Battle For Azeroth Review In The Eyes of a 14 Year Subscriber

oh boy do we have a controversial video today I'm gonna talk about BFA wait this is controversial now well damn I look away for one second and the sky starts falling did you guys know that Blizzard is awful the game sucks and if you like it your mindless fake fanboy chill and not a true OG gamer and at the same time and those people are just whiners and they should just quit and how dare they be critical of the game streamers are angry youtubers are angry the players are angry everyone's angry it's one of those old MTV reality TV shows or everyone's screaming at each other and pulling out each other's weeds oh I think originate again as for myself my spirit animal is the guy in the background eating Taco Bell watching it all transpire I haven't really shared my opinion yet because I think these videos are all over the place and I just had other things I wanted to do but people have asked here and there about my thoughts on BFA so I think it's time and just to throw this out there this is all just my opinion and if you disagree with what's said in this video that's fine I'm not trying to sway anyone in any direction under sharing my honest thoughts and impressions of the expansion so far this isn't coming from someone who plays 14 hours a day and complains that there's nothing to do more from someone who plays once a week and has no idea what's going on I've always considered myself the pretty average everyday player in this game aside from vanilla back when I played way too much these days I play every other day and rating wise the most I'll do is heroic expanding on that though I definitely haven't played BFA as much as I did Legion in Legion I was online pretty much every day and running mythix left and right levelling new alts and much more active in trading and so on I think that's because a I really loved a legion after the disaster that was drain our I found it really revitalized the game and it brought so many new features to the table I like the story most of the raids the dungeons the artifacts pretty much everything about it BFA however I've had less play time in I think simply due to its new main features which are war fronts expeditions and as raid Armour just haven't felt as fun to me compared to what Legion brought to the table I don't think BFA has a whole is terrible or unfun I still have fun running mythix and I think the raids are great so far and I've actually dealt into PvP a bit this expansion which is something I've neglected since Cataclysm overall so far I'd say it's an average expansion but therein lies the problem World of Warcraft is the first thing that comes to mind when someone says mm all we hold the game to the incredible standards that we know Blizzard is capable of yet it's received a lukewarm reception at best because it's very average [Music] so that's the too long didn't watch of it I do want to go into more detail though and explain exactly why I feel this way and the main way I want to express then is just by going over those major features one by one what does this expansion bring to the table that's different from the others and after that we'll just talk about it as an MMORPG as a whole this video was made in April of 2019 so about eight months into the expansion just after eight point one point five so this is before the upcoming crucible of storms and as Shara's eternal palace rates so I think one of the main problems that everyone has right now is that it simply boils down to it's very similar to Legion gameplay-wise what you grind how you grind your daily itinerary it's all very reminiscent of the Legion expansion and the new features I just mentioned have fallen short in a lot of ways to really get my point across here I think it's appropriate to draw comparisons to Legion since it's the direct previous expansion as I said i loved-ed it introduced mythic plus and brought five men content to the endgame challenge-wise world quests are a much better alternative to that old daily quest hub system that they had the zones were good I personally liked artifact weapons because they give you another form of character progression and a long-term goal to work towards like I said the story was interesting to me and also the raids were great and the dungeons were designed well and they were fun to play and the legendaries although they had their flaws and their method of obtain Minh I thought that their various unique perks that they gave and had depth to the classes there are so many great new features that really turned the game around a huge improvement over Draenor although that's pretty easy to do right here comes BFA though with all of those huge new features from Legion what great heights well this one take us to with artifacts disappearing we have the new as rate system now there are differences you don't get every trade rather you have to choose just one at each tier you also have three pieces of armor that you can enter change instead of being stuck with your weapon with each armor having different combinations of traits for each of your specs but even with this at the end of the day it boils down to you collect artifact power to level up your amulet which in turn lets you pick more traits for your gear which is what we had in Legion it's not the exact same system but it is very similar just stressed up a bit different which a lot of people don't like I think personally that itself doesn't bother me what I don't like about Azrin armor is that the traits are pretty boring and they aren't enough for what they replaced at Blizzcon 2017 they were hyped up to be these game-changing traits similar to talents or they heavily alter your play style each piece of armor enough handful of sloths that we select we currently have 3 in mind we'll offer a potential for customization and choice in a handcrafted way these are not random traits unlikely never like crucible a helm is a helm as a helm and you can pick what you want just suit your play style to suit your needs as you progress through the world so maybe if you have this trade you can stand in the fire a bit longer and heal the tank or maybe this one makes you more mobile but what we got we're basically a bunch of inconsequential passives increased some secondary stat for 10 seconds on this proc chance to proc a bleed chance to proc a heal and yes even just straight-up stat increases if you can actually believe that you might find a power that makes you think twice about using a talent that you'd previously written off and you will certainly find combinations that reinforce your favorite way to play your character it all boils down to the problem that they've been having for 14 years back with the old talent tree there's no real choice because there will always be a best and that's the case with these traits they're so inconsequential that they really just boiled down to another number like oh snap I practically born infusion guys what am I going to do well nothing since it's just another one of the dozens of proc based stat increases again for the most part there are a few here and there that do actually change what you do they're extremely limited in fact the only one I can think of off the top of my head is the seductive power trade where we have to run to bomb sandy spirit to get a stacking buff although it is minor this actually has some consequence with your gameplay but again it's so few and far between that your decision 99% of the time is based off of the highest number and a spreadsheet the scenario is which one is higher oh okay I'll pick that one rather than what it should be and what was promised and that's which one is more fun or better fits my play style and another issue is in regards to what they're replacing artifacts were hugely impactful in Legion game changing in fact in the beginning of Legion as you may remember we had a huge pruning of abilities skills our passives that were deemed unfit for class fantasy were removed or just restricted to one specialization of the class leaving things much more simple in comparison to drain our with the introduction of artifacts though a lot of these gaps are filled with new traits passives and even abilities that made the class feel more whole however as I mentioned we lost artifacts in BFA and they're basically replaced with azurite armor some not all of the old abilities were instead thrown into the talent tree as an option against existing talents but everything else gone for the most part there are some exceptions but overall our net game from Draenor to BFA is negative so you have this big void left and the system that was supposed to fill it in has fallen short in many people's eyes a problem made worse with the fact that there are no tier sets in BFA because of azurite armor just another casualty of the system as stated by ian has a Costas and a November 2017 interview tier sets of course need the head shoulders and chest but since those slots are filled by asteroid armor they just decided to do away with them citing that people would get their customization through the azurite armor the last resort filling the void left behind the removal of artifacts gone and not only that but also the Legion Legendary's and her missing a level 120 Talon row artifacts tier sets legendary affixes new talents players have lost so much since Legion and they've been replaced by increase your mastery and leech even if it was perfectly designed one system can't possibly emulate the customization depth and impact of four and to add on to that to start off a lot of the good traits who aren't even the class specific ones in general I hate traits that are shared between the classes although it had its own flaws I could see where they're coming from with the class fantasy revolution during Legion make the classes and specializations stand off from each other not just for the sake of making alts more interesting but just for the sake of having something that no one else but your spec has we have a whole ring that's dedicated to these generic traits for every single spec again for how big of a deal that they made about class fantasy and Legion this really doesn't make sense to me and speaking of this expanding more in tier sets here too a lot of people these are the holy grail of raiding in world of warcraft one of the huge reasons that people rate to begin with is for the tier sets to have something to complain and to get those cool set bonuses to make their class more interesting or powerful they're what separates mythic Plus from writing now since you can get pretty comparable I levels from both especially if you don't count mythic rating since I think like two percent of the population actually does that and even more so because mythic pluses are spammable and with the advent of Titan forging you really cannot gear rates even mythic raids if you do enough it's grindy yeah but it's possible like I said I think mythic plusses are great for the game but in my opinion writing should always be the mainstay primary endgame for any MMO and with no tier sets that line between raids and mythic plus becomes even more blurred and thus not even getting into the aesthetics of it another reason why people want tier sets is for the looks or for collections sake and now we're left with this awkward system of sharing these quote sets the armored type every leather wear looks the same every cloth wearer looks the same and so on g4 how big a deal they made about class fantasy during Legion with all of the pruning this sure seems contradictory doesn't it raise your hands how many of you have actually seen the full all deer or desert Lord sets on people everyone I know trans mugs out of them not because they're objectively ugly but rather because they're simply shared across every armor types so they're no longer unique or rather they don't match their class like how does this look like a rogue or this a hunter some people say that looks don't matter but if that's the case how about we just have one armor set so everyone looks the same how about were all just gray blobs with no distinguishable features I have separate classes we should all just look the same and just have one ability I'm obviously joking here but you have to admit that there is some truth to what I'm saying there is value and straightforwardness but sometimes I think they just take it way way too far especially in an MMO setting where the whole genre is about that complexity and character progression change is inevitable you can't reasonably expect a game to never evolve but in my opinion in certain aspects it's done so in a destructive way evolution should be constructive with more features and depth added not taken away I think the game has done a great job with this in areas like dungeons and raids huge improvements over the years and when people trash PFA they conveniently seem to never talk about these new raids and boss fights which I think are well done gone are the days of having five different salamander boss fights that are all slightly different from each other the latest one is that this video is the Battle of desert lore and it's phenomenal the fights are so fun and unique and it might be my favorite grade in the entire game and for someone who's played since 2005 that's saying a whole hell of a lot but where they have an A+ in the rating scene and dungeons there has been some definite regression and a lot of the details such as the lack of tear sets or no new talents like I mentioned earlier it feels like we're losing the RPG in MMORPG it would be unbelievable to remove tear sets from the games say during the wrath of the lich king or Burning Crusade or whatever but in today's climate it's more acceptable since it's just another one of the many things that they've slowly whittled away it's the little things that matter and they all build on each other and when you start slowly taking the mound expansion by expansion you start seeing the effect tear sets are just one of many victims and it's all for the sake of a system that's been less than impressive from a design standpoint from a character progression standpoint and even from just a raw gameplay standpoint and that's not even the end of it they're still rebalancing these traits all the time which is good I mean you're never gonna get perfect balance like I mentioned but the bigger issue is then it creates situations like this since they change these traits so much everyone hangs on to like 50 azurite pieces and each patch we go through them to see what's good and what's bad this week sometimes even if a piece is 30 I levels under another piece it's still better because it just has a better traits in general which should never be the case so those are my general thoughts on Hazard Armour as a whole I think like I said though I want this video to be constructive and credit where credit is due they have been addressing the azurite armor they added another ring that has the class traits in their pool which gives a bit more added depth and just having another layer is nice in general and they've also removed a lot of the boring or useless ones and they even added a currency where you can buy specific pieces from any mythic Plus dungeon they've also said that they're looking to make substantial changes to the system as a whole in patch 8.2 as of this video there's not a lot of detail but they hinted that they're moving a lot of the power to the amulet itself possibly bringing in active abilities and overall making them more similar to the Legion artifacts if that's true and we have something as substantial as active abilities we'll finally have something closer to what was promised in Blizzcon 2017 but please Blizzard I beg of you on make these abilities SPECT specific a new poison for assassination rogues maybe a new demon for warlocks I don't know it'll be hard to balance but after losing artifacts and tear sets class identity is something that's regressed so much and this is your opportunity to address it if it's a generic one spell fits all classes type of deal I think it'll be following down the same path that led you to all of these problems to begin with so I'm hoping that all of these changes will be good but like I said earlier when you're trying to force one system to replace four it's an uphill battle to say the least I guess we'll just have to wait and see but next let's talk about another big bf a future and those are the island expeditions I think these could also use some work there are some good aspects to them the advanced AI is really well done I think and the role agnostic as they should be so they're easy to just hop in and do right now the biggest problem is that the main thing they're banking on which is it's a different experience each time isn't really true I mean it's technically true technically there are different mobs or chess placements each time or different quests or an opposing team and so on but at the end of the day they boil down to this rush to get X amount of azurite before the enemy team does you never really can stop to look around or notice any of the changes because you're just constantly rushing to go get azurite even the different maps because there's really no difference between them a problem made by the randomness itself let me explain now some islands do have set enemies here and there but a lot of them such as the rares or invasions are from a larger pool that are selected randomly if 90% of the expeditions are random was the real difference between the maps it's all just topography and senex there's a hill here instead of there or maybe this rune is in that location and it's compounded by the fact that most of the maps right now are on these tropical islands I know they're called the island expeditions but one of the downsides is that there's not much variety in the setting yeah there are certain spots where there's fire in the molten K or the foggy rottenmeier but these islands are varied enough themselves that they just sort of blend in together like there's no real fire map that's brimming with fire elementals or lava spewing everywhere or flame walls that you have to dodge instead we have an island with some fire an island with some snow and an island with some buildings and so on I think if the maps had more of an identity you could maybe say that you get more variety between expeditions like imagine if mythic plus dungeons had a random assortment of enemies random trash mobs and every boss room is a random boss from any of the 10 dungeons in BFA take that and instead of each of these dungeons having these unique settings just make them all take place on tropical islands what's there to make you say that one'd freehold key that's my favorite one or a shrine of the storm forget that if there instead these ultra random mishmash is they wouldn't truly have anything that sets them apart from each other when have you ever done an island expedition anyway oh yeah the molten K baby my favorite yes in my opinion it results in them being kind of dull because once you've done one island expedition you've pretty much done them all I think if we maybe had something to incur all of these islands to something identifiable it would make for a more memorable experience like say the ice level has a lie senem ease and not only that but there are also these flash blizzards that give you a stacking debuff that you have to get rid of by taking cover in a cave and kill less lucrative enemies inside or you can risk it by finding materials to build a campfire that gives you a buff that lets see whether the storm for a bed this would set it apart from the others and at the same time they that problem of not really having any strategy other than rush rush rush maybe for the city map the quirk is pickpockets will constantly spawn trying to steal your azurite they don't attack you they just wait until you're in combat or something and they stealth up and steal a hundred or so azurite and start running away if you don't kill them within ten seconds they vanish along with that as a right make each map a unique and memorable experience like this to where if you get it in the queue you're like oh cool it's this one as for the reward structure at first it was pretty poor you either got the balloons sometimes a pet and sometimes nothing just some asteroid which you can get from basically any other activity in the game this is still largely the same but they did add a vendor or you spend those two balloons for some goodies finally adding some structure to the reward system and giving players long-term goals to work towards instead of rolling the dice every run and praying to the orangey gods and in regards to the balance and pace to try and make people deviate from the rush rush rush strategy they have extraction points for you to defend so there's actually a benefit in slowing down every once in a while and giving players decisions of attacking or defending they also have the new treasure map system if you fill up your weekly bar you get a treasure map which unlocks bonus table mission that can have as raid amount residual gold and so on chosen at random again an improvement but at the end of the day is just another random reward everything is so random these days PvP gear Titan foraging caches what happened to this I thought this was alright some random this is good as it adds your playability but if your whole game is based off of caches and Titan the foraging it tends to get a bit too grandi and frustrating if the rng gods happen to have it out for you the equipment caches have really taken over the game at this point and I think they would benefit greatly from introducing a badge system similar to what they had in the Burning Crusade or a Wrath of the Lich King days but back on topic here island expeditions like I said they're not bad they're just not great either at least in my opinion I think if they made each map more unique and added more structure to the reward system more people around them moving on here though another big feature are the war fronts now the actual gameplay of war fronts isn't bad in my opinion you collect resources recruit troops take capture points and take down the enemy commander in a battle that's reminiscent of the old RTS games that we all know and love gameplay wise they're all right my issue with them is the fact that you can lose them because what happens then is it just becomes a mindless Zerg where if you do bad it just takes longer to win in fact it's quite common to go a whole round without anyone ordering a single word and ray chat because there's no need you may as well be playing with bots what's the point of playing any game if you can't possibly lose you ever see that Twilight Zone episode or the guy thinks he's in heaven because he never loses and everything goes his way money fame and women he has it all but after a few months of this he finds out that it's actually hell because his life becomes so boring all of his whims and wishes are immediately satisfied and there's no real challenge or thrill left in this life in the case of war fronts there's no real obstacle to overcome because eventually you win in fact there's a big problem with people just AF king to hold around you'll still win don't get me wrong but it just takes a bit longer to prove this I did one whole round where I did nothing but jump I was never called out and I was never kicked because it never mattered no one noticed and we won anyways I do feel a bit bad about it but it brings to light their biggest issue and that's the fact that they need to be loose ball if there's no challenge it's just a chore you ever play with the cheap codes in the old Final Fantasies back in the day you max out your characters they one-shot everything and you have all of the ultimate weapons every magic spell and nothing can touch you it's fun right well it's fun for about 10 minutes until you realize you're just pressing buttons there's no actual thought or decision-making going on a game isn't a game if there's no possible way that you can lose so that's my main gripe with the war fronts themselves their actual gameplay is alright I just wish that there was some real opposition and I think they'd be way more fun if you actually had to plant things out and formulate a strategy rather than just a mindless surging it just begs to have a PvP option available the expansions whole focus is Alliance versus horde so let us kill some actual players and at the same time bring in that danger of losing his two birds with one stone there are issues outside of them right now as well this has been approved a bed in 8.1 with the addition of the dark shore war friend but by themselves there's 75% in action and just waiting for them to start which also ties in to how they were released for those who don't know the war ferns work in stages of four the alliance controls the keep and the horde gathers resources to launch an attack and once they finish that they can do the actual scenario for one week they're successful so they take it and now the Alliance gathers resources and then finally the Alliance can do this scenario if you're only playing one faction for three of these four stages you're just looking at progress bars the scenario is playable for a week like once a month India I know about the benefits of controlling the keep but the actual warfarin is what we're all interested in the world busts rares and turn-ins are all stuff we've seen for 14 years from a pure gameplay standpoint we care about the actual scenario where you gather resources and take bases so when be a fair released and we only had one it was so slow moving that it took months before the Alliance could even do this scenario since the Horde started in that phase for a future that was advertised and hyped up as one of the main things in Blizzcon 2017 it just seems wrong that it took a couple of months before one side even got to see it and a problem that made it even worse was the fact that they were unlocked on the 4th of September which was the 4th week of the expansion in my opinion and they should have come out after the first week of the expansion I had the very latest considering how slow-moving they are now they said that the reason for why they're so slow is eventually they're gonna have multiple war fronts so there won't be such a huge gap which is true now but back then they should have accounted for that up until that second war front got released I thought that they should have sped up the rate at which the non war fronts stages progress so you're not just waiting for 75 percent of the time the first month of any expansion is crucial and you gotta blow people away to get him to stick around and they kind of dropped the ball in regards to war fronts bud here comes 8.1 we got the battle for dark shore which is a holy war friend that runs concurrently with the battle for strong guard the solving that issue of them being slow-moving and 75 percent in action and in 8.2 we're getting a heroic mode that'll be much more difficult than normal war fronts and hey there even lose a ball a lose a bowl game mode that's crazy talk I'm still whining a PvP mode but hey these are good changes that solve pretty much every issue that I have with war fronts but that does bring up another point for all of these features I've said that they improved this in 8.1 or they're going to add this aspect in 8.2 that's all well and good but let's talk about the here now 8.1 was released four months after be a phase lunch and that heroic mode is 8.2 which who knows when that'll drop as players we expect these features to be fully tested and optimized at release not piece by piece and content patches so in the current game with azurite armor island expeditions and war fronts all having their flaws be if aid doesn't bring many new things to the table people aren't as active in these game modes and they regress to the bare bones and the play such as dungeons and raiding and you're really left with a very similar experience to Legion your daily itinerary is world questing grinding loot from mythic Keystone's and once a week rating without raid sets and if they happen to be your cup of tea you have expeditions and war fronts if they're up that is the story is gated and just like Legion and an 8.1 we got the new incursion feature which is just like the demon invasions from Legion zone comes under attack you do for world quests and then a finale the expansions look almost identical in a lot of ways and with how many new features Legion brought to the table BFA seems kind of underwhelming for a lot of people in comparison right now it is good that they've been addressing this stuff in these patches but I think there are some little things that they could do as well that would go a long way when was the last time we saw a new row of talents was that in the warlords of Draenor the old trees with how much people derived them at least let you slowly improve and customize your character level by level with monster scaling with you as you level and no new talents you have to ask yourself the question what's the actual point of leveling where it used to be a hit soul journey it's now just an obstacle to overcome to get to the endgame and a vessel to force a few players the story of the expansion to set the narrative it's like I mentioned earlier the smaller details by themselves may seem minor but if you slowly chip away things they add up adding another row of talents honestly isn't even a little thing class balance is never simple as add more but it would give us something that's long overdue and relieves some of the tremendous pressure from the back of the failing as rate system listen I don't pretend to have all the answers I'm not a developer I don't know what goes on behind the scenes and there are probably very good reasons for a lot of these problems BFA is facing but at the end of the day problems are problems and they still need fixing so even through all of this like I mentioned at the beginning of the video I'm enjoying the expansion for what it is I think the stuff that it did well they did really well I'm pretty much addicted to the dungeons in BFA and I'm always down to run some mythic bless even if I don't need them for gear anything I just like running him with my friends I'm loving this story and the first two raids seem to have hit the mark the fights have impeccable design and quality and that only Blizzard can achieve my favorite ones in particular our mother and all dear and either Mekkatorque or Jaina and dazzle or is hard for me to decide and outside of that I think they're warm Lord was also a stroke of genius I think it really revitalized PvP and the way they have the PvP talents set up where you can gain some added power and experiment with the new perks even out in the world just questing is a really good design like I said I haven't touched PvP release since Cataclysm and it'd be a Fae I find myself going out of my way to world PvP and even arena here and there it adds a new danger to the otherwise mundane world questing and I've had a lot of fun and memorable battles against the Horde and with the incursions sort of forcing everyone together it makes for quite a hectic time I have a feeling that this video will get a lot of hate and that's fine again it's just all opinions if you personally enjoy every aspect to be FA more power to you like I said overall I'd like BFA and I still play in it's just not as much as I would be since the issues I mentioned have put a damper on my experience personally I don't want this video to give you the impression that it's worse than drain R or the game is dying like many what have you believe listen people have been saying that the game has been dying ever since the Burning Crusade some of you veterans may remember just how controversial that was what the heck you mean to tell me that all of the gear we worked two years for will be useless by level 65 what a ripoff way to jump the shark blizzard you know I hear that this new game called the Lord of the Rings Online is coming out everyone says it's gonna be a while killer so I'll see you guys on the other side or I really meant age of going in there or maybe Warhammer Online no no no I meant Star Wars The Old Republic it seems like a hundred of these supposed Wow killers have come and gone but through it all the world of warcraft always seems to pull through we do still have a lot of time to spend with BFA so I don't think anyone can conclusively say that it's good or bad yet a lot can happen in two years and although some of this stuff got off to a rocky start I have faith that they can turn it around and make it into a great expansion I really do hey I played through all of Draenor if that doesn't tell you how much love I have for this game I don't know what will I think it all really hinges on how they address the azurite armor system expeditions and war fronts are kind of tertiary at the end of the day if you think about it their design activities to do when you're bored as rain armor however is so important because it's your character progression for the expansion as I've said many times character progression is so important for MMOs I really can't say it enough it's the reason why anyone does anything in the game whether it be gearing up getting those mounts investing talent points earning PvP rank or whatever if they can save this I think they can save the expansion but that's about it hopefully this video didn't come up as negative because that wasn't the goal these are just my honest thoughts about a game as a player who's been playing since March of 2005 I've actually been working on this video for over a month trying to approach it from a calm and fair perspective and I'm hoping I did just that don't take it too seriously you got to live with that mindset opinions are like buttholes everyone has one [Music] farewell for now mortals we hope you enjoyed today's video see you again soon you

Channel: MadSeasonShow

Views: 444,664

Rating: 4.8796182 out of 5

Keywords: wow battle for azeroth, wow, world of warcraft, 8.0, 8.0.1, madseasonshow, World of Warcraft, guide, tutorial, how-to, walkthrough, bfa, World Of Warcraft: Battle For Azeroth (Video Game), World Of Warcraft (Video Game), wow bfa, battle for azeroth, wow bfa review, how is wow bfa, bfa state of the game, battle for azeroth review, is bfa worth playing?, wow patch 8.2, azerite armor, warfronts, island expeditions, is wow dead, is wow dying, wow current vs classic

Id: pPkQRUmosKY

Length: 36min 33sec (2193 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 11 2019

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