I started wow in legion so I wanna ask from a veteran if the earlier xpacs were really that better.
Matter of opinion, but in my case - yes, definitely. One of my favorite things to do in game is collecting things - particularly transmog, and getting class sets was wonderful for me. Or in Legion, I absolutely wanted every single artifact appearance I could. Or getting rare and unique mounts. BfA lacks thatā¦ luster. It feels fewer, lacking.
Not that previous expansions were without flaws. The random legendaries in Legion comes to mind. Yet, even in what I found to be the most flawed expansion I played through - Warlords of Draenor - there was still reasons for me to log in every day and a lot of enjoyment from the conflicts in the story we had.
ā¦But BfA, in contrast, just feelsā¦ boring. I know itās not burnout, since I still like to get on and do older content. Current content has no excitement or thrill for me. My factionās been āthe bad guyā all expansion, moreso than usual, while the Alliance have had to suffer through just letting it all happen despite having the power in-canon to prevent it, because of poor writing. Meanwhile, thereās not a whole lot for me to collect or enjoy. Plus - the wholeā¦ Azerite gear nonsense, which is straight-up NOT FUN. Iāve been playing other things for the majority of this expansion. Iām looking forward to Shadowlands, regardless, since a lot of the systems in that expansion LOOK like theyāll āworkā, at first glance.
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BfA is Legion but slightly worse and people generally liked Legion. The hate isnāt totally without warrant, but itās incredibly exaggerated. Probably some form of burnout since itās so similar to Legion tbh.
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Battle for Abilities cut a lot of corners.
Class design, professions neglected, a lot of activities are not rewarding. Player time is not respected, etc.
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Battle for Loot, the RNG Saga.
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I got 3 toons to 120 in BfA . I will probably just finish it out on this toon when the next patch comes out.
I am currently leveling alts with the anniversary bonus and xp potion from warfronts. As soon as a toon gets to the level to do BfA zones I bench it because I donāt have it in me to run another through BfA yet I look forward to going to Draenor (WoD) and starting in a different zone each time I get to the Legion zones.
I spent more time during 8.0 running around Broken Isles at 120 than I did in BFA zones because it ran out of stuff worth doing.
Thereās plenty to DO. But It goes out of its way to make nearly all of it worthless.
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Blizz thought they could trade Legendaries, Artifact Weapons, Artifact talents, and the Netherlight Crucible for Azerite gear. Thatās all you need to know.
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Right this
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the games are similar but bfa is just a lot worse than legion when you compare them, if you didnāt play either and checked systems youād think bfa came out first then legion came out after.
BFA suffers the WoD problem.
Lots of things to do but they are not rewarding relative to time investment. Remember apexis quests in WoD? Haha I think I was the only one that did them.
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Some of the main reasons
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Rng wrappped in rng wrapped in rng
Bop items to the max. This char has expulsom my engineering char would kill for.
And for me horde story, most forced game play ever for me. Even after backing saurfang you had 2 choices. Keep on being on being a war criminal. Orā¦donāt play on our horde chars.
Last item blizzard fixed for me. I have 3 horde who touched no bfa story. They are innocent of all charges. So I thank korrrack av for that.
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Patch 8.3 is going to cap this expansion with TRIPLE grinds.
And corruptforging has MORE RNG than warforged/titanforged. GG.
Enjoy having a corrupted item āupgradeā sit in your bag till you can farm enough anti corruption in time gated content. 
Donāt forget the global cool down debacle. ALL classes felt much more fun and complete to play in Legion - then they ruined it.
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GCD was forced in which is still bad. It puts more strain on tanks and healers.
And in PVP situations it is harder to avoid burst because of the GCD and trying to use defensives. Ironic because the GCD was forced in to stop cool down stacking in PVE/PVP. And yet the devs didnāt think about how the GCD impacted mobility and defensive use.
The devs eventually relented and moved some abilities and spells off the GCD but it wasnāt enough.
The story has been ugly, the players (us) have not been given any reason to feel great. It hasnāt been at all fun for me Main-ing Horde, and from the multitude of posts here, itās been no fun Main-ing Alliance.
The War succeeded in creating an awful divide between players, a lot of animosity here, and anger at the Writers for the way so many beloved Lore Characters have been decimated and tarnished.
Personally I have found the Game-play dull:
I donāt like Warmode at all; itās non-existent Horde side on Oceanic servers because the Alliance far outweigh our population, so, opposite to US servers, they dominate WM and make it virtually unplayable for Horde, all the while maintaining the expansion-long incentives and rewards to Warmode as Alliance. (Thanks for that, Blizz. Imagine if the Horde had been getting those incentives and rewards on US servers, while dominating WM against the Alliance!)
Iām sick of World Quests.
I hate the War Campaign.
I hate the way our Factions have been portrayed.
I have played since Vanilla, the first day the Game arrived in Australia. My two main accounts (I have five) have never unsubbed. Yet this expansion I came as close as I have ever come to unsubbing, I just hate BfA so much.
Thank goodness for old content, Achieves, collections, Transmog and Alts.
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The story is a big issues with BFA. But the story being drip fed like in Legion was a big mistake.
Nearly everything about BFA is excessive time gating and drip fed content.
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When I level a character I get literally nothing between 110 and 120. Right when I hit 120 my character is weaker than it was at 119 due to how scaling works and the fact that I wonāt have a high enough neck level to use azerite traits on gear.
In BC I remember being so excited to hit level 70 so I could use bloodlust on my shaman. Wotlk introduced deep freeze on my mage, which was a fundamental skill for pvp. It also introduced a new class.
I started playing WoW because I played warcraft 3, and BC/Wotlk lore were tied to wc3 lore. IMO the new lore is pretty convoluted and poorly written.
Our characters are too celebrated now, and it feels like there are more references to pop culture than actual warcraft lore in quests these days. When the cataclysm rework of the quests happened, it felt like they were designed to be ācuteā rather than meaningful. The new undead quest where you get to be a quest giver is a perfect example of this, as are the awful quests in redridge mountains.
I think pop culture references can and have been done tastefully (e.g. the dart sidequest in nazmir), but when large sections of the main quest are ripped straight from someone elseās work (heart of darkness), I donāt feel like Iām in the warcraft universe.
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To be fair, the Heart of Darkness ripoff was in the original STV too. Like, the whole zone is basically Vietnam.