by Hotstreak - 7 years ago     show comments

Hello everyone and welcome to my Battle for Azeroth review that will be split into multiple parts spanning the entire expansion through each major content drop. I plan to end it after it’s final patch and will give a final opinion on how I feel the expansion went and if it delivered or if it was a dud. So without wasting anymore time, lets get into it.

New Adventures

There’s something really awesome and unique about fighting dark sadistic blood trolls a long side a T-Rex demigod whom you can also ride and control. Then when I’m done, head on over to the continent of Kul’Tiras and get into fights with pirates, witches, wicker-men, and old god worshipers. This is hands down the biggest strength of BfA. The diversity in each continent and zone is staggering. Everything down to the scenery, music, quest design, and story is very finely crafted. This really is some of the best open world diversity that the game has seen. This is also the first time an expansion has ever released with two full size continents each with their own narratives and capital cities.

Thanks to the War Campaign each faction gets pretty seamlessly tied into their opposing factions world content. But all of this diversity doesn’t come without it’s flaws. Some of the zones suffer from really inconsistent quest pacing. This was especially apparent in the Horde zone of Nazmir where there were a crazy amount of side quests that kind of took you off of the main narrative and felt like they were there just to slow you down. This zone took me the longest to complete and it felt like it dragged on a bit too long. While there were some really standout moments like the Loa of Death Bwonsamdi’s temple and hopping around on a giant frog Loa, there just seemed to be a lot more filler quests than the others. The other two zones were completely different in terms of pace with Vol’dun being extremely short and Zuldazar being a little bit longer but didn’t feel like it dragged on.

Stormsong Valley has this issue as well. The overarching story for the zone is really cool and fairly engaging. But it suffers from some of the same problems as Nazmir where a lot of your time is spent doing busy work with side quests that are loosely connected. Tiragarde Sound is beautiful and has a fun story with taking out pirates and follows a story of betrayal while Drustvar is all about folk lore and deals with witches and wicker-men. This was my favorite out of the Alliance zones as it has such a unique and dark feel to it with the end dungeon being a haunted house. The music  was so eerie and beautiful and the quests were well paced with a really sad story. Seriously, there are some quests that make you pretty sad.

Dungeons

Battle for Azeroth has such a diverse set of dungeons. You have troll ruins, a kul’tiran prison, a pirate fort, a temple full of snakemen, an underground lair full of blood trolls and old god themes, the list goes on. Each dungeon is really finely crafted and this is some of the most fun I’ve ever had grinding through these for the gear that I need.

One of my favorite aspects of these is that, much like how raid finder removes mechanics from the flex and heroic counterparts. Normal difficulty dungeons have missing mechanics from their heroic and mythic counterparts. This caught me completely off guard while tanking but also excited me. Because by the time I got to heroics, I had already run normal dungeons a bunch of times to gear up. So I was surprised to see that heroics were actually a different experience. It’s not just the bosses that have different mechanics either, the mob packs have more potent abilities and mechanics as well.

It’s really great to see Blizzard give more and more attention to dungeons as they have fully become an expansion long endgame activity ever since the inclusion of Mythic+. So if you love dungeon content, this expansion will not disappoint you.

Unless of course you like to push really high end Mythic+ because they have removed the ability to gear swap during them. Which is a real bummer because there will be a really strict class meta  dictated by which classes are great at single target, AoE, and survivability. Which is a shame because these dungeons are really high quality and deserve to be run many times on all difficulties and enjoyed by all.

Islands to Plunder

Battle for Azeroth introduces a brand new PvE activity that sets teams of three on an island expedition with the simple goal of getting the most Azerite for your faction. These islands rotate each week with three different ones being available. The thing that makes these more interesting than the average dungeon is that they are different each time you go back to them. Anything from the weather, enemy types, puzzles, quests, and time of day can be different each time. Along with that, you have brand new AI tech for the opposing faction that surprisingly acts very similarly to real players. They can come find you to disrupt your Azerite gains, stay focused on their own gains, retreat in fights, focus certain players and prioritize them. For a PvE activity this is actually a very different experience as you can lose pretty easily if you’re not careful as it seems communication and coordination is key to winning these. There are four difficulties Normal, Heroic, Mythic, and PvP. I haven’t tried the PvP version yet, but I’ve heard from friends that it makes things really interesting and adds a new layer to the experience.

Expeditions are also meant to be the best source of Azerite for progressing your artifact. You get around 300 per win on mythic along with a weekly bonus of 2500. There’s also a lot of unique transmog sets you can unlock along with mounts, pets, and weapons. So there is definitely some incentive to keep doing them if you enjoy them and if you don’t, you can just hammer out seven of them for the weekly and be done.

I found these to be way more enjoyable with friends on voice chat since you can actually communicate and coordinate. Random groups are a mixed bag as I’ve had really good groups and really bad ones more times than not. Since it’s a new mode I expect that players will get used to the mechanics and how you have to play this content as times goes on in the expansion. Since people tend to just kind of run around and kill monsters for Azerite or just go head first into the enemy team only to die quickly. I also kind of worry about the longevity of this content since it doesn’t seem to be quite as dynamic as we were lead to believe. However, Blizzard does plan on adding more dynamic gameplay to them with the next patch and have already done numerous hotfixes.

Overall I do enjoy this content as it really helps break up the monotony of the usual world quest and dungeon grind. I’m really curious to see where Blizzard takes this feature over the next couple of years.

War Mode

Battle for Azeroth brought a new way to engage in world PvP with War Mode. This mode phases players together when toggled and enables full on world PvP and has replaced the PvP server archetype. When it’s active you also get bonuses to quest experience, gold gains form world quests, and extra currency. There’s also battle royale style air drops that happen for each faction to fight over that  contain extra honor points and gear. I really like the idea of more unique and emergent gameplay for world PvP and I think this is a great step in the right direction.

I would like to see Blizzard add more unique and dynamic elements to this since this is the most active I’ve seen world PvP in a long time. I’m also the most interested in it than I have been in a while. Overall this is a really positive feature for the PvP crowd and I’m excited to see what they do with it going forward.

Warfronts

Ever since I started playing WoW I’ve always wanted to see what it would be like to play a Warcraft III match from the perspective of a soldier. With Warfronts, you get to do just that. You and nineteen other players work together to get resources in order to deploy troops, build structures, and upgrade your base. The objective is to take key points in the map and take out the enemy faction’s commander. There’s also some of the tech from Island Expeditions at play here with random objectives and enemies that appear throughout the match. In one of my play sessions there was a hill giant that appeared on the map and if you defeated him he would fight for you. There was also an objective to escort a goblin caravan full of iron back safely to the base. If successful everyone gets a big chunk of iron in their resource chest to use for upgrades and troop deployment. Things like this spice up each session with different objectives and side activities to make each one yield a different experience.

The fantasy of this mode is really cool and I have enjoyed this feature much more than I initially thought I would but, there are some issues. When doing these with random players, everyone is really uncoordinated and there isn’t really any build orders people follow like you would in WC3. I suspect that if you do this with mostly your guild or friends, then these would go a lot smoother and would probably be a lot more fun.

The Warfront isn’t active for both factions at the same time either. It seems to rotate between the Horde and Alliance every couple of weeks. This is a bit odd to me as one faction is getting quick and easy item level 940+ gear for a whole week while the other isn’t able to participate. This doesn’t seem like it will be much of a problem once each faction has their turn but, it will definitely make PvP and war mode feel unbalanced for a little while.

While I do enjoy this mode it does feel weird to me that there isn’t a PvP variant, this is a faction war afterall. With that being said I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a PvP version of Warfronts later down the line.

Spoils of War

With the expansion comes new loot and new progression systems. This time around we have the Heart of Azeroth and Azerite. This is the successor to the Artifact weapons from Legion. You level up and progress your Heart of Azeroth the same way as in Legion by collecting artifact power which is called Azerite. With the amount required to level decreasing by 30% each week instead of increasing the amount of AP gained by 30%. This is a way for Blizzard to prevent the AP gains from getting to insane levels throughout the expansion like they were at the end of Legion. So what are we doing with all of this AP and why do we want to progress our new artifact?

Azerite armor acts as our new shiny loot that has replaced legendaries and tier set bonuses. With this gear you get to select multiple perks for your class and spec with each one being divided by an outer ring, an inner ring, then finally a flat increase to item level. Some perks are spec wide while other are spec specific. These traits are locked behind the level of your Heart of Azeroth which is initially easy to progress but then the AP requirements are significantly increased once it hits level ten. A lot of the max level Azerite gear has level requirements of 16, 17, and 20 which requires a decent amount of grinding.

I will say that initially it’s really fun to get new Azerite armor and choose what perks you want to use. But once you hit max level, you’ll start hoarding pieces and filling up your bags. I play multiple specs on my Paladin so keeping track of each piece is really unintuitive. I’m constantly switching between Azerite sets and pieces and figuring out how to juggle them between specs based on what perk is best for what spec or gear setup. It’s way harder than it needs to be and it’s pretty annoying.

There’s also a real disparity between what specs have the most fun and gameplay impacting Azerite traits. For example, on my Protection Paladin I have traits that cause my Avengers Shield to bounce to an additional target and another trait that gives me a shield every time I use Avengers Shield. There’s also a talent you can pick up in the Protection tree that adds an additional bounce on the shield for a total of five. I really enjoy this setup as it does have a fairly large impact to my gameplay when tanking in dungeon content.

Retribution on the other hand doesn’t have much synergy between Azerite traits and talents. There’s a trait that makes my Blade of Justice cause enemies to burn when it crits and a trait that increases the damage of Divine Storm on enemies below 20% health. Not horrible traits, but they don’t really offer any gameplay changing synergy with the class. Azerite armor from Raids and Mythic dungeons get a little more beefy with an additional ring to choose a third passive trait, but the traits themselves aren’t really that different.

Honestly, I just don’t like this system the way it’s currently implemented. It just feels really bad to get a higher item level piece of Azerite only to find out it’s not an upgrade. On top of that, you feel like you have to keep all kinds of different pieces with all different types of traits because you have no idea what’s going to get hit with the nerf bat, or what’s going to be buffed. It’s just a constant juggling act and you never really get to just find your best in slot and forget about it to move on to finding your next BiS for a different equipment slot.

Whatever happened to the days of just getting normal gear without worrying about so many different levels of RNG? It was plenty satisfying enough to get a good piece of gear with the only randomness being the drop rate. With Azerite and war forging, you never feel like you’re going to hit a satisfying end to your progression.

Blizzard just seems dead set on funneling everyone through these tightly knit progression systems with virtually no room for deviation or real customization and it’s definitely detrimental to the players enjoyment and for the health of the game. They really need to go back to a more free-form approach to progression with much less randomness involved.

Conclusion

I think that right now, Battle for Azeroth is an expansion with really good content and beautifully crafted zones, but with very unsatisfying progression systems. There’s just way too much RNG and not enough control over your gear progression. World content still continues to be mediocre and not something I put too much time into since world quests just don’t hold my attention outside of the emissary quests.

Patch 8.1 is right around the corner and is looking promising so hopefully some of these issues can be sorted out sooner rather than later. It will also be interesting to see what gets shown off at Blizzcon next month. Until then, we will just have to wait and see.