Battle for Azeroth

Battle for Azeroth wore me out, and it did it with the one thing WoW is supposedly built on. Faction war. Alliance versus Horde, the oldest fight in the game, cranked up to be the entire point of an expansion. And instead of feeling like the payoff to two decades of buildup, it mostly made me tired. I main an undead warlock. I've been Horde since Burning Crusade. And BfA is the expansion that made me realize I didn't actually want to fight this war anymore.

It's also the expansion where my altoholism got the most out of control, at least until recently.

It opened on a gut punch. Sylvanas burns Teldrassil, the whole night elf world tree, right there in the intro cinematic, and the message was clear. This is going to be ugly and you're going to have a side in it. I'll give them this, it was a bold swing. The trouble is what came after never earned that opening. The war campaign turned into a slog of back-and-forth where nobody could win because the story wasn't allowed to let anybody win, and Sylvanas's whole arc got muddier and muddier until by the end I genuinely could not tell you what she wanted or why I was following her into any of it.

Then there was Azerite. The Heart of Azeroth, this necklace you leveled up, feeding it to unlock traits on your armor. On paper, more progression. In practice it was the borrowed-power grind at its most joyless. You'd get a new piece of gear and it would be sidegrade-locked behind a system you had to grind out again, and the whole thing had this treadmill-on-a-treadmill feel that soured a lot of the expansion for me. I'm a guy who likes the loop, I said so yesterday, but even I have a limit, and Azerite armor found it.

The zones themselves were actually good, which is the frustrating part. Zandalar and Kul Tiras were gorgeous and full of character, the troll city stuff and the vaguely-nautical Drustvar witch questing were some of the best-built leveling content in the game. Mechagon was a fun little side world. Island expeditions were a decent idea that never quite came together, and warfronts were an okay idea that came together even less. There was a good expansion buried in BfA. It just kept getting in its own way.

But the thing that actually got me was the fatigue. Twenty years of "for the Horde" and "for the Alliance," and BfA leaned on that harder than any expansion before it, and instead of firing me up it just made me notice how little I cared about the war anymore. I don't want to burn down the other faction. I've got friends who play Alliance. I had more than a dozen max level Alliance characters myself at that time.  The whole premise felt like it was written for a version of me that stopped existing around Wrath. When your big emotional hook is a grudge I no longer hold, the whole thing rings a little hollow.

The old god payoff at the end, Ny'alotha and N'Zoth, was fine. Serviceable. But by then I was mostly running on momentum, doing my heroics and my LFR, leveling alts and waiting to see what came next, hoping the next one would be about something other than a war I was done with.

And my altoholism completely lost control by the end of it, as I finished with 43 max level characters.  Basically one of each class across three servers and a decent start on a fourth.

BfA isn't the worst expansion. But it's the one that quietly retired the faction conflict for me. After that, "for the Horde" stopped being a rallying cry and started being a thing my character says out of habit. Kind of like logging in, some nights.

Cheers! 

Joar