BFA was more aesthetically pleasing, SL is gross and it is uber annoying that flying is out, yet I still have to use a flight master between zones.
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Not like you didn’t have to use a travel master for BfA either.
Oh wait…
Sarcasm aside, I find that I don’t end up wanting/needing to switch zones all that often, and the flight between the zones is a non-issue when you can cut half of it off with a quick Dalaran Stone->Portal Jump to Oribos. It’s what, like 30-45 seconds? Enough to get up and get a drink, run to the bathroom, etc and come back and you’ll be sitting at your destination and ready to go.
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Hot take: BfA was good in 8.1.0. Mechagon was good and an exemple of how a great self contained side content zone can be made. All six new zones are great and visually stunning (Vol’dun being the weakest imo). That’s it. These three aspects are the only highlights of BfA. Everything else was worse than similar content in previous xpacs.
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Vol’dun was kind of bland in the looks department, but then what can you really do with badlands and desert that hasn’t already been done? They tried, though, with the Temples buried in the sand, and making them look and feel old, ancient, and abandoned and only populated by wastelanders.
However.
Vol’dun was…
1). Less annoying to travel around than the other zones (which was a huge plus)
2). It’s quests had you doing far less travel to get from group of quests to group of quests (another huge plus)
3). Concentrations of aggressive mobs are mostly centered around certain points.
These points are what Vol’dun does right where most of the other zones, don’t. The other zones fail at one or more of the above points, despite them aesthetically looking nicer.
Also, Mechagon? I would have liked that place if they had designed its mechanics a bit better. Maybe toned down the mob density a bit, maybe make it so that everybody can pick up every box, once per day, randomize which boxes are up at any given day (so you aren’t searching high and wide only to see a box disappear 2 seconds before you click on it on those days that want 6 boxes).
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I didn’t like BFA at all but it was miles ahead of Shadowlands.
At a bare minimum, there were parts of the story that weren’t outright nonsensical - it didn’t actively make the underpinning lore of the game worse.
Gameplay wise, it was every bit the crapshow SL is imo; we’re just another level of exponentiation deep in antagonism now.
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To be honest, though, every character I’ve taken to Korthia and gotten at least half of the equipment slots filled with Korthia gear, I find that classes feel way better now than they did in BfA.
I remember in BfA, asking myself “when does this get fun?”, partly because everything was balanced around upkeep of your HoA (which I slacked on hard, because of the lack of skips for alts) and grinding/finding/etc the correct doodads to stick in the slots later in the patch. Also, the azerite slots on gear being such a huge impact on your character’s performance, which was all up to RNG blew hard too. At least Soulbinds/Conduits aren’t RNG once found, you unlock em, and slot the ones you want.
Also, Korthia’s mobs might be a little overtuned, but they aren’t downright annoying AF as Nazjatar was. Well, ok, shardhides suck for anybody lacking in self-heals. But eh. I don’t go there unless I must and I just join in on others’ kills to get credit.
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You know your expansion is bad when “bfa is a 1000 times better than you remember”
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Heading to Zuldazar for the first time was definitely more impressive than seeing Oribos.
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BfA (and WoD before it) is kinda like a girl – looks are only skin deep, gotta get to know her and find her personality out.
BfA did well on the hype and the looks, and the intro when you arrived in Zuldazar but quickly falls apart once you actually get to know it.
SL’s Maw Intro is kinda like that girl that you knew who wasn’t gonna win any beauty contests, but dang if she isn’t the nicest, sweetest most supportive loyal girl around who would cook all of your meals and have the house all cleaned up for you when you came home from work, or would have if you’d only gotten to know her instead of chasing after the good looking ones, at least by comparison anyhow.
Obviously other expansions (esp. Legion and moreso MoP) were much better.
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Ill go even further OP…I think every expansion was better than SL including WoD
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Ehh…
That’s a hard No.
SL is better than WoD.
WoD gave us Farmville Garrisons, and the beginning of the “Raid or Die” philosophy behind WoW’s core design. You either raided or you logged off after your daily FarmVille chores, and WoW still struggles with this problem to this day.
At least we have Korthia. It took 8 months for them to finally give us non-instanced daily open world content, but better late than never. I quit during WoD .0, but I was under the impression that Tanaan was in its final patch, which took way longer than 8 months?
And before Tanaan, there was like, no non-instanced content other than the apexis daily?
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I liked Asurite gear and i liked Corruption. Managing to get Infinite Stars on everything with the right Asurite trait combination and no corruption penalty was fun. But then I’m just a casual who likes to blow up things.
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The destination is fun, but the RNG-heavy journey is not unless you’re someone who loves gambling.
Not everybody loves gambling, though, especially a person who isn’t into that RL. I like consistent rewards, I like something I can gradually work towards. If I wanted to gamble, I’d go play some poker or something. I don’t want it in my game where I have to pray I get the right piece, pray it has the right azerite on it, pray the corruption abilities were good, blah blah blah.
No thanks.
The amount of RNG in WoW anymore is a huge turn-off to me, and it’s one of my #1 barriers to having fun in current WoW. Some RNG is necessary but when you start stacking RNG ontop of RNG, it’s time to say Enough and dial it back some and find ways to let the player have control over what they get in reward for their efforts.
Korthia is a step in the right direction – you find a piece of gear you like, and then you upgrade this gear through research at the upgrade NPC. This is consistent reward that’s controllable by the player. I don’t like how random the secondaries and the pieces you get, and what the dailies give, but eh. It’s better than what we had in BfA.
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We got a ton of new races and the essence system was very good indeed, i also really liked going into the Visions of N’zoth. Yep, I really enjoyed visions.
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I liked trolls and unlocking zandalari that along makes it better then shadowlands. I also played more in bfa then shadowlands. The only thing shadowlands did better was the first patch for the first couple of months.
Shadowlands has only given us some custimizations and nothing else. At least we got allied races in bfa
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Outside of maybe the Vulpera, Kul’tiran, and the Zandalari Troll if you were a druid, the allied races aren’t really all that good.
Most of them, from what I could tell by looking at the racial abilities are just reskins of other races with ‘meh’ abilities (and things that will get ignored later, like the Dark Irons’ Mole Machines (I notice there are none in Shadowlands).
I think that’s why they stopped making allied races, they realized that players were kinda rolling their eyes about the reskinned races that don’t have all that great of abilities (excluding, of course, Vulpera who have the best racials in the game).
BFA almost killed my Artistic passion especially after recovering from Legion, nothing wrong with the story overall, but it was when I discovered Death Knights have the class fantasy of a sore loser.
It’s even worse for Blood Death Knights since all of them died as Virgins and were damned to being greeting with hostility by every.
Sure the Frozen Runemaster and Necromatic Dreadblabes maybe losers but the Unchadly Blood DK out-performed them in receiving the “L”.
#PoorBDK 
SL is exactly same as BFA
BFA was exactly same as Legion
But in Legion everything was new and fresh, while now we’re doing same thing for third expansion in a row, it’s never been like this up to Legion. Every expansion was different.
Both suck and the suckness of BFA kept me from prepurchasing, preordering and buying Shadowlands; which appearantly also sucks so imagine my glee.
Joined the game first in TBC, probably more active now than I’ve been at any point except for MoP. Outside of pre-Pathfinder WoD, I’ve been subbed to this game non-stop during that time.
No, BfA wasn’t “1000x better.” BfA to me was like watching an overloaded airplane try to take off. It couldn’t get air under its wings enough to lift off the runway, so they’d have to shut it down and keep trying over and over. The only difference between the two to me was that BfA would go up and down depending on the patch, but it never gained altitude. SL’s best days were the two weeks immediately post-launch, before systems really became an important part of the game. It has gone steadily downhill since then (although the new raid has been fun to play through; I just can’t stand its overall story).
Basically BfA and SL have both tried to capitalize on the legendary weapon concept from Legion and failed terribly both times. While Legion had its issues for sure (dual-spec players got very locked out of progress for some time), overall the legendary weapon was one of the best concepts the game has had. It just couldn’t be spun out into similar systems despite the devs trying to do that. In the meantime, the story has gone absolutely into the gutter, beginning actually with the Argus patch of Legion, through BfA in its entirety, and into SL with the exception of the early-weeks covenant stories, specifically in Revendreth and Maldraxxus.