Was Warlords of Draenor is the worst expansion in WoW's history?

[ryudaraku]

It is hard to say.

Warlords was a huge flop in a lot of spots, however Gul'dan was FANTASTIC and I hope he does not get killed in the first Tier of Legion.

On the other hand

Cataclysm damaged so many lore characters beyond repair it is hard to not say that the overall effect it had on the game was not worse.

[ThunderLust]

WOD could have had a great potential lore but it totally disappointed me.

[FelPlague]

thing is each expansion brought something, BC brought dailies and flying, wrath brought the new heroic system and started adding actual mechanics, cata brought new questing and redid a outdated world, mop brought in a new raiding and talent structure...

sadley wod brought a new questing system and new art : / very good art.... but new art isent something alot of people will really notice or go "yeah that was good" cause some people dont care... the new models are awesome, enemies and the enviroments look super good, but people will allways hate them cause art is in the eye of the beholder so : /

wod brought alot... just not what most people wanted

and the lore was ok... to meh it wasnt horrid, it wasnt awesome... just meh... or ok at best, i did like some of the reference though... finding mankriks girlfriend, khagar wanting guldans skull for... reasons... grommash finally realizing he had been used and we were the good guys

[Darkeon]

Bullshit. I was here, every second thread was bitching about how Wrath ruined WoW.

There's quite a leap in difference between quite some people complaining and having over half of the total population leaving mid-expansion.
I wonder which had the most dissatisfied bulk of people....

[Kelimbror]

Objectively it was the worst without going into extraneous factors. It lost the most subscribers in the shortest amount of time. Subjectively, I'm honestly not sure if I thought it was the worst. I played less of it than Cata, but I distinctly remember loathing Cata and forcing myself to play it.

On one hand, the questing really made it feel like we had one of the best expansion ever. At first, the Garrison was exciting because the tech was something we hadn't seen in WoW...but then the rest of the game hit and it was just not good. No content, reduced the enjoyment of some content (like LFR), all in the attempt to control how people played the game. Overall I think that was a total failure, that not even Cata tried to do. Shipyard and Tanaan were the most not fun content additions I've ever seen in the game.

I think I actually decided while writing through this that I do dislike this more than even Cata. That's sad, but hey...maybe we're at rock bottom and the only direction to go is up. I'll keep hoping that's true.

[Lotus Victoria]

I'd say so. Cata had a shitload of problems, but at least Cata had content. WoD is leveling, and then Garrison. Raid sometimes, Dungeon suck, that's it.

[Fuji47]

Honestly its not as bad as people make it out to be. Personally the leveling was great, but the PvP has stayed then same imo. I go through content slowly as im semi-casual, Im planning to raid normal mode before legion comes out, maybe heroic. Don't really mind the garrisons, as my realm is already dead so its not social anyways. Then again I liked cataclysm as well, especially at the beginning. Was it the worst though?, I enjoyed it more than BC, mainly because the graphics were better and my computer was shitty at that point, also enjoyed it more than cataclysm at the end.

[kunta kente]

Yea it's horrendous, Hfc is worse than DS was especially. The ring was worse than the cape.

[Deleted]

Upsides:

-Great leveling
-Strong raiding content
-Excellent art
-WoW Token, can't say no to saving tangible real money (yearly it's a lot of money)

Downsides:

-Alt intensive (don't confuse with alt friendly; alt intensive means forcing players to make loads of alts in order to reap garrison gold)
-No endgame content aside from raiding
-Low number of dungeons, dungeons made obsolete very quickly
-Ashran
-Professions
-Flying restriction for 10 months
-Faction hubs that are mundane garrison assets instead of announced Karabor / Bladespire
-Very long last patch, yet again
-Bad content pacing in general. HM and BRF lasted too shortly, HFC drags on forever

Overall pretty damn bad. I feel like playing a single player game, forever locked up in god damn garrison. There's no reason to leave it, aside from raiding. WoW without seeing other players is just not clicking. Single player RPG's don't cost sub money to play, gold or real money doesn't matter.

[Hughes]

Outside of what everyone here has talked about with what WoD fell short on (which I agree), the whole thing felt like a huge plug for the Warcraft movie. That kinda bugged me.

[Vzz]

WoD... is an example how to destroy something brilliant in no time.

[Flurryfang]

WOD could have had a great potential lore but it totally disappointed me.

Pretty much this. I can always live with mediocre questing content, a poor maintained raiding content and a devastating dungeon pool. This is all something, which will pass with time and which can be overdone by better content. But the totalt destruction of lore potential is killing me! When i am being informed about lore and story, which neither excites or surprises me, my soul cries out. When i can personally make up better lore events within minutes of experiencing Blizzards original story, then there is something wrong.

[kendro1200]

Outside of what everyone here has talked about with what WoD fell short on (which I agree), the whole thing felt like a huge plug for the Warcraft movie. That kinda bugged me.

It very much was a tie-in for the movie. I think the original intent was have the movie and expansion release at roughly the same time. That way when people decided to play the game, for the first time, after they saw the movie they would see similar characters and settings that they are familiar with. The movie got pushed back to the end of the life of WoD, and the developers were clearly not that interested in the story of WoD, as so much content was scrapped and everything was condensed to get it over with as soon as possible.

[Toppy]

Upsides:

-Great leveling
-Strong raiding content
-Excellent art
-WoW Token, can't say no to saving tangible real money (yearly it's a lot of money)

Downsides:

-Alt intensive (don't confuse with alt friendly; alt intensive means forcing players to make loads of alts in order to reap garrison gold)
-No endgame content aside from raiding
-Low number of dungeons, dungeons made obsolete very quickly
-Ashran
-Professions
-Flying restriction for 10 months
-Faction hubs that are mundane garrison assets instead of announced Karabor / Bladespire
-Very long last patch, yet again
-Bad content pacing in general. HM and BRF lasted too shortly, HFC drags on forever

Overall pretty damn bad. I feel like playing a single player game, forever locked up in god damn garrison. There's no reason to leave it, aside from raiding. WoW without seeing other players is just not clicking. Single player RPG's don't cost sub money to play, gold or real money doesn't matter.

The raiding was excellent, but, mythic ruined many raiding guilds. It was just all around a bad move.

[Deleted]

the raids were the only redeeming feature in wod. Buit even there there was too little.. they cashed in on nearly 2 years of sucriptions by only adding tanaan jungle .. its borderline criminal how UTTERLY LAZY blizzard is looking atm.

[themightysven]

I'm in Alpha and the first big roadblock to ever enjoying Legion is the removal of the old character models, this abomination of new fem nelf model staring at me like a fucking zombie.., more "fill a bar" quests, the massive ability pruning, removal of active buffing and things like shaman's water shields, yet another flying drama in the making, the still unimaginative "implementation" of Timewalking, more removal of old content, Legendaries galore, etc. Unfortunately, everytime I look stuff up on mmo-c or the forums this list is getting longer and longer.

They're completely removing the old character models? I had not heard of that, as I only play Female Dwarves, and the new Model for them is the worst this makes me A. A little sad and B. not interested in Legion at all

[Toppy]

They're completely removing the old character models? I had not heard of that, as I only play Female Dwarves, and the new Model for them is the worst this makes me A. A little sad and B. not interested in Legion at all

they arent removing the old models, but the old models are having their animations updated

[Pony Soldier]

Yeah I'd say it is. It's not like it was bad through and through but there was more bad than good. The main downfall of this expansion, to me at least, was the horrible confusing mess of a story it had. The Dark Portal somehow becomes a time machine but Blizzard said it has nothing to do with time travel but it has something to do with going back in time so how could it not have anything to do with time travel? Then there was this orc warlord story going on that evolved into Legion stuff and now it's making that warlord story seem like a diversion, a waste of time because this is what is was all about. Complete bad guys like Grommash become good simply because of similar interests and everything he has done is simply just forgiven, we're friends now.

Then the oversimplifying (pruning) of the classes. They were gutted to hell further simplifying the game as if it wasn't easy enough. Taking this out, taking that out, changing this, changing that and now WoW has become so uninteresting compared to what it was. Such a hollow shell anymore. It hardly even feels like an RPG anymore either and more like an app game where you just hit a couple buttons for your attacks and level up your character and collect loot to get stronger. The garrisons in particular has this feeling.

They got rid of JP/VP and said they were going to distribute loot a different way which they kind of did but in it's place was the apexis crystals which is basically just like JP/VP except you don't get them as easily and you have to do even more tedious grinding for them and you have to collect a bigger amount (2200 JP/VP vs 20000 apexis).

Dungeons feel so unrewarding and underwhelming anymore. Once you get gear from Tanaan the dungeon gear becomes vastly inferior and reduced down to nothing but something to sell to a vendor or disenchant and whenever you don't get loot you just get a couple gold, can't even get apexis like how we got JP/VP from killing bosses and completing the dungeon. Now that I'm leveling alts I actually rather just jump right into Tanaan for the Baleful gear and skip all the dungeon bullshit. Have a friend to help me get a couple pieces and then I'm set. Shouldn't be that way. Dungeons also don't really feel like dungeons anymore. This is not really exclusive to WoD but in WoW in general. They're more like those scenarios we had in MoP. Really sad seeing how low dungeons have gone since vanilla days where dungeons were big mazes with danger around every corner. They were basically 5 man raids. All because it was too hard to follow a map or because it was too long, "I don't have time for this" and all that stupid bullshit.

Hopefully Legion can make WoW feel like how it's supposed to feel. I doubt it will feel anything like the WotLK days but hopefully it's at least better than WoD.

[themightysven]

they arent removing the old models, but the old models are having their animations updated

thanks, though removing the old models does sound like something they would do

[Vestig3]

Warlords of Draenor makes Cataclysm look like the Burning Crusade.

Opinions are opinions and i still rate Cata shittier then WoD.