Now that the pre-patch has arrived, it’s time to take a look back at BfA and see how well it went!

Battle for Azeroth was widely held as one of the worst expansions of World of Warcraft history, right up there with Warlords of Draenor. That being said, most people would agree that the reasons the expansion were bad were not because of the story but rather the systems and gameplay the developers intended us to work with that were clearly broken or mis-used. Let’s take a look.

• Azerite Armour
• Corruptions
• Warfronts

Let’s kick this off with Warfronts. Warfronts, while not the first problem players encounter, were ever prevalent throughout the expansion’s lifetime. There were two specifically, The battle for Stromgarde and The battle for Darkshore. Players would go in and capture flags in areas, defend these areas and do their utmost to breach and clear the enemy’s castle. The immediate problem with these warfronts was the fact that it wasn’t Horde Players vs. Alliance Players, it was Horde players vs. Alliance NPC’s and vice versa. On paper it was a great idea, but you have to remember that in an expansion that clearly resonates with the battle going on between the Horde and Alliance, it seems that not fighting against each other was the wrong move on Blizzard’s part.

Next up is Azerite Armor. This was the first issue players ran into along the way during Battle for Azeroth. Azerite Armor is the bread and butter of character’s gear in BfA. It takes up the chest, shoulder, and head slots of your gear and each piece has between 3 and 6 slots that all have different effects. Now let’s get into why this was a problem. First off, at the beginning of the expansion, everything was random. You’d get a random head-piece, with random Azerite Traits on it, and you could get unlucky and not get a single Azerite trait on that piece of gear that was good for you. As a commandment to Blizzard, they did fix this issue rather early on, but they didn’t fix it, so much as make a handful of smaller problems come out of a single bigger one. In patch 8.2, Blizzard revamped the system so that specific pieces would drop from specific dungeon or raid bosses, but the Azerite Traits would still be random. This made it easier for players to get their best in slot pieces as all they had to do was go kill a certain boss, but the problem that persisted was the fact that the Azerite Traits were still randomized, so even if you got your best in slot piece, it could turn out that the Traits in it sucked so back that you’d have to sell the piece and go farm the boss again to get the piece.

Finally, Let’s talk about Corruptions. Corruptions were added in patch 8.3. They were essentially, random effects on gear that you would obtain, like gaining more critical strike or versatility stats from all sources, or even having random AOE damage procs. They came a price though. Each piece of gear that had one of these traits would also come with a corruption modifier and if your corruption modifier exceeded your corruption resistance modifier you were subject to some nasty penalties. These could include a DoT effect that would last throughout a battle, to straight up dying in one hit during combat if your corruption was high enough. This was a good system overall, but for most casual players, this was a nightmare, as the only way to increase your corruption resistance modifier was to participate in some pretty high-end dungeon-like instances.

Overall, Battle for Azeroth was a pretty good expansion. It had some great musical scores, lovely leveling zones and a lot of fun dungeons and raids. Hopefully Blizzard takes what they learned about player power from this expansion and really deep delves into that kind of stuff in Shadowlands!