Which expansion hurt WoW the most in the long term?

WoD also crashed the playerbase immensely, to a point where WoW was no longer a revered titan of industry but W OMEGALUL W in the wider gaming community.

And yet, I still enjoyed it more than Legion.
WoD’s biggest issue was a lack of content. It harmed the game then, but it doesn’t harm it now like Legion’s massive design changes do.

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WoD’s problem was scrapped/lacked content. The content it had was good and well received by many players. BRF is considered one of the best raids they’ve ever made. The questing improved drastically. Pathfinder although a tad too much, it wasn’t necessarily a bad idea, most of what was needed by playing the game. If you can’t do that, then why need flying? The dungeons and raids were enjoyable, the zones looked great and the end cinematics for zones added a nice touch.

There isn’t one expansion that did it all wrong. All expansion brought good and bad. Wrath brought lfg and later on easy epics, cata changed the world in a way not many liked and added lFR and Deathwing isn’t exactly something special compared to Arthas. MoP bad daillies system imo and too much Panda. WoD lacked content, Legion to much of a grind for the weapon. BFA waaaayyyyyyyy to much grind for borrowed power items. Sl lacks content so far.

Legion by far. Legion ruined everything that was left of WoW and turned the game to the abomination that it is today. I too think Legion was enjoyable but it ruined World of Warcraft and everything that made it great.

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The vast majority didn’t.
Which is why in WoD subs dropped and in Legion they raised.

Funny thing, I would have said the biggest world change was TBC. Spaceships and alien worlds were out of place.

I feel like WoD killed a lot. Everyone raid logged and forgot to socialise.

Dont you dare talk ditry about my precious legion xD
It was my faw exp, like WotLK and BC,

WoD hands down, no competition there.

Implying the ones before were better. They were not. Cookie cutter back then, cookie cutter now.

OT: Also the worst expansion in general was WoD by a large margain.

WOD was the killer, remember the no flying rule that Blizzard introduced in the beginning, but later had to reverse it but then came up with the absurdly stupid pathfinder to obtain flying.

Not to mention garrisons meant that players were stuck in an phased zone most of the time. Garrisons had so much potentional if Blizzard had not set them to be solitary content that was phased. Plus the alternate time storyline really did not make any sense at all.

Legion was good because we had the return of Illidan and the burning legion, plus there was much more to do in terms of zones, quests, and many places to explore. Not to mention so many toys, mounts, and pets to collect.

BFA basically undid any growth that Legion had for WOW. There wasnt much to do in BFA plus I think that we were really attached to our legion legendary weapons and to have those replaced with azerite armor and the HOA was just a killer for many.

With SL due to the canceled 8.3 patch and the delay with covid, SL was great to many, after all nothing could be worse than WOD and BFA right? Wrong! While SL has many good things, there are many terrible things as well.

Class design peaked in WoD and MoP. The gameplay was smooth, interesting and satisfying with 90% of the specs.

WoD was an awesome expansion, there just wasn’t enough of it. But what little we had was excellent. Great zones, best leveling experience, cool dungeons, and very very good raids. BRF and HFC is among the top 5 raids they ever made.

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They were, definitely. The choices were not just “Single target, or multi target?” for DPS as far as talent choices go. :3 Lot more points to play around with too, yet another thing I’m enjoying in Classic over retail.

The points were far less meaningful so you can decrease that number really. Also having to spent worthless points just to get to the next row quite often. Or literally dead talents like improved drain soul (outside of solo play at least). Yes you could temper with them but in the end we all went for cookie cutter if we wanted to play properly.

You can temper with current talents as well. For example i could take talents that cause me to play differently. Quite a lot for some. Doesnt mean i would want to take them tho unless i wish to gimp myself.

‘play properly’ only applies to maybe 10% of the players the other 90% can play however we want including solo play. Protip: a very small % of players raid mythic or were taking ‘cookie cutter specs’.

Plus, guess what? We had the option for hybrid builds and messing around with stuff, which the current talent trees don’t even allow which is not very RPG like.

Guess what? Improved drain soul is a big nice talent for leveling warlocks in classic or indeed, solo play! Which, there is a lot of considering you can clear a raid in a couple hours(Including retail normal raids, woah.)

and no you really can’t with retail talents, they don’t allow you to make ‘meaningful changes to gameplay’. Single target, or aoe.

Solo play only. The talent is literally dead for anything group related as the chance of you proccing it is next to zero.

Normal raids. K mate. Vanilla has one difficulty, which was its highest so at least compare it to mythic. Vanilla raids are a joke ontop of it.

Blindside and Elaborate planning. It changes the way you play. Subterfuge. Vigor, Deeper Stragem and most certainly Marked for Death (MfD especially). Alacricity and Exsanguinate. Crimson Tempest. Thats just Assassination.

Thats the only point you get.

Everyone and its nan used cookie cutter. Even way into wotlk. The ones that didnt were barred more often than not from pugs because they were deemed a burden. This became more and more common with each xpac.

Solo play is longer of your content than group play in the first place.

Mm, don’t think I will. I think I’ll compare the same difficulty to the same difficulty. Just because they decided to increase the difficulty and add tons of extra mechanics, doesn’t change that. Normal raids in retail are a joke on top of it.

You mostly parse as sub, curious. Bunch of those are just single target vs aoe or multi target. You only use one in raids, and another in m+. None of those really ‘change the way you play’ or specifically a rotation even while leveling.

All the points, so far actually.

I didn’t, tons of people didn’t especially back then. Especially not in true classic because there wasn’t such a word for it and people were not just following ‘who parses highest’ or ‘this streamer said y.’ Plus, as I said that’s only for the people that are raiding at high tiers that care about such things.

Had no problem pugging wrath, even into ICC with whatever build I decided to run for that day. Same goes for getting 2.4k+ in arena for Wrath.

Something becoming more common with a small % of the community doesn’t = removing the better of 2 options just to make it easier to swap between them because the top end players wanted it so. ‘I should be able to switch my talents for each boss… For mutli target and single target.’

Least with old talent trees? I can pick whatever I want, and the people you say are being ‘cookie cutter’ can do the same whatever guildies you hang out with.

There was the choice, whereas now there it’s basically non-existent. Also completely killed hybrids and going cool dual-specs. Shockadins, pom pyro, fire+frost, pom frost…

Up for debate. However its still defacto dead in anything group related.

Thats your comeback? Oh dear. Yeah great normal raids are a joke. Classic raids even more. Different games. So if you want to compare the hardest content of an xpac to another xpac then yes, you choose the hardest content.

Oh my dear god <.< Yes sub was the spec i played until the changes. I am now back to Assa due to changes and my logs are A: From the old guild and B: Havent received new ones for mythic as im progressing Denathrius. Also my logs change literally nothing to what i said in my given example. So why exactly did you bother to check my logs again?

Wrong just given logs in general. Applies to all rows except alacrity because nobody picks Exsan due to it being subpar by a lot.

Ye the term cookie cutter was born later but yes people used them because they copied not a streamer but the elite of their realm because they surely must know what they do. Thats how cookie cutters were established at first.

Congratz. It still happened left and right in pugs. One way to ignore that was either being known on the realm as a player or guild or by outgearing.

The only way the old talents were better was in regards of hybrid specs and your RP reason. Other than that the talent tree was not superior. And a point back then didnt feel as impactful as a talent point does now. Only thing they did was utilize the big talents of the old trees and get rid of the 1% dmg increase of ability X.

Read above.

Edit: Oh ye now i remember you. You did that Elemental rant couple days ago in the classic forum. Dont bother to answer me, youre not worth my time.

Honestly, I don’t blame a single expansion for the downfall.

Yea. we can point towards WOD as an easy target. Or legion for some implemented changes.

But the truth is, the biggest and worst issue this game is suffering from is non other than blizzard’s inability to listen to proper feedback.

And no. I’m not talking about a bunch of random nobodies in forums. I’m talking about ACTUAL USEFUL feedback coming from people who spent years playing this game.

They listened to those people the most in shadowlands, in comparison to other expansions.

However, they barely did anything they asked even in this one. They’re just too far stuck with their own ideology of how the game should or shouldn’t be played which makes this their biggest and most destructive reason for this game’s long term downfall.

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BFA, solely because it was so boring. I’d have more fun staring at bread untill it molded.