People are waking up from streamers fevered dream.
Apparently it was better to have fair loot drops and laugh at mythic raiders spamming islands.
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Bfa started to be good when they made Essences, so EP patch; before that? When you couldnât unlock your rings? It was terrible.
Corruption was⌠I wouldnât say amazing but I liked the stat corruptions, not the ones with effects like random procs with massive damage such as Twilight Devastation.
Dungeons were amazing, way better than most Shadowlands dungeon.
Raids were horrible, Shadowlands raids are more fun in my opinion (except for some fight like KT).
I really miss Bfa dungeons, that alone saved the expansion for me. I would return to Bfa only for M+ (and well⌠not having to farm Domination socket ranks and pieces).
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BFA was eons better from a pvp perspective. It was only near the end of the xpac the gear requirements got way too over the top.
If you missed the boat at the start of season 1 in SL then too bad. You had a massive gear disadvantage. Season 2 was even worse because the honor set wasent even 223.
I at least lasted more than the first season in BFA
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Man ofcourse there be some thread going around talking how the previous expansion was better than the recent one; can you suck my dik? every wow expac has had these CUKS, to say the least, that donât know or realize how to stand up for themselves. WoW has been lacking since TBC!!! god you internet forum chicks mustve been knowing this by now
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i do approve to this.
People have a habit of comparing the end of an expansion to the start.
At this stage in BfA, your azerite rings still scaled with your neck level so you were essentially punished for playing the game.
The only reason why BFA seems better than SL is that SL is just that bad, where even BFA, which is pretty bad, is better than SL. I mean even WOD is better than SL and that says quite a bit about SL in general.
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Iâm still playing BFA.
But from what I read, I think the dev team focused way too much on trying to delay player progress as much as they could.
Thatâs probably why I keep reading:
âNo respect for player time.â
Hereâs an example:
It seems a lot of people preferred the old style of world quests.
You could finish it on the spot as opposed to the new one where you have to go back and forward.
People also miss Azeroth environment as the afterlife seems to be depressing.
If SL is truly worst than BFA in terms of gameplay experience than they surely hit a new low.
I think this reply from the first thread OP linked summarize it better:
"I honestly had some fun memories in BfA. It didnât really feel like a job to me. Shadowlands feels like one after having to put nearly 8 hrs a day and getting little progress.
But, to be fair, both are bad and probably the worse expansions."
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For me the worst expansion is the one that kills all expansions and that was BFA for me.
Thatâs why I didnât purchased SL.
Cheers.
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Thats a first. If iâve ever read one. Because i donât remember that experience on here from PvPers at all.
I didnât see alot of posts on the forums back in BfA from PvPers that said PvP in that expansion was good. Majority i read consistently said they was sick of PvP and saying ââit is the worst it has ever beingââ.
In SL however i have read much more praise consistently from PvPers on the forums.
PvP in SL has been better, indeed Iâve heard the same. I donât do it myself, but all my friends who do have been, if not entirely happy, more pleased with it than theyâve been in years, so thatâs ONE positive thing we should all hope continues. (Again, not entirely happy still, it still has MAJOR ISSUES like balancing between patches is a joke PER USUAL, but better.)
I thought BfA was a lot better. I still had MAJOR issues with it all through the expansion, and it never really got better, but at least there were more things in the world that interested me than in SL. Story was better (if already on a serious downward slide), side-quests made more sense, the world was a dang lot prettier and coherent (you could actually travel between most of the zones ON THE GROUND) and you had other goals than just the endgame.
I can say that if SL was just as good as BfA, I still wouldnât have kept playing now though. âBetter thanâ doesnât mean it was âgood enoughâ. 
I only tried SL in the hope that weâd been through the mediocre expansion (following the Star Trek formula for movies), and now weâd get the good stuff again. Alas, we did not.
No, people are just being delusional because they conveniently forget everything bad about an expansion just to bash the current one. Just a reminder, people spammed these forums during Legion, saying WoD was better and that the game is so dead, they canât find groups for anything. Hard to take all these 100~ people seriously. Especially when:
- Pruning was still going on, unlike in SL where we got stuff back. Most specs lost their artifact abilities, while others were allowed to keep it. Same with multiple abilities and talents that people liked, while simultaneously a lot of baseline abilities became talents with nothing to replace them.
- They put a lot of spells on the GCD just for the sake of slowing the game down for pvp-ers. Which if course made combat worse for pve players as well.
- They forget how bad Azerite gear and the necklace was. I mean really, we farmed almost the same azerite gear for 2 years just to get the exact same traits on higher ilvl items. The necklace first only existed to allow us to use these traits.
- 8.2 was the most alt-unfriendly patch ever created with the essence farms, like memory of lucid dream and blood of the enemy and of course Benthic gearâŚ
- 8.3 became slightly less alt-unfriendly when they added the essence/corruption vendor 5-6 MONTHS into the patch, but before that it was just the same bs, but add our legendary cloak on top of it, which required farming vision keys, and doing visions. Visions were also Torghast level bad but it was even more frustrating if we equipped masks to get mythic raid ilvl gear from it.
- From start to finish, emissaries had the chance to give us normal raid ilvl armor/weapon/trinket, making normal mode raids completely irrelevant.
- Warfronts did the same, while heroic warfronts gave us heroic raid ilvl gear for doing nothing for 20 min~.
- Corruption was also a system so garbage (especially before the vendor was added) that its still unbelievable that it actually got implemented to the game. It made pve content a joke by boosting our dps to the sky, and it was the cause of pvp completely breaking like never before, when rng procs oneshotted other players.
- Island expedition was a bad joke. We did the same thing over and over again for weekly 3000 (?) AP. We pulled the whole island, zerged it down in a minute and repeat 3 more times.
- BfA was the only expansion where we got weaker during leveling, by a ridiculous amount, because of losing Legion legendaries at lvl 115, and constantly losing our secondary stats as usual. It was just bad right from the beginning.
SL has itâs issues, but itâs in no way, shape or form as bad and frustrating as BfA was.
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People who compare the old expansion to the new one make the mistake of comparing the end of an expansion to the start of one. I remember BFA being VERY punishing if you played the game, since the rings in Battle for Dazarâalor (So, patch 8.1) levelled up with you neck. Meaning, you were unlocking exactly the same skills over and over again. You werenât getting ânew skillsâ, you were working through your neck level to unlock the same thing you had in your weaker Azerite pieces with it only being a tad bit stronger.
Not only this, the MAJORITY of azerite powers were just passives and didnât really change much. Covenantâs on the other hand give you 2 spells that are different from each other and actually make an impact on your playstyle, like Soul Rot for Affliction Warlocks being really good with the legendary, allowing a 1min haste buff (I usually get 40-50% haste every minute now xD).
Warfrontâs were also a thing, and were practically impossible to lose. It was just done for the loot and nothing else.
Both expansions have brought some good dungeons, but also bad ones.
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Throwing this out thereâŚ
Most expansions start to get good at the third patch.
Should expansions be five or six patches instead of three?
It would give time for stories to mature and play out properly⌠(come on we met and killed Nzoth in a single patch!)
As well as give us time to play an expansion for longer after the inevitable kinks in the tuning, mechanics and gear itemisation have been fixed.
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Nahhh, then youâll just have a majority saying ââIâll play when 10.5 is released, Then i will play a Full Release and Fixed game, and no longer an Alpha, beta game.ââ
Both are equally meh for me but at least with BfA I didnât get bored after 2 weeks.
And by rights thatâs how it should be. We SHOULD be playing a fixed, full release without all these insane bugs, the insane fixes, the problems that without fail get reported, en masse, again and again but still make it into the game.
Itâs honestly pathetic that here we have an developer who measures progress in the game by âpatchesâ, and not âchaptersâ. That measures progress not by when they release new, good content that the player will want to play, but by when they will fix the major issues they were already told would fail in detail months before it even hits the major public, that measures progress by when they will wipe the player progress and introduce new repeat grinds.
The more I look at it, after just a little bit away from it, the more crazy it looks. Theyâre banking SO MUCH on our fear of missing out on current content before they make it irrelevant, and itâs so lazy.
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Start of BFA was not so bad, i even like it. And then they started to add more and more activity, more and more grind, more and more BS - especially 8.3 its just was super-bad patch.
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Titanforging, corruption, essence farm, neck farm, warfronts, island expeditions, rotating corruption vendor.
SL is better then BFA simply because it doesnât have the above
That said since 9.1 itâs not by much
I hope they donât repeat the mistakes of BFA which was just an endless cycle of âplayers donât like the content? DOUBLE DOWNâ. Iâd prefer an announcement that 9.2 is cancelled too probably
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Curruption, TF, islands, azerite armor, PvP and visions in BFA are much better than anything SL offers.
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To be fair, that was this weekâs campaign quest. And it was the worst one so far. Took me 15 mins to begin the quest, then there was a corpse run in the book tower because those traps are unexpectedly dangerous. My annoyance resulted in me not reading a single line of Maldraxxus quest text. I wonder what it was all aboutâŚ
The Revendreth part was actually quite fun when I finally got there. Moonberry can rescue nearly situation and sheâs more subtle than the Maldraxxian âkill all these guysâ mindset. But it just makes me feel like they have a different quest writing team for each zone because the experiences are so different!
Regarding actual world quests⌠I barely feel a difference. Thereâs a lot of fill the bar. Thereâs also quite a lot of non-fighting options, which I personally beeline because solo combat is so dull in WoW. The annoying ones are the multi-parters that donât say so up front. Fill the bar. Now kill an elite thatâs dead right now. Youâve been walking round it for a while, avoiding engaging, but now you need to wait for it to spawn.
This afterlife definitely is! Itâs full of âtrue deathââŚ
Which means itâs just like life, only some people are incorporeal and thereâs a lot less racial and cultural diversity. Kyrians look awesome but you have to forget your previous life. Venthyr live comfortably, but you have to humble yourself. Maldraxxus respects your past life, but you look like crap and you may fall apart and get stitched into an abomination with a few others who fell apart too. Ardenweald is the only pleasing afterlife where they seem to have some sort of social life, but itâs full of predators and Drust, and dead folk here only get weak spirit forms and canât defend themselves, thus being reliant on the native fae to continue to âsurviveâ.
Or thereâs being sent to the Maw, which is our actual literal classic hellscape. Yummers.
Environmentally, BfA was just a better place to be. I enjoyed lingering in Boralus - I donât enjoy lingering in the Oribos airport.
Funny thing, I donât get that at all. What are they grinding that needs those hours? Because I run my mission table and log out. Thereâs a weekly renown quest that usually takes an hour. Twice a week I do the assault. Sometimes I dabble in Korthia, but itâs not vital. Sometimes I run Torghast, but again, itâs not actually vital. A T4 legendary is still very solid, and if you have T6 for main spec, you really can calm down on this.
Other than that, I log for dungeons and raids only.
Anima is not Azerite. You donât need it. It is an optional grind. Korthia is an alternative to dungeons. If you arenât in the competitive scene, you donât need those sockets all that bad. Youâll get them eventually, you donât need to force it.
The places I think SL is worse than BfA tend to be the systems. Essences were annoying to collect; Conduits ramped it right up and gave us even more. Conduit energy does literally nothing but irritate. Legendaries are nice, but there are some that still come from Castle Nathria. Sucks in 9.1 if thatâs one of your best. Valor and Research upgrades both need heavy time investments to raise the ilvl cap; and yet the weekly Valor cap is so low we can barely earn enough to be useful. By the time I can upgrade to 12/12, I will be geared better from other content. I like Valor as a concept, but this iteration is pure frustration. All it does is sell KSM boosts to casuals so that they can actually access the higher upgrades.
Then thereâs rubbish like Torghast scoring. Which was probably a non-timer way of making sure people didnât get ahead of their abilities and complain that it was too hard. But now thereâs a chance of sockets and cosmetics for a 5-star and people feel bad if they donât get it. Itâs gone from âyou need to do this twice weeklyâ to âif youâre serious about WoW, you should be grinding this until you get double flawless every weekâ.
And none of it is the content players ask for. Over and over again, we request more dungeons, more battlegrounds and arenas, more raids, and sure, more interesting questing zones. Over and over again, the dev team put their time into anything but that.
Korthia is the best thing theyâve done in a while. At least casual players have something to do. Although it only lasts an hour each day, then youâre done, which is pretty whiffy game design.
But thatâs Shadowlands in a nutshell. Lots of âdo this! youâve done enough!â situations.
By way of recovery, my suggestion is consistently the same:
One currency. Multiple ways to earn it. Letâs use Valor. Throw away soul ash and cinders; Torghast rewards Valor. Dungeons reward Valor. World quests reward Valor - just not very much. All upgrade systems, including legendaries, require Valor. Ilvl caps are de-linked from KSM or reputation. Cosmetics are bought with Valor. The game is now about earning Valor.
Pick a goal.
Want to upgrade your gear? Do the content you like. Want to upgrade your legendary? Do the content you like. Want cosmetics? Do the content you like.
Sliding weekly caps are good, and I encourage them as long as there are enough things to do that we can catch up. This allows us to take a week off, then hit the game hard the next week without falling off the treadmill forever.
WoW needs to stop giving us a list of tasks every day and start asking what we would like to do.
(But BfA didnât really do this any better, imo. I have not forgiven Horrific Visions for the state they launched in, and I doubt I ever will. As a healer main, with no good dps gear, that was one of the few things that made me consider throwing in the towel.)
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