Rightly so, the game’s tried to keep people on an everlasting loot treadmill that got worse come Legion.
Sure, you got the heroic item. But did you get the heroic WARFORGED item? No? Then try again, you don’t have the best item.
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No such thing as lore books. Everything is in game.
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I’ll add that Legion already felt like inferior iterations for some classes. (RIP beastmaster for me, TBC-WoD main.)
If anything Cataclysm is still getting some pretty undeserved hate imo. The only raid I thought was bad was Dragon Soul (and all these years later it still is). Bastion of Twilight was good, Descent was meh and Firelands was great. The direction they took dungeons in was also a good change, but that got panned and was changed to the point heroic dungeons aren’t even worth doing anymore. I’m not even sure why they exist aside from making it take longer to access mythics at the start of an expansion.
Instead of just having BIG DAMAGE to up the difficulty, dungeons felt more like solving puzzles with knowing what to stun and what to focus. Cata dungeons made it so decently challenging content was readily available even to casual players, which has been sorely lacking since. Instead of abandoning the idea they should’ve just tried to flesh it out a bit more, but here we are, with the non-raid challenges being reliant on timers more than anything. Time-based difficulties suck.
That said, I overall agree with your point, at least regarding MoP (I can’t speak for Wrath since that’s when I started and it’s not like I read any forums as a wee lad lol). I remember people hating MoP from the start, complaining about “kung fu panda”, scenarios being a thing, the dailies and the new talent system. It was only when we got 5.2 that people’s opinions seemed to change (or maybe everyone that disliked those things had quit by then)
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And Blackwing Descent, your mileage may vary depending on whether you were raiding 10 or 25 man.
I personally have only good memories from Cataclysm (other than working my butt off in raids and still being told it’s not good enough) but that may only be because I was young and naive.
It’s also the time I tipped my toes in RP for the first time, so maybe that took my eyes away from the dumpster fire?
So the LFD thing was really well received at the time, and didn’t really get negative attention until towards the end of the expansion when WotLK fatigue was setting in and people started noticing the effects of grouping for dungeons being automatic.
The Naxx rehash being disgustingly easy was only really a problem for a smaller percentage of the playerbase, near enough everyone else was happy with the expansion, particularly the setting being mega hype.
That said, every expansion experiences dips in popularity and when Cata came around people were bemoaning how bad WotLK (me included) was because they’d just spent 2 years playing it. Burning Crusade had the same issue.
MoP was definitely not super well received at launch though, despite being a pretty good expansion. But MoP is mainly viewed as a good expansion because of what came after and now realising that class design really peaked then for the most part and has only gone downhill since.
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WoTLK was definitely when “welfare epic” was coined, and it was not entirely unfounded.
I remember welfare epic was being thrown around as early as Burning Crusade when you could get decked out in epics from PvP. But yeah WotLK started the trend of handing them out like candy.
For me my biggest overriding memory of WotLK was that suddenly tanking wasn’t an absolute chore, especially with trash packs. Also the introduction of titan grip which I still hate sorry.
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True + Real
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It sucks and looks terrible.
Only good use is polearm + shield for RP.
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easily 90% of the time yeah it sucks but it does enable a few rare kino styles
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The main issue with Titan’s Grip is that WoW already has pretty bad animations for weapons being held. Most of the time it even today has that “Glued onto the hand” vibe. With Titan’s grip it just becomes a bit worse.
We didn’t even need titan’s grip for busted animations because WotLK also introduced those whack 1h swords and maces that were the size of a man.
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Even that looks horrible because of how badly WoW characters hold spears.
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Everything.
The least offensive is ranged stance and you can’t even see it!
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My body contorts violently everytime I see a 2h axe or mace being held at the very tip of the handle or randomly right in the middle. Honestly axes and maces would work better with most races’ polearm animations instead.
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As I’ve stated before and shown in WoW through repeated behaviour, death toll and willingness to deploy weapons of catastrophic destruction to destroy whole cities and even world zones, the Horde is actively an existential threat to all who dare oppose it and overtures of peace and stability mean nothing since the warchief can pull everyone into a new conquest next week.
This should have the Alliance reaffirm its original purpose of defending azeroth from Horde aggression and BfA should have seen escalation, radicalization and relentlessness as the final war to decide the fate of the world; the Horde full bore swinging for the high score with Sylvanas unrestrained in her absolute power and the Alliance going boorish nationalist american world police with ultimatums, invasions and occupations of strategically useful and resource rich neutral territory.
Let there be internal conflict, sadfang have regrets but fighting on because everything snowballs, Anduin loses his naivete and Turalyon’s thousand years of war against pure evil resurfacing as a useful but extreme tool.
Eventually both factions run out of steam because they keep having wars every year and digging graves for whole generations, unable to resist the outside force come to mess with them and so we get the next expansion of frantically trying to stop Azshara.
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Small mercies. Have you seen a gnome use a bow with those stumpy arms?
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You can’t see their arms past their shoulder pads, so meh.