BFA feels less like an expansion and more of a mishmash of various content and mechanics you'd see blizzard experimenting with in expansion patches, and not all of it really works in their favor. if that analogy makes any sense at least.

combine that against a backdrop of the horde/alliance conflict that blizzard still has no earthly idea how to write, and you easily have one of the most irritating expansions i've had to sit through in WoW's lifespan.

that being said, the main questlines for Zandalar and Kul Tiras are actually pretty solid; it's rare for me to play both horde AND alliance to experience both sides of the story. but the war campaign, nazjatar questing, and so much else? god

clown all you want on vashj'ir, at least it's less painful to go through that zone than nazjatar is without flying.

Sylvanas Windrunner’s character evolution is quite the spectacle. Fifteen years of tragic character development and deep motivations in the mind of a sinister general capable of planning some of the most heinous acts of indecency in war. Then tossed out for three years’ worth of female empowerment. The Banshee Queen has been uplifted from a background plotter who worked her way around the eyes of those who held her back to maneuver herself into a position favorable to her people, in to the Warchief of the Horde she has historically cared little for. Kind of. She still puts her people, the undead citizens of Lordaeron, above the other races. Except when she doesn’t.

Look, Sylvanas’ character development could go either way. It wouldn’t be crazy to say she’s a maniac who wants nothing more than to blight the world, and ensure her people’s survival. At the same time, it’s not impossible that she could have a change of heart and learn what the Horde symbolizes in Warcraft. But Blizzard just doesn’t seem to fucking know what they want to do with her, and give off some of the most whack mixed messages I’ve ever seen. And unfortunately, being a hot, undead, Elven dominatrix means she can get away with just about anything because of the inevitable legion of fanboys she’s got. Thankfully, even the fanbase seems to be waking up to her, and when your playerbase is autistic enough to actually protest her in-game so much that you’ve got to give them the opportunity to betray her, it should be a sign that maybe you’ve gone just a bit off the deep-end with this character.

The end of WoW as we know it.

Playing through this expansion (although I dropped it before the final patch), there is a sense that WoW is no longer an MMORPG. It is now a "multiplayer dungeon crawler".

Playing this it became obvious no one wanted to do anything anymore. Unless you Role Play, there is no server community. It's dead. Everything is automated either through an interface, like dungeons and raids or via buying it in the in-game shop that's shoved into your face at seemingly every moment (that's selling level boosts and gold). This expansions latest addition "Cross Realm Raids" (with the cross-realm group finder), where you can find a group made up of people from all realms, only made this worse. "Cross Realm Raids" were another half-hearted attempt to address dying servers, when the solution a decade ago was to just simply hard merge the servers which Blizzard won't do. Since they need the extra cashflow of people transferring to the few populated servers left.

Blizzard meanwhile are seemingly perfectly happy about this. Why would they care about subscription numbers when you can now buy gold and pay to get boosted through the latest endgame content? The game pretty much became "pay-2-win" via the WoW Token and the "boosting culture" that has developed.

Being in a guild is literally pointless unless you're Role Playing or are in one of the Mythic Raiding guilds selling boosts.

There's also Mythic+. 5-man content that blizzard wants to replace raids by the looks of it, given how many players that would ordinarily push for higher difficulty raids decide to just grind out mythic+ instead. This content feels hollow and the antithesis of what WoW once, that being joining up with many more people in "epic" scale content of a massive amount of people.

These "meta" issues with the expansion aside, the expansion content isn't particular great. For the never ending story that feels like its been going on far longer than it should have, the premise seemed fine. A faction war, although we already had that from Wrath-MoP, but this time they seem serious about it by blowing up player cities. The execution is where it falls apart. As Blizzard struggle to write new characters without them being cringe inducing self-inserts of the writers like Nathanos or desperately clinging on to legacy characters, while contradicting their aim in this by killing more of them off. With that said, I did rather like Jania here, who always been one of the better story characters. The quests themselves are very mid or downright forgettable, as are the zones. The Kul'Trias city is rather nice however. The dungeons are also mid or downright bad such a MOTHERLOAD!, which is a contender for the worst dungeon in the entire game across all expansions.

As for the features we have Warfronts, which is the pointless and disappointing feature ever added. What was presented as a PvP MOBA battleground turned out to be a PvE weekly where you get free loot. It's nigh-impossible to lose and it being PvE is totally baffling. It's not fun to play in itself and seems completely wasted. Another feature is island expeditions, which aren't all that interesting.

With all these complaints I would rate this game a 2/10, or 3/10 but Mechagon was this expansions saving grace. The "mega-dungeon" was fun to play through with interesting raid-quality boss fights and the zone itself, while grindy, was not all that bad. I am rather bias in favour of it due to the theming, but it really is the highlight of the otherwise terrible expansion.

Nazjatar meanwhile was a horrible zone. Not fun to navigate one bit, the raid was also just tedious with boss mechanics having now become completely catered towards Ultra-Hardcore raiders. Long gone are the days of fairly simple raid bosses and now every raid boss has like 30-40 tactics. The complexity bloat really makes the barrier to entry nigh-impossible for higher difficulties. As learning an entire raid is like trying to learn a "Grand Strategy game" with the amount of "revision" needed to navigate around even 1st or 2nd boss. Most players will just stick to lower difficulties where 3-4 people can carry a 20-man group and hoping they'll be randomly matched with such players in LFR or the "cross-realm group finder".

In conclusion. BFA is WoW's gravestone and it only gets the generous rating I give it because Mechagon was one of the best instances Blizzard had made in literally years.

Modern WoW puts profit above player, with inflexible timegates compounding with a pricey subscription fee to keep players playing as long as possible to maximise profit. Azerite and corruption gear compounded on the already grindy and RNG-driven gearing system to the frustration of players, while the story constantly rambles in odd tangents. With the top DPS classes doing almost double the damage of the bottom ones, extremely simple rotations and inflexible builds, endgame combat is more of a gear check than a skill-based one. On the positive side, some of the soundtrack is quite good.

i almost feel like this is the complete opposite of WOD, back there we had no content but the small pieces of it were amazing (raids and leveling) here you have plenty of things to do but they all sucked fucking ass except raids... not ny'alotha, that sucked ass + we got the second worst ending in expansions, first one belongs to shadowlands, also even here we had content drought and they managed to fuck up lore, something that they never did was making lore bad, they did it here.

amazing effort.

Man. This had promise. But it was just so crammed with shit.

They should have just focused on either the Old Gods or the Fourth War. Not both!

Shit story, horrible dungeons. Even the raids were lackluster. Ny'alotha was fucking horrid and is hands down the worst raid in Warcraft along with N'Zoth was the worst boss EVER!

This is definitely where the Activision Era kicked in and Blizzard just became a shell of its former self. The worst expansion by far. Even Shadowlands is more decent than this shit.

Kul Tiras and Zandalar are banger zones though.

This is an expansion that really dropped the ball imo. Borrowed power systems came to be hated because of this cause back in legion they were new and fresh. The heart of azeroth sucked, azerite gear SUCKED, the story (mostly) sucked though I did enjoy the saurfang plot a lot. PvP gearing was ATTROCIOUS like whos idea was it to remove vendors srsly?? Most of the zones I wasnt a huge fan of other than Drustvar, loved that place. Even warfronts were a letdown with the exception of cool mogs and mounts to farm. Honestly the most fun I had in this xpac was corruptions in 8.3, the overpowered mess that patch was was lowkey a blast, especially in arena. The dungeons were pretty g too not gonna lie. Except underrot, fuck that place.

I stopped playing WoW after 10 years because this expansion was a huge disappointment after Legion. They took a page from WotLK and reinvented it on Legion, awesome stuff but for some reason, after getting almost everything right on the previous expansion, they decided to backpedal to all the Warlords of Draenor/Mist of Pandaria/Cataclysm bullshit. The whole expansion feels disjointed and awkward. And reminder: it costs 14$/month + expansions. That's a full game on Steam every month plus a AAA game every 2 years, so you are giving them around 200 USD every year. We all should expect way better from the so called "best MMORPG of all time" that costs an outrageous amount of money. I don't think it's worth it anymore.