Easily the worst expansion WoW has had to offer thus far, but nowhere near as awful as some claim.

Understandably, much of the criticism against BfA is wrapped up in the elements that make it an MMO. It launched a grindy nightmare and much of its post-launch lacks real content and mostly just exists for dailies/weeklies/world quests. Nazjatar and Mechagon both look awesome, but their questlines can be completed in an hour, yet most of the time you'll spend in either place is getting lost in their arbitrary grind. Nazjatar even went so far as to timegate the player by forcing them to complete Follower dailies in order to continue its questline. At least Mechagon just lets the player finish its questline, but even then, that place is immensely tiny and has a lot of wasted potential. Even Visions, which are admittedly quite fun, are entirely a grind. To even do a vision, you need to grind dailies/weeklies, and then within the vision itself, you're grinding for different currencies.

So yes, BfA is a grindy hellhole, especially for those who played it during its retail period. But thankfully, most of those things can be avoided for anyone who jumps in now. There's nothing to grind anymore; now you can just enjoy the content for what it is.

And as far as the actual content of BfA, it's mostly OK. The Horde questlines is the biggest offender, as those zones range anywhere from meh to OK. But all of the Alliance zones are solid and were actually a joy to explore.

Dungeons are overall OK. Some just feel redundant and unexciting, others are solid. Mechagon is a great dungeon, had an absolute blast with that one. Freehold is also lovely, but yeah, this expac probably has some of the weakest dungeons in WoW so far.

The Raids are where BfA really stands out to me. The Eternal Palace was an absolute joy, and the fight against Azshara is probably my favorite moment from this expansion by far. It's a great experience. All of the other raids are quite good too, and I really enjoyed how different they each felt visually and thematically.

The story in BfA is absolute dogshit. Besides from enjoying Jaina's questline, this writing is shockingly weak. The fourth war is a mess of poor character motives and unsatisfying conclusions. No, Blizzard, I don't believe the entirety of the Horde (and especially my character) would stand idly as Sylvanas commits genocide???

I actually quite enjoyed the Heart of Azeroth system. I can imagine it was pretty awful at launch, as grinding for it probably made it exhausting. But now, the experience to level it up is constantly being thrown at the player. I didn't have to grind at all to get it to level 80, and really enjoyed messing with all the unique abilities, passive, and armor modifiers it provided.

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Overall, BfA is a fine expansion. It clearly failed to be an exciting MMO, as all of its "never-ending" systems suck. But the dungeons are fine, the raids are really fun, and the Alliance side was quite fun to play through. Boralus is also an awesome city.

This expansion probably really sucked at launch, but it's not too bad to go back to now. And of course, the story is still awful and the post-launch content is 90% grind.

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.

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.

Disappointing on every front. In a weird way it's the inverse of WoD, which was an expansion people wanted to play but quite literally couldn't. BfA technically had so much content but ultimately created an experience that had you wanting to engage with none of it.

BfA really highlighted the unwieldiness of balancing external power systems with consistent content releases. Remember, Legion was only able to somewhat accomplish both by killing WoD in its tracks and siphoning its development time.

Tearing through 3 to 4 expansions worth of storylines and the resulting whiplash and unsatisfactory story beats also works against the game, but at the end of the day the miserable gameplay experience is what really drags it down.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Needed to mull over this one for a while for plenty of reasons. Mostly my perspective coming into it, as hot off the heels of FFXIV that I was and with that game being my sole expectation of MMOs I decided to play pretty much every popular one under the sun thinking "yeah i'm into FFXIV so I must be into the genre." That and my SO played WoW since TBC, having put it away somewhere in the early patch cycle of BfA. She loves the series still, and keeps up to date to everything, and also her conversations of the stories she's made for herself in the fantasy world was strictly appealing to me. So I came in thinking well, nothing but the best. Add that to me coming in 'right' as Blizzard put in their New New Player Experience and I felt like I would be right at home.

If you have played WoW or tried getting into it recently then the end result will come as no surprise to you. But the scope of talking about pretty much everything deeply WRONG here is so massive and wide to where I understand how just talking about WoW in its current form requires such a historical and veteran perspective. In my spoiled brain I can only vent about the multitudes of anguish and information overload trying to parse several different types of content, all of which were mindlessly tedious to explore.

I guess to start the new island is as good as an intro as you can get to this. You get dumped into a very restricted world and taught very very basic fundamentals about your class mechanics and a very easy dungeon plus light worldbuilding and introduction to what exactly the fuck is happening. And while I didn't enjoy it, it's moodsetting.

But the sheer vertigo that happens after you leave there? Words cannot describe the world design transition. It's like walking out of a dark cupboard and then seeing a whole WORLD of everything fighting for your attention alongside quality of life features missing entirely by design. Walk slowly and head empty from place to place, picking up quests and doing what basically surmounts to bizarre grinding. Do your own research and realize that not only do you have to have 10+ some-odd add-ons to make your experience even slightly tolerable because Blizzard does not give a shit, but also that still won't save you from reaching pain points and having to take a gamble that it was either a) something by design, b) actually a major bug they didn't patch cuz blizzard doesn't finish their games here which i guess is also by design, or c) fixable but you had to go through a few wikis to realize the error and a couple guides and then you'll wonder why that was never taught or On by default.

And Battle for Azeroth is just a terrible first expansion for people to be forced through to reach endgame. Just mercilessly boring areas and the only half decent one is also a "whoops you're actually AGAINST the ghosts trying to fight back because their lands were being taken and being systemically genocided". Things are so lined with bile, and once you actually do reach endgame you'll still be required to gear up with even more of a grind because those quests were absolutely not designed to furnish a new player with wings. And to put a hammer to it all, once I'd gotten through all of that and made it with all my gear unlocked, shadowlands released the same day and the LFR for BfA raid stuff was just gone for me, never to return until well, just recently this patch. Honestly a good bit, but a deep shade of paint of what WoW really is. Driven by adamant hate for what's been juxtaposed with what has to keep going, a shell attempting to put whoever's left into a skinnerbox before rewarding, finally, with treats of endgame. I'm sure Mythic+ and certain other tangential aspects are worth it to some, but after the gauntlet I have now ran out of interest. One of the worst experiences of the last year for me, by miles.