*** World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth ***

Soldato
Joined
13 Sep 2008
Posts
5,445
Yeah there seems to be a real backlash on this one. I resubbed over Christmas as I had a lot of free time and am finding it ok so far but only lvl 117. The few lfg dungeons I did were dull though.
Seems plenty of rants on youtube about it (and Activision's control over blizzard)
 
Associate
Joined
20 Feb 2007
Posts
1,716
Seeing a lot of mixed opinions of this latest expansion? What's the reasons people aren't/are enjoying it.. Thinking of giving it a go

- Classes are boring compared to Legion. Abilities were pruned and nothing new was added. Rotations have been simplified all round and there is no power progression in reaching level 120 (infact it feels like you lose power).
- Lack of new interesting content. The flagship content of the expansion, warfronts and Islands, failed miserably. Warfronts are something you do for 30minutes every few weeks, and Islands were poorly implemented. Islands were improved significantly in patch 8.1, but they're still nothing special.
- Azerite armor. Supposed to be legendaries and tier sets rolled into one, but they have the appeal of neither and require a lot of grinding to unlock. Thankfully it is being replaced by something more Legion artifact like in 8.2, but this is still a long time to wait.
- Allied races. Zandalari trolls and Kultirans still don't have an exact release date. While races don't have a huge impact on the game, given that they were advertised as a main feature of the expansion creates a feeling of being strung along by Blizzard.
- General bugs and lack of polish. There are many features that have been bugged or changed without word from Blizzard. For example huge world lag in certain zones since the release of 8.1. The communication from the dev team is terrible. They have semi-frequent live Q&As where they promise to improve communication, but fail every time. There is a general sense of Blizzard not caring about the needs of the playerbase, and profit numbers and player retention analytics being the only thing that drives development.
-Shady business practices. As alluded to above, Blizzard are in the midst of a PR nightmare, and everything they do seems to further this. For example releasing a new store mount for £20, retiring old store mounts to create artificial scarcity to drive sales, heavily downsizing their customer support department, on top of rumors that many Blizzard staff are recieving lower pay. This sentiment is compounded in other Blizzard games, for example the Diablo Immortal fiasco and ceasing HoTs development.
- Poor 8.1 patch. Compared to the ".1" patches in previous expansions, this one was severely lacking in content giving players little reason to return. The new raid opens on the 22nd Jan but this is over a month since the 8.1 release.

All that said, there are fun things still to do in the game and the new raid looks like it will be very good. Dungeons are very well designed but the overall simplistic class design leads them to feel not as fun as in Legion. There are a lot of improvements promised for 8.2 but that is still many months away. It is my feeling that BFA, while terrible on release, will be in a good state in 8.2. It's not terrible now by any means and still probably the best MMO out there (which is saying more about the state of the genre than the quality of WoW), but if you are on the fence I'd advise waiting for patch 8.2.
 
I haz 4090!
Don
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
8,002
Location
Manchester
- Classes are boring compared to Legion. Abilities were pruned and nothing new was added. Rotations have been simplified all round and there is no power progression in reaching level 120 (infact it feels like you lose power).

I did wonder about this. I haven't played WoW regularly since TBC, but I had to keep checking my skill book to make sure I'd moved everything to quick access as it did feel like I had less abilities. Sign of the times I guess. :)
 
Soldato
Joined
21 Oct 2002
Posts
2,787
Location
Sunderland
Souness has it right. Wow and Blizzard is in a bad place now, Blizzard are supposed to be cutting costs and the lack of polish and bugs in this expansion was really unlike Blizzard of old. It feels that they are way out of touch with the player base and BFA is just a legion patch with bits cut out and very little added.

I’ve played since vanilla and it’s sad to see how bad this game has become now with pretty much all the end game just meaningless and designed to become a way of holding on to subs through endless grinding for rewards you don’t even care about. I lasted about a month and a half and I was done.

I will probably try classic for the vanilla feeling again as I thought that was the best game I have ever played, however since have I done it all before I’m not sure it will be that interesting as no surprises or real progression. Although it may be interesting to really min max this time since that wasn’t really a thing until around latter AQ40 onwards i guess.
 
Associate
Joined
13 Feb 2010
Posts
934
I did wonder about this. I haven't played WoW regularly since TBC, but I had to keep checking my skill book to make sure I'd moved everything to quick access as it did feel like I had less abilities. Sign of the times I guess. :)

- Classes are boring compared to Legion. Abilities were pruned and nothing new was added. Rotations have been simplified all round and there is no power progression in reaching level 120 (infact it feels like you lose power).
- Lack of new interesting content. The flagship content of the expansion, warfronts and Islands, failed miserably. Warfronts are something you do for 30minutes every few weeks, and Islands were poorly implemented. Islands were improved significantly in patch 8.1, but they're still nothing special.
- Azerite armor. Supposed to be legendaries and tier sets rolled into one, but they have the appeal of neither and require a lot of grinding to unlock. Thankfully it is being replaced by something more Legion artifact like in 8.2, but this is still a long time to wait.
- Allied races. Zandalari trolls and Kultirans still don't have an exact release date. While races don't have a huge impact on the game, given that they were advertised as a main feature of the expansion creates a feeling of being strung along by Blizzard.
- General bugs and lack of polish. There are many features that have been bugged or changed without word from Blizzard. For example huge world lag in certain zones since the release of 8.1. The communication from the dev team is terrible. They have semi-frequent live Q&As where they promise to improve communication, but fail every time. There is a general sense of Blizzard not caring about the needs of the playerbase, and profit numbers and player retention analytics being the only thing that drives development.
-Shady business practices. As alluded to above, Blizzard are in the midst of a PR nightmare, and everything they do seems to further this. For example releasing a new store mount for £20, retiring old store mounts to create artificial scarcity to drive sales, heavily downsizing their customer support department, on top of rumors that many Blizzard staff are recieving lower pay. This sentiment is compounded in other Blizzard games, for example the Diablo Immortal fiasco and ceasing HoTs development.
- Poor 8.1 patch. Compared to the ".1" patches in previous expansions, this one was severely lacking in content giving players little reason to return. The new raid opens on the 22nd Jan but this is over a month since the 8.1 release.

All that said, there are fun things still to do in the game and the new raid looks like it will be very good. Dungeons are very well designed but the overall simplistic class design leads them to feel not as fun as in Legion. There are a lot of improvements promised for 8.2 but that is still many months away. It is my feeling that BFA, while terrible on release, will be in a good state in 8.2. It's not terrible now by any means and still probably the best MMO out there (which is saying more about the state of the genre than the quality of WoW), but if you are on the fence I'd advise waiting for patch 8.2.

Thanks for the replies, think I'll probably hold off for a bit maybe until I've ran out of other things to play. The last time I really got into the game was Cataclysm and despite most peoples opinion's I loved it.. Seems like a much different game now though
 
Associate
Joined
20 Feb 2007
Posts
1,716
Yeah, I mean I love mythic+ and raiding, but everyone I speak to who's not into hardcore endgame content gets bored very fast. Also if you don't have a group of friends to play with then the community can be quite toxic, but it seems that way for most games these days...
 
Soldato
Joined
1 Dec 2006
Posts
16,814
Location
Amsterdam, NL
Yeah, I mean I love mythic+ and raiding, but everyone I speak to who's not into hardcore endgame content gets bored very fast. Also if you don't have a group of friends to play with then the community can be quite toxic, but it seems that way for most games these days...

Also agree, thankfully the guild I'm in has 5 guilds all tied together under 'Toast' on Area 52 US West, 19 raiding teams, 17 of which push mythic raiding content and most do full mythic clears and end up selling them towards the end of said raid windows.

Even with the above, there is a regular 5 of us who used to be mods and raid lead for our much smaller previous guild which only had 1 team and we all left due to a VERY toxic guy who was in a relationship with the GM. And she was nice until she was so warped by the guy. But us 5 sticked together, are in the same guild now and regularly play together and even have our own dedicated discord and talk daily. We've all met each other as well with one of the girls staying with my wife and I a couple of times when shes in SF. The wife and I have also met a large group of the guild members as well including the GM who is a good friend now at the recent (and now infamous worst) Blizzcon.

I created a new alliance toon on Moon Guard for an easy leveling experience to get some rep for the new races, and it's hell having no one to 'play with', you're entirely dispensable to others as are they, gone are the days of meeting people and sticking together, you can solo 99% of the content whilst leveling, group finder makes it so impersonal it's there simply to fill a need and you don't even talk the majority of the time. LFR is just a mess and rarely goes well. It's a real shame. I miss the days of whilst leveling, you'd actively try and get a group to level with to make content much smoother and easier and ultimately you'd make friends doing so.
 
Soldato
Joined
21 May 2004
Posts
2,516
Location
South Staffs
Most of my guild have quit (although we're only small) - echo everyone else above really. The questing to 120 is great, but otherwise, the rest is poor. They'll have to do something pretty amazing to bring me back before the next expansion, which is saying something as I don't even need to spend money (using in-game gold to cover subs).

TBH they'd be better off just writing this off as a bad job and putting all effort into the next expansion.
 
Associate
Joined
1 Mar 2010
Posts
290
Location
UK
Yeah, I mean I love mythic+ and raiding, but everyone I speak to who's not into hardcore endgame content gets bored very fast. Also if you don't have a group of friends to play with then the community can be quite toxic, but it seems that way for most games these days...

Completely agree with this 100%. The best days were with friends in our own guild. Since they aren't playing anymore, I've tried joining other guilds but I've only come across toxic communities.

If I had friends to play the game with I think I'd 100% enjoy the game like I did in Vanilla/TBC/WotLK.
 
Associate
Joined
20 Oct 2011
Posts
149
Completely agree with this 100%. The best days were with friends in our own guild. Since they aren't playing anymore, I've tried joining other guilds but I've only come across toxic communities.

If I had friends to play the game with I think I'd 100% enjoy the game like I did in Vanilla/TBC/WotLK.

The game is boring if you play alone, Being in a guild does make it more enjoyable
 
Associate
Joined
27 Feb 2019
Posts
23
Location
London
Anyone seen the recent class changes from Blizz?
Quite a lot of people annoyed at how little they are changing, like 3 class changes in a month....
 
Soldato
Joined
23 Nov 2004
Posts
10,646
I was playing on the Kronos 3 vanilla server for a bit with my mates, got to 40 and for some reason whilst drunk looked into my old retail account.

I started in TBC as a 60 decked out in 'welfare epics' Grand Marshall gear bought with honour and loved PVP in AV. I then ended up in a guild tanking through BT, became pretty decent through Ulduar/Naxx/Dragons and it looks like I bought MoP and then stopped playing years ago.

I started playing through legion content on my main warrior from back then to 100ish but used my free boost to 110 to create an orc warrior on Frostwhisper to be with a few mates who still played.

I've really enjoyed the levelling in the new zones, the hand holding side of things meant I followed the whole story of that zone which I enjoyed. So many flight paths compared to being Alliance in pre rebel camp down in STV back int day!

I'm 118 at the moment and I've been through Underrot, the dock one and the temple dinosaur one but they feel so easy? I remember having to use CC just to get through Scarlet Monastery!

The item stat changes I'm not 100% sure on yet as I keep trying to get crit+mastery for my bleeds but a lot of gear is hate/versatility.

The helm/shoulders/chest with the slots you can change seem cool, it meant as a warrior I can pull quite a few mobs and have all sort of heals/shields popping as each one dies AND a heal from victory rush that is also improved through one of those stats.
 
Soldato
Joined
14 Nov 2012
Posts
17,934
Location
Close to Swindon, but not Swindon
I play daily as well and only recently got my 2nd char, demon hunter, to 120. Sat around 375 ilevel but just bought Division 2, so WoW will take a back seat for a while. I severely dislike the progression on gear though, its more grindy than a chick with a pole and too much to drink. M+ seems to be my only route and even then, my guild is quiet right now.
 
Soldato
Joined
8 Sep 2003
Posts
22,850
Location
150 yds from OcUK
screencapture-raider-io-characters-eu-aggramar-Ocukace-2019-03-26-12_56_53.png
 
Back
Top Bottom