World of Warcraft: Was Battle for Azeroth as BAD as I Remember? 

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.

the expansion was bad on itself, but the huge problem that made it even worse was the hype beforehand, the premise of true horde vs alliance war, huge battle grounds, the fall of Undercity etc nothing of that was delivered ... another turtle has reached the ocean.

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

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.

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 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!

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!

The main difference between BFA and Legion was that with Legion there was polish and detail everywhere. BFA was really cheap by comparison.

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.

Finally a retrospective essay on WoW expansion. Love it! Please keep doing those on all of them!

I remember I started playing at the end of Legion and there was a Horde vs Alliance battle on Darkshore and it was EPIC! Players fighting over this classic zone, finally ending on Sylvanis BURNING DOWN the capital city of the Night Elves. She was SO BADASS in my eyes. I was all for it! Then... I finally got into the expansion and.... Dinosaur island.... Huh...

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.

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

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 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.

The trailers made me think BFA was gonna be some sort of massive us vs them type story where we participated in massive battles both on land and sea… I’m 20 hours into BFA and all I’ve been doing is quests for a faction I do not care about at all. Only benefit is Zandalar is insanely gorgeous

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.

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!!...

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.

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

Yet again, another great video! Keep up the awesome work!

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.

Just started but I already know the vid is going to be a banger.

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.

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

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.

Nyalotha deserved to be its own patch zone

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.

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.

BFA is one of my favorite expansions top 2 at least. but mostly because of corruption gear and season 4.

Hurray! I was waiting for this very much! Thank you!

I just simply love this game. BFA was a bit grindy, but it actually was fun. The M+ was fun, i even PVP:d in BFA again, but yeah the story was a bit confusing and i had a small break during Nazjatar. The worst part of the whole expansion was not being able to fly untill you grinded for weeks. I hated that.

Legion set a very high bar. BFA reminded me of those filler episodes they'd have in Star Trek back in the 90s. Everything would be kicking off then there'd be some weird an unnecessary episode disrupting the momentum of the narrative. Lots of ideas that were never really realised in it as well; of course the Alliance vs Horde stuff... but I think that was the first expansion where I felt it just the routine of a WoW expansion rather than excitement. Think its just such a big animal now and they probably needed to revise how they approach development.

dude idek where this community opinion comes from. i joined wow during legion so BFA was only my second expac, and i loved it. i had a blast. had next to no clue what i was doing in the game but i still had fun, to this day i get nostalgic chills when i hear the zuldazar music, idk if it was a bad expac when compared to others or not, but id give almost anything to feel the way i did about the game then, now.

It was the last expac i played with my best IRL before he passed away RIP Snacktime ❤️

BFA had its issues, but one thing that I don't think anyone can complain about was the shorts & music that came out of it. Like the song from Jaina even has a horde player for my entirety of playing WoW was just sooo good

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

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.

Azerite should just been a return of the glyph system. Prime Glyphs for outer ring abilities, major glyphs middle ring abilities. Minor glyphs for inner ring abilities. With you getting a full set of glyphs during leveling, and then each raid tier awards the rest for doing its' respective quests, which you being able to freely mix and match glyphs as you saw fit. the Essence system for the heart was alright (and finally gave everyone a way to solo Dreamwalker in ICC that didn't get nerfed the next patch after a new solution was found).

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

BFA was one of my favorites, I came back to wow and into bfa after after not playing since Pandaria, and I had such a great time raiding again. Nyalotha was ❤❤

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

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.

bfa had a rough start but overall i genuinely enjoyed this expansion, had amazing times running mythic raids with my guild and we got some incredible content patches. 8.2 was phenominal. story was good but executed poorly in game. leveling was good aside from the loss of power over time. it had a rough start with azerite gear but got it right with essences. bfa certainly isnt the worst expansion. that honor goes to shadowlands.

I didn't like how we got the info that the old gods are just dead now. The titans themselves couldn't kill them but bob from goldshire managed to kill nzoth and then also yogg and cthun are just straight dead not just pushed back to their prisons but just straight dead. Also just everything with nzoth should've been an expansion

oof. I'm kinda late to this for feedback. I'll give it anyway though and it will be a lot to read. PvP in BFA was likely either awesome, decent, or painful depending on how you chose to PvP. *Rated Content* was once again, good or bad depending on where your race/class fell into the meta and your willingness to do PvE for BiS weapons and trinkets that did broken amounts of damage i.e. Geti'kku bleed procs and the Remote Guidance Device oneshot. Farming certain dungeons/raids every week for certain azerite gear was worse, warforging made it EVEN worse, and Essences/Corruptions in later patches.... you get the idea. These items were not nearly as necessary in *Unrated PvP* but were obviously great to have; the introduction of battle flag items and the various engineering items that could be used in battlegrounds made them a bit more interesting but with the absence of a dedicated PvP vendor and the universal minimum that came in SL/DF, gear was all over the place and the gap between performance was at points, glaring and daunting. This also made rated content HIGHLY inaccessible. Despite all of these issues, *World PvP* was experiencing an incredible peak, due in part to the practically mandatory War Mode system's incentives and the World PvP features in BFA zones. Personally as a member of an Alliance World PvP Community and Guild _of PC Gamer Magazine Fame_ that was thousands of players strong at the time, I was World PvPing in groups of players varying from 5 (mostly farming Horde Slayer Titles) to 120 (matching numbers for big fights. yes, it was laggy af). Cross-Realm sharding via LFG, _while indicative of the server community issues that have degraded player socialization since CR's inception,_ was necessary to chase enemy streamers and at least 10 rival guilds/communities from Emerald Dream, Tichondrius, Wyrmrest Accord, and Azralon. The fights were INCREDIBLE and weren't even limited to BFA zones; I recall 40v40s in Redridge, Crossroads, Goldshire, Darkshire, STV, Hellfire, City Attacks and Defenses, and even wargames in Epic Battlegrounds. The battles were incredibly engaging and there were multiple per day, and the resulting trash talk would spill over into social media almost every single time, often provoked by infamous agitators on both sides. BFA was a golden age for myself and the friends I played with, and it made up for the tedious systems surrounding it. I'm hoping for World PvP in this form to make a serious comeback in future expansions, though the Post-BFA "peacecraft" narrative has gained lots of traction with the PvE/RP purist playerbase, stoking staunch anti-faction PvP sentiment and as a result, causing the devs to pull support/resources from WPvP that were gaining steam to instead implement the free-for-all WPvP areas we see in DF, rendering WPvP soulless and unengaging.

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 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.

Another great video. It's nice to see your feelings echo similar to mine.

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.

Honestly outside of the feeling that I always had to be going at 100% or fall behind, I liked BFA a lot. It was the only time I got really into pvp and I really enjoyed the dungeons especially Mechagon.

BFA was a slightly worse Legion. It had a lot of content just like legion. Apart from the end and the fact that each story lasted not as long as it should be, the story(ies) was(were) pretty good. The game should get harder as you level up, so I never understood that argument in BFA, and it's the same even to this day and it was the same up to and including Cataclysm. Azzerite gear was a less interesting version the legendary weapons, but they were good. And I never grinded AP, be it in Legion or BFA and I still had no problem doing Heroic Raids and M+10/15 dungeons. Essences and Corruptions were great. The daily/weekly activities in BFA were good, you didn't have to do everything. Warmode is good. The Dungeons were awesome, almost as good as Legion's but not quite, nor WoD's. Raids were fantastic though, I'd say on par with Legion, but no quite WoD level. Class design was as good as Legion, as it was the same, you just didn't need the legendary weapon. Island Expeditions were fun, both PVE and PVP. Warfronts were too easy, otherwise they would have been fun for more than the first few runs. Allied Races were and are pointless imo. Horrific visions were awesome, single player/co-op instanced content is a must for every expansion IMO.

Edd, this is quality content. You deserve a few thousand more subs!

I really liked doing the visions and the zones, dungeons and raids were really cool but azerite gear was a constant frustration and the classes felt a bit gimpy coming from the legion prune and no more legendary. the visions required too much busy work to get into them as well, farming for the currency etc

Patch 8.3 was one of my all time favorites, corruptions + gemming all your gear was insanely fun.

After 7 years I came back to BFA, I actually really enjoyed the bfa world: aztec and fairytale (theramore). Pvp felt awful. Wasn't fan of azerite power either.

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.

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

The only problem with BfA was the implementation of azerite armor and the heart of azeroth grind, forcing you to do mandatory content

Bfa for all its faults, was the last time i really tried in the game. Came back when the second raid released. Located my old legion guild, who moved to area 52 , and had fun progressing with them. And towards the end with essence and corruption gear, i was having a blast. Shadow lands pushed me out .

amazing video. nice job!

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.

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.

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.

BFA was pretty dope imo I loved it, the lore was mostly shit but I don't play for the lore anymore

i absolutely hated bfa, until we got the corruption gear it was really cool, and the m+ affix with the obelisks was fun too

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.

Entirely disagree with personal loot. personal loot is way better and i think most people didnt not have a problem with it. I saw more of a backlash when they returned master loot. Totally agree with najatar and nyolotha. they should have been their own expansion. its so sad....same with argus in legion

As a casual I like bfa a lot, one of my favorite expansions. It has the best zones in all expansions.

Yeah a whole nyalotha old gods expansion would've been my wish but a zone would have been also nice. Craming it just into one raid seems like so much wasted pontential.

One of my favourite expansions, I loved the story, the maps and allied races.

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.

All i remember is that BFA felt like going to a second job having do all chores before reset

Just hearing the story of BFA.. its so much in one freakin expansion no wonder ot delivers so bad. But it was amazing and I still love BFA. BFA has in my opinion best music zones and zone storys and the leveling experience was amazing.

I think this is an easy expansion to love in hindsight when you just look at the overall amount of content given, but the biggest problems with it at the time were things that were slowly patched out and things that were made irrelevant by patch and expansion cycles. The horrible slow molasses feeling some classes had with with the GCD changes are something that most people won't remember and are hard to understand how bad it felt to play if you didn't experience at it's worst at the time, but it's definitely a reason why this expansion sucked donkey schlong at its release and is a mistake I don't want them to make again. I think it was a particulaly bad miss-step because one of the best things about WoW especially in comparison to FF and the other big MMO's right now is how much more fast-paced the combat is and yet this almost single handedly ruined that for a short time. A lot of the early class changes were negative and made some classes and specs like shadow priest poopy. Shaman was an irrelevant class almost the entire expansion. I felt like Paladin aside, classes were close to perfect in Legion only to see unnecessary hefty nerfs and almost no complaints addressed except for druids in BFA, who get everything they ever want or complain about intstantly fixed and always have at least two specs that are brokenly overpowered for the past eight expansions. All of that was coupled with losing our artifact weapons/their powers, legiondaries, and class sets. So that they they could be replaced with artifact gear which was extremely underwhelming by comparison. I feel the better half of this expansion's story was the Alliance side with Jaina and her overall development as a character but since only five people collectively on servers that aren't Moonguard play Alliance almost no one saw this and they instead saw the slow building trainwreck that was the Slyvanas story crashing into the next expansion. I think Warfronts were a terrible idea from the outset and there was no real way to salvage them, Im not even exactly sure what the concept with these was supposed to be from a gameplay standpoint other than a PVE battleground, which is just a dumb idea to begin with. Island adventures and Torghst which was basically the same thing, could have been great if Blizzard embraced the Rogue-like games they were trying to emulate with these but they never really let us feel overpowered and "lucky" in the way a true Rogue-like could, so it just felt like a boring slog in both cases with none of the benefits of those types of games. One of the biggest things I hated about this expansion that almost no one ever mentions is the effect that party sync had on PVP they never really balanced this at all and it was almost a forgone conclusion that you were going to lose if you saw a high-level party synced character on the other team, oh but Blizzard did "balance" things by destroying the twink community that was starting to get big around this time with XP-Off. I'm glad they punished players that put in hours of effort getting specific gear, enchants, and gems for a small advantage in certain level brackets, only to elevate some idiot whose sole reason for being unbalanced was that he was party-synced with his wife or his little brother. As someone who used the XP-buff and the double PVP trinkets to level characters back then and had to see this on a near daily basis for months... Yeah, I hate party-sync and I'm still bitter.

BFA was the most fun I've ever had in the game. The zones and questing are out of this world. Probably tied with Legion for best expansion.

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.

the azerite armor was a horrible idea. but Kul Tirans!

Just the fact that this video is 1 hour long, because it takes that long to go over the story, the crazy amount of system reworks each patch, the progression , etc lol. They (blizzard) just could not figure this expansion out

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.

I loved BFA. Some things weren't great, of course. Azerite armor was a disappointment, and not having account-wide unlocks on essences made alts annoying. Warfronts were a missed opportunity. But I thought the story was great, and the dungeons and raids were all really fun to play and replay. Battle of Dazar'Alor and Ny'alotha are wonderful raids, in particular, and the little two-boss raid in the middle was a challenging treat. Mechagon was great, Waycrest was great, Atal'dazar was great. Just lots of awesome content. I think BFA really only sucked if you were a min-max type who wanted to have the highest power character. "The benthic armor grind sucked." Sure, but you could just not do that and then Naz'jatar was great. "Doing thouands of islands sucked." Sure, but you could just do one or two a week for your weekly and that felt fine. You'd still have a big heart, just not quite as big as others'. The design philosophy in a lot of BFA was to lock ever-smaller bits of power behind ever-larger amounts of tedium, so that people who wanted to do more could get rewards for doing so, but they wouldn't dramatically outpace everyone else. But this just made it so degens broke themselves on the game. (This dynamic was present in Legion, too, people just weren't sick of it yet.)

Idk why is there a Shadowlands story recap at the start. We didn't know all that at the time of BfA. Thanks for the video anyway, made me remember those times. Blizz actually found a way to improve the Battlefronts - they made a heroic mode. It was more challenging and kinda fun, you could really lose. Overall I enjoyed playing in BfA. I liked local storylines and farmed new Alliance/Horde-themed and NE/Undead-themed armor sets. World PvP was kinda exausting, but fun enough and I managed to get a 1000 kills achievement. But much later it became quite a chore. I skipped the 8.3 content almost entirely. I think it felt quite hard at the time, time-consuming, there were no teleports to new zones and most of all, I didn't collect all the stuff at the previous zones yet. When I skipped Shadowlands and tried to play at Dragonflight (didn't buy the expansion) I found out that only dungeons you can queue as a level 60 were again, BfA ones. Thanks but not again, I did them enough times already. Also, "oh crap not Azerite gear again". And you also could get loot that is not meant for your class, so it was totally useless waste of time.

idk, was kinda one of my fav expansion. i came to wow after like 5-6 years and everything was so new that it was fun. i had a lot of fun in bfa.

I remember doing 40 hours of epic BGs because it was impossible to win one, ah fun times...

My issue was the very idea of it. The whole of Azeroth had just cone together to put a stop to the legion... Then its an immediate war where everyone wants to kill each other again. It just fekt weird to me.

I loved BfA. But mostly cuz I raided mythic My mom still listens to daughter of the sea

coming off the legion high, bfa definetly didn't hit the mark in many player's eyes. even i am the member of that club but man, after playing it from day 1 to the last weekly reset, i'll admit i enjoyed it very very much. not as much as legion ofcourse but it was a solid expansion. it had it's nice moments

i liked azerite armor a lot. had so much potential.

I have to say: BfA had the biggest number of cool cinematics tho :>

Before i watch the video so my opinion is not biased It's a hard one for me. Been playing since Vanilla, stopped mid cata up to mid (well almost big update) WoD for studies and my account was stolen during that time so i had to start fresh and it was a good experience. I didn't enjoy WoD too much because i was basically solo playing but in Legion I started raiding and doing M+ a lot with a good prog guild. For BfA my laptop that i used to play got stollen and came back just for the launch of Nazjatar and oh boy, i hated it. They wasted so much potential on story, the grind overall was awful and made me hate parts of the game. Ny'alotha was fine as a raid but they also wasted the potential and did bad with N'zoth (i still hate we just kamehameha it/him) The neck? Awful, hated the entire stuff related to it, azerite powers, armor, corruptions, awful design that made raiding elitist because you didn't have X power at X level. PvP? A joke, one shoted because of corruptions (was able to get 1800+ on the last 2 seasons and just stopped after the rewards). M+? As a warr tank was an insult being able to solo a +15 with the 90% haste i had plus powers and stuff. The grinds were insanely bad, too many chores, too many reps, weekly stuff that by the end was not fun and i loved doing weekly stuff before that. Even flying was a struggle compared to legion or even WoD (and i hated getting that last one). I got burned from playing and even my guildies did, to the point that some of them carried that to SL and when we realized it was another grind/chore fest (i look at you thorgast) we lost around 70% of our players on my guild because they couldn't keep up and didn't enjoy the game, and that's one of the things that still hurts the most. I like some of the things from DF but still too much "friendship and magic" so i'm gonna leave it at that... The only "good point" i can say is that we had a few good stories, Jaina, Saurfang and what could have been a great war (that sadly didn''t deliver) Oh well, time to go farm some xmogs and mounts..wait! we still can't because some bosses are still not soloable so no fun yet with BfA ¬¬

Early BFA was crap af. This was the first time where leveling up felt like retardation of your character because you were leaving all these Legion-specific borrowed power systems behind to be replaced with... uh, nothing! Azerite armor was not balanced well on launch. Nasty AP grind (again!), crap talents that were mainly more mastery, more damage, more crit... Late BFA was good and fun to play though. I played 8.3 quite a lot and enjoyed that patch. Lots of content, corruptions were fun, raids were fun, specs were fun to play. Essence accountification came out far too late though and carried high cost of that too. Very alt unfriendly period. I played just my main and that was already a big time investment to minmax it and pad numbers. This is kinda sad because it was an expansion with the largest amount of content ever released I think. It had like 5 raids and 12 dungeons? Something actually crazy.

I feel like I had a very different raiding experience. Ny'alotha and Eternal palace were terrible raids in my opinion with Azhara being one of the worse final boss fights ever designed.

It gave us the best jaina look...

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 LOVE BFA AND IM NOT AFRAID TO SAY IT! I EVEN LIKED AZERITE ARMOR! I have been wanting to say that for years but have been afraid to say so. Oh and I LOVE WARFRONTS! It was great to get near full M0 gear and jump into M+ : )

I enjoyed BFA. I dont do hardcore stuff in wow. I really enjoyed the questing and the world

For quite a while now, I felt like WoW's "Lore" makes no sense at all. This is for once due to allot story NOT BEING EXPERIENCED IN THE GAME but instead in dime-store novellas. The whole Shadowlands Lore was for me... trash, as where the areas for the most part. It feels like the whole thing was made anti-flying. In WoD people wanted to fly and Blizzard didn't want them to fly, but had to give in. After Legion, which was still one big island, they made BfA that is split, separated by a loading screen, seemingly to influence flying, Shadowlands is split into 5 itsy bitsy islands... anti-flying pure. But apart from that, the areas didn't make sense. You have on one side some a mix of Winged Angels and Titan constructs, then a place that seems like undead with Frankensteinian monsters, a place of nature and lastly one of Blood and Aristocracy. One thing I really dislike at WoW, is the fact that there is so much content, but only very few of it you can run on a daily base. While in FF14 you can run ALL DUNGEONS everyday the way they where meant to be run, in WoW only a small selection is actually available. What they should do, is create for EVERY expansion and the base game a Timewalking event, and then have one active each week. And I hated the Seasonal Affixes.

I think the models and areas were gorgeous as were a few of the quest stories but the gameplay elements were horrendous and after stripping everyone's kits and power/class fantasies to nothing after Legion huge L.

Imo the biggest problem of the expac is that all the cool big set-piece events happened before the expansion. Burning Teldrrisil and Seige of Undercity should of happen IN the expansion. Instead we are wandering around random places to bolster forces for a war we couldn't take place in. There was no war for the players and instead of setting place in the places we are meant to be fighting over, we are off on new side islands. With this kind of poor setup, it was never going to be that good, espcially since the war ended 10.1

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.