Came back, grabbed my Elite set, and uninstalled. Canceled my sub on the spot.
Yeah, Retribution is strong in PvP right now — but the game itself? It’s just… meh. A shadow of what it used to be. Retail looks more like some Chinese mobile clone than the WoW that made the MMO genre legendary. And let’s be real: if you stripped out Classic, Retail would be sitting below Warlords of Draenor’s numbers after a full year of zero content.
The game is a mess.
Class design is so horrendous you’ve literally had to invent one-button macros to keep specs functional.
The gearing system is still the same treadmill disaster it’s always been.
Yet another “weekly legendary” shoved in just to keep people logging in and chasing borrowed power.
And lore? You’ve straight-up lifted from Silver Surfer and Galactus.
I don’t like wishing people out of jobs, but Blizzard desperately needs change at the top. Whether it’s management or the design leads calling the shots — this direction is killing the game.
I’ll check out Midnight when it’s revealed. But right now? WoW feels like its diseased.
Well… None of the original Blizzard developers still work there. They all left under Activision. It’s only natural that the game is developing in a direction that no one who fell in love with the old WoW wants.
The name is Blizzard, but there isn’t Blizzard inside. But that should have been clear to everyone for a long time.
The OP might not have explained it in much detail and didn’t propose specific solutions, but he’s right. The game becomes worse with every expansion in many ways. Not in all of them - I like some new mounts and sets, undermine is kinda fun, new zone and raid look pretty, and I’ll even go as far as to say that I love legendaries/artifacts so I even kinda like the cloak. But the game still moves from the best MMORPG that people loved all these years towards something completely different.
I said I liked legendaries and artifacts before. Well, I like when they are interesting and powerful enough to last longer than a couple of months. Now, every gear piece lasts a single raid and gets vendored. Sure, it’s been similar to that for a long time now, but you really shouldn’t double your stats by changing the gear from one raid to the gear of the next one. 610 to 710 is more than +10M HP if I’m not mistaken, with the fresh 80 having what, 1.5M? This is not normal at all.
The classes are all bloated. Having multiple blinks, sprints and CCs for every spec might be useful in M+, but in PvP it became absolutely horrible for everyone. Because of that, rogues, for example, completely lost their identity. Combined with being absolutely neglected in terms of meaningful class design, that led to the fact that rogue is now literally the least played class after evoker. But evoker was released 18 years after rogue! Btw, if you’re interested in a more detailed explanation about what happened to rogues, you can read it here: Why rogue is the least played class.
There’s no Alliance vs Horde at all. The Forsaken are helping Gilneans - are you out of your mind? Forsaken as a race basically gets destroyed more and more with every patch, cause they were evil sometimes. Can’t have that now, apparently. I don’t even remember when was the last time they added undead NPCs. It’s the game of round corners now. My char can’t do anything if his mouth gets wet. Even the mage guy got all depressed. If it’s the world of something, that something is definitely not Warcraft.
They won’t change anything.
People quitting every day and what they do about it? They release some cash mount / transmog or pet so they can regain the lost money but this time they get the 3x amount of money.
They don’t bother about their sub numbers going down.
Example is the AH mount they put every third player you see have it and that mount costed triple the monthly fee.
And they will put some shiny things that people will buy.
There will be always people that will stick to the game and swipe their credit cards for every new cash thing.
It all started with that damn celestial steed. Even if this mount grants a lot of convenience, players who bought it for real money are still responsible for the current state of affairs you mentioned. I’m actually a bit surprised so many people have that mount. I’ve never spent more than 30k gold on a mount, don’t even have the transmog one, even though I have the gold now. I assume quite a lot of people actually bought this AH one for gold though, by selling tokens or however they do it.
Still, I agree with the paladin below quoted message - they can’t ignore this problem forever. I mean, they can probably transform it completely into one of those full blown p2w abominations and maybe it will net even more money. But by that time not a single member of this thread (and 99% of other threads) will care, I believe. And it will probably affect their other IPs as well. Besides, they will have to compete with other p2w abominations and it’s uncertain if they would be able to come out on top.
I don’t want to abandon the character I’ve invested 20 years into just to play a watered-down version of it, running through content I’ve already played thousands of times.
And this isn’t just my opinion—it’s reflected in the numbers. Achievement trackers show fewer and fewer players completing seasonal milestones. For example, War Within Season 1 PvP participation was lower than Shadowlands Season 4, which is widely considered the worst patch in WoW’s history. PvE is also struggling—if it weren’t, Blizzard wouldn’t have needed to introduce “one-button rotations” just to keep people engaged.
Yes, some changes have been good. But the overall direction of WoW since Legion has been steadily lowering subscriptions and success. People often excuse this by saying “well, it’s an old game.” No, it isn’t. WoW isn’t a static 20-year-old title—it’s a live service that releases a brand-new expansion every two years. The problem isn’t age. The problem is Blizzard keeps changing the game into something it was never meant to be.
If you stripped all legacy content from retail WoW, its playerbase would collapse. Many of us only return because of the time we’ve invested in our characters, hoping to recapture the feeling of what WoW once was. Classic players, by contrast, are happy to start fresh because Classic feels more like real WoW. I’d even wager that if Blizzard released a retail expansion on par with Cataclysm—then launched Cataclysm Classic—more players would stick with retail, because it builds on their existing progress. The fact that players are abandoning retail for Classic says everything about where the real issue lies.
Blizzard once said, “You think you want Classic, but you don’t.” That might have been true back then, but years of missteps proved otherwise. Just look at the record:
Mists of Pandaria (MoP): Rocky launch. Shifting from demons, undead, and dragons to pandas felt disconnected from Warcraft’s roots and catered heavily to the Asian market—which quickly dropped off. It only recovered when the focus returned to Old Gods and Garrosh.
Warlords of Draenor (WoD): Garrisons weren’t ready, but the real killer was cutting a full year of content to prepare Legion. Subscriptions plummeted from ~10M to 5.6M.
Legion: The last major “success,” but inflated—just the WoD refugees returning. Its Artifact system set the stage for endless “borrowed power,” and when it was removed, the game’s foundation crumbled.
Battle for Azeroth (BFA): A disaster. Removing Artifacts and layering multiple borrowed power systems gutted both PvP and PvE.
Shadowlands: Worse still. More borrowed power, locked choices, and lore retcons that broke the story.
Dragonflight: Touted as a return to form, but realistically a filler expansion. Without Classic realms, its population would be less than 50% of WoD’s dead year. It might of stitched some of the bleeding, but didn’t fully heal the game.
The War Within: Essentially Dragonflight 2.0—more farming, more power creep, weaker lore.
You may enjoy The War Within. But the truth is, the majority of players don’t. Many are only still around because they’re holding out hope that WoW might one day return to its prime. Realistically, that won’t happen until after the Worldsoul Saga.
And looking ahead? Midnight will be overshadowed by MoP Classic. If Blizzard delivers a functional WoD—with modern tech and actual content—Midnight won’t stand a chance. Then The Last Titan will have to compete directly with Legion Classic… and we all know how that matchup ends.
I would even go so far as to say that if they released an expansion that would play like anything before BfA but would have a writing at least on the level of BfA or earlier, far more people would play retail, than whatever classic servers would be there at the same time.
The biggest issue with modern WoW is that Blizzard seems to think complexity automatically equals good design, and “more” always equals fun.
Class design is at its lowest point ever, to the point where most content feels outright toxic. Rotations have devolved into mindless one-button spam or relying on rotation-helper —driven by endless stacking modifiers, bloated keybinds, and borrowed power interactions that make real gameplay feel secondary.
PvP is no better. Every class now has more mobility and crowd control than ever before. What’s absurd is that Blizzard once pruned abilities in WoD and Legion because MoP made classes feel too similar. Yet in The War Within, Ion admitted borrowed power was introduced to avoid homogenization and power creep… even though classes now are more overloaded with modifiers, CC, and mobility than MoP ever was.
Gearing has been meaningless for years. Every season wipes progress clean, instantly invalidating your old gear. There’s no sense of growth or permanence—just another treadmill that burns players out.
And then there’s the lore. Since Legion, the story has been rewritten patch by patch to fit marketing beats instead of consistency. The Titans knew everything—until suddenly they didn’t. Then the Eternal Ones appeared as their counterparts, only to be reduced to creations of the First Ones. Then the First Ones became a higher cosmic force… until even that was twisted again. It no longer feels like cohesive Warcraft lore—it’s a patchwork of retcons that reads like bad fanfiction.
Unless Blizzard introduces major pruning and course correction in Midnight or The Last Titan, WoW will remain a bloated mess—stacked modifiers, treadmill gearing, autoplay rotations, and lore that contradicts itself every expansion.
Instead of fighting addons and designing one-button rotations as a byproduct of failed systems, maybe it’s time to step back and do the basics right: deliver consistent lore and meaningful gameplay.
I remember MoP was very complex - I remember I had all default blizz panels on and couldn’t fit multiple of my keybinds on a rogue, warlock and warrior, even without arena123 stuff, so I used addons for panels. And char macros were full on all three, so I had to use the shared tab for char specific macros. Yet it still felt miles better than shadowlands and everything after. I think it was much smoother transition from cata in terms of buttons as well - most classes just got a couple more buttons, some lost, everything else was passive. Despite complete talent overhaul, it was simple and there weren’t too much variation either, usually you picked a cc, a gap closer, a burst, a defensive and two passives in talents for every class (and I believe they were per class, not per spec). Yet the choices were meaningful enough to switch certain talents for specific bosses. I think one of the main reasons is the game was slower overall. It was designed for quite slower pace of combat, a bit slower reaction, etc.
Maybe I just played a lot of MoP so for me it felt ok, not sure)
