Originally Posted by
Exilian
I realise I'm probably going to get a lot of hate for this, but I'm honestly getting a bit tired of hearing that "WOTLK was the greatest expansion ever ergmagherrrrd" mantra that seems to be prevalent throughout the WoW community (although it still takes second place in the annoyance competition with the "everything but Vanilla sucked because it was too easy" adage). Hence, I thought I'd outline some of the shortcomings of the fabled expansion to remind people that it, too, had many things that sucked bigtime.
1) Most of the quests in zones like Grizzly Hills, Fjord, Borean, and Sholazar were completely disconnected from the main story, which would have been fine as standalone plot arcs had they not been, for the most part, boring and anticlimactic, not to mention cliche. Just for comparison, every single new zone in Cataclysm, for example, absolutely blew all of Northrend out of the water when it came to plot and aesthetics.
2) The two top level zones were almost completely identical in aesthetics with very few visual variations throughout. This was consistent with the lore of the zones, but failed to make them any less of an eye-sore after a few months of seeing more of the same every single day.
3) Crystalsong, arguably the most beautiful zone in the Northrend, had virtually zero content. Now I'm not sure where exactly I saw this, but I read somewhere that it was supposed to be a thriving questing zone like all the others but Blizz decided to cut content before release, possibly due to lack of resources (WOD flashbacks anyone?).
4) Yogg'saron was squeezed in seemingly out of nowhere, and met a highly unimpressive and unimportant end for something that is apparently the root of (almost) all evil on Azeroth.
5) Flying was available at lvl 77, allowing players to fly over all of the seemingly looming, menacing threats in Icecrown and Stormpeaks, taking away much of the "darkness" and "danger" behind them.
6) The entire expansion was pretty predictable, from start to finish, in that we knew we would eventually get to and kill Arthas. No plot twists aside from Wrathgate, which again didn't impact the overall story though.
Overall, I am not trying to say that WOTLK was a bad expansion by any means, nor that it wasn't *better* than, say, WOD, but when people over-exaggerate and go "oh it was the best thing that ever happened to WOW, everything was 10/10", well, they're wrong. It was, for the most part, fun and new. But it was also a bit monotonous and stale in looks and storytelling.