Why did the community not like WOD?

I, for one, liked WoD. However, the most common complaints were about the pruning, about the pve side not offering much except raids, and about the garrison being too lucrative, making people not venture in the world.

Also, a lot of stuff never made it, like the Horde and Alliance capitals, a whole tier, a whole zone…

Indeed, the music was amazing, as well as the zone visuals. Zones were incredibly atmospheric imo.

pruning
orcs
2 raid tiers
orcs
useless professions
orcs
nothing to do outside of raiding
orcs
garrison was meh
orcs

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WoD was my favourite expansion… for transmog gear, I mean look at those BRF/Highmaul sets/weapons, they’re freaking epic!

Being brutally honest though, it felt more like a stepping stone to Legion, rather than an expansion of its own, coming with a huge swathe of technical changes which are still the norm today, but with very little in the way of actual content.

I rejoined wow at the end of wod I boosted my warlock got my level 3 garrison and started questing. I enjoyed the expansion and negrand was my favourite zone it is sooooo beautiful especially to fly over. I found dungeons a little meh and drawn out but the raids were cool I enjoyed the expansion.

But I did join at the end when it had more content. from what I hear it was very much draught ridden like bfa is. Content stretched to breaking and narrative stretched beyond breaking with a few things thrown in just because.

It had no content.

It murdered Combat spec for rogues and turned Sub rogues into something hideous.

It was an afk simulator.

My guild died in it because of the shift from 10 man raiding to 20 man raiding.

The insane hype for garrisons was only met with disappointment.

People expected full fleshed player housings, customization and something akin to the MoP farm, what we got was COMMANDER! commander… yes COMMANDER, orcs looked super dumb saying commander, and can you imagine a blood elf commander using orcish strongholds? the immersion went down the drain.

Classes were heavily pruned in WOD. After having a tonne of abilities taken away classes felt a bit meh to play.

Plus garrisons were isolating which is not good in an mmo.

Lack of content was also a common complaint. WOD felt like it was unfinished when it was launched.

You are not wrong. Especially leveling in WoD was amazing, story line was interesting and discovering Draenor zone by zone was good. But soon you were max level and suddenly there was nothign else to do outside of the box.

First raid was boring, yes you had your dungeons you could run over and over but there were no world quests or M+ back then and compared to Mists of Pandaria where there were always something meaningful to do, WoD felt like one of those facebook games regarding to garrison “management” which was so timegated that it wasnt fun for the day as game such as wow should.

It all felt very shallow.

Uhm yes it was. The alternative Story crap ist what put Off a Lot of people.

WoD at it’s time was unfinished product since it was suppoes to ship after Legion.Hence it shows how rushed it is.

It will have my respect for two reasons:
1.Tried to get rid of flying
2.Tried to get rid of LFR,the prune to lfr was real

…but the salt was just too much and the unfinished/rushed part didnt help it.Just made it easier for the salt people.

It depends on what kind of content you enjoy.
PvE players had the same ol’ same ol’ with the raids being meticulously crafted.

PvP players didn’t really get anything new though and on top of that, there was the usual rough patch in the beginning like Feral Druids taking out 80 % of your health with one Ferocious Bite and Frost Death Knights being similarly dumb.
There was also some new progression system for PvP.

You had to deal with Ashran (aptly named Trashran, since you fought more PvE Trash than PvP encounters). This is also the expansion that introduced RNG drops in BGs. You could still select certain pieces through an NPC with the honor currency though.

But regardless of whether you like PvP or PvE, everyone had to deal with the mobile game inspired Garrison. Time Gating the likes of which we hadn’t seen before. Some of the gating was reasonable, but almost every option came with a cooldown incurring, which very quickly became frustrating.

Furthermore, this largely replaced people’s tendency of hanging out in their capital city, because you had most things you needed in your Garrison. Keep in mind that it’s phased, because they had to provide the illusion that your Garrison was unique and owned by you (even though they mostly looked the same, with few differences).

Apart from this, most players went to do their dailies which were largely remade from previous iterations. Not quite world quests, but the whole “Complete bland, undefined objectives within this proximity to complete the quest”, originated within WoD.

So once you had painstakingly sat through your garrison for the first few weeks, most players began to realize, that this was the expansion. That didn’t sit well with a lot of people.

Then a long time after, we got 6.1, the infamous “S.E.L.F.I.E” Patch, which was advertising a Toy that tied in with external Twitter integration. New additions to the monthly event of Darkmoon Faire, displayed as major features. I’ll let you guess why this didn’t go down well.

There are other things such as the lore being a time-travel/alternate dimension plotline, which is almost always something writers resort to when they’re out of ideas and it frankly showed.

Class-pruning also hit some classes hard (rest in peace destruction warlock and Windwalker Monks).

It’s actually a shame that it had so many rough parts, because it had some genuinely amazing stuff in it too. Not even talking about the raids, I wouldn’t know, but many classes had some really cool specs to play. My all-time favorite iteration of Retribution was in WoD. Same with Demonology Warlock.

The story of the expansion, while it was in fact a lazy timetravel/alternate dimension approach, actually had some really cool moments and characters.
The lore surrounding a non-broken Draenor was also cool.

But there’s no doubt that the expansion was lacking in content.

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The daily system in WoD was the worst so far: you could choose between 2 areas where you then had to fill a bar. The reputation rewards where underwhelming and the armour useless by the time you had enough apexis crystals to buy a piece.
It was more or less a waste of time since day1. But the invasions were a cool idea.

The garrison was necessary for professions, the only reason to go outside was to catch animals for the butcher. The follower system was good, but aside from leveling you didn’t really need them for anything else.

The mythic inis where a good start, but nothing you would run every week.

The classes still were fun, but for people who don’t like PvP there wasn’t enough to do except raiding with your main and a few alts. But the class design got more appreciation after the expansion. It was the first prunning of the classes, so they got a good amount of hate.

The dungeons and raids were overall pretty good with mechanics and design. Grimrail is still one of my most favourite dungeons.

It was mainly because lack of content.
Raids was good as aways BRF was top tier.
It was more guild based because you had lack of content so you had to make your own.
PvP was good, some changes was bad and blame has shifted towards Holinka mainly cause arenas.
Apexis system was total trash.
Mythic Challenges was top content I miss them novedays.
Music was good, orkish one.
There was racial drama cause man for him self.
Garrison and command table were worst features. Ofc if we´ve got a promised garrison as they say it would work everyone would be happy with that.
Professions were trash I mean they still are.

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The planet itslef is beatifull, the quests in the regions are great.

But it lacked of content. To much effort were put in the garrison. Not enough in end game content.

WoD had plenty of wasted potential.

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Let’s be honest, the horrendous launch/begin killed WoD, it never recovered from that. Other than that it wasn’t even too bad.

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I started in WoD so my views are a bit skewed. I loved the zones, the story, the gameplay and everything (it was my first end game content, I didn’t know any better!). I didn’t do any group content so dungeon, raids, PvP and all of that were irrelevant for me, while the solo player garrison worked well. I hit max level 4 months before the Legion pre-patch and in that time I achieved everything I wanted to from end game content, so I can completely understand why those who played for much longer were very bored. And, now playing group content myself, I can see why garrisons were a lonely hellhole that detract from the point of an MMO.

IMO professions were good as you could make and upgrade gear that was useful, but they were also undermined by the reliance on time-gating NPC’s making things in the garrison for you.

So true. But sometimes it feels great to see other people. Like in RL. Do I wanna talk to them? Helya no, is it good other people are arround. Sure.

To be honest, the Garrison is still one of the most reliable ways to make gold especially if you have the right professions to make use of it :slight_smile:

And my garrisons are still a nice place to relax or meet with friends.

Every expansion has haters and lovers, just like everyone in real life has preferences.

Hoo boy, here we go…

  1. Horrible, garbage alternate universe time travel story.

  2. The Iron Horde were a complete joke.

  3. Garrisons had ton of customization scraped before live, including the ability to chose a zone you wanted to place them in and the level 4 garrison. Garrisons felt like some cheap Facebook FarmVille game.

  4. Karabor and Bladespire were scrapped as the main capitals for the Alliance and the Horde and instead we got the hastily made Trashran hubs, Fort Copypasta and Camp Zug Zug.

  5. Several zones were scrapped, including the ogre land Zangar sea zone and Farahlon. Tanaan was moved to 6.2, even though it was supposed to be available at the start.

  6. Two entire raids were scrapped. Arakkoa raid and Siege of Shattrath raid, with huge chunks of story being scrapped along with them, making the WoD story feel even more rushed.

  7. Reputations were nothing but mindless grind where you just killed mobs for hours.

  8. Apexis dailies which were mind-numbing lay boring and where each mob killed gave like 1% towards completion. Also, apexis shard farm was boring af.

  9. Mounts. Aside from two or three mounts, all the mounts in WoD were a recolor of the stable mounts, aka wolf, riverbeast and talbuk. Also, almost all the reputation factions gave a mount recolor which made zero sense for their faction.

  10. 6.0 got boring after a month or two, and then instead of more content, 6.1 gave us a selfie camera and twitter integration.

  11. Professions sucked.

  12. Shipyard mini game in 6.2 where you’d have your ships destroyed if the mission failed and had to rebuild it all over again. It got hotfixed later, but still.

  13. Trashran was a laggy, messy crap where ranged reigned supreme.

  14. 6.2 lasted for a whole year.

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