What’s the one intentional feature in WoW that grinds your gears the most? You know, the stuff Blizzard clearly meant to do and really annoys you. Bugs are not included.
For me it’s those dungeon/raid bosses who hit 1 HP, drop to their knees, and still feel the need to monologue like they’re auditioning for a Shakespeare play. And in some cases they don’t even die but announce “We’ll meet again” and simply walk away. I wish I could do the same at 1 HP.
Quick/short lasting seasonality - resetting character progress every major patch instead of every expansion.
Completely neglecting previous content the second a new expansion drops.
So much wasted and unsupported content in this game.
When they add something people really enjoy and then either change it to make it unenjoyable or simply never do it again.
The warbound feature not making all the useful currency warbound, like Anima or Veiled Argunite. I’ve got a bunch of alts with a bit of it but not enough to use it on anything.
One could say that pretty much 100% of the game annoys me, since I have criticism on everything the game presents 
But if I had to pick one thing, is the incompletability (new word coined by me) of the game.
You do, except your hp goes to 0, and you run back as a soul to your body.
“Almost done!”
“Just hold them off a little longer!”
.
.
.
“Phew, that was intense! Let’s move on.”
The way upgrading gear works.
I get it, character power, you want to feel a linear curve of getting more and more powerful, but with the way they do seasons it becomes dull towards the end.
I like pushing keys and I also like playing different alts.
My main has over a thousand gilded crests, and my alts are a grind fest… I can send over stones, and other currencies but crests this late in the season is still a no?
People that are here for the quick max gear will anyways grind and stop when they hit it… People that enjoy pushing keys, are doing it regardless of gear, because they enjoy the challenge / game mode etc.
But when I’m forced through billions of keys to “effectively” farm crests instead of pushing keys, I just lose interest… So it results in me just playing other games until next season
Not being able to mount indoors in raids etc.
I can kill the everything inside but somehow going faster on a mount is bad
I don’t particularly like seasonal gameplay in an MMORPG. Sure, it works in Diablo-style hack 'n slash games because the pace is faster and your character can get super busted. But in a game like World of Warcraft, it just feels laborious — a never-ending chore. And unless you’re a high-end player pushing top-tier content, your character never really feels super powerful. Just as you finally start to feel strong, a new season comes along and resets that.
This is one of my major grievances with the game as well. What are we on now, like 10 expansions? So basically, the majority of the player base is only focusing on and engaging with about 10% of the game at any given time. It’s frustrating to see so much content become irrelevant just because the next expansion drops — entire zones, storylines, and systems are effectively abandoned every 18 to 24 months.
I remember back in the day some players criticized The Burning Crusade expansion because it basically funneled players into a much smaller chunk of content — six or seven zones completely isolated from the rest of Azeroth. Even back then, people were saying that the game no longer felt like the world of Warcraft.
But at least in TBC and those early expansions, there were still things that brought you back to the old world — Karazhan, Zul’Aman, Caverns of Time, class trainers, and leveling professions. Whereas now, expansions feel much more self-contained and compartmentalized.
Cataclysm was the last expansion where the world of Azeroth still felt alive and connected to me — though ironically, it’s often remembered as the expansion that “destroyed” the game, both thematically and in terms of setting off a major decline in the player base.
I do find it interesting that there’s now a newfound love and appreciation for the Mists of Pandaria expansion. Sure, it was a solid expansion in many ways, but at the time, it didn’t land particularly well with a lot of players. If I remember correctly, it actually saw an even bigger drop in player numbers than Cataclysm. So if Cata was the catalyst for the big decline, MoP certainly didn’t help mop up the damage — if anything, it may have made things worse.
Yet now MoP is hailed as an overlooked masterpiece. I guess that’s hindsight for you — back then, we didn’t realise just how far the game could, or would, change. Anyhow, I digress.
The only reason why I still think mop was good is cause warlock felt good back then.
Otherwise the expansion was ok except the content hole at the end
Yeah, seasons are trash.
Yes… Jaina is great example of a boss that should be dead.
The auto-phasing of shards. You’re camping out on some timer for an event/rare/whatever, and suddenly you just randomly phase out into another shard, completely wasting your time.
It’s a moronic feature.
Other MMOs allow you to select a layer of varying populations, typically indicated with green/yellow/red, and more get added when earlier ones get closer to being full, so people can always choose to be in a populated or empty layer.
But not in WoW. We got this automated nonsense.
The Mage Tower.
garbage feature sold to you as a genuine class trial of skill.
Staying in combat for no reason what-so-ever.
But also making systems only to forget all about them next expansion or even a patch later. Looking at the circlet and the disco belt.
When your pet stand on top of the ledge you just jumped down from to angrily look at the mobs while you take a beating.
Im for happy for this, if it stood relevant , nobody got time to farm 3 raids a week or whatnot , and if its just some items then its just a bad design .
Like we had font of power back in day, old raid was farmed for 1 item, and 90% of raid were mages cuz it was that good on them …
Identity-thematic loaded quests like the personal tabard quest from DF.
Not everyone wants or needs to question their identity IRL or in a video game. This quest was such a discomfortable experience for me and a few others.
20 years and that STILL hasn’t been fixed…