Battle For Azeroth Looking Back (BfA Review)

battle for Azeroth will go down as a remembered expansion whether it be for good or bad reasons mainly bad reasons we go based off of forums YouTube videos or reddit comments but eight remembered expansion SS in this video we'll look back at battle for us Roth and see what went wrong where they went right and everything in between now since I don't participate in every single faucet of World of Warcraft this video is mainly going to be about pieces of content I actually consumed myself which is mostly all of it except PvP because I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on that subject and then on and off in the video I'll be talking about my favorite things so let's get started with the zones [Music] now there's this thing in the wild community that anytime someone bashes the game for some reason they'll always bring up the fact that at least the art in WoW is consistently good and the art department probably carries the rest of the team on their back the capital city of the Zandalari looks great even if it's a nightmare to navigate for horde players compared to the Alliance counterpart which doesn't look as good but is probably the most convenient central hub they've ever added all of the zones look amazing dressed foreign as mere especially getting to new zones in a patch was an excellent idea and it's something they should definitely emulate in the future as when I started getting bored of makig on I could just hop over to the Ajara zone and vice versa and they both had different little gimmicks to them that made them feel different enough where it wasn't all the same and just doing dailies and Bolt zones even though that's basically what you were doing as well as the art in the Ajara zone just looking really good having a gigantic wall of water as the confines of the zone looked really cool without getting into too much details the zones were excellent almost nothing to complain about in fact rather than minor nitpicks like maybe the ajar zone was obviously created for flying in mind whereas mecha gan was incredibly convenient without flying overall I'd give the zones of BFA a 9 out of 10 now let's get into the rates BFA had five rates and if there's one thing World of Warcraft is good at it's making rates but some of them were obviously better than others and some of them weren't very good at all when players go into old dear it's a Titan facility which was created to research the old gods which accidentally created their own old God who went a rampant and you have to go in and fight all the eldred's abominations culminating with the fight against Cahoon the blood old god honestly it was a pretty well liked raid even with how much criticism the expansion got at the beginning people genuinely liked this place personally I have I was alright none of the fights really stood out to me except for maybe Zul because as a priest I had a special duty to use mass dispel in the ads since it was a fight in which you could completely delete ads by just dispelling them and having a mass dispel made the mechanic much easier moving on over to the battle for des aural or this one I thought was great definitely the best of all the raves from this expansion as it tries a few things that are unique and in my opinion they were able to pull off those unique things without it being overly annoying in this raid the Alliance sieges the city and horde players have to come in and try to stop them but horde players arrive too late in order to save the king and then you have to play as an alliance character to see what they did and both horde and alliance players get different dialogues for the parts that they play cross faction which is a neat little point to show the not all information is super accurate when relayed from a second source and then the fight culminates with chasing Jane out to the middle to see where your force are to retreat all in all in a plus raid highly recommended and then we go over to the mini raid the crucible of storms this is only two bosses and had the exact same rate tier as desire lore but since it came out much later Blizzard decided to tune the fight so that it would be a challenge for world first races and they kind of succeeded and made the place a little bit too hard where the second boss who not is now considered one of the hardest bosses in the game's history so people didn't really like to clear this right now after they finished in once although pretty much every single piece of Luke that dropped from this raid had a special unique effect tied to it which I thought was great and something they definitely should expand upon in the future and then we go underwater to fight to sharra and what I can say about the eternal palace raid is that it definitely looked good the fights however well I wouldn't be surprised to hear if they relegated this place to the b-team and then had the a-team work on the battle for DES our lore that's probably not how these things work I'm not a game designer I'm a youtuber I wouldn't take game design advice from a youtuber but at least the place looked cool especially the final fight that has got to be one of the best-looking boss rooms in the game the fight itself though is a different story and then it all culminates with a fight with an old got in Azov someone who's been in this story for many years and was basically the whole reason that Cataclysm expansion happened so it was nice for us to finally be able to find him especially since we did it in his own domain as you have to go into nylon in order to face him and a zone that looks amazing to the point where many people were asking for this to be some kind of leveling zone or something so they can do more dailies I don't know the art just looks good the fights are also pretty good as well with the only disappointing one being the final boss himself which is a shame since most people will rate an entire raid based on their final boss but this place is excellent and a huge step above from the eternal palace and quality of good raid fights as it both had lots of amazing boss fights as well as an amazing aesthetic but to be fair to the eternal palace that had a good aesthetic as well they almost never mess that part up overall rating in battle for Azeroth was pretty good I definitely have to give it an 8 out of 10 and we'll probably talk more about these raids as the video continues now let's talk about the gear if there's one thing roll the Warcraft players love more than anything else it's their gear and in fact I'm kind of convinced part of the reason mythic plus dungeon succeeded is because they dropped gear that was competitive with raiding gear if you want to coerce a majority of the wild community into doing something giving them a piece of top-end gear as a reward is a good way to go about it and the score I to give be a phase gear is a four out of ten he may be surprised I'm not giving it a 0 or a 1 because they did do some things right all of the gear from crucible storms had special effects on it which was an excellent idea in my opinion and I wish they had more pieces of gear with special effects on it besides just boring stats the corruption gear was a good way to replace Titan forging in my opinion even if the reaction to corruption gear is pretty mixed some players hate any form of RNG on their gear so even if corruption is a step up from Titan forging it's still random on pieces of gear which is bad for a lot of people which Pape sure can't really refute those arguments nor am I gonna try all I'm saying is I'm a fan of cursed items and corrupted pieces of gear fit that fantasy pretty well in vanilla well they had some pieces of year that had negative stats on them and in fact one of the most popular weapons from vanilla well had negative stats on it which was the corrupted ashbringer everybody wanted the corrupted ashbringer you could probably sell your account for a hot price if you had the corrupted ashbringer on it it's an incredibly sought-after weapon especially since it was removed and no one really seems to mind that it had negative stats on it but that's probably because it wasn't random negative stats it was always going to have negative stats on it no matter what so it could be comparing apples to oranges which is why the gear is still 4 out of 10 because let's talk about all of the negatives BFA was the first expansion to not have tier set bonuses in it tier set bonuses have been in the game since vanilla Wow and some of those tier set bonuses would go all the way up to 8 slots where you get certain special abilities based on the amount of equipment you have on in that item set and it really changed how sunglasses played from tier to tier I remember one of the tier set bonuses back in Legion allowed my shadow priests to use void bolt without a cool-down for a couple of seconds after you entered void form and it completely changed my rotation to the point where I still accidentally spam void bolt every time I enter void form Blizzard has been saying that they want to add progression systems that only exist for one expansion and they already had a player accepted version of that in the form of tier set bonuses so then removing it for what I'll talk about in a second seems a bit like a pretty bad idea but in their defense they couldn't really do it with the new gear system they trying out for the expansion and it was kind of limiting in a way you pretty much had to have your 4 set bonus so you always had 4 pieces of equipment that we're stuck and you didn't want any upgrades for those slots which kind of does not fit well with mythic Plus dungeon gearing where can give you really high level pieces of equipment on any of those slots tier set bonuses are limiting when it comes to gear design so it makes sense that they tried to push away from it they just did not do a good job at it and there is also the aesthetic reason of wanting tier set bonuses people like if they had an entire set of gear suited towards their class however arguments that are rarely brought up with the aesthetic one what some people fail to realize is how often can Blizzard really define what a hunter looks like if they're constantly designing tier set bonuses that's just for hunters and there's 20-plus previous tiers before you're eventually gonna run out of ideas as you can't constantly keep making a set that - just for hunters and feels the hunter aesthetic when you have 20 other pieces of equipment - that have the exact same feel and look to them not having to constrain yourself to a single class gives the art department more freedom it's just that without tier set bonuses they kind of went with bland generic armor sets which did not satisfy people who thought they were missing out on their specific tier set aesthetics so they just really made some mistakes with removing tier set bonuses in both ways and then we have the the right ear system a system that was so bad Blizzard abandoned assistant mid expansion and created essences as kind of up we're sorry now the idea behind as a right gear was that it was a soft way to replace tier set bonuses and you'd have three pieces of equipment that would act like their own tier set bonuses where you could choose which bonuses you wanted on a piece of gear and since they were constrained to only three slots instead of four or six it would be easier to add them as rewards to other kinds of content and make them a desirable choice and some of the azurite talents were worthy of their tier set bonus of legacy holy paladin's for example have their glimmer of light as a bonus which is so good it completely changed the way they healed for the entire expansion and that's the kind of thing you'd expect from a four set bonus but that unfortunately was kind of an exception to the rule more of an outlier than what we actually got in most of the spots if every single has the right piece was as good as a glimmer of light people would not be complaining about them as much as they did what we actually got in those spots were a lot of boring passives with my dis priests for example none of the azurite traits were very good at the beginning of expansion to the point where you could kind of pick a random traits and it wouldn't really matter to your class at all or there would just be some traits that had really good passives like the shadow prices shadowy apparition one which just gave you more damage to your shadowy apparitions which is a passive thing that spawns from your dots you don't have to do anything for it and it doesn't change how you play your class but you want to stack as many of them as you could because it just did lots of damage a lot of the traits were just boring stat increases like that and didn't live up to all their tier set bonuses and how they would change how you played your class most of the time and then there was the way you unlocked those pieces in order to actually use their tier set bonuses in your azurite gear you had to have a certain neck level which you grinded through getting artifact power so if you got an upgraded piece of gear there's a good chance you wouldn't actually be able to equip it because you didn't have a high enough neck level to use the as erect traits on it you could have gotten the exact same as a right piece of equipment just at a higher item level and not want to wear it because you couldn't use the abilities on it but you could use the abilities on the lower item level piece of gear and now I will say when you first level the character and get as right pieces it is fun hitting milestones and being able to unlock it slots after that though it's a really stupid mechanic that Blizzard found out wasn't good in the early stages so they abandoned it almost immediately and what was supposed to be the full extra gear progression system was constantly unlocking your azurite pieces which wasn't fun it just felt like a chore that you had to do in order to use your pieces of equipment but not one of those fun chores like being able to enchant all your pieces of gear or putting a whole bunch of different kinds of gems to fit in their sockets some chores are definitely a lot more fun than others as a right Armour just basically punished you for getting better pieces of equipment and it's no wonder no one liked it the Azariah gear was so bad I could have easily have written off all of the gear grand BFA is like a 1 out of 10 but they did realize pretty quickly that it was a failure and dropped it mid expansion and then they created the essence system which was definitely a step up and then they had the crucible storms raids with all those unique pieces of equipment which while fun does it really make up for the disaster that was as a right gear and then we have Titan forging which honestly was not new to BFA and they did try to get rid of it with corruption which personally I like so I'm just gonna leave that out when I'm talking about gear so when it comes to gear I already told you the score it's a 4 out of 10 it's no wonder people have such a negative opinion of this expansion when you remember just how much people care about their gear now when it comes to music rule the Warcraft usually does a pretty good job but some of the music I hear the most is whatever is in the current raid and after a while that music gets kind of annoying but there's also watts of music in the game that's only used in a handful of zones and just like with pretty much all other expansions the BFA had pretty good music as well [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] also for the war bringers Jana they went all out with that and the song might even be better in some of the other languages the Russian one in particular is really good [Music] although being a native English speaker I still prefer the English version that ones done really well till now I ain't no musical connoisseur I'm not gonna go into the intricacies or detail of it or compare video game music to something else it's good it generally gets high praises but I don't think I've ever seen anyone complain about the music which should really say something about a community whose favorite pastime is to complain about everything so for music I thought I'd give it a score of 9 out of 10 pretty good but no masterpieces now let's talk about infinite progression systems one of the reasons people really like runescape is because your character can constantly work on random things which directly contribute to the power of your character you basically have a near infinite progression system where there is always something to work on to increase your character's power which is a great feedback loop for getting people to want to play the game over and over and is one of the reason MMOs can be addicting well the Warcraft doesn't really have a history of infinite regression systems up until Legion you basically had a point in which you could stop gaining more power for your character as you could obtain the very best gear from that current content of rating and then you'd be done you couldn't increase the power of your character anymore and then in Legion they added the artifact system which allowed you to grind an arbitrary system called artifact power which when you hit certain milestones would increase the power of your character at early levels it was significant increases but once you unlocked everything in your weapon the bonuses started to become much smaller and hardly noticeable but we're still good enough to the point where mid maxes ruined the game for themselves by grinding them out like crazy to get their weapon to as high a point as possible so they could push out as much damage as possible and that's kind of what infinite progression systems are for they keep you playing the game longer and potentially make it fun to play the game long as it is fun to constantly progress the power level of your character and with how you got artifact power from doing basically anything in game it was incentivized to do a whole bunch of different things as it would increase the power of your character unfortunately everything led into the system and you couldn't really max out anything in runescape you could eventually max out your skill and wood cutting for example so you wouldn't be able to cut down trees anymore in order to progress the power of your character but the artifact power system doesn't really have those kinds of milestone caps everything feeds into the main thing so the best way to infinitely progress your character was to do the objective in-game which gave you the most amount of artifact power for the least amount of time invested which just happened to be running mob souls over and over and once people found this out everyone started doing it and then people burn themselves out by constantly doing the same thing over and over and Blizzard learn their lesson they changed mythic plus dungeons to be more streamlined with how they gave out artifact power so running mobs souls over and over was no longer the most efficient way to grind out power and in the later parts of the expansion they made it so the infinite progression system was so minor that it was barely worth grinding out anybody now let's go to BFA the BFA progression system really shows that they did not learn their lesson for mob souls rutting Islands was the new mas alts and they never actually fixed islands being the best way to grind out artifact power but at least there was a hard cap on your neck where it wasn't as infinite you could complete the grind but it was nearly impossible to complete in the early parts of the game sell lots of top raiders and mid max are spent all of their time grinding Islands over and over every day four hours a day trying to get as high of a neck level as possible because it directly boosted the power of their characters by a minor amount and more importantly allowed them to equip higher level pieces of azurite gear now the infinite progression system can definitely work in theory Blizzard has already kind of done a good job with it with the paragon system in Diablo 3 and it's very obviously trying to incorporate that with the AR a fax system but they kind of took a step back with azurite power instead of trying to expand upon it to make it something people would like it's now to the point where people hate infinite progression systems and Wow and people cheered at Blizzcon when they said they wouldn't have artifact power the next expansion I don't think an infinite progression system is bad but I do think it's hard to pull off and probably not very easy to pull off in an MMO like world Warcraft unless they have a new artifact weapon every new expansion and then there's also the problem with Titan forging that they kind of remove at the end of the expansion where since it was possible to complete the progression of your character in the past Titan forging made it so that that wasn't possible and there was always a chance you can get an upgrade when you did a piece of content but this one was completely orangey and not the kind of infinite progression system that people liked people like being able to slowly grind out that infinite progression system and not be given it randomly through some random so as a fan of Diablo 3 and it's infinite progression system I'd like to see a good one in WoW but BFA definitely did not have a good one and it's great that when they introduced the essence system there was a hard cap of increase in the power of those essences which technically means essences are not an infinite progression system but they do allow you to grind things out anyway in order to get cosmetic upgrades which i think was a great idea and a lot of those cosmetic upgrades look really good so they're kind of worth getting and many more people would have called essences an absolute slam dunk if it wasn't for the fact that they did not transfer over to alts people like putting a whole bunch of time and effort into one character but people also like to play their alts and they don't like to have to put the same amount of time and effort into their alts for them to be competitive so if they just simply made essences account-wide that would have solved a lot of problems but also if they did that it would kind of be too easy to catch up on an alt I don't know if any of you've tried to get an alt raid ready but it's pretty easy to get gear and B if it and the only thing you really have left to do is grinding out your essences again so I can kind of see why they have it made them account-wide but at the same time who cares it's just an alts that's a pretty lame reason to not make them account wide even if I can kind of see where they're coming from so when it comes to be a phase infinite progression system I have to give them a big old F or a four out of ten even if they did a good job with essences as long as you don't play alts there's no problem with it because funny thing is in Diablo 3 the infinite progression system carries over to all of your alts so it's not like Blizzard is against the idea they just really don't like it in WoW for some reason and next we have new game features b.fa introduced four new concepts to the game excluding gear we have the island expeditions the war fronts horrific visions and the allied races allied races is basically just new races except ones that are tied to lore reasons and rep grinding and despite how much people complain about those things they have been a great success and pretty much everyone loves getting so many new extra races in one expansion allied races filled the open world with new alts leveling because people kind of like the new races that were introduced and it helped that some of them had pretty good racial abilities it used to be that we would probably get two new races every two expansions so getting ten of them in one expansion was a nice change of pace and really made sense as it's a lot easier to balance a few racial z' than it is to balance adding an entire new class to the game and it kind of makes me wonder why Blizzard hadn't thought of this feature earlier because it's such a no-brainer good idea and then I remember why they cut Naga from the game because it would be a pain in the ass to fit armor onto them probably the reason before was they didn't want to have to fit every single piece of armor to a whole bunch of new races which they kind of got over with BFA thankfully the island expeditions and war fronts weren't as popular though but they both sounded great on paper island expeditions we're supposed to be about exploring an uncharted island looking for all the hidden secrets he can find which were littered about an island that was supposed to be different every time you went to one and war fronts were supposed to be like an RTS mode where everyone worked together in order to build up their armies in order to defeat the enemy general but what actually happened with Island expeditions was they kind of ruined it by making you race against the clock with enemy NPCs hunting you down it really kills the exploration aspect of the islands if you have to constantly worrying about losing or getting ganked randomly plus why would you waste time exploring and looking for secrets when you can just pull a gigantic group of mobs and AoE them down in order to win faster you can get a whole bunch of really good cosmetic rewards from Islands including some things that are worth a lot of gold but those only dropped randomly at the end of the island so there's no point looking around for secrets so the best way to get these new secrets was to group up a gigantic group of mobs and AoE them down pretty much everything just boiled down to gather in a gigantic group of moms and then AoE them down as anything else was kind of inefficient and they also tied this mode to the infinite progression system which made people hate having to constantly go around and gather a large group of mobs and AoE them down all day since there wasn't really a stop on how many islands you could do this is kind of an area where I think horrific vision succeeded your Kapton how many can do per week because it's reliant on a resource in order to even run one and the rewards for completing them and pushing further directly increase the power of your character without leading into an annoying infinite progression system as you can only increase the power of your character so much per week plus they're difficult and flexible on whether you can do them solo or not so even if the gameplay is kind of similar you run in and gather a large pack of mobs and AoE them down horrific visions kind of succeeds in forcing you to do actual certain events with the incentives of getting cosmetics and fuelling the finite progression system plus the fact that you can do them solo or with a group means people prefer to play by themselves and have a challenge have something challenging to do and people who won't like to play with their friends can still play with their friend the horrific vision seems like a really good idea so far and I'm excited to see how they expand upon it in Shadowlands island expeditions could really learn a thing or two from horrific visions and then we have the war fronts another idea that sounds good on paper but really is missing a few things to be any kind of success the idea behind war fronts was adding RTS features to Wow where you build up your army fight with them against the enemy general in order to win you see in RTS games you gather resources in order to build up bases and units in order to help you win an overwhelm your opponent or outmaneuver them with your army but in RTS games it's nearly impossible to build every single base and max out all of your upgrades you have to pick and choose which ones you want which is what gives the diversity two different builds and everything and where war fronts fell short on this front is that there isn't a choice you just gather resources until eventually you max out all the buildings and upgrades and then you push for a win since there's no one person to choose all the upgrades this was their way of making it a group choice by having people pick which upgrades they wanted to max out first but eventually all of them do get maxed out so it doesn't really matter more busy work than it is a gameplay feature and then there's the big factor that you can't actually lose and they're really easy so after you complete it once you basically experienced all there was to offer at the war fronts there were literal groups of people who would just afk inside the main building and then win anyway because you don't actually have to do anything the fact that you can't lose or I guess that it's incredibly hard to lose technically you can't lose kind of strips it of any kind of fun there needs to be some kind of challenge in addition to good rewards for a gameplay feature to see any kind of moderate success which will then be factored in with a whole bunch of other features that go into it there were decent rewards for war fronts it was the fastest way to gear out a new character during the tiers in which that gear was still useful but if the mode itself is just inherently super easy or you just kind of have to move your character around to avoid getting kicked out for inactivity that's not a very good selling feature of an expansion this is why they kind of scrapped war fronts early and only released them and then they introduced heroic war fronts which are a lot more similar to what they promise with the war fronts at the beginning of the expansion as there are much harder versions that you can actually lose and it matters a lot more which buildings and stuff you upgrade first they actually send ways to attack your building that are difficult to defend our ignore fronts are actually a good time but they came out a little bit too late in the expansion where everyone had already written off floor fronts as useless but heroic war fronts were what they should have been from the start or if they had a PvP mode I'm sure he would have liked that so when it comes to new features of the expansion they had two duds and Island expands and more fronts and to medium successes with allied races and horrific visions so I'd have to give features for battle for hounds araf a five out of ten not as bad as people would like to make it out to be but not super good either now let's talk about class design BFA gets lots of flack for completely ruining lots of classes after they remove the artifact weapons which had a lot of abilities on them that allowed a whole bunch of classes to play in certain weights and that they didn't do enough to fix classes once they got gutted with their artifact weapons being taken away now personally I play a priest and I dabbled a little bit with a monk warrior and demon hunter with about 95% of my total playtime being on a priest and with the global cooldown changes where they made it so a lot of cooldowns are on the global cooldown so you basically just sit there while you activate your cooldowns not be able to do anything for one second that killed the fun for a lot of certain classes and specs now for my priest in which I play disc in shadow I main disc healing for three of the five for eight tiers and then I main - a doe priest for two of them I have to say that BFA dis priest is in one of the golden ages of dis priests it's a lot of fun and I honestly feel sorry for other classes who don't get to experience disc healing and Shadow Priests had a lot of problems at the beginning of the expansion from what I hear but then once they introduced essences that's when shadow priest kind of came into their own and became a lot more enjoyable and as someone who hates the DPS and raids I had a lot of fun for the few rate tiers I had to play my shadow priest so I have nothing but high ratings for the class I play in the kind of content I enjoy the most so how did those terrible horrible gang changing GCD changes affect the two prefered specs I play in Riggs almost not at all my dis priests has to waste a global cooldown in order to activate some of the essences and rapture but that's about it and they're not super important as I kind of forgot about them it really affected other classes much more and I didn't fill them at all on my shadow priest I don't even know if the GCD changes affected the shadow priests is at all to be perfectly honest so while some classes had a bad time with the changes the priest kind of got off lucky I guessed from all the horror stories I've heard anyway so from personal experience class design for shadow and disc was great I don't play holy nor do I care about it I also don't play other specs or classes except for my fury warrior alt for fun so when it comes to class design for battle for Azeroth specifically disk and Shadow Priests the two specs I have the most experience with I have to give them a 9 out of 10 it would be almost perfect if it wasn't for the fact they constantly got nerfs every patch I'm not going to pretend I played all 30 plus backs so this part of the video is highly subjective but should give a little insight that not all classes were bad but I'm serious about disc and it being in one of its golden ages I don't even want to play a healer in classic Wow because I know dis unique style of healing doesn't exist in that game and in my original cut of this video I went into much much more detail on why I liked disc and shadow but you'll be happy to know I cut those parts out of this video for y'all who don't care about priests and now let's talk about some of the bugs BFA is known as an incredibly buggy expansion as it was very obviously launched early before everything was ironed out and there was just massive bugs everywhere that prevented people from playing the game and then the last patch of the game was one of the most buggiest patches ever and what no one could do anything it was literally an unplayable game and this is exactly what you'd be led to believe based on YouTube videos forum threads and reddit posts and my personal experience based on my own anecdotal evidence I remember I ran into a bug or a staple master let me see my stable pets despite the fact that I was a priest and could not tame hunter pets and with the launch of 8.3 I had to wait a week before I got my gold from sold auctions and that was about the extent of bugs I personally experienced those are not exactly game breaking but I'm sure there were other bugs I encountered and just forgot about because they were minor the stablemaster thing kind of stands out because that was unique and kind of funny and not at all game breaking for me you see what happened with BFA was there absolutely was bugs I'm not going to deny that some parts of it absolutely felt like they were kind of rushed out because of minor bugs like being able to see your stapled Pat's as a priest I've never been able to see that before in previous expansions but what I think happened was a couple of people ran into some bugs and then posted about them online and then they garnered lots of negative attention and they got kind of blown out of proportion making it seem like everyone was experiencing all of these bugs all the time because if five different people all experienced a different to game breaking bug then post about them all within the next couple of days it's gonna seem like servers are constantly crashing even if those things were experienced by less than 1% of the player base because one percent of the player base is still like 50,000 people on a low estimate not to say those bugs don't exist and there's even things like Mac users having trouble with the new patch loading but they were not as widespread as everyone was making them out to be not to defend bugs or anything it would be nice if all games were played tested to the point where they no longer had bugs in them at all but I also don't care about minor things that get fixed in a day or two anyway and based on my own personal anecdotal evidence it completely goes contrary to popular opinion so I can't really knock be a Fae for this I'm sorry but I just haven't experienced any noteworthy bugs at all despite playing the game literally every single day since it came out so when it comes to bugs in BFA I have to give it a 6 point 5 out of 10 just because it's a hots meme and people would get mad if I gave it a higher score now let's talk about my least favorite thing from the expansion personally my least favorite thing of the expansion was all of the nerfs that my two pre specs got and I guess as a right gear I mean talking about nerfs to my class seems like an incredibly subjective thing to not like since there's so many other things people complain about that I could also complain about as well but I'd be lying to say if any of those really affected me as much as my class constantly getting nerfed my priestly abilities do less damage at the end of the expansion than they did at the beginning of it which is not very fun disc was so good at the beginning that immediately after the first patch they got a nerf to their damage and healing which totally makes sense they were putting out competitive healing while also dealing about half the damage of a tank so just having a dis priest was better than having a normal healer because you were getting extra damage on the boss while also having full heals so in the next patch they'd nerf dis priests again because they were still really good at dealing damage and putting out great heals and then after the next right here they nerfed them again and then after another rate tier that got nerfed again and then what do you know after one last patch they got another big nerf to everything since the start of the expansion dis priests have only ever gotten Ursula every single new patch which kind of shows how dominant they were fight just constantly got nurse and still saw constant competitive play there was even still a dis priests in the world first Nazif kill and to dis priests and world second is on skill because the thing with dis priests is it has a pretty high skill ceiling if you're not a good dis priest then you're probably gonna be a bad you learn rates but if you're a good dis priests then you're going to be healing for about as much as everyone else while also putting out extra damage so it's always just a huge plus to have one but they're hard to play well so they're in high demand and they also constantly get nerfed because of this same exact case with shadow constant nerfs every patch so when it comes to my least favorite thing of the expansion I have to give it a 5 out of 10 for constant nerfs I still obviously play my class and I still love it in rates and they were warranted with how good the class is but no one likes to be on the receiving end of so many nerves you know now let's talk about the story BFA is when players started to call the lore bad and gets lots of flack for having terrible lore and inconsistent characters especially since the fact that the expansion was sold as a faction conflict and then it actually ended up being horrid Civil War - electric Boogaloo there was some faction conflict but it was hardly the main focus of the story and there was also lots of characters acting out of character based on their pre-established Lord Sylvanas was being evil for no reason Rex are was helping out the Horde for no reason same with lily and vos and gorona sour fang was just sad the entire time Bane took too long to object to Sylvanas ideologies etc etc and a lot of this boils down to the fact that Wow does not tell its full story in game you have to read extra books and short stories that Blizzard puts out in order to get the full picture as well as know the detailed lore behind everyone as they rarely spoon-feeding that information when they reintroduce past characters like for example I had no idea how they defeated azov' after playing through the patch 8.3 storyline until I went online and looked up rogdon and mothers backstories and then it all made sense although TL DR for you people Rawdon created the engine of Malik and the forge of origination and there is a super-advanced robot AI who was tasked with study in the old gods and did so to such a degree that she accidentally created one and vastly outgrew her programming to the point where it impressed even the other Titan keepers which is why no one was able to figure out how to use Titan devices in the way that she did and since the average wild player barely reads quest techs it's pretty understandable why so many of them are confused as to what exactly was going on now as someone who gets excited every time Blizzard announces a new book I do read all the extra material and I know pretty much the backstories of all the main characters in the story and having a knowledgeable lore background on world of warcraft I can say that the BFA story was not half bad they definitely pulled the bacon switch with the faction conflict and there were some bad parts like pretty much the entirety of the dark shore scenario but there was a lot done well and some things done just okay now I know there's arguments about how you shouldn't need to read outside materials in order to get the full story and there's definitely other games out there that give you the full story in game but I don't really share those opinions I don't care about that if there is extra materials I'm gonna read it it's there for the people who care and it doesn't force in your face if you don't care so I'm going to give my critique including outside sources since they are there for a reason and do help to fill things out and when it comes to critiquing a story nothing is perfect pretty much any story falls under objective criticism Lord of the Rings for example is a very beloved fantasy story it is full of plot contrivance ha's and robotic character moments but it gets nothing but praises for being good because well it is good it was such an influential piece of work that it inspired fantasy tropes to the modern day but even that story doesn't hold up to objective criticism it really comes down to a lot of other things that might just depend on the mood of the critic as they watch or read their pieces of media and if it's good enough on a hole it's easy to forgive flaws in the story because nothing is perfect and some people will look at nothing but nitpicks to paint the whole story in an egg of light and it's very effective since people on a whole treat negative feedback as more real than positive or neutral so you don't have to justify a negative opinion if the popular opinion is already negative because negative equals true to a lot of people but you do have to work harder to justify a positive one so keep that in mind when I talk about the story first let's talk about Blom Samedi this is one character that was introduced in this expansion or at least given more character in this expansion he was actually introduced shadows of the Horde I think and he was a pretty universally loved character tired of old one sandy you go back today live in lower the one who bring the rain mix the crops grow that wither and die then we have the stuff of Jana and her backstory during the Alliance leveling zones and I thought they handled that pretty well and the only real complaints about that is how she ended up working with the Horde anyway towards the end although she has always been friendly to Bane so it makes sense but I would have liked to see her go on more of a rampage first so I get it the story with sour fang was told through full length and fully animated cinematics and game and sour fang is one of the few horde characters that is loved by both alliance and horde players well in general obviously not everybody's gonna like him and his was the story of an old soldier starting a war for his war chief and doing so in an honorable way but at the end when he makes a mistake and doesn't stick to his plans Sylvanas does something completely unexpected and burns down the world tree which sour fang was not morally okay with he was fine with everything up until the burning and this really made him think to himself that maybe his ideologies weren't 100% correct and maybe he didn't actually know what he was doing he was just kind of tired of living and really wanted to die in battle as this was the most glorious thing an orc could possibly do and he didn't want to have to think too much that maybe he's been wrong his whole life so he sought to commit suicide by running into enemy and reinforcements at the Battle of Lordran only to be stopped by recon quite by accident to rekon dint really set out to stop him he just happened to be there and say the right things at the right time which was pretty great he then gets captured and taken by the Alliance later and refuses to escape when the Horde breaks into the prison to free those and Allari allies which was basically the same as a formal declaration of leaving the Horde so then both the Alliance and horde plant deal with sour fate in prison the Alliance free him from prison so that he could possibly set up a rebellion to overthrow the Horde and Sylvanas sends people to assassinate him to prevent him from setting up a rebellion although Sylvanas men fail and Southbank succeeds in building up his rebellion although once they finally get to the gates of orga Marv sour Frank really doesn't want to repeat of what happened with Garrosh and takes on a gamble of trying to fight Sylvanas one-on-one he knows he can't possibly win but he also knows Sylvanas can't possibly give up the opportunity to a melee ate him in front of everyone so maybe a miracle what happened and then that's basically exactly what happens Sylvanas does kill him but also reveals her true intentions to everyone the process and then decides to peace out and end the rebellion before a single battle could take place now this story might not have been perfect they definitely could have handle the parts of Sylvanas a little bit better and we really didn't need a second horde Civil War but it was a nice exploration of an old time character story and putting him into the limelight as the main character with lots of excellent cutscenes to accompany it and then we have the story with Slav honest herself basically doing evil things for no reason and never telling anyone why she's doing the things she's doing for good reasons this little story element pissed off a lot of people and didn't actually get any answers until 2019 to Blizzcon when they announced the new expansion and then during the nizam fight in 8.3 we finally hear the dialogues of what she had planned with Queen Azshara and that's LaVon is basically wanted everyone to die which is why she was trying to stir up as much conflict as possible so her story more or less has just been a setup for the next expansion which is why they focused on sour Fang so heavily the story of BFA was more about sour Fang than it was Sylvanas in the story with alliance characters wrapped up in the first quarter of the expansion you can kind of think of the Alliance story as like act one and then the real story begins afterwards which really left a lot of Alliance players in the dust when it came to just following what the Horde was going to do next in the story so when it comes to the long and complex thing that is the BFA story which had lots of smaller stories that made it up and no actual faction conflict besides the battle for desire lore which I thought was excellent I'd have to give lore on a whole a six out of ten there were some good parts there was also lots of parts that weren't so good but overall the entire thing wasn't terrible and we even got excellent cutscenes and characters out of it it's just really hard to give this a negative score overall and now I'd like to talk about my favorite thing from BFA out of all of the features and things added and neat ideas they tried I definitely have to say that my favorite thing about battle for Azeroth was the Jaina fight at the end of the battle for DES aural or beware beware of me BFA had a lot of things that sounded good on paper but then didn't really work out well when it was put into practice I'd say this is kind of common in game development though and in world Warcraft in general because I remember back in Cataclysm when I first read about the Deathwing fight it sounded like an amazing idea on paper you'd hop on a gunship in order to chase down Deathwing parachute on his back and were to pop office plates and then finish him off in the Maelstrom it sounded like a fun exciting time and what it actually came to do nits in practice we had the gunship fight which was one of the most buggy fights in the game's history the spine of death link fight being one of the most hated fights in the game's history because it heavily favored class staffing for the tendon burst mechanic and then we had one of the most disappointing final fights in the game's history with the madness of death wake which still kind of holds true to this day Nezhat was a pretty disappointing final boss and they compared it to the madness of death link madness of death link is basically the comparison if you want to compare a disappointing final boss so ever since then I've kind of tempered my expectation when it comes to fights that sound good on paper and then don't really work out in practice then when I first heard about the Jaina fight I remember reading that you're trying to chase her down because he just killed the king of the city so you board her boat and then start fighting her and her crew men since the Alliance is in full retreat they have a whole bunch of boats next to Jaina who come to her aid and give her more Marines to help her fight so you have to man the ballistas in order to shoot them away then halfway through the fight she just freezes the boat and the immediate sea and it runs out to the middle of the ocean so you have to chase after her only since you're fighting on ice you're slowly freezing to death and you have to pop barrels of oil in order to heal yourself up only there's a limited supply of these so you have to defeat her before you run out of heat sources and freeze to death now all of that sounded pretty cool on paper and then when you actually do the fight itself you get pretty much exactly that during the first phase of the fight you have to fight them or eans on the boat and then shoot the boats that are trying to give her more reinforcements in order to stop the mobs from spawning which makes sense thematically and as a neat gameplay interaction with it you can also mind-control the mobs off the boat most boss fights have taken damage in the fight anyway and on the Jaina fight you're just constantly getting stacks of the Frostbite debuff which you have to remove by heating yourself up with fire which makes sense thematically and works out great too gameplay wise having to race against time to destroy an ice wall before you freeze to death makes for a great mechanic and fits very thematically having Jaina ice block when you bloodlust make sense from a smart NPC point of view can be used as a beneficial part of the fight to deer in the final fates and then having to rush her down the very end before everyone starts getting frozen and blocks of ice adds a thematic enrage timer to the fight without having to resort to the default enrage mechanic basically the Jaina fight sounded cool in theory and then when you actually do it in practice it's pulled out very well to the point where I think the Jaina fight is probably the pinnacle of final boss fights it's definitely my favorite one honestly before the Jaina fight I don't think I even had a favourite fight just a lot that I thought were pretty ok or really unique and it's kind of the bar I have for comparing other boss fights to now because of just how well done it puts I'd even go so far as to call it a masterpiece which is why it's a shame that both a jar and is off afterwards weren't nearly as fun and it was kind of a cop-out with how Jaina got away in the end by just teleporting but then again those kinds of plot points don't bother me at all so I didn't really care so when it comes to the Jaina fight I have to give this a 10 out of 10 this is what I'll be comparing good boss fights to from now on Jaina also had a good story in the best war bringers video really Jaina was the MVP of the expansion and the only bad thing about her was that her story ended too quickly all right and that concludes battle for Azeroth looking back or the BFA review going over all of the good and bad things from the past expansion with a heavy bias towards my own subjective opinions now my opinions on this expansion overall have been kind of positive but that's because as a healer the only role in raids where gear doesn't matter very much I didn't really care about the gear problems very much I rarely do unless it has fun or gimmicky components to it and my class was actually handled very well so the biggest problem of the expansions were pretty minor ones for me personally and the reason I didn't really talk about PvP or mythic loss dungeons is because I developed carpal tunnel in my left hand during BFA so I just can't play high-performance activities as much as I used to so I limited high usages of my hand to rate I'm only and only casually did a handful of PvP matches and only a small handful of mythic class dungeons for the weekly so overall with battle for Azeroth when looking over all of the objective data definitely not having subjective opinions on anything and when comparing it to previous expansions coming from a casual point of view I'd have to give it a solid six point eight six out of ten based on the averages I gave all the other spots speaking of numbers did you know only thirty two point five percent of people who watched my videos are actually subscribed to the channel so if you enjoyed videos like these you should probably subscribe so you'll be notified when similar videos come out [Music] you

Channel: hirumaredx

Views: 578,040

Keywords: Battle, For, Azeroth, World Of Warcraft (Video Game), hirumaredx, history, wow, worl, vanilla, bc, burning crusade, wrath, wrath of the lich king, linch king, Video Game (Industry), World Warcraft, facts, Warcraft (Fictional Universe), how did doom work before wrath, before cata, how it use to work, funny, 8.3, 2020

Id: -A5yAILtwBs

Length: 53min 56sec (3236 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 10 2020