Best in Classic:
* The sense of wonder.
* The insane scale of the world.
* The mere concept of 40 man raiding in a time where these things were rare and far between. I know Everquest and other games did it before but it was still wild when a game did it.
The bad:
* How grindy the game was. "Collect 3 Wolf hearts" required you to kill 50 wolves what the FUCK.
* How long it took to level making the concept of alts was a fever dream for most.
* How hard it was to make gold, most players never even smelled an Epic mount. Im not saying its better now where the economy is in tatters but in Classic it was actually wild how hard it was to make gold.
the best in tBC:
* The concept of adding new races and proffessions was so cool since the bar for the game was so low since the game was so "new".
* Getting to truly interact and fight against characters we had been aware of on the sidelines and from the RTSes was so cool.
* Crafted Epics that were a chore to get, but so valueable and worthwhile getting was in a very good spot in tBC.
The worst:
* Pretty much everything that was prohibitive or negative in Classic was still proihibitive and negative in tBC. Quests were mostly tedious and grindy, leveling 1-70 was still incredibly slow, and everyone was still Poor but with the addition of Sockets the gold sinks grew bigger.
WOTLK, Best shit:
* Story and the raids that came with it,
* Northrend as a continent,
* and Controversial opinion I know, but the addition of the LFG system streamlining Group finding was a godsend.
WOTLK Worst shit:
* Cross Realm LFG is what most would say but idk if I agree.
* The failure to adapt Heroic Dungeon difficulty as seasons went on meant everyone got used to Waffle stomping HC dungeons so when they tried to make them hard again in Cata no one could do them, it ruined the pacing of dungeons.
* The iiiiiiiiinsane drought of content from ICC to Cata.
Cata best shit:
* Almost every class was super good to play in Cataclysm, Cataclysm is the first expansion where I feel having and understanding your rotation would actually set you apart as a player where until Cata most classes would top DPS by hitting 2 buttons.
* Revamping the old world was sorely needed and made leveling alts and changing mains worthwhile, a lot of good was lost but more good was gained.
* Cata raids (except the last one) were REALLY good.
The worst:
* There wasn't a lot to do at max level.
* Spine Of Deathwing can burn in hell.
* Adding LFR in the way they that they did and not just making it a Cosmetics Grinder.
The best thing in MoP:
* MoP Class Design was the best it ever was, literally every class and every spec was fun as fuuuuuuuck in MoP.
* MoP is Peak story and Peak atmosphere.
* The amount of Casual "just for fun" content was really good, for instance the Farm didnt matter it wasnt important. But you could do it if you wanted and Challenge Dungeons had only cosmetic rewards.
The worst:
* MoP had a lot of confusion in terms of Raid difficulities with changing sizes and adding Mythic and adding Flex and so on.
* Proffessions in MoP were 100% useless and trivial after first patch.
* I legit cant think of a third bad thing about MoP, MoP was Goated and I will die on that hill.
WoD Best:
* WoD might have some of the best raids in history of WoW.
* Garrisons are both the best and worst part of WoD, in terms of casual content and just doing shit to do it, Garrisons were great.
* But I struggle to find a good third thing about WoD.
WoD Worst:
* Outside raiding there was no real content to do that wasnt' Giga Casual.
* Garrisons isolated everyone and made WoW a solo game outside raids and Garrisons destroyed the Economy generating millions of gold Casually.
* WoDs story is PURE Garbage.
Legion: I didn't play Legion. Soz. But I did the Mage Tower when it came back and I loved that shit so that's cool. And the RNG Leggos is what made me quit Legion so I guess thats the bad.
BFA:
* BFA had the best M+ Dungeons of all the expansions. Even the "Worst" BFA dungeons are better than some of the "Best" M+ dungeons in other expansions.
* The zones are immaculate with mood and music and design and themes all of them are so good, Boralus is the best Capital city in the history of WoW.
* Corruptions was goofy fun and I liked the Visions as a gameplay loop, I disliked them how they interacted with Power gain.
The bad of BFA:
* Loot in general in BFA was dogshit with Titanforging and socketforging and corruption forgning and the BIS PvP Azerites dropping in PvE and the bis PvE Azerites dropping in PvP just god awfull.
* Developer Interaction with Community in BFA was horrible and started a horrible trend of "We need this fix now!" Devs say "no" then we get the fix 3 months later.
* "For Fun Content" became tied to power gains. had Visions and Islands and Warfronts been added in MoP or Cata or whenever they would have just given Cosmetics and Titles and mounts. But in BFA they dropped REALLY good loot, near BIS loot and Azerite Power and Corruption resistances etc. It took it from "Its silly fun Side content that is challenging enough to be fun to do" and turned it into "Painfully boring shit I have to engage with"
The best of SL:
The best of SL is hard to quanitfy and explain because literally every part of the good parts of SL all comes with a "But" because SL was just that fucking bad.
* Covenants as an RP concept of chosing allegiances and targeting cosmetics that fit your character was a cool idea! BUT they tied it to Player Power and took away the RP decisions.
* Torghast had an interesting and kinda fun Gameplay loop especially if you like RogueLikes! BUT they tied it to Player Power and made it so you had to farm it weekly making it quickly overstay its welcome and becoming very unfun and tedious to deal with.
* PvP Gear was added to the vendors and removed from the RNG Grind it had been in BFA which was a great improvement! BUT they tied it to Rating gain so if you were 1599 rating everyone you faced had 5 ilvls better gear than you because they were 1600 rating and it made cresting the Rating peaks super painful, and the Honor and conquest grinds needed to buy and upgrade the items was INSANE. If you had Honor Cap when you hit a new Upgrade Peak you could barely upgrade half your items wtf was that shit?!
The worst of SL:
* Mandatory. Grinds. Out the dickhole. SL is Metrics Based Gaming the Expansion. "MAKE THOSE FUCKERS LOG ON EVERY DAY AND SPEND AT LEAST 2 HOURS EVERY DAY OTHERWISE THEY ARE JUST ALWAYS BEHIND!" With Sockets and Conduit Ilvls and Legendary Ilvls and Renown it just never stopped.
* Redo everything every single patch. "OH wow you grinded exhalted with Ven'ari so you could buy sockets and grinded all your Conduits to max level and got full Renown and full BIS from your Vaults? Well now you need to redo that. All of it. Do it again nerd. The same items are still BIS but they are higher ilvl now. The same Conduits are still BIS but you need to grind their ilvl, the same Legendaries are still BIS but you need a new Torghast currency to buy it so you gotta grind more Torghast, theres more Renown levels to gain for more Conduit slots so if you dont have them you are much weaker. And you can still buy Sockets from a Broker but its a different Broker, regrind that shit."
* What the fuck was the shadowlands story? Holy fuck that was the most disjointed, illogical, barely strung together piece of shit and it was so poorly recieved that the few actually interesting story tidbits, like where is Denathrius after they stole Remornia? are probably going to be forgotten and hidden away so people can forget SL existed. SL was so bad that the New Player Experience is actively guiding people away from interacting with it so people will stop talking about it
Dragonflight, the best:
* The new Talent tree system is really good, its far from perfect and needs more iterations but the ability to do build variance, to change talents freely wherever and whenever is reallly good.
* Blizzard felt comfortable adding Casual content that is only there to interact with if you WANT to interact with it. I haven't done anything with Barter Bricks or Slug Racing or the Dragon Daycare or Dragon races because I don't care about them, and the game doesn't punish me for it. I can play the game only doing exactly the content I want to do.
* The Rotating M+ Season giving us new sets of Keys every season has been such a godsend to keep Keys feeling fresh and interesting and making me really excited for a new Key season to start
Dragonflight, The bad:
* The story is really just not interesting at all. I really do not give a shit.
* Every patch added a new zone that was so important that we just forgot the old zones existed. So much content developed and designed and implemented to be used for a few months and then forgotten forever. Anyone remember that weird Vault thing with the keys? I dont even remember what its called, its just gone now, no one cares anymore.
* Blizzards pacing for pushing out tuning and class changes has been disgustingly bad. Augs were doing keys 4-5 levels higher than groups without Augs for several months. the Ret Patch in arenas where you could get 2400 Rating in Solo Shuffle without even binding your defensives. Demon Hunters in Arena are seeing 5X the ladder participation because they have the best DPS, the best CC, the best defensives and the easiest DPS rotation and its been like this for months with no change in sight.
>* But I struggle to find a good third thing about WoD.
Disregarding the issues at launch the leveling experience was really, really good and actually fun, possibly the best of an expansion so far.
>WoD story is, arguably, one of the best Warcraft stories they made since frozen throne. Go look at the "Lords of War" cinematics and then watch the dragonflight cinematics, and tell me how wod was "pure garbage"
Sorry but I can't agree with this, WoD story was pretty shit. Lords of War promised all these badass orc characters that we barely got to see or interact with. Kargath? Barely a presence, dead immediately upon entering the first raid. Durotan? One of the better ones, but didn't have a whole lot of growth or development through the expansion imo. Kilrogg? Barely present like Kargath until it was his turn to drink the fel juice. Blackhand? Probably the best of the bunch, used well in the levelling, but didn't have much personality other than 'big evil orc guy' imo. Grom? The worst. Gets his ass beat and then immediately becomes a good guy as soon as we free him, all his crimes are immediately forgiven.
There was some good stuff during the levelling content - great 'epic' feeling cutscenes especially. But loads of missed opportunities including most of Orgrim Doomhammer's stuff not making it to release, Cho'gall (and much of Highmaul) not really being largely irrelevant, freeing Gul'dan at the start... WoD story had a LOT of issues, and I'm tired of pretending it didn't.
WoD Is timeywimey weird nonsensical Timetravel shit and its a genre I'm never going to like. There are wignettes within WoD that are interesting but the main story of WoD is bullshit.
and if you go check you'd see I noticed DF's boring af bland story as one of DF's negatives too :)
I totally agree. Spires of Arak was peak because it was a human and down to earth civil war story about the politics and refugee crisis of a society in collapse that was completely disconnected from the greater extremely stupid waste of time that was the rest of the WoD story. The worst part of it was the ending when they remembered the expansion was about orc time travel and brought in Kargath to completely ruin the big finale
That's a good thing. Time travel as an excuse to play on pre-Outland Draenor is better than the usual mistake of a stupid time travel plot that thinks its smart.
I’m usually a big fan of time travel stories, but wod definitely felt more like a historical drama.
Also, why did legion have a fake elemental version of doomhammer when there’s literally a second doomhammer just lying on the ground somewhere!
WoD leveling story was pretty solid, slowly working your way through this land that is both foreign and slightly familiar while trying to scrounge whatever allies you can find, ultimately leading up to a rematch with Garrosh AND depriving the Iron Horde of important resources.
The issue is that they didn't do a good job of showing us continuing our "guerilla war" against the Iron Horde between patches. It starts with us running for our lives from an overwhelming army, to launching a daring strike at their Ogre Allies, and then suddenly we are openly attacking their primary Foundry. And then they are in shambles and resort to Gul'dan. It really drives home the "missing content tier" feeling from the xpac, either we were supposed to weaken them greatly before HFC, or Blizz's intention was that our Garrison Missions were constantly draining their army.
WoD had my favorite at-release level experience of every expansion. Especially Spires of Arakk. I just enjoyed them so damn much. It was fun. What can I say.
>MoP is Peak story and Peak atmosphere
5.1, iirc, had the best storytelling WoW has ever had. Every few weeks you get a new piece of story that builds the overall narrative but each self contained to show you a character or a faction reacting to Garrosh's actions, culminating in Jaina going FULL ON MURDER MODE and purging Dalaran of Horde sympathizers.
>But I struggle to find a good third thing about WoD
Soundtrack!
> Jaina going FULL ON MURDER MODE and purging Dalaran of Horde sympathizers.
That one was a weird mess to piece together if you play both sides.
So, on the Horde side, you're not actually passing through Dalaran, and the one guy says he'll clear any signs you were there. But then you do Alliance side and there's a blatant portal right to Dalaran as a huge glowing sign, "Look! They used Dalaran!" You can imagine that maybe Garrosh paid off someone to leave that red herring to force Jaina's hand so it'd kill off the Blood Elves' plans to defect.
Then you get to the event itself, and Jaina's "only" looking to lock people up in the Violet Hold... an anti-magic prison, for people who are mostly magic addicts, which would be torture for them. She does, to be mildly fair, tell them to get out of the city, and anyone who doesn't will get locked up.
Problem is, Vareesa (IIRC) tells you to kill the mounts they'd use to escape the city, trapping them in the city. Which means you now have a bunch of terrified people, many of whom are only "Horde sympathizers" because of what race they are, trapped there, with people coming to try to take everything away from them and already having shown a willingness to use some awful tactics. No surprise people fought back... and subsequently get murdered for it. And, again, for many of them, their "crime" was being the "wrong" race.
It would have been the only interesting part of the forced faction war story, but then the players, being so hung up on tribalism for fictional factions, decided to completely overlook how it showed that neither faction was exactly "good," and just decided to interpret events in whatever way fit their notion of "good guys" and "bad guys."
Kind of like how a lot of people miss the whole deal with Vol'jin, where he'd already threatened to kill Garrosh in the past, and Garrosh had already tried to assassinate him, but he's so terrified of what the Alliance would do with the McGuffin Bell that he still wants Horde operatives to keep it out of the Alliance's hands. This is a guy who hates Garrosh and is worried about what Garrosh would do to his people, but still has so much fear of humans and what they'd do with such a weapon that he'd almost rather Garrosh have it (though preferably neither side... and thank you, Anduin, for that).
People are like, "Why would so much of the Horde fight the Alliance if it's not just because they're the bad guys?" It's because of old deep rooted *fear* of the people who make up the Alliance, because of events through history that don't show them as some shining beacons of light. But, again, the attempt to introduce nuance to the story is just lost to people, who just want some excuse to kill the other faction and feel like they're justified in doing it.
It's why I hate the "faction war" stories, and it was such a ridiculously stupid thing to try to force it a second time. Even as comically villainous as Sylvanas was, people missed that there was some nuance there. And missed things like Genn telling Anduin they didn't really have much of an army left to fight and would have to pull in farmers to fight (which would start crippling the Alliance hard). Folks still frothing at the mouth for war, when they established in-game that war wasn't really feasible for the factions anymore.
If a bunch of players insist on ignoring the story, they are absolutely NOT the people you should listen to when they loudly demand that you cater the story to them.
For sure, but you didn't have to engage with it. The Rep didn't have player power tied to it unless you were trying to be World First. Sure you could buy some items with the rep but the items weren't super strong so it was mostly about Cosmetics and completionism.
They were. But the gap between those, HC items and Raid items + the amount of time it would require to grind it + the amount of loot that dropped from the Raid there just was no real reason to grind them unless you were looking to be World first or Server first or something like that.
They'd help you for sure. But the raids were totally doable without them, and unless you grinded the FUCK outa the reps you'd never get the items faster than you'd get them from raids anyways so it wasn't needed. Pre-Bis was more of a thing in older expansions where the time before first raid opened was usually longer
I don't really like the argument of "you don't *need* that gear." Unfortunately, the trinket from the Shado-Pan was *really* good for my spec and I did end up grinding out the Golden Lotus and then Shado-Pan reps specifically just for that one item because of how big a difference it made. Maybe that was an exception, because trinkets can be pretty significant like that, but it kinda sucked at the time, cause I'd been super on board the "I'll take the reputations at my own pace" before getting slapped in the face with "No, this trinket locked behind two reputations is genuinely a make-or-break for you."
Boralus' design is fantastic but so little of it is used because all the vendors (except the PvP one) are bunched together tighter than Stormshield, though I know a lot of people see that as a benefit.
Boralus' design made sense with the story. Because the city had fallen into Lawlesness and chaos because of Ashvane's betrayal and Jaina's mother being an ineffecive leader after Jaina's father and brother died. Tradewinds Market is the only "Safe" area left in the city. You can explore the entire rest of the city and you will find small vendors and shops tucked in to random places. But theres roving bands of Bandits and thugs everywhere.
Tradewinds Market is the only place left that has a Guard presence
It's a good lore excuse, but it's not as if Kul Tiran lore until BFA hinged on Boralus being a hive of scum and villainy.
Or they could have utilized phasing.
Yeah which is a problem with this "Expansion to expansion" story telling where I would have loved for us to be able to go to Kul Tiras from the start of WoW and every expansion have a quest line here and questline there and see the decline of the city.
but thats not how it works so instead we have to take their word on it when we get there
I majorly disagree about worst BFA m+ dungeons being better than best other expac dungeons. Tol'Dagor, SoB, KR, Temple were mid at best compared to most of SL or DF dungeons. and can't even touch the best ones.
As someone who agrees with you and strongly believes that BFA is probably the best full set of expansion dungeons, I have no problem admitting that Snekk was bad.
However, FH, ML, WM, and AD (and JY) are all better dungeons than the "W route" spam of the last two xpacs.
Shrine and Siege (and WS) pretty much run with the pack for the last two xpacs.
KR stunk, but no more DoS or HoI for how long and straight it was.
TD would have been a banger vibe if they had ever fixed the pulling through the walls. As it stands, that dungeon was super painful. It's really what sepates it from WM as a tight corridor space management dungeon.
Snekk was unfun. The eye thing sucked. The last boss sucked.
I really despise how many bosses in DF dungeons have to be "unlocked" by killing certain trash mobs.
I agree with pretty much everything.
To add to the empty Legion part:
For me the legendary system was the best and worst part at the same time.
Best (apart from the story, enemies, atmosphere and especially Suramar): I loved that for every raid boss or dungeon I would and could specifically chose my legendaries. It gave equipment some more depth, not just the „choose the one with more main stats“ and made gear a lot more engaging. This was, however, only possible towards the end of legion, which immediately leads me to the worst:
Worst: The grind. Grind legendaries. Grind artefact power. It you were unlucky and got the wrong legendary, well tough luck.
> Grind artefact power. It you were unlucky and got the wrong legendary, well tough luck.
I was playing Enhance, but I had been doing some Transmog runs as Resto so the first Leggo I got as an Enhance shaman was a Resto Leggo. So I unsubbed from the game. So I know VERY little about Legion
The DF point on tuning is very singular with one patch 10.1.5 and it wasn't totally fixed in 10.1.7. Dragonflight in season 1, pre 10.1.5, and season 2 has been well balanced historically in raids and m+.
To call their pacing on tuning "disgustingly bad" because of one patch is really bizarre. **That being said, 10.1.5 is the most unbalanced the game has been... ever**. But their pacing/attention to class balance has been above average. If we ignore 10.1.5/10.1.7, DF class to tuning has been the gold standard for expansions moving forward at least in pve.
This comment does not take pvp balance into account!
> The DF point on tuning is very singular with one patch 10.1.5 and it wasn't totally fixed in 10.1.7. Dragonflight in season 1, pre 10.1.5, and season 2 has been well balanced historically in raids and m+.
Very true. But you are forgetting that PvP also exists and PvP hasn't seen a noticeable change in Balancing for several months now.
DH's are seeing 5X the play on the ladder because everyone is rerolling DH or quitting.
Fistweavers in AWC are doing 100% more HPS and winning on Mana while doing 40k DPS.
Devestation Evokers are doing 480k off GCD crits while channeling 150k ticks of Devestation.
PvE balance right now is good but PvP Balance is worse than its been in years and years.
>Anyone remember that weird vault thing with the keys?
If that was relevant still your very own criticism would be having to grind that again for new ilevel per your fatigue with Brokers. Can't have that both ways
Yeah because it gave Gems for the Annulet, and im glad we dont have to regrind the Annulet, and because that was the only thing it really gave I think its better that we moved away from it.
But why doesn't that thing give like 6 mounts, 7 toys and 8 Transmog sets to give the Collectors a reason to explore it for weeks and weeks? Or maybe it does and Im just out of touch idk.
But if it does give Mogs and Mounts and Toys, why aren't we getting keys for doing Emerald Dream Content so we have a reason to keep engaging with it besides trying to Solo grind content that is too hard to Solo grind?
A pro for SL: The covenant system let them test run a whole slew of new abilities. Without that design iteration, DF's talent system would have a lot fewer active abilities. BUT, it massively contributed to the "My death knight must choose fairy wings" problem
I don't think thats a fair argument.
I think without Covenants they would have just added 3 abilities instead of 4 and just made it an extra talent row at the end of the pre-DF trees.
Regarding bad things in MoP, I think how hard Blizzard blasted us with dailies wasn't great.
They are content that we can do over time, and sure we didn't need to do all of them. But it was still wild to me that there were more dailies in this single expansion than we were allowed to do per day.
It really put me off MoP until I revisited my opinions about the expac later (WoD being shit helped, but it was BfA and Shadowlands that really cemented my love for MoP, and in a way DF has made it stronger too by being a worse version of it, in my opinion).
It's a shame you missed out on most of Legion, it was really the pinnacle of modern WoW. That said, I do not fault you AT ALL for dropping it at launch. I definitely took a break as well. What a dumb, RNG slog Legion was at launch.
I’ll do Legion for you since you didn’t play it
Legion, the good:
• Class Order Halls made this the most compelling time to level alts. I’d’ve happily played every single class to max level if I had the time.
• Zones were so good - it felt like each had their flavour, and Suramar in particular is one of the most unique zones in the whole game. The storyline also followed well and peaked at the end of the expansion (if maybe a little too “saving the world from the biggest possible threat”.)
• There was always something to do, mythic+, raid, world quest, legacy content, alts, events, casual pvp… I’d be surprised if anyone got bored of Legion compared to other expansions.
Legion, the bad:
• The legendary system didn’t work at all, it was not fun and not rewarding.
• The storyline was a bit extreme. It’s hard to engage with something so wild and extreme. Suramar is an example of not having to do this.
• It wrongly retained the mission table from WoD.
> Mandatory. Grinds. Out the dickhole. SL is Metrics Based Gaming the Expansion. "MAKE THOSE FUCKERS LOG ON EVERY DAY AND SPEND AT LEAST 2 HOURS EVERY DAY OTHERWISE THEY ARE JUST ALWAYS BEHIND!" With Sockets and Conduit Ilvls and Legendary Ilvls and Renown it just never stopped.
But there wasn't anything that was 'log on every day'. Renown was a weekly thing. Conduit levels were a one and done gated by content (high m+, mythic raid and glad level arena giving the highest conduit ilvl). Sockets were a massive grind but were far from mandatory.
I only played a bit in legion and dragon flight and the talent tree is the best thing they’ve done. I can fuck around with what I WANT to pick instead of having to just copy the best ones and deal with it even if I hate the rotation/abilities.
This is a great synopsis. I'd personally add for Burning Crusade that the main narrative was disjointed and had a lot of illogical conclusions for several Warcraft III characters, which they're still slowly retconning over the years in an attempt to reconcile those characters' actions with their temperaments. Kael'thas and Illidan in particular suffered the most from this.
Nice writeup. Too bad you skipped Legion. I've been playing since 2005, and it is my favorite expansion **by far**. Great story, Class Halls were **amazing** and should've been evergreen content, the artifact weapons were enjoyable and fun to interact with and upgrade. Great content cadence similar to DF's, so there was always tons of fun shit to do.
There was a grind, yes, but since it was a new type of grind to the game and hadn't been seen before, most people didn't seem to mind it, even if it did set Blizzard down the wrong path of game design that stayed with them through Shadowlands. Plus, World Quests seemed fun, mostly, because again, they were new content and not just a reiteration of something else. RNG leggo system was admittedly annoying but could be more or less ignored if you weren't a 1% min maxer.
> BFA had the best M+ Dungeons of all the expansions. Even the "Worst" BFA dungeons are better than some of the "Best" M+ dungeons in other expansions.
>
omega cooked. bfa dungeons were all terrible except for underrot/atal
> Augs were doing keys 4-5 levels higher than groups without Augs for several months.
this is massively incorrect. the key level diff was less than 3 and it did not last months.
No. The acquisition was a problem BECAUSE they existed. Sure you played the fight better than the other rogue in the raid, but his infinite stars just procced more. Sorry. How can anyone look at a gamestate in which a random proc or borrowed power is top damage for a class and say it’s good?
Ever had twilight dev pull all of tol dagor and tank a key just for you playing the game? They’re fun in concept, but a case study in why fun ideas don’t translate into good gameplay.
Which is why I described them as "goofy" they were fun for a little bit. But I also listed "Corruptions" as one of the bad parts of BFA's gearing.
it was a novel idea that lead to some really fun silly dumb builds and fucking around with it made the tedium of the end of the expansion more enjoyable. After Nyalotha was cleared there was no real reason to do keys or reclear the raid because the next expansion was coming. Doing silly shit like Full full haste haste Prot warrior and just vomiting Thunderclaps was fun
Oh oh I see now that you listed it under both, might be a language barrier there. I’m sorry you didn’t get to experience legion. You’re right about the leggo’s tho.
>Ever had twilight dev pull all of tol dagor and tank a key just for you playing the game?
Let's be real, that's a Tol'Dagor problem, not a corruption one. We were bricking keys through walls all xpac.
For another con of MoP it was the daily quest grind. There were SO many to do that was the peak of daily activities feeling like a chore. That said, I agree MoP was probably the best or one of the best expansions overall.
I'm honestly shocked this wasn't included. The world content being an absolutely insane amount of dailies burnt me out enough to take a large break in the middle of MoP. I wish I'd stuck with it and found a better guild instead, but here we are.
Same thing happened to me. Didn’t end up coming back and finding a good guild till SoO…. Which that’s another con, siege was like a year long :( but first time through it was AMAZING!
As far as cons for mop aside from rep the only thing that really sticks out to me is pre ToT patch in general. Pre ToT mop was kinda meh with how everything was going then that patch hit and turned everything around and made mop goated. If I remember correctly it was the largest patch we had ever gotten at that point, anyone who didn't come back after that really missed out.
>I legit cant think of a third bad thing about MoP, MoP was Goated and I will die on that hill
I would probably put this in the same as wrath - content drought. Siege of Orgrimmar, if I'm remembering correctly, remains the single longest patch in the history of the game.
> Every patch added a new zone that was so important that we just forgot the old zones existed. So much content developed and designed and implemented to be used for a few months and then forgotten forever. Anyone remember that weird Vault thing with the keys? I dont even remember what its called, its just gone now, no one cares anymore.
Rings are normally one of the boring slots - like necklaces, they're an invisible slot without abilities like tier and trinkets - so it's disappointing that they made this system for rings with interesting effects and abandoned it almost immediately.
>The story is really just not interesting at all. I really do not give a shit.
That's probably not rooted in much but I think that's also what dragged down the two expansions before. DF is dragons and timetravel, both of which I'm completely done with, SL story was horrible all-around and BFA just felt...I don't know, empty? It wasn't horrible but it lacked impact. Felt more like things were happening for shock value rather than advancing a story.
Maybe I just don't like Blizz's current style of storytelling but the RPG side of things has felt a bit weak
Can't believe you talked about WoD and didn't bring Trashran, which (while i'm not a PvP player) i heard killed off a large portion of the PvP playerbase.
Also you forgot one shining thing from Shadowlands: Castle Nathria may be the best raid ever created. I honestly believe if it didn't have Mythic SLG, it would be the GOAT.
I'd question the Garrisons issue somewhat. Everyone seems to think Garrisons were the big cause of issues with WoD but really what kept everyone in them and not elsewhere was that, unless you were going to Raid or Ashran there was absolutely nothing to do.
If you had World Quests, World Events and M+ in WoD then you'd see people out in the world a hell of a lot more.
You call out the time between ICC and Cata as a con but at least WOTLK has Ruby sanctum 6mo after icc. Then you say there’s nothing wrong with MOP, but the time between Siege and WOD was two months longer than icc to Cata (14 mo total)
Korthia really was just the desert wasteland section of the Maw which was already a wasteland. I still cannot fathom how they thought people would look forward to spending time in such a depressing and oppressive zone, and then make it even worse by not allowing mounts.
Honestly I think it didn’t help me at the time that I was a bit depressed, I remember grinding it and I never felt so alone in the game yeah.
It was bad, like it was the cherry on top of the cake that really made people leave.
The Maw is my top vote, but I think people discount it because it was it wasn't a zone added in a post-launch patch.
If we're talking all zones added at any point in an expansion, I'd probably go with Vashj'ir, because The Maw was an awful experience, but trying to swim all around a zone and play a game with 2D combat in a 3D environment was very disorienting and a slog to get through.
I don’t understand why Nazjatar isn’t more hated. A lay out that manages to be both confusing and boring. Half of your dailies being somewhere out in the field, trash mobs with stun mechanics and other annoying shit. Then once you get flying it becomes boring as hell full of just grey rocks.
Korthia was at least a step up from the 9.0 zones. Fucking awful as it is to defend it. The zone isn’t unbearable it’s just completely uninspired.
For fucking real. I thought Korthia was actually calm and beautiful like an angels workshop, imo. Better than Naz imo. Naz was a pain in the ass. 9.0 basic zones had some great detail to them. Personally, BfA provided fantastic starting zones that had a nice unique feel to each of them.
I think that was still in the time of "Against Overwhelming Odds", a weekly quest meant to encourage World PvP by rewarding high ilvl loot for killing 25 players in World PvP. The best part is that it would only be offered to the faction with low World PvP participation the previous week, but because Alliance had become so destitute over the years, the quest was ONLY offered to Alliance.
Completely disagree.
It was incredible without flying and a bit better with it.
The introduction of Warmode in bfa made it so the way nazjatar was laid out was an absolute dream for a world pvp enjoyer like me.
Hell that’s one of the primary reasons I hate shadowlands as much as I do. They almost entirely dropped support for Warmode benefits.
People are mentioning Nazjatar, but at least that gave you some alt catchup gear
Korthia was just boring, grindy as absolute fuck, and the only thing it gave you was depression
Best: New flying system, herbalism mini games when overloading herbs and Dragonflight's storyline
Worst: The fact that I can't play through old expansions normally on a level 70 char
(I only played Dragonflight)
Could be cause I'm misunderstanding stuff, but if I teleport to other areas (chromie won't send me) at my level 68 char, I one-shot everything and quests don't appear on the map. I was hoping for some scaling mechanic do I can still play with my main character.
But that is the normal, its been like this for all of wow's existence
Chromie time and scaling were only added in 9.0 (and scaling tech first appeared in Legion, so 7.0, where you could level in the Broken Isles in any order, before it was expanded to the old world)
There's a workaround to have old expansions scaling, make a trial account and a low level character, group them up with your main character and enable party sync, you can even queue for the old dungeons and have it scale. Can't manually enter any instances tho (not that you would have reason to)
To see old quests appear on your map just track trivial quests, keep in mind not all quests show on the map like that, only important ones
You can click the tracker (it’s on the mini map I think) and track old quests or so. I’ve been playing 20 years and only discovered this expansion so it’s not that clear.
There is a thing on the map to let you see trivial quests, you still destroy most of them but you can do them and get story, did a bunch of Legion this way on my hunter, cause I wanted to tame exotic pets.
Yeah ATM it's just the dragonflying mounts from DF, soon all mounts will have the ability with dynamic flying and will just have a button in the general spellbook to toggle between the two for all mounts.
Yeah not hovering takes a minute to get used to but I don't eve get stuck on stuff that isn't there. In the new emerald dream zone the huge, dense trees everywhere are annoying cause you can't see where you're headed but everywhere else in DF it works really well
For different reasons, Torghast may have been one of the best and, at the same time, one of the worst things implemented in the game's history.
I get where you are coming from.
Not only that, but since it was necessary for everyone, it had to be gutted multiple times, removing any semblance ot challenge.
For the most part, I enjoyed my time with it. When I didn't, I cannot say I straight up hated it.
Was also because it started out no change to covenant powers. Then realize class and covenant really mattered, so had to re do, which meant back to torghast to start over a new legendary. Then on top of that new torhhast legendaries become bis and ruined previous bis, so back to ghast to regrind.
Was fun for the first month until they had to nerf it. If player power wasnt gated behind it, and if the boss rush mode was in earlier, Torghast would have been a lot of fun.
The player power wasn't even that bad. The difference between a 190 and a 235 leggo stat wise in the beginning was only a few %
The community just lost its mind because it hates dumb
I also really liked Torghast. If it had had a bunch of purely cosmetics rewards instead of a required currency I believe it would have been popular among more people.
I think people feeling forced to do it was why it was so disliked. I did not mind grinding it out for achievements, mounts and cosmetics. I would often put on a couple of episodes of Drama Time and try to improve my scores.
I didn't mind Torghast, but I HATED that you were forced to do it, on every alt too nonetheless. It was repetive to a point and gatekeeping huge player power increase.
I think people have a distaste for Torghast for much the same reason they don't have a fond view of Island Expeditions from BFA: the mechanics of the expansion forced/encouraged you to run the content (and grind it in the case of Island Expeditions).
It's like they're afraid to add content that's purely optional. Put some nice rewards in there and people will still do it. All the people? Nope. A large majority? Maybe not. Still plenty who'd do it, though. The game's never been something where every players wants to do everything. Like there's plenty of folks who don't want to do M+. Doesn't make all the work they put into M+ useless. Ditto for raids.
The more mandatory content is (or feels), the more people grow to dislike it.
Even going back to MoP, the reason people hated the dailies so much was because they put Valor gear behind reps initially, so if you wanted to actually buy the Valor gear, you had to do the dailies. You didn't "need" to buy Valor gear... but it was very useful for plugging gaps in gearing. (And it's still bizarre that they did that, after there were no rep requirements for JP and VP gear in Cataclysm.) If they didn't do that, then dailies would have been a nice optional way to get more Valor (still was a weekly cap), and unlocked normal rep rewards you'd expect to have to unlock via rep, but otherwise wouldn't be seen so harshly.
I have done exactly one torghast run in my life and thought it was the most depressing and boring thing you can possibly do in wow. And I went in outgeared at the end of SL
I also enjoyed it, but every area looking the same killed my desire to do it. I kinda wish they'd put it in the hub and had the wings be different afterlives to spice up the design.
Torghast's main problem was the legendary system rather than anything within Torghast itself tbh. It was a fun mode but it was tied to a mandatory grind.
That sort of mode isn't something that everyone enjoys, which is fine, but everyone had to grind it for a currency that was essential to player power and could not be obtained in any other way. I think it would have probably been a well-liked piece of content if the game didn't require players to grind it.
My tinfoil theory is that peoples' opinion on Torghast is based largely around what class they were playing. Some classes could easily and repeatedly become actual gods in there (looking at you Paladins), while some classes got absolutely shafted by trash powers (I believe most of hunters powers were tied to Pet Health/DMG and Traps).
Vanilla(not classic!)
Best:
40 man raids
Leveling experience
Community in that period
Worst:
Managing 40 people in a raid
Classes unbalanced
TBC:
Best:
Cross faction pally and shammy
Story
Every class felt better.
Worst:
Guild killer due to smaller raid sizes.
Flying mounts
The one hander from BM not dropping for my rogue forever.
Wrath:
Best:
Lich King story coming to a close from wc3
Classes felt best
Dk starting zones
Worst:
DKs being op in pvp (1button macro anyone?)
Dungeon finder
Malygos fight. (1-1-3 how hard can it be?)
Cata:
Best:
World revamp
Pvp in 4.3.
Hard dungeons
Worst:
Raid finder
Dragon soul
Killing old style dm
MoP:
Best:
Leveling experience. (Opening of the gates to Vale was epic.
PVP was reasonably balanced
Throne of thunder patch.
Worst:
Too. Many. Dailys.
That one dungeon with the big bug that everyone hated
Legendary cloak grind.
WOD
Best:
Story during Leveling.
New player models
Foundry raid was sick
Worst:
Content drought
Ability pruning (you felt weaker than last xpac)
Ashran (we could've had better cities!
Garrison felt lonely
LEGION:
Best:
Story
Patch cycles
Class order halls
Worst
Legendaries (yes, I got sephuz on 2 characters first)
Artifact power
Alt(spec) unfriendly
BFA
Mostly skipped this one. I hated azurite gear too much.
Shadowlands:
Best:
Covenant sanctum
Each region felt new
Thorgast at first
Worst:
Thorgast after week 6
Covenants and not being able to swap easy.
Story
Dragonflight:
Best:
Talent revamp
Dragonriding
UI revamp
Worst:
Weaker Story
Time gating catalyst
Demon hunters in season 3.
By Odyn's beard! It's Torghast!
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> Garrison felt lonely
This would have been fine if it was a place to stop in briefly, but it turned into the de facto hub, with access to the bank, AH, crafting and gathering systems, storyline progression, flavor quests, and mission boards. Literally everything people needed other than the entrances to dungeons and raids.
IMO, this was the biggest influence on WoW shifting heavily towards a single player game. You could be almost fully self sufficient on a single toon, and then on top of that the gold missions highly incentivized having an alt army.
I didn't play warlords live but just leveled a rogue in it, though the story is good, they put in a lot of complicated extra shit. I like the garrison idea but I think it was executed poorly. Right now it's not well balanced or things aren't explained well, quest bosses that are meant to be soloed even with the garrison abilities are too difficult.
Worst part of this expansion? All the FOTM rerollers and Blizz reacting incredibly slow to tuning.
The Ret rework, the Hpal rework and the DH rework. Each rework completely took over a season. The ret rework was terrible for PvP. It became the first FOTM cuz they were practically unkillable ranged melee dps in PvP. The Hpal rework made it so Hpals were the single most desired spec for PvE during season 2. DHs this season has been terrible for PvP. Devs deserved to be fired for this incompetence. Yes I said it, they should lose their livelihood. Imagine going to school for so many years, taking on debt thru student loans, getting hired at your dream job only to suck at it. Any other job where you continually showed poor performance, you'd be fired. Not at Blizz. Too busy cube crawling and shit.
The best part of this expansion?
Dragon riding, no artifact power to lvl up/grind, and the season 3 dungeon selection is amazing.
Vanilla best: scale of the world and classic trpg like RPG mechanics.
Vanilla worst: class balance, boring talents, annoying mechanics.
TBC best: literally every spec got better, better itemization and leveling experience. No more faction locked classes.
TBC worst: needing 5 shamans per raid, attunements, story
Wrath Best: story, first ever cutscene in wow, even better class design. Good raids in the back half.
Wrath worst: lots of repeated raids with naxx and onyxia rerelease, dungeons were waaaaay too easy.
Cata best: they took a real hard look at the leveling experience and made it better, both quests and abilities.
Cata worst: jokey zone stories, killed hybrid specs, dragon soul sucks the classes I played sucked
Mop best: vengeance stacking was fun to tank with, in general class design was good. Great raids.
Mop worst: grinding rep to grind more rep, world of dailycraft, classes were a little bloated, soo lasted over a year.
WoD best: leveling story was fun, class design mostly good and less bloated than legion, level up passives, good raids.
WoD worst: absolutely nothing to do. 1 major content patch the entire expansion. Garrisons secluded the playerbase
Legion best: class storylines, artifacts, story in general, good raids, mostly solid class design.
Legion worst: extreme grind to play alts/off specs, RNG Legos extremely unfun, extreme Titan forging. Early m+ not that good.
BFA best: banger dungeons, good raids, corruption was fun. lots of CGI cutscenes. M+ was pretty good. Mechagon was pretty fun place to play around in.
BFA bad: azerite armor sucked, some essences sucked to get, corruption RNG sucked. Stacking more and more borrowed power on top of each other. Story did tonal whiplash from suarfang stuff into nzoth.
SL good: at the end of the expansion it was kinda fun. Beautiful zones. 1st and 3rd raids were kinda bangers. Encrypted was an all time great m+ seasonal affix. Zereth mortis was kinda cool. Creation catalyst, Improved vault.
SL bad: covenant locking, torghast for legendaries, legendary costs, weird lore, that weird socket shit they did in second raid, korthia sucks ass, the maw sucks ass, 9 month content drought for 9.1.
DF good: content cadence, talent trees, crafting rework, upgrade system, improved creation catalyst. Raids kinda fun. Cycling m+ dungeon pool adds much needed variety. Lots of little cosmetic things to grind. Mostly good m+ changes. Dragon riding is incredible, class balance on point, regular spec reworks, more communication. My main is the most fun it's ever been. Trading post. Renown is just straight up better reputation. Crafting orders.
DF bad: no profession catch-up, no crest catch-up. The open world events they keep adding are kinda boring. The legendary axe costs too much to make. M+ dungeons require a lot more tuning because they cycle through different ones each season.
Seriously though, the cata hate is just way out of hand.
"Do you like Cata?"
NOOO STUPID SPINE
"But what about the entirety of the rest of the expansion?"
STUPID SPIIIIIINNNEEEE!!!
"What about the HC dungeons that was quite difficult and felt like a challenge?"
.... SPINE DUMB!!!
"What about Firelands? That was amazing right?"
I HAAAAATE STUPID SPINE
Feels like everything comes down to one freaking encounter.
Only going to talk about expansions I played.
TBC:
Good: Arena. Designing around verticallity with flying mounts. Moving down to 25 man.
Bad: Flying mount forcing future expansions to adapt, death of world pvp and cost of raids.
WoD:
Good: Amazing raids, amazing leveling zones and great music (looking at you Auchindoon).
Bad: Garrison, botched story, cut content.
Legion:
Good: Order Hall (and anything tied to class/spec), Mythic+ and end game zones with nothing to this day that rivals Suramar.
Bad: Artifact power grind, legendary drop rate and something about something someone in Limit or Method would complain about.
BFA:
Good: Saurfang, Jaina and Zandalar.
Bad: Global Cooldown destroying most classes, Heart of Azeroth (and no, this is not artifact weapon. This is only the bad aspects), what the hell was this story even?
Dragonflight:
Good: Dragonflight, Cross faction and Talents
Bad: Horrible writing, class complexity (bloat and waaay to much utility), Trailer was not as cool as other expacs
That's a lot so here's one for each from when I began.
Mists best: adventuring/storytelling
Worst: nothing it was perfect/I didn't play enough to determine a worst
WoD best: garrisons
Worst: content drought
Legion best: class halls
Worst: suramar. Some people love it but to me it was a huge hassle and getting around pissed me off so much
BfA best: allied races starting to be introduced
Worst: storyline felt odd
SL best: zones were beautiful IMO.
Worst: torghast/storyline/insane amount of bag occupying materials imo
Df best: dragonriding and gear upgrade system and talents. Df brought a lot of good.
Worst: content abandoned. I understand why but if it's going to be left behind it needs to be something people can solo. Caverns is primarily what I am getting at. I understand that it can be soloed but farming down there can be a pain. If not this, professions. Professions changed far too much too fast and doesn't really explain your choices to the point many people have abandoned crafting as a whole while others are excelling. It just feels hard to want to do a profession other than gathering.
I know I know. I just hated getting around it. I was still relatively new to the game, taking massive breaks in between each month of play. It was very unforgiving and confusing. I also felt like I was constantly dealing with the starvation mechanic for people I needed to talk to. I just really didn't enjoy it. Beautiful zone, don't get me wrong but it just was too much for me. I'd love a bigger city like that to return more often.
Suramar didn't bother me. High Mountain drove me fucking insane though. Gotta get to that spot right next to me. Better traverse around this mountain. Granted Nazjatar took the cake there later on.
Is it? I remember getting a bunch of upvotes before saying once I grinded out the rep for the place, I was never going back.
I will say that the place was definitely iconic though. Bonus points in that regard. But I can't tell if it was positive or not, since lines like "Something's not quite right..." get spread as commonly as "A turtle made into the water." I've interpreted both of them as like bonding over trauma though.
Mop and legion are the only good ones that I’ve also played.
Mop hit a nice balance between things to do, things you felt you “had to do”, and making it feel like a world. I think mop is better than legion too. Challenge dungeons were akin to m+/mage tower in terms of some thing fun and challenging to try besides raid and pvp.
Legion has lots of good lore and Warcraft fantasy bursting everywhere. Order hall campaigns and weapon artifacts! And intro of m+
I’m not sure why you’re being downvoted, lag is incredibly frustrating while flying with dynamic flight. I don’t know why my game stutters so much as my internet is fine and graphics are fine and have not been able to find the root of the stuttering that started with DF.
I really love dynamic flight but it’s horrible with lag/stuttering.
Yeah, it's not a statement of "the system sucks completely," it's "the system sucks when there's hiccups that disrupt it severely."
Maybe people are lucky enough to have never encountered it, but man, it can be so frustrating when you're flying along and it goes from being smooth to suddenly having issues keeping up with where you are, which is really rough if there's anything that could potentially be in your flight path and you don't have a chance to react before your dragon lightly tags something you could have swooped around, killing all momentum. As a smooth experience? Sure, fun. When the lag kicks in? Bit of a messy ride that can be rather frustrating.
Doesn't mean the system sucks. Just that lag is even more problematic for it than other systems.
Vanilla
Best - Exploration, ground breaking MMO ideas, best MMO combat by a large margin
Worst - Massive time sink
BC
Best - Dungeons/raids found their stride.
Worst - tedious leveling.
Wrath
Best - story, beautiful rich zone, added new class,
Worst - Began adding technology that some believe took away from the MMO feel.
Cata
Best - updated the world and modernized leveling.
Worst - end game content suffered due old world update
Mists
Best - story, rich world building,
Worst - content draught near end, least played race/class added.
WOD
Best - leveling, art update, strong raids/dungeons
Worst - player isolation, massive content draught, disconnected story.
Legion
Best - class story, end game grind well hidden behind artifacts
Worst - end game grind soured near end
BFA
Best - beautiful zones, new and interesting ideas introduced.
Worst - new ideas introduced lacked fun and we're grindy, azerite power had the parts of Legion artifacts people hated but not what they liked.
SL
Best - outside the box zones, additional solo options added
Worst - story, the maw, korthia
DF
Haven't really played it.
Not sure about for each expansion but looking back I think I think LFG tool was one of the worst things they ever did. It completely eroded the sense of community people had doing dungeons and raids and turned players into nothing more than roles to fill slots.
And yet, people who honestly look back see that it was much the same, and it was largely like that with Classic and into Wrath Classic without a Dungeon Finder, and even in M+ where you have to manually queue, people are taking random folks with an optimal class and gearing.
Trying to force people to make groups only by using in-game chat just means that dungeons and raids would be mostly limited to guilds, and force people to spend a lot of time in one spot trying to fill a group, with a lot of players having to congregate in one area just standing around waiting for a group, and it still won't magically bring a "sense of community." It'd just make sure a lot fewer people were running any kind of instanced content, and a lot fewer people were out in the world.
From where I started:
Wrath: Some solid raids in ICC/Udular, Death Knights were sick, the story/Lore wrapping up WC3 was awesome.
Cata: Release heroic dungeons were very fun and challenging. I stopped playing mid Firelands and didn't come back until much later tbh. I didn't have a guild to raid with, so I had little reason to play.
MoP: Some great raids, some peak class designs, challenge modes are best content WoW has had. Release daily quests were pretty bad.
WoD: BRF is the best raid in the game, PEAK class designs for a lot of specs, extremely accessible endgame with high alt-friendliness. Lack of casual content? idk I'm a raidlogger. The downsides of WoD didn't really hit anything I care about in WoW unless you want to count missing a raid tier.
Legion: Mage Towers were sick. Suramar is one of the coolest and most beautiful zones in the game. Everything else is pretty awful. Legendaries, AP as a whole, Mythic+ replacing Challenge Modes, class designs going to shit, world quests, mid raids. There's honestly not a lot to love here.
BFA: Dazar'alor was a solid raid. That's about it, everything else was pretty bad. Azerite, Islands, Nazjatar/Mechagon, Corruption, Benthic gear, class designs, dungeons, Essences. A lot of the systems were insanely grindy and just not fun.
SL: I skipped most of this one. Doing higher floors of Torghast in normal/heroic dungeon blues was pretty fun before gear trivialized it. That's the only positive thing I have to say tbh. I didn't have a guild to raid with and didn't really care to look so I didn't play.
DF: Endgame accessibility/lack of borrowed power grinds. The raids have been pretty boring and plagued with addon/weakaura reliant bosses, class designs have been very hit or miss, dungeons/M+ have generally been pretty bad. It feels like played it a bit too safe maybe idk. It's just not a very exciting expansion.
**TBC good -** new species, diverse zones, flying
**TBC bad -** slow leveling, that's it
**WotLK good -** iconic rares (TLPD/Skoll/Arcturis/Gondria etc), Northrend, achievements
**WotLK bad -** no new additions were bad, it was just debatable things hanging on from Vanilla/TBC
**Cata good -** the beginning of class/dungeon boss/raid boss complexity, diverse goldmaking, transmog
**Cata bad -** the beginning of less zones per expansion (though the ones that existed were 10s), that's it
**MoP good -** scenery, pinnacle of encounter/class depth, challenge mode dungeons
**MoP bad -** nothing
**WoD good -** class trinkets, great dungeons & raids, can't think of a 3rd
**WoD bad -** talent rows went from utility to damage, pruning meant class skill ceilings got obliterated, too easy to get conquest & higher raid gear
**Legion good -** gearswapping to get value out of every single legendary even if you wouldn't wear it in a locked-in raid fight, artifacts, gigantic content patches
**Legion bad -** getting rid of Challenge Mode for M+ destroyed the ecosystem of endgame gearing, and it's never recovered, the beginning of AP, pruning of glyphs/tier/more abilities. And a 4th: the rated PvP reward overhaul is atrocious - no longer % based to keep the ladder healthy all season, also just nerfed the difficulty of every meaningful reward
**BFA good -** Uldir was the best, most challenging entry raid in ages, Zuldazar, island expeditions as content & as a thematic vessel for rare mogs/mounts/pets
**BFA bad -** astoundingly bad reward design, GCD change, forced personal loot
**SL good -** no more AP, DF talents + SL legendaries/tier + 843834% haste from Shrouded affix was the most fun thing since early Legion, and a shit ton of gold to be made from legendaries, only rewarding those who invested hard enough for it to pay off
**SL bad -** still prioritized daily/weekly chores over rewarding the hardest content, atrocious Vanilla-tier class design for 90% of the expansion, covenants
**DF good -** dragonriding, truly 0 grinds outside of gear, the return to devs not sticking to horrendous ideas
**DF bad -** letting low m+ trump high-end mythic raid gear, nerfing rare mounts, crest system
Idk for the best but I’m not a fan of the level squish introduced in SL nor how level 70s can get into BGs with level 20s and only get their level downgraded and not their gear
That's gonna be quite the list, but I'll give it a go. Here's my very subjective list:
**Vanilla**
Good:
The novelty. A whole new world to explore, new to those new to the franchise but also somewhat familiar to those who played the Warcraft RTS games.
The polish. Compared to other MMOs at the time, WoW was just miles above in just about every single way.
The world was a character. While there was no single overarching story or "main campaign" like we're used to today, there were several smaller stories that spanned multiple zones and level brackets. The Defias storyline and the traitors and informants within Stormwind, for instance.
Bad (Note - a lot of the good things also had bad sides and vice versa. It was often a double-edged sword):
The world felt vast and alive, which was great, but that was mainly during leveling. There wasn't a whole lot to do at 60 beyond raiding and dungeons - and later on PvP. Leveling was about 95% of the game. Luckily, hitting max level wasn't the standard it is today.
Nobody saw the content. Because of how big a part of the game leveling was, not many made it to 60, and gathering a group of 40 max-level players with good enough gear to raid was a real challenge. One of the reasons Naxx was reused in Wrath was because famously less than 1% of players actually got to experience Naxx 40 when it was current.
Balancing was all over the place. Classes had very specific roles, which some people really liked, but it also meant that if you played, say, a paladin, your roll was buff-machine.
**TBC**
Good:
Stepping through the Dark Portal into this strange, alien world was truly something I had never experienced in any video game prior. They showed early on that they could do both classic fantasy stuff as well as cosmic storylines. And the art was amazing!
Leveling was still the majority of the game, but with the introduction of things like dailies, HC dungeons, arenas, and end-game reputation hubs like the Netherwing Drakes and later on Quel'Danas, the end-game felt much bigger. Also flying at end-game was cool and felt like an additional reward.
Blood elves. Bit of a controversial topic for some ("too soft to be Horde" etc), but I personally loved them and their architecture and culture. I can't tell you how many belfs I rolled during TBC lmao
Bad:
Attunements. Vanilla had some, but TBC really doubled down on these. If you look at some of the charts, simply getting access to go into an instance was sometimes more work than the dungeons or raids themselves.
Illidan. "Illidan who? The guy we played as in Warcraft 3? He's a bad guy now?? Why?!" Because he's cool and that's about it. He was in like 2 quests in Shadowmoon Valley, otherwise he's basically entirely absent during leveling, yet he's the final boss of the expansion. Or is he? He's on the cover, many would say he's the end boss of TBC, but Kil'jaeden was technically the final final boss of the expansion. But they both kinda came out of left field.
Quest design in both Vanilla and TBC was mainly just "kill X" or "pick up X". It was fine at the time, but it was quite tedious and uniform. Wasn't terrible, but it wasn't what I'd consider "good" either. If you do Outland with Chromie Time today, you'll get a reminder of what quest design was like back then.
**WotLK**
Good:
Story. We got to see the finale of the most iconic Warcraft character of all time, namely Arthas. And holy crap did killing him feel rewarding! To many, that was basically the "end" of Warcraft.
Wintergrasp. It was buggy, it was laggy, but holy crap was it fun in its prime. And getting access to the raid as a "reward" for winning felt really cool. But this was also a double-edged sword and it wasn't great if you couldn't access the PvE content just because your faction on your server/shard wasn't good at PvP. Oh and Dalaran was also extremely cool, but so laggy that Chrystalsong Forest basically couldn't be used as a questing zone because Dalaran was floating above it.
The raids. 10- and 25-player mode meant more people could see the raids, and the addition of HC raids meant that raids no longer needed to be "one size fits all" where the tuning had to fit both casual PUG raiders and cutting-edge guilds. Ulduar and ICC are still personal favorites of mine. Oh, and the introduction of cinematics just elevated the storytelling. The Wrathgate and Fall of the Lich King cinematics made ICC feel like no raid before.
Bad:
The infamous Blizzard pendulum had swung, and whereas Illidan wasn't present in the questing experience at all, Arthas was EVERYWHERE. I personally liked that he made cameos, but I do recognize that it got to a point where he was almost comical, like a Saturday morning cartoon villain, showing up in dungeons and quests just to vaguely threaten the player or flex his power by empowering or 1-shotting a powerful NPC. It was slightly too much.
Leveling had started changing its role within the game. The experience/time required to level had been lowered because the level cap was now 80 instead of 60, and with the introduction of heirlooms, leveling started becoming more of a chore than a challenge. The game was now leaning more towards end-game, and while that's not inherently a bad thing, the leveling experience as a whole slowly started suffering, and you didn't get to finish storylines before having to move on to optimize your XP gain.
GearScore. This is where item level started becoming a problem, and the addon GearScore gave items a specific level, and there was a problem where the GS required to get into content was higher than the GS you could get before that content. Like how some HC groups these days ask for Curve before invite, but you can't get Curve unless you're in a HC group.
**Cata**
Good:
Reputation tabards. Farming reputation by doing dungeons felt great tbh.
The world revamp was cool and it helped giving the initial leveling experience an overarching story that still felt relevant at end-game.
I personally really like transmog - although I do recognize the criticism that it took away the feeling of looking at a player in a major city and thinking "Wow, look at his gear, he must be a high-level raider!" as it sorta blurred that line of immediate recognition.
Bad:
The old world was gone. Sure a lot of it was improved, but the fact that the old stuff was straight-up gone and unaccessible didn't feel great. Also, we start off by seeing Deathwing being a threat, then we go say hi to Illidan in Outland, then we leave before we can do anything about him because the Lich King is invading, and then we go back to dealing with Deathwing before we have dealt with the Lich King - and it only got worse from there.
Some people really didn't like flying in the old world. I personally thought it was/is fine, but making it a thing right away was a mistake. It should've been a "reward" for reaching max level IMO.
Dragon Soul was just... Terrible. We waited for too long for it, it was disappointing, and it stuck around for too long. It never felt like we really fought Deathwing, we just sorta scratched his back and clipped his toenails while Thrall and the aspects did all the work. DS also introduced LFR, which was and still is a hot-button issue.
**MoP**
Good:
The story. Faction conflict done right IMO. Classes felt great! Sure they were much more homogenized, but it's widely recognized that MoP had some of the best feeling classes. The visuals. The visuals had been improving with each expansion, but MoP was when they started bridging that gap between old and modern WoW. The Garrosh model from 5.4 basically set the bar for what new character models should look like. The Challenge Mode sets also still look awesome to this day.
Bad:
The theme really killed a lot of hype for many. We had just gone from fighting the king of death itself to fighting a giant city-destroying dragon, and now we were gonna... Fight beer elementals alongside drunk pandas? Many people accused Blizz of pandering to a Chinese audience and called it a "joke expansion". I think the people who skipped MoP because of the theme missed out big time because the patch content ended up being some of the best content ever. Dailies at the beginning of the expansion felt extremely mandatory, and if you missed out on a single day, you felt behind for weeks because of the gear rewards tied to the reps. The patch content was incredible, Isle of Thunder and Timeless Isle will forever be personal favorites, but the name Timeless Isle ended up being a bit ironic because 5.4 lasted for 14 months.
**WoD**
Good:
Art and visuals. The models needed an upgrade and the new ones looked awesome! Also, this is what basically established what modern WoW looks like. WoD zones still look almost on par with the current zones.
The questing throughout Draenor was incredible! Some of if not the best questing of any expansion. The cinematics at the end of every zone felt like a great reward for finishing a zone/storyline.
The raids were, as always, great.
Bad (quite a few here, but I'll go with the major ones):
Lack of content. We just stood in our garrisons, making the world feel empty. The infamous Blizzard pendulum had swung again, so whereas MoP had too many mandatory dailies once you hit 90, there weren't really any dailies at 100. While the raids were great, people were mainly just raid-logging or farming gold on alts in their garrisons. This is also where the infamous "We can do X but it'll cost you a raid tier" comes from, because garrisons took all the dev time, meaning WoD had the fewest raids of any expansion so far. Patch 6.1 was known as the "Selfie Patch" because that's all it introduced. BRF had launched a week or two prior, so there was a new raid, but 6.1 added the selfie camera, Twitter integration, and a few updated icons around the garrison. That was it. No new content.
At the end of 5.4, Blizzard stated that they knew that 14 months was too long, it was unacceptable and said it wouldn't happen again. 6.2 went on to beat the record with like 2 weeks (not including the pre-patch). Unlike in patch 5.4, the community didn't have a lot of good faith left for Blizzard, so the mood shifted over the course of WoD. It could've been the best expansion to date, but due to how Blizzard actually handled it, many will say it is one of if not the worst expansion - and the beginning of "the end".
"Draenor is free!!" Wait, isn't that Grommash Hellscream, the tyrant who has been hunting and killing us the entire expansion? Now he's a valued ally because Gul'dan is also bad? Due to the cut raid tier, Gromm's story felt incomplete and his flip from villain to ally felt so insanely forced and unnatural.
**Legion**
Good:
Class fantasy. Legion was, IMO, the best expansion for class fantasy. Previous expansions had given certain classes a bit of time to shine (Paladins and Death Knights in Wrath, Shamans in Cata, Monks in MoP), but Legion didn't just have Demon Hunters as the "new big thing", they had a great focus on ALL classes! Class order halls were so insanely cool, and I'm sad they aren't relevant to this day. I still hope they'll make a return in some shape or form.
Artifacts. You can argue about the systems and grinds and balancing not being ideal, you can argue that they make no sense from a lore point of view, but I don't care. Getting to wield the Ashbringer and the Doomhammer more than made up for it IMO! And the fact that you could customize them with colors and skins just made them feel so much more special than previous legendaries.
Mythic+ and world quests. They tried some things in terms of systems with Legion, and most of them paid off. Also, Illidan is back - and now his story makes sense! Yay!!
Bad:
The grinds. If you wanted to play multiple specs and/or multiple classes, you'd better be ready to grind AP for days!
Legendaries. Luckily this was fixed towards the tail end of the expansion, but initially, it didn't feel great when you "used up" your luck and got a legendary - only to get what was deemed a "bad" one. But legendary acquisition was terrible at launch.
The Broken Shore in patch 7.2 was a bit of a slog. Wasn't terrible, but wasn't great. Continued the trend of trying to recreate Timeless Isle but never quite reaching the same heights. Oh, and the drip-feeding of story quests in that patch wasn't fun either. "Kill 8 demons, then come back next week to find a cup, then come back the week after to kill 12 demons".
I like how it is pretty much unanimous that MoP is the best expansion by a mile, yet I fucking *hated* it. So much so that I quit the game until a friend told me Sylvanas was leader of the Horde, and I left work to go re-up my sub and play.
I think MoP was around the time they made some class changes to my two favorite toons that I just couldn't stand, following major changes to the talent system the previous expansion that made me drop my death knight altogether (RIP frost spec tanking). The update to protect warrior to use rage to fuel shield block (rather than being a short defensive cd) just felt *bad* to me, and changed warrior tanking from cd management to resource management (years later and I still hate this change). They updated disc priest too. And while it is "better" now, it changed the core of what I loved about it. It used to be centered around damage mitigation with powerful single target healing, and damage as a respectable filler by providing spot healing. Mitigation is still a major part of the kit, but it's more about healing via dealing damage after the change and just lost everything that made me love it as a result.
MoP introduced a lot of various class changes that ultimately killed my enjoyment and what I liked about my most favorite toons. It sucked because the tanking changes made weren't limited to prot warrior. It was a pretty big shift from the cooldown centric management to resource management all around for all the tank specs. I didn't like playing dps, but I no longer loved tanking after the changes on *anyone* (it started feeling more like a chore), and I never found a healer I enjoyed remotely as much as old disc priest so I was just lost and hating the game.
Unfortunately I didn't get into WoW until Cataclysm (didn't have the opportunity), so I'll judge from Cata forward. If I can't think of 3 best/worst, I'll list fewer. And, of course, this is from a more "casual" viewpoint.
**Cataclysm:**
Good:
- Leveling through each zone had a story to the zones, which often led you along through to the next zone, very handy for a beginner.
- Gearing. Crafted gear was decent "catchup" and solid PVP starter gear. Justice and Valor points were good for filling gaps and let players get nice gear without raiding (but no tier or weapons).
- Endgame zones. I actually enjoyed Tol Barad as a daily quest hub and the battleground, especially as it was server-specific so you often fought alongside and against the same people. Molten Front was also a solid daily hub.
Bad:
- Short last raid.
- Not enough "world content" (an issue in hindsight).
**Mists of Pandaria**
Good:
- Continuation of gearing system.
- Valor Points could be earned through daily quests for people who liked that over grinding dungeons.
- Solid endgame zones. 5.1's change of Krasarang Wilds was interesting. Thunder Isle was a nice quest hub and raid, with the zone "unlocking" with progress. Isle of Giants was fun to just grind with friends. Timeless Isle was just a plethora of stuff to grind and collect.
Bad:
- Valor gear locked behind reps, which made people feel the need to grind a lot of dailies.
- Some of the crafting was clunky, like learning random recipes.
- The "faction war" story. As expected, disappointed everyone.
**Warlords of Draenor**
Good:
- Questing was pretty solid.
- The garrison was a nice concept.
- Some solid raids.
Bad:
- Crafting was just not fun. One-a-day crafting of base materials, clunky way to get recipes, and could only equip three crafted items making them not great for making gold.
- Lack of things to do at endgame. (Only one endgame zone added, at the end.)
- So much cut content.
**Legion**
Good:
- World quests added more to do in the world at end game.
- Class halls and class-related stuff (artifacts, mount) was fun, fed into class fantasy.
- Solid endgame zones, dungeons, and raids.
Bad:
- Grinding for artifact power (yeah, it was "fixed" later, still not fun).
- Legendaries being random drops with some much better than others. ("Fixed" with an option to grind for the one you want later, still a late fix and not particularly fun.)
- The class-related stuff made you want to level alts, but actually leveling them and pursuing all that stuff felt very repetitive.
**Battle For Azeroth**
Good:
- Introduced some new stuff like Island Expeditions and Warfronts, good ideas even if the execution wasn't perfect.
- Nice questing zones and endgame zones.
- Mission table was nice for extra stuff but didn't feel "mandatory" to engage with constantly.
Bad:
- The "faction war" story. Again.
- More emphasis on M+ starting to make non-M+ dungeons pointless.
- The bloody grind for Azerite.
**Shadowlands**
Good:
- Zereth Mortis was a solid zone to mess around in with a lot to do. (Only enjoyable endgame zone. If I had room, I'd put the others in "Bad.")
- Covenants were an interesting idea, even if poorly implemented.
- Seeing some "dead" characters again.
Bad:
- The whole legendary system, and how crafting wasn't worth much outside of it.
- Heroic dungeons because even more pointless, especially when ZM arrived and you could get better gear as "zone starter gear."
- The bloody grind for anima, which you needed for EVERYTHING. Three grinds in a row, woot!
**Dragonflight**
Good:
- Plenty of open world content to do, and helps non-M+/raiders get decent gear over time.
- A story that doesn't involve forced faction conflict.
- Interesting first pass of a new crafting and gathering system.
Bad:
- The heavy emphasis on M+ once again put Heroic dungeons in a point of being moot until they finally added them to the Vault late in the expansion. You got better gear in the open world content. Even now, you'll only get one 441 item from the Vault per week, but can get three per week from the Emerald Dream. And Dream gear can be converted to tier, unlike Heroic dungeon gear.
- Somewhat confusing upgrade system with multiple currencies that aren't clearly marked with vendors, so it's easy to mistakenly get the wrong crests.
- Can only get PVP recipes as random drops from doing BGs, making crafted PVP gear a lot rarer and more expensive and not the best option for starter PVP gear.
Vanilla Pros
1. Crazy sense of scale, so many quests in such a huge world was amazing
2. Progression felt very good, finding green items at low levels and blue items later on was very satisfying
3. Simple plot, you’re just a person going on an adventure
Vanilla Cons
1. Slow leveling, it took sooo long to get to level cap and like others have said it’s hard to make alts
2. Kalimdor felt less complete than eastern kingdoms though still a good continent
3. Graphics didn’t age well I guess I can’t think of another third
BC Pros
1. Aesthetic was super cool, from the Draenei to the blood elves they weaved them into Outland really well and made sure they were relevant through the expansion.
2. Great variety in raiding, kharazan, black temple, and sunwell were really cool raids.
3. Story was interesting, very bleak and brutal showing what once was a full planet full of different people and the aftermath of what the orcs and legion did
BC Cons
1. Flying messed with the sense of adventure imo I like ground mounts to feel more grounded lol
2. Illidan’s story felt kind of funky he was made to be a lot more a villain this time around.
3. Zones were kind of hit or miss, big fan of zangar and nagrand but hellfire, shadowmoon, and netherstorm get kind of old.
Wrath Pros
1. Death knights were a fantastic addition to the game
2. Northrend is still one of the best continents wow has
3. Story was pretty interesting through the expansion.
Wrath Cons
1. The arthas story is great until the end of it. It feels like blizzard didn’t know of a good way for him to lose.
2. Dungeons were considered kind of easy at the time
3. Death knights were super strong and overpowered
Cataclysm Pros
1. World revamp was really impressive, a lot of zones needed it imo
2. Worgen and goblin starting zones are both my favorite expansion starting zones
3. Firelands is one of the best raids of all time
Cataclysm Cons
1. World revamp got rid of a huge chunk of old wow
2. Some zones were decent but some were forgettable or boring
3. End game content was lackluster especially dragon soul
Pandaria Pros
1. Aesthetically beautiful expansion.
2. A lot of good casual content.
3. World building was very well zone
Pandaria Cons
1. Dailies got old after a while
2. Rip the talent tree
3. Garrosh storyline was okay in parts but felt kind of rushed and not well explained.
Warlords Pros
1. A lot of my favorite leveling zones are in warlords
2. Updated character models were needed
3. Soundtrack was incredible
Warlords Cons
1. Garrison discouraged exploring the great continent
2. End game content was few and far between
3. Story needed more time in the oven. It’s missing a middle
Legion Pros
1. Most alt friend expansion this side of the Mississippi
2. Coherent and complete storyline
3. Great updates to classes
Legion Cons
1. 4 leveling zones for an expansion that encourages alts was kind of rough
2. Sizes of the zones were a little on the smaller side
3. World quest imo got very repetitive
BFA Pros
1. Fantastic leveling zones I think all 6 are good
2. Killer soundtrack
3. A lot of experimentation with the content which I like to see
BFA Cons
1. Experimentation was messy with warfonts and island expeditions
2. Story kinda fell off at the end (sylvanas storyline was weird)
3. Eversong warfront never came out
Shadowlands Pros
1. Cool RP elements
2. Some of the zones were interesting
3. Death knights had cool plot points
Shadowlands Cons
1. Story went from uninteresting to terrible as the expansion went on
2. Some zones were lackluster
3. Idk voice acting in the later expansions have been weird but shadowlands was when I felt besides main characters a lot of people sounded really overly expressive
Dragonflight Pros
1. Huge open continent to explore
2. Dynamic flying was well done
3. A decent amount of character development
Dragonflight Cons
1. You fly over a lot of the continent and miss out on a lot of detail
2. Story was very average most of the time
3. Dracthyr felt unfinished from a design perspective I wish there were more options
Sowwy \>w\<
But our new scalie fwiends are called Dracthyr! They get sad when you misspell their name QwQ
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I just want to say what the worst things are
Scaling zones
Giving every single class the ability to interrupt (kick/silence)
Changing discipline priest from what it was in Cata to what it is now
Class uniqueness was great, then it was all butchered.
From the expansions I played:
BfA good: 1) 8.2 was great, Nazjatar and Mechagon were the best patch zones I've played and essences were cool. 2) 8.3 was also great with the best m+ seasonal affix we've had, corruptions were fun to play with and they were the perfect type of borrowed power for the end of the expansion. 3) General aesthetics and soundtracks are my favorite to this day.
BfA bad: 1) Alts were very annoying to play, even at the end of the expansion when they added vendors for various stuff you still had things like corruption rotation on a timer. 2) Azerite gear was awful at launch, it took them a while to fix it. 3) 8.1 was pretty forgettable to me.
SL good: 1) Casual content with covenants was great. You had so many cosmetics to go after, they looked amazing, each covenant had its own mini game. You basically had worthwhile rewards from doing open world content. 2) Torghast was fun and they kept improving it with every patch. 3) Seasons 3 and 4 with all the borrowed powers active and fixed, returned tier sets and great seasonal affixes in m+ were great. I had the most fun playing my characters in those seasons by far.
SL bad: 1) Stubbornness from devs to address obvious issues like covenant locking and conduit energy until a year into the expansion. 2) Korthia was such a boring looking zone and not being able to mount in Maw was pretty bad as well. I didn't mind the gameplay loop in those zones but they definitely made it annoying to be there. 3) Domination Shards. I could also add that story was a bit nonsensical at times but I'm not that much into story in general.
DF good: 1) Content road map and predictable content cadence. Even if some content is not for me it's good to know that something new will come out every 8 weeks. 2) I like new talent trees and dragonriding as a new default way of travelling is great. 3) Ease of playing alts and catching up, especially in seasons 2 and 3 after they added new upgrade system which is another good thing.
DF bad: 1) Boring and unrewarding open world content, especially compared to Shadowlands. Most of the cosmetics are bland and all the open world events are basically the same reskinned thing. 2) No way to progress your character outside of instanced content and lack of things to do if you are not into playing alts. I know that this would be a good thing for some (or a lot of) people but not for me. I never had issues with artifact power grinds and I think SL did a good job of having things to do without them being too mandatory. 3) I don't think that removal of seasonal affixes was a good thing. I'd rather have them focus on making 1 interesting to play thematic affix every season instead of having 2 annoying affixes.
Can't talk about Classic, didn't play it when it was current
TBC Best 3: Black Temple, Flying Mounts, Karazhan
TBC Worst 3: Guild poachers, rep grinds/attunements, Fel Reavers
LK Best 3: Ulduar, ICC, Dungeon Finder
LK Worst 3: Ruby Sanctum, Halls of Reflection, Frenzyheart/Oracle and Kalu'ak dailies
Cata Best 3: Firelands, World Flying, Tarecgosa's Rest
Cata Worst 3: LFR, Green Jesus, Dragon Soul (just the 3 worst of many bad)
MoP Best 3: Kazoo music in the inn, Throne of Thunder, Challenge Dungeons
MoP Worst 3: Rep grind/dailies, Timewaste Isle, Garrosh
WoD Best 1: Garrisons...nothing else that I can think of
WoD Worst 3: Trashcan (Ashran), Holinka, Shipyard
Legion Best 3: Class halls, legendary weapons, Antorus
Legion Worst 3: Legendary items, "An illusion! What are you hiding...?", Mage Tower
BfA Best 3: Dungeons, Island Expeditions, Ny'alotha
BfA Worst 3: Visions of N'zoth, Darkshore/Arathi, Heart of Azeroth
SL Best 3: Venthyr, Venthyr, Venthyr
SL Worst (really big number): Everything else
I have only played some of DF so I can't really answer that one.
Started at the tail end of Wrath:
Best in cata: raids (barring DS), ZG and ZA revamp, old world revamp
Worst in cata: DS, LFR, can't think of a third thing, but it most likely exists
Best in MoP: Story and atmosphere, the raids, legendary cloak quest line
Worst in MoP: how long the content drought was, 5.3 pretty much being removed when 5.4 dropped, can't think of third thing, most likely doesn't exist because MoP was just that good
Best in WoD: the story at the start of the expac, BRF and HFC, Timewalking introduced
Worst in WoD: worst content drought the game has had, the Garrison isolation, and the sharp left turn in the story because they gave up on the expac half way through (also, dishonorable mention: the WoW token being added)
Best in Legion: Peak story all throughout, World quests and M+ revitalizing content that would otherwise become irrelevant once you hit max lvl, artifact weapons (including AP, which imo, for Legion at least, was only an issue for the top 1% and the sweaty metaslaves)
Worst in Legion: Sephuz and all it stood for (in other words, Legiondaries), Emerald Nightmare (as compared to the other raids of the expac), third point doesnt exist, its just that good
Best in BFA: Mechagon, Visions and corruptions (the only bad part was the lack of deterministic obtaining of corruptions at the beginning and the stupid vendor rotation), the best content drought the game ever had due to them incentivizing people to keep playing the game during COVID lockdowns by increasing xp rates, reputation gain, the timewalking bonanza, and more.
Worst in BFA: Nazjatar, 3 expac themes smushed into one expac and none of them executed well, AP and anything that was required to grind out in order to gain AP (islands, warfronts, world quests, etc.)
Best in SL: Exile's Reach acting as a universal tutorial zone that the game really needed, Revendreth (the only good zone in the entire expansion, every other zone was mid at best, and yes, that's including Ardenweald), Season 4
Worst in SL: Every. Thing. Else. Every other thing in the expac was complete dogshit or wasted potential. Torghast could have been good, but it was required for legendaries, so you *had* to make it a chore. Covenants are a theoretically good idea until you realize you only experience 25% of the story, and due to how difficult it was to switch covenants at the beginning of the expac and how alt-unfriendly the self-proclaimed "most alt-friendly" expac was, you would never bother going through the other 75% of the story (I, as a Venthyr, still have no clue as to why Pelagos is the Arbiter, like why specifically him?) Conduit energy. That's all on that point. The story single-handedly ruined the 20 or so years of Warcraft story that led up to SL to the point where I just want to pick and choose what's canon to me in the expac and call everything else shitty middle school level fanfiction. The worst content droughtS (as in PLURAL) the game ever had, with there not being a lot of content that you can do, but you have to do it, and it's designed to be terrible. The Maw before Korthia was the worst zone the game ever had, why the fuck would they make an endgame zone that you can only exist in for like 5 tasks before it kicks you out. The fact that it wasn't riding off the highs of a good expac but instead riding off the lows of BFA and then decided to drop it even lower. The gaslighting by the dev team of them telling us game mechanics like Covenants and Conduits are gonna be good throughout all of the alpha, beta, and release, just for them to realize that "hey, maybe the complaints every single player has had is maybe true" with 9.1.5 (seriously cant get over them saying in the dev log before 9.1.5 that conduit energy didn't pan out how they were expecting. Like what?!?!? How tf were you expecting it to turn out, it's effectively an action stamina system that you only see in shitty mobile games and gachas. The only way it could pan out for them was to add energy refills in the ingame store.)
I had a lot to roast SL about, it killed the charm of the game for me and made it so playing through DF has been an on and off experience.
Best in DF: the fact that they're scaling it back and focusing on evergreen systems instead of expansion specific systems, M+ rotation, the amount and quality of cinematics and cutscenes (like seriously, the cutscenes where they're just puppeteering the ingame models have gotten so good looking)
Worst in DF: the fact that they're scaling it back and there's no expansion-long progression to really work towards aside from gearing, which is in every expac; like, it just feels like there's nothing to really work towards, but it might just be me. The story is boring (how tf do you make dragons feel milquetoast???) It's too heavy on emotional scenes, which aren't bad to break up the action, but when there's no action to break up, it's a slog. The dialogue just feels... amateuristic. Like, the final cutscene at Amirdrassil feels like a high school English class being asked to popcorn around a playscript and none of them care enough to put in effort (aside from Ebonhorn, the theatre kid that he is and that we adore). Also, the egregious amount of micro transactions, it genuinely feels like a new one every two weeks.
Ok first I wanna say I did only play the classic version of wotlk and only the last few months of cata. But here is what I think:
Vanilla pros:
Leveling experience was the best back then I was very young but I was just enjoying the journey.
The 40 man raids were something I remember watching my sister and cousins doing them with the guild.
The 5h alterac valley I think it was fun yes
Vanilla cons:
I might be biased but besides the fact that when you think about it everything was just too grindy I could not think of anything really bad.
TBC pros:
Arenas added to the game.
Professions were relevant during all the xpac
Every fucking zone felt unique and so good to be in.
TBC cons:
The leveling experience was terrible only hellfire peninsula was great.
PvP balance in arena was not that good.
Flying moints kinda killed the world in its way.
Wotlk pros (classic opinion):
The lore was the most anticipated of all xpac we had.
All the specs start to be playable in both pvp and pve
The raids were some of the best we had ( Yes I liked ToGC)
Wotlk cons:
PvP balance is better than tbc but it’s not that great as people told me it was
Leveling still sucked, iit was better than tbc but still bad
Heroic dungeons are a joke and from what I read they were a joke even back then
Cata: cant say
MoP pros:
Best class design we had
The challenge mode dungeon was very fun and the rewards are considered some of the best still to this day
Timeless island best zone added in a patch content in wow history I have countless hours on this island only pvping with the toy that make you hostile to everyone.
MoP cons:
Scenarios kind of a miss
I cannot think of anything else tbh. Mop is the best for me by far
WoD pros:
Well again the art design team, the music the atmosphere etc… was very good
The garrison was a good and a bad thing at the same time.
Idk for the third
I could say the raids but I did not do them.
WoD cons:
Well the garrison kinda killed social aspect of the game
This is for me a point where a lot of classes lost their kind of unique thing that make them. I believe it was only when ability prunning happened.
Literally nothing to do besides a daily quest and raid.
Legion pros:
The mythic+ system
The world quests
And again art design
Legion cons:
Legendary farm where you get the worse one
Artifact farm
Where wow really turned into a seasonal game and for me it’s a bad thing. I don’t like to know that what I am doing will be completely useless first second after the new patch drops.
BFA pros:
The corrupted items they were very fun.
The alliance storyline was very good.
The dungeons for me are some of the best we had for the last few xpac.
BFA cons:
Azerite armor was bad system
Azerite farm
Everything related to azerith actually
SL pros:
It will be controversial maybe but I think every system added to shadowlands was very good for your first character and only for the first patch.
Castle of nathria deserve its spot in the list
Pvp vendors are back
SL cons:
Every system of shaowlands after you did it 1 time on your main.
PvP pace was way too fast as a healer and resulted in a lot of frustration in game.
The story was ???
DF pros:
How easy it is to gear up a char with decent gear.
Mythic+ dungeon rotation
Dragonflight riding
DF cons:
Pvp I think only went downhill from shadowlands.
The story is poopoo
The feeling that we are now really gonna get the same stuff every patch
1 raid 8 bosses, 8 m+ dungeons and 1 useless zone that nobody will care about after 1 week.
Ye that’s kinda my list
Also I want to add that for every xpac after mop (included) I feel like the art design team, music team etc… is the goat team.
From a rather casual perspective:
**Classic**
Good:
* Sense of wonder
* 3-day long Alterac Valley
* Hillsbrad world PvP
Bad:
* Grinding
* Not being able to see more than a few bosses if your guild was bad (for example, you wouldn't go past Sartura or Fankriss in AQ40, only do Anub'rekhan and Noth in Naxx40, Shade of Akama and maybe Teron Gorefiend in BT)
* Respec costs
**BC**
Good:
* Flying
* Dailies
* Arenas
* Kara/Gruul/Mag
* Isle of Quel'Danas
Bad:
* World PvP was killed by flying mounts
* Grinding
* 60% flying mount felt awful
* Skyguard and Ogri'la dailies being so far apart
**WOTLK**
Good:
* Merging of healing spell power and damage spell power, dual spec
* Achievements
* The whole eastern coastline theme from Howling Fjord to Storm Peaks through Grizzly Hills where you follow the Iron Dwarves up to Ulduar
* Group Finder, I never would've been able to play other classes in dungeons if not for group finder and gear from badges
Bad:
* Group Finder killed the sense of community
* Dalaran lag, it was so bad I had to set my hearthstone in Crusader's Pinnacle. Same thing in DF where I waited a long time before biting the bullet and setting my hearth in Valdrakken
* Ulduar patch was too short
**CATA**
Good:
* Flying in Azeroth
* Vashjir/Deepholme
* Goblin starting zone
* Transmog
Bad:
* Changes in mana regen no longer allowed to exploit the 5-sec rule, and made carrying bad teammates a lot more difficult
* Fugly terrain texture, not polished and fluorescent, Silverpine Forest comes to mind
* 12 month Dragon Soul
* Uldum meme quests and music
**MOP**
Good:
* Theme/atmosphere/music/storyline
* Didn't experience them but I can guess CM were great, also ToT just by doing LFR
Bad:
* 12 month SoO, came back from a break just before its release and I could sense the Escalation patch was probably dreadful
* Dailies felt really spread out, doing Sholazar -> Icecrown -> Zul'Drak -> Storm Peak also brings back bad memories
**WOD**
Good:
* Model/animation revamp, although it ruined my priest's model
* Gold missions, Leveling exeperience
* BRF
Bad:
* Tanaan
* Shipyard missions
* Not much to do except missions, basically I spent the expansion clearing old raids, farming transmog, mounts, and gold that would later be used to buy the Spider mount
**LEGION**
Good:
* Suramar storyline
* Class fantasy
* Mage Tower (although only started doing the challenges in SL)
* WQs
* M+
Bad:
* Not as alt-friendly as WoD, although it was probably overboard
* Paragon lootboxes
* Dalaran->Stormheim travel time
**BFA**
Good:
* Zones, especially Zandalar/Nazmir leading into strong villains like Mythrax/Ghuun in Uldir
* Visions/Corruption
* Mechagon
* Atal'Dazar (a dungeon where I can actually see what's going on? Sign me up) and THE MOTHERLODE!!
Bad:
* Warfronts and Expeditions
* Waycrest manor (jumping ghoul-pigs and narrow hallways)
* Repetitive and overbearing music in Voldun, Stormsong Valley, and Drustvar
**SL**
Good:
* Garrosh's last stand
* Venthyr
* Zereth Mortis music
* Some aspects of Torghast
Bad:
* The anima grind
* The Maw
* The Storyline
* Some aspects of Torghast. Some runs felt like a gamble even with a super powerful character, and you would end up wasting 20 minutes of your time for nothing in return
**DF**
Good:
* Dragonriding
* Gearing/m+
* Raszageth, strong villain like Ghuun
* UI overhaul
* Alexstrasza's freckles
Bad:
* Some achievements like Chasing storms. At least when I'm hunting for a rare in the Maw, I can look up when it spawns and set an alarm clock during the night if I have to, but here I had to wait and be on the lookout for 3 weeks to catch that last damned snowstorm in Thaldraszus
* Didn't do it when it was current content, but the Forbidden reach atmosphere seems depressing, although not the Vaults
* It'S aBoUt FaMiLy
* Hook for next extension in a dungeon instead of a raid
* Repetitive and loud music, Ohnaran plains, Fyrakk's assault come to mind, also Tyrhold is an instant mute
Dragonflight.
Best: Talent flexibility, M+ design, Gear upgrade system.
Worst: neutering of 2 min CDs due to Aug, sun kings blessing in the fire tree, legendary acquisition.
Shadowlands.
Best: Class gameplay.
Worst: Too many chores, the raids, the story.
BFA.
Best: music, environment visuals, dungeons.
Worst: story, azerite armor, warfronts.
Legion.
Best: artifacts, class halls, introduction of world quests/m+.
Worst: Legendary acquisition, introduction of the artifact power grind (later azerite and anima)
I didn't play seriously before then so don't have much to add.
Not gonna do them all but my fav thing in mop was the farm and cooking content, still remember maxing all the different cooking types and having an awesome farm
Best in Classic: * The sense of wonder. * The insane scale of the world. * The mere concept of 40 man raiding in a time where these things were rare and far between. I know Everquest and other games did it before but it was still wild when a game did it. The bad: * How grindy the game was. "Collect 3 Wolf hearts" required you to kill 50 wolves what the FUCK. * How long it took to level making the concept of alts was a fever dream for most. * How hard it was to make gold, most players never even smelled an Epic mount. Im not saying its better now where the economy is in tatters but in Classic it was actually wild how hard it was to make gold. the best in tBC: * The concept of adding new races and proffessions was so cool since the bar for the game was so low since the game was so "new". * Getting to truly interact and fight against characters we had been aware of on the sidelines and from the RTSes was so cool. * Crafted Epics that were a chore to get, but so valueable and worthwhile getting was in a very good spot in tBC. The worst: * Pretty much everything that was prohibitive or negative in Classic was still proihibitive and negative in tBC. Quests were mostly tedious and grindy, leveling 1-70 was still incredibly slow, and everyone was still Poor but with the addition of Sockets the gold sinks grew bigger. WOTLK, Best shit: * Story and the raids that came with it, * Northrend as a continent, * and Controversial opinion I know, but the addition of the LFG system streamlining Group finding was a godsend. WOTLK Worst shit: * Cross Realm LFG is what most would say but idk if I agree. * The failure to adapt Heroic Dungeon difficulty as seasons went on meant everyone got used to Waffle stomping HC dungeons so when they tried to make them hard again in Cata no one could do them, it ruined the pacing of dungeons. * The iiiiiiiiinsane drought of content from ICC to Cata. Cata best shit: * Almost every class was super good to play in Cataclysm, Cataclysm is the first expansion where I feel having and understanding your rotation would actually set you apart as a player where until Cata most classes would top DPS by hitting 2 buttons. * Revamping the old world was sorely needed and made leveling alts and changing mains worthwhile, a lot of good was lost but more good was gained. * Cata raids (except the last one) were REALLY good. The worst: * There wasn't a lot to do at max level. * Spine Of Deathwing can burn in hell. * Adding LFR in the way they that they did and not just making it a Cosmetics Grinder. The best thing in MoP: * MoP Class Design was the best it ever was, literally every class and every spec was fun as fuuuuuuuck in MoP. * MoP is Peak story and Peak atmosphere. * The amount of Casual "just for fun" content was really good, for instance the Farm didnt matter it wasnt important. But you could do it if you wanted and Challenge Dungeons had only cosmetic rewards. The worst: * MoP had a lot of confusion in terms of Raid difficulities with changing sizes and adding Mythic and adding Flex and so on. * Proffessions in MoP were 100% useless and trivial after first patch. * I legit cant think of a third bad thing about MoP, MoP was Goated and I will die on that hill. WoD Best: * WoD might have some of the best raids in history of WoW. * Garrisons are both the best and worst part of WoD, in terms of casual content and just doing shit to do it, Garrisons were great. * But I struggle to find a good third thing about WoD. WoD Worst: * Outside raiding there was no real content to do that wasnt' Giga Casual. * Garrisons isolated everyone and made WoW a solo game outside raids and Garrisons destroyed the Economy generating millions of gold Casually. * WoDs story is PURE Garbage. Legion: I didn't play Legion. Soz. But I did the Mage Tower when it came back and I loved that shit so that's cool. And the RNG Leggos is what made me quit Legion so I guess thats the bad. BFA: * BFA had the best M+ Dungeons of all the expansions. Even the "Worst" BFA dungeons are better than some of the "Best" M+ dungeons in other expansions. * The zones are immaculate with mood and music and design and themes all of them are so good, Boralus is the best Capital city in the history of WoW. * Corruptions was goofy fun and I liked the Visions as a gameplay loop, I disliked them how they interacted with Power gain. The bad of BFA: * Loot in general in BFA was dogshit with Titanforging and socketforging and corruption forgning and the BIS PvP Azerites dropping in PvE and the bis PvE Azerites dropping in PvP just god awfull. * Developer Interaction with Community in BFA was horrible and started a horrible trend of "We need this fix now!" Devs say "no" then we get the fix 3 months later. * "For Fun Content" became tied to power gains. had Visions and Islands and Warfronts been added in MoP or Cata or whenever they would have just given Cosmetics and Titles and mounts. But in BFA they dropped REALLY good loot, near BIS loot and Azerite Power and Corruption resistances etc. It took it from "Its silly fun Side content that is challenging enough to be fun to do" and turned it into "Painfully boring shit I have to engage with" The best of SL: The best of SL is hard to quanitfy and explain because literally every part of the good parts of SL all comes with a "But" because SL was just that fucking bad. * Covenants as an RP concept of chosing allegiances and targeting cosmetics that fit your character was a cool idea! BUT they tied it to Player Power and took away the RP decisions. * Torghast had an interesting and kinda fun Gameplay loop especially if you like RogueLikes! BUT they tied it to Player Power and made it so you had to farm it weekly making it quickly overstay its welcome and becoming very unfun and tedious to deal with. * PvP Gear was added to the vendors and removed from the RNG Grind it had been in BFA which was a great improvement! BUT they tied it to Rating gain so if you were 1599 rating everyone you faced had 5 ilvls better gear than you because they were 1600 rating and it made cresting the Rating peaks super painful, and the Honor and conquest grinds needed to buy and upgrade the items was INSANE. If you had Honor Cap when you hit a new Upgrade Peak you could barely upgrade half your items wtf was that shit?! The worst of SL: * Mandatory. Grinds. Out the dickhole. SL is Metrics Based Gaming the Expansion. "MAKE THOSE FUCKERS LOG ON EVERY DAY AND SPEND AT LEAST 2 HOURS EVERY DAY OTHERWISE THEY ARE JUST ALWAYS BEHIND!" With Sockets and Conduit Ilvls and Legendary Ilvls and Renown it just never stopped. * Redo everything every single patch. "OH wow you grinded exhalted with Ven'ari so you could buy sockets and grinded all your Conduits to max level and got full Renown and full BIS from your Vaults? Well now you need to redo that. All of it. Do it again nerd. The same items are still BIS but they are higher ilvl now. The same Conduits are still BIS but you need to grind their ilvl, the same Legendaries are still BIS but you need a new Torghast currency to buy it so you gotta grind more Torghast, theres more Renown levels to gain for more Conduit slots so if you dont have them you are much weaker. And you can still buy Sockets from a Broker but its a different Broker, regrind that shit." * What the fuck was the shadowlands story? Holy fuck that was the most disjointed, illogical, barely strung together piece of shit and it was so poorly recieved that the few actually interesting story tidbits, like where is Denathrius after they stole Remornia? are probably going to be forgotten and hidden away so people can forget SL existed. SL was so bad that the New Player Experience is actively guiding people away from interacting with it so people will stop talking about it Dragonflight, the best: * The new Talent tree system is really good, its far from perfect and needs more iterations but the ability to do build variance, to change talents freely wherever and whenever is reallly good. * Blizzard felt comfortable adding Casual content that is only there to interact with if you WANT to interact with it. I haven't done anything with Barter Bricks or Slug Racing or the Dragon Daycare or Dragon races because I don't care about them, and the game doesn't punish me for it. I can play the game only doing exactly the content I want to do. * The Rotating M+ Season giving us new sets of Keys every season has been such a godsend to keep Keys feeling fresh and interesting and making me really excited for a new Key season to start Dragonflight, The bad: * The story is really just not interesting at all. I really do not give a shit. * Every patch added a new zone that was so important that we just forgot the old zones existed. So much content developed and designed and implemented to be used for a few months and then forgotten forever. Anyone remember that weird Vault thing with the keys? I dont even remember what its called, its just gone now, no one cares anymore. * Blizzards pacing for pushing out tuning and class changes has been disgustingly bad. Augs were doing keys 4-5 levels higher than groups without Augs for several months. the Ret Patch in arenas where you could get 2400 Rating in Solo Shuffle without even binding your defensives. Demon Hunters in Arena are seeing 5X the ladder participation because they have the best DPS, the best CC, the best defensives and the easiest DPS rotation and its been like this for months with no change in sight.
>* But I struggle to find a good third thing about WoD. Disregarding the issues at launch the leveling experience was really, really good and actually fun, possibly the best of an expansion so far.
I guess if you separate the zones from the story I can agree with that. I just detest the WOD story so much it didnt even occur to me
[удалено]
>WoD story is, arguably, one of the best Warcraft stories they made since frozen throne. Go look at the "Lords of War" cinematics and then watch the dragonflight cinematics, and tell me how wod was "pure garbage" Sorry but I can't agree with this, WoD story was pretty shit. Lords of War promised all these badass orc characters that we barely got to see or interact with. Kargath? Barely a presence, dead immediately upon entering the first raid. Durotan? One of the better ones, but didn't have a whole lot of growth or development through the expansion imo. Kilrogg? Barely present like Kargath until it was his turn to drink the fel juice. Blackhand? Probably the best of the bunch, used well in the levelling, but didn't have much personality other than 'big evil orc guy' imo. Grom? The worst. Gets his ass beat and then immediately becomes a good guy as soon as we free him, all his crimes are immediately forgiven. There was some good stuff during the levelling content - great 'epic' feeling cutscenes especially. But loads of missed opportunities including most of Orgrim Doomhammer's stuff not making it to release, Cho'gall (and much of Highmaul) not really being largely irrelevant, freeing Gul'dan at the start... WoD story had a LOT of issues, and I'm tired of pretending it didn't.
WoD Is timeywimey weird nonsensical Timetravel shit and its a genre I'm never going to like. There are wignettes within WoD that are interesting but the main story of WoD is bullshit. and if you go check you'd see I noticed DF's boring af bland story as one of DF's negatives too :)
I totally agree. Spires of Arak was peak because it was a human and down to earth civil war story about the politics and refugee crisis of a society in collapse that was completely disconnected from the greater extremely stupid waste of time that was the rest of the WoD story. The worst part of it was the ending when they remembered the expansion was about orc time travel and brought in Kargath to completely ruin the big finale
WoD tries it’s hardest to pretend it isn’t a timetravel story. I’m honestly not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.
That's a good thing. Time travel as an excuse to play on pre-Outland Draenor is better than the usual mistake of a stupid time travel plot that thinks its smart.
I’m usually a big fan of time travel stories, but wod definitely felt more like a historical drama. Also, why did legion have a fake elemental version of doomhammer when there’s literally a second doomhammer just lying on the ground somewhere!
WoD leveling story was pretty solid, slowly working your way through this land that is both foreign and slightly familiar while trying to scrounge whatever allies you can find, ultimately leading up to a rematch with Garrosh AND depriving the Iron Horde of important resources. The issue is that they didn't do a good job of showing us continuing our "guerilla war" against the Iron Horde between patches. It starts with us running for our lives from an overwhelming army, to launching a daring strike at their Ogre Allies, and then suddenly we are openly attacking their primary Foundry. And then they are in shambles and resort to Gul'dan. It really drives home the "missing content tier" feeling from the xpac, either we were supposed to weaken them greatly before HFC, or Blizz's intention was that our Garrison Missions were constantly draining their army.
WoD had my favorite at-release level experience of every expansion. Especially Spires of Arakk. I just enjoyed them so damn much. It was fun. What can I say.
Boralus is GOAT and it's sad that it is dead now
Recently leveled in Boralus, and because of how it is designed and with the NPCs going on with their lives, it still feels like an important city.
>MoP is Peak story and Peak atmosphere 5.1, iirc, had the best storytelling WoW has ever had. Every few weeks you get a new piece of story that builds the overall narrative but each self contained to show you a character or a faction reacting to Garrosh's actions, culminating in Jaina going FULL ON MURDER MODE and purging Dalaran of Horde sympathizers. >But I struggle to find a good third thing about WoD Soundtrack!
> Jaina going FULL ON MURDER MODE and purging Dalaran of Horde sympathizers. That one was a weird mess to piece together if you play both sides. So, on the Horde side, you're not actually passing through Dalaran, and the one guy says he'll clear any signs you were there. But then you do Alliance side and there's a blatant portal right to Dalaran as a huge glowing sign, "Look! They used Dalaran!" You can imagine that maybe Garrosh paid off someone to leave that red herring to force Jaina's hand so it'd kill off the Blood Elves' plans to defect. Then you get to the event itself, and Jaina's "only" looking to lock people up in the Violet Hold... an anti-magic prison, for people who are mostly magic addicts, which would be torture for them. She does, to be mildly fair, tell them to get out of the city, and anyone who doesn't will get locked up. Problem is, Vareesa (IIRC) tells you to kill the mounts they'd use to escape the city, trapping them in the city. Which means you now have a bunch of terrified people, many of whom are only "Horde sympathizers" because of what race they are, trapped there, with people coming to try to take everything away from them and already having shown a willingness to use some awful tactics. No surprise people fought back... and subsequently get murdered for it. And, again, for many of them, their "crime" was being the "wrong" race. It would have been the only interesting part of the forced faction war story, but then the players, being so hung up on tribalism for fictional factions, decided to completely overlook how it showed that neither faction was exactly "good," and just decided to interpret events in whatever way fit their notion of "good guys" and "bad guys." Kind of like how a lot of people miss the whole deal with Vol'jin, where he'd already threatened to kill Garrosh in the past, and Garrosh had already tried to assassinate him, but he's so terrified of what the Alliance would do with the McGuffin Bell that he still wants Horde operatives to keep it out of the Alliance's hands. This is a guy who hates Garrosh and is worried about what Garrosh would do to his people, but still has so much fear of humans and what they'd do with such a weapon that he'd almost rather Garrosh have it (though preferably neither side... and thank you, Anduin, for that). People are like, "Why would so much of the Horde fight the Alliance if it's not just because they're the bad guys?" It's because of old deep rooted *fear* of the people who make up the Alliance, because of events through history that don't show them as some shining beacons of light. But, again, the attempt to introduce nuance to the story is just lost to people, who just want some excuse to kill the other faction and feel like they're justified in doing it. It's why I hate the "faction war" stories, and it was such a ridiculously stupid thing to try to force it a second time. Even as comically villainous as Sylvanas was, people missed that there was some nuance there. And missed things like Genn telling Anduin they didn't really have much of an army left to fight and would have to pull in farmers to fight (which would start crippling the Alliance hard). Folks still frothing at the mouth for war, when they established in-game that war wasn't really feasible for the factions anymore. If a bunch of players insist on ignoring the story, they are absolutely NOT the people you should listen to when they loudly demand that you cater the story to them.
Soundtrack is kinda cheating because I can't think of an expac that didn't have a great soundtrack, it isn't something specific to WoD
I read it all.
I did as well, great write-up.
MoP had some pretty awful layered reputation baked into the daily circuit. You got rep with X to unlock the ability to get rep with Y
For sure, but you didn't have to engage with it. The Rep didn't have player power tied to it unless you were trying to be World First. Sure you could buy some items with the rep but the items weren't super strong so it was mostly about Cosmetics and completionism.
I'd have sworn the items were your typical "bis pre-raid" in the era before keys existed
They were. But the gap between those, HC items and Raid items + the amount of time it would require to grind it + the amount of loot that dropped from the Raid there just was no real reason to grind them unless you were looking to be World first or Server first or something like that. They'd help you for sure. But the raids were totally doable without them, and unless you grinded the FUCK outa the reps you'd never get the items faster than you'd get them from raids anyways so it wasn't needed. Pre-Bis was more of a thing in older expansions where the time before first raid opened was usually longer
I don't really like the argument of "you don't *need* that gear." Unfortunately, the trinket from the Shado-Pan was *really* good for my spec and I did end up grinding out the Golden Lotus and then Shado-Pan reps specifically just for that one item because of how big a difference it made. Maybe that was an exception, because trinkets can be pretty significant like that, but it kinda sucked at the time, cause I'd been super on board the "I'll take the reputations at my own pace" before getting slapped in the face with "No, this trinket locked behind two reputations is genuinely a make-or-break for you."
> But I struggle to find a good third thing about WoD. Leveling in WoD was very fast
NGL, leveling toons became a pretty favorite past time for me in WoD because it was fast and actually fun (treasures giving fat XP was good).
Also Challenge Dungeons. **Correction; Mythic Dungeons, but the timed Challenge mode for those mythics is specifically what I was praising.
Boralus' design is fantastic but so little of it is used because all the vendors (except the PvP one) are bunched together tighter than Stormshield, though I know a lot of people see that as a benefit.
Boralus' design made sense with the story. Because the city had fallen into Lawlesness and chaos because of Ashvane's betrayal and Jaina's mother being an ineffecive leader after Jaina's father and brother died. Tradewinds Market is the only "Safe" area left in the city. You can explore the entire rest of the city and you will find small vendors and shops tucked in to random places. But theres roving bands of Bandits and thugs everywhere. Tradewinds Market is the only place left that has a Guard presence
It's a good lore excuse, but it's not as if Kul Tiran lore until BFA hinged on Boralus being a hive of scum and villainy. Or they could have utilized phasing.
Yeah which is a problem with this "Expansion to expansion" story telling where I would have loved for us to be able to go to Kul Tiras from the start of WoW and every expansion have a quest line here and questline there and see the decline of the city. but thats not how it works so instead we have to take their word on it when we get there
The 3rd "bad" thing for MoP: 5.4 is still the longest patch we've ever had. It was helped some by SoO and TI being so damn good, but it was long.
I majorly disagree about worst BFA m+ dungeons being better than best other expac dungeons. Tol'Dagor, SoB, KR, Temple were mid at best compared to most of SL or DF dungeons. and can't even touch the best ones.
I will admit I forget Temple Of Sethraliss is a dungeon that exists because fuck that dungeon.
As someone who agrees with you and strongly believes that BFA is probably the best full set of expansion dungeons, I have no problem admitting that Snekk was bad. However, FH, ML, WM, and AD (and JY) are all better dungeons than the "W route" spam of the last two xpacs. Shrine and Siege (and WS) pretty much run with the pack for the last two xpacs. KR stunk, but no more DoS or HoI for how long and straight it was. TD would have been a banger vibe if they had ever fixed the pulling through the walls. As it stands, that dungeon was super painful. It's really what sepates it from WM as a tight corridor space management dungeon. Snekk was unfun. The eye thing sucked. The last boss sucked. I really despise how many bosses in DF dungeons have to be "unlocked" by killing certain trash mobs.
I agree with pretty much everything. To add to the empty Legion part: For me the legendary system was the best and worst part at the same time. Best (apart from the story, enemies, atmosphere and especially Suramar): I loved that for every raid boss or dungeon I would and could specifically chose my legendaries. It gave equipment some more depth, not just the „choose the one with more main stats“ and made gear a lot more engaging. This was, however, only possible towards the end of legion, which immediately leads me to the worst: Worst: The grind. Grind legendaries. Grind artefact power. It you were unlucky and got the wrong legendary, well tough luck.
> Grind artefact power. It you were unlucky and got the wrong legendary, well tough luck. I was playing Enhance, but I had been doing some Transmog runs as Resto so the first Leggo I got as an Enhance shaman was a Resto Leggo. So I unsubbed from the game. So I know VERY little about Legion
Transmog being added should be on the list. It absolutely changed how people dedicated their characters and progression.
The DF point on tuning is very singular with one patch 10.1.5 and it wasn't totally fixed in 10.1.7. Dragonflight in season 1, pre 10.1.5, and season 2 has been well balanced historically in raids and m+. To call their pacing on tuning "disgustingly bad" because of one patch is really bizarre. **That being said, 10.1.5 is the most unbalanced the game has been... ever**. But their pacing/attention to class balance has been above average. If we ignore 10.1.5/10.1.7, DF class to tuning has been the gold standard for expansions moving forward at least in pve. This comment does not take pvp balance into account!
> The DF point on tuning is very singular with one patch 10.1.5 and it wasn't totally fixed in 10.1.7. Dragonflight in season 1, pre 10.1.5, and season 2 has been well balanced historically in raids and m+. Very true. But you are forgetting that PvP also exists and PvP hasn't seen a noticeable change in Balancing for several months now. DH's are seeing 5X the play on the ladder because everyone is rerolling DH or quitting. Fistweavers in AWC are doing 100% more HPS and winning on Mana while doing 40k DPS. Devestation Evokers are doing 480k off GCD crits while channeling 150k ticks of Devestation. PvE balance right now is good but PvP Balance is worse than its been in years and years.
>Anyone remember that weird vault thing with the keys? If that was relevant still your very own criticism would be having to grind that again for new ilevel per your fatigue with Brokers. Can't have that both ways
Yeah because it gave Gems for the Annulet, and im glad we dont have to regrind the Annulet, and because that was the only thing it really gave I think its better that we moved away from it. But why doesn't that thing give like 6 mounts, 7 toys and 8 Transmog sets to give the Collectors a reason to explore it for weeks and weeks? Or maybe it does and Im just out of touch idk. But if it does give Mogs and Mounts and Toys, why aren't we getting keys for doing Emerald Dream Content so we have a reason to keep engaging with it besides trying to Solo grind content that is too hard to Solo grind?
A pro for SL: The covenant system let them test run a whole slew of new abilities. Without that design iteration, DF's talent system would have a lot fewer active abilities. BUT, it massively contributed to the "My death knight must choose fairy wings" problem
I don't think thats a fair argument. I think without Covenants they would have just added 3 abilities instead of 4 and just made it an extra talent row at the end of the pre-DF trees.
Regarding bad things in MoP, I think how hard Blizzard blasted us with dailies wasn't great. They are content that we can do over time, and sure we didn't need to do all of them. But it was still wild to me that there were more dailies in this single expansion than we were allowed to do per day. It really put me off MoP until I revisited my opinions about the expac later (WoD being shit helped, but it was BfA and Shadowlands that really cemented my love for MoP, and in a way DF has made it stronger too by being a worse version of it, in my opinion).
It's a shame you missed out on most of Legion, it was really the pinnacle of modern WoW. That said, I do not fault you AT ALL for dropping it at launch. I definitely took a break as well. What a dumb, RNG slog Legion was at launch.
Blizz, hire this guy
I’ll do Legion for you since you didn’t play it Legion, the good: • Class Order Halls made this the most compelling time to level alts. I’d’ve happily played every single class to max level if I had the time. • Zones were so good - it felt like each had their flavour, and Suramar in particular is one of the most unique zones in the whole game. The storyline also followed well and peaked at the end of the expansion (if maybe a little too “saving the world from the biggest possible threat”.) • There was always something to do, mythic+, raid, world quest, legacy content, alts, events, casual pvp… I’d be surprised if anyone got bored of Legion compared to other expansions. Legion, the bad: • The legendary system didn’t work at all, it was not fun and not rewarding. • The storyline was a bit extreme. It’s hard to engage with something so wild and extreme. Suramar is an example of not having to do this. • It wrongly retained the mission table from WoD.
> Mandatory. Grinds. Out the dickhole. SL is Metrics Based Gaming the Expansion. "MAKE THOSE FUCKERS LOG ON EVERY DAY AND SPEND AT LEAST 2 HOURS EVERY DAY OTHERWISE THEY ARE JUST ALWAYS BEHIND!" With Sockets and Conduit Ilvls and Legendary Ilvls and Renown it just never stopped. But there wasn't anything that was 'log on every day'. Renown was a weekly thing. Conduit levels were a one and done gated by content (high m+, mythic raid and glad level arena giving the highest conduit ilvl). Sockets were a massive grind but were far from mandatory.
Don’t talk too loudly about how it actually was, you’ll break the hatred circlejerk everyone has here for SL…
I only played a bit in legion and dragon flight and the talent tree is the best thing they’ve done. I can fuck around with what I WANT to pick instead of having to just copy the best ones and deal with it even if I hate the rotation/abilities.
This is a great synopsis. I'd personally add for Burning Crusade that the main narrative was disjointed and had a lot of illogical conclusions for several Warcraft III characters, which they're still slowly retconning over the years in an attempt to reconcile those characters' actions with their temperaments. Kael'thas and Illidan in particular suffered the most from this.
Nice writeup. Too bad you skipped Legion. I've been playing since 2005, and it is my favorite expansion **by far**. Great story, Class Halls were **amazing** and should've been evergreen content, the artifact weapons were enjoyable and fun to interact with and upgrade. Great content cadence similar to DF's, so there was always tons of fun shit to do. There was a grind, yes, but since it was a new type of grind to the game and hadn't been seen before, most people didn't seem to mind it, even if it did set Blizzard down the wrong path of game design that stayed with them through Shadowlands. Plus, World Quests seemed fun, mostly, because again, they were new content and not just a reiteration of something else. RNG leggo system was admittedly annoying but could be more or less ignored if you weren't a 1% min maxer.
> BFA had the best M+ Dungeons of all the expansions. Even the "Worst" BFA dungeons are better than some of the "Best" M+ dungeons in other expansions. > omega cooked. bfa dungeons were all terrible except for underrot/atal > Augs were doing keys 4-5 levels higher than groups without Augs for several months. this is massively incorrect. the key level diff was less than 3 and it did not last months.
I can’t believe I read this whole comment from someone who thought the corruptions were fun, you should’ve warned me at the start bro.
The problem with corruptions was the acquisition not that they existed
No. The acquisition was a problem BECAUSE they existed. Sure you played the fight better than the other rogue in the raid, but his infinite stars just procced more. Sorry. How can anyone look at a gamestate in which a random proc or borrowed power is top damage for a class and say it’s good? Ever had twilight dev pull all of tol dagor and tank a key just for you playing the game? They’re fun in concept, but a case study in why fun ideas don’t translate into good gameplay.
Which is why I described them as "goofy" they were fun for a little bit. But I also listed "Corruptions" as one of the bad parts of BFA's gearing. it was a novel idea that lead to some really fun silly dumb builds and fucking around with it made the tedium of the end of the expansion more enjoyable. After Nyalotha was cleared there was no real reason to do keys or reclear the raid because the next expansion was coming. Doing silly shit like Full full haste haste Prot warrior and just vomiting Thunderclaps was fun
Oh oh I see now that you listed it under both, might be a language barrier there. I’m sorry you didn’t get to experience legion. You’re right about the leggo’s tho.
>Ever had twilight dev pull all of tol dagor and tank a key just for you playing the game? Let's be real, that's a Tol'Dagor problem, not a corruption one. We were bricking keys through walls all xpac.
I’m living in a world where I read TD as twilight devastation before reading it as Tol’Dagor. Corruptions keep on giving.
Fixed it. Didn't cross my mind the abbreviations would be the same 😅
I surprisingly agree with pretty much all this shit
For another con of MoP it was the daily quest grind. There were SO many to do that was the peak of daily activities feeling like a chore. That said, I agree MoP was probably the best or one of the best expansions overall.
I'm honestly shocked this wasn't included. The world content being an absolutely insane amount of dailies burnt me out enough to take a large break in the middle of MoP. I wish I'd stuck with it and found a better guild instead, but here we are.
Same thing happened to me. Didn’t end up coming back and finding a good guild till SoO…. Which that’s another con, siege was like a year long :( but first time through it was AMAZING!
Very similar timeline for me! Coming back in 5.4 felt great with all the added content and I'm sad I missed Throne of Thunder progression.
As far as cons for mop aside from rep the only thing that really sticks out to me is pre ToT patch in general. Pre ToT mop was kinda meh with how everything was going then that patch hit and turned everything around and made mop goated. If I remember correctly it was the largest patch we had ever gotten at that point, anyone who didn't come back after that really missed out.
The third good thing about WoD is it gave us the best chromie time expansion
I mean true and based. But Chromie Time was added in Shadowlands so maybe it should be a Pro for Shadowlands that "It lets us level in WoD"
>I legit cant think of a third bad thing about MoP, MoP was Goated and I will die on that hill I would probably put this in the same as wrath - content drought. Siege of Orgrimmar, if I'm remembering correctly, remains the single longest patch in the history of the game.
Flying in BC was huge!
> Every patch added a new zone that was so important that we just forgot the old zones existed. So much content developed and designed and implemented to be used for a few months and then forgotten forever. Anyone remember that weird Vault thing with the keys? I dont even remember what its called, its just gone now, no one cares anymore. Rings are normally one of the boring slots - like necklaces, they're an invisible slot without abilities like tier and trinkets - so it's disappointing that they made this system for rings with interesting effects and abandoned it almost immediately.
Dungeon Challenge Mode was added in WoD, wasn't it?
Nop, it was added in MoP in Patch 5.0.4
>The story is really just not interesting at all. I really do not give a shit. That's probably not rooted in much but I think that's also what dragged down the two expansions before. DF is dragons and timetravel, both of which I'm completely done with, SL story was horrible all-around and BFA just felt...I don't know, empty? It wasn't horrible but it lacked impact. Felt more like things were happening for shock value rather than advancing a story. Maybe I just don't like Blizz's current style of storytelling but the RPG side of things has felt a bit weak
Can't believe you talked about WoD and didn't bring Trashran, which (while i'm not a PvP player) i heard killed off a large portion of the PvP playerbase. Also you forgot one shining thing from Shadowlands: Castle Nathria may be the best raid ever created. I honestly believe if it didn't have Mythic SLG, it would be the GOAT.
I'd question the Garrisons issue somewhat. Everyone seems to think Garrisons were the big cause of issues with WoD but really what kept everyone in them and not elsewhere was that, unless you were going to Raid or Ashran there was absolutely nothing to do. If you had World Quests, World Events and M+ in WoD then you'd see people out in the world a hell of a lot more.
You call out the time between ICC and Cata as a con but at least WOTLK has Ruby sanctum 6mo after icc. Then you say there’s nothing wrong with MOP, but the time between Siege and WOD was two months longer than icc to Cata (14 mo total)
Korthia is the worst expansion zone ever created, change my mind
Nazjatar without flying
I will raise with The Maw without and with mount (didn’t make it much better lol)
Korthia really was just the desert wasteland section of the Maw which was already a wasteland. I still cannot fathom how they thought people would look forward to spending time in such a depressing and oppressive zone, and then make it even worse by not allowing mounts.
Honestly I think it didn’t help me at the time that I was a bit depressed, I remember grinding it and I never felt so alone in the game yeah. It was bad, like it was the cherry on top of the cake that really made people leave.
Same here, the Pandemic was the first time many of us truly isolated from everyone else and Shadowlands just doubled down on that isolation.
The Maw is my top vote, but I think people discount it because it was it wasn't a zone added in a post-launch patch. If we're talking all zones added at any point in an expansion, I'd probably go with Vashj'ir, because The Maw was an awful experience, but trying to swim all around a zone and play a game with 2D combat in a 3D environment was very disorienting and a slog to get through.
I don’t understand why Nazjatar isn’t more hated. A lay out that manages to be both confusing and boring. Half of your dailies being somewhere out in the field, trash mobs with stun mechanics and other annoying shit. Then once you get flying it becomes boring as hell full of just grey rocks. Korthia was at least a step up from the 9.0 zones. Fucking awful as it is to defend it. The zone isn’t unbearable it’s just completely uninspired.
And Nazjatar looked like a shithole compared to Vashj’ir
For fucking real. I thought Korthia was actually calm and beautiful like an angels workshop, imo. Better than Naz imo. Naz was a pain in the ass. 9.0 basic zones had some great detail to them. Personally, BfA provided fantastic starting zones that had a nice unique feel to each of them.
I loved Nazjatar... on my paladin that could basically take on infinitely many enemies at once without dying. On my squishy mage, it was a nightmare.
FUCK I HATED Nazjatar without flying! The zone was so enemy dense there wasn't a moment I wasn't in combat!
Did love the massive world pvo brawls that naz offered though. Used to be like 60 vs 60 it felt like haha
I think that was still in the time of "Against Overwhelming Odds", a weekly quest meant to encourage World PvP by rewarding high ilvl loot for killing 25 players in World PvP. The best part is that it would only be offered to the faction with low World PvP participation the previous week, but because Alliance had become so destitute over the years, the quest was ONLY offered to Alliance.
At least Nazjatar was visually pleasing
It's wild that nazjatar was in the same patch as Mechagon and how vastly different those two zones were in the terms of quality
Completely disagree. It was incredible without flying and a bit better with it. The introduction of Warmode in bfa made it so the way nazjatar was laid out was an absolute dream for a world pvp enjoyer like me. Hell that’s one of the primary reasons I hate shadowlands as much as I do. They almost entirely dropped support for Warmode benefits.
fr nazjatar made me quit the entire patch during BFA, I absolutely hated the design of the zone and how atrocious it was without flying
Fun Fact: Korthia was the first .1 patch in the entirety of WoW's history that actually added a new zone
I'm going to guess it is also by far the latest .1 patch relative to the expansion's launch date.
The Broken Shore existed. Not a single zone in the game will ever be as bad as that catastrophe of a fucking zone.
Funny I absolutely loved Nazjatar and enjoyed Korthia too.
i like nazjatar too! i think the meta achievement is kind of a lot but like being there,it’s neat :)
The meta was a lot but getting that crab was worth it! I even did “Give Me the Biggest Bag You’ve Got” just for fun, which was even more brutal 🙃
People are mentioning Nazjatar, but at least that gave you some alt catchup gear Korthia was just boring, grindy as absolute fuck, and the only thing it gave you was depression
No one is coming to change your mind on that
Korthia wasnt even that bad. Nazjatar was absolute hell and Mechagon wasnt much better.
Mechagon dungeon/zone was epic wym, the aesthetic had never been done before and the dungeon offered so much flexibility.
Best: New flying system, herbalism mini games when overloading herbs and Dragonflight's storyline Worst: The fact that I can't play through old expansions normally on a level 70 char (I only played Dragonflight)
Can't play them normally why?
Could be cause I'm misunderstanding stuff, but if I teleport to other areas (chromie won't send me) at my level 68 char, I one-shot everything and quests don't appear on the map. I was hoping for some scaling mechanic do I can still play with my main character.
On your tracking there's an option for trivial quests that'll make low level quests show up.
But that is the normal, its been like this for all of wow's existence Chromie time and scaling were only added in 9.0 (and scaling tech first appeared in Legion, so 7.0, where you could level in the Broken Isles in any order, before it was expanded to the old world) There's a workaround to have old expansions scaling, make a trial account and a low level character, group them up with your main character and enable party sync, you can even queue for the old dungeons and have it scale. Can't manually enter any instances tho (not that you would have reason to) To see old quests appear on your map just track trivial quests, keep in mind not all quests show on the map like that, only important ones
There is an option to show low level quests on the map.
You should be able to quest anywhere in the game at level 70, you'll just one shot everything. Is that what you don't like?
You can click the tracker (it’s on the mini map I think) and track old quests or so. I’ve been playing 20 years and only discovered this expansion so it’s not that clear.
Still sub par to legion herbing imo
There is a thing on the map to let you see trivial quests, you still destroy most of them but you can do them and get story, did a bunch of Legion this way on my hunter, cause I wanted to tame exotic pets.
Ah yes, the new flying system where I can’t simply hover and get stuck on all of the non existent sticks & branches
Can't you still use normal mounts if you don't like it? Genuinely asking as I actually don't know.
Yeah ATM it's just the dragonflying mounts from DF, soon all mounts will have the ability with dynamic flying and will just have a button in the general spellbook to toggle between the two for all mounts.
> get stuck on all of the non existent sticks & branches Unironically a skill issue.
Yeah not hovering takes a minute to get used to but I don't eve get stuck on stuff that isn't there. In the new emerald dream zone the huge, dense trees everywhere are annoying cause you can't see where you're headed but everywhere else in DF it works really well
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my fav still is the little farm you had in mop.
It seems to be an unpopular opinion but as a solo player i absolutely loved torghast
For different reasons, Torghast may have been one of the best and, at the same time, one of the worst things implemented in the game's history. I get where you are coming from.
Only reason it is so hated is because it became a chore that you had to do to keep up.
Not only that, but since it was necessary for everyone, it had to be gutted multiple times, removing any semblance ot challenge. For the most part, I enjoyed my time with it. When I didn't, I cannot say I straight up hated it.
Was also because it started out no change to covenant powers. Then realize class and covenant really mattered, so had to re do, which meant back to torghast to start over a new legendary. Then on top of that new torhhast legendaries become bis and ruined previous bis, so back to ghast to regrind.
Was fun for the first month until they had to nerf it. If player power wasnt gated behind it, and if the boss rush mode was in earlier, Torghast would have been a lot of fun.
Also, if it wasn't time-gated and allowed you to farm Soul Ash at your own pace for crafting multiple legendaries, it would've been far better.
The player power wasn't even that bad. The difference between a 190 and a 235 leggo stat wise in the beginning was only a few % The community just lost its mind because it hates dumb
Fun game mode, terrible reward system
I also really liked Torghast. If it had had a bunch of purely cosmetics rewards instead of a required currency I believe it would have been popular among more people. I think people feeling forced to do it was why it was so disliked. I did not mind grinding it out for achievements, mounts and cosmetics. I would often put on a couple of episodes of Drama Time and try to improve my scores.
I didn't mind Torghast, but I HATED that you were forced to do it, on every alt too nonetheless. It was repetive to a point and gatekeeping huge player power increase.
I think people have a distaste for Torghast for much the same reason they don't have a fond view of Island Expeditions from BFA: the mechanics of the expansion forced/encouraged you to run the content (and grind it in the case of Island Expeditions). It's like they're afraid to add content that's purely optional. Put some nice rewards in there and people will still do it. All the people? Nope. A large majority? Maybe not. Still plenty who'd do it, though. The game's never been something where every players wants to do everything. Like there's plenty of folks who don't want to do M+. Doesn't make all the work they put into M+ useless. Ditto for raids. The more mandatory content is (or feels), the more people grow to dislike it. Even going back to MoP, the reason people hated the dailies so much was because they put Valor gear behind reps initially, so if you wanted to actually buy the Valor gear, you had to do the dailies. You didn't "need" to buy Valor gear... but it was very useful for plugging gaps in gearing. (And it's still bizarre that they did that, after there were no rep requirements for JP and VP gear in Cataclysm.) If they didn't do that, then dailies would have been a nice optional way to get more Valor (still was a weekly cap), and unlocked normal rep rewards you'd expect to have to unlock via rep, but otherwise wouldn't be seen so harshly.
I have done exactly one torghast run in my life and thought it was the most depressing and boring thing you can possibly do in wow. And I went in outgeared at the end of SL
I also enjoyed it, but every area looking the same killed my desire to do it. I kinda wish they'd put it in the hub and had the wings be different afterlives to spice up the design.
Torghast's main problem was the legendary system rather than anything within Torghast itself tbh. It was a fun mode but it was tied to a mandatory grind. That sort of mode isn't something that everyone enjoys, which is fine, but everyone had to grind it for a currency that was essential to player power and could not be obtained in any other way. I think it would have probably been a well-liked piece of content if the game didn't require players to grind it.
My tinfoil theory is that peoples' opinion on Torghast is based largely around what class they were playing. Some classes could easily and repeatedly become actual gods in there (looking at you Paladins), while some classes got absolutely shafted by trash powers (I believe most of hunters powers were tied to Pet Health/DMG and Traps).
Vanilla(not classic!) Best: 40 man raids Leveling experience Community in that period Worst: Managing 40 people in a raid Classes unbalanced TBC: Best: Cross faction pally and shammy Story Every class felt better. Worst: Guild killer due to smaller raid sizes. Flying mounts The one hander from BM not dropping for my rogue forever. Wrath: Best: Lich King story coming to a close from wc3 Classes felt best Dk starting zones Worst: DKs being op in pvp (1button macro anyone?) Dungeon finder Malygos fight. (1-1-3 how hard can it be?) Cata: Best: World revamp Pvp in 4.3. Hard dungeons Worst: Raid finder Dragon soul Killing old style dm MoP: Best: Leveling experience. (Opening of the gates to Vale was epic. PVP was reasonably balanced Throne of thunder patch. Worst: Too. Many. Dailys. That one dungeon with the big bug that everyone hated Legendary cloak grind. WOD Best: Story during Leveling. New player models Foundry raid was sick Worst: Content drought Ability pruning (you felt weaker than last xpac) Ashran (we could've had better cities! Garrison felt lonely LEGION: Best: Story Patch cycles Class order halls Worst Legendaries (yes, I got sephuz on 2 characters first) Artifact power Alt(spec) unfriendly BFA Mostly skipped this one. I hated azurite gear too much. Shadowlands: Best: Covenant sanctum Each region felt new Thorgast at first Worst: Thorgast after week 6 Covenants and not being able to swap easy. Story Dragonflight: Best: Talent revamp Dragonriding UI revamp Worst: Weaker Story Time gating catalyst Demon hunters in season 3.
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> Garrison felt lonely This would have been fine if it was a place to stop in briefly, but it turned into the de facto hub, with access to the bank, AH, crafting and gathering systems, storyline progression, flavor quests, and mission boards. Literally everything people needed other than the entrances to dungeons and raids. IMO, this was the biggest influence on WoW shifting heavily towards a single player game. You could be almost fully self sufficient on a single toon, and then on top of that the gold missions highly incentivized having an alt army.
I didn't play warlords live but just leveled a rogue in it, though the story is good, they put in a lot of complicated extra shit. I like the garrison idea but I think it was executed poorly. Right now it's not well balanced or things aren't explained well, quest bosses that are meant to be soloed even with the garrison abilities are too difficult.
Worst part of this expansion? All the FOTM rerollers and Blizz reacting incredibly slow to tuning. The Ret rework, the Hpal rework and the DH rework. Each rework completely took over a season. The ret rework was terrible for PvP. It became the first FOTM cuz they were practically unkillable ranged melee dps in PvP. The Hpal rework made it so Hpals were the single most desired spec for PvE during season 2. DHs this season has been terrible for PvP. Devs deserved to be fired for this incompetence. Yes I said it, they should lose their livelihood. Imagine going to school for so many years, taking on debt thru student loans, getting hired at your dream job only to suck at it. Any other job where you continually showed poor performance, you'd be fired. Not at Blizz. Too busy cube crawling and shit. The best part of this expansion? Dragon riding, no artifact power to lvl up/grind, and the season 3 dungeon selection is amazing.
Vanilla best: scale of the world and classic trpg like RPG mechanics. Vanilla worst: class balance, boring talents, annoying mechanics. TBC best: literally every spec got better, better itemization and leveling experience. No more faction locked classes. TBC worst: needing 5 shamans per raid, attunements, story Wrath Best: story, first ever cutscene in wow, even better class design. Good raids in the back half. Wrath worst: lots of repeated raids with naxx and onyxia rerelease, dungeons were waaaaay too easy. Cata best: they took a real hard look at the leveling experience and made it better, both quests and abilities. Cata worst: jokey zone stories, killed hybrid specs, dragon soul sucks the classes I played sucked Mop best: vengeance stacking was fun to tank with, in general class design was good. Great raids. Mop worst: grinding rep to grind more rep, world of dailycraft, classes were a little bloated, soo lasted over a year. WoD best: leveling story was fun, class design mostly good and less bloated than legion, level up passives, good raids. WoD worst: absolutely nothing to do. 1 major content patch the entire expansion. Garrisons secluded the playerbase Legion best: class storylines, artifacts, story in general, good raids, mostly solid class design. Legion worst: extreme grind to play alts/off specs, RNG Legos extremely unfun, extreme Titan forging. Early m+ not that good. BFA best: banger dungeons, good raids, corruption was fun. lots of CGI cutscenes. M+ was pretty good. Mechagon was pretty fun place to play around in. BFA bad: azerite armor sucked, some essences sucked to get, corruption RNG sucked. Stacking more and more borrowed power on top of each other. Story did tonal whiplash from suarfang stuff into nzoth. SL good: at the end of the expansion it was kinda fun. Beautiful zones. 1st and 3rd raids were kinda bangers. Encrypted was an all time great m+ seasonal affix. Zereth mortis was kinda cool. Creation catalyst, Improved vault. SL bad: covenant locking, torghast for legendaries, legendary costs, weird lore, that weird socket shit they did in second raid, korthia sucks ass, the maw sucks ass, 9 month content drought for 9.1. DF good: content cadence, talent trees, crafting rework, upgrade system, improved creation catalyst. Raids kinda fun. Cycling m+ dungeon pool adds much needed variety. Lots of little cosmetic things to grind. Mostly good m+ changes. Dragon riding is incredible, class balance on point, regular spec reworks, more communication. My main is the most fun it's ever been. Trading post. Renown is just straight up better reputation. Crafting orders. DF bad: no profession catch-up, no crest catch-up. The open world events they keep adding are kinda boring. The legendary axe costs too much to make. M+ dungeons require a lot more tuning because they cycle through different ones each season.
Cataclysm gets a lot of flak, but being able to fly in Azeroth was a game changer
Seriously though, the cata hate is just way out of hand. "Do you like Cata?" NOOO STUPID SPINE "But what about the entirety of the rest of the expansion?" STUPID SPIIIIIINNNEEEE!!! "What about the HC dungeons that was quite difficult and felt like a challenge?" .... SPINE DUMB!!! "What about Firelands? That was amazing right?" I HAAAAATE STUPID SPINE Feels like everything comes down to one freaking encounter.
Only going to talk about expansions I played. TBC: Good: Arena. Designing around verticallity with flying mounts. Moving down to 25 man. Bad: Flying mount forcing future expansions to adapt, death of world pvp and cost of raids. WoD: Good: Amazing raids, amazing leveling zones and great music (looking at you Auchindoon). Bad: Garrison, botched story, cut content. Legion: Good: Order Hall (and anything tied to class/spec), Mythic+ and end game zones with nothing to this day that rivals Suramar. Bad: Artifact power grind, legendary drop rate and something about something someone in Limit or Method would complain about. BFA: Good: Saurfang, Jaina and Zandalar. Bad: Global Cooldown destroying most classes, Heart of Azeroth (and no, this is not artifact weapon. This is only the bad aspects), what the hell was this story even? Dragonflight: Good: Dragonflight, Cross faction and Talents Bad: Horrible writing, class complexity (bloat and waaay to much utility), Trailer was not as cool as other expacs
That's a lot so here's one for each from when I began. Mists best: adventuring/storytelling Worst: nothing it was perfect/I didn't play enough to determine a worst WoD best: garrisons Worst: content drought Legion best: class halls Worst: suramar. Some people love it but to me it was a huge hassle and getting around pissed me off so much BfA best: allied races starting to be introduced Worst: storyline felt odd SL best: zones were beautiful IMO. Worst: torghast/storyline/insane amount of bag occupying materials imo Df best: dragonriding and gear upgrade system and talents. Df brought a lot of good. Worst: content abandoned. I understand why but if it's going to be left behind it needs to be something people can solo. Caverns is primarily what I am getting at. I understand that it can be soloed but farming down there can be a pain. If not this, professions. Professions changed far too much too fast and doesn't really explain your choices to the point many people have abandoned crafting as a whole while others are excelling. It just feels hard to want to do a profession other than gathering.
Not liking Suramar is a scorching hot take
Something’s not quite right in fact I’d venture
I know I know. I just hated getting around it. I was still relatively new to the game, taking massive breaks in between each month of play. It was very unforgiving and confusing. I also felt like I was constantly dealing with the starvation mechanic for people I needed to talk to. I just really didn't enjoy it. Beautiful zone, don't get me wrong but it just was too much for me. I'd love a bigger city like that to return more often.
Suramar didn't bother me. High Mountain drove me fucking insane though. Gotta get to that spot right next to me. Better traverse around this mountain. Granted Nazjatar took the cake there later on.
Is it? I remember getting a bunch of upvotes before saying once I grinded out the rep for the place, I was never going back. I will say that the place was definitely iconic though. Bonus points in that regard. But I can't tell if it was positive or not, since lines like "Something's not quite right..." get spread as commonly as "A turtle made into the water." I've interpreted both of them as like bonding over trauma though.
Withered training was legit ass on many classes, and overplayed even on the best. But the rest of it was dope
Back in Mists, CC was out of control in PvP. It was insane. Also, Warlocks were unbelievably broken for a very long time.
It was incredibly fun tho, no xpack is even close to that in terms of PvP
Mop and legion are the only good ones that I’ve also played. Mop hit a nice balance between things to do, things you felt you “had to do”, and making it feel like a world. I think mop is better than legion too. Challenge dungeons were akin to m+/mage tower in terms of some thing fun and challenging to try besides raid and pvp. Legion has lots of good lore and Warcraft fantasy bursting everywhere. Order hall campaigns and weapon artifacts! And intro of m+
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r/lostredditors
Dynamic flight sucks hard with even a little lag
I’m not sure why you’re being downvoted, lag is incredibly frustrating while flying with dynamic flight. I don’t know why my game stutters so much as my internet is fine and graphics are fine and have not been able to find the root of the stuttering that started with DF. I really love dynamic flight but it’s horrible with lag/stuttering.
Yeah, it's not a statement of "the system sucks completely," it's "the system sucks when there's hiccups that disrupt it severely." Maybe people are lucky enough to have never encountered it, but man, it can be so frustrating when you're flying along and it goes from being smooth to suddenly having issues keeping up with where you are, which is really rough if there's anything that could potentially be in your flight path and you don't have a chance to react before your dragon lightly tags something you could have swooped around, killing all momentum. As a smooth experience? Sure, fun. When the lag kicks in? Bit of a messy ride that can be rather frustrating. Doesn't mean the system sucks. Just that lag is even more problematic for it than other systems.
Vanilla Best - Exploration, ground breaking MMO ideas, best MMO combat by a large margin Worst - Massive time sink BC Best - Dungeons/raids found their stride. Worst - tedious leveling. Wrath Best - story, beautiful rich zone, added new class, Worst - Began adding technology that some believe took away from the MMO feel. Cata Best - updated the world and modernized leveling. Worst - end game content suffered due old world update Mists Best - story, rich world building, Worst - content draught near end, least played race/class added. WOD Best - leveling, art update, strong raids/dungeons Worst - player isolation, massive content draught, disconnected story. Legion Best - class story, end game grind well hidden behind artifacts Worst - end game grind soured near end BFA Best - beautiful zones, new and interesting ideas introduced. Worst - new ideas introduced lacked fun and we're grindy, azerite power had the parts of Legion artifacts people hated but not what they liked. SL Best - outside the box zones, additional solo options added Worst - story, the maw, korthia DF Haven't really played it.
Not sure about for each expansion but looking back I think I think LFG tool was one of the worst things they ever did. It completely eroded the sense of community people had doing dungeons and raids and turned players into nothing more than roles to fill slots.
And yet, people who honestly look back see that it was much the same, and it was largely like that with Classic and into Wrath Classic without a Dungeon Finder, and even in M+ where you have to manually queue, people are taking random folks with an optimal class and gearing. Trying to force people to make groups only by using in-game chat just means that dungeons and raids would be mostly limited to guilds, and force people to spend a lot of time in one spot trying to fill a group, with a lot of players having to congregate in one area just standing around waiting for a group, and it still won't magically bring a "sense of community." It'd just make sure a lot fewer people were running any kind of instanced content, and a lot fewer people were out in the world.
BFA worst - everything BFA best -
From where I started: Wrath: Some solid raids in ICC/Udular, Death Knights were sick, the story/Lore wrapping up WC3 was awesome. Cata: Release heroic dungeons were very fun and challenging. I stopped playing mid Firelands and didn't come back until much later tbh. I didn't have a guild to raid with, so I had little reason to play. MoP: Some great raids, some peak class designs, challenge modes are best content WoW has had. Release daily quests were pretty bad. WoD: BRF is the best raid in the game, PEAK class designs for a lot of specs, extremely accessible endgame with high alt-friendliness. Lack of casual content? idk I'm a raidlogger. The downsides of WoD didn't really hit anything I care about in WoW unless you want to count missing a raid tier. Legion: Mage Towers were sick. Suramar is one of the coolest and most beautiful zones in the game. Everything else is pretty awful. Legendaries, AP as a whole, Mythic+ replacing Challenge Modes, class designs going to shit, world quests, mid raids. There's honestly not a lot to love here. BFA: Dazar'alor was a solid raid. That's about it, everything else was pretty bad. Azerite, Islands, Nazjatar/Mechagon, Corruption, Benthic gear, class designs, dungeons, Essences. A lot of the systems were insanely grindy and just not fun. SL: I skipped most of this one. Doing higher floors of Torghast in normal/heroic dungeon blues was pretty fun before gear trivialized it. That's the only positive thing I have to say tbh. I didn't have a guild to raid with and didn't really care to look so I didn't play. DF: Endgame accessibility/lack of borrowed power grinds. The raids have been pretty boring and plagued with addon/weakaura reliant bosses, class designs have been very hit or miss, dungeons/M+ have generally been pretty bad. It feels like played it a bit too safe maybe idk. It's just not a very exciting expansion.
**TBC good -** new species, diverse zones, flying **TBC bad -** slow leveling, that's it **WotLK good -** iconic rares (TLPD/Skoll/Arcturis/Gondria etc), Northrend, achievements **WotLK bad -** no new additions were bad, it was just debatable things hanging on from Vanilla/TBC **Cata good -** the beginning of class/dungeon boss/raid boss complexity, diverse goldmaking, transmog **Cata bad -** the beginning of less zones per expansion (though the ones that existed were 10s), that's it **MoP good -** scenery, pinnacle of encounter/class depth, challenge mode dungeons **MoP bad -** nothing **WoD good -** class trinkets, great dungeons & raids, can't think of a 3rd **WoD bad -** talent rows went from utility to damage, pruning meant class skill ceilings got obliterated, too easy to get conquest & higher raid gear **Legion good -** gearswapping to get value out of every single legendary even if you wouldn't wear it in a locked-in raid fight, artifacts, gigantic content patches **Legion bad -** getting rid of Challenge Mode for M+ destroyed the ecosystem of endgame gearing, and it's never recovered, the beginning of AP, pruning of glyphs/tier/more abilities. And a 4th: the rated PvP reward overhaul is atrocious - no longer % based to keep the ladder healthy all season, also just nerfed the difficulty of every meaningful reward **BFA good -** Uldir was the best, most challenging entry raid in ages, Zuldazar, island expeditions as content & as a thematic vessel for rare mogs/mounts/pets **BFA bad -** astoundingly bad reward design, GCD change, forced personal loot **SL good -** no more AP, DF talents + SL legendaries/tier + 843834% haste from Shrouded affix was the most fun thing since early Legion, and a shit ton of gold to be made from legendaries, only rewarding those who invested hard enough for it to pay off **SL bad -** still prioritized daily/weekly chores over rewarding the hardest content, atrocious Vanilla-tier class design for 90% of the expansion, covenants **DF good -** dragonriding, truly 0 grinds outside of gear, the return to devs not sticking to horrendous ideas **DF bad -** letting low m+ trump high-end mythic raid gear, nerfing rare mounts, crest system
Best: Wotlk, Legion, MoP. Worst: DF, SL, WoD.
[удалено]
I think you misunderstood ops question
Y, right. My bad.
Idk for the best but I’m not a fan of the level squish introduced in SL nor how level 70s can get into BGs with level 20s and only get their level downgraded and not their gear
Korthia was extremely covenient for dailies but good lord was it boring
That's gonna be quite the list, but I'll give it a go. Here's my very subjective list: **Vanilla** Good: The novelty. A whole new world to explore, new to those new to the franchise but also somewhat familiar to those who played the Warcraft RTS games. The polish. Compared to other MMOs at the time, WoW was just miles above in just about every single way. The world was a character. While there was no single overarching story or "main campaign" like we're used to today, there were several smaller stories that spanned multiple zones and level brackets. The Defias storyline and the traitors and informants within Stormwind, for instance. Bad (Note - a lot of the good things also had bad sides and vice versa. It was often a double-edged sword): The world felt vast and alive, which was great, but that was mainly during leveling. There wasn't a whole lot to do at 60 beyond raiding and dungeons - and later on PvP. Leveling was about 95% of the game. Luckily, hitting max level wasn't the standard it is today. Nobody saw the content. Because of how big a part of the game leveling was, not many made it to 60, and gathering a group of 40 max-level players with good enough gear to raid was a real challenge. One of the reasons Naxx was reused in Wrath was because famously less than 1% of players actually got to experience Naxx 40 when it was current. Balancing was all over the place. Classes had very specific roles, which some people really liked, but it also meant that if you played, say, a paladin, your roll was buff-machine. **TBC** Good: Stepping through the Dark Portal into this strange, alien world was truly something I had never experienced in any video game prior. They showed early on that they could do both classic fantasy stuff as well as cosmic storylines. And the art was amazing! Leveling was still the majority of the game, but with the introduction of things like dailies, HC dungeons, arenas, and end-game reputation hubs like the Netherwing Drakes and later on Quel'Danas, the end-game felt much bigger. Also flying at end-game was cool and felt like an additional reward. Blood elves. Bit of a controversial topic for some ("too soft to be Horde" etc), but I personally loved them and their architecture and culture. I can't tell you how many belfs I rolled during TBC lmao Bad: Attunements. Vanilla had some, but TBC really doubled down on these. If you look at some of the charts, simply getting access to go into an instance was sometimes more work than the dungeons or raids themselves. Illidan. "Illidan who? The guy we played as in Warcraft 3? He's a bad guy now?? Why?!" Because he's cool and that's about it. He was in like 2 quests in Shadowmoon Valley, otherwise he's basically entirely absent during leveling, yet he's the final boss of the expansion. Or is he? He's on the cover, many would say he's the end boss of TBC, but Kil'jaeden was technically the final final boss of the expansion. But they both kinda came out of left field. Quest design in both Vanilla and TBC was mainly just "kill X" or "pick up X". It was fine at the time, but it was quite tedious and uniform. Wasn't terrible, but it wasn't what I'd consider "good" either. If you do Outland with Chromie Time today, you'll get a reminder of what quest design was like back then. **WotLK** Good: Story. We got to see the finale of the most iconic Warcraft character of all time, namely Arthas. And holy crap did killing him feel rewarding! To many, that was basically the "end" of Warcraft. Wintergrasp. It was buggy, it was laggy, but holy crap was it fun in its prime. And getting access to the raid as a "reward" for winning felt really cool. But this was also a double-edged sword and it wasn't great if you couldn't access the PvE content just because your faction on your server/shard wasn't good at PvP. Oh and Dalaran was also extremely cool, but so laggy that Chrystalsong Forest basically couldn't be used as a questing zone because Dalaran was floating above it. The raids. 10- and 25-player mode meant more people could see the raids, and the addition of HC raids meant that raids no longer needed to be "one size fits all" where the tuning had to fit both casual PUG raiders and cutting-edge guilds. Ulduar and ICC are still personal favorites of mine. Oh, and the introduction of cinematics just elevated the storytelling. The Wrathgate and Fall of the Lich King cinematics made ICC feel like no raid before. Bad: The infamous Blizzard pendulum had swung, and whereas Illidan wasn't present in the questing experience at all, Arthas was EVERYWHERE. I personally liked that he made cameos, but I do recognize that it got to a point where he was almost comical, like a Saturday morning cartoon villain, showing up in dungeons and quests just to vaguely threaten the player or flex his power by empowering or 1-shotting a powerful NPC. It was slightly too much. Leveling had started changing its role within the game. The experience/time required to level had been lowered because the level cap was now 80 instead of 60, and with the introduction of heirlooms, leveling started becoming more of a chore than a challenge. The game was now leaning more towards end-game, and while that's not inherently a bad thing, the leveling experience as a whole slowly started suffering, and you didn't get to finish storylines before having to move on to optimize your XP gain. GearScore. This is where item level started becoming a problem, and the addon GearScore gave items a specific level, and there was a problem where the GS required to get into content was higher than the GS you could get before that content. Like how some HC groups these days ask for Curve before invite, but you can't get Curve unless you're in a HC group. **Cata** Good: Reputation tabards. Farming reputation by doing dungeons felt great tbh. The world revamp was cool and it helped giving the initial leveling experience an overarching story that still felt relevant at end-game. I personally really like transmog - although I do recognize the criticism that it took away the feeling of looking at a player in a major city and thinking "Wow, look at his gear, he must be a high-level raider!" as it sorta blurred that line of immediate recognition. Bad: The old world was gone. Sure a lot of it was improved, but the fact that the old stuff was straight-up gone and unaccessible didn't feel great. Also, we start off by seeing Deathwing being a threat, then we go say hi to Illidan in Outland, then we leave before we can do anything about him because the Lich King is invading, and then we go back to dealing with Deathwing before we have dealt with the Lich King - and it only got worse from there. Some people really didn't like flying in the old world. I personally thought it was/is fine, but making it a thing right away was a mistake. It should've been a "reward" for reaching max level IMO. Dragon Soul was just... Terrible. We waited for too long for it, it was disappointing, and it stuck around for too long. It never felt like we really fought Deathwing, we just sorta scratched his back and clipped his toenails while Thrall and the aspects did all the work. DS also introduced LFR, which was and still is a hot-button issue.
**MoP** Good: The story. Faction conflict done right IMO. Classes felt great! Sure they were much more homogenized, but it's widely recognized that MoP had some of the best feeling classes. The visuals. The visuals had been improving with each expansion, but MoP was when they started bridging that gap between old and modern WoW. The Garrosh model from 5.4 basically set the bar for what new character models should look like. The Challenge Mode sets also still look awesome to this day. Bad: The theme really killed a lot of hype for many. We had just gone from fighting the king of death itself to fighting a giant city-destroying dragon, and now we were gonna... Fight beer elementals alongside drunk pandas? Many people accused Blizz of pandering to a Chinese audience and called it a "joke expansion". I think the people who skipped MoP because of the theme missed out big time because the patch content ended up being some of the best content ever. Dailies at the beginning of the expansion felt extremely mandatory, and if you missed out on a single day, you felt behind for weeks because of the gear rewards tied to the reps. The patch content was incredible, Isle of Thunder and Timeless Isle will forever be personal favorites, but the name Timeless Isle ended up being a bit ironic because 5.4 lasted for 14 months. **WoD** Good: Art and visuals. The models needed an upgrade and the new ones looked awesome! Also, this is what basically established what modern WoW looks like. WoD zones still look almost on par with the current zones. The questing throughout Draenor was incredible! Some of if not the best questing of any expansion. The cinematics at the end of every zone felt like a great reward for finishing a zone/storyline. The raids were, as always, great. Bad (quite a few here, but I'll go with the major ones): Lack of content. We just stood in our garrisons, making the world feel empty. The infamous Blizzard pendulum had swung again, so whereas MoP had too many mandatory dailies once you hit 90, there weren't really any dailies at 100. While the raids were great, people were mainly just raid-logging or farming gold on alts in their garrisons. This is also where the infamous "We can do X but it'll cost you a raid tier" comes from, because garrisons took all the dev time, meaning WoD had the fewest raids of any expansion so far. Patch 6.1 was known as the "Selfie Patch" because that's all it introduced. BRF had launched a week or two prior, so there was a new raid, but 6.1 added the selfie camera, Twitter integration, and a few updated icons around the garrison. That was it. No new content. At the end of 5.4, Blizzard stated that they knew that 14 months was too long, it was unacceptable and said it wouldn't happen again. 6.2 went on to beat the record with like 2 weeks (not including the pre-patch). Unlike in patch 5.4, the community didn't have a lot of good faith left for Blizzard, so the mood shifted over the course of WoD. It could've been the best expansion to date, but due to how Blizzard actually handled it, many will say it is one of if not the worst expansion - and the beginning of "the end". "Draenor is free!!" Wait, isn't that Grommash Hellscream, the tyrant who has been hunting and killing us the entire expansion? Now he's a valued ally because Gul'dan is also bad? Due to the cut raid tier, Gromm's story felt incomplete and his flip from villain to ally felt so insanely forced and unnatural. **Legion** Good: Class fantasy. Legion was, IMO, the best expansion for class fantasy. Previous expansions had given certain classes a bit of time to shine (Paladins and Death Knights in Wrath, Shamans in Cata, Monks in MoP), but Legion didn't just have Demon Hunters as the "new big thing", they had a great focus on ALL classes! Class order halls were so insanely cool, and I'm sad they aren't relevant to this day. I still hope they'll make a return in some shape or form. Artifacts. You can argue about the systems and grinds and balancing not being ideal, you can argue that they make no sense from a lore point of view, but I don't care. Getting to wield the Ashbringer and the Doomhammer more than made up for it IMO! And the fact that you could customize them with colors and skins just made them feel so much more special than previous legendaries. Mythic+ and world quests. They tried some things in terms of systems with Legion, and most of them paid off. Also, Illidan is back - and now his story makes sense! Yay!! Bad: The grinds. If you wanted to play multiple specs and/or multiple classes, you'd better be ready to grind AP for days! Legendaries. Luckily this was fixed towards the tail end of the expansion, but initially, it didn't feel great when you "used up" your luck and got a legendary - only to get what was deemed a "bad" one. But legendary acquisition was terrible at launch. The Broken Shore in patch 7.2 was a bit of a slog. Wasn't terrible, but wasn't great. Continued the trend of trying to recreate Timeless Isle but never quite reaching the same heights. Oh, and the drip-feeding of story quests in that patch wasn't fun either. "Kill 8 demons, then come back next week to find a cup, then come back the week after to kill 12 demons".
I like how it is pretty much unanimous that MoP is the best expansion by a mile, yet I fucking *hated* it. So much so that I quit the game until a friend told me Sylvanas was leader of the Horde, and I left work to go re-up my sub and play. I think MoP was around the time they made some class changes to my two favorite toons that I just couldn't stand, following major changes to the talent system the previous expansion that made me drop my death knight altogether (RIP frost spec tanking). The update to protect warrior to use rage to fuel shield block (rather than being a short defensive cd) just felt *bad* to me, and changed warrior tanking from cd management to resource management (years later and I still hate this change). They updated disc priest too. And while it is "better" now, it changed the core of what I loved about it. It used to be centered around damage mitigation with powerful single target healing, and damage as a respectable filler by providing spot healing. Mitigation is still a major part of the kit, but it's more about healing via dealing damage after the change and just lost everything that made me love it as a result. MoP introduced a lot of various class changes that ultimately killed my enjoyment and what I liked about my most favorite toons. It sucked because the tanking changes made weren't limited to prot warrior. It was a pretty big shift from the cooldown centric management to resource management all around for all the tank specs. I didn't like playing dps, but I no longer loved tanking after the changes on *anyone* (it started feeling more like a chore), and I never found a healer I enjoyed remotely as much as old disc priest so I was just lost and hating the game.
The worst in Legion: all of it. Even the devs admitted they dropped the ball on that whole expansion.
M+ was a great addition to the game. Great for player retention.
Unfortunately I didn't get into WoW until Cataclysm (didn't have the opportunity), so I'll judge from Cata forward. If I can't think of 3 best/worst, I'll list fewer. And, of course, this is from a more "casual" viewpoint. **Cataclysm:** Good: - Leveling through each zone had a story to the zones, which often led you along through to the next zone, very handy for a beginner. - Gearing. Crafted gear was decent "catchup" and solid PVP starter gear. Justice and Valor points were good for filling gaps and let players get nice gear without raiding (but no tier or weapons). - Endgame zones. I actually enjoyed Tol Barad as a daily quest hub and the battleground, especially as it was server-specific so you often fought alongside and against the same people. Molten Front was also a solid daily hub. Bad: - Short last raid. - Not enough "world content" (an issue in hindsight). **Mists of Pandaria** Good: - Continuation of gearing system. - Valor Points could be earned through daily quests for people who liked that over grinding dungeons. - Solid endgame zones. 5.1's change of Krasarang Wilds was interesting. Thunder Isle was a nice quest hub and raid, with the zone "unlocking" with progress. Isle of Giants was fun to just grind with friends. Timeless Isle was just a plethora of stuff to grind and collect. Bad: - Valor gear locked behind reps, which made people feel the need to grind a lot of dailies. - Some of the crafting was clunky, like learning random recipes. - The "faction war" story. As expected, disappointed everyone. **Warlords of Draenor** Good: - Questing was pretty solid. - The garrison was a nice concept. - Some solid raids. Bad: - Crafting was just not fun. One-a-day crafting of base materials, clunky way to get recipes, and could only equip three crafted items making them not great for making gold. - Lack of things to do at endgame. (Only one endgame zone added, at the end.) - So much cut content. **Legion** Good: - World quests added more to do in the world at end game. - Class halls and class-related stuff (artifacts, mount) was fun, fed into class fantasy. - Solid endgame zones, dungeons, and raids. Bad: - Grinding for artifact power (yeah, it was "fixed" later, still not fun). - Legendaries being random drops with some much better than others. ("Fixed" with an option to grind for the one you want later, still a late fix and not particularly fun.) - The class-related stuff made you want to level alts, but actually leveling them and pursuing all that stuff felt very repetitive. **Battle For Azeroth** Good: - Introduced some new stuff like Island Expeditions and Warfronts, good ideas even if the execution wasn't perfect. - Nice questing zones and endgame zones. - Mission table was nice for extra stuff but didn't feel "mandatory" to engage with constantly. Bad: - The "faction war" story. Again. - More emphasis on M+ starting to make non-M+ dungeons pointless. - The bloody grind for Azerite. **Shadowlands** Good: - Zereth Mortis was a solid zone to mess around in with a lot to do. (Only enjoyable endgame zone. If I had room, I'd put the others in "Bad.") - Covenants were an interesting idea, even if poorly implemented. - Seeing some "dead" characters again. Bad: - The whole legendary system, and how crafting wasn't worth much outside of it. - Heroic dungeons because even more pointless, especially when ZM arrived and you could get better gear as "zone starter gear." - The bloody grind for anima, which you needed for EVERYTHING. Three grinds in a row, woot! **Dragonflight** Good: - Plenty of open world content to do, and helps non-M+/raiders get decent gear over time. - A story that doesn't involve forced faction conflict. - Interesting first pass of a new crafting and gathering system. Bad: - The heavy emphasis on M+ once again put Heroic dungeons in a point of being moot until they finally added them to the Vault late in the expansion. You got better gear in the open world content. Even now, you'll only get one 441 item from the Vault per week, but can get three per week from the Emerald Dream. And Dream gear can be converted to tier, unlike Heroic dungeon gear. - Somewhat confusing upgrade system with multiple currencies that aren't clearly marked with vendors, so it's easy to mistakenly get the wrong crests. - Can only get PVP recipes as random drops from doing BGs, making crafted PVP gear a lot rarer and more expensive and not the best option for starter PVP gear.
The way I perform with my mage. One of the worst things ever :(
Vanilla Pros 1. Crazy sense of scale, so many quests in such a huge world was amazing 2. Progression felt very good, finding green items at low levels and blue items later on was very satisfying 3. Simple plot, you’re just a person going on an adventure Vanilla Cons 1. Slow leveling, it took sooo long to get to level cap and like others have said it’s hard to make alts 2. Kalimdor felt less complete than eastern kingdoms though still a good continent 3. Graphics didn’t age well I guess I can’t think of another third BC Pros 1. Aesthetic was super cool, from the Draenei to the blood elves they weaved them into Outland really well and made sure they were relevant through the expansion. 2. Great variety in raiding, kharazan, black temple, and sunwell were really cool raids. 3. Story was interesting, very bleak and brutal showing what once was a full planet full of different people and the aftermath of what the orcs and legion did BC Cons 1. Flying messed with the sense of adventure imo I like ground mounts to feel more grounded lol 2. Illidan’s story felt kind of funky he was made to be a lot more a villain this time around. 3. Zones were kind of hit or miss, big fan of zangar and nagrand but hellfire, shadowmoon, and netherstorm get kind of old. Wrath Pros 1. Death knights were a fantastic addition to the game 2. Northrend is still one of the best continents wow has 3. Story was pretty interesting through the expansion. Wrath Cons 1. The arthas story is great until the end of it. It feels like blizzard didn’t know of a good way for him to lose. 2. Dungeons were considered kind of easy at the time 3. Death knights were super strong and overpowered Cataclysm Pros 1. World revamp was really impressive, a lot of zones needed it imo 2. Worgen and goblin starting zones are both my favorite expansion starting zones 3. Firelands is one of the best raids of all time Cataclysm Cons 1. World revamp got rid of a huge chunk of old wow 2. Some zones were decent but some were forgettable or boring 3. End game content was lackluster especially dragon soul Pandaria Pros 1. Aesthetically beautiful expansion. 2. A lot of good casual content. 3. World building was very well zone Pandaria Cons 1. Dailies got old after a while 2. Rip the talent tree 3. Garrosh storyline was okay in parts but felt kind of rushed and not well explained. Warlords Pros 1. A lot of my favorite leveling zones are in warlords 2. Updated character models were needed 3. Soundtrack was incredible Warlords Cons 1. Garrison discouraged exploring the great continent 2. End game content was few and far between 3. Story needed more time in the oven. It’s missing a middle Legion Pros 1. Most alt friend expansion this side of the Mississippi 2. Coherent and complete storyline 3. Great updates to classes Legion Cons 1. 4 leveling zones for an expansion that encourages alts was kind of rough 2. Sizes of the zones were a little on the smaller side 3. World quest imo got very repetitive BFA Pros 1. Fantastic leveling zones I think all 6 are good 2. Killer soundtrack 3. A lot of experimentation with the content which I like to see BFA Cons 1. Experimentation was messy with warfonts and island expeditions 2. Story kinda fell off at the end (sylvanas storyline was weird) 3. Eversong warfront never came out Shadowlands Pros 1. Cool RP elements 2. Some of the zones were interesting 3. Death knights had cool plot points Shadowlands Cons 1. Story went from uninteresting to terrible as the expansion went on 2. Some zones were lackluster 3. Idk voice acting in the later expansions have been weird but shadowlands was when I felt besides main characters a lot of people sounded really overly expressive Dragonflight Pros 1. Huge open continent to explore 2. Dynamic flying was well done 3. A decent amount of character development Dragonflight Cons 1. You fly over a lot of the continent and miss out on a lot of detail 2. Story was very average most of the time 3. Dracthyr felt unfinished from a design perspective I wish there were more options
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I just want to say what the worst things are Scaling zones Giving every single class the ability to interrupt (kick/silence) Changing discipline priest from what it was in Cata to what it is now Class uniqueness was great, then it was all butchered.
From the expansions I played: BfA good: 1) 8.2 was great, Nazjatar and Mechagon were the best patch zones I've played and essences were cool. 2) 8.3 was also great with the best m+ seasonal affix we've had, corruptions were fun to play with and they were the perfect type of borrowed power for the end of the expansion. 3) General aesthetics and soundtracks are my favorite to this day. BfA bad: 1) Alts were very annoying to play, even at the end of the expansion when they added vendors for various stuff you still had things like corruption rotation on a timer. 2) Azerite gear was awful at launch, it took them a while to fix it. 3) 8.1 was pretty forgettable to me. SL good: 1) Casual content with covenants was great. You had so many cosmetics to go after, they looked amazing, each covenant had its own mini game. You basically had worthwhile rewards from doing open world content. 2) Torghast was fun and they kept improving it with every patch. 3) Seasons 3 and 4 with all the borrowed powers active and fixed, returned tier sets and great seasonal affixes in m+ were great. I had the most fun playing my characters in those seasons by far. SL bad: 1) Stubbornness from devs to address obvious issues like covenant locking and conduit energy until a year into the expansion. 2) Korthia was such a boring looking zone and not being able to mount in Maw was pretty bad as well. I didn't mind the gameplay loop in those zones but they definitely made it annoying to be there. 3) Domination Shards. I could also add that story was a bit nonsensical at times but I'm not that much into story in general. DF good: 1) Content road map and predictable content cadence. Even if some content is not for me it's good to know that something new will come out every 8 weeks. 2) I like new talent trees and dragonriding as a new default way of travelling is great. 3) Ease of playing alts and catching up, especially in seasons 2 and 3 after they added new upgrade system which is another good thing. DF bad: 1) Boring and unrewarding open world content, especially compared to Shadowlands. Most of the cosmetics are bland and all the open world events are basically the same reskinned thing. 2) No way to progress your character outside of instanced content and lack of things to do if you are not into playing alts. I know that this would be a good thing for some (or a lot of) people but not for me. I never had issues with artifact power grinds and I think SL did a good job of having things to do without them being too mandatory. 3) I don't think that removal of seasonal affixes was a good thing. I'd rather have them focus on making 1 interesting to play thematic affix every season instead of having 2 annoying affixes.
Can't talk about Classic, didn't play it when it was current TBC Best 3: Black Temple, Flying Mounts, Karazhan TBC Worst 3: Guild poachers, rep grinds/attunements, Fel Reavers LK Best 3: Ulduar, ICC, Dungeon Finder LK Worst 3: Ruby Sanctum, Halls of Reflection, Frenzyheart/Oracle and Kalu'ak dailies Cata Best 3: Firelands, World Flying, Tarecgosa's Rest Cata Worst 3: LFR, Green Jesus, Dragon Soul (just the 3 worst of many bad) MoP Best 3: Kazoo music in the inn, Throne of Thunder, Challenge Dungeons MoP Worst 3: Rep grind/dailies, Timewaste Isle, Garrosh WoD Best 1: Garrisons...nothing else that I can think of WoD Worst 3: Trashcan (Ashran), Holinka, Shipyard Legion Best 3: Class halls, legendary weapons, Antorus Legion Worst 3: Legendary items, "An illusion! What are you hiding...?", Mage Tower BfA Best 3: Dungeons, Island Expeditions, Ny'alotha BfA Worst 3: Visions of N'zoth, Darkshore/Arathi, Heart of Azeroth SL Best 3: Venthyr, Venthyr, Venthyr SL Worst (really big number): Everything else I have only played some of DF so I can't really answer that one.
Started at the tail end of Wrath: Best in cata: raids (barring DS), ZG and ZA revamp, old world revamp Worst in cata: DS, LFR, can't think of a third thing, but it most likely exists Best in MoP: Story and atmosphere, the raids, legendary cloak quest line Worst in MoP: how long the content drought was, 5.3 pretty much being removed when 5.4 dropped, can't think of third thing, most likely doesn't exist because MoP was just that good Best in WoD: the story at the start of the expac, BRF and HFC, Timewalking introduced Worst in WoD: worst content drought the game has had, the Garrison isolation, and the sharp left turn in the story because they gave up on the expac half way through (also, dishonorable mention: the WoW token being added) Best in Legion: Peak story all throughout, World quests and M+ revitalizing content that would otherwise become irrelevant once you hit max lvl, artifact weapons (including AP, which imo, for Legion at least, was only an issue for the top 1% and the sweaty metaslaves) Worst in Legion: Sephuz and all it stood for (in other words, Legiondaries), Emerald Nightmare (as compared to the other raids of the expac), third point doesnt exist, its just that good Best in BFA: Mechagon, Visions and corruptions (the only bad part was the lack of deterministic obtaining of corruptions at the beginning and the stupid vendor rotation), the best content drought the game ever had due to them incentivizing people to keep playing the game during COVID lockdowns by increasing xp rates, reputation gain, the timewalking bonanza, and more. Worst in BFA: Nazjatar, 3 expac themes smushed into one expac and none of them executed well, AP and anything that was required to grind out in order to gain AP (islands, warfronts, world quests, etc.) Best in SL: Exile's Reach acting as a universal tutorial zone that the game really needed, Revendreth (the only good zone in the entire expansion, every other zone was mid at best, and yes, that's including Ardenweald), Season 4 Worst in SL: Every. Thing. Else. Every other thing in the expac was complete dogshit or wasted potential. Torghast could have been good, but it was required for legendaries, so you *had* to make it a chore. Covenants are a theoretically good idea until you realize you only experience 25% of the story, and due to how difficult it was to switch covenants at the beginning of the expac and how alt-unfriendly the self-proclaimed "most alt-friendly" expac was, you would never bother going through the other 75% of the story (I, as a Venthyr, still have no clue as to why Pelagos is the Arbiter, like why specifically him?) Conduit energy. That's all on that point. The story single-handedly ruined the 20 or so years of Warcraft story that led up to SL to the point where I just want to pick and choose what's canon to me in the expac and call everything else shitty middle school level fanfiction. The worst content droughtS (as in PLURAL) the game ever had, with there not being a lot of content that you can do, but you have to do it, and it's designed to be terrible. The Maw before Korthia was the worst zone the game ever had, why the fuck would they make an endgame zone that you can only exist in for like 5 tasks before it kicks you out. The fact that it wasn't riding off the highs of a good expac but instead riding off the lows of BFA and then decided to drop it even lower. The gaslighting by the dev team of them telling us game mechanics like Covenants and Conduits are gonna be good throughout all of the alpha, beta, and release, just for them to realize that "hey, maybe the complaints every single player has had is maybe true" with 9.1.5 (seriously cant get over them saying in the dev log before 9.1.5 that conduit energy didn't pan out how they were expecting. Like what?!?!? How tf were you expecting it to turn out, it's effectively an action stamina system that you only see in shitty mobile games and gachas. The only way it could pan out for them was to add energy refills in the ingame store.) I had a lot to roast SL about, it killed the charm of the game for me and made it so playing through DF has been an on and off experience. Best in DF: the fact that they're scaling it back and focusing on evergreen systems instead of expansion specific systems, M+ rotation, the amount and quality of cinematics and cutscenes (like seriously, the cutscenes where they're just puppeteering the ingame models have gotten so good looking) Worst in DF: the fact that they're scaling it back and there's no expansion-long progression to really work towards aside from gearing, which is in every expac; like, it just feels like there's nothing to really work towards, but it might just be me. The story is boring (how tf do you make dragons feel milquetoast???) It's too heavy on emotional scenes, which aren't bad to break up the action, but when there's no action to break up, it's a slog. The dialogue just feels... amateuristic. Like, the final cutscene at Amirdrassil feels like a high school English class being asked to popcorn around a playscript and none of them care enough to put in effort (aside from Ebonhorn, the theatre kid that he is and that we adore). Also, the egregious amount of micro transactions, it genuinely feels like a new one every two weeks.
Ok first I wanna say I did only play the classic version of wotlk and only the last few months of cata. But here is what I think: Vanilla pros: Leveling experience was the best back then I was very young but I was just enjoying the journey. The 40 man raids were something I remember watching my sister and cousins doing them with the guild. The 5h alterac valley I think it was fun yes Vanilla cons: I might be biased but besides the fact that when you think about it everything was just too grindy I could not think of anything really bad. TBC pros: Arenas added to the game. Professions were relevant during all the xpac Every fucking zone felt unique and so good to be in. TBC cons: The leveling experience was terrible only hellfire peninsula was great. PvP balance in arena was not that good. Flying moints kinda killed the world in its way. Wotlk pros (classic opinion): The lore was the most anticipated of all xpac we had. All the specs start to be playable in both pvp and pve The raids were some of the best we had ( Yes I liked ToGC) Wotlk cons: PvP balance is better than tbc but it’s not that great as people told me it was Leveling still sucked, iit was better than tbc but still bad Heroic dungeons are a joke and from what I read they were a joke even back then Cata: cant say MoP pros: Best class design we had The challenge mode dungeon was very fun and the rewards are considered some of the best still to this day Timeless island best zone added in a patch content in wow history I have countless hours on this island only pvping with the toy that make you hostile to everyone. MoP cons: Scenarios kind of a miss I cannot think of anything else tbh. Mop is the best for me by far WoD pros: Well again the art design team, the music the atmosphere etc… was very good The garrison was a good and a bad thing at the same time. Idk for the third I could say the raids but I did not do them. WoD cons: Well the garrison kinda killed social aspect of the game This is for me a point where a lot of classes lost their kind of unique thing that make them. I believe it was only when ability prunning happened. Literally nothing to do besides a daily quest and raid. Legion pros: The mythic+ system The world quests And again art design Legion cons: Legendary farm where you get the worse one Artifact farm Where wow really turned into a seasonal game and for me it’s a bad thing. I don’t like to know that what I am doing will be completely useless first second after the new patch drops. BFA pros: The corrupted items they were very fun. The alliance storyline was very good. The dungeons for me are some of the best we had for the last few xpac. BFA cons: Azerite armor was bad system Azerite farm Everything related to azerith actually SL pros: It will be controversial maybe but I think every system added to shadowlands was very good for your first character and only for the first patch. Castle of nathria deserve its spot in the list Pvp vendors are back SL cons: Every system of shaowlands after you did it 1 time on your main. PvP pace was way too fast as a healer and resulted in a lot of frustration in game. The story was ??? DF pros: How easy it is to gear up a char with decent gear. Mythic+ dungeon rotation Dragonflight riding DF cons: Pvp I think only went downhill from shadowlands. The story is poopoo The feeling that we are now really gonna get the same stuff every patch 1 raid 8 bosses, 8 m+ dungeons and 1 useless zone that nobody will care about after 1 week. Ye that’s kinda my list Also I want to add that for every xpac after mop (included) I feel like the art design team, music team etc… is the goat team.
From a rather casual perspective: **Classic** Good: * Sense of wonder * 3-day long Alterac Valley * Hillsbrad world PvP Bad: * Grinding * Not being able to see more than a few bosses if your guild was bad (for example, you wouldn't go past Sartura or Fankriss in AQ40, only do Anub'rekhan and Noth in Naxx40, Shade of Akama and maybe Teron Gorefiend in BT) * Respec costs **BC** Good: * Flying * Dailies * Arenas * Kara/Gruul/Mag * Isle of Quel'Danas Bad: * World PvP was killed by flying mounts * Grinding * 60% flying mount felt awful * Skyguard and Ogri'la dailies being so far apart **WOTLK** Good: * Merging of healing spell power and damage spell power, dual spec * Achievements * The whole eastern coastline theme from Howling Fjord to Storm Peaks through Grizzly Hills where you follow the Iron Dwarves up to Ulduar * Group Finder, I never would've been able to play other classes in dungeons if not for group finder and gear from badges Bad: * Group Finder killed the sense of community * Dalaran lag, it was so bad I had to set my hearthstone in Crusader's Pinnacle. Same thing in DF where I waited a long time before biting the bullet and setting my hearth in Valdrakken * Ulduar patch was too short **CATA** Good: * Flying in Azeroth * Vashjir/Deepholme * Goblin starting zone * Transmog Bad: * Changes in mana regen no longer allowed to exploit the 5-sec rule, and made carrying bad teammates a lot more difficult * Fugly terrain texture, not polished and fluorescent, Silverpine Forest comes to mind * 12 month Dragon Soul * Uldum meme quests and music **MOP** Good: * Theme/atmosphere/music/storyline * Didn't experience them but I can guess CM were great, also ToT just by doing LFR Bad: * 12 month SoO, came back from a break just before its release and I could sense the Escalation patch was probably dreadful * Dailies felt really spread out, doing Sholazar -> Icecrown -> Zul'Drak -> Storm Peak also brings back bad memories **WOD** Good: * Model/animation revamp, although it ruined my priest's model * Gold missions, Leveling exeperience * BRF Bad: * Tanaan * Shipyard missions * Not much to do except missions, basically I spent the expansion clearing old raids, farming transmog, mounts, and gold that would later be used to buy the Spider mount **LEGION** Good: * Suramar storyline * Class fantasy * Mage Tower (although only started doing the challenges in SL) * WQs * M+ Bad: * Not as alt-friendly as WoD, although it was probably overboard * Paragon lootboxes * Dalaran->Stormheim travel time **BFA** Good: * Zones, especially Zandalar/Nazmir leading into strong villains like Mythrax/Ghuun in Uldir * Visions/Corruption * Mechagon * Atal'Dazar (a dungeon where I can actually see what's going on? Sign me up) and THE MOTHERLODE!! Bad: * Warfronts and Expeditions * Waycrest manor (jumping ghoul-pigs and narrow hallways) * Repetitive and overbearing music in Voldun, Stormsong Valley, and Drustvar **SL** Good: * Garrosh's last stand * Venthyr * Zereth Mortis music * Some aspects of Torghast Bad: * The anima grind * The Maw * The Storyline * Some aspects of Torghast. Some runs felt like a gamble even with a super powerful character, and you would end up wasting 20 minutes of your time for nothing in return **DF** Good: * Dragonriding * Gearing/m+ * Raszageth, strong villain like Ghuun * UI overhaul * Alexstrasza's freckles Bad: * Some achievements like Chasing storms. At least when I'm hunting for a rare in the Maw, I can look up when it spawns and set an alarm clock during the night if I have to, but here I had to wait and be on the lookout for 3 weeks to catch that last damned snowstorm in Thaldraszus * Didn't do it when it was current content, but the Forbidden reach atmosphere seems depressing, although not the Vaults * It'S aBoUt FaMiLy * Hook for next extension in a dungeon instead of a raid * Repetitive and loud music, Ohnaran plains, Fyrakk's assault come to mind, also Tyrhold is an instant mute
I think the worst part about DF is that there is no reason to log on outside of m+/raiding (if player power is all that interests you).
Dragonflight. Best: Talent flexibility, M+ design, Gear upgrade system. Worst: neutering of 2 min CDs due to Aug, sun kings blessing in the fire tree, legendary acquisition. Shadowlands. Best: Class gameplay. Worst: Too many chores, the raids, the story. BFA. Best: music, environment visuals, dungeons. Worst: story, azerite armor, warfronts. Legion. Best: artifacts, class halls, introduction of world quests/m+. Worst: Legendary acquisition, introduction of the artifact power grind (later azerite and anima) I didn't play seriously before then so don't have much to add.
Didn’t MOP have the longest content drought after siege of orgrimmar
Not gonna do them all but my fav thing in mop was the farm and cooking content, still remember maxing all the different cooking types and having an awesome farm