Now that MoP is over, how would you rank it against other expansions?

[Therealmagoo]

WOTLK will be remembered by the majority of WOW players as THE best expansion ever on wow , unless somehow they top it with the next one but considering we got cata and MOP after WOTLK i doubt it very much.

[Dasani]

MOP > TBC > Vanilla > Wrath > Cata

I know it's kind of popular to hate on pandas and MOP in general, but I like em.

Monks are my favorite class at the moment being ridiculously fun to both tank and DPS with, and the ability to do both with the same gear is an added bonus. They are so well designed and fun. The healing monks I think need work in a lot of respects though. As for the pandas themselves, I think they have nice models and very cool animations. They are also some of the more interesting NPCs i've had to interact with before. I like how the Shado Pan npcs consistently show up in multiple places and are always working together against the common enemy. Some of those characters are pretty cool, like Taoshi.

I'll honestly be sad when MOP ends and we move on to some new part of the world where the style and character of pandaria won't exist anymore and this lovely continent will be reduced to a leveling zone.

[Sole-Warrior]

LOL @ anyone who didn't pick mop, how sad.

[Pebrocks The Warlock]

Please do. I should start collecting the stat sources for refernce. I wasnt just pulling a number out of my ass. I said based on your number of 30 million lost and the +10 million lost that I read previously would make it 20 million. Perhaps I should have made it more clear that the numbers seem contradictory which is why I am wondering why this 30 million lost number is coming from when I did not see it in previous threads on sub losses.

I shall start building a text document on such sources so that I can be more constructive when it comes to numbers.

It's going to take awhile for me to find it. I should be able to find it by tomorrow hopefully. I'll remember to update my post.

[lappee]

Hard to say, Wotlk was the best expac PvE wise while TBC was the best PvP wise. As a former PvE'r i'll say Wotlk

[lokinrond713]

beter then cata (which is no accomplishment)
better then wrath or bc? probably not since my server is so dead my guild has to rely on a pool of unreliable players with only 4 ppl (including myself) that are regulars in 10 man raiding and we've had to cancel some raids because ppl didnt show up. we had to merge with the only other decent sized guild on the server and we still have attendance issues. In 10 man

[Deleted]

I've been around since vanilla so I'm judging this by the time i put in an expansion. That way MoP wins without doubt.

[Issalice]

MoP>>WoTLK>TBC>Cata

[Reserk]

Worst expansion, it simply wasn't fun, i stopped playing in feb or march and never looked back. The numbers don't lie, they lost almost 3 million subs with this expansion...

Why can't people who don't like MOP just say. "I don't like MOP for this and this and that" rather than fucking attack it. You obviously didn't like the expansion, stop making it like your opinion is the majorities opinion. Or even fact for that matter.

[H3llhog]

Woah, I'm surprised MoP actually has more votes than TBC. o_O Considering all the bad hopes they had for this expansion since they showed the first trailer.

As a person who plays since The Burning Crusade (but also as someone that doesn't have as much time as those days) I must say I actually enjoyed this expansion. Unlike others I welcomed the new asian theme with the new race and class. What I missed in Cataclysm, which was the sense of exploring and discovering the world (pretty much like TBC/Vanilla/WotLK) came back at the beginning of the expansion: Pandaria was a great new place to visit, and the lore, including the characters involving it, were quite entertaining. The new raids, while I did most of them in LFR and while I don't consider them as good or memorable as those in WotLK or BC, were enjoyable and done well for me (my favorite being Throne of Thunder). New activities, like Pet Battles or the Tillers farm, were quite interesting. Oh, and the world bosses were amazing, too. What I didn't like from this expansion: the numerous dailies and farming reputation, most of how the new gear looked, some PvP imbalances (the new last bg is sorta boring, too), the lack of new dungeons while giving too much attention to the scenarios....and that it wasn't quite alt friendly until this last patch.

Overall, I found this to be a good expansion. FAAAAAAAAR better than Cataclysm and maybe a little behind from Burning Crusade. WotLK is still the best expansion for me, though.

[Deleted]

Why can't people who don't like MOP just say. "I don't like MOP for this and this and that" rather than fucking attack it. You obviously didn't like the expansion, stop making it like your opinion is the majorities opinion. Or even fact for that matter.

Sorry if I step in but be actually didn't say that, if you add "in my opinion" after his first comment (kind of goes without saying though) he's actually ok.
And about the drops in subs, that's a fact. Mop lost more than anyone else. We don't know why that happen and that's why you get speculations.
I also think mop sucks, it actually made me stop playing constantly, so for that I am grateful

Anyway:
Wotlk-tbc-vanilla--------mop----------cata.
Cata killed the game FOR ME with that horrible linear needlessy comic world they created.

[Psykewne]

I feel mists of pandaria had every reason to be the best expansion ever but in my opinion it had been the worst in many respects.
- lfr has not been a good feature at all as a whole expansion experiment, by being mandatory it felt like extra work and by being pointless for main raiders it suddenly becomes tedious to succeed at outside reset day (or even get a group in reasonable times)
- 5 man dungeons have died a death, scenarios are not particularly interesting as end game content.
- access to gear for alts is restrictive and time consuming or provides gear so poorly itemised it can be as bad as gear many item levels lower
- levelling content felt drawn out and while the quests and stories were the most fun questing first time around, they really suffered in repetition for levelling alts
- pet battles was a great idea and feels like it really did not live up to expectation
- no tri-spec ever surfaced (i feel this was a big thing in opening the game up more and not putting it in was a missed opportunity)
- raiding content itself shifted the bar from cataclysm too much and I feel this hurt alot of guilds in transitioning
- the legendary for all has been nothing but an annoying way to feel bad for changing character mid expansion and prohibitive to those wishing to change

The best thing about pandaria I feel is certainly Flex Raid

After TBC gave us such great raiding content, wotlk gave us great quality of life and raiding inclusiving, cata gave us a very alt friendly experience and fast gearing of fresh characters. We really should have expected more. After over 6 years playing WoW, I really have not enjoyed the last year as much as I could have in my opinion. Cata had many things wrong, but it was a good learning experience for blizzard and also gave us alot of good decisions, there was no reason to make so many mistakes in MoP. I really hope LFR goes away and we get more 5 man centric stuff back, reforging and valor upgrades have both been unexciting resource drains rather than compelling game features and I wish they would also go.

[Deleted]

TBC > Classic > WotLK > MoP > Cata ...

[Myrandron]

Wrath, MoP, Bc, Cata.

Wrath was enjoyable from a story standpoint with plenty of lore galore and also fun content and it was really enjoyable. MoP had some pretty good story which I enjoyed and content wasn't the worst but it could have been better, but was still enjoyable. Was never one for Bc and really only enjoyed hitting up a few of the raids just because of how they looked, story was a bit eh considering the flows a bit weird for me and really I only enjoyed the raids again for the aesthetics. Catas story was a bit lack luster for the most part, and the raiding wasn't anything as exciting as I expected it to be, hell only reason I enjoyed it was the guilds I did the content with.

- - - Updated - - -

TBC > Classic > WotLK > MoP > Cata ...

Classics not an expansion though, unless this is all suddenly and has always been more expansions for WCIII

[Derah]

Incoming super long post:

For me, the ranking would be: MoP >/= WOTLK > TBC > Vanilla > Cata. By this I mean that in MoP the coin is still up in the air. Depending on what they do with Garrosh, it will either tie with WOTLK, or surpass it.

For me, WOTLK was pure awesome. The leveling was great, the zones were great, the storylines were awesome, the lore was awesome, the raids were awesome (Ulduar FTW) but the one things that holds it back is its REALLY lackluster ending. That was one piece of shit ending with a plot twist that came out of nowhere. "There must always be a lich king" BULLSHIT.

The scourge existed for less than 15 years, its not even fucking 100 years old. Azeroth was just fine without a lich king for the past 20k years, now that we've dismantled the cult of the damned, and razed the icecrown glacier, and later the icecrown citadel to its knees, we're supposed to instate a new lich king? from a story perspective this makes absolutely zero sense, and its just a lazy way of blizzard to reuse the lich king for a later expansion and we just KNOW he's gonna go evil in a later expansion. It made all our war, all our struggles, all our losses, meaningless because in the end, the lich king wasn't destroyed, he was just delayed. Very underwhelming end to an expansion. At least in TBC, sure we didn't killed kil'jaeden, but we prevented him from entering azeroth, we stopped the legion invasion dead on its tracks, we scored a victory.

in WOTLK? Scourge is still there, cult of the damned is still there, lich king is still there. We brought them to their knees, and then rather than finish them off, we just....... backed off. Bullshit.

I'm really hoping blizzard doesn't do that here, I get why garrosh didn't died in SoO. Both Horde fans and Alliance fans were clamoring for their faction to land the killing blow on him, and it would be more "fair" for both sides, if a neutral faction did the deed. I am hoping that the pandaren do the trial, and then EXECUTE garrosh. if they don't, then this is just another lich king 2.0, with garrosh in prison waiting to be released at a later date to resume his warmongering campaing, or even worse, (shudder) be redeemed (/shudder).

I'm hoping blizzard doesn't do this, and instead grant us (all of us, horde and alliance together) the victory we deserve by killing off the dictator and putting a definitive end to him, rather than a lazy "to be continued".

So for now, MoP is tied with WOTLK, because it depends on how they will handle garrosh.

Putting the ending asides, time to analyze the rest of the expansion.

PVP: I'll keep this brief. I'm not a pvper, I am terrible at it, and I fully admit I know jack about it. I will give this expansion a good score on pvp though because it added new BGs, new arenas, and every major patch had some form of world pvp. From the node control in 5.1 to the pvp dailies in 5.2 to the barrens event in 5.3, to the bloody-coins in 5.4, so there's always something to keep the active pvp player engaged. I wont comment on class balance, or the many changes to resillience/gear/etc because as I said, I'm not an expert in pvp, or even remotely educated on the matter.

Leveling: Supreme. Masterful. Extraordinary. Just fucking bravo blizzard, you made me regain my faith in you, after the clusterfuck that was cataclysm.

Every zone was amazing, and evoked plenty of emotions in me, from histerical laughter during the Scout's report (Riko and Kyrin FTW) to sadness at the battle of the jade serpent, lighthearted joy at the valley of the four winds, downright buckets of tears when Dezco's wife died in krasarang, fistpump moment of awesome in stoneplow, and kun-lai, and genuine fear in the dread wastes. This expansion has it all. it seems to have stucked a balance between the different quest hubs mode of WOTLK, and the linear integrated story of cataclysm. With aplenty use of phasing, and spectacular narrative. Almost no plot holes, no cliffhangers, and ample background lore.

For all the disproportionate shit people seem to give to the pandaren, they are perhaps the most perfectly integrated race into the game, with an intrinsically crafted backstory, rich adaptation of real life legends, and a unique niche as a culture. I haven't seen a newcomer race so perfectly integrated to the game since the Vry'kul in WOTLK. But unlike those, we can actually play as these, so that's a bonus (Unlike the worgen, and draenei who are the worst integrated races in the game, the latter requiring multiple major retcons to explain how they even exist)

It wasn't perfect though, I have a couple of major complaints about this expansion.

The first is the treatment given to the horde and alliance.

The former get all the attention, sure, but its negative attention. This is an expansion where the horde gets nothing but slaps in the face. We lose one of our most beloved minor characters (Nazgrim T_T) we lose YET ANOTHER FUCKING GUNSHIP (for the love of god blizzard, STOP KILLING OFF OUR AIRFORCE GODDAMMIT) we get a massive civil war where we have to fight our own people (I joined the horde to kill alliance, not to kill other horde) we have to invade our own lands (again, I joined the horde so I could storm enemy cities, not invade my own) at the end we are only alive because our enemy chose to have mercy on us, rather than our own strength sustaining us, and we get major defeats EVERYWHERE. And before any alliance fan whines "but in cata the horde won all the time and the alliance only lost" BULLSHIT. Sure the horde won a lot in cata, but so did the alliance. They won in northwatch, Honor Stand, against the Shatterspear in darkshore, etc. They lost more, but they at least gave almost as good as they got. Compare to the horde in this expansion were we just lost, and lost, and lost, and lost, and lost. Not a single victory against the alliance. Not one. The few victorious moments we had were against ourselves. NOT COOL.

I tremendously disliked how the horde was treated in this expansion and I expect many moments of awesome to be given to us in future expansions (Mind you, they don't necessarily have to come at the expense of the alliance)

The alliance didn't got off scotfree either. Because while they got victory after victory against the horde, they weren't the focus of the expansion, and to make matters worse, it seems that the alliance is only humans. If you look at the many horde storylines you get plenty for the orcs, for the blood elves, the trolls, and even a bit for the goblins and taurens (The forsaken had very little developments, but given how much attention they had in cata, this is balanced) Now look at the alliance, and you could be forgiven for thinking that it disbanded and its made up of humans only. The night elves act like reckless leeroy jenkins just so the humans can bail them, the dwarves bicker among themselves just so the humans can unite them, the gnomes worgen and draenei are NOWHERE to be seen (there is a grand total of ONE semi-important draenei NPC in the expansion, Mishka, and she only shows up for a grand total of THREE quests)

For fucks sakes just look at the ending cinematics. Horde one gets to show ALL of the leaders of the horde, and while it focuses mainly on Thrall and Vol'jin, everyone else also shows up at least for a fraction of a second. Alliance cinematic? exclusively Varian and Jaina with a micro cameo of Anduin. You could be very easily forgiven for thinking none of the other leaders were present. The alliance may have won the war, and every battle, but they had too little focus, and what little focus they received, was given to the humans. Everyone else doesn't matter.

My second gripe with the lore, is how this expansion treated women. This may as well be called "The Great Estrogen Purge of Azeroth". -_- don't look at me like that, I'm dead serious here.

Varian was a major ASSHOLE in WOTLK, but blizzard was dead set on making him the messiah of the alliance, so what do they do? why easy, they transplanted EVERY SINGLE ONE of his unlikable characteristics to female characters. His impulsive, brash, hot headed stupidity to channel leeroy Jenkins? lets put that into Tyrande, and lets have Varian school HER on how to lead troops, even though she's been a fucking sentinel general since before Varian's great great great great great great great great great grandfather was even born and led the defense of this world against not one but TWO Burning Legion invasions. His racist bigoted views on every horde race? lets put those into jaina and make her a complete racist bitch. His genocidal "kill every single one of them" mentality regarding said races of the horde? lets put that in Admiral Rogers.

In order to finally make varian a character that is likeable for his nobility rather than his asshole attitude, they transplanted everything bad about him onto women. And that is NOT cool with me. Not one bit.

The women of the horde didn't fared better. Warlord Zaela was without a doubt my favorite character of cataclysm, and her questchain was the only bit of lore that not only I deeply enjoyed, but also made me proud to be horde. Here was a youthful and idealistic young woman, who descended from a tribe that in the past commited heinous unspeakable horrors upon the red dragonflight, and rather than continuing to perpetuate the dark legacy of her forefathers, she chose to break the cycle, and lead her people into a new bright future, by deposing her tyrannical and corrupt dictator, and chart a new prosperous reign for her tribe.

So what does she do in the new expansion? why of course do a 180° and support a new Tyrannical Dictator, and simply redo all the crimes of her tribe all over again. Which means all her character development, all her progress, all the redemption that the Dragonmaw received in cataclysm meant shit. Thanks blizzard. Seriously, -_- I hope you're proud.

Barring these two major gripes I have, I actually enjoyed the story of MoP far more than most other expansions, and for this reason, the lore gets a massive score for me.

RAIDS

Pleased. Beautiful designs, fun boss mechanics, good integration to the lore, and more. My only tiny gripe is that a lot of the fights are NOT melee-friendly, but that's something I've gotten used to. Nothing new to see here, every expansion is the same, favoring ranged blatantly, I was hoping this one would break the mold, but alas, maybe next time it'll happen. I also am not that pleased with SoOs obsession of having nearly every boss battle shower us with adds. Come on, I want to fight the boss, stop putting a gazzillion adds to kill on every single frikking fight.

Content

This is probably the richest expansion in terms of content. Now, its irrelevant whether or not you LIKE the content, the point is that there's plenty of it, if you like it all, good for you, but all of it is sufficiently varied to please as much large a crowd as possible. 5mans, scenarios, proving grounds, farm, timeless isle, dailies, pet battles, raids, brawlers guild, rare hunting, treasure hunting, OMG.

While I didn't liked many of those activities, the fact that they're there shows me that blizzard isn't just focusing on catering to one demographic (*coughvanillaandtbccough*), but instead, trying to please as many players as they can, and that is something deserving of an applause for me.

Flex Raid

*cue "Ode to Joy"*

Hallelujah. A raid mode custom-tailored JUST for the type of players like me =D

All the practicality of LFR (can be done multiple times, at any time, pug-friendly, cross-realm possible, split in easier to swallow wings, lower difficulty than normals, personal loot, which avoids loot drama) with almost all the benefits of normal (Achievements can be earned, superior loot rewards than the garbage of LFR, the fights are actually challenging rather than faceroll, vanity rewards like pets and mounts,) and the one benefit neither Normals, nor LFRs will ever have: Group size can change, if for whatever reason X number of people can't join, you don't have to cancel the raid night, you just continue and difficulty is adjusted on the fly.

T_T Thank you blizzard, thank you for adding this to the game. God bless every single soul who worked into this feature =D

NEW RACE

Love it. What can I say? I love pandas. If anything, I'm saddened that this level of detail isn't present on the other races, just looking at the incredibly wide level of facial expressions a pandaren can have, and then comparing them to the stiff faces of TBC or the blocky, horrendous faces of Vanilla makes me cringe. Honestly those new race models can't come soon enough, I hope blizzard takes a break on the next expansion and rather than work on new races, they take this time to work on the old ones. The more the graphics of this game evolve, the more glaring the datedness of the old models shows. This is specially glaring on the human and orc models, which ironically, are the ones MOST used, since 99.99% of all the focus given to the alliance goes to the humans, and 70% of all the focus given to the horde goes to the orcs.

New Class

Impressed. The class is fun, its unique, has a SHITLOAD of awesome visual candy, and most importantly, they didn't fucked up the balancing this time. I play a DK as my main, and WOTLK was an exercise in frustration. My class was ridiculously OP during all of Beta, which blizzard ignored (presumably to draw new players with the new super OP class) which led to everyone and their mother playing a DK at launch, and seeing DKs everywhere, which ranged from the bad to the attrocious, whcih in turn led to my class having a horrible reputation and finding invites a pain in the ass (Which of course made me love the LFG tool even more. Do any of you have ANY IDEA of how fucking hard it was to get an invite for a 5man in wrath if you weren't a DK tank?)

Then they tried to correct their mistake, but rather than lower the power of the Dks to a reasonable amount on par with the other classes, they just said "fuck it" and nerfed it to hell to the point even normal non-elite mobs in Icecrown (the zone, not the raid) could kill me if I wasn't in blood spec. Rather than use the scalpel they used the chainsaw, and fucked up my class up and down. Death Strike went through FOUR major reworks before it went to how it works today. Scourge strike went through FIVE revamps before it went to how it looks today. Every major patch meant having to relearn my class from scratch as whole mechanics, features, or major CDs were either reworked, removed, or replaced. And then came the total revamp in cata.

Just horrible.

I'm very happy to see that the same has not happened for monks on this expansion. With the minor exception of healer monks but I don't heal so I don't care =D

MAJOR COMPLAINT

My biggest gripe against this expac however is the gearing system for alts, and its dreadful implementations of dailies, and this is coming from someone who got the Crusader title twice in WOTLK, and the Flamebreaker title twice in cata. AKA, a daily junkie, and as a proud daily junkie, I can say without hesitation that 90% of the dailies in MoP SUCK.

For all the horrors of cataclysm (the expansion that actually made me quit the game for over a year, something I've never done before or since) it had a pretty solid and neat gearing system for alts. Buy the newest hottest gear with VP, buy the older obsolete gear with JP. When a new tier rolls out, the new loot is bought with VP, and the now obsolete one with JP. It worked wonders. Rep gear was there too, but it was optional and if you didn't wanted it, you could simply skip the dailies and just level the one you needed for your helmet&Shoulder enchants.

Therazane was ridiculously easy to level, as just doing deepholm would get you to revered, and after that, slap a tabard on, and 8 5mans later you're exalted. The others weren't that harder either. The rest of the Rep gear was completely optional as if you were a casual you could simply wait until the next tier content, and then buy epics with JP. It was great.

Not so much in this expansion. JP was useless for 95% of the expansion, being used to buy useless blues (WTF was up with that shit? the initial blue rewards for JP in cata was of equal worth as 5man loot, but in MoP the blue rewards were even worse than 5man loot. WHAT WAS THE POINT OF THEM BEING THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE?) And the purple shit, required a painfully slow grind to get to the good stuff. Not only you had to grind rep, you had to grind VP. That is NOT cool. But as if that wasn't enough, you also had to grind 2 reps to revered to unlock the other two. And then to top it all off, the dailies gave a paltry sum of rep, making the grind ultra slow and ultra painful.

Let us do a prayer together, that blizzard NEVER AGAIN repeats this mistake. I don't like how they approached a solution in 5.4 "So you hate dailies? we wont include any, instead kill a trillion mobs to reach exalted"

I hated the timbermaw grind, and I hate the shaohao grind. Dailies can be fun as long as they're not required for progression (AKA: Make VP gear completely separated from Rep requirements) and they dont include 16-quest long hubs. Keep it short, at most 7 quests per faction. Pepper it with nice story progression along the way like they did with Dominance/shieldwall. And that, THAT is how you make dailies, fun and engaging. But please, please for the love of god, never again the horrors of the 5.0 grind.

[Deleted]

I stopped at leveling: supreme.

Linear as fuck.

[Necrolepsy]

TBC > Wotlk > Mop > Cata

Mop was very mediocre but not the blunder cataclysm was.

[Deleted]

Classics not an expansion though

true. still i wanted to express that i liked vanilla wow more than i did wotlk, mop and cata :P

[Ealyssa]

MoP
WoLK
BC
Cata
Vanilla

I liked every single stage of wow (yes, even cata was enjoyed wouldn't have paid a sub if not...). But for me MoP was a reeeeaaaaaally great period (and still is). An amazing leveling. Clearly the best continent we ever had in wow in term of design, quests, zone, content (people shiting on timeless isle haven't even discover half of the things to do).
The raid are amazing, all of them. Maybe the first time in wow history were I haven't any underwhelming feeling about a single tier/instance (BC : TK, WOLK : ToC, Cata : DS, MOP : ???)
The new BG are my favorite with the cata one. Even if PVP is clearly the laking part of MoP. Arena were never as imbalanced than now imo, it's fotm or get roflstomped (2's are sooo retarded right now).

So yeah. MoP is clearly the greatest time in wow for me, but it became a pure PVE game (doesn't matter as I now play Smite for PVP action that is funnier than arena ever was).

[Lyrax]

i didn't play wotlk, and i dabbled in TBC but in terms of content/improvements:

MoP>WoTLK>Cata>TBC>Classic

Cata was a bit poo tbh, but MoP i think has been really good.