Which expansion was the absolute worst?

[Accendor]

At least N'zoth could be reused later.

I mean ofc they can do whatever they want, but it would really be a bad idea. N'zoth was shown as a very weak creature indeed with barely any influence at all. His overall impact on the world with 8.3 was abysmal and all the "fear" or respect that we had before is long gone now.

Like srsly, compare the death toll of the faction war and the general impact of it with the death toll of N'Zoths rising. Its is not even close. Not even a tiny bit.

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I don't know how people even can compare wod to bfa... bfa has it s problems, but still miles ahead of wod..

Its pretty easy: BfA destroyed the very foundations of warcraft lore, so no wonder people hate it more.

[Ifeanychukwu]

The logic still applies regardless of either or. You seem to forget that people did boosts for real money, and have done them for gold for forever. The garrison hasn't been the only nor really the most taxing thing for the economy in that regard. Bots and gold farmers are not really separate at all considering the topic. I understand what you are trying to say but I don't think it's made such an impact as you think it has. People have been making tons if gold since the beginning, I think singling garrisons alone as the sole reason (Hell by the time a majority of people I know even found out about that they nerfed it as far as I remember to the resources) for an impact on it is stupid.

There have always been bots, gold farmers and boosters so there's nothing special about them. Garrisons singlehandedly introduced millions of gold for many individuals. There was a reason that when tokens were first introduced they were worth around 30k but by the end of WoD they were well over 100k IIRC. I get what you're saying but at the same time it was incredibly obvious what a dramatic impact garrison missions had on how much gold was suddenly in the game. We went from the most expensive gold sinks being 100k (yak) to multimillion gold sinks in both Legion and BFA and yet there is still gold from WoD floating around.

Another point that I'd like to make is that boosters only shuffle the gold around, they boost for gold sure, but after that they spend that gold on things that send the gold back into the economy and even remove it entirely through gold sinks. Garrisons on the other hand generated gold from nothing and required next to no input thanks to addons and mobile apps. Bots are somewhat similar but their return on time/effort spent is nowhere near as efficient as garrison gold missions were and they're actively banned from the game with their resources/gold being removed from the game as well.

[Ealyssa]

WoD was an absolute lack on content, so for a mmorpg that's hard to be worse, but the very small nuggets of content were good.
BfA is a garbage salad, with a lot more things but that all taste like shit.

It's really a toss between what is worst : a pile of nothing or a pile of shit.
I still played WoD because raiding was good and I enjoyed the pvp (pre ashran destruction). I stopped playing wow for the first time since Vanilla launch because of BfA...

[ek0zu]

For me WOD was actually one of the best.
Log in
Raid or PvP
Log out

No stupid currency grinds, RNG on top of RNG, or mandatory forced content that is currency grind and requires another currency grind to enter in the first place.

I treat wow like a game, not a second life or second job.
In normal games i just set it to "hard" and that's it.
In wow to participate in challenging content you have to go through many hoops of menial, braindead content to access it.
Harder content in BFA is more inaccessible than it was in Vanilla. In Vanilla grinds actually had a goal and the ending point. In BFA they go on forever, with no clear goal.

WOD raiding content and class gameplay were crisp af. This is all i want from WoW.

^ This! Thanks for writing it down!

When i read that BFA has so many things to do, i am like wtf?

What are those things?

How many times do you want to kill the same boar PER day?

[matrix123mko]

I mean ofc they can do whatever they want, but it would really be a bad idea. N'zoth was shown as a very weak creature indeed with barely any influence at all. His overall impact on the world with 8.3 was abysmal and all the "fear" or respect that we had before is long gone now.

Like srsly, compare the death toll of the faction war and the general impact of it with the death toll of N'Zoths rising. Its is not even close. Not even a tiny bit.

We learned one thing from BfA. A fully free old god is about as strong as weakened and imprisoned old god. If you free one, he will teleport into a piece of architecture akin to his prison and wait there until you kill him.

[Vrinara]

WoD hands down was probably the worst expansion. With BFA being close to it. It started off promising, but ended in well. Shit.

[Mermeoth]

BFA isn't subjectively the worst. It's objectively the worst one.

Since when is game sale profit perfect indicator of how game is good?

[Thelxi]

BfA gets my vote. WoD PvP was great for me (rogue), and I genuinely enjoyed garrisons (perfecting followers took MONTHS and was very rewarding).

Many people don't pvp and many people certainly did not enjoy the garrisons, I get it. Personally I was also offended by the brazen lack of effort and resources that went into WoD, which was a big setback from MoP and reminiscent of Cata. I also did not like the strong orc theme and Horde bias that permeated the whole thing.

Overall though, between BfA and WoD I'll take WoD any day.

[Osmeric]

Trashran and being stuck in your garrison all day was "good"?

For casual PvPers, Ashran was far better than what came in Legion and BfA.

[Rovsnegl]

BfA
5 you could raid log

What the fuck have I been doing for the past months with N'zoth mythic on farm then if that isn't raid logging

[Pury]

For raiders - BfA, for others - WoD. MoP was the worst for childs who thought pandas were not cool enough for them, while in reality MoP was one of the best expansions with golden era of class design.

[bowlink]

I have another one for wod. They changed gorgrond so BRF was next door to the iron docks so there was no reason for the train network. And by extention this means grim rail depot is a nonsencal dungeon. I wanted to stow away on iron horde trains and afk on them

[WowIsDead64]

If WotLK were re-released, do you think that WoW would immediately garner 12M subs again?

Because if you do, I have some oceanfront property in Colorado I'm looking to sell.

No, I don't. Unfortunately players have changed. I don't think, that badge runs would be so popular today, as they were back then. While Timewalks are as popular, just ordinal heroic runs aren't. But who knows...

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Since when is game sale profit perfect indicator of how game is good?

Blizzard themselves have replaced sub numbers with profit numbers.

[Akibaboy]

As much as my heart is inclined to say WoD, my brain says Cataclysm.
Made the existing game worse:

• Ruined all of Vanilla's leveling content - while there were improvements to quest flow and access, the overarching progression of story and theme was completely broken. Entire zones that had interesting pieces to play in the narrative were turned into meme zones - CSI meme zone, Rambo meme zone, drunk dwarf stories, a second Rambo zone. There are gems in there, but even worse was that the pacing of XP would find you leaving zones before you were even half-way finished.

• Ruined leveling progression and character feel - on Cata's launch night I hosted a LAN party at my place with a bunch of friends where we all rolled Worgen to level together. Leveling together proved to be pointless because everything was so trivially easy. It became more of a chore to ensure that our group was caught up and had what they needed for the next quest than the boon a couple of buddies provided in speed and power in previous versions of the game. A friend on his Hunter was 1-shotting mobs with Aimed Shot. I was a Priest who could just dot enemies and watch them die while they beat on me and did trivial damage. There was no more sense of friction or accomplishment in leveling. Classic-WotLK was by no means "hard" by any stretch, but it did have some version of danger. Pull too many and you wouldn't have the resources to survive. We'd often find the zones' new quests were green or grey to us, so we'd spend as much time looking for or traveling to relevant content than actually engaging it... and again, engaging it wasn't all that engaging.

In contrast, I recently did a leveling stint with that same group of friends in Classic and we had some very good times.

• Executed big guild raiding outright - 10 man raids were now the same as 25 in reward. You could only do 1 run of a certain raid each time. Sayonara my 25-man raiding guild from WotLK.

I feel like a lot of the changes listed were done because they had some piece of research somewhere that said that the majority of players would quit WoW shortly after starting, and so they made all these sweeping changes to draw people in harder or something. What we were left with was something gutted and trivial feeling from beginning to end.

The new content was not good:
• The new zone's content felt severely disjointed and almost unfinished at points. I liked the strong emphasis on the overarching goals of the zone, but having flying right away meant that there wasn't really a sense of discovery or movement through the zones. Previous expansions found you working your way into new areas, cresting over a hill to find a new settlement, finding contextual story telling along the way. Cata had you flyover pretty much everything on purpose to get to the next objective. There wasn't even an option to progress on foot in a lot of areas.
• While I liked the reformed dungeon difficulty in theory, there just wasn't a good method of gearing and progressing into them for whatever reason. I was fine because of my guild, but pugging was a nightmare. I remember on an alt, running about 5 normal dungeons in hopes of getting out of my quest greens and crafted crap and getting 1 item in total. It was going to be an eternity until that alt was able to do Heroics. The curve was far too gear dependent, as skilled players just found themselves getting hit too hard from unavoidable stuff and healers going oom.
• New raids weren't great - BRF was alright... maybe. The fights were a little bland, and it revolved around being a throwback to BWL in a lot of its themes. Twilight was fine. Firelands had cool fights, but went months with a lot of prevalent bugs. Dragon Soul was another absolute mess in both location, theme, and the quality of the fights.

I think the shear amount of things that did irreperable harm to WoW in Cata will leave it being forever the worst to me. WoD did some dumb stuff, like over pruning and whatnot, but those things could be unpruned in theory. I feel like the damage that Cata did is only going to be resolved when Blizzard gets around to releasing Classic TBC and Classic WotLK... but I often wonder how good the game could've been these last 10 years if their design sensibility had stuck just a little more towards the identity of the game and not "how do we attract more players".

[Katchii]

WoD without question, but BfA is pretty bad too.

[Thrif]

Wod was still much worse than BFA. It was an attempt at a one year expansion that extended to a two year one in the end. And it showed.

[Accendor]

We learned one thing from BfA. A fully free old god is about as strong as weakened and imprisoned old god. If you free one, he will teleport into a piece of architecture akin to his prison and wait there until you kill him.

You know what, I was already very negative about 8.3, but I never thought about it like that. You are completely right, what a tool lol

[Doffen]

You know what, I was already very negative about 8.3, but I never thought about it like that. You are completely right, what a tool lol

It was just a Vision yall. Freeing him from his prison that is.
8.2, Visions of Azshara.

[Th3Scourge]

What the fuck have I been doing for the past months with N'zoth mythic on farm then if that isn't raid logging

And before that? You had to get your cloak to 15, do visions for chance at 470 corruption, farm for corruptions, pray you get the right ones.

WoD you could legitimately raid log well before the tier was done

[Valdhammer]

I get the bfa hate, trust me I have done it myself lots. But I don't see how you could say it's worse than WoD. WoD was a DoA xpac that had almost no updates. At the very least, they continued to support BfA for it's lifecycle. That aspect in itself makes it beat out WoD by default. At absolute worst case I have found reasons to log in for content that just didn't exist in WoD. Not even counting the cinamatics and art. WoD Just felt so bloody lazy, on top of the most rediculous story direction.

You may not like bfa story(I know I don't love the directions or the massive arbitrary destruction of just commiting mass genocide and destorying fleets of the other factions military every other day), but WoD was about interdimensional Orcs that they accidentally broke the lore of multiple Burning Legions. At least Bfa's story is contained to Azeroth.

Classes were miles better in WoD. It also wasn’t as pointlessly bloated as BfA.