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.

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.

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.