I remember the hype for WoD, we all did. After the panda expansion we were going back to a far more proper "Warcraft" theme. Sure the time travel nonsense seemed silly but who cares, it's Draenor baby, uncorrupted Outland!
Watching videos from the community that highlighted the problems in MoP normally had "But they're fixing this in WoD." I'm thinking this it! WoW is making a comeback, they've learned from their mistakes in Cata and MoP, they got this!
And you know what.....they did! WoD at launch was awesome. While leveling my friends were saying, "this is the best expansion since WoTLK" some even saying "Best since TBC!" The leveling experience initially was awesome, the dungeons were good despite scarce. And when I hit max level and geared up I started doing Challenge Modes for the daily epic.
I tell you I haven't had such a blast running Dungeons since TBC. Grouping with strangers, going on voice comms because the level of difficulty required it. Wiping like crazy while trying out strat after strat, most of us veteran players loving the challenge laughing "We did ask for harder 5 mans!" Then after clearing the CM after 2-3 hours friending people so we could do the next one tomorrow. I haven't friended someone from 5 man group content since early WoTLK. (Seriously Blizz really dropped the ball on these and shoulded upgraded the rewards with each tier).
WoW bounced back to 10 million subscribers. And this remained constant for 6 months to many people's surprise as the next raid was unlocked. And then Blizzard literally made the same exact mistake they made in Cataclysm, that they never recovered from. WoD was released in in November and we didn't get a real content patch until June.....-_-. And about that yearly expansion!
I mean yes WoD was riddled with fundamental problems but this is the core of it, but screw Garrisons, we got jack for post launch content. In MoP they learned from this mistake in Cata and had a seperate team to handle smaller content patches, and another team for big raids. I mean I wasn't there for all of MoP but I seriously feel that it's an extremely underrated expansion due to the "Panda Theme" Was BRF really supposed to tide us over? Not everyone likes raiding, especially when they can just LFR clear the place, and we get so much gear from our Garrison anyway.
Also in Cata Blizz at least seemed to care about the sub loss, seeming to scramble out content. (This is before D3, Hearthstone and Overwatch hype tho).
Most importantly, I haven't heard Blizzard address this issue in Legion. Come out with all the shiny new features you want, are we going to get one content patch again?