While BFA has not been my favorite expansion by a long shot, I think that, conceptually, it hasn't been a total failure. Warlords of Draenor remains WoW's nadir in my opinion, given that, aside from a good leveling experience and some decent raids (but very few of them) it was mostly left a "why are we even doing this?" kind of plot. The Iron Horde never felt like much of a threat, and the game introduced a whole time-travel plot - a subgenre I'm generally very into - but didn't actually play with the time-travel-ness of it. We didn't see a single freaking Infinite Dragon the whole time!
But BFA has definitely been in the "not as good" side of expansions. Personally, I think that the leveling experience left something to be desired (stuff like finishing the main plot of Stormsong Valley before you'd seen 2/3 of the zone) and the way that we've been dragged once again into a Horde v. Alliance narrative, which once again has the Horde playing the conflicted bad guys and the Alliance playing the reactive good guys who get no real inner conflict, have been problems that prevent me from enjoying seeing places I've always wanted to see - Kul Tiras and Zandalar - as much as I want to. And then there's the Heart of Azeroth, which mechanically feels like they just took the Netherlight Crucible part of artifact weapons and none of the really flavorful, exciting, and aspirational stuff you got with the earlier traits.
BFA also had a really tough act to follow, given that Legion was the best expansion since Wrath (and, though I still love the Scourge as my favorite WoW villains, probably actually surpassed it.)
8.2 will be bringing a lot of new stuff to the expansion. Two new zones, with a raid on one and a Return to Karazhan-style mega-dungeon on the other. There will be a lot of world content as well as some new development to the stories.
And, exciting to me, there's the fact that we're focusing on an external and cool threat in the Old God-affiliated Azshara.
See, I come to WoW for some otherworldliness. Much as I enjoyed Game of Thrones (give or take a super-rushed final season) I actually prefer my fantasy to be of the high fantasy variety. I loved going to the futuristic alien world of Argus to fight space demons. To my mind, if you're going for fantasy, give us something fantastical.
And obviously, there is fantastical stuff in Kul Tiras and Zandalar. But a massive rift in the ocean, magically suspended waters allowing us to traverse this sunken land? That's what I'm freaking talking about.
I mean, to be fair, WoW has inoculated us a bit against a sense of supernatural otherness by making some inherently magical people into, well, people. The Forsaken, for example, only walk around because they're saturated in necromantic energy. And one of the things I love about the game is how it takes the "mage-punk" view of things, saying "the world is filled with magic, and this is how people have learned to live with that." It's a bit like the Eberron setting for D&D (which I'm not incredibly familiar with, but has a similar idea of magic allowing the equivalent of modern technology to exist.)
But given that werewolves and zombies are treated as normal people in this world, it means we've got to go further to really make things feel magical.
Mechanically, of course, I'll be curious to see how the changes to the Heart of Azeroth work out. The system does look a little less obnoxious - allowing people to collect the best traits and swap them out, rather than just hoping to get a piece of armor that has the right stuff on it.
But it remains to be seen just how well the patch works in giving the game a good feeling. No expansion has been without merits, but it's also a big question whether a patch can fix things, or if we'll just have to wait for Blizzcon to see what expansion comes next.
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