🩸 The definitive expansion tier list

Community General Discussion
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Greetings, forum enjoyers.

Dragonflight has been out long enough for me to compare it with its predecessors.
In this thread, you will find the definitive expansion tier list.

My opinions, as many of you are aware, are the closest thing to the Truth that mankind has ever known.
Feel free to argue in the comments if you disagree, but while you do so, please be aware that you are factually incorrect.

Here’s the list:

S tier - Great expansions. The best. Peak World of Warcraft.

Summary

Warlords of Draenor - Its greatest strength is that it’s the game’s most modern expansion to predate the ability pruning from Legion. Peak music, great raids, updated character models, amazing PvP and PvP gearing, and extremely alt friendly.

Cataclysm - This expansion is carried to the S tier thanks purely to its class design. It features the best iteration of several specializations, such as Marksmanship Hunter, Affliction Warlock, Subtelety Rogue or Fire Mage.
It succeeded in modernizing the combat, but it wasn’t as bloated as MoP, or as generous with mobility as the most recent expansions.
Cataclysm’s Heroic dungeons were also fantastic and brought some much needed challenge to a game mode that’s always suffered from being too easy and boring.

A tier - Great expansions. Not the best, but very close.

Summary

Dragonflight - It’s WoD, except the story is tame and boring, and it suffers from Legion’s catastrophic class design. The flaws hold it back from being S tier, but it’s still great overall since it did away with most of what was wrong with modern WoW.

MoP - Fantastic expansion, there’s no much explaining to do here. It’s a pretty popular opinion and I won’t have a hard time to convince you.

B tier - Pretty good expansions. Tolerable. Definitely okay.

Summary

Shadowlands - A very flawed expansion. But let’s not forget what it did great.
It was the first expansion since MoP to add spells and class mechanics to the game instead of removing them.
It reintroduced PvP vendors.
It still had borrowed powers, but less than BFA.
There were a lot of bad decisions, but those decisions only hurt Shadowlands, and not the game itself in the long run, so I can forgive them.
All in all, I didn’t hate Shadowlands, nor did I especially like it. It was pretty meh. A solid B tier contender.

WOTLK - I enjoyed the theme, the lore and the atmosphere like everybody else. But old WoW is old WoW, and it didn’t age well from a gameplay standpoint.
You’re all here on retail rather than on WOTLK Classic, and there’s a reason for that.
It was great for its time, but it’s not great by modern day standards.

C tier It’s not very good.

Summary

TBC - I won’t be too harsh with it.
The only reason it’s so low on this tier list is because I’m judging it by modern day standards, just like WOTLK. It just doesn’t hold up. And it makes sense, it was Blizzard’s first expansion, and it was nearly two decades ago.
It’s not a bad expansion. Just a very outdated one. I would never play this today.

Garbage tier - Expansions so bad they actually hurt the game in the long run

Summary

Legion - It saddens me that BFA exists, because I have it to rank it lower than Legion. I wish I didn’t have to, because Legion is the expansion I hate the most.
It introduced everything you hated in BFA and Shadowlands: the borrowed power grind, AP, being unable to play alts. Cherry on top, it deleted PvP vendors from the game.
But Legion’s most unforgivable mistake will forever be the ability pruning. Most classes nowadays are only shadows of their former selves. Everything has been dumbed down to oblivion and oversimplified. Interesting and intricate class mechanics are gone forever, and many specializations feel bland and one dimensional as a result.
No other expansion has hurt the game so much in the long run.
Legion was truly a vile expansion.

BFA - Legion’s incestuous, deformed child. It took everything wrong with Legion, and made it worse.
More pruning, more dumbing down of class design, more borrowed powers. It also removed Legion’s only good idea, the PvP templates, and forced PvP players to spam M+ for gear since there was no PvP gear vendor.
Then came the nail in the coffin: corrupted gear.
I completely skipped this one, and I was right to do so. Without a doubt, WoW’s darkest times.

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S-tier thread.

I advise you change the formatting so people will actually read what you wrote. Because your prose deserves to be enjoyed by all here.

Good luck have fun.

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Thanks.

I thought the formatting was actually better, since it prevents people from being scared away by a massive wall of text.
I think it’s more approachable this way.

Thanks for reading the whole of it, though.

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Finally a person with an ego bigger than Roger Waters lol - joking aside, here is my personal opinion, just swap MoP and WoD around and its bang on

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I understand where this comes from, but I still think WoD was superior.
PvP gearing alone is a major factor, but let’s not forget that while MoP’s class design was enjoyable, it created some memorable atrocities.

Do you remember Rogues’ Burst of Speed? Or Shuriken toss auto-attacks?
Warriors’ second wind? BM hunter’s stampede?

These had to go.

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WoD could have been amazing if it wasnt for all the cut out content - the only time i unsubbed, and returned for Legion

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same WoD overrated.
Wotlk underrated too, wow was at its height back then in sub space.

I unsubbed for cata too since we went from killing dragons to alien space

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But Legion didn’t have a GCD for Soothing Mist, it can’t be that bad.

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Open thread, check ‘garbage tier’: see Legion.

Yeah, not going to take this serious. Is it Friday already?

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A tier ?

U lost me there, i cant even continue rest .

Rewamped talents are nice and they added some ilusion of choice but thats it .

4 mounts with new flying which is more and more annoying the longer you use it , as a part of main content and selling point is realy a low standard . For most content this doesnt even matter.

Yes, they made some nice looking zones, added some nice music and whatnot, but this is just a niche for most . Wow is rpg and that revolves around content . Some do open world stuff and they are happy for this, but for rest that sits in pvp, dungs or raids most of the time this is useles.

What people actualy care about is class balance( but this is “bad” in every expansion so… ) how finished the product is , tons of bugs since alpha till now still in game . Stuff like SS fiesta with leavers , completly unbalanced m+ dungeons, or pure fact that in S1 we get half of recycled content. Quite bad launch, and tons of issues with servers, stability and stutters which affects some till now . Random group disbands during dungeon etc etc … huge class balance changes mid patch …

Dont even let me started with their changes to loot, and timegating which even they themselves admited was a bad move in SL and then made exactly same mistake in DF.

So yea… game is nice, but far from A tier.

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Strong disagree. I enjoy it more now then I did when it first released. Recently started levelling an alt and the old flying just feels depressing now.

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Lmao, WoD S-tier.
I’ve read enough :stuck_out_tongue:
Seems people forgot how little to no content outside raiding WoD had, not to mention the amazing selfie cam patch that was released as “content”.

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Are you sure you want to talk about Legion Mistweaver?

Because Legion:

  • Turned Soothing Mist into a passive ability
  • Removed Chi
  • Removed Stances
  • Removed nimble brew
  • Removed our interrupt
  • Removed touch of death
  • Remove our class buff

What Legion did to Mistweaver is far worse than adding a GCD to Soothing Mist.

Only PvE players need content, because PvE is boring and they get tired of it really quickly.
PvP players have been enjoying the game on the same 3 maps for 18 years, because PvP is inherently fun.

I couldn’t care less about WoD’s lack of content because it was extremely alt friendly, didn’t require any PvE to perform well in PvP, and have much better class design than all the post-Legion expansions.

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Greetings Rompuche,

Totally agree on the S-tier!

I’d swap Shadowlands into A-tier and Legion into B-tier.
Since Dragonflight is basicly a mix off shadowlands and MoP they should be ranked toghetter.

Rest off the xpacks I don’t really cared about.
Wotlk and vanilla is a deff D-tier for me, so boring…

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Terrible list.

Flagged for trolling

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sorry but this is impossible.

on topic - sincerely op i disagree with many of your ideas.

s tier. i can speak just about cata. dungeons were just hard and not fun. about classes i remember my mage (arcane at that time) with pain. i switched to fire and it was better…
The problem with cata wasnt, like many say, the revamp of the world; but the bad revamp. no imagination at all. an egyptian theme zone? really? or CSI westfall?
They had courage with vashjir but it wasnt my cup of tea.
Gilneas was good but it languish forgotten since there.

B tier - sl for me (except torghast and minigames) its the evil incarnate of wow. terrible terrible. no fun no fun
wotlk - it was a very fun exp but IMHO aged badly. here i agree.

c tier - i loved TBC and i think it aged better than wotld. only flaw was the butchering of his majesty KT. good story and fun dungeons\raid.

last tier - legion. i loved legion with class halls. for people who never aimed the top alts were playable (expecially in the 2nd half).
Pruning was requested by a good chunk of playerbase. And sincerely i agree. its a game, not a thing you require an instruction manual to be played.

but here i think it depends by your POV

BFA? is better now (zones are beautiful) than back in time. i dont think is worse than that garbage of SL.

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S - WotLK
A - Dragonflight, Legion
B - WoD, Cata, BFA
C - Shadowlands
Garb. - I think looking back I wouldn’t say there was a complete garbage expansion even if some felt that way at some point.

I omitted MoP and TBC as I wasn’t playing during those.

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My tier list is rather subjective. I had certain memories but recent experience has updated them:
BC > MoP, Classic > WoD alliance > Cata > WLK

I didn’t play anything past WoD, I played Azsuna and I didn’t connect, but I shall not judge quickly.

While BC is basic in many aspects, I still love its dark ambient atmosphere. Questing is great using retail updates (soloable except a few missed ones that nobody does), while I had tons of fun with the leveling dungeons now. I’m super sad it’s removed in favor of WLK, not even an era realm remaining.

MoP is nice to immerse in, while I love the purity of Classic. I even recreated some characters and took them to majestic level 14. Seriously though, the lack of buttons in Classic, aside from being manageable, creates a challenge that requires awareness. Also zone and thematic variety is great.

WoD is nice now, I think I enjoy every zone now, except the orc one. Had a daily there, brr. Not a fan of the mission table but it’s just a minigame now.
I didn’t like the orc garrison, and the orc starting zone is bland. I like winter, but ideally with forests involved. Also the music is disturbing-upsetting.
This was the first time where I clearly felt that horde equals orc and alliance equals human, no one else matters. Being a night and blood elf main, it didn’t sell well, including thematically.

Cata is a spectrum. Some zones I loved, I didn’t like changes to many, there was too much upheaval. Would be fine in a scenario, calming the storms, enduring a volcano, but it destroyed many (all) of the lovely, peaceful zones in favor of action, action, action!

WLK was something I loved for a long time, I also love nordic areas and themes, for a long time I would ping-pong between this and Skyrim. However, playing it now it doesn’t induce those fond feelings I expected, and its mechanics favor rush and gatekeeping.

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Expansion that is notoriously known for having zero content S tier in your book? Interesting. I personally would put WoD next to BFA and SL in → :wastebasket:. On the positive note PvP was way better compared to that 2.

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Cant move for tier lists in the 2020s, dont know how people survived before.

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