Which expansion is the absolute worst in your mind?

[sibut]

The fact that anyone (let alone the majority) picked WoD over Cata leads me to believe that a lot of newer players are voting. Cata was a dumpster fire in just about every way following BC and Wrath, and it hasn't exactly aged well either. What a shit xpac.

[Villager720]

after playing WotLK after classic and TBC it was the biggest let down i've ever experienced and made me quit the game...

looking back some expansions might've been worse but for me .. at the time .. it sucked the life out of the game for me

WotLK is the first time I had ever quit the game since starting in 2006. Don’t get me wrong - I was MEGA hyped for Wrath.
But the disappointment of going from Sunwell raiding to a rehashed tier + two dragons in two rooms was so very profound. And in retrospect I think what I was feeling was just the fundamental shift the game was making many of the issues we have today - most notably being the “seasonal” approach. Wait a patch : all previous content made irrelevant.

If all my friends hadn’t gone apeshit for how great Ulduar was, I probably never would have returned to the game.

Still voted for WoD though.

[Eluvium]

WoD as that's what made me quit (but Pandaria wasn't doing it for me either) Came back to BFA (not great) and annoyed I skipped Legion as it seemed to be half decent.

[plz delete account]

Artifact weapons, care-bear towns, performance issues across-the-board upon release. Draenor was far superior. Pandaria was the worst though.

Draenor... had a better launch... then Legion?

Did you downgrade to a potato router with less then the weccomended amount of dedotated wam during WOD?
I have never, not once seen someone make the argument WOD was better then Legion.

[Panta]

The Burning Crusade (although I loved the expansion), but only cause I didnt played Vanilla.

[Enosh]

The fact that anyone (let alone the majority) picked WoD over Cata leads me to believe that a lot of newer players are voting. Cata was a dumpster fire in just about every way following BC and Wrath, and it hasn't exactly aged well either. What a shit xpac.

cata was at least coherent and wasn't abandoned half way through

[Jargathnan]

The fact that anyone (let alone the majority) picked WoD over Cata leads me to believe that a lot of newer players are voting. Cata was a dumpster fire in just about every way following BC and Wrath, and it hasn't exactly aged well either. What a shit xpac.

Cata absolutely pulls a close second to WoD for me. But I believe, with no degree of uncertainty, that WoD was worse. Cata, while dull, was at least a complete thought process. And it launched with a full suite of content.

WoD released with a lot of missing content. That includes Tanaan, which would go on to be the only piece of true content released during the WoD cycle. WoD is infamous for its 6:1 “Selfie” patch... a “major” patch consisting of no new, tangible content. A blunder never seen before, nor ever repeated since.

Cata at least had content dispersed throughout, though Dragon Soul went on for too long. But for that matter so did IC before it, and SoO and HFC after it. So that’s not a Cata-specific issue.

While I do believe WoD is worse than Cata, I can at least appreciate the opposite opinion. What I can’t, for the life of me understand, though, are those that actually rank BfA as worse than WoD. The two are, in my opinion, so vastly far apart in terms of quality.

[Popastique]

Vanilla. Though nostlagic, but compared to every other expansion - it has 0 quality of life improvements and is very grindy.

[Zenfoldor]

WoD had good raiding while in BFA raiding has been replaced with very stale and same as launch content mythic+ as the go to end game. BFA is boring in all areas. I think BFA is the first time I really dislike playing the game, so I voted BFA. Legion was my favorite xpak. I think BFA will be remembered less fondly than we even remember it now.

[Nyel]

Even that won't be able to get an objective picture, because quite a lot of folks who'd vote "BFA is worst" just left and stopped checking news. We lost a lot of people. Player activity is lower than it ever was - lower than the previous lowest point mid-summer right before BFA by something like 30%. And we aren't at the end of the expansion, we are in the middle of it, right before the big mid-expansion patch. Things are quite likely going to drop down even more as we move into the second half of BFA.

God, every time I think about this it hurts. There's at least another full year of BfA ahead of us before we'll get the next expansion...

[Yes but actually no]

Legion and BFA by an absolute landslide for me.
People mock WoD but i would go back to that in a heartbeat to finally enjoy my class and my alts again, last expansion i actually enjoyed raiding, pvp and 5 man pve content.
It's actually quite funny reading some people posting about WoD because some of them are just so oblivious and trigger happy to bash it they bash it for stuff they don't even know what they are talking about. The timewalking mmochamp post is a perfect example, people mocking WoD dungeons which were largely praised just because it's WoD and i guess bashing it is what the cool kids do.

[Zantera]

I think the ranking of the expansions discussions is interesting because of the different reasons why we liked or didn't like them. Outside of gameplay and content I think the experiences we had also has a strong impact. For example while I enjoyed the content of Cata (outside DS really) I was in a situation where I had no friends left from TBC/Wotlk still raiding and I was a bit too socially awkward to find myself a new guild so I experienced that expansion as a solo player doing 5-man heroics and LFR towards the end and I didn't enjoy the game at all. Wotlk was interesting because I still played with the people I played with in TBC (which I loved) and you could argue gameplay was good but the raids and dungeons being so easy made me have a miserable time as well. On the flip side I've had a great time through Legion and BFA playing with some great people. WoD was the worst expansion for me overall but I liked the dungeons and I thought the raids were great honestly.

I do think the best expansions still had their flaws which were probably papered over OR ignored by yourself because you were having a great time with friends or guildies, and the worst expansions had great things too.

[MrLachyG]

BfA shouldn't even be on this list as the expansion isn't finished yet and 8.2 does look quite good.

My pick is WoD. from a long content drought to literally nothing to do outside your garrison other than raiding. the raids and dungeons themselves were fine but yeah even the most hardcore of raiders had to log in maybe half an hour to an hour before raid, raid and then log out. the rest of the expansions at least had something to do in the world - MoP had Timeless Isle, Legion had World Quests etc

[Stevano]

WoD second worst, BFA worst. WoD had, besides of the cutting, some form of depth in the gameplay that remained, even though there was almost nothing to do with that gameplay. BFA on the other hand has quiet a lot to do but 80% of it feels useless and feels like a 'just do it once' system. I'd say BFA is more of a dissapointment instead of just a bad expansion because it could be so much more. Gameplay, systems, rewards, it's all so empty that it feels even worse than WoD to me.

[Flurryfang]

Just going through old polls of mine. Interesting that more folks hate vanilla then WOTLK.
Perhaps Wrath was actually the rumored golden age.
Or people put on rose tinted goggles when looking back at vanilla-wrath.

I just think that people were "satisfied" in Wrath. Its not everybodies favorite expansion, but it supplied a level of content, that its not really anyones least favorite expansion.

It might be the golden age then.

[Daevelian]

I feel like it depends on which aspect you are looking at. IMO it is as follows.

WoD had amazing raids and ok class design, but is completely overshadowed by the biggest lack of content ever, a (bad) story no one wanted and the god damned selfie patch.

BfA has the worst class design to date as well as very bland raids, but at least has other things going for it, such as a decent story (if you aren't a 13 year old edgelord at least) and amazing world design.

Cata i remember as being just all around "ok". Nothing it did excelled but nothing it did was an utter failure either, very middle of the road. If anything, too much Thrall.

The rest of the expansions were IMO pretty decent all around, personal favourite being WotLK.

[Vorkreist]

BfA shouldn't even be on this list as the expansion isn't finished yet and 8.2 does look quite good.

I agree Bfa shouldn't be on any list. It should be removed from existence and public memory.

[Eurhetemec]

I think BFA will be remembered less fondly than we even remember it now.

That's definitely wrong, because that's not how it works.

BfA will likely gradually go from "Ugh" to "yeah that was pretty okay" in collective memories, especially when people go back through it to level their alt on the way to 130 and so on. The quest design is really solid, the Sylvanas story will eventually resolve, one way or another, and however it resolves, people will hate it a lot less, the other stories are decent. A lot of the gear is pretty cool, much as people sneer at it now, I fully expect to see a tons of it as transmogs once BfA is old enough to farm (not Uldir armour, admittedly!). Once we no longer have to actually deal with the Azerite system, people will quickly forget about it except as punchline to jokes.

Cata had 10HC raiding and the first two raiding tiers were awesome. The entry dungeons were challenging and the achievements runs even moreso.

This seems like a pretty renegade opinion or hardcore spin to me.

The dungeons were "challenging", in the sense that they were more fiddly and complicated in terms of mechanics than many raid encounters in previous expansions and had extreme punishments if you fucked up (like insta-wipes), but the actual result of that wasn't "fun", it was tedium. Before you start sneering, I should note that my friends and I had them all done and all the achievements and so on before they got nerfed, but we didn't enjoy it - not the way we did WotLK. They just weren't fun.

Nerfing them didn't help, because it just proved that they were un-fun. Prior to the nerf people could claim they were just "too hard for most", but post-nerf, they were shown to just be dull, fiddly, and annoying.

They also became irrelevant extremely fast, far faster than any previous expansion, but maybe that's a blessing.

Re: the raids, I'm glad you found them awesome, because we sure didn't. They had terrible atmosphere and weak visual design, feeling almost like parodies of WoW raids in terms of boss dialogue and what was happening, most of the fight mechanics were pretty annoying or dull, and the difficulty was in a really bad place relative to WotLK. With the same guild and same people we'd been able to clear 10HC stuff in WotLK when it was completely current, and have a good time, and not exclude anyone, and so on. With Cata, 10HC was a significant difficulty bump, and more punishing and annoying in terms of fuck-ups (plus having more real gear-checks), so where we'd previously run two 10-man groups very successfully, we quickly saw an "A-team" and a "B-team" emerge, and this ended up really damaging the guild (which had existed since very early WoW - possibly day 1). We had a stark choice between excluding players who were only "okay" and condemning them to essentially not get anywhere with 10HC, or trying to integrate them and risking our run.

That was not fun. And the shit atmosphere of the raids due to Blizzard's crap visual design and horrible fucking dialogue/stories (easily the worst in any raids in WoW) really didn't help.

ZG invalidated the previous dungeons because Blizzard overdid it on limiting the quality of loot that doing Heroic dungeons could get you, then regretted it, I note. They overdid it on a lot of things in the early design of Cata, and severely under-did it in quality of writing and visual design. I mean, people complain about BfA's writing - but the actual dialogue and stories are completely solid (barring Sylvanas, that mystery-box shit needs to DIAF), whereas early Cataclysm felt like Pardo had arrived at Blizzard with a truckload of coke (not the drink) and said "Snort this lads and shit me out an expansion pronto!". WoW turned into a parody of itself and one of the best potential villains WoW ever had was totally wasted.

Now to be fair, things did improve. The later content in Cataclysm was universally better, and increasingly less coke-addled (I guess however big the truck was, it emptied out) and tone-deaf.

Agree with what you're saying re: WoD 100% though.

It's actually quite funny reading some people posting about WoD because some of them are just so oblivious and trigger happy to bash it they bash it for stuff they don't even know what they are talking about. The timewalking mmochamp post is a perfect example, people mocking WoD dungeons which were largely praised just because it's WoD and i guess bashing it is what the cool kids do.

Largely praised? Are you kidding? WoD's dungeons were praised in that they weren't anywhere near as bad as Cataclysm's initial set of dungeons, but they're not good dungeons by WoW standards. They're not fun, nor interesting. Don't give us this sad defensive "cool kids" nonsense. You like WoD, that's fine, but try to avoid re-writing history too much.

[sch1ntus]

WoD, then MoP...

[BadguyNotBadGuy]

before BFA it was definitely WOD, and now that ive played BFA i gotta say BFA is by far the worst experience ive had gaming in wow