I will start by stating this post is intended to be a lengthy, thorough review of the systems that were introduced in BFA, (some that have carried over from Legion) and how they have evolved, where they have fell short, and everything in between.
Let’s start with the expansion launch hype features, those being allied races, island expeditions, warfronts, warmode and azerite armor.
Island expeditions have their place, but I feel like as the expansion has progressed, these are more of a chore than content most players get excited about doing. By far the most efficient way to farm azerite on a weekly basis, but unless you are just hoping for some rare mount drop or transmog, there is very little appeal to do these aside from the chunks of azerite, and I suppose reputation gained from completing the weekly. Sure, they added vendors to burn dubloons on, but this feature now seems only targeted by alts to try to catch up neck levels. The islands themselves are just not what myself, and probably others thought they would be. They seem to be just themed instances full of random rare spawns and quests to just accelerate how quickly you hit your azerite cap and end the instance scenario. There is very little challenge, even on mythic and the use of AI pvp bots is just poorly implemented. I understand this is solo content, and designed to be another something for players to do, and doesn’t necessarily need to be challenging, but overall I think islands missed the mark. (This will become a trend)
Moving on to allied races, I can say that I was completely uninterested in more races. I had done the work already in Legion to unlock the first sets of available ones, and did so once they became available, but I can’t help but be aggravated that something that was a huge marketing push for the expansion was gated behind reputation walls for prior and current content. Z Trolls and KT Humans weren’t even open until months into the expansion. I can see how and why players who purchased with excitement about these races became upset about their pathway to playing them. We are a year in, and there may/may not be more allied races coming, but I fear the walls that will be gating these from players that will want to have access to them. Personally, I am not one who is thrilled about the prospect of more races to play, especially when some have just been reskins of existing races. I WOULD get behind the concept of allied races if they came up with a way to give races class unique abilities, similar to how dwarf priests had fear ward. undead priests had touch of weakness and devouring plague, night elfs had star shards, etc. Perhaps to make allied races, and all races, more interesting would be to take some of the (excessive) pruned abilities from classes and grant them as a racial ability for each class.
Next up is Warfronts, and I feel this had potential, but again, it just feels like this feature absolutely missed its mark. When I saw warfronts featured I was looking forward to PvP based content that actually mattered somehow in terms of available content to the factions, something like wintergrasp in WotLK. What we got was an absolute afk-able faceroll instance ‘scenario’ that is PvE based, and about 15 minutes longer than it needs to be. Honestly, if these were just shifted to PvP 20v20, I feel that alone would improve them drastically. With the faction conflict being re-ignited post Legion, I don’t see how they made content called Warfronts NOT be PvP baseline.
That brings me to Warmode. Perhaps this was implemented because of some technical behind the scenes bandaiding because of instance sharding, but I dont understand what was wrong with either being on a PvP server, or a PvE server. Warmode has made a lopsided faction balance even more lopsided, and it has created silly phasing issues while grouped with others. (Think how many times you said “We need one more with warmode on at the stone to summon because Joe Blow has WM off and I have WM on”). It has only served to assist the faction with greater numbers in a particular location. Yes, this happened on PvP servers all the time, but I had no incentive to have PvP flagged on. It was on because I enjoyed pvp, not because I want 10 or 25% more experience/AP for something as simple as toggling on an option.
Finally, we have Azerite Armor. I think the design angle here was to compensate for the loss of tier sets and Artifact weapons by giving players a variety of options to choose for traits and abilities. First of all, rental gear systems like Artifact weapons and AZ armor just need to go away. The maddening thing about azerite armor is all during Beta testing, the feedback was loud and clear that this system was lackluster. It created yet another AP grind, and the value of traits and trait stacking was just locking so many specs into either stacking one trait or only being on par with other classes with the ‘right’ trait setup. There will always be min/maxing as long as logs, damage meters, parse heroes exist. But the discrepancy in trait values, EVEN NOW is just staggering. It is exactly like Legion in a sense that you either had the 2 ‘best’ legendaries or you didnt. This is not engaging character development or progression. You get lucky, or you don’t, and since you have to do some lengthy stockpiling of essence to target your best item from a vendor, most players will acquire maybe one of their ‘BiS’ az peices by patch end, and only the extremely hardcore or dedicated will have 3.
I feel like this has devolved into a bashing of the systems, but if I’m being frank, I think it is deserved criticism. Systems that on paper had so much promise, in practice are just lackluster.
What are your thoughts?
Edited for grammar, and probably missed some.
