What did go wrong with WoD?

[Soon-TM]

As I've mentioned on another thread, I quit WoW during Dragon Soul (yuck) and have returned only recently. There seems to be a general consensus on these boards about WoD being the lowest point in the game's history. I can understand the hatred towards Garrisons (I definitely loathe that Facebook-like stuff) but I honestly can't understand 1) why there was so much cut content, which must have upset PvE'ers and RP'ers alike, and 2) how something like Ashran could make it past beta, which I am sure many PvP'ers hated.

Besides, as convoluted (and unconvincing imo) as the whole AU Draenor story was, I think that it could have made a nice, if heterodox, episode. To learn in detail about the Orc and Draenei leaderships before Ner'zhul took over, to know what the Iron Horde was like seen from the inside, to see more about the demon-held Shattrath and the arrival of the Naaru... There were lots of possible stories imo, but for some reason Blizzard completely and utterly missed the opportunity. The question is, of course, why? I honestly don't get it

[Sandrox]

They cut all support from the expansion to focus on Legion.

[Corroc]

AFAIK they scrapped alot of content because they didn't want to push it through so the players got the worst part of it. We didn't know it until the expansion was over.

[Baltasar]

Everything

[Shelly]

Mostly it's because - aside from the size of the area - the whole thing didn't feel like an expansion so much as a patch that was basically over when Garry got a lightning enema from Thrall.

They mismanaged the characters, there wasn't a very good arch, Grom himself always felt like an afterthought with Blackhand honestly seeming the main villain.

The raids were enjoyable as far as fights but they gutted LFR, which made it less a stepping stone to organized raiding and more an entirely separate tier of raiding.

It was billed as a return to burning crusade but never fulfilled that promise.

About the only thing that was really good about it was just how much gold you could accumulate with a few alts.

[Flurryfang]

The WoD disaster was a mix of a couple of things. It was about alot of cut content, that was visible missing from the game. It was the Garrison design, that was just wrong and since it was a primary thing of the expansion, it had a huge impact. It was the seriously messed up story, that did not really use the subject of timetravel to its advantage. It was the horrible questlines in the mid-expansion and the lack of an overall story arc.

But the primary 2 things is proberly that Blizzard made a storyline, that did not make sense and did not pull the audience in and that they stopped using energy on the game after it was clear, that too many things had gone wrong with WoD. WoD only got 1 content patch, which should be more then enough evidence to prove, that WoD was left behind by Blizz.

[Skulltaker]

I enjoyed WoD to some extend. I liked the leveling, for example. I enjoyed each zones story, especially Nagrand. I am still considering leveling a Horde character to see the Frostfire story. I initially thought the Garrison was a good idead. But it got old, fast, and it did one thing really ruined it for me - it kept us 'inside.' You had no reason to go out into the wild anymore. There was nothing to do in the Zones whatsoever. Mists at least had Dailies. I cannot tell you anything about PvP, but the Raids were a complete bore, imho. It was fun fighting some of the big names, but that's about it.

Warlords always felt like a lot of wasted potential. And it was the first xpac with a bigger price tag attached to it, iirc. And the biggest cock block, imo, was that we didn't get to finish off Garrosh ourselves.

Everything

I see what you did there.

[Vonthialas]

I think at the middle of the expansion they thought, "Fuck it man, this is so fucked up. Parallel worlds, quantum, like wtf?! Let's start next xpac, this ain't going anywhere nor will continue in the future."
And there starts Legion.

[Alvito]

Weak story, complete lack of content and even less quality content. They missed the mark big time with things like apexis dailies. Longest 1st raid tier and longest final raid tier with nothing in between. They seemed to have thrown in the towel on WoD before it even went live. In some sort of effort to do many things then ended up doing almost nothing. They went all in on garrisons and far too late realized what a mess it would be to have race speciffic buildings for each building type and the art to have it in every zone like they had said it would be. They were also partially working on Legion which means they were stretching thin there too. Metzen even said during MoP they weren't sure what they would launch first WoD or Legion and started doing stuff for both.

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The WoD disaster was a mix of a couple of things. It was about alot of cut content, that was visible missing from the game. It was the Garrison design, that was just wrong and since it was a primary thing of the expansion, it had a huge impact. It was the seriously messed up story, that did not really use the subject of timetravel to its advantage. It was the horrible questlines in the mid-expansion and the lack of an overall story arc.

But the primary 2 things is proberly that Blizzard made a storyline, that did not make sense and did not pull the audience in and that they stopped using energy on the game after it was clear, that too many things had gone wrong with WoD. WoD only got 1 content patch, which should be more then enough evidence to prove, that WoD was left behind by Blizz.

How quickly Hellscream goes from bad guy lead enemy to our cheerleader and somehow a hero is one of the silliest things in WoD/HFC.

[Doffen]

90% of WoD budget was cut and sent to the designers of Suramar City.

[Aestholus]

Scrapping Bladespire Citadel and Karabor as captitals for Ashran was the first bad omen I got before release..... both locations were awesome.
Ashran wasn't.

Content wise I really hoped to see a living Earth giant and the flying Arakkoa City.
Storywise there was so much to tell about Frostfire Ridge and Gorgrond and what happened to the Ogre Empire, there wasn't even a friendly ogre faction like in Outland.

When I look back at WOD all I see is wasted potential.

[Flurryfang]

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How quickly Hellscream goes from bad guy lead enemy to our cheerleader and somehow a hero is one of the silliest things in WoD/HFC.

Not only that, but that Yrel was used very little compared to how much Blizzard had hyped her up and that Wrathion was merely teased in the expansion, EVEN THOUGH HE WAS THE GUY WHO STARTED THE FUCKING THING!.........

They wasted alot of characters on that expansion and it was a shame that both of the Hellscream boys would have their end in that silly expansion.

[Soon-TM]

Weak story, complete lack of content and even less quality content. They missed the mark big time with things like apexis dailies. Longest 1st raid tier and longest final raid tier with nothing in between. They seemed to have thrown in the towel on WoD before it even went live. In some sort of effort to do many things then ended up doing almost nothing. They went all in on garrisons and far too late realized what a mess it would be to have race speciffic buildings for each building type and the art to have it in every zone like they had said it would be. They were also partially working on Legion which means they were stretching thin there too. Metzen even said during MoP they weren't sure what they would launch first WoD or Legion and started doing stuff for both.

- - - Updated - - -



How quickly Hellscream goes from bad guy lead enemy to our cheerleader and somehow a hero is one of the silliest things in WoD/HFC.

Come to think about it, Legion would have made way more sense after MoP than after WoD. It looks like a typical case of project mismanagement :/

[Flurryfang]

Scrapping Bladespire Citadel and Karabor as captitals for Ashran was the first bad omen I got before release..... both locations were awesome.
Ashran wasn't.

The worst thing about that is that the designed space for the city areas are still there, but they are just empty..... It is like a thing, that teases you for what might have been.

[Dracullus]

Just lack of solid daily system for dungeons and open world. Zones and instances were great, but we had no reason to go there (it changed a little with dungeons in 6.2, but damage was done already). Only thing we could do every day were hunting achievements, raiding or facebook game.

And yeah, as people mentioned, lot of scraping.

It for sure was not the setting. I remember how people loved levelling experience. Story of WoW is always epic, but stupid as hell - it doesn't really matter if we face infinity army of demons or go back in time to fight space orcs.

[FelPlague]

One of the main issues was how long everything took but then once it was done there wasn othing to do. for example, a major problem with the garrison.


During the beta people LOVED the garrison, progressing it and upgrading it.
But the issue was with the garrison was once you maxed it out... it was... boring... there is nothing left to do...
The issue was in the beta people did not have enough time to find this MASSIVE issue, and blizzard did not think about it and went all in on it.
So blizz made a system that had a HARD cap, but the people on the beta were unable to reach that hard cap in the time because they didnt give us enough time or test.
I may be too tired to say this the best i could, but blizzard didnt add enough progression to the garrison, their was so much they could have added, and SOOO much was cut from WoD. it could have been AMAZING

Shatrath
Apexsis city
ogre empire
arrakoa and ogre races (this was not confirmed but seemed SUPER likely)
moveable garrison
garrison customization with trees and trophies from killing old raid bosses and current rares.
A REASON to hang out with your friends.

[Flurryfang]

Come to think about it, Legion would have made way more sense after MoP than after WoD. It looks like a typical case of project mismanagement :/

The wierd thing is that outside of the small Gul'dan storyline in WoD, the expansion simply does not fit in anywhere. The expansion changed nothing about the world, which is normally a signature thing about expansions. If we had skipped WoD and gone straight to Legion with 1 small patch in MoP to explain Gul'dan, everything would be the same-

[Seramore]

A lot. WoD was a really interesting expansion, it had a lot of promise and I would argue that it could have been one of the best expansions if done right. The content we actually received in the expansion was good, what went wrong was the amount of it that they gave, as well as the actual quality of it. The content was rushed, and there was way too much cut content: the train and other content in Gorgorond, I'm pretty sure the Tanaan we received was nothing like how it originally was, the rumored Ogre continent never came to be, neither did Shattrath. And let's not forget about Farahlon.

I like to think that this was all due to Warlords of Draenor being Blizzard's attempt at having their yearly expansion model and after seeing that it wasn't going to work, they doubled down on Legion and made the expansion very desolate without patch content. The biggest reasoning behind this theory is that they went from saying "we would like to try to make a new expansion every year" each time the subject of the expansions came up, into just trying their best to push content and future content as fast as they realistically can once Legion was announced. Instead of just speaking mostly meaningless words, they've pretty much backed this model up this time with the entire Legion expansion so far.

On the plus side, Warlords of Draenor gave us one of the better leveling experiences in the game. Leveling always sucks but the zones were mostly pretty great.

Come to think about it, Legion would have made way more sense after MoP than after WoD. It looks like a typical case of project mismanagement :/

I disagree. WoD pretty much allowed Legion to happen, especially considering how Gul'dan was a major factor in everything regarding the Legion's recent movements.

[Deleted]

Player's housing.
The garrison was a nice idea, let's face it. It was, however, a rare case of everything at once. It allowed the player to be completely self sufficient, turning an MMO into a single player experience.
No need for gathering professions, no need for interactions. It spoiled the bare bones of an MMO: interaction.

Raids.
Raids were good-ish, nothing memorable. But outside of them there was jack-all to do.
If you didn't PvP, you gathered materials for raids. No need to do dungeons, no need to repeat challenge modes. You leveled alts if anything and that was that.

Class development.
This is the sorest of buttons for me. Class development was completely neglected, it looked like they got to the Ma- syllabe and then ran out of time and will.
Arms went live with buttons missing, Monks' hardest hitter was their gapcloser, Mages' was an instant. It was a wreck that damaged gameplay on all levels, and for some class' enjoyment aswell.

Patches.
People patiently waited for patches to deliver, to patch up the expansion. But nothing really came. The 6.1 major patch content had some garrison upgrades and the selfie stick.
In a devoid expansion.

PvP in general.
Stale meta, classes better than others in a drastic way, Turbo or wizard and the rest was bananas, and Ashran.
The recipe for disaster.

Now to be fair, WoD did something good. Namely, PvP gearing is the best the game has ever seen. The rest is better forgotten.

[Eggroll]

Garrisons design: awful.Garrison.Prison.
Story: awful... wow I had hoped to learn so much about how Draenor was like before it was destroyed, but NOTHING!
World content: awful, it's just an empty world, nothing going on
Execution: awful, in fact, the worst I have ever seen. That pile of sh*t is bugged to the boot, you wouldn't even think it's a Blizzard game
... that and the fact that they obviously just abandoned the xpac halfway through.
Professions: just gutted, booring
Itemization: entry LFR ilvl for lvl91 toons, seriously? They carries that over to Legion, I still hate it

That flying desaster also left a bad taste for sure plus some of the new character models looking quite unfinished and not at all on par with the Pandaren model.

The only two redeeming things that come to my mind are Pepe the Garrison bird and some of the music that I still like to listen to.