Why is BFA hated ?

[kaminaris]

MoP at launch was horrible, it improved a lot with time, but first patch where u had to basically just login do dailies for 2 weeks just to start do anything else in game

At mid patch you were farming cloak by killing mobs on isle of thunder and hoping to drop some shits on raid. Last patch you just didn't have anything to do anymore for about a year. It was at that time my guild I had best memories of disbanded, 80% left the game for good.

[Rotted]

source ? the last time i remember blizz stated that only 600k killed LK 25 hc in entire world, so how exactly was that a 'joke' ?
also during patch 3.0 and even 3.1 the most killer NPC was the 'easy hc' Loken from HoL, wrath hcs became easier by 3.3 after massive gear increase and even then ppl still avoided HoR like plague
wrath was 'universally hated' how exactly? did it drop to less sub numbers than classic wow like what happened in WoD? Or did blizz go out state they screwed up class designs like they did in BFA? Heck bfa biggest savior is an actual world plague that made ppl play it again
It is ironic how ppl try to twist everything to serve their pov, but no matter how hard u try, fact will stay that wow during wrath was the most successive game of its time until its very end, and if china didn't ban wrath (google it, china version of wrath is very idiotc, dk was renamed to unhappy knight for example) wrath numbers may be twice as TBC, since ~40% of TBC subs were purely from china (heck blizz literally introduced belfs due to asian market influence as they flat out stated)

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MoP at launch was horrible, it improved a lot with time, but first patch where u had to basically just login do dailies for 2 weeks just to start do anything else in game

Its slightly ironic you asking me for a source for a point I personally remembered, then your next sentence is "A fact" from what you "remember" tbh.

To answer it, my source is my own memory and experience. If 600k is actually the figure that got him down, that is way below than what I would guess in all honesty. What I can tell you is my guild was on a low pop server, ranked 42th and we had a 25 man team and two 10s which had all content on farm. Now I'm not saying I was a good player back then, more so if I can do it, anyone could do it.

You might be right, but unless I see a chart of all the logged data, I refuse to believe loken was top dog. Had more wipes on the trash up to him than him.

Halls of Reflection, now that is something that was avoided. Even with geared people that place was just frustrating.

Universally hated at the time and just after is correct. If you could pull up a random date from towards the end of wrath or just after for these forums or the official ones, you'd be greeted by shit posts left right and center. Every day towards the end of the icc patch and RS patch, all we had was shit posts about content drought and boring.

Lastly, would you care to point out where I said the expansion wasn't successful? It was extremely successful and one of (in fact if not) the highest subs we've ever had. It's also my 2nd favorite expansion of all time. Just because I'm sharing my view of the negatives from at the time doesn't reflect my opinion of the expansion. I purely stated my dislike for the RS. Which looks like you agree with given you said yourself "of its time until its very end".

As for Mop and dailies, thats one of the only things it got right. The dailies were fine, now if you said Cataclysm Hyjal dailies were "2 weeks just to start do anything else in game", then I'd agree with you all the way.

[Arna]

You don't NEED to grind anything.
1. You can settle for other essence, you won't fall behind at least until you are like 2200 rating.
2. You don't need to grind cloak, you just need to get it, by the time you will be "griding" for cloak you will get 470 corrupted gear, absolutely no pressure here.
3. Nope, can absolutely skip it
4. You need to do vision twice to get 470 and 465 ilvl corrupted gear which is like mythic level quality gear

Legendaries were worse to get, i grinded one for 8 months.
You didn't even had a chance to get close to mythic ilvl gear before so if you compare heroic level power, you get this by simply doing 15min dailies.
Now you get almost mythic level quality gear and complain it's a grind, lol.

You are out of touch with my message.

What I'm saying is you can't jump into the game and play your character if you skipped most of BFA. You need weeks of chore before being actually able to play it at the power other players expect from you. I don't care to be able to play a subpar essence instead of Conflict and Strife. I deeply think it is wrong that one of the best essence in the game can be gated behind 15 weeks. FIFTEEN WEEKS WHICH TRANSLATE TO MORE THAN 3 MONTHS.

I don't understand why you are talking about mythic quality gear. I don't think anyone gonna tell I'm wrong if I say that power level in this patch is not linked to your item level but translated by :

1) Azerite
2) Essence
3) Corruption
4) Trinket (same thing since launch of this game)
5) To a lesser extent, the rank of your cloack.

You tell me I can skip Nazjatar grind. Ok, I follow your advice and I go to play my Mage Fire without grinding Memory of Lucid Dreams. I'm pretty sure that even with 470ilvl a guy 20ilvl behind will shit on me if he grinded this essence. Oh I know you gonna tell me that I can quickly get rank 1. Who cares, no one play subpar on this game anymore unless you are casual to an extreme. You need rank 3 so you have to grind.

And the grind is extremely tedious, especially the reputation from this last patch.

I love that game and I really wanted to play it before SL. But the design philosophy requires me to grind for weeks before being actually compete with others. And I don't have fifteen fucking weeks to waste in my life. So I will wait for prepatch. And I'm sure I'm not the only ones and Blizzard actually loose customer from this bad design.

[Ealyssa]

Hello.

Why is BFA so hated ? Sometimes more than WOD.

because it's honnest garbage. First time in 15 years I stopped playing wow...

The hamster wheel of farm-farm-farm RNG-RNG-RNG has gone waaaaaay too far, it's retarded.
Gameplay fundamental are still there, game is still snappy, looks good, dungeon and raid design are good, but all the BFA specific mechanics are 100% horseshit that I can't stand anymore.

[Osmeric]

special mention to the 3 caches

The three Black Empire caches I find are usually up in Uldum are the one up north at the top of the waterfall, the one near the fields with the eyestalks at the bottom of the square well, and (less reliably) one among the trees to the west of the central area.

[Milfshaked]

There is no one answer for this. Different people dislike different things. For example, a lot of my friends aswell as people on forums hated the story and thought the storytelling was bad. I personally dont care for story and I dont really think this expansions story was worse than previous expansions. In my opinion, WoWs strong side has never been storytelling, but that might just be me.

Another aspect is baggage from previous expansions. Gold and by extension player trading is a good example of this. Previous expansions completely screwed over the entire economy with inflation and WoW having an incredibly short sighted and not well thought through economy system since day 1 has just created more and more problems. This is something that is not really BFAs fault, but nevertheless hurt the player experience.

But lets get into why I think BFA is hated. For some players it is all these points, for some, it is just some of them.

1. Level scaling. Leveling felt horrible. You got weaker and weaker every level. When you leveled up, things that you could previously do, you could no longer do.

2. Adding new shit content like island expeditions and warfronts then filling them with rewards that makes them necessary for players both playing PvE and PvP to progress their characters. Wasting development time on worthless content is one thing, but that you can still laugh off. Creating worthless content and then forcing players to run it in order to progress effectively, thats a huge nono.

3. Character progression has never felt worse. Between azerite, x-forging, bonus socket, tertiary stats and azerite powers / corruptions, it is just a hot mess. RNG upon RNG upon RNG. Only being able to get 1 chest from M+10 was also horrible with the amount of RNG that the loot system has.

4. World quests is just a more scuffed version of previous expansions daily quests.

5. Classes have no identity whatsoever.

6. General problems going back through the past expansions, not 100% BFAs fault. For example, design choices completely killing social aspects of the game. Faction imbalance gone crazy. Killing server communities. Personal loot being forced on people. And so on.

Overall, BFA feels like a polished turd. The soundtrack is great, dungeons looked good, the zones looked good. The problem is that everything that is not surface level is an absolute mess. It completely embodies the modern gaming industry, make things look good so you can market it in a commercial, but dont put any effort into actually making it good.

[Spoonman]

Class wise Its incredibly unbalanced
The specs are boring af if u compare it to Legion due to a lot of spells and effects from Artifact weapon and Leggy system was lost
character progression system is 100% based on RNG
PvP is a complete mess
Except for neck level Its impossible for new players to catch up
When the game launched you basicaly paid for 10% of a expansion and you actualy only got 5% on start since the other 5% was time gated

As time went by these things only got worse instead of better

[kaminaris]

You are out of touch with my message.

What I'm saying is you can't jump into the game and play your character if you skipped most of BFA. You need weeks of chore before being actually able to play it at the power other players expect from you.

And this is where you are wrong. Of course you can. You can jump from zero to at least being able to do +10 M+ in a day.
In a week it is perfectly possible to do +15 in time.

I don't care to be able to play a subpar essence instead of Conflict and Strife. I deeply think it is wrong that one of the best essence in the game can be gated behind 15 weeks. FIFTEEN WEEKS WHICH TRANSLATE TO MORE THAN 3 MONTHS.

3-4 weeks, not 15 that is one. And you are greatly overestimating conflict essence. If you do actual math you will understand how wrong you are.

I don't understand why you are talking about mythic quality gear. I don't think anyone gonna tell I'm wrong if I say that power level in this patch is not linked to your item level but translated by :

1) Azerite
2) Essence
3) Corruption
4) Trinket (same thing since launch of this game)
5) To a lesser extent, the rank of your cloack.

Wrong, do the math first. In BfA you are able to obtain almost mythic quality gear in couple of weeks, not even farming much, something that was simply impossible before.

To reach heroic power level you need 2 weeks.

You tell me I can skip Nazjatar grind. Ok, I follow your advice and I go to play my Mage Fire without grinding Memory of Lucid Dreams. I'm pretty sure that even with 470ilvl a guy 20ilvl behind will shit on me if he grinded this essence. Oh I know you gonna tell me that I can quickly get rank 1. Who cares, no one play subpar on this game anymore unless you are casual to an extreme. You need rank 3 so you have to grind.

You get memory of lucid dreams R1 just by stepping a foot in nazjatar. Done, you are ~2k less dps than R3. Congrats, you can do +15 with ease (assuming you got corrupted gear from visions and done some M+).

And the grind is extremely tedious, especially the reputation from this last patch.

I love that game and I really wanted to play it before SL. But the design philosophy requires me to grind for weeks before being actually compete with others. And I don't have fifteen fucking weeks to waste in my life. So I will wait for prepatch. And I'm sure I'm not the only ones and Blizzard actually loose customer from this bad design.

Do the actual math.

[Arna]

And this is where you are wrong. Of course you can. You can jump from zero to at least being able to do +10 M+ in a day.
In a week it is perfectly possible to do +15 in time.

You are still out of touch with my initial message. Please try to understand before replying stuff.

3-4 weeks, not 15 that is one. And you are greatly overestimating conflict essence. If you do actual math you will understand how wrong you are.

You have to read again my post my dude. Hint : "Can" is a word that bend toward probability. You should know it since you repeat to me to do the maths all along.

And you are wrong once again with the understanding of my message my dude, I don't overestimate anything. I just say C&S is one the best essence of this game. I didn't say it was 200% more powerful than the rest.

Wrong, do the math first. In BfA you are able to obtain almost mythic quality gear in couple of weeks, not even farming much, something that was simply impossible before.

To reach heroic power level you need 2 weeks.

IDK what to tell you my dude if you came to the conclusion that the difference between the worst and best azerite trait for your specialisation is not great. Do the math. Same for corruption. Same for essence.

You get memory of lucid dreams R1 just by stepping a foot in nazjatar. Done, you are ~2k less dps than R3. Congrats, you can do +15 with ease (assuming you got corrupted gear from visions and done some M+).

I forecasted this kind of reply, it is in your quote.

Do the actual math.

You did it for me

You get memory of lucid dreams R1 just by stepping a foot in nazjatar. Done, you are ~2k less dps than R3. Congrats, you can do +15 with ease (assuming you got corrupted gear from visions and done some M+).

A same skilled guy gonna do more DPS than me if I choose to not to grind for weeks.

[sam86]

Its slightly ironic you asking me for a source for a point I personally remembered, then your next sentence is "A fact" from what you "remember" tbh.

so at worst it is as valid as urs, which means nothing, but at least u admit ur source is just personal experience, while i remember it was stated in a blizzcon pre-wod where they talked about end game bosses and why wow keep going even more casual (i think it was asked when they introduced flex raiding)

You might be right, but unless I see a chart of all the logged data, I refuse to believe loken was top dog. Had more wipes on the trash up to him than him.

that's actually easy to check, or used to be, blizz used to keep track of stuff like that, it was mentioned hundreds of times on many youtuber videos

[Utrrabbit]

I remember a time where Wrath of the Lich King was the WORST EXPANSION EVER.

This

Never

Happened.

Wrath is literally the best expansion they ever made.

[Zantera]

This

Never

Happened.

Wrath is literally the best expansion they ever made.

It wasn't and it most definitely happened. If you played in TBC and was there at the start of WotLK you would remember the amount of crap it got. Whole first tier was a joke and back then WotLK was far easier than what came before it. Trial of the Crusader was considered by many to be the worst raid in the game (until Dragon Soul overshadowed that in Cata). It's easy now to look back and say "Ulduar was so great and the zones were cool" but at the time it wasn't all universal love. There was even the term 'wrath babies' that spawned during that expansion which I remember as an insult to those who started in that expansion.

[Kalisandra]

There are some things WoD got better for sure (no awful grinds like AP and Essences, better class design, mission system was complex and rewarding if you cared for it), but both expansions will go down as the worst two by far.

However some specs' best PvE essences are only available via PvP (and vice versa). Some specs best essences are really easy to get and improve, while others' are not. In the past this has usually only been the case for a couple of specs in any given patch, or for one particular trinket that was op.

Catch up BfA is awful because of this sort of thing. Pre-Legion to catch up you had to grind gear, but at least once you had a minimum of it your guildies could carry you through the best farm content and gear a new toon or a returning guildie pretty quickly. In Legion at some times there was an AP grind, though they largely fixed that later on. Here in BfA there's a gear grind, and a grind vs the RNG for corruption, and an essence grind because if you're returning from a long break or you didn't get all the essences to rank 3 on your main you now have to grind the things out from scratch. At least your guildies can do a certain amount of carrying through Visions and m+ to get you gear and cloak levels, though you still have to grind out currency for the Visions.

Even having a second spec that you like to keep current on your main takes a ton of work. Once upon a time it meant some swap pieces with different secondaries and some role-appropriate trinkets of your off-spec was a different roles, and a separate tier set to fill out once you'd got your main spec's 4-piece (and running 2-piece of the previous tier for your off-spec wasn't too bad quite often), and then when tier pieces worked for all specs it wasn't even that. Now you need a complete 3-piece set of azerite, and trinkets, and swap pieces with different corruptions, etc. It's ludicrous.

[Milfshaked]

It wasn't and it most definitely happened. If you played in TBC and was there at the start of WotLK you would remember the amount of crap it got. Whole first tier was a joke and back then WotLK was far easier than what came before it. Trial of the Crusader was considered by many to be the worst raid in the game (until Dragon Soul overshadowed that in Cata). It's easy now to look back and say "Ulduar was so great and the zones were cool" but at the time it wasn't all universal love. There was even the term 'wrath babies' that spawned during that expansion which I remember as an insult to those who started in that expansion.

There is a difference between something being easy and it being bad. Yes, the Naxx, EoE, OS tier was very easy. Still, people were not shouting that it was bad. ToC being hated was mostly because it was directly following the most popular raid of all times. "Wrath babies" is not an insult to the expansion, and it was not like that term was everywhere. You would see it every once in a while on forums.

[Kalisandra]

BFA had glaring issues in 8.1 - Some were adressed later, after a ton of complaints from the community. ( Warfronts and islands still lackluster, though little better. Shadow priests still abandoned, not sure about shamans. At least Dazar'alor was good.)

Elemental Shamans got the same 'fix' that Arcane Mages did - overpowered azerite traits that let you do well to exceptionally well if you stacked them and the fight was right for them. However, those traits happen to not scale well, with results that can be seen on the DPS rankings on warcraftlogs, etc.

BFA had glaring issues in 8.3 - Some were adressed after a ton of complaints from the community. (Overpowered Corruption, Coalescing visions and keys having a cap. Made essences more alt friendly. Worst end game boss in history of WoW imo)

I didn't mind the N'zoth fight, as it's somewhat like the C'thun and Yogg-Saron fights, so it's thematically appropriate. Not so impressed with the carapace fight before it, though. That 'fight the boss twice' thing reminds me of Deathwing, and it's not a good thing when your raid reminds people of that.

BFA feels like it was trying to push a certain playstyle onto people, and the general consensus was that people wanted to play their own way. Aside from Jaina's story, I also think most of BFA's story kinda sucked.

I liked Jaina's story. I liked the Drustvar plotline when levelling, and Vol'dun. The rest were pretty meh. To be fair, I generally hate levelling through content I've already done, which colours my opinion, but the last levelling zones I really liked were Shadowmoon Valley, early (Alliance) Talador, and Arrack in WoD.

Artifacts were not complicated. And towards the end you just maxed everything out.

They were only ever slightly complicated right at the start when a 'wrong' choice could leave you a little behind until you got the thing filled right out.

BFA Class design is the worst class design I've seen since Vanilla.

Well, to be fair, BfA's Ret Pally design is still better than the early Cata version (where the Holy Power and Mastery system just didn't work), so there's that. However, Elemental was even worse than early Cata's and it was dire.

I understand BfA's Demo is considered better than Legion's, but I can't think of another spec where the player consensus is that the BfA version is better.

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Covenants are factions, not close to class halls. Much closer to horde/ally factions.

They are basically the BC Scryer/Aldor factions, but with bigger bonuses.

[Zantera]

There is a difference between something being easy and it being bad. Yes, the Naxx, EoE, OS tier was very easy. Still, people were not shouting that it was bad. ToC being hated was mostly because it was directly following the most popular raid of all times. "Wrath babies" is not an insult to the expansion, and it was not like that term was everywhere. You would see it every once in a while on forums.

Yeah but it wasn't JUST the difficulty. Naxxramas had this 'air' of being this epic awesome raid and the WotLK version was nothing like that at all. As a person who didn't see original Naxx I was very hyped to experience it (as it was the only raid that wasn't accessible for a TBC player) and I was massively let down. Others in my guild who did the original Naxx felt it was disappointing too. I would argue the first tier of Wotlk with how mediocre Naxx felt (and the 2 lackluster dragon raids) was an even weaker PVE-start of an expansion than Emerald Nightmare or Uldir. You also have things like vehicle combat that were highly controversial at the time. The addition of LFD was also something that divided people at the time (though not as much as LFR in Cata).

I mean the point is, when WotLK came out it did receive a lot of criticisms and even though we look back at it differently now it just says a lot about the human mind.

[Kalisandra]

Honestly I wish they would just copy ideas from themselves from earlier expansions - tabards for people who don't like dailies... a currency with a weekly cap that you can get in a variety of ways... they don't have to be inventive, they just have to stop being so freaking controlling about everything and loosen the reins a bit, give us options.

I would like the currencies to be like the Arena currency used to be - effectively an overall season cap that climbed each week, so if you came in late you could put the work in and catch up to the current cap. Far too much of BfA (and Legion for that matter) revolved around grinds that you couldn't really catch up on, because the cap was the total amount of WQs, or that you had to do something X times when you could only do that thing once a day or week.

The mythic+ box system is a decent one - you get something based on your week's best, do as many or as few runs as you like. The Visions boxes likewise. Just about everything else is awful.

[never Lucky]

Cause it sucks.

[Kalisandra]

This has been discussed in a million threads..
but for my money, it's because of how the classes feel. There isn't a single class that I enjoy. Literally none. In wod I enjoyed a fair number of classes so even if I could only raid, at least I had fun raiding

I stacked a whole lot of Haste proc corruptions on my Ret Pally. I can report that when they procced and I had 40%+ Haste the spec felt pretty good - quick, responsive, and powerful. Lots of fun, didn't really notice the gaping holes in the rotation where everything's on CD. However, it shouldn't take running at 40% Haste to make a spec feel fun.

Fury's pretty fun with good gear, too. Pity I don't like it's asthetic, and Arms feels like crap to me compared to (any from LK onwards) previous versions.

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Oversimplification of fucking everything. Stacking defense was too hard I guess. Stacking spirit, mana per five, etc, I guess that made it too hard to be a healer. Just gonna whittle every thing down to as few stats as possible. This is an RPG for christ sake, what was wrong with the stats we started out with? The only one I don't miss is weapon skill. That should have never been in game. The rest were fine.

Even MoP with gems, enchants, and reforging, gearing to hit caps, etc. was simpler than what we have now, with secondary stats and corruptions to juggle on non-azerite pieces, and traits on the azerite pieces, and essences on the neck. Oh, and for those specs that have two or more viable talent builds to choose from, getting a new piece of gear might mean respecing and swapping to a whole different build. It's insane.

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Oversimplification of fucking everything. Stacking defense was too hard I guess. Stacking spirit, mana per five, etc, I guess that made it too hard to be a healer. Just gonna whittle every thing down to as few stats as possible. This is an RPG for christ sake, what was wrong with the stats we started out with? The only one I don't miss is weapon skill. That should have never been in game. The rest were fine.

Even MoP with gems, enchants, and reforging, gearing to hit caps, etc. was simpler than what we have now, with secondary stats and corruptions to juggle on non-azerite pieces, and traits on the azerite pieces, and essences on the neck. Oh, and for those specs that have two or more viable talent builds to choose from, getting a new piece of gear might mean respecing and swapping to a whole different build. It's insane.

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Strangely I find words like "grindy" and "work" thrown around in the last few expansions to describe the game play experience. Wasn't vanilla and TBC also "work" and "grindy"? Or was that a different type of "work" and "grindy"? I thought all this simplification and loot grab was to stop the game from being "grindy". hmm.

It was, actually. Rep grinds in Vanilla were sort of like current ones, but in BC you ground rep by running dungeons. When you weren't doing that you were probably working on an attunement questline, which at least was a questline and also probably included having to get certain pieces of crafted gear, and so might well have included the other grind - trying to make money, which probably meant crafting or gathering. The thing is, none of this had much RNG in it - only grinding dungeons for gear did.

Today's grinding has a lot of RNG in it, and doesn't interact with other systems much. When gold was rare and the longer quest-lines required stuff from crafters you had reason to interact with the economy, with the crafting and gathering systems, and with other players. Sure, it's a lot more convenient these days, but there's less immersion and the economy and skills have real problems with relevance (or rather, their lack of it).

I tried Classic when it came out, and it reminded me of all the reasons I didn't think Vanilla or BC were the best versions of WoW (though I had a ton of fun in them, because they were new, etc.), but some things we've lost were better than what we have now, and the crafting/economy system (damaged in MoP by the farm, among other things, badly injured by WoD's garrisons, and trashed completely by LEgion and BfA) was one. The style of grind was another. The highly RNG grinds of Vanilla, etc. outside of raiding were for rare mount and pet drops, and a few weapons (Rivendare's Runesword, for example).

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Agreed. Nothing like a one track grind to kill a game. People used to complain about the grind back in the day but Blizzard kept the grind diverse which kept them playing and paying. Its no wonder that WoW started bleeding subs like rain drops when the "new way of things" went into full effect. Odd and seemingly "inefficient" things like what you mentioned seemed like a buzz-kill, but were a very important staple for game staying power. People complained, but yet were still smiling and logging into the game for x hours a day.

Yep. I used to gripe about the grind to buy flight (and then epic flight/mounts) in BC to my guildie while doing a mining circuit of Nagrand over and over, but I still did it, and honestly it wasn't that bad because I had my guildies to talk to as they did their herbing, mining, and skinning, worked on their BT attunements, collected ogre beads for rep, etc., and it would be broken by helping on a tough group quest kill or a dungeon run. These days gathering is awful because there's almost no-one to talk to, because few people gather, and when they're doing dungeons it's probably a m+ so they're going balls-to-the-wall and have to time to type in chat.

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The second wave of hate come in with Cataclysm. Wrath heroics launched with easier, less lethal mechanics. Which resulted in them just be farmed for mats (currency conversion) for the entire game. When Cataclysm launched the dungeons, let alone heroic versions brought back TBCs mentality of dungeons and they wiped the floor with the majority of the player base. This gave rise to the term "Wrath Baby".

Actually, a fair number of Wrath heroics wiped groups pretty well early on. However, gearing up was quick and solved most of that quickly, and by the end people had forgotten (if they ever knew).

As for Cata, I saw a lot of dislike for it early on, and not just because the dungeons were harder. There was some real problems with some classes' redesigns (Ret & Holy Paladins and Shamans for example) that upset a lot of players. Hard dungeons because they're tuned hard is one thing. Hard dungeons because your Elemental does DPS like a Vanilla/BC Ret, your Ret isn't much better, and the Shammie healer keeps ooming is a something else.

It wasn't until the Deathwing raid launched that people could actually see the quality difference between wrath and cata. It also died down more when MoP was announced, specifically the pandas. Back in April 2002, pandarns were used as an april fools, which it apparently gained enough of a backing to make it into an expansion. When it was officially announced though, it was pretty much ridiculed and I'm pretty sure we saw a massive drop in subs.

Well Alliance players probably noticed about the time they got to the Twilight Highlands, and realised that 1) their storyline wasn't really finished, and 2) they had no idea what was going on and what their dailies there were about unless they did the Horde side of things. Oh, and half the Worgen storyline was in the revamped Horde starting zones.

Then there was Baradin Hold, and the inland dailies there. The dailies were hard, especially if your character was in an under-performing spec (my Ret felt like it was back doing the QD dailies BC as a newly dinged L70 in questing gear), and the PvP battle wasn't very interesting, and nor were the rewards from it that good. It didn't compare well to Wintergrasp.

I saw a lot of discontent with Cata pretty early on.

People started getting happier with it when Firelands came out. The dailies weren't super-popular, but at least the redesign of a some classes fixed them (and they did actually redesign some, not just band-aid them with over-powered tier set bonuses or azerite traits), and Firelands was fairly well received. Dragon Soul and Looking For Raid, OTOH... well LFR gave us something to do, but the real innovation was allowing cross-realm groups, because that let us get onto PvP realms with good world PvP scenes, and late Cata PvP was pretty good (as long as you were okay with all the stuns and CC that was getting thrown around).

One thing I complained about at the time, but in retrospect was a good thing, was many healers having their mana regen attached to making some kind of an attack. This had been the case a bit in previous expacs via the Paladin seal debuff, but in Cata it was a big thing, and in Firelands for a Resto druid finding time to throw a lightning bolt out between heals was a big part of being an effective healer (I think Firelands was probably a high point in Resto healing overall, in terms of both design, and the fights). Back then I felt it made the difference in difficulty between progression and farm too great, but now I think that really, who cares how easy farm healing is? If the healers want a challenge on farm night, some can go DPS.

[Milfshaked]

Yeah but it wasn't JUST the difficulty. Naxxramas had this 'air' of being this epic awesome raid and the WotLK version was nothing like that at all. As a person who didn't see original Naxx I was very hyped to experience it (as it was the only raid that wasn't accessible for a TBC player) and I was massively let down. Others in my guild who did the original Naxx felt it was disappointing too. I would argue the first tier of Wotlk with how mediocre Naxx felt (and the 2 lackluster dragon raids) was an even weaker PVE-start of an expansion than Emerald Nightmare or Uldir. You also have things like vehicle combat that were highly controversial at the time. The addition of LFD was also something that divided people at the time (though not as much as LFR in Cata).

I mean the point is, when WotLK came out it did receive a lot of criticisms and even though we look back at it differently now it just says a lot about the human mind.

I for sure agree that the first tier of WotLK was not really that amazing, but it was not hated either. And overall, you have to judge the entire expansion. Every expansions have its ups and downs. LFD 2.0 is a good example since that was not added until much later in the expansion. Overall, the expansion was very well liked even though you can nitpick certain aspects that different players disliked.

One thing that a lot of people forget is that WotLK dungeons was actually very well liked in the beginning. It was not until ICC that people started hating on them because player power scaled a ton during the expansion.