Why do YOU dislike BFA?

Community General Discussion
123

I’d say the story telling. Game play changes like the wind so you have to roll with the punches. What you like today will be gone tomorrow and what you dislike will more than likely change in the future.

Back to the story. The story is what drive me to play “mostly”. What bugs me is we see a bit of the story then wait for months, get another bit wait a few months see some more. So it’s like watching a series and you watch about 3/4 of an hour every 2 to 3 months. After a while you don’t care or remember much of what was going on.

Maybe they should change up the story telling like a Quentin Tarantino movie. He gives you the story in an order to keep a person interested. Maybe they should just dump the whole story out in the first patch then the next bunch of patches give you the why. Then you get the story and over the next year and a half you go, “Ohhhhhhh, well that makes sense now.”

edit: reading the title I should clarify I do not dislike BFA, over all it is pretty good. It’s just the story telling that bothers me a bit.

124

I don’t dislike it. I thought I might, but overall, I’ve had fun with this xpac.

125

You’re a weird guy, Ace. Weird guy.

126

Azerite:
I don’t like a single thing about it. But what I hated the most was completing something in the game and seeing a sliver of Azerite as a reward. It felt like I was being insulted anytime I did something in the game.

And there is almost nothing you can do in BfA that doesn’t revolve around Azerite.

In the future, please don’t come up with one idea for an expansion and embed it into every aspect of the expansion. That way if it sucks, like azerite, people can still find things to do without it being everywhere.

One last thing on Azerite. It was absolutely stupid to present azerite to us as this rare and powerful resource yet, you cannot walk 10 feet without tripping over it. Azerite is the metallic version of tribbles.

5 Likes
127

THIS!!!

Just so boring.

1 Like
128

For me:

  • Losing all the bells and whistles from Legion felt bad. Some of it was fixed by new azerite powers, but not all. Legion classes weren’t better on launch too, but it was masked well later in the expansion by all the artifact and gear stuff. I wish they came back to the pre-Legion designs where classes didn’t depend on expansion gimmicks.

  • Catch up mechanics are way too aggressive, undermining any effort of foraying into any slightly more difficult content. Additional effort feels unrewarding. Essentially, there is no point to do anything except emissaries, because they will be upgraded to give heroic level gear even before the next tier comes out.

  • General trend of streamlining everyone into one path seems worrying. When I play WoW what makes me login every day, is looking towards something that I can do which is not what everyone else does. Even simple thing like PvP progression used to feel a choice, and used to give at least a bit of uniqueness when my character wore a conquest set next to people in PvE sets. Nowadays everyone runs in random gear from everywhere. My character doesn’t feel special in any tiny way.

  • I don’t quite feel PvP progression in BFA. We got gear back, we have conquest bar to fill every week, we have arena chests that give nice rewards each week, and yet it all feels meaningless, because PvE gives as much for much less effort.

  • Professions are useless - used to be so many markets you could get into and specialize in, but nowadays everything is so streamlined. Gear barely needs any profession treatment.

1 Like
129

Which one??? Can I join you???

After the relinquished gear issue - I’m taking my money to another company.

1 Like
130

Tuning, Scaling, Class Neutering, not viable for M+, leveling is a slog.

131

Azerite grind
Scaling
Ilvl scaling
Azerite armor
Scaling
Essences
Scaling
Ilvl scaling.

Top reasons why bfa sucks.

132

I do not like the azerite artifact system. I didn’t like artifacts in Legion, and I don’t like artifacts now.

I think the story set-up has been pretty poor in terms of what has been shown in-game - and what has been shown sometimes makes little sense without context of what the other side is doing (like the Horde attacking Stormsong Valley, which just seems random from the Alliance side since there are no perpetually active Horde attacks in the other Alliance zones) - which has led to me having little investment in the story. This war is dumb and I don’t care who wins or loses.

Scaling still stinks and makes no sense. I know how I’m growing in power because I’m off saving the stupid world again. How is that porcupine over there powering up so he can keep up with me?

4 Likes
133

And painting the alliance as the “good” ones

134

I guess my overall feeling is that for years now there has been a slow but steady degeneration of the game. More and more things have been added to make the game easier, or funnier, or more interesting, and it has gotten busier, you could say, until there is so much to do and focus on that it feels like it’s all over the place.

In the beginning you were either a PvP player or a PVE player, which meant you were focusing on your PVP skill or had an eventual goal of beating raid content. You had a specific path to follow to excel in whichever role you were going to play, be it a high end raid healer or a stabby mcstabberson BG rogue going for the highest rank PVP title, or a raid tank, or the guild alchemist, or whatever it was that you did.
Things kept getting added, like the way almost everyone has a heal button of their own now, like the adding of challenge and then mythic dungeons that devalued the raiding scene, like adding achievements then adding flying then taking it away then giving it back but only if you got certain achievements that required people to do things they wouldn’t normally have bothered to do with their playtime. Meta-achievements people now felt obligated to do for the rewards that made PVE players do some PVP and vice versa. The pet battle system which is fun but adds basically a whole new mini game within wow. Same with toys.
Of course there is the LFR and CRZ cultures which dehumanized any group building and social activity and made dungeon grouping almost like botting to the point that now you can run dungeons with people who never say a word to you.

Most of these things were added in response to something, either a complaint or another game that is popular, but the overall effect has been noxious. the game feels completely different - a distraction of entertainments with no clear goal. Should I change specs this week? I don’t even have to switch my gear besides trinkets and weapons now, so why not? How about changing my main? It will only take a few days to get a new one to max and gear it up to a level where I can do end game content. Professions? Well they aren’t really worth much these days but I don’t have to start from scratch anymore anyhow, I can start at bfa level, so there isn’t even a sense of accomplishment with them now.
Storyline? If this were a book it would be like reading one paragraph every 2 months. Granted, we already know the story in Classic. But at least that one wasn’t as depressing as this chapter has turned out to be. I know everyone keeps saying go outside of the game to read 50 other source materials to make the game make sense but you used to be able to follow the story by doing quests without having to go do research on what is happening elsewhere, and I think it’s a fair complaint that this isn’t happening.

I guess this is a bunch of tldr that adds up to “too much qol has led to a loss of focus, which has in turn made game quality suffer”.

2 Likes
135

This made me laugh

2 Likes
136

My biggest complaint is the overall narrative. I absolutely hate that BFA is basically MOP 2.0: Blight Edition.

The idea that yet ANOTHER Warchief has been hit with the villain bat that half the Horde now has to team up with our sworn enemy in ANOTHER civil war completely invalidates everythin’ we did in MOP (imho).

137

We don’t have the ones we want back.

138

You have listed everything on why I dislike BfA.

But I would also like to add, is that the content is not even fun, or rewarding, and the Artifact/Azerite System is the worse thing ever to replace class tier sets.

2 Likes
139

If you ask me, I think that Blizzard has always felt very “story lite”. Like, yes, there’s all this stuff going on, but at the same time…

I feel like there could be more going on. Not like more Azshara vs Jaina, the big stuff. What’s so difficult about writing quest text for what Tyrande and Malfurion are doing?

Why don’t we ever see quests for side characters? There’s a lot of stuff going on in the world that isn’t related to the big bad, and it’s not that time consuming (in the grand scheme of things) to actually write out the quest text and then link it to some objectives. It won’t necessarily be huge phased events, but that feels fine to me.

Like, why does Tyrande’s stuff end suddenly after Nathanos and the Val’kyr? Why don’t we have optional quests to explore the after math, rather than just more big-bad stuff?

It just feels like they invest all of their efforts into the plot vehicle of the expansion, but they don’t spend enough time supporting that vehicle. It’s one of the core reasons that, despite it’s flaws, Legion was a win for me. You actually got to see all the build up to events and how they ended up there. You had custom story lines for every class, which meant that there was all this rich story and depth to the events surrounding you.

Now, we end up in BfA, and it’s like… all right so there’s some of that with the War Campaign, but… what’s everyone doing? Where’s our “Suramar” with a broad and deep story stretching across the zone, ultimately culminating in a huge lore event?

Perhaps if they focused more on the side stuff, they could create more content instead of drip feeding us a few quests a week. It’s all well and good to say that we’ll eat it all up in an afternoon if they let us, but it’s also fair to point out that that’s significantly more true when there’s only a few dozen quests total.

1 Like
140

The rehashed story, lack of a charismatic main villain, pathfinder still being a thing, timegating loot drops for all systems including the new essence system, continued devotion to ‘AP’ as primary character progression despite its lack of tangible impact on gameplay, Azerite traits continue to be confusing and not engaging enough, new Azerite traits and combinations on new gear are often worse than old ones and it feels bad to have to keep grinding AP to unlock traits for the gear to be useful at all, warmode has destroyed the identity of all servers rendering them all PVE with guest star PVP if you want to, dailies and mission tables continue to be underwhelming and unrewarding in most instances, warfronts are dull and would benefit from a PvP version, and raids are once more coming to over-rely on the soak mechanic to create the illusion of difficulty by creating instances where you must take unavoidable damage in order to prevent raid wiping damage instead of creating new and interesting mechanics or environmental features in the boss room itself.

2 Likes
141

Sharding potentially making entire zones unplayable, Essences not being account-wide (dude, 50k Honor in BGs PER CHARACTER to get rank 3 Blood of the Enemy after slogging through at least one PvP island is cruel), and class design is kinda bad.

1 Like
142

•GCD
•Pathfinder (idk why they insist on this if the community hate it, also Old zones Pathfinder has no Sense at all)
•RNG
•Rep grind to unlock allied races, it should be enough with an achievement imo
•removal of class Tier sets, I Loved them
•alt unfriendly

4 Likes