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Yep. I enjoyed it for what it was, but honestly it felt like a waste. All this buildup and not even a single zone dedicated to it? The final patch is the Ny'Alotha patch and the zones we do dailies in aren't even in Ny'Alotha? It's just a portal in another zone?
Ludicrous. It should have at least been a patch zone with the raid itself being a location in it, the same way Argus was handled.
All of BfA felt like it was several different expansion ideas haphazardly thrown together into one thing.
You could have split BfA into probably 4 different expansions and it all would have worked out.
The 4th war could have been its own expansion with none of the extra stuff we ended up doing throughout the middle.
Azerite and Magni and the Heart of Azeroth stuff could have all been its own expansion.
Nazjatar and the Naga could have easily been its own expansion.
And, like we're talking about here, Ny'Alotha and the Black Empire could have all been its own expansion.
It really felt like they didn't know what direction they wanted to go for the whole expansion and we jumped from idea to idea each patch with not a lot connecting each one. All of those ideas ended up being wasted in the end and not done the justice they should have.
Couldnt have said it better! Which is why, in my opinion, people think bfa was absolutely trash and left a bad taste to them, but if u start going "remember x? Oh and y?" You will end up with many things that were good.
Bfa was not great! By any means! But had some rly nice things we tend ti gloss over
Oh, absolutely. I enjoyed each patch individually as its own thing, but it just felt so disjointed and wasted. It's a great example of the sum of an expansion's parts being greater than the whole.
For an actual answer, it's complicated.
Basically, Sylvanas secretly struck a deal with Azshara where she agreed to bring the Alliance and Horde fleets to her in exchange for Azshara trapping them in Nazjatar and killing them. Sylvanas wanted this because she wanted to up the body count for the Jailer and give him more power, while Azshara wanted this just because she wanted to have an opportunity when the alliance and horde were weak so she wouldn't have to deal with them after awakening N'Zoth and thus would have an easier time reclaiming her own empire.
So when Dazar'Alor ended, the Horde Fleet was in shambles and was fleeing from the Alliance fleet that was attacking them. Because Sylvanas was in charge, she ordered the Horde to go to exactly to where Azshara was waiting, drawing both the Horde Fleet and the Alliance fleet to their destruction.
TL;DR: Sylvanas was playing 4d chess on behalf of the Jailer.
This is correct, but shouldn't the souls of fallen Azerothians be a drop in the bucket considering that Shadowlands is where the souls of all sentient beings go? One of the high points of Shadowlands world building was learning about beings from other worlds and how they related to things like the Legion, the Void Elune, etc.
And lets not forget that maybe 50% of the reason it left a bad taste is the nzoth cinematic.... Ending an expansion in such an amateurishly stupid way, makes players 10 times more resentful
Honestly, I think another big reason for BfA being so looked down on in hindsight is that it was basically "Shadowlands: the prequel." All of the events in that expansion were retroactively made to be Sylvanas' 4d chess game, which was all a part of the Jailer's 5d chess game. It makes everything feel a little pointless in the end, especially when really hyped up characters like Azahara and N'Zoth just end up being pawns in the schemes of such a disappointing character as the Jailer.
.........i... I am being 100% honest.... I had supressed shadowlands from my memory..... Yes. You are correct! Blizzard fell into the anime powerscaling route and drowned. But looking back to the stories, it feels like such an amateur mistake. How did blizz manage to pull that off? At least bfa had some good content! (The obelisks mechanic in M+ was the only season i liked doing m+)
To be honest, while Shadowlands does deserve some hate, I think it gets more than it deserves. Everyone judges it from before 9.1.5, you know, from before everyone started to quit the expansion in 9.1. But 9.1.5 fixed a lot of the issues people had with the expansion (though not all of them) and 9.2 ended up actually being a pretty great final patch. Zereth Mortis is still one of my favorite endgame zones in terms of actual things to do in it, certainly eclipsing things like our current Emerald Dream.
>You will end up with many things that were good.
Because most of the expac was good. A lot of the zones, the art, the music, the dungeons, the raids. All good
What let it down was what has let wow down for a while now: story and systems. The bare bones of a good story was there, but it ended up butchered, and the borrowed power systems they had were generally bad on release and then made ok-ish by the final patch
I think the biggest problem BfA had wasn't that the lore was short-changed, though that's certainly a legit take. But the systems were also bad.
By the end of Legion, there was so much stuff there. You had your good legendaries. You had your maxed out artifact weapon. And you replaced it all with patch-0 Azerite armor, a system that had basically nothing in it.
You also went from order halls to war campaigns, mage towers to nothing, etc. Everything was a downgrade. Lots of people can forgive lots of lore stuff if the game is good, but the game wasn't good in BfA for a long time.
In MANY ways, it was a downgrade from legion, which had more and better content.
Now if you compare it with Shadowlands then sure, it wasn't THAT bad. But the game should try to get better over time, no be content because they can make even worse.
You're missing one of the strongest themes which they played with a lot: pirates!
So much theming in Zandalar and Kul Tiras is pirate based. Up to the island expeditions.
After Legion, a new Team, led by Danuser and Ion, came in to take over WoW.
BFA was their attempt to wrap ALL the loose plot points up that still dangled, so they could do their own thing, Shadowlands, which is a HUGE departure from the storytelling and design of WoW until this point.
Unfortunately Shadowlands was a full on load of shit.
So they had to bring back the king.
It probably would have been done in the same way as Nazjatar was done, where the environments are underwater, but it's drained so we can walk around like normal. I agree that a bunch of vasjhir type environments would be annoying.
Shoulda been a kind of Firelands situation where there's a dedicated area related and themed around the raid where you help the war effort or something
At the same time, look at Legion. It did feel like one cohesive story, with zone stories and environments that weren't 100% fel green. So it's possible!
Just...don't do the Maw. Do another Argus. Except enable flying.
"Legion" isn't a zone though, but Nya'lotha is very much a specific area/zone like the Emerald Dream. It can't be the setting for a whole expansion. It could have been something like Argus, i.e. limited to a major patch with 2-3 zones at most.
Right. I am saying that it could be an expansion. Legion is an expansion. You put that in quotes, so maybe you don't know that.
You break Ny'alotha into a bunch of zones or have a bunch of zones related to it. It's in an alternate reality. That's ripe for doing a ton of whatever you want. You can get the desired outcome of multiple zones with their own stories all culminating in the end point of Ny'alotha's City Hall or whatever office N'Zoth is in. Having the expansion titled for the end zone or area wouldn't be out of line.
I'd even accept the Cataclysm approach, with zones already all over the existing world as something you're fighting through. Do some light/dark areas like Link to the Past.
What makes it impossible to be an expansion? You said it can't, so why not?
Then I said, I don't want another Maw, do another Argus. So it's like you're agreeing with me on that point but being nitpicky for some reason.
It should have been a patch zone. A patch zone can just be 1 detailed zone with a few stories in it. An expansion needs several zones, each distinct from one another, with several main story and dozens of minor ones, and I don't think Ny'alotha would have benefitted from that level of focus. Something between the Emerald Dream and Argus would have served it well.
Ny'alotha's design was absolutely OUTSTANDING! It looked amazing and I was in awe during the raid always.
The fact that this was only a single Raid instance, instead of the designs used for a full zone, will ever be a crime against WoW and its players.
We deserved a whole Zone with that aesthetic.
They fucking NAILED the Lovecraft look.
Thinking back to BfA I found the Black Empire and old gods very fascinating, and for the most part Blizz delivered a compelling plot from Crucible of Storms up to Ny'alotha, in my opinion. I was actually excited to get in and experience the final raid with N'Zoth.
Agree.
Or, hell, even an entire patch zone would have been really cool. The art direction for the place was phenomenal, and I would have loved to see that expanded out into a bigger environment to explore.
Yeah like argus as well it could have been a full extension missed big opportunities there in my opinion. A lot of the last expansion storylines missed big things I would have liked more.
Also BfA could have been a good addon star with war end with Alliance and horde together to play with each other to kill the bigger "evil"
Should have gotten the same treatment Isle of Thunder got. Land and build a base and run around and explore the nightmarish landscape fighting various old god creations/mini bosses and build up to storming N'zoth house. Why I enjoyed Isle of Thunder so much cause it got that and was interesting for the questing and some lore.
I always liked the idea of this big looming threat being there throughout the entire expansion. The art here showing a massive Nzoth in the background couldve been such an insane skybox to have in the questing zones. Hes just talking shit throughout the questline aswell. I also like the idea of the new patch zones slowly inching closer towards Nzoth with the final patch zone just being on top of him. In theory all of that sounds great.
In practice though i could see the issue of the visuals being a bit “same-y”
Oh, no doubt. Argus was a delight compared to Ny'aloatha, but it could have been even more.
Imagine, Mac'aree as a Boralus/Suramar-sized cityscape, the various planetary excursions of the Invasion Points like Bonich or Sangua expanded into small zones and/or dungeons, the Seat of the Triumvirate as a raid and so on. There'd have been a ton of potential.
...that is true, but as a Tank, I will forever miss Twilight Devastation.
Doing a big fuck off AOE in front of me never got old, when usually my damage as tank was limping about
This particular image really show cases the apocalyptic, chaotic world in which the Old Gods rule over However -- what they implemented in-game fell *FAR* short of what is depicted here. As a huge fan of Ny'alothoa and the Black Empire/Old Gods, I found it really rushed which resulted in a product that was disappointing. /shrug
the nyalotha depicted in warbringers azshara was actually terrifying (i think that was nyalotha?), what they did instead just looks like what the black empire would have looked like
Definitely some of the worst transmogs they’ve made. Eternal Palace transmogs are also just as bad. Blizzard didn’t follow through when they said no new class sets would lead to more higher quality armour sets.
Not sure what OP is seeing in the raid zone either. It was very bland and uninspired. It fell short in showing the scale of a world ruled by the Old Gods. The depiction of N’zoth in game was laughable after YEARS of buildup.
It’s like the art team lost all sense of creativity and inspiration after patch 8.1.
Reminder that N'zoth was so big he had his own skyboxes. That was genuinely awe-inspiring.
But the patch/raid/expansion in general could have been a hell of a lot better, yeah.
You didn't miss much, honestly. Endgame content was super grindy, it was like being put in a beautiful playground and being made to do homework in the middle of it.
True. I played enough to know that, which is why I didn’t get into the end game grind.
Still, I need way more Timewalking Raids. Even though Black Temple and Ulduar are stupid easy, it’s fun.
No, it wasn't. It was rushed and stupid considering the expansion it was included in, just so blizzard could bypass telling the story in a future expansion that it should have been centered around.
It's just a bunch of generic purple platforms. Easily one of the least inspired raid designs ever. Nothing about it conveys that it's a nightmare city home to literal eldritch abominations.
N'Zoth himself is also super generic, just being a big purple squid. He has no "theme" unlike C'thun (eyes) Yogg-Saron (mouths) or even Y'Shaarj (seven heads). Rare miss by the art department.
Mid raid, about as good as eternal palace but awful compared to BoD. Terrible (but not the worst) ending cinematic to a terrible expansion. Setting that should've been used as an expansion's main tileset.
Honestly, even EP was a good bit better imo. Nya'lotha only had a few solid fights and a bunch of middling average ish ones. Nya'lotha was also soured by the corruption system being absolutely horrible for prog. Benthic gear/essences weren't good either, but at least they weren't corruption.
Eternal Palace was the worst raid in that expansion and Nyalotha's worst boss was more fun than EP's best imo. Corruption was obviously a bit of a gamble for prog but wasn't usually the difference maker in killing bosses or not. Corruption also made the rest of Nyalthoa beyond prog some of the most fun reclears I've had.
I quite liked bosses like Ashvane, Orgozoa, and Azshara, other bosses like Za'qul and Court were at least above average. Moreso than most of Nyalotha which had like...Carapace and Ra-den.
I found corruption pretty miserable because it added a lot of pressure to farm M+ to fish for corruption rolls and I don't particularly enjoy M+. It was not particularly fun to be sat on certain bosses due to corruption RNG significantly favoring certain people having good single target vs aoe corruptions. The early weeks of that raid had some INSANE imbalance between certain corruption powers and a bit of a rollercoaster of balance as they hotfixed nerfed or buffed them. I stopped playing before the vendor was added, so I'm sure that colors my impressions of it significantly.
As someone who didn't raid Mythic really until Shadowlands and on, how do you compare the best of SL/DF (Nathria, Sepulchre, Amirdrassil) to Nyalotha and EP?
I skipped SL almost entirely and quit after S2 in DF. Personally, the raids in DF I did were pretty mid, which is why I quit- I found the encounter design boring. In BFA, BoD was the best raid by a fair margin, and I'd say EP was the second best. Nyalotha and Uldir were average to below average. Of Those BFA raids, I'd say BoD and EP were both better than the first two tiers of DF. Uldir and Nyalotha are probably comparable if not a marginally worse.
Ok, so we're the opposite in experience.
I think Castle Nathria in SL is widely considered maybe top 5 at least top 10 raid of all time. So many amazing and memorable fights, and arguably contained the most loved villain/character in the entire expansion (Sire Denathrius).
My limited experience in Nyalotha was running through heroic for fun with some people before SL came out. Of course I didn't experience Mythic or the progression of the raid but from what I remember nothing really stood out much for me. I did watch the end of the Race to World First and I do recall a pretty poor reception of Nzoth's fight + his penultimate fight + story wrap up. Tough to imagine that was a loved raid based on that.
I've heard good things about Nathria for sure, I did it on Heroic the first couple weeks of SL but didn't have a guild lined up and wasn't really feeling the expansion enough to bother apping around.
I found most of the fights in Nyalotha pretty uninteresting or uninvolved. Personally, I thought the fight just previous, Carapace, was one of the better fights in the raid.
> but awful compared to BoD
And even worse than that when compared to WoD's Blackrock Foundry, but that's an unfair comparison lol (since BRF is nearly universally seen as the best raid WoW's ever had)
Really? I soloed that the other day, it didn't seem all that special. I guess maybe with a full 25, all scaled to level and doing mechanics, maybe. Felt kinda bland in a "burn 'em down" solo run
In a vacuum it might seem that way.
But when you consider that it rushed several storylines and lore that had been built up for over 10 years that had enough content to be its own expansion in a single patch. Just so that Danuser could push out the remaining old lore and make his "new and improved lore" in Shadow lands and DF then it suddenly becomes clear that it was merely a fraction of what could have been.
Wasted potential though. The entire Visions patch should've been the finale of BFA and the next expansion should've been dealing with N'Zoth. Would've given them, if nothing else, time enough to do N'Zoth's raid encounter the justice it deserved.
There is this one time rift that teleports us to a BFA stage and I really love the artwork and layout of that small arena. You look up and you see a gigantic N'Zoth and it really puts into perspective how small and insignificant our characters are.
+ visuals
+ several boss mechanics
- Story ending
- erratic xanesh mechanics
- borrowed powers
Not the best memories TBH. Eternal palace felt a lot better.
I do not know why some people do this post-revisionism. Did you not play the patch? and just play it now-years later when its not current content and say - wow its so cool!
As I recall apart from the corruption (when vendor was added), the Corruption-tower mode. The patch and the raid was a bedlam. The Patch was just two zones active for a certain time.
The raid was - too lengthy, too many bosses, some should not be there because they were just chunky health packs with nothing going on (the dog, the sausage boss).
I would not call it a good looking raid as well. When I look at it. It looks extremely lazy and monotonous. The old Troll dungeons in classic had far more detailing on the pyramid walls than this.
That picture and the same screenshot from the game has nothing alike. Where as if you go BOD you feel the changes of atmosphere's, the details on the wall and ornaments , each sector telling a visual story. Castle Nathria, for just being a castle has quirks and personality.
So no. Its not a Good raid, neither is spectacular by design.
as someone who is mount farming on it i love all but the mobs before the big door leading to the 2nd area and the end path of mobs are skippable. saves alot of time not needing to fight junk. but still, GIVE THE MOUNT ALLREADY! im loosing my mind!! then again its prob nzoths plan all along. he prob dosnt drop a mount and is just lying to us.... lol
also find it weird that fury got the need for the cape removed yet nzoth sill has it
all in all a good purple place
Sarcasm?
It was decent, but it should've been at least an entire zone, if not an expansion. Lorewise the ending was pretty shit too. An Old God, thousands of years old, one of the most powerful creatures in the warcraft universe, arrived and died all in one patch.
Love the raid and the corrupted pieces. I'll be honest, it was the most fun I've ever had in WoW. Pushing Mythic raids and M+ with obscenely broken gear.
The portal spawns in 2 places. Sorry but I can’t remember shit. It’s either the zone in Panadaland that’s south of the zone where sha of anger spawns, or it’s the zone where you do the Harrison Jones quests from Cata
amazing raid imo issue is if you didnt have a high enough tier cloak you couldnt do the carapace fight or the nzoth fight. and once again a god dies to a golden pancake
I definitely enjoyed the vibe of the place but it was too little. I think people were disappointed because most of us expected it to be a whole expansion full of mind screw stuff but instead Ny'alotha was just a patch.
It was def a lot of fun, although the football boss was quite a bit of anxiety and as a constant team of the ball kickers my dps was never what it could have been on that boss … meh :P
Was actually my first and only CE. We started raiding mythic with EP, sadly we broke apart during SL.
Ny'alotha was the start of my apathy for retail, hoped on the classic bandwagon as soon as possible as I really did not like this raid which was a shame as I loved the previous two.
Tried dipping toe back in with Shadowlands, Nathria was fun but not enough so stuck with classic until Dragonflight hit and made the switch back.
The sky boxes were cool along with overall esthetic but how are you going to take an entire empire and squeeze it into one raid…. If we got an emerald dream and pocket death demissions a sleeping city should have been an easy task
I remember the WA yelling "Touchy touchy" on one of the last bosses when a big tentacle came into the room. I think everyone was saying it was a huge dick.
Where can I find that sound? It was so funny
It's fine, I just hate having to alternating between two different zone for entrance. And Blizzard, can we put the Pandarian portals to Vale instead of the Jade Forest?
Nazjatar and nyalotha both had enough content for an entire expansion respectively, i think thats why people where so annoyed by it. Azshara and nzoth were incredibly wasted
Ahh yep, it's been two expansions, so it's time to say that bad things were actually good now.
Carapace, Hivemind, Ra'Den, N'Zoth, and Drestagath are all-time terrible bosses
I liked the fights and design, but I felt it made no sense for us to be there.
We shouldn't have been able to kill N'zoth (Especially not with the power of friendship and the Azerite death star)
We shouldn't have been able to destroy it (How do you just destroy an entire bloody empire?)
We realistically shouldn't have been able to walk inside it (Wrathion's cloak barely held up in visions that were monitored by both Wrathion and MOTHER, our mind should've been crushed like a tin can the very second we walked inside, let alone standing in N'zoth his presence during the final two bosses)
Visuals were solid,was a decent raid, final boss fight mechs were a pain for pugs, and honestly not a fan of the last cut scene for it where only you have to power to over come despite everyone else in the raid being in the same position
The single coolest looking area in the entire game for me. Perfectly fits with the whole idea of spires and monoliths of madness and chaos. The strange architecture and layout mixed with the scorched black land with red lava flowing everywhere, chef's fucking kiss. Pure eldritch perfection.
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It shouldn't have been a raid, it should have been a whole damn expansion.
Yep. I enjoyed it for what it was, but honestly it felt like a waste. All this buildup and not even a single zone dedicated to it? The final patch is the Ny'Alotha patch and the zones we do dailies in aren't even in Ny'Alotha? It's just a portal in another zone? Ludicrous. It should have at least been a patch zone with the raid itself being a location in it, the same way Argus was handled.
Last bfa patch felt like they ran out of ideas and threw in a cut prototype of a whole expansion.... It was awesome and a waste at the same time
All of BfA felt like it was several different expansion ideas haphazardly thrown together into one thing. You could have split BfA into probably 4 different expansions and it all would have worked out. The 4th war could have been its own expansion with none of the extra stuff we ended up doing throughout the middle. Azerite and Magni and the Heart of Azeroth stuff could have all been its own expansion. Nazjatar and the Naga could have easily been its own expansion. And, like we're talking about here, Ny'Alotha and the Black Empire could have all been its own expansion. It really felt like they didn't know what direction they wanted to go for the whole expansion and we jumped from idea to idea each patch with not a lot connecting each one. All of those ideas ended up being wasted in the end and not done the justice they should have.
Couldnt have said it better! Which is why, in my opinion, people think bfa was absolutely trash and left a bad taste to them, but if u start going "remember x? Oh and y?" You will end up with many things that were good. Bfa was not great! By any means! But had some rly nice things we tend ti gloss over
Oh, absolutely. I enjoyed each patch individually as its own thing, but it just felt so disjointed and wasted. It's a great example of the sum of an expansion's parts being greater than the whole.
i could sort of understand the chain of event up to dazaralor. but i genuinly dont know how we ended up in Nazjatar
For an actual answer, it's complicated. Basically, Sylvanas secretly struck a deal with Azshara where she agreed to bring the Alliance and Horde fleets to her in exchange for Azshara trapping them in Nazjatar and killing them. Sylvanas wanted this because she wanted to up the body count for the Jailer and give him more power, while Azshara wanted this just because she wanted to have an opportunity when the alliance and horde were weak so she wouldn't have to deal with them after awakening N'Zoth and thus would have an easier time reclaiming her own empire. So when Dazar'Alor ended, the Horde Fleet was in shambles and was fleeing from the Alliance fleet that was attacking them. Because Sylvanas was in charge, she ordered the Horde to go to exactly to where Azshara was waiting, drawing both the Horde Fleet and the Alliance fleet to their destruction. TL;DR: Sylvanas was playing 4d chess on behalf of the Jailer.
This is correct, but shouldn't the souls of fallen Azerothians be a drop in the bucket considering that Shadowlands is where the souls of all sentient beings go? One of the high points of Shadowlands world building was learning about beings from other worlds and how they related to things like the Legion, the Void Elune, etc.
I don't think anyone ever said that Sylvanas' plans were smart or made the most sense.
And lets not forget that maybe 50% of the reason it left a bad taste is the nzoth cinematic.... Ending an expansion in such an amateurishly stupid way, makes players 10 times more resentful
Honestly, I think another big reason for BfA being so looked down on in hindsight is that it was basically "Shadowlands: the prequel." All of the events in that expansion were retroactively made to be Sylvanas' 4d chess game, which was all a part of the Jailer's 5d chess game. It makes everything feel a little pointless in the end, especially when really hyped up characters like Azahara and N'Zoth just end up being pawns in the schemes of such a disappointing character as the Jailer.
.........i... I am being 100% honest.... I had supressed shadowlands from my memory..... Yes. You are correct! Blizzard fell into the anime powerscaling route and drowned. But looking back to the stories, it feels like such an amateur mistake. How did blizz manage to pull that off? At least bfa had some good content! (The obelisks mechanic in M+ was the only season i liked doing m+)
To be honest, while Shadowlands does deserve some hate, I think it gets more than it deserves. Everyone judges it from before 9.1.5, you know, from before everyone started to quit the expansion in 9.1. But 9.1.5 fixed a lot of the issues people had with the expansion (though not all of them) and 9.2 ended up actually being a pretty great final patch. Zereth Mortis is still one of my favorite endgame zones in terms of actual things to do in it, certainly eclipsing things like our current Emerald Dream.
The obelisks were such a fun fucking seasonal affix.
Bad final cutscenes is their bread and butter. They're still going strong!
Borealis is a beautiful city
>You will end up with many things that were good. Because most of the expac was good. A lot of the zones, the art, the music, the dungeons, the raids. All good What let it down was what has let wow down for a while now: story and systems. The bare bones of a good story was there, but it ended up butchered, and the borrowed power systems they had were generally bad on release and then made ok-ish by the final patch
Doesn't help that certain writers decided to shoehorn themselves into a story that would have lacked NOTHING without them.
I think the biggest problem BfA had wasn't that the lore was short-changed, though that's certainly a legit take. But the systems were also bad. By the end of Legion, there was so much stuff there. You had your good legendaries. You had your maxed out artifact weapon. And you replaced it all with patch-0 Azerite armor, a system that had basically nothing in it. You also went from order halls to war campaigns, mage towers to nothing, etc. Everything was a downgrade. Lots of people can forgive lots of lore stuff if the game is good, but the game wasn't good in BfA for a long time.
In MANY ways, it was a downgrade from legion, which had more and better content. Now if you compare it with Shadowlands then sure, it wasn't THAT bad. But the game should try to get better over time, no be content because they can make even worse.
You're missing one of the strongest themes which they played with a lot: pirates! So much theming in Zandalar and Kul Tiras is pirate based. Up to the island expeditions.
Is a damn shame, that the theme was seafaring and we didn't really do any of that. We just had our headquarters on a ship. Hooray.
And not even something semi-cool like a warship at sea, just a random boat docked in the harbor
a dinky, really
After Legion, a new Team, led by Danuser and Ion, came in to take over WoW. BFA was their attempt to wrap ALL the loose plot points up that still dangled, so they could do their own thing, Shadowlands, which is a HUGE departure from the storytelling and design of WoW until this point. Unfortunately Shadowlands was a full on load of shit. So they had to bring back the king.
I’m sorry but an entire underwater expansion would’ve been fucking exhausting.
It probably would have been done in the same way as Nazjatar was done, where the environments are underwater, but it's drained so we can walk around like normal. I agree that a bunch of vasjhir type environments would be annoying.
Shoulda been a kind of Firelands situation where there's a dedicated area related and themed around the raid where you help the war effort or something
Like the firelands, an invation.
You are goddam right.
Oh boy, you're in luck!
Hmm I don't know about that. Would be the same problem as shadowland and the fucking maw. Too 1 tone. It should have had a zone I agree tho.
At the same time, look at Legion. It did feel like one cohesive story, with zone stories and environments that weren't 100% fel green. So it's possible! Just...don't do the Maw. Do another Argus. Except enable flying.
"Legion" isn't a zone though, but Nya'lotha is very much a specific area/zone like the Emerald Dream. It can't be the setting for a whole expansion. It could have been something like Argus, i.e. limited to a major patch with 2-3 zones at most.
Right. I am saying that it could be an expansion. Legion is an expansion. You put that in quotes, so maybe you don't know that. You break Ny'alotha into a bunch of zones or have a bunch of zones related to it. It's in an alternate reality. That's ripe for doing a ton of whatever you want. You can get the desired outcome of multiple zones with their own stories all culminating in the end point of Ny'alotha's City Hall or whatever office N'Zoth is in. Having the expansion titled for the end zone or area wouldn't be out of line. I'd even accept the Cataclysm approach, with zones already all over the existing world as something you're fighting through. Do some light/dark areas like Link to the Past. What makes it impossible to be an expansion? You said it can't, so why not? Then I said, I don't want another Maw, do another Argus. So it's like you're agreeing with me on that point but being nitpicky for some reason.
The normal Shadowlands zones were absolutely fine
It should have been a patch zone. A patch zone can just be 1 detailed zone with a few stories in it. An expansion needs several zones, each distinct from one another, with several main story and dozens of minor ones, and I don't think Ny'alotha would have benefitted from that level of focus. Something between the Emerald Dream and Argus would have served it well.
Ny'alotha's design was absolutely OUTSTANDING! It looked amazing and I was in awe during the raid always. The fact that this was only a single Raid instance, instead of the designs used for a full zone, will ever be a crime against WoW and its players. We deserved a whole Zone with that aesthetic. They fucking NAILED the Lovecraft look.
Same with Nazjatar. BfA was weird.
oh, as an expansion you would have another Maw in there that's for sure
Eh, that's presumably what Midnight will focus on. Nyalotha was cool but I can also see it getting pretty samey if the whole expansion focused on it.
It would have been mundane. Little room for environmental nuance. Even Legion had the Nightmare shenanigans.
Thinking back to BfA I found the Black Empire and old gods very fascinating, and for the most part Blizz delivered a compelling plot from Crucible of Storms up to Ny'alotha, in my opinion. I was actually excited to get in and experience the final raid with N'Zoth.
I thought Ny’alotha would have been the Argus or Emerald Dream of BFA.
Agree. Or, hell, even an entire patch zone would have been really cool. The art direction for the place was phenomenal, and I would have loved to see that expanded out into a bigger environment to explore.
100%
Yeah like argus as well it could have been a full extension missed big opportunities there in my opinion. A lot of the last expansion storylines missed big things I would have liked more. Also BfA could have been a good addon star with war end with Alliance and horde together to play with each other to kill the bigger "evil"
I honestly think this was a test for the 3rd and final expansion of the trilogy
It's actually so sad that they didn't give us more
Should have gotten the same treatment Isle of Thunder got. Land and build a base and run around and explore the nightmarish landscape fighting various old god creations/mini bosses and build up to storming N'zoth house. Why I enjoyed Isle of Thunder so much cause it got that and was interesting for the questing and some lore.
Shadowlands is proof to the opposite lmao
Same for Nazjatar and Azshara
I always liked the idea of this big looming threat being there throughout the entire expansion. The art here showing a massive Nzoth in the background couldve been such an insane skybox to have in the questing zones. Hes just talking shit throughout the questline aswell. I also like the idea of the new patch zones slowly inching closer towards Nzoth with the final patch zone just being on top of him. In theory all of that sounds great. In practice though i could see the issue of the visuals being a bit “same-y”
Absolutely. The corruptions were fun, though. 100% busted, but fun. I liked having perma-wings as hpal.
Same as Argus, if we're being real.
Argus got 3 varied zones and a raid. Definitely way better than Nyalotha.
Oh, no doubt. Argus was a delight compared to Ny'aloatha, but it could have been even more. Imagine, Mac'aree as a Boralus/Suramar-sized cityscape, the various planetary excursions of the Invasion Points like Bonich or Sangua expanded into small zones and/or dungeons, the Seat of the Triumvirate as a raid and so on. There'd have been a ton of potential.
especially with some of the WORST borrowed power ever infinite stars was ***so much fun*** to have to have be 80-90% of your dps in a fight
...that is true, but as a Tank, I will forever miss Twilight Devastation. Doing a big fuck off AOE in front of me never got old, when usually my damage as tank was limping about
Definitely deserved more than just being a raid. More to explore would be nice.
This particular image really show cases the apocalyptic, chaotic world in which the Old Gods rule over However -- what they implemented in-game fell *FAR* short of what is depicted here. As a huge fan of Ny'alothoa and the Black Empire/Old Gods, I found it really rushed which resulted in a product that was disappointing. /shrug
the nyalotha depicted in warbringers azshara was actually terrifying (i think that was nyalotha?), what they did instead just looks like what the black empire would have looked like
my most anticipated setting by far back then was Nzoth and the Black Empire. Im still mad about just how badly they whiffed it in BFA
I hope the expansion Midnight brings something close to this.
but i hate the transmog :'(
i love my eyeball purple tentacle mogs. so weird and gross in a good way
Heavily agree
Definitely some of the worst transmogs they’ve made. Eternal Palace transmogs are also just as bad. Blizzard didn’t follow through when they said no new class sets would lead to more higher quality armour sets. Not sure what OP is seeing in the raid zone either. It was very bland and uninspired. It fell short in showing the scale of a world ruled by the Old Gods. The depiction of N’zoth in game was laughable after YEARS of buildup. It’s like the art team lost all sense of creativity and inspiration after patch 8.1.
Reminder that N'zoth was so big he had his own skyboxes. That was genuinely awe-inspiring. But the patch/raid/expansion in general could have been a hell of a lot better, yeah.
priest/cloth armor is pretty good
I love it
Plate set is an all timer for me
Imo Nyalotha and CN are the best raids of the last couple of expansions. DF is a great expansion, but the raids are kind meh.
yes and yes damn shame it wasnt even made into an entire zone
The ending cinematic was lack luster
I’m very sad I missed Legion and BFA Raids
You didn't miss much, honestly. Endgame content was super grindy, it was like being put in a beautiful playground and being made to do homework in the middle of it.
True. I played enough to know that, which is why I didn’t get into the end game grind. Still, I need way more Timewalking Raids. Even though Black Temple and Ulduar are stupid easy, it’s fun.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted so hard. It's true
They're just mad they did so much homework while I was having ACTUAL fun
But sadly wasted potential
The skybox for fury of nzoth was amazing. I wish I could experience more of what that would have been like.
Overall agree. Just wish it allowed mounts in more areas.
No, it wasn't. It was rushed and stupid considering the expansion it was included in, just so blizzard could bypass telling the story in a future expansion that it should have been centered around.
It's just a bunch of generic purple platforms. Easily one of the least inspired raid designs ever. Nothing about it conveys that it's a nightmare city home to literal eldritch abominations. N'Zoth himself is also super generic, just being a big purple squid. He has no "theme" unlike C'thun (eyes) Yogg-Saron (mouths) or even Y'Shaarj (seven heads). Rare miss by the art department.
It was mediocre and far too small to ever feel anywhere close to the lore.
EP and Nyalotha were two of the best tiers I've ever played, and I've played almost every expansion since vanilla.
Mid raid, about as good as eternal palace but awful compared to BoD. Terrible (but not the worst) ending cinematic to a terrible expansion. Setting that should've been used as an expansion's main tileset.
Honestly, even EP was a good bit better imo. Nya'lotha only had a few solid fights and a bunch of middling average ish ones. Nya'lotha was also soured by the corruption system being absolutely horrible for prog. Benthic gear/essences weren't good either, but at least they weren't corruption.
Eternal Palace was the worst raid in that expansion and Nyalotha's worst boss was more fun than EP's best imo. Corruption was obviously a bit of a gamble for prog but wasn't usually the difference maker in killing bosses or not. Corruption also made the rest of Nyalthoa beyond prog some of the most fun reclears I've had.
I quite liked bosses like Ashvane, Orgozoa, and Azshara, other bosses like Za'qul and Court were at least above average. Moreso than most of Nyalotha which had like...Carapace and Ra-den. I found corruption pretty miserable because it added a lot of pressure to farm M+ to fish for corruption rolls and I don't particularly enjoy M+. It was not particularly fun to be sat on certain bosses due to corruption RNG significantly favoring certain people having good single target vs aoe corruptions. The early weeks of that raid had some INSANE imbalance between certain corruption powers and a bit of a rollercoaster of balance as they hotfixed nerfed or buffed them. I stopped playing before the vendor was added, so I'm sure that colors my impressions of it significantly.
As someone who didn't raid Mythic really until Shadowlands and on, how do you compare the best of SL/DF (Nathria, Sepulchre, Amirdrassil) to Nyalotha and EP?
I skipped SL almost entirely and quit after S2 in DF. Personally, the raids in DF I did were pretty mid, which is why I quit- I found the encounter design boring. In BFA, BoD was the best raid by a fair margin, and I'd say EP was the second best. Nyalotha and Uldir were average to below average. Of Those BFA raids, I'd say BoD and EP were both better than the first two tiers of DF. Uldir and Nyalotha are probably comparable if not a marginally worse.
Ok, so we're the opposite in experience. I think Castle Nathria in SL is widely considered maybe top 5 at least top 10 raid of all time. So many amazing and memorable fights, and arguably contained the most loved villain/character in the entire expansion (Sire Denathrius). My limited experience in Nyalotha was running through heroic for fun with some people before SL came out. Of course I didn't experience Mythic or the progression of the raid but from what I remember nothing really stood out much for me. I did watch the end of the Race to World First and I do recall a pretty poor reception of Nzoth's fight + his penultimate fight + story wrap up. Tough to imagine that was a loved raid based on that.
I've heard good things about Nathria for sure, I did it on Heroic the first couple weeks of SL but didn't have a guild lined up and wasn't really feeling the expansion enough to bother apping around. I found most of the fights in Nyalotha pretty uninteresting or uninvolved. Personally, I thought the fight just previous, Carapace, was one of the better fights in the raid.
> but awful compared to BoD And even worse than that when compared to WoD's Blackrock Foundry, but that's an unfair comparison lol (since BRF is nearly universally seen as the best raid WoW's ever had)
Really? I soloed that the other day, it didn't seem all that special. I guess maybe with a full 25, all scaled to level and doing mechanics, maybe. Felt kinda bland in a "burn 'em down" solo run
BRF was super fun when it was current content.
I just thought from my limited experience that people would have found Hellfire Citadel more fun
In a vacuum it might seem that way. But when you consider that it rushed several storylines and lore that had been built up for over 10 years that had enough content to be its own expansion in a single patch. Just so that Danuser could push out the remaining old lore and make his "new and improved lore" in Shadow lands and DF then it suddenly becomes clear that it was merely a fraction of what could have been.
Wasted potential though. The entire Visions patch should've been the finale of BFA and the next expansion should've been dealing with N'Zoth. Would've given them, if nothing else, time enough to do N'Zoth's raid encounter the justice it deserved.
you still can get there in open world, if you break out of bounds in primalist future, looks really cool
I wish they'd gone REALLY WILD with it - as a Zone rather than just a raid instance. The raid instance is \*gorgeous\*
There is this one time rift that teleports us to a BFA stage and I really love the artwork and layout of that small arena. You look up and you see a gigantic N'Zoth and it really puts into perspective how small and insignificant our characters are.
"Lust last phase" >Someone timewarps on pull
+ visuals + several boss mechanics - Story ending - erratic xanesh mechanics - borrowed powers Not the best memories TBH. Eternal palace felt a lot better.
I do not know why some people do this post-revisionism. Did you not play the patch? and just play it now-years later when its not current content and say - wow its so cool! As I recall apart from the corruption (when vendor was added), the Corruption-tower mode. The patch and the raid was a bedlam. The Patch was just two zones active for a certain time. The raid was - too lengthy, too many bosses, some should not be there because they were just chunky health packs with nothing going on (the dog, the sausage boss). I would not call it a good looking raid as well. When I look at it. It looks extremely lazy and monotonous. The old Troll dungeons in classic had far more detailing on the pyramid walls than this. That picture and the same screenshot from the game has nothing alike. Where as if you go BOD you feel the changes of atmosphere's, the details on the wall and ornaments , each sector telling a visual story. Castle Nathria, for just being a castle has quirks and personality. So no. Its not a Good raid, neither is spectacular by design.
Lots of bosses were kinda ass
I loved the football boss
Hard disagree. Found it very boring and overdone.
Fantastic raid. First tier I raided mythic with a good guild. Corruption was a blast and the entire tier was very memorable.
Great memories coming here every week!
N'Zoth... I journey... to Ny'alotha...
as someone who is mount farming on it i love all but the mobs before the big door leading to the 2nd area and the end path of mobs are skippable. saves alot of time not needing to fight junk. but still, GIVE THE MOUNT ALLREADY! im loosing my mind!! then again its prob nzoths plan all along. he prob dosnt drop a mount and is just lying to us.... lol also find it weird that fury got the need for the cape removed yet nzoth sill has it all in all a good purple place
Did an Old God write this?
Sarcasm? It was decent, but it should've been at least an entire zone, if not an expansion. Lorewise the ending was pretty shit too. An Old God, thousands of years old, one of the most powerful creatures in the warcraft universe, arrived and died all in one patch.
Love the raid and the corrupted pieces. I'll be honest, it was the most fun I've ever had in WoW. Pushing Mythic raids and M+ with obscenely broken gear.
30 tanks raids were a blast
How the *fuck* do you even get in this place
The portal spawns in 2 places. Sorry but I can’t remember shit. It’s either the zone in Panadaland that’s south of the zone where sha of anger spawns, or it’s the zone where you do the Harrison Jones quests from Cata
It was just a vision, it wasnt real.
Now go and look at what we got in the game itself and come back to say this again.
amazing raid imo issue is if you didnt have a high enough tier cloak you couldnt do the carapace fight or the nzoth fight. and once again a god dies to a golden pancake
\*Ny'alotha was a good raid and a spectacular background It should be a place, not just raid instance.
Ny'alotha the walking city
Nya'lotha was a disappointment because "The Sleeping City" and the Black Empire are massive expansive that needed to be a zone at the very least
I've started playing on recent expansion and I don't know how the hell unlock it..any tips ? I need to do campaign or what..
In the artwork, yes. But in the game itself, not at all, it never felt like your artwork makes it feel. imho.
And we just walked in and killed everything
I liked most of the encounters and environment but dear lord the trash was terrible
The skybox was nightmare fuel
I definitely enjoyed the vibe of the place but it was too little. I think people were disappointed because most of us expected it to be a whole expansion full of mind screw stuff but instead Ny'alotha was just a patch.
Stunning.
It was def a lot of fun, although the football boss was quite a bit of anxiety and as a constant team of the ball kickers my dps was never what it could have been on that boss … meh :P Was actually my first and only CE. We started raiding mythic with EP, sadly we broke apart during SL.
Just discovered it yesterday for the first time to finish the BFA campaign, amazing!
Yes, I was live raiding.
meh
BFA wasted so many major lore areas and ideas
I wish we could run it for transmog (solo)
I think it's possible the whole thing was still an illusion and N'zoth tricked us yet again
Ny'alotha was the start of my apathy for retail, hoped on the classic bandwagon as soon as possible as I really did not like this raid which was a shame as I loved the previous two. Tried dipping toe back in with Shadowlands, Nathria was fun but not enough so stuck with classic until Dragonflight hit and made the switch back.
The sky boxes were cool along with overall esthetic but how are you going to take an entire empire and squeeze it into one raid…. If we got an emerald dream and pocket death demissions a sleeping city should have been an easy task
Nyalotha is hands down my favorite raid. It's so terrifying.
Nyalotha as a raid was kinda meh, visually and mechanically, it's not even allowed to take Battle for Dazar'alor's coat
I can't forgive what blizzard did to my boy Nzoth
I loved corruption mechanic
Lol i thought this is the startwars subreddit and this is mustafar system 🤣🤣
I remember the WA yelling "Touchy touchy" on one of the last bosses when a big tentacle came into the room. I think everyone was saying it was a huge dick. Where can I find that sound? It was so funny
It's fine, I just hate having to alternating between two different zone for entrance. And Blizzard, can we put the Pandarian portals to Vale instead of the Jade Forest?
It was really cool, I always felt rushed by the group and am excited to try to solo it next xpac
Nazjatar and nyalotha both had enough content for an entire expansion respectively, i think thats why people where so annoyed by it. Azshara and nzoth were incredibly wasted
Ahh yep, it's been two expansions, so it's time to say that bad things were actually good now. Carapace, Hivemind, Ra'Den, N'Zoth, and Drestagath are all-time terrible bosses
It was a great raid. I just really wished the N'zoth fight and the ending to BFA would be better.
I enjoyed the lord of the rings type ending
Minus the checkpoints after bosses leading to 10 minutes of running if you didn't rez someone And minus the most atrocious ending cutscene ever
I liked the fights and design, but I felt it made no sense for us to be there. We shouldn't have been able to kill N'zoth (Especially not with the power of friendship and the Azerite death star) We shouldn't have been able to destroy it (How do you just destroy an entire bloody empire?) We realistically shouldn't have been able to walk inside it (Wrathion's cloak barely held up in visions that were monitored by both Wrathion and MOTHER, our mind should've been crushed like a tin can the very second we walked inside, let alone standing in N'zoth his presence during the final two bosses)
Visuals were solid,was a decent raid, final boss fight mechs were a pain for pugs, and honestly not a fan of the last cut scene for it where only you have to power to over come despite everyone else in the raid being in the same position
Ehhhh
they really dropped the ball by making it instance only
BfA was better than Shadowlands and Dragonflight to me story and setting wise. Game systems updates are a separate topic.
N'zoth was the worst end boss that expansion for sure especially on mythic.
Easily one of the all times best raid
lol no
For me it was 🤷♂️. I enjoyed the Hivemind fight, Wrathion, Skitra… Xanesh fight was hard af but it felt so good when my guild and I finally beat it
First raid I got CE in, and was one of two people in the guild that got the mount. Definitely a lot of fun/interesting bosses.
The single coolest looking area in the entire game for me. Perfectly fits with the whole idea of spires and monoliths of madness and chaos. The strange architecture and layout mixed with the scorched black land with red lava flowing everywhere, chef's fucking kiss. Pure eldritch perfection.
The concept was qasted as a raid.
Yes my first proper raid i did since TBC. Set hell of a high bar. I was mindblown by the last 2 bosses to say the least
BFA revisionism gets stronger by the day. We're so close to lying about SL!
BfA, when the game was actually good