For me it is the fact that Nazjatar the zone does not involve the actual city of Nazjatar. Like imagine if Suramar did not have Suramar city in it. That is Nazjatar. Also the Eternal Palace needed to be longer. Eight bosses where two of them do not take place in the palace itself (Za’qul and Azshara) was not enough in my eyes.
100%. Honestly BFA should’ve ended with Eternal Palace. Have the Uldum, Vale stuff as the prepatch and have Ny’alotha as an expansion. Keep the “place beacons to triangulate N’zoths position for the re-origination device” plot but expand it for the whole expansion.
probably the worst timing of an expansion
lets go from order hall leaders flying on spaceships
to being ordered around by freshly raised night elves.
absolutely zero threat from the alliance all expansion, dazaralor was the only alliance attack past battle of lordaeron. battle for azeroth more like skirmishes on the south seas.
barrens raptors stealing silver in classic is more threatening to horde operations than the alliance in bfa
Absolutely. There are plenty of ways they could’ve had a whole Nazjatar continent with adequate zone diversity. And I think the worst part about Eternal Palace was that it didn’t feel at all like the place that Azshara, delightful queen that she is, would’ve spent millennia chilling out. Where’s the luxury and vanity? Outside of the water column she uses as a mirror in the sixth boss room, all we really saw were a bunch of big empty spaces designed for housing lots of trash.
BfA is the only expansion that ever actually made me want to stop playing. After the WoT dropped, I didn’t log in for two weeks. So that probably has to count as my least favorite moment, but a close second would be these lines from “The Negotiation”:
"That was the great lie upon which the Horde was founded—that anything we did was honorable… We could not fill the chasm between the Horde and Alliance if we labored for a thousand years.”
Not only did BfA completely destroy the Horde that I joined the game for, but it retconned it into never having existed in the first place. That’s when I checked out of the lore, and I’ve paid minimal attention to it since.
Saw the Tree Burn with Sylvanas standing in front of it in the Warbringer’s animation. Immediately thanked my guild for all the happy times, but I was getting off at the next stop. Never participated in the War of Thorns, missed out on the giant Pale Bat-gargoyle mount which looks great for a Forsaken, but that was the price of my integrity.
Didn’t return until the Forsaken Heritage quest came out.
The Burning of Teldrasil: It hit the Horde with the Villian bat. It hit the Alliance with idiot/incompetent bat. And it was completely unnecessary to stoke tensions between the factions.
The addition of too many plot lines: BFA was a mess of too many ideas thrown into one expansion and they simply didn’t work very well together or worse could have been entire expansions on their own.
Feeling like I was lied to: The cinematic for BFA was fantastic; arguably my favorite of all their cinematics to date. But the story that I saw and played through did not match the tone of that cinematic in any way.
While the mechanics were mostly good, here’s what I hated about BfA’s story;
-The Burning of Teldrassil
-Whitewashing Saurfang.
-Establishing Rastakhan as a great character and then killing him off right away.
-Sylvanas’ plot armor powers.
-Nathanos’ plot armor in the Terror of Darkshore campaign
-Making the faction war a morally imbalanced joke and abandoning it halfway through the expansion.
-Under-using Zul.
-The poor and inaccurate flip-flopping between “morally grey” and black and white morality (they couldn’t seem to tell which was which).
-The Mag’har recruitment scenario.
-Underusing Azshara.
-Wasting Ny’alotha as just a raid.
-N’Zoth’s death cinematic.
You nailed it. They promised us all “faction pride.” And then they gave us this. I am genuinely confused. Was this supposed to make me feel proud of my faction? Because I can tell you, it had the complete opposite effect.
I could list a hundred other things that I hated about BfA (Rastakhan’s death is a big one), but when it comes down to it, the thing I hate about it the most is it ruined the Horde. Permanently. There is no going back from this. I doubt I will ever be able to feel faction pride again. And Blizzard isn’t even trying to do anything about it. They shattered the Horde, but they don’t want to deal with the aftermath so they just keep ignoring it.
It is admittedly, highly subjective. Prior to BfA she was probably the most popular WoW character. Yes, even above Arthas and Illidan. Which means that a lot of WoW’s team loved writing her and, being as aloof as she is, there was a lot of room for them all to write her with different views of her beliefs and motivations. This of course echoes into the player base’s views of her.
For a lot of players, she was always irredeemably evil. For others, she pushed boundaries but always did so for the Horde or at least for the Forsaken. I fell into the latter camp.
Yeah, she punished Koltira but he was making truces with the Alliance without approval so I don’t care about him.
Yeah, she used blight, but I it never made sense that that’s the one weapon that violate’s Azeroth’s Geneva Convention so why should I care as long as it’s only used to melt Alliance flesh?
Yeah, she had her line to Garrosh about Arthas, but it obvious snark.
There’s no shortage of players who found her “For the Horde!” in the BfA cinematic to be genuinely inspirational. Metzen handed that to the rest of the team just for them to dump it in the trash.
However, with all that you said in mind, I think the issue is that what people wanted out of Sylvanas’s character is not necessarily what was put in. I think a lot of people wanted her to be all for the Forsaken and not even necessarily for the Horde except out of complete practicality.
Between “What are we if not slaves to this torment” and referring to the Forsaken as her bulwark against the infinite and arrows in her quiver I think it is fair to say that she hated her condition and probably hated the Forsaken as well because of what they represented. She didn’t find any elegant nobility in the suffering of undeath, she hated it only marginally less than having to go into the Bad Soul Corner with Arthas.
That isn’t to say she couldn’t come to different conclusions later through character growth. But in lieu of that, nothing she did is out of character for her. I think it is more fair to say that up until Shadowlands, people’s desires for Sylvanas’s character were ruined.
I mean, I obviously kept my Horde side characters going through the war campaign.
But man, the choice between being a slavering lunatic to people who had done very little to you with the plot laser focused on all the mess or a largely forgotten victim who was mostly there to feel sad about stuff… It was not my favorite.
I’m exercising some hyperbole, but seriously. The Horde got lots of attention, particularly with the war plots. It was just all mostly on how psychopathic it was, which was about as satisfying as being hit upside the head by a balloon full of lukewarm swamp water. And the Alliance spent most of the time on the moral highground, but like none dwelling on any consequences. A lot of the blueside plot avoided the Horde entirely, which was just… weird. Given what was happening.
It was a mess.
It absolutely took me away from both my Horde toons and my night elves, given how chronically unfun the experience was. And even now, my Horde mains are a Dracthyr and a sand troll, and my Alliance mains are… Well, dwarves.
I tried to avoid the war campaign entirely. I just wanted to focus on Zandalar and forget about the faction war. I ended up having to do it to unlock Zandalari trolls, but I refused to do it on my mains. I did it on an alt and felt disgusting the whole time. Zelling was probably the one highlight of the whole ordeal, and we all know how that turned out. The one good thing about the campaign and they wouldn’t even let us keep him.