Because everything you did was tied to the Garrison one way or another.
It also had only one major content patch.
There are things that WoD definitely did well.
The classes were pruned but they were still good.
The leveling was fantastic.
No limitless AP grind.
No TF.
Dungeons and Raids were great (imo it has one of the best raids to ever grace this game. Blackrock Foundry).
But, as you can see, none of these points mean that you could do anything outside of the Garrison, and you could not. Dungeons were obsolete after 2 weeks.
And then you could literally only log in to raid and log out for the entire week. And the times you were logged in, you were staying in your garrison clicking missions on the table.
I’d like a middle ground, no endless farming because it’s a chore, but also no nothing to do for a whole week.
M+, scaling of the world and WQs definitely do the world and dungeons a favor after you hit max level these last 2 expansions.
What I still don’t get, how did Dreanor advance this much technologicly? Garrosh got there with one bronce drake. He kille this beast and was alone there.
So what did he know about time travel and alternative Universes? How did he get his goblins there before he made Guldan open the portal? Or is he a tinkering genius and knew how to build all this and tought the Blackrocks?
it was absolutely the worst expansion, because there was almost no content besides raiding the only other content was Apexis farm
there was a lot of cut content
they wanted to get rid of flying
you didn’t have to leave the garrison at all there was no reason to…
patch 6.1 only brought a S.E.L.F.I.E. camera (A major patch only gave us a selfie camera!!! is that a joke?!)
massive pruning of classes
needless stat squish (it broke a lot of other game elements, because of VERY bad scaling)
Content drought
Holy Priest wasn’t fun to play (this is my opinion)
As a purely PvP player: WoD was “okay” for me. Worse than MoP, but faaar better than both Legion & BFA.
I didn’t like how they overhauled some classes (fire mage), pruned others too much (rogue: they removed disarm effects entirely!).
I loved the gearing system in s3 though.
Pruning 1.0, classes were still pretty fun in hindsight but since they were just a downgraded version of MoP at the time they weren’t received all too well.
Garrisons were a massive fail, they were hyped up way too much and didn’t even come close to what most players thought it would be.
All the content we actually had was do excessive amount X (pvp kill 500 of each race, win 5000 pet battles, kill 6 billion mobs to level up your bodyguards and so on)
First major patch was a selfie camera and twitter integration
Ashran sucked, tanaan jungle sucked
Huge content drought with PvE
One of the worst launches I can remember, just the fact that the first quest everyone had to do was click a spyglass that only 1 person could click at a time and it’d despawn after one clicked it and you had to wait for it to respawn again and then once people started getting their garrison it was a disconnect vortex for about 3 days meaning if you got even remotely close you’d disconnect and get world server message down for hours.
First expansion without an actual hub, ashran was sort of a hub but not a very good one.
The complete lack of content, WoD had one major patch through the entire expansion and the main feature was the ever despised garrisions feature, imagine paying full price and then subscribing to a game only to then have the game play itself for you.
WoD had THE worst launch in wow history - and that for a couple of days
WoD also had the content people zoomed throgh too fast, there was no timegating… so people pushed day and night and then cried for the rest of the expansion that there was nothing to do.
And then people talked about Garrison as a prison and that it made people antisocial.
Today people just stand around in SW/Org or one of the BFA capitals. No one is talking and trade is stuffed with boost sellers - Almost prefer Garrisons then at least Alliance Garrison was great looking
Well wod had extremely crappy start and i do mean extremely it took nearly 2 weeks to game barely work from all the bugs.
Then there was the free gold free everything prison garrison as a “content”
Wod also had lots of cutted content like large main cities ogre island that you can see on the bottom of the map.
And they tried to actually sell the expansion with apexis grind.
The story made no sense at all especially the weird grommash redeem cinematic where all the draenei cheering at him while week before him and hes posse just slaughtered everybody they knew.
Wod also had one of the most underwhelming patch ever with selfie camera crap.
Leveling was the only part that i really enjoyed with music and art everything else either made no sense or was just half assed.
Cata was not that bad, besides a last raid tier that lasted wayyyyy too long and the fact that Blizzar nerfed Heroic dungeon (Gut would be more appropriate). Still, Cata got hate for LFR.
MoP was excellent, besides a last raid tier that lasted wayyyyyyy too long and wayyyy too much dayli quests. Still, MoP got hated only for Pandarens.
I’m pretty sure Wotlk got hated for some reasons too.
Regarding WoD, it was not that bad regarding many aspects. But in terms of content outside of raids, well…
As a raider, I obviously don’t hate WoD. I would even say that I prefer have nothing to do than being forced to do pointless content (This is self explanatory).
I started playing in Legion and WoD was by far the least interesting legacy Expack to level through. No atmosphere or anything to make it stand out. Felt very much like a filler between MoP and Legion.
guess there was also challenge mode dungeons.