the expansion has been out for a while now, and in contrast to review sites that choose to review wow expansions in the first few weeks, content has actually been cleared, bugs, gameplay, and balance issues that didnt show up in beta has had time to be fixed, and its now possible to give a fair review of the expansion.
mythic +: 7/10 - fun, but with glaring flaws.
overall a considerable step up from legion, fewer impossible situations, and generally class viability is better. community perception of class viability is sadly unchanged, which is something blizzard could make an effort to change. for example by highlighting unusual group comps even more during MDI, and after.
affixes are still hillariously unbalanced, and some affix combinations should not exist to begin with, teeming/explosive/fortified springs to mind here. affixes that punish players for playing the content as intended is not fun.
and m+ sure is designed for big pulls and rush strats, otherwise the timer wouldnt be the only success criteria.
which brings me to the second issue with m+, with rewards strictly based on completion time, the content is reduced to being a race on an obstacle course. any obstacle you can avoid should be avoided, which in turn makes abilities that help you do so (like shroud) more important than abilities that help you deal with mechanics and affixes, resulting in affixes not changing optimal group compositions at all, despite being intended to.
speaking of group compositions, some dungeons like kings rest punishes you for bringing melee, while no dungeons punishing range exists.
lastly, and this is strictly a matter of opinion, but blizzard really missed out by strictly focusing dungeons on racing through trash.
having some dungeons focused on longer, more challenging bossfights could have both shaken up group comp viability, created more variety, and in my opinion made running m+ immensely more enjoyable.
class balance and design: 2/10 - failed. you didnt just get the answer on the test wrong, you answered the wrong question, and got that wrong too.
balance tuning is not a thing in bfa while still relevant. feedback is largely ignored, and any changes are either too little, or too late (prot war, guardian druid, enhancement shaman, shadow priest, ret pala, resto shaman, mm hunter)
class gameplay is just as bad, and suffers from the exact same issues. feedback is ignored, and change is pushed through for the sake of change, instead of for the sake of improvement.
additionally, skillful play is less rewarded than ever, and leaning heavier into rng than ever. leading to feelbad moments when you are underperforming without being able to do anything about it, and a complete lack of sense of accomplishment when you are overperforming without playing better than usual.
raiding: 4/10 - could have been good with just a little more effort.
i thought blizzard explicity stated after tomb of soakgaras that they would add coordinators between encounter design teams, to avoid a repeat of nearly every fight having the same mechanic dictating group composition.
how the hell do you end up with 7/8 fights punishing guilds for bringing melee for the exact same reason after explicitly taking steps to avoid such a simple problem?
normal and heroic are genuinely fun and varied, but mythic is a complete oops.
loot (including azerite): 1/10 - you literally made everything you changed worse.
titanforging and sockets are hugely problematic.
i am in no way opposed to the idea behind it, but the implementation is awful.
while having lucky moments create feelgood situations, which increases motivation to run content, keeping the game active, which is the whole base of a mmo, having such a huge gap between lucky items, and normal loot causes a situation where a players luck, or lack thereof, can be the deciding factor in them having a raidspot or not.
further into the expansion, this will no doubt lead situations where some specs will again have to rely on lucky drops from old content to perform at their best.
reducing the odds of items forging is again a solution to a problem that completely misses the mark, and instead make it worse. instead of solving the disparity issue, it makes it harder to compensate through effort and dedication.
enforced personal loot is another change that is seemingly done for no reason, and creates problems.
while i absolutely get the idea of removing the ability to “steal” items in pugs, there was no reason to enforce this for guildruns.
guilds should obviously have the option to run with personal loot if thats what their members want, but why cripple the ability for guilds who wish to optimize loot distribution?
on top of this while the way loot was awarded on masterloot somewhat encouraged varied group compositions, personal loot strictly rewards reducing armor and weapontype variety in raidcompositions.
lastly, azerite armor… god dammit. its replacing legendaries, new talents, and tier sets, which were all designed to augment, and slightly alter playstyles, creating variety.
availability is awful.
players are punished for attempting to change azerite traits around depending on content, by both having to pay for it, and leave whatever content they are doing to change it.
and barely any traits are actually designed to alter or augment playstyles, while the few that are, are either undertuned to the point of not changing anything, or inn the majority of cases, tied to the abilities that are already causing gameplay issues, augmenting the problems with specs instead.
pvp: ??/10 - no opinion
i dont pvp, im not qualified in any way to rate the expansion from a pvp point of view.
arti… azerite power: 3/10 - its something to do at least.
again a case of good idea, bad implementation.
what exactly is blizzard attempting to accomplish with this?
if the purpose is to give players endless rewards for playtime spent, to increase player retention, why is it not account bound?
this would reward players for playing their alts, increasing diversity in gameplay, reducing monotony, which for most people will make them have more fun, giving them additional motivation to play.
if the idea behind it is to time gate azerite trait unlocks and gradually increase player power, why is it not capped, allowing players to focus on other gameplay elements once max power is reached, again increasing player retention?
finally… and this is the biggest question.
why on earth is ap, which unlocks bonuses largely focused on group content, on gear obtained from group content, tied so heavily to doing a ton of solo content?
world content: 5/10 - well, at least its pretty.
world quests… dailies are still not interesting after the first time you do them, never have been. funneling players into doing them by having them be the primary source of ap does not make them more interesting.
first thing when i log on and realize i need to do my daily ap wq’s is a feeling of having work to finish before i can have fun, after finishing im mentally worn out, and no longer feel like playing.
warmode is ment to give players the choice between participating in pvp or not, but due to the rewards being as important as they are, it instead removes the choice for pve players.
zones are beautiful, and clearly designed for players to fly around in, sadly flying is not available, so getting around instead makes the most beautiful and well designed zones an absolute pain to be in.
island expeditions: 5/10 - trying to appeal to everyone equally, ends up not very appealing to anyone.
soooo much potential here, could have been great for multiple things, if only it was designed to focus on one of them, instead of none.
if pve players are the target, islands would have been the perfect setting to adapt the “race to the finish” mentality from m+, there’s no set path, and a multitude of different ways to complete them.
instead we got runs with absolutely 0 challenge outside of attempting to do them in a single pull.
ai thats more annoying than anything else, bringing all the small anoyances strictly pve players dislike about pvp, without bringing any of the challenges pvp’ers like about pvp.
if pvp’ers was the target audience, islands could have been amazing as well, if only they had better pvp relevant rewards, like pvp specific lootdrops and ranking.
if cosmetic farmers was the target audience, islands could have been great chill content to run from them, if they actually had any chance of knowing how to get the drops they were looking for.
and lastly, if islands were ment for azerite farming, then why do they reward less ap than a wq?
other visual stuff: 3/10 - why is this still a thing? other mmo’s fixed it easily years ago.
camera collisions are still a major issue, especially with m+ being designed with many pulls in tight corridors, while having high positional requirements. the tunnel in waycrest manor where your camera will get stuck almost inside your characters butt while fighting mobs that constantly jump around, and random collisions with pillars in the prison part of tol dagor are significant sinners too.
new spell effects are pretty, and people love it when their spell has some ooomph behind it. but nobody likes being in melee when the spell effect fireworks means that you cant even see your character on screen, much less whats on the ground behind it you’re supposed to dodge.
wow needs an option to turn down unnescesarry friendly spell effects, without turning down harmful and personal spell effects, allowing you to pay greater attention to your surroundings, without loosing out.
currently the only option is to turn down particle effects all together, which also happens to turn down harmful spell effects making some aoe effects nearly invisible. leaving the player with the choice between trying to dodge invisible death, or being blind while needing to dodge visible death.
on the same note, a lot of mobs with aoe abilities will only partially, or not at all show them when the mobs are placed on slopes or stairs, yet in islands and m+ a significant portion of such enemies are specifically placed on slopes and stairs.
finally, aoe being bigger than its animation is another big issue this expansion. or well sort of, im pretty sure thats not really the issue, but instead an issue of the aoe effect being very accurate, but player feet position in no way representing player hitbox.
it was time to enlarge aoe animations enough that a player with his feet outside the effect would not be hit by it 10 years ago, its a wonder its still not being done.
communication: 1/10 - communication implies listening, without it its a monologue.
sadly, communication has actually improved, which brings it from a 0 to a 1. questions are indeed being answered, sadly 90+% of them are cherry picked questions that matters very little.
for larger issues, not even intent, or future ideas are being presented for discussion.
feedback is ignored, and potentially disliked changes are not announced before implemented on ptr, while being implemented so late that even if feedback was considered, there would be no time for change.
and, why are the forums still seperated, with devs only using one of them? there’s absolutely no reason to keep the playerbase segregated, laanguage specific subforums could easily be created for those who need it.
overall: 4/10 - so much to do, so little reason to do any of it.
others may have different opinions, but to me, BFA is the worst expansion to keep my playing for more than 2 days.
if i had anything even slightly interesting, or constructive, to spend my time on instead, i would.
on the other hand, not much would need to change for me to enjoy it a whole lot more, and i still have a bit of hope that it will.