No?
Shadowlands was a bandage, it added more spells.
Legion removed twice as much as WoD.
My biggest gripe with WoD is the story.
First of all, it’s all about the time travel that the devs simply can’t do right, as was proven every time they tried it. Seriously, what even are the bronze dragons doing these days…
Second, an issue is how easily we slaughtered through the fabled Warlords and how little screen time they were given. Ner’zhul died in the very first Alliance dungeon, Kargath and Kilrogg aren’t as much as final raid bosses in their own right, Blackhand only yells during each of his appearances, Grommash basically got away with everything he arranged, and neither of them even looks like a genuine threat. It’s just not interesting.
Third, the cut content. And I’m not even talking about the ogre island and other ideas that never saw the light. The abhorrent decision of denying us the chance to see Garrosh’s story to the end by removing the storyline involving it has no excuses. This alone is an insult.
Finally, the “one Legion across all timelines” idea that hardly retcons a lot of established lore and turns the chance to show the Horde as it is into just another war with demons right before the expansion that’s entirely about it. We don’t see Grommash shown the folly of his idea of conquest, there is no definite end to the befouled, wrong timeline, we aren’t allowed to enjoy the spoils of our work and battles, but Archimonde of all things is just there to presumably die for good due to his mythic hidden phase happening in the Nether. This cost us much, much more than it gave, and there is no logical excuse for it.
Overall, it’s just another hoard of lost opportunities made with good intentions and a nice initial setup. Not horrible, but definitely not quite good.
nobody disputes legion removed more.
it is however reductive to say “more spells = more unique class”
wod removed a bunch of spell bloat but left every class/spec with a similar toolkit.
legion removed things but also reworked the talent trees significantly to make the classes less streamlined.
Legion made everything more generic. It removed Hemorrhage and Backstab from Rogues, of all things.
It also removed Tigereye Brew from Windwalker, the most unique burst mechanic in the entire game. And it replaced it with Serenity - a plain copy of Avenging Wrath.
WoD had a lot of unique elements to its class design, like Gladiator stance for prot warriors, or Prismatic Crystal for mages.
I didn’t enjoy WoD’s pruning of blanket silence and disarm effects, but for the most part, it kept classes somewhat similar to what they were in MoP.
Legion just destroyed everything and many classes still haven’t recovered.
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I think Blizzard should not try to make classes like how they were in the past and instead make something new and unique that plays well with current technology, knowledge, techniques, etc. For example I really like that they added the evoker mechanic of charging up attack to windwalker monk
For example in terms of fun gameplay, Ret Paladin is one of the most fun classes they ever made, and it’s something completely new gameplay-wise that wasn’t in wow before. I’d say Evokers are thematically not popular, but their gameplay is very nice.
Then you have something like warrior, where they tried to squeeze wow’s complete class design history into it, and it’s kinda bad
I can agree and disagree.
For some classes, their old iterations were just peak and nothing should be changed at all, they could be copy-pasted into current WoW and work perfectly.
WoD Mistweaver, MoP Fire Mage, Cataclysm Subtlety, WoD Windwalker, MoP Marksmanship, etc.
Have you tried current Marksmanship? Pretty sure it’s more fun to play than any prior versions in PvE. In PvP I cannot comment on this
Haven’t played TWW whatsoever actually, I didn’t buy it yet.
Maybe you’re right about this one, I have no idea.
My opinion remains the same for the rest of my list though.
It was good expansion. Only did not have enough patches. They were trying to optimise for the loses of subs MOP caused. So the bad of MOP is what really killed WOD and WOW.
i disagree with ur concept of generic. if everyone is the same base with bunch of bloat button with clunky mechanic, that is generic to me.
to me, legion tried to make classes and specs more clean. no longer you learn useless spells that either feel clunky to fit in ur rotation or you only use 5% of the time.
yes, legion went to far with this, it is why we have gotten many buttons back over the expansions. this is part of the recovery we both recognize.
but when you mention tiger brew and serenity, u neglect to mention serenity was there in wod too. WW spec had 3 major cooldowns and it was mess.
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Alot of content drought and missing features made it very disappointing at the time.
However I really enjoy it as an expansion for alt leveling. Its quite a fun one with a decent storyline.
and Frostfire Ridge has always been one of my favourite zones.
Serenity was a talent in WoD. I played the entire expansion with Hurricane Strike, a completely unique and fun spell they also deleted in Legion.
In Legion, Serenity REPLACED Tigereye brew, which was straight up delete.
As a Mistweaver, Legion also removed:
- Spear-handed strike (kick)
- Touch of Death
- Mana Tea (since Chi was gone)
Every single one of my guildmates left the game in Legion. All of them, purely because of lackluster class design.
But it’s not just “buttons” that I miss, it’s depth.
“Chi” wasn’t a button.
Stances were indeed buttons, but if anything, they reduced keybind bloat because you could bind different spells to the same key since you could only use them when in the correct stance.
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WoD could have been an epic expansion. Unfortunately it was an abortion.
If there was ever a chance to remake an expansion, it would be WoD for me.
Just a shame we’ll never have anything like it again. There’s far too much “toxic masculinity” in it for the blue haired feminists at Blizzard to even consider it.
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I hope that they remake WoD in WoD Classic, and then do a WoD remix in Retail with the remake of WoD Classic 
That’d be so good
for the poin that doesnt change much, cooldown is cooldown
ask urself, is it healthy for game design if everyone has everything? must healer rlly have execute spells and interrupt? one of the biggest pvp complaints has always been everyone has silence, interrupt, CC, slow.
i understand bad feelings when your guild /quit in an xpac
theres much to be said for resource tag on top of existing resources like chi.
in my opinion two resources only work for:
A. classes where their other resource is flavour and nowadays only used for heal. (think of dps druid and dps paladin mana) In practise they have 1 resource. Ret is most beloved when it is like it is now: reskinned warrior in sense of resource management, but with different abilities, utility and aesthetic.
B. their other resource is fast paced but purposeful.
With the mistweaver and holy you had 1 resource that was basically egg clock in kitchen. it goes down but it is meaningless. the two could be combined to create 1 satisfying mechanic instead of 1 satisfying one and 1 boring.
and its also less clutter.
that is to say u clearly have ur opinion which i understand but i only hope u see the other perspective other than “fun detected fun nerfed” from the blizzard
Launch was worst there’s ever been.
So far blizzard seems to want to skip WOD?
Frankly, all Blizzard have to do is put a level cap at 60 and make chromie time scale both lvl and ilvl to 60. Now every expansion is playable. Now you can play WOD as current expansion. Done.
As far as garrisons, if anyone has not played WOD, i will break down it for people.
If you look at war 3, characters are too big for houses, and the majority of whats happening is killing.
So logically WOW’s most flashed out housing system was generated as a town from War 3, instead of a small flat, like we had back in lotro in 2000s.
Garrison was basically a collection of options for every playstyle. E.g.
Want to do repeatable world content? - choose to build the portal room and the bodyguard barracks
Want to do pet battles - there is a pet battle building to provide you content every day
Want to do mining? - Here, have a private mine
Want to do pvp? - build arena in your garrison
Want to farm mounts? - build stables and work on taming new mounts
Want to customize? - Choose soundtrack for your garrison, choose guards, put on banners etc. etc.
How did the garrison make you go out and explore the world?
Well, by hunting treasure chests, you could get useful rewards (not currency and not junk), that would enhance your garrison gameplay
You could do quests and other activities in the world, that made your garrison stronger.
For some buildings, you had to go out and do pvp or pve or farming to get the “fuel” for the building.
Also the garrison had a table, that worked as a kind of semi-passive income.
Finally, the whole premise of the garrison was that you are in a new alien world, with unseen before vegetation, wildlife etc. And you are building armies and navies and whatever else to explore it. The naval mission table had 4 different seas on the map, implying we did not necessarily gain access to the whole draenor, just to one continent so far.
Absolutely glorious
Were there drawbacks? Sure. Not enough racial garrisons, not enough spots to pick from, instanced etc. Blizzard was working on it, but aborted due to backlash from a small group of players, who played the game 24/7 and did everything there was to do too soon, and then there were no more grinds/raids for them, and since they had no life, it was blizzard’s mistake to fix. Reception by general public was better than any subsequent expansion, but who cares about general public.
But here is the most important thing about garrisons, that not everyone understands. Basically, garrison had itinerant/rotating traders and garrison worked on AH resources.
So if you played strategies, they have limited amount of resources to run your base. Famously, heroes of might and magic had a lot of resources to run the base: gold, wood, sulfur, coal etc.
WOD garrison had ALL the current profession resources, and then some to run the base.
Every single profession raw resource was involved in garrison production loops.
If you were playing garrisons as a strategy game, you actually had to build an A/H and a bank, to take advantage of that.
So a lot of criticism you see, of “experts” and “elite players” and “community”, that speak about garrisons, are 2-bit takes, because they dont even understand that garrison was a strategy game within WOW, and much more complicated than War3.
I dont think blizzard have the balls to retry it
Like the mystical detective of classic WOW is gone, and blizzard cant repeat it, so the strategy game of garrisons are gone.
wow will probably remain a mythic enjoyer game. kill your trash and enjoy it
It’s a melee interrupt. For a healer.
It’s high risk high reward, it’s really good design in the case of Mistweaver.
Same for Touch of Death which also had a Chi cost, it wasn’t free to use in WoD.
okay? robbing bank is high risk high reward ))
these spec who had their interrupt moved away have other effective ways to interrupt that engage with DR.
I recall I enjoyed it, but I didn’t enter from the start. Somewhere mid expansion, since I had stopped playing since start of Wotlk !