good elements to it, if you looked hard enough.
I will say I still have some good memories but also some bad memories of BFA, I was way more casual than I was in Legion and WoD and now, as such I didn't feel the pressure of the grind, but the grind was a major hurdle for me getting into raiding and joining a guild as I feel I'd put more pressure on myself to do keep up and partake. Let alone tracking BiS azerite traits...not armor but the traits which was overwhelming. As such keeping to myself, running heroic dungeons is where I kept myself at. Out of the expansions I played from WoD onward, I would list my favorites as Dragonflight, WoD, Legion, BFA, Shadowlands. I joined WoD in 6.2 and raided with a good guild so I have favorable views but I'm sure it'd be lower if I played it from the beginning lol. The lull in WoD let me play previous content and achievement hunt. But I digress, BFA was okay for me but I didn't enjoy how all the systems felt like a hurdle to get into more challenging content. Huge difference where DF is more open and all you need to do is run dungeons to get into raid.
It's definitely a mixed bag. It wasn't all bad, but the bad was REALLY bad, so a very large shadow is cast over the good. I wholeheartedly agree with you on your thoughts and frustrations with the systems, and the lack of clarity that came with them. I think WoD gets a lot of hate because there just wasn't enough going on there, which is funny considering there was just TOO much going on in BFA; it feels like Blizzard can just never win in that sense. Thank you for watching and sharing your thoughts and feelings!
BFA is easily the most underrated lore expansion in WoW. So much depth, and very few bad decisions As someone who came back in 8.2, the last 2 patches of BFA were absolutely fire. Twilight Devastation was so damn fun.
I share the same opinion as you. I do think 8.2 saved the game. It should never be this way obviously, but it did breathe a lot of much needed life into BFA. Definitely some bad and rushed decisions narratively, and worse decisions systematically but I was able to appreciate the beauty and fun the game did offer. The dungeons and raids were great, I loved the zones, horrific visions were awesome. Similarly to you I had a blast with corruption, ineffable truth was insane!
Craziest thing before they changed it. The imbalance between alliance and horde unlock for allied races was insane. Look how many dungeons you have to do alliance side vs horde.
That sadly seems to be a great fear and philosophy of Blizzard. For example, Torghast had massive potential in Shadowlands, but they were likely wary that some players simply wouldn't engage with it, so they gated the legendaries behind it. It's not good game deisgn and hopefully a cycle they are going to break in the future.
I started late legion and had my first max lvl char at BFA 1st season, As a w3 fan, I leaned to PvP pretty fast, and oh god I was disappointed, farming PvE gear to go PvP, trinkets that prevents healing, arenas that last 15 min until you run out of mana, the holy priest off meta until late SL (snif) and most of all, the world PvP, pretty inexistant and it was more like running into a bus of the opposite faction. Beside that, I absolutely loved the ambiance, the first part of the story, the battle for Dazar'Alor raid, and the musics. I also loved the first season of Shadowland, interesting fights in PvP as a healer, PvP vendors etc
That's so interesting to me that you're a Warcraft 3 fan but started WoW so late! Why was that if you don't mind me asking? I do recall what you're speaking of regarding arena, I think there was something called Principles of War? I'm not so big on PvP but I can definitely remember the noise surrounding it. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences!
Honneslty, paywall, paying 14€ per month was too much for me (and I was too young when the game started) but I finally decided to try it and until now (beside some breaks) I never really stopped.
Jaina's more "Stable" in BFA but at least for the early part of it she's basically suicidal and still incredibly anti-Horde. She brought back her Father's flagship and was willing to face death for standing aside and letting him be killed, if it would get Kul'Tiras back in the war.
BFA is where i quit WoW cause i hated what I was doing as a horde player, i hated the grind and felt i was so weak that i had to change from a ret pally to a protection just to survive, so for me that where my WoW journey ended
BFA was the second time I quit WoW for a lengthy period of time. WoD was my first, and that was mainly due to boredom/loneliness. I agree with you that the grind and chores in BFA were very demanding, and if you raided mythic it really ate your time and felt like an excessive commitment and a second job. I don't begrudge you for switching to protection just to survive, the levelling experience felt really rough.
@@edd_TV I also wasn't a raider or heck even dungeons, I was there mostly for story and it was just bleh, I came back in dragonflight to test it and it ok, but generally the "endgame" of WoW isn't for me, I'm a quest guy
@@rawdoncat8326 I think that's fair. Endgame in WoW is incredibly competitive, formulaic and repetitive. It's not for everybody and you're certainly not alone with that. I think some people forget that WoW is also the telling of a story, and not everything has to be seen with a 'Gotta-go-fast' approach or a desire to obtain loot. It's definitely important, but it's not the primary focus of the game.
@@edd_TV pretty much, I think my biggest issue I have since taking that break and playing ff14 and seeing how they structured there story and how you go through it, it makes me go "why are you pushing me to get to 60 fast to then do dragonflight?" Making the story a bit harder to follow as if you let say go to legion, well unless you got a "guide" that tells you what quests were in what patch you might end up starting legion, but then starting a chain that leads to the 3rd patch where the tomb of sargaras is for example, so you kinda end up having a broken story cause you accidentally did the quests in the "wrong order"
A lot of the issues with BFA is, it was a victim of Legion's successes. They tried to do "something different" while keeping it the same with the HOA and the azerite gear, and that fell flat on its face. Warfronts seemed promising but were just an afk to win scenario that gave powerful gear for doing nothing. (They were INCREDIBLY boring too.) Island expeditions had promise, but turned into an AOE fest for grinding azerite and nothing more. Nothing like "Got a new piece of gear, have to go grind island expeditions for a few hours before I can equip it!" Underneath all of these terrible systems is actually a pretty good expansion. The lore is great. The zones are some of the most beautiful WOW has ever had, same with the music. The dungeons and raids were great. BFA's failure was in its systems. If you go back to it now, you can pretty much ignore the systems and see what it would've been like without them, and yeah, it's not the top WOW expansion but it's pretty good. Unfortunately, they took the wrong lessons from BFA and Shadowlands failed in both its systems AND its story. Nothing can save that. The only good content in Shadowlands were dungeons and raids.
Beautifully written. I adore Legion. I will honestly scream that until I'm blue in the face. Legion was immaculate, but I am incredibly cognizant of the cruel road it paved for both BFA and Shadowlands. When you have success like Legion, I think they thought it was impossible to do anything other than double down on it. I think had Legion been the only expansion to do borrowed power, it would be held in even higher regard. I agree with you on the zones, I also think the music is gorgeous! It has one of the best soundtracks in WoW for me, just beautiful! I also think they did a brilliant job with the dungeons and raids. You have summed it up with the systems, for sure. And sadly this is the loudest sound in BFA. When you see BFA, you hear 'Azerite' and then everything else is white noise. You can't appreciate the beauty of BFA because everybody is so focused on the bad, the hurt and the negative, and there was just so much of it. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and speaking so candidly! I really appreciate it!
I honestly had a blast in BfA. The raids were awesome, the dungeons were great, new zones were really great, and the corruption was fun to mess around with. However, the progression system and so many dailies and other stuff made the game an insane time sink just to keep up. Shadowlands was so bad that I quit, and never went back (I started WoW in '07). I'm in my FF14 era now, and I'm having a really fun time with the game.
Glad to hear it! I don't begrudge you for quitting Shadowlands, it was a really dark period generally speaking with both the lawsuit and the pandemic; the game being miserable was just the cherry on the cake in that awful time. Glad to hear you're having a blast with FFXIV, as I have so much love for that game too! I'm very excited for Dawntrail! Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feelings!
Honestly I really liked BFA, while it did have problems, it did a lot of things right. And at no point during the journey did I get bored of what we got. I really liked the big push in new playable races, something I wish we kept up the pace with subsequently.
I'm glad to hear BFA hit for you! It's definitely a mixed bag for me but it's always refreshing to see people look back on it fondly because it absolutely had some great elements to it. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
100% agree. It was very tiresome, and felt very punishing if you skipped out on the chores that were being asked of you, and that list would just continue to grow and grow as the expansion went on.
The biggest thing I hated about BFA was how rushed a lot of the plot points were. Nazjatar and Azshara should've had an entire expansion about them, not a patch.
100% agree. We're going to see Azshara again for sure, but Nazjatar was so storied and anticipated. Vashj'ir seemed to set the tone for what it could potentially look like, and whilst I loved Nazjatar and had a good time with it, it deserved so much more. I would have loved an Azshara expansion.
THIS!!! And the story just didn't make any sense at time. We didn't know about the Jailer so everything about Sylvannas didn't make sense (but the reveal was even worse in SL so....) and we basically had to play both factions to understand everything (which no one did, it was hard enough to have a reroll)
@@lilyx77 I agree. The fact the dots weren't connected and when they finally were, we got what we got with Shadowlands and it just felt....rough. You make a good point about the campaigns too. It was different with Class Order Halls in Legion because they were relative to your class, but having to do both Alliance and Horde to see the full scope on the narrative was harsh.
And it felt TOTALLY unconnected in many ways... it was just like ok ummm SO YOU"RE ON A BOAT NOW
@@briangregory8223 I think weaving and connecting storylines is something that has been encouraged from the success and growth of FFXIV. I believe that's why we're getting the Worldsoul Saga. I agree though, it made zero sense and coming off the back of the greatest threat we've ever faced in the Burning Legion, it was just odd to jump back into faction wars.
Legion introduced a new gameplay cycle of levelling -> world quests> mythics/raids. But the moment a player reaches mythics, the world itself becomes irrelevant. All those newly designed zones and creatures are all a temporary part of the game, even though that's the main selling point. WoW could be so much more if they kept the world-content going into the end game.
That is very true. I often feel like players can be quite desensitised to the world and adventure that WoW offers now due to this striving for gear/raider.io score and just generally blasting the game so they can achieve their goals as quickly as possible. I really love Legion, but it did change WoW forever. It's a huge gripe of mine that Blizzard create systems just to abandon them after an expansion ends. I talk about it in more detail in my 'Island of Irrelevancy' video.
almost every issue that bfa had can be boiled down to either "blizzard thought they were smarter than the playerbase" or "blizzard ignored feedback"
so many things were problematic from the start and players literally bombarded them with feedback and all they did was ignore it
Very sad but true. I think we can apply that to Shadowlands too with the Covenants and 'pulling the ripcord'. Time and time again Blizzard have said 'We hear you', but nothing was done. I think they got lost in the success of Legion. They saw how well received everything was, but doubling down on it was just exhausting.
@@edd_TV imo shadowlands had a completely different problem, that one just starved to death
from what i know, the drought between the first and second patch was the biggest ever in any expansion (8 months iirc)
yes they also refused to listen regarding a lot of things in shadowlands, but the biggest problem was that they did NOTHING, bad/mediocre content is always better than no content
@@Marunylos The first patch was outrageously long, yeah. And it was so rough because players spent so long in The Maw just for 9.1 to be entirely based in The Maw. It was very rough.
Despite how bad some of the expansion might have felt. I can not deny how incredible the art design and direction were. The zones and raids were actually so good in BFA. Shout out, Drustvar, incredible zone. And Ny'alotha was such an amazing raid to just look at. It looked so alien and like nothing we've seen before
I think so too. I feel both the soundtrack and cinematics were on another level to anything we had seen before.
@@edd_TV The Saurfang cinematics they made for BFA are some of my favorites that Blizzard has created. They captured everything so perfectly. And Boralus has remained my favorite capital city of any expansion because of the soundtrack for that city alone.
@@TheeGoober Agree on both counts! Boralus really felt alive and the theme was everything BFA needed it to be. Some of the music that features in BFA is long forgotten about, but I had a fun time selecting tracks to use from the expansion for this video - there is a lot of slept on pieces.
Art team is always the hard carry with WoW
@@ragingfilthycasual Very true.
1:49 Yeah to Daelin the Horde had just murdered their way out of camps the alliance had been overly kind to build instead of killing them all in the first place. The Horde and ran through stormwind and into the northern kingdoms in a genocidal wave, and been spared an equal reprisal when they lost. Then they chose to kill their way out and leave to rebuild. (Keep in mind, an Orc is fully grown at like 15, and bigger than most adult humans at 12, he had reason to fear the Horde bouncing back FAST if given a whole continent to multiply on.)
There's an interesting alternate Post-TFT custom campaign where he meets Jaina FIRST and she manages to get him into a less mass-murdery mood. Only for the Scourge to come back to Kalimdor chasing the Illidari.
I've never seen that with TFT! I'm gonna have to check that out! Thank you for sharing!
Just a bit about the mak’gora, it’s not an enshrined rule that magic is not allowed, merely the rules are dictated by those who are going to fight.
Agreed! The very first Mak'Gora we see is Thrall disciplining Garrosh in the Wrath pre-patch, it's not to the death, Thrall and Garrosh are both in full armor (Garrosh wielding two weapons, and Thrall wielding both magic and the Doomhammer). The one-weapon(Or I guess magic and no weapon) fight-in-loincloths thing was just the rule for Garrosh's era.
When I recall BFA I have nothing but disdain. I resented so much of the expansion and how it felt like work, and my refusal to step away likely led to my burnout which only got worse with shadowlands. That said, now that you mention it, I went hard in BFA, and despite all the negative my most treasured achievements all came from BFA. My “Horde Slayer” title from getting HKs with an active bounty on my head, my completion of the solo 5 mask runs, mechagon hm, and the one where I killed 10 allies as a servant of N’zoth in world PvP. I forgot these were all the same expansion wtf. This expansion just had too much.
I tried to go hard too with BFA, until it got to a point where it just wasn't sustainable. I think maybe Legion might have had something to do with it too; I went REALLY hard at Legion. Maybe back-to-back was just too much, but the amount of chores and jobs in BFA was exhaustion. I think you're right. There is a lot of negativity (which is all valid) that blinds us from any prestige we may have achieved in the game, or any shining lights/fun we may have had. It can be difficult to remove emotion sometimes. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feelings!
Finally a retrospective essay on WoW expansion. Love it!
Please keep doing those on all of them!
So glad to hear you enjoyed it! I have a Legion video too if you are interested in checking that out. I do have plans for a Shadowlands one in the near future and then I'll probably backtrack with Warlords! Thank you for your support!
I will say, as someone who started playing WoW for the first time ever in season 2 of BfA, I loved it. I know it's not for everyone, and it didn't live up to legion for a lot of people, but the M+ dungeons were awesome and 5 of the six zones (sorry vol dun) were really interesting. Mechagon and naz stayed around for just the right amount of time too. It wasn't a perfect expansion, but I had hundreds of hours of fun in it!
It's good to hear you had a great time with it. I think it's always surprising because BFA is so consumed by hate and resentment, it blinds people to any good elements this expansion had, and they DID exist, so it's great that you had a good time with it. I know I did with Season 4. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feelings.
I’m with you on this. Although, I began during season 3, and basically did the story backwards (N’zoth, Nazjatar, the war campaign/horde vs alliance).
Heck, the LAST thing I did in BFA, getting pathfinder aside, was the whole thing with Sylvanus abandoning the Horde. Even now, I kinda forget that N’Zoth came after that because he sure didn’t in my game!
But yeah. BFA was the first time I got into max level content (hasn’t played since Cata, and never hit max level back in the day), and given it was the middle of the pandemic, I had hours to spend grinding endgame. It was definitely a great time. Does the fact that I didn’t play prior expacs at max level help, as I have nothing to compare it to? Maybe. But I still acknowledge parts of BFA that I didn’t enjoy, even with no comparison.
@@silverwolflucky It's insane that the narrative is such an afterthought for Blizzard most of the time that you can just complete the story and patches in any way you see fit. They really should heed FFXIV's approach on this. It must have been very confusing for you. I talk about story woes and narrative struggles in my 'Island of Irrelevancy' video, which I'm sure you will relate to.
I think you definitely had a better time than most due to not having anything else to compare it to, but that doesn't make your experiences or opinion any less valid. Fun is fun, and if you had fun then the game has served its purpose. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feelings!
Island Expeditions had the potential to be small group or solo content that was engaging. The only problem that I feel existed was that in the end the expedition became a resource race against the opposing faction. While it was neat to have an enemy player group on the island with you, the rush to get azerite power completely diminished the exploration and fun aspect of the island expeditions. There were a lot of really neat things to see, like magical portals that spawned after you gathered certain items to take you to an elemental plane or a tomb with powerful monsters imprisoned.
That is very true. I wasn't sure what to think of the feature when it was announced and I didn't know how to feel about it, but I was definitely filled with feelings of adventure and exploration. I didn't know about those magical portals! I think I was probably in the mindset of 'Let's just get this done so I can get my reward'. I think this mindset is a great failing for a lot of players. I talk about it in another one of my videos 'Why Some Players Aren't Having Fun Anymore'. I think if I just appreciated Island Expeditions for what they were and not as a means to an end, I would have probably enjoyed them more. I would like to see them return in some fashion in the future. Depending on how Delves goes we will likely see more evergreen systems too, so I definitely think there's a chance for something like Expeditions and Torghast again! Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
I have fond memories from the expansion. It was my first time back since Cata and I played it with two friends from work, one I still work with and play together. But I'm sure my fond memories are from that, and I think I started halfway through the expansion.
I think that's a good point nevertheless; I often think expansions can be defined by the people we play with, and also our lifestyle. Everybody's experience is different. I'm glad you enjoyed it!
@@edd_TV I absolutely agree. I enjoyed BFA and Legion immensely but they both definitely had their faults
One little correction when mentioning where Wrathion was: He wasn't in the Dragon Isles, rather he was trying to find it. Because when the Dragon Aspects left there, their memories were wiped of it's location.
Thanks for sharing! I'm no lore expert and was just reading from the Reddit post. I appreciate you correcting this, thanks!
I unironically liked BfA. At least until Crucible. That’s as far as I played retail WoW.
I thought azerite traits were excellent just poorly implemented, but had really strong potential for making creative builds. The story was interesting and felt like a continuation of MoP; world threats mixed with faction war, multiple character spotlights with their own arcs all coming to a head with each other in a capstone raid.
Did it fall apart? Yeah. They killed PvP servers and War Mode was a band aid that didn’t last. They chickened out of the faction war too quickly, and Jaina finally growing a spine was undone almost immediately. Warfronts should have been a PvP event like WG. Islands were cute but ultimately useless. The background stories for the mission table gave a good glimpse of how the war is going around the world, but there was no reason we just got to read about it instead of playing it, would have been a perfect use of the MoP scenario tech… so many ideas that just never materialized beyond half-baked efforts... But at least up to the point I played, I enjoyed it well.
Yeah, I know I’m in the minority. But I’m not alone! There are dozens of us! _Dozens!_
You are right, there are definitely a lot of BFA enjoyers out there! I think they just feel too afraid to say it. I think you have been very fair with your thoughts on BFA. I think for me I just wanted more with things like Nazjatar, Ny'alotha and N'Zoth. They felt so important and anticipated that to be done with them so fast felt really flat to me. I'm glad to hear you had fun with it though! Thanks for watching!
@ Haha oh man! When my friends told me the next raid was Nzoth I was like lol wait wasn’t Azshara just revealed on the last patch? Is that over already? Do you actually kill Nzoth? I couldn’t understand how they burned through an expansion’s worth of lore in two patches! Pretty wild stuff.
@@HCSR2 It was kind of up in the air for a while. I think players truly didn't want to believe he was bested so easily after being anticipated for so long, but Blizzard did confirm that he is dead. Such a waste. I agree, it's mental how they got through such storied characters with the click of their fingers. Azshara IS coming back though, so there's a shot at the redemption there at least. N'Zoth is definitely history though :(
i quit during battle for azeroth, the only other time i did this was cataclysm. but i returned for mop. BfA was so bad i left until the end of DF which i was pleasantly surprised at how much the game had improved. glad to be back, and great vid
I think I quit BFA more than any other expansion. I would always come back just to get burned out again. I'm glad to hear you're back and enjoying yourself again! Thank you for your kind words, and thank you for watching!
The algorithm randomly suggested you and I'm quite glad because this was a great video. BFA was one of the last expansions I played seriously and ended up quitting for many years after that. Seeing the story again and catching the things I'd missed when playing through it was nice. Edit: First thing I did after finishing this video was going to your channel to see if you had more videos showing the entire story of the expansions like this. I would certainly watch more!
Very kind of you to say so, thank you very much!
Quick summary of PvP in BFA: There were no PvP vendors and the only way to get PvP gear by Blizzard's designed systems were to complete weekly quests, which awarded base level (M0 equivalent) that could only be upgraded via tokens that were obtained at a rate of 1 upgrade per month. The only other way to get better item leveled items was through the weekly vault which provided the same randomly stated versatility items that could not be upgraded. This system was so bad that players had to PvE for almost ALL of their PvP gear, which included raid trinkets because there was no PvP trinket set bonus at the time or nerfing of PvE trinkets in PvP. These were odd decisions considering that BFA was when blizzard undid the changes made in Legion regarding PvP stat templates which made gear effectively not matter outside of item level. So for the entirety of the expansion Players were forced to fully gear PvE to be able to start gearing PvP, in addition to needing to obtain azerite powers and azerite armor with not much help in the way of alt friendly game design to make this any less of a burden. Not to mention that the scaling of gear in PvP sometimes caused upgrades to make your character weaker or do less damage (which was theorized as some messy residual code from Legion's reworking of PvP). The final insults to injury was that there was no new PvP content in an allegedly PvP themed expansion (which in reality hijacked and sacrificed the theme/motif to hype people up for a PvE-Old Gods story) and in any circumstance where PvErs were asked to pay a "PvP tax" the decision was nerfed by over 50% meanwhile the "PvE tax" to PvP increased season after season. A good talking point regarding this is warmode, which seems like an overall PvP feature, but in reality served as a unique way for PvErs to obtain PvP essences without really PvPing. Some people world PvPed for the fun of it, but because PvP gear didn't really exist and world PvP provided no gear progression there was no reason for PvPers to really engage with the system. It turned into feeling like doing world content with Honor talents that made some specs MUCH stronger, while most players opted to not PvP while in warmode. It just made the entire community feel like an actual after thought, and caused enough of a wave in response to cause several major changes felt today: 1) PvP vendors returned, 2) Honor and Conquest gear returned to scale up to Heroic and Mythic item level equivalencies in PvP combat, 3) world PvP received set bonuses and upgrade systems that had bleed-over into instanced PvP (which is a current part of early season PvP gearing), and 4) PvP and PvE gear have become almost completely isolated from each other with most PvE items being nerfed by 50%+ and PvP trinkets having a pretty massive PvP only set bonus.
Wow, that sounds horrendous! I do feel this often seems to be the case with PvP. It so often feels like an afterthought. I do feel sometimes Blizzard have had really solid methods in the past, be it valor points, the badge system from TBC and wrath, or like you say the PvP vendors returning. 'If it isn't broke, don't fix it' comes to mind so often, but they insist on trying to reinvent the wheel for whatever reason. Thank you so much for sharing this!
I find there's a recurring issue that isn't just isolated to BFA, but even the "good" expansions.
In Legion: Big Bad is here, huge invasion, world is literally ending, and what do we do? Go spend countless hours finishing story zones that had next to nothing to do with the invasion half the time.
In BFA: Horde vs Alliance War. You're immediately shipped off to a remote island to do storylines that have very little to do with said war, just so that you can win over the locals.
Like, time and time again, you're sold on a premise and then we go and do something that feels entirely unrelated. It makes the start feel so slow to me, every time.
That's very true. It's getting very jarring that this is the way stories have been told and hopefully The Worldsoul Saga can attempt to break that mould. I think the thing that felt very odd to me with BFA is that Azerite was used as a plot device to initially spark the faction war, and then was barely a footnote in the storyline. This is a great comment. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feelings!
From Wotlk to WoD the story was very much interconnected with the threat. Legion lost the script a bit with Val'sharah and Highmountain, but the other zones made a lot of sense. BFA and onwards I agree.
Honestly I believe that BfA was as bad or even worse that we remember. Legion hyped me into oblivion that I bought it right away. When prepatch came out I lost my artifact and my spec felt way worse to play. Later came a boring story, kinda bland zones, very very badly designed warfronts and island expeditions and of course the grind. Wow there was so much grind it was unbelievable. The prize for braving all of it was boring armor sets. I felt betrayed.
Understandable. Your feelings are very valid and your opinions are shared by many players. It was disheartening and oppressive and unforgiving if you wanted to play alts. I think it's important to revisit these things though and attempt to remove emotion if possible and see that BFA did have some good elements to it; the dungeons, the raids, horrific visions for example. The bad absolutely outweighs the good though. You hit the nail on the head with the loss of the artifact weapons and the Legion legendaries too. Levelling in BFA was horrid.
I started playing in the middle of Shadowlands an my head is still spinning. Thanks for this. It helped me a lot to understand what is going on.
You're very welcome. I can't imagine how difficult it must be for you to piece things together. There is so much content on RUclips to help you get by and understand better, but I really wish it was all in the game for the player too! Thank you for watching!
Oh golly where to begin. Commenting before watching so my thoughts are for sure my own and not influenced, I’m going off of memory here
CLASS DESIGN: going from Legion to BfA was the worst gameplay downgrade in WoW history. Losing the artifacts and legendaries made the leveling experience awful (everyone remembers the level 116 cutoff where it all stopped working), and the scaling at the time didn’t help either so playing your character just felt flat out bad. Sure some legendary effects and artifact abilities/traits became talents but now you had to choose between different things instead of having it all in Legion. On top of all that, BfA was when literally almost every ability got put on the GCD so not only did we lose so much of the fun gameplay from Legion, what we were left with just felt even worse to play. I can’t remember if the AoE cap came with BfA or SL so I’ll mention it here since that also isn’t too fun. Every class and spec became significantly worse to play and the replacement stuff wasn’t nearly good enough to make up for it which leads us nicely into . . .
AZERITE ARMOR: everything about this just flat out sucked. You had to grind your neck level up to just unlock the abilities. The abilities themselves were pretty much all just so boring and uninteresting especially compared to what we got in Legion. So many content creators at the time during the alpha and beta went into greater detail about the specifics of why it was bad so I’ll refer to them since I’m struggling to gather my thoughts here. Just basically nothing about azerite armor was interesting or good and opened to the door to the grind . . .
CONTENT/SYSTEMS: back in legion you got AP from doing literally everything. Yeah there were degenerate farming methods (Maw of Souls over and over again) but world quests (which were way more fun in Legion than BfA), M+, raids, it all gave relatively comparable AP so you could do whatever content you wanted and were up to date. In BfA that all changed so if you wanted to get your azerite you were forced to do every single magni world quest every day (needed the rep too), and then there were island expeditions, which in my opinion are the most mind numbingly dull bad content they’ve ever introduced. Everyone hated islands, everyone knows how bad they were. I’m in the minority in that I never hated warfronts but they definitely could’ve and should’ve been much better. I see what they were trying to do and what warfronts were supposed to be but it just turned into an afk fest. I think the dungeons and raids were good though. Seasonal affixes were a good idea even though 2 were not fun (the ghuun worms and azshara people) but the other 2 were great (reaping and nzoth minion portals). Battle for/of Dazar Alor is a top 10 raid for me, there were so many fun creative bosses, and Waycrest Manor might be a top 5 dungeon, the atmosphere is incredible. But that’s just the launch, what about the patches . . .
PATCH CONTENT: essences were fun to unlock the first time but not having it be account wide from the start was baffling. Grinding it all again on multiple characters was awful. Mechagon was fine, not for me since I’m not a ravenous collector but those who are seemed to enjoy it from what I remember. Nazjatar is 1 of many examples of locations and stories that should’ve been an entire expansion launch content, not relegated to a single patch. The benthic lottery grind was just another terrible addition to the ever growing list of chores we had to do just to keep our power level at the bare minimum of what’s considered decent. Horrific visions were better than islands and warfronts for sure but still another thing you had to do over and over again to stay relevant. Corruption sucked, the pieces were acquired through rng, had rng levels it could be, and the effects were boring. Just because it made our characters insanely powerful doesn’t mean it was good. Having most of my damage be from a random proc on my gear that I have no control over is not good design. Infinite stars, twilight devastation, all insanely powerful, insanely boring, and frustratingly out of my hands for how much it did on the meters (but when it procced it was a high percentage of your overall dps so people liked it). Yes they eventually added a vendor but it didn’t really help fix the problems since it was on a rotation.
STORY: I actually enjoyed the story quite a lot. I wanted a faction war when speculation was going crazy about what the new expansion would be and that’s what I got. The burning of Teldrassil was awesome, it’s just a shame it wasn’t done as well in game but the 2 novellas they released about it make the whole pre patch events very good. The character work and writing for Jaina and Saurfang was outstanding. I enjoyed the stories leveling up and also the max level war campaign. Where it loses me though is 8.3 since I hate how N’zoth was just offed like that. Nyalotha and old gods is another setting that should’ve been its own thing not a single patch.
All in all I think BfA is the worst expansion ever released. Yes I think it’s worse than SL. Comparing the 2 in a vacuum I think BfA as a whole is slightly worse than SL, SL just feels worse since it came after BfA and we were already at wits end with the game.
I admire your passion, and I agree with so much you have said in this comment! It's really great to see people engage with the videos and put together their thoughts and feelings. I think Shadowlands is worse than BFA personally; in terms of the narrative, Blizzard's reputation and just overall life struggles during that period of time, but BFA probably isn't too far behind it. There are some shining lights in BFA, but the bad overshadows the good so dramatically, it's so easy to forget. Thank you for leaving such a detailed comment, it was a great read! And thank you for engaging with the video. I hope you enjoy.
BfA was a rough time. I still have difficulty to synthesize how overwhelming and lackluster it was, at the same time. The devs had hundreds of ideas that, on themselves, could be the foundations to their own expansions. But they not only putted everything into the mix, but also never really developed anything.
To start with the elephant in the room, the entire idea of making a faction pride themed expansion and reignite the war is absolutely flawed, from the get go. It was already a bad idea to go back with this conflict in Legion (Stormheim's questline with Gen and Sylvanas was a giant filler), but escalate this with the burning of Teldrassil was just insulting. The writers who took Metzen's place didn't learn from their horrible storytelling mistakes in the previous expansion, so they kept doubling down in BfA.
Any possibility, any form of potential, or originality, all those ideas could end up in the story they just refuse to develop or elaborate. Afrasiabi interrupted whatever the previous writer had in mind for Sylvanas back in Cata, by making her Warchief in Legion (one of the dumbest ideas ever), just for do an 180 on her and fundamentally committing character assassination. The entire ceasefire back in MoP's ending, and the coalition they did in WoD and Legion, got ruined right in the pre-patch and they NEVER contextualize the new conflict in-game, making every single peace time between factions worthless.
This was a HORRIBLE time in WoW (from Legion to DF) for Lore enthusiasts, because all the information was fragmented. To have any form of basic understanding of what was going on you have to, basically, do homework and read several books, comics, see short videos like Harbingers and Warbringers, and so on. The narrative was all over the place, and when you add the fact that the writing was only getting worse, off course people would be pissed. No one cared about the Zandalari's internal politics, or the Kul Tiras plotline with the Drust, for example. Everything was so... disjointed, even on itself.
I remember clearly, back in Stormsong Valley, most of the questline was just filler and I was constantly wasting my time fighting the Horde and the quilboar, literally stealing the spotlight of the main plot instead of being just side quests, and when finally came the moment to START to uncover what the hell the Tidesages were doing, IT ENDED. All that Tidemother cliffhanger, all that bs with the naga (clearly setting up Azshara), all led to NOTHING. And when this storyline came back with the Crucible of Storms raid, they didn't connected the dots, it's all past now. This happens with EVERY SINGLE story in this expansion. Nothing is even thematically cohesive, even when it was clearly leading up to something. I just quit the game for the first time, in 8.2. DECADES setting up Azshara just for her being featured in only one patch, repeating 7.3 all over again. That was the moment when I stopped caring. This, combined with Steve Danuser LYING to all the player base at BlizzCon, saying that the Chronicles is told by the Titans' perspective, pissed me off.
This main problem completely overshadowed the rest of BfA. I mean, the soundtrack, the art direction, the level design (for the most part, Nazjatar was horribly lazy), were a huge improvement over Legion's excessiveness of uniforming its own "main" antagonist (the old colorful BL from WC3 and TBC, and even WoD, became just a giant blob of GREEN and BLACK 😑). There were some good characters here and there, like Bwonsamdi. The zones were bigger, I genuinely felt like Zandalar was huge, in comparison to the "Broken Isles" where it was all overcondensed, tiny (looking at you, Azsuna). Even the raids weren't that bad, I actually really liked Uldir, its art style etc.
But all the central ideas, the intentions, everything in between, all ruined everything this expansion could offer, from the beginning. If it wasn't clear for people back in Legion, it became crystal clear in BfA, and it only got more... explicit, to say the least, in SL and DF. I still think Legion was the absolute worst, in terms of breaking the Lore, but what I think that made people sorta wake up in BfA was that... they weren't even pretending. The higher ups stopped caring, they saw that recycling everything and not doing their homework in Legion didn't get any "riot" level of criticism, like in Cata days, so they were just doing what they wanted.
You are so right. Everything that happened in BFA could have been told and executed over several expansions. It was crazy to me that they just threw it all together and hoped for the best. It was such a waste, and like you say what was the actual payoff? It was just tainted so much mystique. Azshara and N'Zoth were both so anticipated and neither were written well. Nazjatar needed to be a continent. I can't believe it was simply one zone. Don't get me wrong, I liked it, but both Nazjatar and Ny'alotha had potential and acclaim to be the continents for their own expansions. It is MYSTIFYING to me that this didn't happen.
I agree with so much of what you have said. I personally enjoyed Legion but it's important to recognise that we had to go through WoD to get there, and when you throw in Warlords and timey-wimey stuff, that becomes really difficult for me to accept. I did really love Suramar personally, but I know some people are quite iffy with Argus.
Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and feelings. This was a really enlightening read and I really appreciate your passion! You are somebody who clearly cares about the lore, and I love it too but I'm not an expert by any means! But I do feel your pain. I'm still feeling it now. I haven't even bought The War Within yet because I just feel quite defeated with it all. Shadowlands really hurt me. I think you're right in the cracks showing in Legion, ABSOLUTELY BFA and then by the time Shadowlands rolled around it just felt absolutely soulless.
@@edd_TV Thanks for noticing. Sorry to show up now, after... What? Months, since my comment in your video about Legion KEK (this was a busy year 😅).
Not only did it feel soulless, this era of WoW we got fully into the devs' terms the entire time. Like, the pathfinder stuff being shoved since WoD bc the new team probably never liked flying, or the azerite armor feature and the saturation of RNG in every single facet of the game, even the zones.
Nazjatar and Ny'alotha, just like Argus before them, kinda felt offensive. I mean, I felt like the devs didn't want to put those zones in the game, at any capacity, so they just brought one single small area with some unique reskins and sold it as "new content". It's like they knew players were expecting those zones to be in the game, so they ruined it on purpose.
And this applied to the characters too. Sure, the biggest offender of it was Sylvanas bc her writer, Alex Afrasiabi, straight up despised her and defenestrated her. But the rest of the crew wasn't that much different. Take Anduin, for example, his entire time in Legion was to put his grieve aside for a minute to lead the Alliance, and he does NOTHING afterwards, and when he reappears in BfA he is just the same insecure guy we knew back in Pandaria, and he STAYED at this state all the way until 9.2. Or Saurfang, all that setup of giving him more depth, taking his storyline in WotLK as a foundation, giving him a sidekick, showcasing his journey as different as possible to Vol'jin back in MoP... only for him to die for NOTHING, just like Vol'jin. Even Thrall's comeback is pointless, because his "retirement" in Legion was already pointless and they treated this like an afterthought.
In hindsight, all those choices were... just idiotic. Why rushing all those different plotlines, ideas and so on? Why shoving everything into one single expansion, if it could have been more lucrative for them to make an expansion for every single one of those ideas? Even with the writing sucking, it would be less damaging to the game and they could easily get away with this by explaining everything in a condensed way in books (just like Chronicles, and they managed to shit on them too).
And now, the game is in an unfortunate position, where it NEEDS to correct those mistakes (and if necessary, REMOVE the "grease") in order to make it somewhat cohesive. It didn't need to come to this at all, but... it happened, and no matter how they'll handle this in the future (or not), the damage was already done and the game paid for it. SL didn't flop just because, people were already warning those mistakes back in 2016, even 2014, and Blizzard chose to not listen.
Sylvanas story is a strange thing, you wouldn't think on the surface that it would be a detriment to a characters story if the people making the decisions are fans of the character, and yet the result is the absolute abomination that we got.
I remember there was a lot of uncertainty around the character and her direction post Legion. I think Alex Afrasiabi was primarily responsible for the burning of Teldrassil arc and ushering Sylvanas onto that dark path. Then the reins were handed to Steve Danuser, who whilst gets a lot of flak, was thrown into the deep end and ultimately out of his depth; both with the story of Sylvanas and the narrative generally. I agree though, and I also think it's a reason why the game suffers sometimes. People often ask the question 'Do the devs actually play the game?' because of some of the bizarre decisions they make.
BFA forced me as a Horde player to be complicit in genocide without me being able to have any say in it. Ergo, it will always be the worst expansion.
Yeah, that was an utterly bizarre decision. It's something I never really took the time to think about either as an Alliance player. I was always of the mindset of 'the Horde are the enemy' so them being the bad guy just felt normal to me, but it must have felt so awful for Horde players to have no say in the matter.
@@edd_TV I've played a Blood Elf paladin as my main since Wrath when I started just at the end of high school, minus the huge break until recently. I always imagined he leaned into the lore they had for TBC Sin'dorei: ruthless in protecting his people, but not a monster. But as far as a roleplaying perspective, especially on the heels of Legion, he would have never ever agreed to something like that. They paralleled Sylvanas and Arthas too hard, it was too close to the Scourge destruction of Quel'thalas. Absolutely zero chance that he'd have gone for it.
It became impossible to reconcile the lore they gave us with who he was as a character. And as a player on an RP realm, that made it very hard to feel connected anymore. The systems on systems on systems of BFA carrying into Shadowlands was my true breaking point, but the lore damage they did in BFA and Shadowlands was what kept me away for so long.
I feel like I'm only really "back" because Dawntrail has been iffy and I ran out of content until 7.2 comes out.
As someone who didn’t play during BFA or Shadowland, I’ve really loved your videos on third expacs. Playing BFA after the fact (leveling up and doing old content in Dragonflight/TWW), I loved a lot of this expac since Zuldazaar is one of my favorite zones in the entire game (that music just hits) and Zandalari trolls are such an awesome allied race.
Thank you my friend. I really appreciate that! I think Mists of Pandaria is the next stop and then I'll follow that into Warlords! I agree with you that Zuldazar is a banger! I think they really did well with these zones in BFA. They really felt like Warcraft! I also think BFA has sone of Warcraft's best music. It's just gorgeous. I'm also in agreement with you on the Zandalari, they are badass!
This is an odd thing for me, because personally, I actually enjoyed BfA more then legion. The games expansions fall into 3 sets for me, the really good (Vanilla, Wotlk, Mop, DF), the okay (BC, Cata, Legion, BfA), and the bad (WoD, SL). BfA sits at the top of the okay set for me.
Now I know taste has a good chunk of sway in anything, but it really seems that people completely handwave the rocky bits of Legion all the while dunking BfA for some justified and some odly petty or insignificant reasons.
Do people really not remember the shit show that was 7.0?
- Legendaries making or breaking some specs
- RNG hell with legendaries
- the "soft" cap making it nearly impossible to get more legendaries
- exploiters of the Legendary system being ignored
- the lore brakes that Legion flants around.
- The Legion being stuck on the island "But trust us, it's a battleground out there too".
- Nightfallen rep timegated to hell.
- Emerald Nightmare being a complete joke in terms of difficulty.
- Not being able to respec your artifacts, leading to some people being stuck with a really underpowered artifact until their knowledge allowed them to catch up.
- Artifact knowledge being a pain to gain AND being per character
- the return of the dreaded WoD mission table
- only 5 zones
- AP clogging your bags to hell all the time.
- Some classes just flat out better by a pritty large margin
- some pritty big winners and looser with artifact abilities
-Maw of the infinite AP runs
All that, and I'm sure I missed a few, just for patch 7.0... get into patches 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3, and it keeps going. Yet now we never hear anyone bring any of that up, but ohh no if you ran heroic Uldir the first week it opened, you may have not yet unlocked your last ring of marginal buffs... completely unacceptable!! expansion ruined!!...
Everything you have said here is absolutely valid, and I do think Blizzard are notorious when it comes to elements of a storyline that were considered to be important to not even be a footnote; look how irrelevant Azerite became in the storyline for instance. I love Legion, and I can solemnly say it was one of my favourite times in WoW, ever. But I do acknowledge everything you have said here and I agree with you.
Preach on! I loved Legion but it was not sunshine and rainbows as people like to remember.
@@atomosk9937 I agree. I have done a video on Legion too! Legion is my favourite, but it definitely had issues.
@@edd_TV I’m watching your Legion video now 😎
@@atomosk9937 I hope you enjoy!
Little pretext before I say this. I played from Classic to BFA 8.2.5. When BFA launched I started as Alliance. I was doing the witch hunt quest at lvl 83, first day of the expansion and as I chased a greasy pig around I stopped. Literally stopped. I stopped playing WoW, on an expansion launch. I wasn't having fun, the entire experience up to that point had felt AWFUL. Like what the hell is this. First we're ultra serious mode, then we're doing this prison break comedy, then we're being toured, then we're back to serious. Don't even get me STARTED on the facial animations for Humans. Mother of God. How can I take flap jack over here seriously? I took 2 weeks off... Came back till 8.2 and gave up.
That's a really great point, and it's SO talked about now with Dragonflight I feel. I talk about it in my 'The Mourned Identity' video about the radical change and tone in direction with Warcraft's story in the modern day, and just who is Blizzard's target audience these days. You are absolutely right though, it felt akin to Disney Star Wars at times with just misplaced humour and what felt like mood swings in the tone.
I think if you had been playing longer, you’d realize this is a pattern in wow. I didn’t even realize classic was out during BFA, I thought it was shadowlands.
Due to playing on a RP Realm, the Xpac reveal had me hyped beyond belief. Once I saw the eagle shot of the battle for lordaeron I thought "No way... they're actually doing it." I was fully expecting an xpac, that would upset the status quo of the setting, deliver interesting stories for the main characters and side characters. And we got that somewhat. Lot's of minor characters got time to show themselves in Warfronts, Faction War World Quests, the Questing and Raids.
And then it all just fell flat on it's big nose. They wanted to go full Cataclysm levels of world changing events and got wet feet one third into it, leaving a underdeveloped mess.
They blew it. But I still enjoy the xpac. It made the world feel bigger, with Kul Tiras and Zandalar.
I think I really take for granted how the narrative changes the game for roleplayers. A lot of people were saying in my Shaodwlands video that Shadowlands really spoiled a lot of elements of RP for them, which is so sad. I think it's amazing that you can tell your own stories with your own character, but such a shame that they felt so much damage too. I regret not getting into it when I was younger.
I can remember feeling very hyped too, and off the back of Legion I had serious high hopes for BFA because Legion was so great for me. Admittedly it felt a bit iffy going straight back to the Faction War after going to Argus, but it felt familiar and it felt like Warcraft so I was happy to let it slide at the time. And similarly to you, seeing Lordaeron was a real 'Oh my God' moment. I agree with you in regards to certain characters getting some moments, and of course an introduction to some other characters too like Flynn and Taelia! (who they could still definitely do more with!) I thought Saurfang was just fantastic too! Regardless of how people may feel about BFA, he was brilliant.
Like every other WoW expansion there was huge potential here but for some reason they wanted to tell 3-4 different stories all at once. They would repeatedly remind us that BFA was about 'the faction war', even though everybody knew N'Zoth was lurking around the corner and the hints were constantly there. I'll always reiterate personally that I would have loved both Nazjatar and Ny'alotha to have been their own continents in their own expansions! I would have even settled for Azshara being the final boss of BFA which could then lead into a Black Empire expansion afterwards. It just felt like we had two really big anticipated antagonists that were just shoehorned in. They absolutely blew it, I agree. I really enjoyed both Kul Tiras and Zandalar too. They felt like Warcraft zones. Also the soundtrack of BFA is absolutely gorgeous!
Sorry for such a long response! Thank you for watching and sharing your thoughts!
@@edd_TV Don't worry about the long response. It was a special time and like you, I have allot of mixed experiences with BfA.
But for RP? It was just amazing. Participating in RP PvP campaigns. Roleplaying out your character in this World Conflict and interacting with the other faction under that premise was a very fond experience. The Backdrop for all that RP created the opportunity for some of the most immersive and memorable character interactions I had in over a decade worth of Roleplay experience.
It just hit's different to Roleplay an Orc and talking about Blood and Thunder and then having to actually live that in RP.
@@hansgerman3437 I totally get what you mean. As an Alliance player I can imagine what a big deal something like Arathi and Stromgarde would be. And honestly that's what it's all about, right? The game may have had glaring issues but you still managed to make the best of it and you have positive experiences to look back on. Hold onto them!
Thank you for sharing your memories! I hope you're still having fun with WoW today!
[sperg out warning] i remember the day BfA was announced and i was extraordinarily disappointed. i started playing in WoD and had just come off the heels of Legion, so can you imagine how schizophrenic a faction war seemed at that point in the story? Mists of pandaria was the last time there was any terrestrial-stemming conflict on Azeroth, and it concluded with the Alliance pretty much winning the faction war, and Varian threatening total extermination of the horde if it ever attempted something as blatantly malicious as Garrosh's horde again. The horde and alliance proceeded to work together for two expansions straight, with at worst, some poorly justified skirmishes here and there (Stormheim's forced conflict and random faction war related world quests). it was done. there was zero plausible reason for it to happen again.
basically BfA's entire premise is overtly contrived garbage that was written because steve danuser saw some a twitter comment complaining about how world of warcraft doesnt feature enough war based on conflicts from 20+ years ago in-universe. yes, i am being that guy. the faction war is a terrible plot device that has been dead since warcraft 3, and has been painfully revived for trivial reasons over and over again throughout WoW's history. alliance have always been in the right, they were defending their world from literal alien invaders than happened to bring a storm of calamity alongside them. the Orcish invasion caused ner'zhul to end up as the lich king on azeroth which created the scourge and in turn made the forsaken as well as blood elves. literally the only horde race with any innocence are the tauren, who have done literally nothing wrong. all of the other horde races could have easily just remained neutral or more realistically have joined the alliance. its such a terrible conflict to center the universe around, and putting the fundamentally flawed conflict back in the spotlight should have been avoided at all costs.
I do agree with you. I think putting the 'main scope' of the story on the faction war was quite left-field, and it seemed like they were trying to stoke the nostalgia fires in a weird way because that's what Warcraft was all about in the past, despite the fact the two factions often team up in the end to take down the bigger threat. I talk about the factions a bit in my 'Mourned Identity' video, but you are right. It's contrived, it limits gameplay and it limits social experiences. There's no place for it anymore in the modern game. The most frustrating part of it all for me was, it didn't serve a purpose. They tried extremely hard to sell the faction war but I think most players knew that N'Zoth and the Old Gods were the serious threat. It was just really odd and I don't think they knew what they wanted to do. I admire your passion. Thank you for taking the time to type this up!
Thanks for this retrospective it brought back some great memories!
Regarding Corruptions, I think their power annoyed me because it felt like my gear was playing the game instead of my character. When you opened up details and over 50% if not 70% of your damage was coming from a RNG affix on your pants it was a pretty feelsbad moment
Thank you for watching!
You are absolutely right regarding corruption. It was definitely polarising and I know it upset a lot of people. I had a lot of fun with it personally but I know it was a horror story for a lot of people too!
The main difference between BFA and Legion was that with Legion there was polish and detail everywhere. BFA was really cheap by comparison.
There was so much more at stake with Legion too, considering how poor WoD was. Legion HAD to be successful.
This
Considering that Legion ate parts of wod and bfa's betas and resources it makes sense. There was no redeeming factor in BFA. Even the seldom fun systems at 8.3 made you miserable the rest of the time and completely made you forget what and alt is and what a transmog without purple poop on top of you is.
To be fair I'm not even entirely sure that when they started working on BFA they were sure they were gonna do the Jailer retcon. That probably came late.
I don't think so either, certainly not whilst Afrasiabi was writing anyway. I think it all likely began to take shape (for better or worse) when Danuser took over. Like it's not good backstory by any means, but it does provide some context. Like you say though, I think it could come across as a bit disingenuous because there is no way we knew this at the time and there was no guarantee this is where things would potentially lead.
It's really difficult to envisage what they wanted to do or where they wanted to go. And considering how fast they laid waste to characters like Azshara and N'Zoth, I'm not sure they really knew either.
As a mainly Horde player I just pray that Alliance would not fall victims to the blizzard’s favourite writing trope and that none of the Alliance leader would become “Garrosh 3.0”.
As much as I think of unjust writing “horde is mostly bad in a major plot, alliance is only sometimes bad but in minor and forgettable side quests” stuff, it is such a disgusting fate that I just hope the alliance players won’t have a taste of it ever
I think we almost got close with Jaina. I think towards the end of MoP and with Legion it definitely could have happened. I'm not sure when the whole Dreadlord theory started cooking up originally, but I think something could have been there if they wanted it, definitely. I still think it will happen in the future, I would say likely Turalyon. The thing is, I don't think many will care. I like Turalyon but he doesn't really have the weight or gravitas of characters like Garrosh and Sylvanas.
I will admit as an Alliance player and maybe even from my days of Warcraft III I was led to believe the Horde and more particularly Orcs were bad. I always remember the quote Uther says to Arthas: "Vengeance cannot be a part of what we must do. If we allow our passions to turn to bloodlust, then we will become as vile as the orcs." I was obviously quite young at the time then though! I do think the Horde have been royally shafted for years now. It's unfair.
Thank you for watching and sharing your thoughts! Love your username btw!
The content that we got was phenomenal, but the 2 main issues were the insane amount of dailies/weeklies that forced you to make WoW a second job and the azerite pieces that forced you to get rid of your abilities to focus on iLvL.
Like... Island expeditions? Yea, they sucked but imagine not being rushed to do them in 5minutes or less to be efficient and instead just taking your time hunting rares for mounts and other cosmetics.
BfA has phenomenal content, but you couldn't slow down and take the time to appreciate it.
-4 great to amazing and unique raids
-memorable dungeons
-just a single "bad" zone (deserts are usually empty and boring)
-the most power costomisation we've ever had (azerite pieces, azerite necklace, mechagon trinket, corruption equiments, etc)
-"turtle made it to the water"
-gang banging Jaina
-great zone stories
Great comment. There is some strong elements in BFA that are marred by poor systems, an inconsistent tone with storytelling and just exhaustion from activities. You raise a very good point with the whole 'Gotta-go-fast' philosophy, and I think that has been showing a lot in recent years with WoW; it's not a coincidence they have decided to remove the timer in Mythic+ for season 4. It's not a great foundation for gameplay.
I'm glad you were able to appreciate things in BFA, and you have hit the nail on the head brilliantly with this comment. Thank you for taking the time to watch the video and for sharing your thoughts and feelings.
i was forced into playing bfa for leveling when i rejoined during shadowlands.
put together like this the story actually makes sense, i had no idea at that time what the hell was going on and who all those named characters around me were - yet alone why everyone called me a champion
That's true, BFA was the starting point for new and returning players! I believe it's Dragonflight now. I highly recommend watching my 'Island of Irrelevancy' video if you're a new or returning player! I talk about this A LOT. I think it's insane that they think new players can have titles such as Highlord, Azeroth's Champion and Maw-Walker and just accept them at face value. They have no idea what's going on!
2:53 She was punished for the atrocities she committed after getting her freedom. The torture of captured farmers to test New Plague/Blight on. Of course she probably wasn't TOLD that. And just took a "Woe is me, punished for things outside my control" stance on it that the Jailer was more than willing to nurture. (I hate this retcon as a whole, but I kinda like the psychological angle of it)
Loved it! Nyalotha our guild killed 11/12 myself stopped after 10/12 but came back one night to stand in for one of the guildies who were sick and had to go midway through the raid and then we got the kill on carapace. That was truly a great feeling! But i must say my by far favourite raidboss in wow is in there, Ra-den. Its such a massive fight with alot of responsibility aswell as awesome loot along with the difficulty bump compared to the earlier bosses. (We went Ra-den as the 6th boss after hivemind and the dog) and o boy after 150-200 pulls we finally did it! It was truly an amazing feeling and i felt like the guild really levelled up with the confidence and improved as players. Nyalotha was amazing in my eyes with the difficulty being just a step easier every week cause of the cloak.
Adding to this, the 8.3 was amazing and all the corruptions was quite fun. I remember we did as a 4 man squad a 4 masked run the first week. It was truly on the hair that we made it but we had to skip on the reducing max sanity since the other stuff was more of a skill issue if we didn't make it. It was truly a good system with the visions although maybe after a while it became alot like a chore. None the less I really enjoyed them! I played both dk and dh in this patch and they didn't have any issue what so ever to deal with alot of mobs or survivability.
@@Ranzoepwns It's always super refreshing to me when I hear people say positive things about BFA. I think a lot of people have such resentment for the expansion that they struggle to find positives within it, and there definitely was some! I'll be the first to admit that BFA had faults, from the narrative to the systems. I still found joy in it though at times, and it's great to hear you did too! Thank you for sharing your experiences and thanks for watching!
I remember doing 40 hours of epic BGs because it was impossible to win one, ah fun times...
I went through the same hell with my friend trying to obtain the Blood of the Enemy essence for him. It was genuinely exhausting.
The scenario makes so much more sense when summarized and narrated in 20 minutes. Even the retcon thing. But in my opinion it didn't quite work in the context of the actual game...
I think that seems to happen quite a bit, especially when important things are getting told through books. It goes over so many players heads that important things or events have taken place inside a book, so when it's put into the forefront of the MMO some players are just like 'Well this is random'. I think everything needs to be told inside the game, I've always been of that opinion. I think they were in a 'Jesus, take the wheel' situation with BFA and Shadowlands because they were changing writers and stuff. I agree with you though, some of it felt really out of place.
For me, BFA had some of the best levelling and art design. Everything felt choppy/rushed, and i wish they expanded on certain themes throughout, like N'zoth and Azshara. Instead of doing the whole Naga and Old god patches, unless they were going in depth from the get go,wish they went in on exploration and had us explore new islands and cultures to secure alliances for the war. Mechagon was a good example of this.
I really disliked the levelling experience personally as I just felt my character getting weaker and weaker. In terms of art/zones/soundtrack though, absolutely phenomenal. I agree that it was super choppy/rushed and the tone changed so drastically; it was faction war, it was Naga, it was Black Empire. The pacing was all over the place and they really breezed through a lot of very important lore. I think you're absolutely right in regards to how they could have handled both Azshara and N'Zoth. It's such a shame, but hopefully there is a chance to rectify some of this moving forward. We are definitely going to see Azshara again, and I think the Black Empire now lives on through Xal'atath, so let's see how that goes! Thank you for sharing your thoughts and feelings!
Just started but I already know the vid is going to be a banger.
That's really kind of you to say. I hope you enjoy!
I'm leveling through the zones in an alt right now and they are god-tier. They're so good, I'm gonna lock my level at 70 so I don't have to leave chromie time and just gonna get loremaster on them before I continue.
I'm guessing it really was azerite armor and islands/warfronts and the peak of mobile "you have to log in every day" crap that made it bad, but the content is sublime from what I've seen.
Glad to hear you're having a blast! I remember being blown away by Drustvar. I think Boralus is one of the best cities EVER too. I wasn't too hot on Nazmir or Vol'dun personally, but I thought Zuldazar was amazing.
It's definitely where the focus and triggers go, absolutely. If you say 'BFA' people will instantly react with Azerite, the Heart of Azeroth, the grinding etc. It's like if you mention Warlords everybody will automatically say 'OMG THE GARRISON!'. The gripes with BFA were a lot more valid than the Garrison in WoD though. I do agree with you, some of BFA's stuff was really great and that's why I wanted to make this video. I think retrospection is important and if people can put their emotions aside, maybe they too can look back and think 'Do you know what? There actually WAS some good stuff in BFA'. Definitely a lot of bad...but some good!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Things I remember about BfA:
- Island expeditions were practically unlosable and rewarded you with Azerite, which was a pointless imh as I didn't see any kind of significant improvement on my char despite the grind.
- Leaving your artifact weapon and replacing it with a system I didn't like at all.
- Warfronts were lame, provided no challenge, no rewards, they were awful.
- A turtle made it to the water.
That's pretty much the nail on the head right there.
the best part is the ragnarok online bg music at the end :p brings back memories
Glad to hear you recognised it! I use it for all my outros! It always makes me happy when somebody acknowledges it! Thank you for watching!
Been watching your videos these last few days and as a veteran Wow player got to say I love them! You clearly put a lot of work into these and absolutely deserve more subs! And I think I just became your 3000th subscriber! Keep up the good work mate!
Aww thank you so much my friend. If you were number 3000 then that's a great milestone and certainly a name I'll do well to remember! Thank you so much for your kind words and support. I really appreciate it!
Yes Sylvanas character fell prey to bad writing.
I'm confident when she returns, everybody will be excited to see her. I hope!
I remember leveling with war mode on and killing hordes who were even 5 levels above me due to the mentioned power regression. That thing just wasn't handled very well at the start of the expac. Leveling up was equal to being weaker
It was the weirdest levelling ever felt. Gaining levels and losing power? it was just such a bizarre experience. I think the artifacts (and all the QoL they gave us) and legendaries were going to be difficult to replace or match, but yeah you're absolutely right. We were just penalised the higher level we were. It felt like a strong example that they don't really play their own game because it was a really crap experience, and I know levelling has changed quite dramatically these days. Long gone are the days where you level in Vanilla and it feels like an adventure and journey. Levelling is just a means to an end now, but when you were sapping players of any sort of power, that felt really bad.
Thank you for watching and sharing your thoughts!
War in nazjatar was peak internet issues and it was so funny to me. Never had any other experience more memorable than this. Loved warlock havoc rune and mortal coiling 40 players at once.
I can still remember the servers just utterly capitulating. It was crazy. It was a really fun event though! I'm glad you can look back fondly at it!
The story for BfA honestly isn't bad for a lot of it, but it's so horribly presented and, as you mentioned, tries to tell multiple stories at the same time all over the place, that while I was playing BfA from 2018 to 2020, I rarely had a full grasp on the story. Even after it finished, I tried to look back, both on my own and with synopses written up by others, and it still felt like drunk history. It wasn't until that reddit post you shared that the story actually felt cohesive. Unfortunately, it's hard to look at the story of two years of a game, that concluded almost four years ago, in retrospect and go easy on how the story was presented as a player at the time. On top of that, BfA was the only time I really felt lost in the plot because it more or less required playing both Alliance and Horde (or doing a deep dive outside of the game to get the perspective of the other faction) to understand the story. It didn't feel like you were getting a full story playing one faction, with the opposing faction getting a different story; it felt like you got a fraction of the story. On paper, it doesn't sound so bad when labeled "a return to Alliance vs Horde," but in practice, it felt terrible. Not to mention Alliance and Horde only have three zones each with real quests for that faction, with nothing of note to do while leveling(except for normal mode dungeons, maybe) on Kul'Tiras as Horde or Zandalar as Alliance.
I agree wholeheartedly that BfA has one of the worst leveling experiences of any WoW expansion - which I find pretty ironic that since Chromie Time was introduced for leveling, BfA is the default expansion for 10-50 or 10-60(whichever it is) for a brand new player. Shadowlands was also pretty bad, and both of these were expansions where you _lost_ power while leveling up to avoid power creep from your endgame gear from the previous expansion, but regardless, it feels terrible either way. It feels even worse when you hit the level cap and not only are you weaker relative to PvE enemies at the new level cap than you were at the previous endgame, but you're also weaker _compared to yourself at the beginning of the xpac._ I didn't experience this in BfA because I re-rolled going from Legion to BfA, but I did more DPS as a warrior during the SL pre-patch, after corruptions were disabled(I think around 2.8k ST) than when I hit level 60(was doing around 2.2-2.4k ST IIRC). I did play with people who experienced a DPS decrease between level 110 and 120 in BfA, and that just feels awful.
Honestly, it's really hard for me to critique a lot of aspects of BfA from a less subjective standpoint, as I was pushing for CE every tier & achieved such, but I never felt as much pressure placed upon me, to log in and do chores every single day, as I have in BfA. Maybe I wouldn't be as low on M+ if I didn't feel the need to spam King's Rest every tier to get a high-ilvl Get'ikku(or two, since I was playing fury in 8.1 and 8.2), or if it didn't feel necessary to bring a rogue for shroud or invis pots to time a high-level key by skipping a bunch of trash that, if it were Legion, you'd just kill almost all the trash in a dungeon to get enough percentage to even complete the key. Maybe I wouldn't be as low on the borrowed power systems if I didn't feel the need to sink so much time on RNG items. Maybe I would like some raid fights I don't like or vice-versa if I felt like I was playing a game, not playing my WeakAuras and DBM. What I _can_ say, though, is that the positives didn't outweigh the negatives for me, after two years, to give it a thumbs up. It felt like the expansion that had the *least* respect for your time, by far, and the constant feeling of either needing to micromanage every aspect of time in the game, or the constant feeling of _wasting_ your time made almost every "feature" of the expansion feel crappy.
tl;dr: Video was good, agreed on some parts and disagreed on other parts, and, at least in my opinion, it _was_ as bad as I remember, because it felt like it had zero respect for your time.
I think that's the main problem, and it's not even your fault. Why should players be punished for striving to be the best they can possibly be, and wanting to participate and beat the hardest content? You discuss pushing for CE, and it's so awesome you achieved those goals..but at what cost? It reminds me of Gul'dan: 'What must be given in return?' '....Everything.'
The game should NEVER have been like that and the barrier to entry for Mythic was incredible because so much time was required of you, and if you weren't prepared to put in the hours or perhaps get a bit lucky with RNG/loot, you were out the door. You are bang on the money with your comment here, and I do agree with you. There are some good elements of BFA but they are totally overshadowed by the darkness of BFA in its systems, time commitment and sheer randomness.
Thank you for watching the video and putting together such a detailed response. It was a pleasure to read and I love to hear peoples thoughts and feelings.
I have mixed feeling for BFA, I was so hyped for the Faction War due to the Warcraft Commercials building up to the Expansion's release.
I really loved the Questlines for Zandalar and Kul Tiras, the Lore was so rich and had me wanting to learn more about both Locations, I liked both Island Expeditions and War Fronts and was left pretty sad they both ended up dropped.
I did not like the Burning of Teldrassil, mainly due to I knew logically their was no way the Horde could be forgiven for committing Genocide and it'd left me bitter that Blizzard has never taken the true serios ramifications of this action and just smoothed over it. I also did not like the Heart of Azeroth, it made my Character feel so weak no matter what I did I kept dying to mobs if I pulled too many.
This Expansion also made me realize how Blizzard wasted Lore, Nazjatar and Azshara could've been their own Expansion and instead of N'Zoth been endgame. They could've used G'huun while letting the Faction War continue with G'huun's influence spreading from Zandalar to Kul Tiras which could've led to both Factions uniting to fight him and have him being the one responsible to have corrupted Sylvanas. Poor Sylvanas who was completely ruined, I don't hate her I do feel real bad for her Character. Like starting the Fourth War to help empower Zovaal? How does that make sense when after the Third Invasion Azeroth had just been devastated by the Burning Legion, who's Fel Magic destroyed Souls or used for fuel for Legion Technology, after the Third Invasion you wouldn't think there wasn't enough forces for the Alliance and Horde to start a War. But ignoring that, I think it would've been better if Sylvanas used those souls to empower G'huun, making him stronger to make him a bigger threat. But you know who also got ruined to me? Anduin and Tyrande. He was so weak, like he actually told Tyrande she was being unreasonable after her race was genocided, I felt so bad for Tyrande it felyt like was being victim shamed.
After Nazjatar I had to take a break from Warcraft because playing BFA felt like such a chore.
I was SUPER hyped for BFA after how good Legion was. It definitely felt out of place returning to the faction war, and now we know why with everything that happened in Shadowlands and such, but I digress. I loved both Zandalar and Kul Tiras too! I thought Islands and Warfronts were nice ideas but just executed poorly and eventually left to rust. They deserved so much better.
That is so true. Not having both Ny'alotha and Nazjatar as their own expansions and continents was CRAZY to me. They just ham-fisted them both into the same storyline and called it a day. It was infuriating to me! I think I came back right as Nazjatar/Mechagon dropped, so I had a great time with them! But I can understand the people who had been slaving away for months were just exhausted at this point. BFA was overwhelming and Shadowlands was underwhelming!
Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
@@edd_TV Thank you for your Retrospectives, they really make me think about WoW again.
I really do hope they continue to develop the warfronts. IMO this has the most potential.
Someone said that the future of PVP should be objective based. And warfronts seem like the perfect playground.
I think with delves looking at introducing evergreen content, it's a really strong opportunity to reignite some of the forgotten systems. I agree with you, I think warfronts could be a great asset for PvP and provide something different! It was really unfortunate how it went down and it deserves better.
@@edd_TV Yup yup. Sadly they might never consider them again considering the visceral reaction they got.
@@nikroth I think it will depend solely on execution. I think similarly with garrisons (and a lot of other ideas) it was great in theory. It just depends on how they want it to function within the game and what it hopes to achieve. If they tie power to it, it'll be a disaster. If it can be a fun PvP mode? I think there's actual hope for it.
@@edd_TV I really really do hope you are right !
- bfa issues (as a casual)
- long world quests, cf everyone having turtle ptsd
- warfronts and expeditions were bold experiments but them not working out left a gaping hole in the expansion
- turned out, there were no breadcrumbs on alliance side to go do uldir, so i waited too many months before realizing & then it was too late to do it in LFR
- if you did nazjatar months later, the quest where you level up followers actually slams the breaks on everything, 1 entire week, massive bottleneck
- yeah going back to war ressources, command table, etc after doing that for 2 expansions was definitely getting a bit tedious, but not horribly too bad yet
- them keeping borrowed power around was definitely kinda grating. Legendaries stopped feeling special a while back already but I do mind it getting worse with every passing expansion.
- bfa pros
- the zones were incredibly pretty, i did a ranking of expansions based on zones recently (vibes only), and BFA came up S tier (with mop and tbc in front)
- how rich the world was felt kinda bonkers tbh, the size of boralus & dazaralor, the amount of niche jungle areas in zuldazar & nazmir...
- I've always had something for how fake vs how organic the /road layouts/ are in the game, and they specifically nailed it in BFA. Super organic & believable.
- the raw amount of cutscenes, story moments, plot developments was honestly super cool in BFA.
- I don't remember struggling with the story, but i'm one of those lunatics that... reads... quests. Unheard of apparently.
- the tortollan voice acting is like, half the expansion.
- Drustvar & Nazmir are 2 of the only zones in the entire game where anything felt actually creepy/scary and we could see the potential WoW had for darker stuff.
- Raids were really good, period.
- overall: most of the downsides of modern wow, with most of the benefits of modern wow, but before shadowlands put a crater in the game lol, and not too much worse than legion, so still quite solid overall :)
This has been an incredibly fair and balanced comment and I agree with a lot of what you have said. Thank you for taking the time to watch the video and typing this up! I really appreciate it.
This may be an unpopular opinion but I think the story of BFA is better than people give it credit for. I saw a lot of complaints that Azshara and N'zoth came out of nowhere, but they both appeared in Azshara's Warbringer short, were responsible for 60% of the problems in Zandalar and Kul Tiras, got a bunch of focus and voice lines, so I felt it was pretty clear they were gonna be fought in BFA. For reference, I am pretty sure Azshara has more voice lines in BFA than Kil'Jaeden did in Legion, if not all of WoW. I think the biggest problem with BFAs story (other than 8.3 being really underwhelming) was that it tried to be a story about Azshara and N'zoth, Pandaria 2.0, and a prelude to Shadowlands all at the same time and didn't juggle the three storylines very well so all the good parts of each storyline were undercut.
I would say it's probably unpopular but no less valid! We all have different views and opinions and I'm interested in hearing everyone's thoughts! I think it would be very naive if people thought we wouldn't be seeing Azshara and N'Zoth, as per the Warbringers you suggested. I actually believe you regarding Azshara and Kil'Jaeden! I think you have summed it up wonderfully with this comment. I didn't 'hate' them, I was really interested and invested but the juggling of all of these narratives just felt too rushed. I imagine that BFA could have honestly been akin to the worldsoul saga in a sense. It could have began with the faction war and then bled into an Azshara/Nazjatar expansion and then finally concluding with N'Zoth and Ny'alotha. I would have genuinely loved that so much. Luckily we can have another chance with Azshara and if she doesn't show up in Midnight, I'll eat my own hat! As for the Black Empire, that's going to have to continue with Xal'atath for now and we'll see what happens! Thank you for sharing your thoughts. A very enjoyable and balanced read!
Azerite armor was such a bad system, even worse than the legion legendaries and the RNG to get them. Also the scaling respect fee was beyond insulting. The Heart of Azeroth was fine until they made essences, all except 1 were stupid grinds. They promised essences would have story tie ins, only 1 did. Legion was already too grindy, but BFA double it. BFA removed group finder world quests and cut world quest rewards literally in half. Quadruple the work, half the reward for world quests. Azerite was only plot important Trisgard sound story line and a foot note in the other 5 zones. Not even a major plot point in Naga Area and all but forgotten in the nzoth Uldum and Eternal Blossums. Characters blindly joined the war, with poor motivations. Many were much more willing to work together lorewise than actually go to war. Such as Rexxar. Most characters acted out of character.
That's actually such an important point you have raised, the importance of Azerite in the storyline. It was hugely prevalent in Tiragarde Sound like you said and then just an afterthought. You are absolutely right with everything you have said. Character motivations at this point is something I try not to dwell on, as I have felt for sometime now the writers don't simply understand the characters. I talk about this in more detail in my 'The Mourned Identity' video. It feels like some of the people who work on World of Warcraft now struggle to understand certain personalities, and it makes characters feel completely foreign to what the players were used to.
Thank you for watching and sharing your thoughts and feelings. I appreciate it!
I LOVED horrific visions so damn much
They are fantastic, I love a challenge mode where you are expected to lose many times before ever winning.
Couldn’t put it better, me too!
BFA content was fun for me to go back to during Shadowlands since I didn't play during BFA and it provided many useful things to get for what became my favorite activity and that was making Timewalking sets. Timewalking wasn't really hard at all but it was worth the effort since it let me deal 60-80% of my random dungeon finder groups damage at time and that was all that mattered to me. It definitely seemed like it would have been miserable to do while current though.
I think Shadowlands probably gave me a new found appreciation for BFA to be honest. Glad to hear you enjoyed the content! Thanks for watching!
I started my Journey of becoming a WOW player in Battle for Azeroth. and i loved everything about this Expansion. The System, The Dungeons. The Powers you get and the things you can experiment with. it was Fun and ended in Corruption. a System that was fun and brought so many fun builds i tried and played and i quickly did my first +22 Keys in the End of BFA while also Mythic Raiding. I loved it. BFA was my Reason to keep playing WoW and finding friends and love.
That's really refreshing to hear! You're absolutely not alone with that either. I think the expansion you begin your journey in WoW is always going to be hugely important, and the reason most people dislike BFA is because of everything that preceded it and how much the game has changed over the years. Players didn't feel that their time wasn't being respected. Having this fresh experience will give you a completely different stance on the game, and you will take in the world like other players used to! Glad to hear you had such a blast with BFA, and thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences!
For me as someone that first started playing retail at the end of WoD, I'm of the opinion that BfA itself wasn't "shit" like some people would say. There are valid reasons players didn't/don't like it, but there are also a lot of reason to have liked BfA. For me the music, zones and the cinematics and even some parts of the story were top tier, even in comparison to Legion. The biggest downfall for BfA objectively was the faction war, it just didn't make sense after an expansion like Legion. The reason it started also felt so weird, of course we know why Sylvanas burned down Teldrassil, and in the end it was the cause for not one expansion being received bad but two (shadowlands could've worked if we got there for different reasons). The patches in Bfa also felt mostly boring, 8.0 was dead on arrival imo and was the first time I took a longer break, going into 8.1 I felt a bit better than 8.0 but it still wasn't that interesting, 8.2 for me was the best patch of BfA, adding two very interesting zones with good music, and cool lore, and then there is 8.3 which for me was worse than 8.0, the borrowed power was actually fun, but the content felt rushed, Ny'alotha should've been a zone and the raid wasn't that interesting imo, the mechanics were ok but the raid got super stale after 2 or 3 clears.
The music and cinematics are genuinely some of the best in WoW, for sure. I think it's easy to hate on BFA because there was so much fundamentally wrong with it, but it did have some strong elements to it. The bad just sadly overshadows the good, and there was so much bad. Thank you for taking the time to watch and write this. I appreciate it.
I will argue the point that "Nyalotha could have been a whole expansion". It definitely needed to be more than a raid though, if it had been a patch zone like the Emerald Dream in DF I think we'd remember it more fondly than spending a whole expansion in and of itself. In theory I appreciate reuse of previous locations, but I'm very sure that the N'Zoth assaults were a poor implementation, given they had given us 2 pretty decent patch zones in 8.2. Even if they wanted to keep horrific visions I would have rather collected Coalescing Vision in Nyalotha than N'Zoth assaults. All of the Old Gods were dealt with in one patch, and making Nyalotha the final tier of BFA is more than C'Thun or Yogg-Saron got. I don't want a full expansion in the Black Empire, but I want a full patch in the Black Empire.
Yeah, that's fair. A zone could have been nice, on the same levels of Argus in Legion maybe; 3 zones in a little continent. Like you said, it all felt like a 'wham-bam-thank-you-maam' and I think it deserved better. Maybe an expansion is a bit far-fetched or hyperbole, but the Black Empire definitely deserved better than what we got. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and feelings, and thanks for watching!
@@edd_TV thank you, and I don't disagree with most of your points, just one specific point. Great video overall, thank you.
@@EloquentTroll Even if you did disagree, I'm always very interested to hear players thoughts and point of view, so don't ever be afraid to disagree with anything I say! Thank you for your kind words. I really appreciate your engagement with the video.
@@edd_TV I'm just finished the video, and I agree with you on Benthic gear, but I will add that Dragonflight actually evolved that system in a manner I consider positive. It's really neat that I can get an alt to max level and do all the patch stories and once it's finished I can upgrade my gear to more than ready for normal raids, and for my main (Holy Priest, healer solidarity!), getting upgrade mats from an M+ run is reasonable consolation prize if I don't get a gear upgrade, and the ability to turn my vault reward into one of those currencies is very nice.
And I will add that I hope corruption comes back in a future final patch. My main may be a Holy Priest but my first alt is a Destruction Warlock, and I deeply enjoyed watching Twilight Devastation reap it's toll.
@@EloquentTroll That's a good point! I do feel that Dragonflight has done some serious damage control with both BFA and Shadowlands. It had to put out a lot of fires and I think it's done a pretty good job. It would be pretty fun to see corruption make a comeback someday, but I think people would doom too much over the thought of any sort of elements of borrowed power again. It was great for its time and I agree, Twilight Devastation was very fun.
If Sylvanas and The Shadowlands stuff wasn’t hanging over the expansion, I think people would have liked it a lot more.
I mean we had both Old Soldier and The Pride of Kul’Tiras in the same expansion. Both were fantastic.
BfA failed story-wise because they were trying build up a mystery about Sylvanas and her true motivations. The payoff wasn’t good enough, Shadowlands was a mess.
I think so too. I think the fact BFA was a precursor to Sylvanas' power and the Shadowlands stuff, it could have been easier to enjoy or maybe forget about? I think it's quite difficult to leave things behind that are canon, it's why I struggle with the Star Wars sequels so much. It's frustrating to me. You are very right about both Old Soldier and Kul'Tiras, there is so much good in BFA but it really is tainted by the bad. Great comment!
Amen on Naz/Mechagon saving the expansion. My guild had already fallen apart in Uldir and I tried my best to pug through BoD but eventually fizzled out. Having two pretty good zones packed with content kept me playing and vaguely gearing until I could pick back up in season 4. Edit: I wish I could like this video twice. Its such a fair and balanced take on BFA.
Thank you for your kind words and sharing your thoughts and feelings!
@@edd_TV No problem! I really loved the legion video aswell, keep up the great work!
@@Crazylegs677 Really appreciate your support! Thanks again!
Thanks for summarizing the story line, I'am thinking on getting back to the War Within after leaving in Legion and it helps a lot to have the lore and the game growth summarized. Looking forward to the shadowlands and Dragonflight :D
You're welcome. I think it's important that people can understand the story regardless of how good/bad they perceive it to be. I think The War Within will be a great opportunity to get back into the game, I just hope they are able to bridge the stories so people who have been out of the game for sometime can understand what's happening! Thank you for watching!
Thematically BfA had everything - South Seas, Faction War, Azshara and Nazjatar, Nzoth and Nyalotha. Narratively, they fumbled every single one of them except Kul Tiras and Zandalar. I have no idea how anyone would have green lit that script if it was written from start to finish in one go. Sylvanas Warbringers came out before BfA launched and it was one of the biggest shitshow in the WoW community I have ever seen. Soured the expansion before it even started, first of its kind. Worst part is, Nazjatar and Nzoth felt like they were forcefully wrapped up so the new writing team at Blizzard could move on to tell their own new stories, except Shadowlands and Dragonflight storytelling were not great either. BfA, SL, DF all felt like their stories were cut, rewritten, and served half-baked.
I still love these expansions visually, because god damnnit the zones are just so beautifully crafted. I still walk around Ardenweald on ground and log off my character there because I'm just that enthralled by the place. Like you, I fucking loved Horrific Visions and Corruption, they were thrilling and had my adrenaline pumping throughout. I'm glad they are revisting Visions in 11.1.5 after Undermine. I foresee people will complain again about "recycled content". TWW was already continuing the leftover plot from BfA - Xalatath, the Sword, the Goblins. Siren Isle was originally made for an Island expedition. Now Visions, another BfA feature returns. The community is 100% going to whine about TWW being a recycled BfA that plays like DF.
I could care less about TWW thematically because it feels so all over the place, but as long as the gameplay feels good, that works for me. My eyes are on Midnight. Who knew an expansions centered around Quelthalas and the Void could generate so much anticipation. I get the impressions from Blizzard that they are hedging their bets on Midnight too. It's Metzen's idea as well. That man is overhyped since people forgot all about Cata, WoD, SC2, D3, but he sold me the idea, now I just want to see the execution.
I agree. I think the execution of both Kul Tiras and Zandalar was great. They felt like real Warcraft zones! The themes were wonderful and familiar. You really have summed everything up masterfully. It felt like the ingredients were there for BFA to be something special but they were telling so many different stories all at once. It was just never going to work. For me personally I would have maybe settled for Azshara as a final boss of BFA which could have followed up into a Black Empire expansion. But on the other hand I would have loved a fully fledged expansion that took place on Nazjatar too. I think both Nazjatar and Ny'alotha should have probably been their own continents in their own expansions rather than what we got. It just felt very wasteful to me. I think you're absolutely right too. These were hugely anticipated antagonists and it felt like Blizzard wanted to just sweep them aside for whatever is coming next. And that's always a very frustrating thing for me, even more so with Shadowlands because it caused so much damage narratively, but now it's time to forget about that expansion too because 'The Dragon Aspects are here now!'. It feels like a theme park in that respect. We're just bouncing around and nothing is woven together as well as it should be.
The art team are superb. It has to be said. No matter how dark WoW gets or whatever poor decisions are made, you know they will deliver! The music, the zones, it's all just so magical and it gives you a feeling no other game can. I have read they are revisiting the Horrific Visions, which sounds brilliant! I can't speak for The War Within at the minute as I still haven't picked it up but as the days go by, I'm getting closer and closer to pulling the trigger. I miss it. I've seen bits and pieces on Siren Isle, all I know is it's an unused zone from BFA and it's centralised around some sort of ring. I can understand why people might want to moan about it, but I think any content is better than none. It gives me Forbidden Reach vibes from Dragonflight a bit?
I think you're right. Midnight is going to be immense. I think my only fears with Midnight will be the return of Sylvanas, which seems inevitable. I don't know how they can put her back in a favourable or acceptable light with the audience. It's going to be interesting, but I do strongly agree with you. I would bet the house that Midnight is going to completely steal the show! I love Metzen, but I will absolutely acknowledge (with the examples you have given) he is far from perfect. And I think he owns that. I think he does admit when he fucks up, and that's the bare minimum I want from him, and everybody else at Blizzard. If it's shit, if it's bad, if it's wrong, just be honest and tell us. It really annoyed me that Shadowlands was swept under the rug and never talked about again. We never understood the execution, why it failed, why the product delivered was what it was etc. We deserve transparency. I want to trust Chris. These worlds are so important to him and I think this is his and WoW's redemption arc. I really want to believe that.
Sorry for such a long response! I really enjoyed reading your comment. We share so many similar thoughts and feelings. Thank you so much for sharing them!
@@edd_TV I really enjoyed reading your comment too, and I've been loving your channel, so I'm glad to help with engagement. Plus I love discussions.
I agree with most of what you said, but I'm on the fence about an entire expansion based on Nazjatar. The environment could run the risk of being too samey to make 5-6 launch zones without causing player fatigue. However, BfA at the very least could have done Nazjatar like Argus - give us 3 zones for the final patch. That would have been amazing. 8.2 could instead focus on Mechagon and the Faction War. The story going into Nazjatar will have to do more heavy lifting with Ashvane and Sylvanas' deal with Azshara. What we got was a wasted potential anyway, but at least this wouldn't have been too different from Argus in Legion, and we would still have Nzoth and Nyalotha for another expansion.
I agree that Metzen is admirable for owning up to his faults. I would love to see a post mortem of BfA and SL by Blizzard someday, like that making of Vanilla WoW book by John Staats. So much went wrong with those 2 expansions narratively and gameplay design wise that I think the player base would love to hear what happened behind the scenes that caused such a mess.
As for TWW, I don't think you missed much as of right now. The story isn't fantastic by any means, but it is neatly wrapped up in one patch. However, if you only follow cutscenes on RUclips, you miss out a hecka lot. They have added so much "stay a while and listen" dialogue that it's very obvious when someone complains about TWW story, you know they skipped everything and paid zero attention. It does feel like a family therapy session instead of Warcraft, but I like the heartwarming vibes. Gameplay wise, it's just DF + Delves. So if you enjoyed DF S2 and S3, you would enjoy TWW gameplay too.
@@Ryan-sn3uo Thank you for saying so. I really appreciate that! Me too. I'll do my best to respond to everybody because I love hearing everybody's thoughts and opinions!
You do make a very good point with Nazjatar. It makes me think of Vashj'ir which potentially could have been the precursor to something like a Nazjatar continent and you're right, it is all very samey. It would be hard to give zones their own flavour like that. I think 3 zones like you're suggesting would have been better, because I thought Argus was cool as hell!
I think somebody mentioned in my Shadowlands video that a former member of Blizzard did come out and talk about Shadowlands. I think it's in a book but I never got around to actually looking for it. I would be more interested in hearing from the real higher ups at the time though. People like Ion, J.Allen Brack and those kinda guys. Shadowlands is tricky because you can't really erase it. Once you pull back the veil on the afterlife, it's here forever really. They could retcon it if they really wanted to, but it does just further admit failure. I think they would rather never discuss it again, but I would love to know what happened. Not even from a place of anger. It's just so obvious the product we got isn't what they wanted to give us.
"Stay a while and listen" moments are always good, so I'll look forward to that! I'm very open to the idea of heart-warming and emotional stuff too. I do think they need to have more of a balance with it. I think Dragonflight exposed that a lot, but there's absolutely a place for it! I think we all want to be moved in all forms of media: TV, film, music etc. Video games are no different. We just need balance and execution. I think it's only a matter of time for me. I had a look at Undermine(d) and honestly it looks great!
After a bit of time in Legion without owning Legion, and 10 years of WotLK in private servers, BFA was fucking awesome for me. I joined in 8.2 and loved every second of it.
That's great to hear! I always find it super refreshing to hear people had a blast with BFA because it's spoken about so negatively. A lot of people just assume that it's universally hated and it's not true at all. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
I like that you pull bits of info from past and future expansions to explain their relevance in the plot, even if they're not outright explained in this exact expansion. I feel like a lot of gripes people have tend to forget that you're not meant to have every single question answered in the current expansion.
BFA was definitely an expansion I played less than most, but I enjoyed the time I spent playing it. My main issue was the dripfeed of content. However, coming back at the last patch, I feel the expansion was in a genuinely good spot. Fun solo content. Fun raids. Fun dungeons.
Even for the less-banger wow expansions, there's always something to remember fondly. Even SL had a couple bright spots amid the controversy.
I can't take any real credit for that as I was just reading off the Reddit post, but I agree, it's a lot better when there is some perspective and actual answers and connections; it's just the overarching shadow of the jailer that really upsets players, and I get that. Thanks for watching and sharing your thoughts and feelings!
I haven't played much WoW until BfA, so I may be biased as it was my first time really playing, but I absolutely loved BfA's art, both Kul-Tiras and Zandalar were unbelievably aesthetically pleasing. Also I didn't understand the downsides people are talking about here, so basically I loved BfA strongly.
There's nothing wrong with that. I think regardless of when players start in WoW, it can be a very special and important feeling, and I know you're not alone with that. A lot of people feel that same affinity with BFA due to the same reasons you do, and I think that's nice.
Siege of Boralus was pretty bad for horde players. The start of the dungeon was different and worse/harder. When i swapped to alliance it was mind blowing how much better it was.
Great video and hello fellow crab mount enjoyer 👍I would love to see a shadowlands video, as I enjoyed that xpac despite a lot of bad stuff. Especially the dungeons and zone designs.
I never thought about Siege of Boralus from a Horde perspective! It's coming back for Season 1 of The War Within. Thank you for your kind words, and Shadowlands is definitely something I'm planning on pursuing down the line!
Just stopping by to comment my own experience with soccer/Xan'esh fight! Nya'lotha was my first time doing real raiding since wotlk (which I was in elementary school for) so it has a pretty special place in my heart. Though I was a half blind (irl) death knight who was assigned to do soccer, which, as you can guess, made for some pretty funny moments in where I was set up, ready to hit the ball, only for my sight to have LIED to me and it passed right next to me while my teammates were crying out in dismay! Or I was WAY too slow to catch up to the ball since DK's movement options were, um, not great XD. It was all in good fun though, I usually hit it well :) though I have yet to learn, I still always volunteer myself to do the trickier mechanics in boss fights even if my class isn't really suited for it.
Oh no, haha! It's great that you're still up for it and willing to throw yourself in the deep end and take responsibility and learn mechanics! I think it's great that you have people who are really understanding too, as WoW can sometimes have a notorious reputation for being toxic. That must have been challenging, even just the DK part like you say! That's a funny story, thank you so much for sharing and watching the video! It's nice that people can watch these retrospective videos and think back to some of their favourite/memorable times in the game!
I was only interested in BFA for Kul Tiras, a city-state that was finally included in this expansion. Overall it was gorgeous and I loved the art style and theme. Other than that BFA was nothing more than bantha poodoo
I absolutely love Boralus and its music. The art and soundtrack of BFA was immense. It's so good! I also appreciate the Star Wars reference.
@@edd_TVoh absolutely. I managed a roleplay guild centered entirely around Kul Tiras so you could imagine the excitement in our guild when finally after 10 years we were finally included.
@@HPNomad That's so cool! Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences!
I was wondering why I look back on BFA pretty fondly and realised it was because I did my 1 month of free then came back in 8.2 (essences and binging the story I guess). Makes total sense now
8.2 honestly saved BFA for me, for sure. The game initially felt so drab and it's no wonder everybody called it 'Beta for Azeroth'. There were definitely consistent problems with BFA, but 8.2 really did a lot for it.
It's not nearly as bad as people claim. The azerite system was unfortunately the biggest issue that prevented a great expansion. I genuinely loved the zones and raids. The weakest patch was by far the final N'Zoth tier. The raid was really good but everything else fell flat.
I agree. Whilst the bad was really bad, I think it's very easy to latch onto negative things, for example people go crazy over the garrison in WoD, but it was hardly the biggest offender. It was just the scapegoat, and because people spent all their time in it because of a lack of content, it's the first thing players think of.
@@edd_TV Agreed, and the fact that we recognize these things later down the line has me pause a bit before being too hard on any expansion. Current or otherwise. Criticism is good and useful but not blind hatred honestly. There IS nuance to positive and negative things.
@@SirCalebEvans Yeah, that was important to me when making this video. I think it's fine to be critical but understanding is also key, and I think attempting to provide solutions rather than blind hatred as you say is always the healthier option. It doesn't have to be so black and white. BFA very clearly had good elements to it, but poor execution and a lateness to much needed changes sealed its fate with a lot of players.
BFA had a lot of good ideas that were executed poorly. Azshara and N'Zoth should've been in a standalone expansion, but the narrative with what the hell Sylvannas was doing demanded attention while also still being shrouded in mystery. She went from being one of my top favorite characters to the least with how the Jailer's character basically stripped her agency away from her, while also never being fully explained himself. I still have a lot of good memories from 8.3 for a lot of the reasons you listed, but man talk about wasted potential with N'Zoth being sidelined into a single patch.
Hard agree. I tried my best to be invested in both Azshara and N'Zoth with BFA, but this expansion just felt like a slap in the face considering how anticipated both of these characters were and what we got. They absolutely deserved to be in the spotlight in their own storylines. It is genuinely devastating how far Sylvanas has fallen, and whilst I do think she'll be a lot easier on the eye when she eventually returns, I do wonder if some of the fanbase will ever forgive what has happened to her. I hope so. I think the Black Empire just has to live through Xal'atath going forward at this point. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and feelings!
i am soo up to the next one about shadowlands! and the dragonflight one might be needed soon too! your takes are very thought out and not really emotion-based
I'm glad you enjoy them! I do my best to be objective when making these videos and try and view things as fairly as I can. Thank you for your kind words, and thanks for watching!
There was nothing wrong with the story. The problem was the gearing system, it destroyed a ton of guilds. You were constantly updating Azerite gear because you wanted certain abilities. Some abilities were just far superior to others, and you wanted a combination.
The gearing system is what destroyed this expansion. Raiding became a horrible chore.
In the end of the expansion it was pretty much fixed, mostly by making all the azerite abilities the same. And making the neck give the more powerful abilities that you could CHOOSE to put on yourself. But at this point the damage was mostly done. Most guilds had just fallen apart at this time.
I would disagree regarding the story personally, but if you enjoyed it then that's great! The systems in BFA were very poor, agreed. I felt like the barrier to mythic raiding was becoming a lot more apparent too with everything that was expected of you.
@@edd_TVHaven't started the video(have a few minutes left on a podcast before starting this), but as someone who got CE every tier for BfA: I think every system besides Essences were absolutely HORRIBLE for mythic raiding, and I would wager it's because Essences were the only borrowed power system in the expansion that you could directly target and acquire right from their introduction. Azerite pieces, Corruptions, Titanforging sockets onto gear, etc., all were _introduced_ as pure RNG. I lost my raid spot in 8.3 and had to join a new guild because I was playing arms warrior(which stacked the hell out of haste corruptions) and I could not, for the life of me, get haste corruptions on random drops to save my life, and corruptions were so strong that I was replaced halfway through Ny'alotha by an arms warrior that was recruited solely because of having a ton of haste corruptions.
They corrected course later on in the patch by adding the vendor, and I finished the xpac with over 90% haste because of whatever the rank 3 haste corruption was called on every piece of gear I could have it on, but outside of Essences, every borrowed power system in BfA created anywhere from annoying to MASSIVE barriers to entry upon introduction due to being completely reliant on RNG for weeks or months. Anyway, podcast has finished; will now watch the video.
@@Unregistered.HyperCam.2 You're absolutely spot on with everything you say. I completely agree with you on Essences, they needed to be in the game on launch. I'm sorry to hear you lost your raid spot in 8.3. BFA was very unforgiving in the sense of commitment and devotion needed for your character and it honestly came down to blind luck sometimes, and that just feels so, so bad.
Thank you for taking the time to write this up, and thank you for watching! I hope you will enjoy.
I’m quite partial to BFA and I actually thought it was one of the better expansion’s that I played.
I quit wow back during WOTLK and didn’t return until the very start of BFA so I had missed nearly a decade of WoW. BFA felt so different than how I had remembered WoW from all those years back and I had a lot of fun playing since then.
That's such a long break! The game must have felt SO different by the time you picked it up again. That's really great that you came back and still had a good experience. It's quite rare people tell a story like this. Most people come back and find the game unrecognisable and tend to drop off relatively quickly, rather than persevering and see how the game has changed. Do you still play?
I'll never forgive them for burning down the World Tree. That was so uncalled for and honestly didn't mean anything
It was even worse at the time too because we didn't know about The Maw or the Jailer or anything like that. It just felt like an excuse for war. They obviously tried to tie in with Sylvanas' drastic gains in power but I agree, it felt bad for a number of reasons. It feels like Night Elves have had the shit kicked out of them for years now, it painted the Horde as serious villains and it just wasn't needed.
BFA is one of my favorite expansions top 2 at least. but mostly because of corruption gear and season 4.
That's super refreshing to hear. I think people can be so prone to spewing hate for expansions like WoD and BFA, but they are absolutely favourites for some players and we all have a personal preference. This is what fascinates me about people who make WoW tier lists; there is no right or wrong answer. If you love BFA, that's awesome as far as I'm concerned! Thanks for watching.
Azshara and her whole kingdom of Nazjatar deserved to be its own expac. And fully underwater. What we got was okay but was not enough
I agree. I think after what we got with Vashj'ir in Cataclysm, it really set the tone and whet the appetite for a lot of players of what Nazjatar could have potentially been like. I still had fun with Nazjatar, but it was very underwhelming to what I had envisaged it to be.
“Fully underwater” no thanks. Exposing it like they did was perfect, it just needed to be way more fleshed out
@@Frankthegb I think maybe if we had sections similar to Vashj'ir or Argus, one of them could have been a fully underwater area. They probably considered it, but Vashj'ir was such a polarising zone and considering how integral Nazjatar was to the endgame of BFA, it would have ruffled a lot of feathers I think. Vashj'ir was different, it was a levelling zone and if you really hated it that much you could just do Hyjal instead and not have to worry about it. It would have offered a lot of problems, no doubt.
My favorite part of BFA...TWILIGHT DEVASTATION! I felt like BFA was done by a completely different group of people who were hellbent of shifting the entire world to their version of WOW which was only waved by the art and music.
Twilight devastation was just so nuts, haha! It's crazy thinking back that we actually had something like that in the game. It was just wild! I don't know what BFA was supposed to be to be honest, from the narrative to the systems. It felt like a crazed experiment. I will say the art team absolutely cooked though. The zones were fabulous and I genuinely think BFA has one of the best OSTs in WoW's history!
Corruption was the most fun part of WoW in a long time. With everything being simmed down to the decimals, corruption gave those "what if" situation that gives gratification or "that was worth it" feel even if you lay dead on the floor.
It's like PoM Pyro you build your character to be a one trick pony. And if 2 mages in classic PoM Pyro'ed each other I'm pretty sure both are laughing out loud behind the screen.
It makes me happy to see that others had a great time with it too. I can remember there was so much noise about it, and I do understand why that was. It definitely wasn't a 'one size fits all' system and it was clear the issues that became prevalent in PvP and such, but from a PvE perspective I genuinely loved it. It was a breath of fresh air for me as opposed to the horrid titanforging we had in the past, and knowing this was thematic and likely wouldn't move with us past the final patch of BFA made it feel more acceptable to me. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
The zones were good, especially horde ones. Patches were very solid and feature rich. Nazjatar was great, the mech island, Nyalotha, visions.
It also had plenty of disappointing things but I did not really care about those as a casual. I'm not going to bother farming gear anyway so I care very little about the best azerite traits. The powers from the visions being on a rotation was dumb. Warfronts, islands and azerite armor really set a negative tone at the start that people never got over.
I was definitely more than casual so I felt the real brunt of it, but you have hit the nail on the head. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feelings!
I'm still upset that my horde guild had a more aggravating set of trash between bosses 2 & 3 in that capital raid.
My guildmates also hated it. But that's more for the joke I made every week while Jaina rained down ice on us. After all, the cold doesn't bother her anyways.
Nice reference, approved!
I was a big fan of BFA despite recognizing its flaws. I do have to say, a lot of people often bit off more than they were required to. I was a mythic raider and was often confused about my normal and heroic friends complaining about needing a BiS neck at all times which just was absolutely not at all the case. I hardly ever grinded m+ or islands, I didn’t have bis essences, corruptions or the like. All things people said you NEEDED in order to just PLAY. My guild had no complaints about me when we finished CE: Nzoth; it was a made up problem by the casual playerbase who thought they needed to have everything.
Anyway, Jaina didn’t have a personality change up randomly either. She was 4-5 years past her trauma and was proven right. She showed up smug and smiling because the rest of the alliance finally agreed with her.
It's very true. A lot of it comes down to pure mindset. People have a desire to be the best and in BFA it wasn't easy to achieve. It took a lot of energy, luck and time. Players can so often be their own worst enemies without realising. Glad to hear you had such a great time with it. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feelings!
It was the last expac i played with my best IRL before he passed away RIP Snacktime ❤️
I'm so sorry for your loss :( RIP Snacktime.
@@edd_TVthank you man. I know BfA gets a bad rap but in hindsight I had so many great memories playing it with my friend, but as grown adults and not kids, so it's very special to me
@@lordfizzz I honestly think that's what it's all about - friendship and community. I'm very much of the belief that you can make anything fun with the right people. It's hard to believe but there will be people out there who loved Shadowlands! Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and feelings. I really appreciate it.
BFA was the peak of WoW from Art perspective - zones, music and cinematics were incredible. So sad, that there were so many bad systems and the story felt rushed
I agree with you. When I was making this video, it was genuinely a joy to be able to take in certain music tracks. ALL of the 'Sky Night' tracks are just so lovely. The cinematics were genuinely fantastic too. I feel like The War Within could offer something very similar, as the reveal was incredible. It is a massive shame what we got from BFA narratively (and systematically) when the art team go above and beyond, time after time.
i've gotta say after thinking about years after the fact i actually did enjoy my time in bfa, i found the story somewhat interesting despite not being as compelling as previous expansions and did engage a looot of the game content. the grinding drove me nuts, especially the reputation stuff which i think peaked at its worst in bfa moreso than any other expansion. but the allied races were cool, war table stuff was cool, the special alliance v horde stuff was very cool, bwonsamdi was awesome and even the nature of world quests sort of having a theme of "being behind enemy lines" just felt great given the backdrop we played in. i bet you'd be hard pressed to find many people who consider it to be their favourite expansion but there are probably a surprising number of players who will look back on it and have a similar sentiment to myself about bfa.
I very much agree! I even surprised myself with how much positive stuff I wanted to say about BFA. I think it's really easy to hone in on negative stuff with expansions. I feel like the most polarising expansions often have beacons or landmarks you can attach them to, to just incite hatred
WoD: Garrisons
BFA: Azerite
Shadowlands: Sylvanas, Jailer, Anima, Covenants, Torghast, take your pick really.
I hope people do look back on BFA and think similarly to you: okay, the grinds were brutal BUT....they did have some good stuff going for them. That's certainly how I feel anyway! I think we could carve out good and bad with any expansion if we took the time to think about it. None are perfect, and like you say BFA was definitely off in the deep end with grinds and such, but all expansions have things people dislike. This was a refreshing comment to read! Thank you for taking the time to watch the video and sharing your thoughts. I appreciate it!
Compared to Shadowlands it was fun but overall bad. I like it, i think Zandalar is the best thing about it. the PvP was ok, Azerite sucked. I liked N'zoth towards the end. I am blinded by it because its pre-covid nostalgia kicking in lol
I would agree. I think BFA (through all its faults) is infinitely better than Shadowlands. When I took the time to write the script, I did have to cast my mind back to how the world was at the time and just how important WoW was for me. It doesn't forgive BFA for its misgivings, but there was definitely some good elements to it, if you looked hard enough.
I will say I still have some good memories but also some bad memories of BFA, I was way more casual than I was in Legion and WoD and now, as such I didn't feel the pressure of the grind, but the grind was a major hurdle for me getting into raiding and joining a guild as I feel I'd put more pressure on myself to do keep up and partake. Let alone tracking BiS azerite traits...not armor but the traits which was overwhelming. As such keeping to myself, running heroic dungeons is where I kept myself at. Out of the expansions I played from WoD onward, I would list my favorites as Dragonflight, WoD, Legion, BFA, Shadowlands. I joined WoD in 6.2 and raided with a good guild so I have favorable views but I'm sure it'd be lower if I played it from the beginning lol. The lull in WoD let me play previous content and achievement hunt.
But I digress, BFA was okay for me but I didn't enjoy how all the systems felt like a hurdle to get into more challenging content. Huge difference where DF is more open and all you need to do is run dungeons to get into raid.
It's definitely a mixed bag. It wasn't all bad, but the bad was REALLY bad, so a very large shadow is cast over the good. I wholeheartedly agree with you on your thoughts and frustrations with the systems, and the lack of clarity that came with them. I think WoD gets a lot of hate because there just wasn't enough going on there, which is funny considering there was just TOO much going on in BFA; it feels like Blizzard can just never win in that sense.
Thank you for watching and sharing your thoughts and feelings!
BFA is easily the most underrated lore expansion in WoW. So much depth, and very few bad decisions
As someone who came back in 8.2, the last 2 patches of BFA were absolutely fire. Twilight Devastation was so damn fun.
I share the same opinion as you. I do think 8.2 saved the game. It should never be this way obviously, but it did breathe a lot of much needed life into BFA. Definitely some bad and rushed decisions narratively, and worse decisions systematically but I was able to appreciate the beauty and fun the game did offer. The dungeons and raids were great, I loved the zones, horrific visions were awesome. Similarly to you I had a blast with corruption, ineffable truth was insane!
@edd_TV all tank raids with Strength of the Warden and Twilight Devastation>>>>
I hated football boss, but I loved Hivemind, since as DK I could deal some incredible damage pulling far ahead from the rest of the raid.
I enjoyed rotating healing cooldowns on Mythic Hivemind but thought it was a real mess!
Craziest thing before they changed it. The imbalance between alliance and horde unlock for allied races was insane. Look how many dungeons you have to do alliance side vs horde.
I didn't even take that part into account! You're right.
Nazmir was awesome... Bwonsomdi particularly...... that's about it... Another turtle made it to the water....😐
Agreed, Bwonsamdi was a very compelling character.
When there is a need of separate videos about the lore behind a game, you know that is a bad game.
This. So much this.
The only problem with BfA was the implementation of azerite armor and the heart of azeroth grind, forcing you to do mandatory content
That sadly seems to be a great fear and philosophy of Blizzard. For example, Torghast had massive potential in Shadowlands, but they were likely wary that some players simply wouldn't engage with it, so they gated the legendaries behind it. It's not good game deisgn and hopefully a cycle they are going to break in the future.
It was a great idea, the design had huge flaws
I started late legion and had my first max lvl char at BFA 1st season, As a w3 fan, I leaned to PvP pretty fast, and oh god I was disappointed, farming PvE gear to go PvP, trinkets that prevents healing, arenas that last 15 min until you run out of mana, the holy priest off meta until late SL (snif) and most of all, the world PvP, pretty inexistant and it was more like running into a bus of the opposite faction.
Beside that, I absolutely loved the ambiance, the first part of the story, the battle for Dazar'Alor raid, and the musics.
I also loved the first season of Shadowland, interesting fights in PvP as a healer, PvP vendors etc
That's so interesting to me that you're a Warcraft 3 fan but started WoW so late! Why was that if you don't mind me asking? I do recall what you're speaking of regarding arena, I think there was something called Principles of War? I'm not so big on PvP but I can definitely remember the noise surrounding it. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences!
Honneslty, paywall, paying 14€ per month was too much for me (and I was too young when the game started) but I finally decided to try it and until now (beside some breaks) I never really stopped.
@@Kedustrolder That's understandable. I'm glad you managed to finally experience it!
Jaina's more "Stable" in BFA but at least for the early part of it she's basically suicidal and still incredibly anti-Horde. She brought back her Father's flagship and was willing to face death for standing aside and letting him be killed, if it would get Kul'Tiras back in the war.
BFA is where i quit WoW cause i hated what I was doing as a horde player, i hated the grind and felt i was so weak that i had to change from a ret pally to a protection just to survive, so for me that where my WoW journey ended
BFA was the second time I quit WoW for a lengthy period of time. WoD was my first, and that was mainly due to boredom/loneliness. I agree with you that the grind and chores in BFA were very demanding, and if you raided mythic it really ate your time and felt like an excessive commitment and a second job. I don't begrudge you for switching to protection just to survive, the levelling experience felt really rough.
@@edd_TV I also wasn't a raider or heck even dungeons, I was there mostly for story and it was just bleh, I came back in dragonflight to test it and it ok, but generally the "endgame" of WoW isn't for me, I'm a quest guy
@@rawdoncat8326 I think that's fair. Endgame in WoW is incredibly competitive, formulaic and repetitive. It's not for everybody and you're certainly not alone with that. I think some people forget that WoW is also the telling of a story, and not everything has to be seen with a 'Gotta-go-fast' approach or a desire to obtain loot. It's definitely important, but it's not the primary focus of the game.
@@edd_TV pretty much, I think my biggest issue I have since taking that break and playing ff14 and seeing how they structured there story and how you go through it, it makes me go "why are you pushing me to get to 60 fast to then do dragonflight?" Making the story a bit harder to follow as if you let say go to legion, well unless you got a "guide" that tells you what quests were in what patch you might end up starting legion, but then starting a chain that leads to the 3rd patch where the tomb of sargaras is for example, so you kinda end up having a broken story cause you accidentally did the quests in the "wrong order"
A lot of the issues with BFA is, it was a victim of Legion's successes. They tried to do "something different" while keeping it the same with the HOA and the azerite gear, and that fell flat on its face. Warfronts seemed promising but were just an afk to win scenario that gave powerful gear for doing nothing. (They were INCREDIBLY boring too.) Island expeditions had promise, but turned into an AOE fest for grinding azerite and nothing more. Nothing like "Got a new piece of gear, have to go grind island expeditions for a few hours before I can equip it!"
Underneath all of these terrible systems is actually a pretty good expansion. The lore is great. The zones are some of the most beautiful WOW has ever had, same with the music. The dungeons and raids were great. BFA's failure was in its systems. If you go back to it now, you can pretty much ignore the systems and see what it would've been like without them, and yeah, it's not the top WOW expansion but it's pretty good. Unfortunately, they took the wrong lessons from BFA and Shadowlands failed in both its systems AND its story. Nothing can save that. The only good content in Shadowlands were dungeons and raids.
Beautifully written. I adore Legion. I will honestly scream that until I'm blue in the face. Legion was immaculate, but I am incredibly cognizant of the cruel road it paved for both BFA and Shadowlands. When you have success like Legion, I think they thought it was impossible to do anything other than double down on it. I think had Legion been the only expansion to do borrowed power, it would be held in even higher regard.
I agree with you on the zones, I also think the music is gorgeous! It has one of the best soundtracks in WoW for me, just beautiful! I also think they did a brilliant job with the dungeons and raids. You have summed it up with the systems, for sure. And sadly this is the loudest sound in BFA. When you see BFA, you hear 'Azerite' and then everything else is white noise. You can't appreciate the beauty of BFA because everybody is so focused on the bad, the hurt and the negative, and there was just so much of it.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and speaking so candidly! I really appreciate it!
I honestly had a blast in BfA. The raids were awesome, the dungeons were great, new zones were really great, and the corruption was fun to mess around with. However, the progression system and so many dailies and other stuff made the game an insane time sink just to keep up. Shadowlands was so bad that I quit, and never went back (I started WoW in '07). I'm in my FF14 era now, and I'm having a really fun time with the game.
Glad to hear it! I don't begrudge you for quitting Shadowlands, it was a really dark period generally speaking with both the lawsuit and the pandemic; the game being miserable was just the cherry on the cake in that awful time. Glad to hear you're having a blast with FFXIV, as I have so much love for that game too! I'm very excited for Dawntrail! Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feelings!
Honestly I really liked BFA, while it did have problems, it did a lot of things right. And at no point during the journey did I get bored of what we got. I really liked the big push in new playable races, something I wish we kept up the pace with subsequently.
I'm glad to hear BFA hit for you! It's definitely a mixed bag for me but it's always refreshing to see people look back on it fondly because it absolutely had some great elements to it. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
All i remember is that BFA felt like going to a second job having do all chores before reset
100% agree. It was very tiresome, and felt very punishing if you skipped out on the chores that were being asked of you, and that list would just continue to grow and grow as the expansion went on.