Class design that I wanted was taken in prepatch and never returned. So I said screw it until 8.2 when at least I could fly in new zones. Not viable for M+ because arcane is not fun anymore and not competitive. Raid mechanics keep kicking it while it’s down because movement, interrupts, stack/spread, repeat performance all conspire to kill my dps. I’m still surprised belf racial (torrent) was nerfed into ground because AOE silence (easier to kill trash groups but not essential) was supposedly too strong in mythics, but rogues’ AOE stealth allowing to straight up SKIP trash groups was not removed or nerfed. Bring a melee, not a player is a thing because encounter mechanics keep going in the movement direction. Some classes/specs still have more utilities than 5 others together.
Zone design in this expansion seems to be purposefully making people hate ground mounts and await the glorious day when the timelocked rep grind will allow them to fly around all the ridges, mountains, jungle trees, and other obstacles. Mob density is so freakishly high in some places that invisibility potions are necessary if you do not like fighting 50 mobs just because you gathered a resource node. Nazjatar especially was MADE for flying with its multilayered, million murlocs in 1 place design, awesome sights, and long distances between everything. And then you have to grind Mechagon to fly in Nazjatar. Because reasons.
Pathfinder would not be so bad, IF the reps were not timegated. And the worst of them all are daily quests for a pittance. You cannot play 7 days a week because you work/study/have RL stuff to do? You’re out of luck, wait some more for flying, so you can waste some more time in the effort of saving some time later. Just remove the whole thing and be done with it, it does not work, does not make us appreciate the world any more, does not really do anything except make us hate hate HATE being unable to fly right away.
World quests could be fun if there was more variety of them, they were not so far away from each other, and awarded more than 40 war resources and tiny amount of rep in a situation where you have to get revered/exalted ASAP.
Yo dawg, we heard u hate RNG, so we put some moar RNG on your RNG so you can play longer and have less fun while u still keep paying for the whole deal despite getting less of it. And you will like it. Cuz timegated grind is such fun when you have to get a correct item, get it upgraded, get a socket in it, and then use 3rd party addons/sims to find out if it is still good for you because item levels. Benthic items are better than pure rng exactly because once you got the one you wanted (i.e. correct item, socket, maybe extra stat for good measure), you could upgrade it with currency that was quite easy, if time-consuming, to farm. Still better than playing casino and not getting anything cuz RNG hates you.
Alts not allowed. Azerite, Essences, and now corruption are taking just too much timegated effort instead of effort to get. But they are too powerful to ignore if you want to be good at something, so if you want to do something, you have to do something ELSE first. To a certain degree this is acceptable, but hiding best PvE stuff behind lots of PvP and the other way is just vile and despicable way of forcing some more time spent playing out of players.
The game has become a chore. Log in, do world quests/emissaries/dailies, send garrison minions on missions, send Legion minions on missions, send BFA minions on missions, do Mechagon dailies because gnomes like to make your life miserable, do Nazjatar dailies because essences are locked behind character tracked npc exp bars, grind your activity of choice for some reward that can be completely random and thus might turn out to be 100% useless. Done with all this? Congratulations, you can now do something you actually WANTED to do in the first place! Oh wait, if it is current content, then you cannot, because you don’t have rank 3 essences, and correct azerite traits, and maxed out corruption resistance, you gotta grind some moar!
Arrogant piece of lawyer as a spokesperson. After that “cannot find vendors” joke, someone up in Blizzard should publish a message consisting of something like “We cannot find this guy on our payroll anymore”. THAT would send a clear signal that not knowing wtf is he talking about to people paying for the game and talking bollocks to them will not be tolerated.
Pruning got out of hand, some classes (DHs) have a tool for everything, and others (mages, especially arcane) have about 5 buttons. Some specs were granted active artifact abilities, while others were denied them and had their passives taken away or thrown into pvp talents, because reasons. I still remember time when there were literally no shamans playing and people were asking what is this blue class. This also led to classes feeling too similar to each other to actually play different characters. What’s the purpose of playing 5 different classes that all have 1 builder, 1 spender, 1 aoe ability, a cooldown and a proc? Same thing, only different looks.
Feedback is being systematically ignored. Best example I can think of is the whole GCD thing and “stop removing portals” topics. THOUSANDS of people saying they do not want this, then the big corp says “we don’t hear anything, so you must like this” and does its own thing anyway because the feedback they got was not the feedback they wanted. This is so suicidally stupid and self-destructive for any organisation that everyone involved should be instantly purged on the basis of ruining the company’s good business. Another example: 800 “laid off” people working on, guess what, quality control among other things. Then we see results: Beta for Azeroth again. On live servers. If I wanted the job of a beta tester, I would apply for it. This is a new, all-time low: A company’s financial results are at its best, and at the same time this filthy rich company cannot pay some people to test the product and fix its faults before it is sold.
War mode in general is failure and it should be scrapped as soon as it became obvious. Same thing about Azerite and other systems like island expeditions - it was clear it is bad, so why was it still around in 8.1, then 8.2, now 8.3? Just get rid of the whole thing and create raid tier sets. Azerite traits on items pretty much defined tier sets anyway, only hiding it behind 3rd party sims…
Story has too many loose elements and that pushed Horde-Alliance conflict, right when our frickin PLANET WE ARE LIVING ON is bleeding out and an Old God tries to take it over is so stupid, I have no words to describe it. Cinematics look nice, but the story they tell is so Horde sided that even my tired old eyes managed to notice that. Heard there is some blue faction in this game - must be another kind of magical elves, definitely not some mythical “Alliance”, there is no proof of such faction in existence.
Another problem: OPTIONS. We need MOAR of em. Options are like dakka: you can never have too much of them, because that would imply already having enough, and there is simply never enough options. Some people like new healthplates. Some people prefer old nameplates. Some would like to see every single debuff on every single mob in 100y radius and others would like to only see things when they are in their effective range. Forcing one option of many and removing or hiding others makes some people not like the game, so they stop paying for it. Thus, taking away options is ALWAYS bad. And yet this is what keeps happening since Legion. Distance at which nameplates show up is the most glaring example to me - I play Arcane mage, most of my abilities have 40y range, so i want to see clearly what is at 40y or closer, not 60, not 20. Guess what? This option was hardcoded at 60y in CLASSIC to fix an exploit and then some -insert a word properly describing state of mind required to mistake BFA for Classic- baked it into retail. Graphics options like shadows, character models, interface options like floating combat text (numbers you see when you hit or heal something), just get Advanced Interface Options addon to find out how much stuff is hidden. Like world text size. The game has colorblind mode, which is good, but if you want to change font size, you have to dig in AIO’s CVAR list. Srsly? 3rd party free addon to show things that should be clearly available at all times, to everyone? Is someone letting their kids play on work PC and restricting options shown so the little gnomes don’t get confused? Where was quality control? Oh right, fired…
I hate on principle all fixed slot items that cannot be removed or else, unless they really ARE worth it. Artifacts were like that, because they offered all those little passives and enhancements, like the old talent trees, but this time you would get them all in time and you would simply choose what to have now and what has to wait a bit. Legendaries were kinda meh - too much RNG dependency and effects as powerful as some of them granted should be built into class/spec, not gear that may or may not drop for you this week. Heart of Azeroth is definitely very meh, because essences are just too strong to ignore but they are not any real part of gameplay. Just another utility - beam for AOE, minion for boss encounters, this or that passive, maybe another for something particular. The cloak I could live with, because it is upgradable so no uber gear out of nowhere and it offers something very useful, but… in 8.3 EVERYTHING and its companion pet has corruption on it. This means cloak is a necessity. I don’t want railroading into purging all corruption over certain limit. I really do not have time to grind visions on every character I would like to play on top of essences. Bad design, that. Time gating stuff hurts people who cannot log in everyday and grind like crazy. Effort gating allows more people to enjoy the game. More people having fun = more subscribers, what’s not to like?
I would say that all this combined makes BFA miles worse than WoD with its garrisons replacing every other activity, pruning, rushing, selfie patch and glaring content holes, but I did not play it, so BFA is the worst WoW expansion that I have the unpleasantness of playing, ever.
For the rest of this expansion I’m going to level alts, hunt achievements, clear old stuff. Definitely not buying pre-ordered Shadowlands before I see in it classes unpruned and made fun again, no more artifact power grind, flying available from day one. So, yeah, since in all probability we will get another rushed, unfixed, tested on us as we play it expansion, that would be it for my adventure in WoW for the foreseeable future.