World of Warcraft: Current Year

TheAylix said:

Like I said: I never played a single minute of live, release version BfA. My experience in the almost six months of the BfA Alpha/Beta was enough to drive me away from WoW completely for the next two years. Up until that point, I'd played at least a month or so of every other WoW expansion at some point during their release cycles - even the ones I wound up not really enjoying, such as WoD and Cataclysm. BfA was the first time I thought: "Fuck it, I never want to see any of this content ever again."

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Blizzard felt the same exact way. They implemented an entire "Azerite powers" system that didn't even have a single actual power (half of them were deemed non-functional by parsers) and then ignored the problem for months. There was no attempt to remedy, acknowledge, or address anything to do with Azerite in any meaningful way. It wasn't until several months went by the playerbase got a mea culpa with the corruption system.

For all Shadowlands faults-- at least people got to play with real powers right out the gate at launch. BFA's Azerite debacle shattered the community and had people questioning if Ion was fit to lead the design at all.

Hmmm is this Raen Dawncavalyr voice actor god damn Wuk Lamat tranny? Like same exact fake accent it seems like.

Oh nonbinary faggotry detected: apparently "Great Kyron" is a 'they/them'

I'll say one positive thing about garrisons: it's been nice not having to farm mats for like a decade off the back of doing garrison missions on fourteen characters with that auto assign addon for a year.

jayrebb said:

Not possible. Titanforging was the worst thing to happen to WoW along with the Azerite fiasco. BFA is way down there.

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I do think Shadowlands is over-hated. Mainly because it was hyped as a potential savior after BFA flopped for a lot of people. The irony is start of BFA was all shit mainly, but once they put in 8.2 with the Heart abilities and 2 good new zones, it got a little better. Then 8.3 was a shitfest again with corrupted gear, and everyone was in the "only SL being amazing can save WoW/Blizzard" mode.

Well, SL wasn't even close to amazing, the zones had decent design, and the first raid was pretty good, but the Maw and Tower shit really turned people off. As did the useless anima grinds, Covenants being mainly stupid, etc. Then they cut a bunch of content, tried to "fix" Maw/Tower shit but never really made it good, and it just kinda was left for dead from as early as 9.1 (also fucking content drought holy fuck).

Never played DF, but early on I feel a lot of people were in honeymoon mode that it just wasn't Shadowlands, and Dragon riding seemed to be a lot of fun for everyone. I remember when people were hyping up the villains early on in DF only to talk about how completely shit they were, and nothing important ever really happened by the end of the expansion.

TLDR; It's been mostly shit since Legion, but power of persuasive "it's not as terrible as it used to be!" and/or "everything is trash Blizzard sucks!" can help ignore/amplfy shittiness.

So I 100%'d two zones, the MSQ, and geared up a bit with what is available.

The good: Metzen's influence and a return to less retard tranny girl power shit seems evident. There is a significant contrast with Dorn, which is tortuously bad and Azj-Kahet which is actually good. As always, the art team continues to impress and their ability to make use of an engine this dated is downright masterful.

The bad: there's still a few notable moments of retard woke shit (albeit less than in recent memory). They also completely overdid it with the volume of side quests and it's such a sharp contrast compared to old Blizzard that used to make the side stuff engaging through a myriad of ways where as now it truly feels like chores.

The ugly: Blizzard has not been able to make a menacing threat or villain in forever. Having the bad guy 'kill' a powerful good guy to highlight how bad ass she is rather than through its own growth and organic storytelling is the height of lazy writing. No one gives a fuck about dagger lady. The main opportunity that this expansion had to earn some good graces back was through Delves and, to no one's surprise, they're terrible. This won't replace M+ and people will be tired of it in record time, similar to what occurred with Torghast and resulted in massive wasted development time for something that is just not engaging or fun. At least the retarded dragon shit had dragon flying, which continues to be useful and was worth the development time put into it.

Conclusion: If you like the WoW formula, you'll probably enjoy this. Public perception will be similar to Dragonflight, in that it's not a terribly insulting bad expansion but it's certainly not good nor will it bring back the massive audience that the game has lost. In a word, it's meh.

Voldeth said:

The bad: They also completely overdid it with the volume of side quests and it's such a sharp contrast compared to old Blizzard that used to make the side stuff engaging through a myriad of ways where as now it truly feels like chores.

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Care to expand upon this? My immediate assumption upon hearing that rep rewards were Warband shared was that they would greatly inflate the number of wizard chores your first character needs to do to max out the reps as a result.

(Also I am kind of shocked so many of you are willing to pay modern Blizz a premium to play this 'early' given their track record over the nearly last decade.)

jayrebb said:

In no uncertain terms could Shadowlands ever be considered worse then BFA

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Is almost everyone disagreeing with you?

BfA was a boring continuation of the WoW formula and story, especially at launch, it had more to do in later patches.

Shadowlands was an embarassment. The story/setting was nonsense, key mechanics like The Maw and Torghast didn't work, patches were underwhelming other than the last one.

Shadowlands is when a mass exodus to another game happened (note how many people are saying "MSQ" now) and when many people quit permanently (me included).

Wombat said:

Care to expand upon this? My immediate assumption upon hearing that rep rewards were Warband shared was that they would greatly inflate the number of wizard chores your first character needs to do to max out the reps as a result.

(Also I am kind of shocked so many of you are willing to pay modern Blizz a premium to play this 'early' given their track record over the nearly last decade.)

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It's always been possible to reach max without completing all the side quests however in this case I was already 80 by the end of the second zone or so. It felt like there was a good 15-20% more of them, which might be an incorrect perception based on the fact that I really did not like any of them (of what I completed). There had been a recent decline in terms of the quality in recent expansions but I could always point to a few that at least had a small chuckle; I can't remember any of them this time around. I also suspect that the rep rewards alongside the release schedule being so slow resulted in them just adding more to give people something to do.

Voldeth said:

It's always been possible to reach max without completing all the side quests however in this case I was already 80 by the end of the second zone or so. It felt like there was a good 15-20% more of them, which might be an incorrect perception based on the fact that I really did not like any of them (of what I completed). There had been a recent decline in terms of the quality in recent expansions but I could always point to a few that at least had a small chuckle; I can't remember any of them this time around. I also suspect that the rep rewards alongside the release schedule being so slow resulted in them just adding more to give people something to do.

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Uh you're lucky to hit 76 if you do only the campaign quests which is a big shift. Usually you can skip most side quests and finish up capped like a zone early provided you are doing dungeon quests.

Which is another thing they changed, not only are you basically never asked to do dungeons for the main campaign, the one case where you are, you actually can't because you get no credit if you the the dungeon normally so you have to use dumb NPCs.

Chris said:

Is almost everyone disagreeing with you?

BfA was a boring continuation of the WoW formula and story, especially at launch, it had more to do in later patches.

Shadowlands was an embarassment. The story/setting was nonsense, key mechanics like The Maw and Torghast didn't work, patches were underwhelming other than the last one.

Shadowlands is when a mass exodus to another game happened (note how many people are saying "MSQ" now) and when many people quit permanently (me included).

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Almost nobody besides the Juvarix responders so far. Merrith is on the fence, but generally agrees Shadowlands was more playable at launch than BFA-- which is the main metric the expansion should be evaluated on for a new purchase.

BFA just didn't include anything functional or operational for months on end.

When you have items that don't work, and it's widespread across all specs and classes-- it's a problem.

Azerite not working, or Torg and Maw being unfinished? I'm going with the loot. Loot matters.

Also the new zones are just not great. I think they're the worst in well over a decade, possibly ever? Visually they're all mid besides hallow fall, and zone layout and construction seems very pedestrian. Maybe it's because of heavy reuse of concepts? IoD for example has a meadery after just getting done mop remix. There's the shore with elementals, the shore with murlocs. The kobold/ shrine areas felt like stormheim.

I feel like they took pieces rated 9/10 and for every zone besides hallow fall somehow combined them to make 4/10 zones.

The 'talent tree' from 70-80 is just weird. You get literally every thing in the tree so its really just deciding what to pick for the either/or nodes... which seems to be essentially an intelligence check as one is typically highly situational and the other is useful everywhere.

Was 80 before getting to Hallowfell since I'm doing all the side quests and yeah it really is a very nice-looking and themed zone. The Arathi seem to be pretty much The Quen from Horizon Forbidden West, however, which is a bit distracting. Of course it will turn out that they are from a long-lost continent on the other side of the planet that no one has noticed despite the number of near-world-ending calamities that have ensued including but not limited to the fact that the Dranei have a ship orbiting the planet.

Qhue said:

The 'talent tree' from 70-80 is just weird. You get literally every thing in the tree so its really just deciding what to pick for the either/or nodes... which seems to be essentially an intelligence check as one is typically highly situational and the other is useful everywhere.

Was 80 before getting to Hallowfell since I'm doing all the side quests and yeah it really is a very nice-looking and themed zone. The Arathi seem to be pretty much The Quen from Horizon Forbidden West, however, which is a bit distracting. Of course it will turn out that they are from a long-lost continent on the other side of the planet that no one has noticed despite the number of near-world-ending calamities that have ensued including but not limited to the fact that the Dranei have a ship orbiting the planet.

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That's already established lore though not super fleshed out yet. The thing that doesn't make quite as much sense is one eyed one arm bandit is like 20s and was old enough to stow away which means she's got to have been in her early teens at least.

So let's say she's 12 when the fleet sets sail. Even if she's generously 24 now, they got swallowed up and built all those things in just over a decade?

Fuck it I'll probably try it out this week, I'll look at it like voting, I can't really bitch unless I take part of the process.

Can you still pay for this shit with Blizzard Bucks, or I need to give them real money this time?

The old FoH horde guild even exist anymore?

Cynical said:

Fuck it I'll probably try it out this week, I'll look at it like voting, I can't really bitch unless I take part of the process.

Can you still pay for this shit with Blizzard Bucks, or I need to give them real money this time?

The old FoH horde guild even exist anymore?

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Bliz bucks still work for all things that Bliz makes. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Microsoft is in any rush to expand the Bliz bucks program to the Xbox store.

Burns said:

Bliz bucks still work for all things that Bliz makes. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Microsoft is in any rush to expand the Bliz bucks program to the Xbox store.

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Thanks, the excuse I gotta use up my Blizz Bucks makes me feel a lot better about this.

I'm just a slut, not a dirty whore.

Palum said:

That's already established lore though not super fleshed out yet. The thing that doesn't make quite as much sense is one eyed one arm bandit is like 20s and was old enough to stow away which means she's got to have been in her early teens at least.

So let's say she's 12 when the fleet sets sail. Even if she's generously 24 now, they got swallowed up and built all those things in just over a decade?

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The timing of it all is what got me scratching my head for sure. I figure she's gotta be older than she looks on account of their whole elf/human hybrid status.

How long has it been since WoW was released in in-game years? Anduin is at least in his 30s now right?

Qhue said:

The timing of it all is what got me scratching my head for sure. I figure she's gotta be older than she looks on account of their whole elf/human hybrid status.

How long has it been since WoW was released in in-game years? Anduin is at least in his 30s now right?

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Says he was 25 at the start of DF

I have a few friends on the battle.net list that were in the Hyjal guild before "someone" deleted the guild. We grouped together for a bit, but none of us had a guild tag on. So I recreated the Fires of Heaven guild back on Hyjal - Horde. Not for raiding, or any specific purpose other than just being a general meeting ground on the same server. Even though a bunch of stuff is cross-server now, there are still stupid limitations to what you can and cannot do on the server. Which was what the old guild essentially was after the last three expansions. Just send "Daiddraco" a message, if I'm on, and Ill invite you and your alts.