Community Reaction

[Bangdingow]

Welfare epics actually started at the very end of Vanilla when they gave away High Warlord gear for damn near free.

[rohoz]

Welfare epics were first in vanilla, tbh, when you could just grind gm/hwl pieces for bg marks.
There was just as much uproar when they introduced flight
Kids were extremely upset when random dungeon finder launched in icc patch

[Gungnir]

I dunno. I see lots of people saying they loved the story, loved the world design, etc... when talking about how awesome MoP was.

I personally liked the story and world design but that's because I am a fan of eastern mythology in general.
I will however say that class design was by far MoP's strong suit.
MoP had the peak of gameplay, something we'll never get back to. Most likely we'll end up back in TBC-era gameplay soon with ranged only spamming one button.

[Thage]

Yep that, tier 5 look-a-likes I believe. This is when the term "welfare epics" was coined. No one really wanted them though unless you were a pvp player, or you had no other choices.

4, 5, and 6 all had their runs as welfare Arena recolors you could fail your way to, but once the previous-season gear went on the Honor vendor, that's when the welfare epics label began to get applied more liberally (really, they were a thing as far back as ZG/AQ20 when you could get a full kit of epic gear from an endgame raid that required relatively few people compared to the Big Three and tended to be much easier, mechanically-speaking, barring Hakkar).

It's also worth noting (for readers who joined post-BC, not you necessarily, Demi) that for most DPS specs, and some others like Bear, the Honor season gear was your best pre-raid set, better than loot from Heroic 5-mans despite what a stat budget glutton Resilience was (something that later stats PvP Power/Defense tried to remedy by having those stats not count against an item's budget, letting them itemize season gear to be more competitive with PvE gear) and the items being a little too heavily biased toward Stamina, but not quite as good as Kara/Mag/Gruul loot for PvE; by the end of the expansion, it wasn't unusual to see a freshly dinged 70 wearing a kit of season gear with some Magister's Terrace loot to fill in the blanks unless it was a tank (since the PvP sets didn't have enough Defense, again excepting Bears) or healer.

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I personally liked the story and world design but that's because I am a fan of eastern mythology in general.
I will however say that class design was by far MoP's strong suit.
MoP had the peak of gameplay, something we'll never get back to. Most likely we'll end up back in TBC-era gameplay soon with ranged only spamming one button.

5.2 Arms and 5.0 Windwalker, how I miss thee.

[Velshin]

There was nobody trying CC in Cata heroics. People tried to plow through them like WotLK-style, got killed, and complained. Bosses were also a lot harder, and there were quite a few deaths. A good chunk of it was also due to crappy mana management for healers when you were still pretty fresh at max level. Overall, just a harder dungeon experience which constantly wiped the group. I don't think anyone was complaining about length of time (unless it was long due to everyone dying). Same reason people just quit LFD when they ended up in one of the 3 end ones in WotLK. WotLK conditioned players for easy dungeons and easy raids.

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I'm surprised you forgot pandas, and MoP in general. That was probably one of the biggest backlashes I've ever seen on the forums. The hate for eastern culture in a western MMO, kung fu panda, blah blah blah. It was pretty intense. It's actually really interesting to see how MoP is now considered one of the best expansions...

Yeah I never forgot about the MoP Panda thingy it was indeed intense but the main reason I didn't mention it in the topic because I didn't feel it was as powerful as the ones I listed tbh.

[Gungnir]

5.2 Arms and 5.0 Windwalker, how I miss thee.

5.1 warlock and 5.2 firemage, soooo satisfying.

[Zafire]

During TBC you could grind BG's all day to get epics, too. They didn't have optimized substats but they were still mucccchhh better than blue gear from dungeons.

[rohoz]

3.0 ret, 3.1 frost dk, 4.0-7.0 blood, 6.1 survival

[Velshin]

During TBC you could grind BG's all day to get epics, too. They didn't have optimized substats but they were still mucccchhh better than blue gear from dungeons.

That reason alone will not make it as easy but yeah I understand your point and indeed first season and second season gears were easy to get during TBC era.

[Accendor]

You forgot the shitstorm that was caused by RealID.

[Jellybear14]

1) Welfare Epics - I had mixed opinions about this when it all started back in wrath. On one hand I disliked that every tom, dick and harry was decked out in epics and felt that they could of left all that gear in Blues. On the other hand the iLvl's were lower than the current raid tier, it did help with gearing alts and after all it was only a colour.

2) Change of the old World in Cataclysm - Really disliked the changes, still do today, alot of zones were ruined in my opinion and even when levelling an alt now, I skip as many of these zones as I can. Losing some of the original quests also sucked, really looking forward to playing Classic.

3) 5 man Dungeons during Cataclysm's Launch - Really loved how hard these were, you actually had to think on your feet, organise and co-ordinate what your group was doing. In my opinion it helped make you realise how bad some players were, but instead of kicking people out of groups for failing I used to help them understand them. Was in a really good guild though and we enjoyed helping players in the community who perhaps didn't understand the fights, learn the fights and on occasions join our guild and join one of our raid teams. Really disliked Blizzard when they nerfed them, all because people were so used to facerolling WotLK. They wanted the faceroll back, because they wanted to gear up with no effort.

4) The creation of LFR - A good choice by Blizzard, it helped people who could not commit to raiding and those that couldn't cut the normal/heroic raids see the inside of them and experience raiding. It didn't take anything away from normal/Heroics in my opinion.

5) The idea of removal of Flying mounts in WoD - Missed most of WoD has I hated the expansion, so can't really comment.

[Dundebuns]

Bus Shock from Vanilla, when Shaman were essentially looked over when every class had their refresh (due to the dev responsible being ill). And then the innumerous dot shocks in the forum.

[Kokolums]

Other major reactions were:

a. the introduction of pandaren as a playable race.
b. the WoD garrison mission table turning WoW into something that felt like a phone app
c. replacing Ulduar too quickly with ToC. Many people loved Ulduar and were not ready to move on but a new tier arrived very fast and it ToC was viewed as a very weak raid tier.
d. reusing Naxx as the 1st raid tier of Wrath. Many people thought it was cheap and lazy.
e. Dalaran lag.
f. 100+ people camping Poundfist in WoD for days. Just a lot of boring sitting around doing nothing for hours.
g. griefers camping out in Blackrock mountain trying to kill raiders heading for MC or BWL in vanilla.
h. the Gearscore controversy (leading to Blizzard unveiling ilvl).
i. the removal of reforging.
j. the Twink community controversy (twinks were low level PvPers. You'd level a toon to 39 or 59, obtain BiS as much as you can, then just play BGs all day as an endgame. Blizzard eventually nuked the Twink community using xp on/off toggles and shunting twinks into their own BGs)

[Will]

The first time I became aware of welfare epics wasn't wrath. It was late TBC when they added that badge vendor in Shattrath. You ran dungeons for these badges and bought really good gear with them.

[rohoz]

Welfare epics were basically any sort of token/non-raid purple. PvP gear in vanilla(post change), badge gear.

[Playintrafic]

Yep that, tier 5 look-a-likes I believe. This is when the term "welfare epics" was coined. No one really wanted them though unless you were a pvp player, or you had no other choices.

That and badge gear after swp patch. You could get decently geared without ever raiding.

Or if you were a warlock you could craft nearly all you gear and not get upgrades until tier 6