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.
