What did go wrong with WoD?

[yetgdhfgh]

No content plus at the end of it all nothing really mattered cause we aint gonna see Grom or Yrel ever again.

The only thing WoD got right was the leveling experience imo cause Frostfire ridge and Shadowmoon valley was brilliant zones imo chock full of lore.

[Vorkreist]

Garrisons : All you had to do was wank in garrison 24/7 and you got everything. Gold, gear, mats and more and the lack of other content besides the garrison.
If wod had the mythic + of legion with a decent reward daily system that sent you out of the garrison the exp would have been almost decent.
The story was just as bad and irrelevant as legion.

[FobManX]

It was obvious that during the tenure of WOD, Blizzard was more focused on Overwatch and Hearthstone.

[Arnoux]

I have started WoD and Legion when it was released. For WoD the leveling was good, but after I hit 100, farmed heroic dungeons, I had nothing to do at all. It was either raid, or stop progressing. I don't really like raiding so unsubbed.

In Legion there are world quests with rewards and mythic+, which gives some loot for non raiders as well.

Also even if the world quest does not give me upgrade, it is still worth to do the emissaries because of legendary drop. As a casual, I can get the exact same top legendaries as the top 0.01% raiders. I have played a bit with my blood dk alt, and now it has the exact same 2 legendaries as the DK who was top1 on mythic+ ladder. Same item level, everything. Also my artifact weapon keeps getting stronger with normal play, I don't have to be a top raider.

I mostly care about progressing and there was no progress for me in WoD. In Legion there are plenty.

Edit: Also the Garrison, I hated it very much. It was snowy, ugly for my tastes, small, no life in it. At least the alliance one looked a bit better, but I did not play alliance character at that time.

[Deleted]

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.

Sorry thats wrong! Blizzard KNEW all faults before the launch thanks to beta testers, every single one of them. And they ignored it.
Hell even the launch desaster was told to them beforehand....

Plus they way the SPIT at customers like me who lost thanks to these fucks every archy progress in humans/nightelfs/trolls/etc thanks to the wod flaw.
first it was claimed we were a very very tiny minority, then it was claimed it would be fixed and 6 month later they were "fuck you we cant do anything about it"

[Ticj]

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.

middle? more like right after release, the first patch we got was fucking twitter integration lol

[Deleted]

Oh yeah, the cut content. Another great WoD thing.

So picture this: you hear the name Orgrim Doomhammer. He's in Talador, he's coordinating the Horde effort alongside Blackhand.
Now, even without knowing anything about Orgrim, you know at least one thing: he was big enough, strong enough, respected enough, that our Horde's capital is named after him.
What you could know is that his weapon and armor have been the weapon and armor of every Warchief of the Horde. Thrall proudly wore them when he reconstructed the Horde, it was a memento of a time long past, a symbol of tradition.
What you might not know is that Orgrim was arguably the greatest Warchief to date, and one of the cogs that led to Gul'dan failing during the second War, and in doing so he basically allowed the Sons of Lothar to win. And I'm summing it up in a very butcher-y way.

You get your ass to Talador as quickly as possible, and run through a number of quests to get to Shattrath city, which is under siege. You have a quick glance at Orgrim when Durotan speaks to him - they have always been great friends regardless of the universe they found themselves in - and the next time you see Orgrim... he's dead at Blackhand's feet.

Just like that. Nothing inbetween, no prosecution at all. Dead like a bitch.
We later discovered that Talador had some cut content, and by some I mean the whole Orgrim chain. Which is kind of important given how big Orgrim is in the Horde myth and how big it could have been.

But no, fuck-all. Grom was a wimp aswell: the charismatic leader of the Iron Horde got manhandled by Kilrogg, which amounts to like half a Mannoroth and we know what Grom can do to Mannoroths, and in the very end he forces the whole populace of Draenor to cheer with him as Archimonde died.
The populace he tried to enslave, the populace he waged war against with all the might and cunning and fury of a united Horde.
Anything that happened for those people to like Grom wasn't shown on screen, I don't even know if there was anything at all. It was bullshit, had no excuse to happen.

And of course another great pearl: the Ogre Empire.
If Empire means some pixels north of Nagrand. Because Ogres were nowhere to be found, nothing relevant has been done by the Ogres, which I hardly believe are on their last leg. If anything I'd have imagined them to oppose the Iron Horde firsthand, with a mighty presence on Nagrand.
Nope.
If such a thing was present, it was not apparent.
If the Ogres were connected to the pale ones, it wasn't explained how.

Everything was an incohesive mess.

[The5thVegetable]

Personally, I think it's less about the story and more about their whole, one expansion per year-deal. WoD suffered from a lack of content- because half the team was off working on other stuff. By the time we'd gotten half-way through the expansion, Blizzard realised not only that their plan had failed, but that players were loathing the expansion(which, as we all know, was far-fetched enough without a lack of content). As a result, they focused on wrapping up the expansion quickly so they could instead move on to Legion- an expansion that wasn't a disaster fresh in everyone's minds.

It really is a shame- WoD had a lot of potential. From the Gorian Empire to the Breakers & Primals, to Farahlon, and Cho'gall and the Pale. Just that there is easily 3 patches worth of lore, and that's not even putting into account the possibility of multiple Iron Horde patches, with the Legion patch finally coming along to wrap up the expansion and lead us into Legion.

I'll be honest, I quite liked WoD. Loved it even! Primarily due to the aesthetics, music, lore, and overall feel. I love Orcs. The leveling was great, I think we can all agree on that. And being a Roleplayer, I personally wasn't all that affected by the content drought. I say with confidence that if it wasn't for the lack of content, I imagine WoD would be a decent expansion at the very least.

[Moggie]

During the beta people LOVED the garrison, progressing it and upgrading it.

Nah. Players hated it from the get go. It went through a few iterations and overhauls though that by the end of the Beta things had been twisted beyond breaking points with Garrisons. And the promise it'd be fixed before it went Live obviously never happened.



Lack of a cohesive storyline, directions, class overhauls, profession screw ups, ashran debacle (as well as pvp balance that was f'd up hardcore), etc... The only saving grace were the raids. But they lasted too long and too chopped up needlessly that even those failed to keep things going. Not going to mention cut content though the game that was announced at blizzcon (gamescon?) was not even a fragment of that game. What we got were a few arrogant devs systematically trying to chop up the product to get rid of any trace of previous devs.

[varren]

The expansion ended about 7 months in.

[Hctaz]

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 :/

It definitely was. The story for WoD even was completely changed enough multiple times. Drastically enough to where Blizzard told us about them. Originally the story was that Garrosh would be displaced and outcast where he would unite the other outcast races of Azeroth such as Gnolls, Centaur, and Kobolds into something called "The Mongrel Horde"
They decided that sounded stupid so they changed it to where he would be exiled to Outland where he would find a powerful artifact that would allow him to forcibly reconstruct the pieces into a "new" Draenor while simultaneously resurrecting the fallen leaders of the old clans into a new horde.

And then they went with the time travel story.

Add that along with the Garrison taking up a huge amount of resources and the overall push for expansions that only last one year and you get WoD. A failed attempt to make something cool happen with not enough time laid out for it to be finished.

[Razion]

I think they under-delivered on Garrisons. It was a core feature and it wasn't implemented in a way that was fun. I think the mission table was the worst offender.

[Zafire]

The main problem was the lack of content. That's it, IMO.

[Thelxi]

Just not enough content. They figured they could get away with what they ended up producing, but they figured wrong.

It also seemed rushed. Like the Ashran hubs had buildings sticking out over edges and everything seemed to be copy pasted from elsewhere. Idk what went on over at the Blizzard HQs but the quality was not what is usually is.

- - - Updated - - -

Also Garrisons were not bad content imo. At least I enjoyed setting it up and spending months recruiting perfect followers. The problem was that it was the only content with zero alternatives.

[Deleted]

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-

No one mentioned it (as far as i read the comments), but this expansion was made for one reason: because of the WoW movie
That's where it fits. They expected millions flocking from the theaters into the online game and wanted to greet them with the same setup and scenery they just saw, so they made a whole timetravel expansion just for them

They failed miserably with the move, they sacrificed for it the expansion, and finally they gave up on both at half way

[Soon-TM]

No one mentioned it (as far as i read the comments), but this expansion was made for one reason: because of the WoW movie
That's where it fits. They expected millions flocking from the theaters into the online game and wanted to greet them with the same setup and scenery they just saw.

They failed miserably with the move, they sacrificed for it the expansion, and finally they gave up on both at half way

I had not thought about the movie, but in my country at least, it flopped hard, like really, REALLY hard.

[Flurryfang]

No one mentioned it (as far as read the comments), but this expansion was made for one reason: because of the WoW movie
That's where it fits. They expected millions flocking from the theaters into the online game and wanted to greet them with the same setup and scenery they saw.

Well that would make sense if the characters and enviroment in the WoW movie mirrored the game, but in reality WoD does not even look like movie. Aside from Gul'dan, all of the characters in WoD are different from the WoW movie. Even one of the more focused characters Doomhammer, are killed off very quickly in WoD and is dumped away.
Furthermore the WoW movie was about humans and green orcs, and WoD is mostly about brown/black orcs, ogres and dreanei... So again, does not really match with the movie.

Finally, i would understand if alot of the characters in WoD were used as characters in the WoW movie, but many of the WoD characters are featured in the WoW movie as fan service and not as acting characters. Bladefist and Kilrogg are only seen shortly for fans to get a glimpse off and even Grommash is only used as a minor character. The only 2 characters who get full acting roles are Durotan and Blackhand, yet Blackhand is completly different from WoD and Durotan does not fear his wolfpelt and is outside of his element most of the movie since we mostly see him in snow in WoD.

....... If Blizzard wanted to make WoD match up with the WoW movie, they did a pretty shitty job doing it.

[Queen of Hamsters]

WoD was the obvious bastard child of their "yearly-expansion"-frenzy.
Everything went wrong with it aside from raiding.

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.

They were working on Legion long before the middle of WoD.

They work on at least 2 expansions as we speak, and only insiders know how far ahead they are in the planning stage for future expansions.

[McNeil]

WoD had no reason to exist. It took place in an entirely different timeline that hardly affected our own, we barely did anything of importance in the long run. They also picked the most bland enemies (orcs and demons) while we were already dealing with orcs for 12 straight months in SoO. It doesn't matter which Hellscream is ruling these orcs, or what gear they are wearing, an orc is an orc and we were long overdue for something else. The developers didn't show any passion at all, they pretty much abandoned WoD right after launch so that they can focus on Legion. We only got one real major patch while the ''fake'' one mostly consisted of a feature that some dev made in his spare time when he got bored. 6.2 also delivered content that could've been at launch (as Tanaan was originally planned to be a release zone, with Farahlon being the new zone to look forward to).

The amount of cut content was just way to much and the game really shows how much if suffered. We didn't get an entire zone (Farahlon), some hints to an Ogre Empire that never got explored, we never got Shattrah as a raid, Bladespire and Karabor didn't become capitals but rather quest hubs that you don't even return to, a lot of storylines cut with the worst offenders being Kargath and Orgrim. Even a whole zone like Gorgrond was planned to be a lot different than the one in retail, it was supposed to be a lot more about Orgrim and the Iron Horde while the Botani only played a small or no role at all. The Botani were originally going to be a race in Farahlon.

Last but not least, the game both suffered from a lack of content and from the garrisons that ended up as a horrible feature. The garrisons single handedly made the world feel empty and the only ''gameplay'' they offered were chores like the work orders and followers. You did get to make a lot of money at least, and doing invasions was a neat idea. There's potential for garrisons to be good but the way they got executed didn't work out for most of the part, they should've been much more optional as a side feature for people to do. They should've allowed you to let you choose where to place your garrison, having only 1 location just makes this feature a lot more boring.

Overall its a bad expansion that caused a lot of damage to the game. I wonder what even motivated the team to make an expansion like this. They might've wanted to promote the Warcraft movie, but I think they wanted to try to ''bring back Warcraft'' after 2 years of MoP which felt to alienated for the franchise. This kind of script that WoD had is the kind of bad fan fiction you'd find on FanFiction.net or something, but once its implemented as an actual game its apparent how bad it turns out.

[Soeroah]

One theory is they put most of their design team on Legion too early and left WoD with too few people working on it, which contributed to a dearth of content before they ultimately gave up on it.

They removed everything good about MoP world content and there was basically no max level story.