Which expansion was the absolute worst?

[schwank05]

Odd, Legion felt like the perfect expansion for alts, since each class had a unique campaign, order hall, item sets, artifacts etc. If anything, Legion was the most alt oriented expansion to date.

But leveling sucked ass and took forever then you had shit loads of questing and stuff to keep alts up after the fact and I despised the Artifact system and the never ending progression. I want to go back to single difficulty and activated hardmodes, I want to know where to get the best gear and do raids to get it then get BIS on a character and move on to the nest I don't want to endlessly grind some BS thing for no reason.

[portillos]

WoD and BfA worst followed by MoP(unpopular opinion on mmo-champ). Shame because I really like Asian themes but I couldn't make myself playing it much. Maybe I was tired of WoW. But WoD had nothing to do in it, and BfA tried too much which made stuff both boring and lackluster in the end. Less is more some times. Just not as less as WoD :P

But I am taking the word from others that they thought MoP had good gameplay. I don't think so myself, but I've learned to take others opinion into consideration. Yeah, that's possible.

Best to worst:
TBC/Legion




WotLK


Cata
MoP
BfA
WoD


Where is the poll btw?

This is about right. I agree MoP was completely overrated.

[schwank05]

Or maybe everyone has different experiences and tastes.

TBC will always be the greatest x-pac for me because of it being my peak as a hardcore raider, I was in a high end guild, I was able to raid and no life the expansion unlike today, and the guild mates were the nicest, coolest and wackiest people I had met, but we had awesome times raiding, and hold many memories. The questing left a lot to be desired but the raids and dungeons were fun because we did it all as a guild and we had a great time.

With that said if TBC came out today would I enjoy it as much as I did then? For a hot minute maybe, but the reason the expansion is well loved by me is the memories and moments that I will never have again or have never had since then

This is how I feel exactly IN TBC and Wrath I was in College and could easily spend 10-12 hours a day playing the game now I am Married and have kids and I refuse to play video games when the wife and kids are awake so I play games from 10PM-2AM after they are all in bed. I like Classic, but hate some of the class designs but TBC had many of them perfectly. I have hated Retail since my play time was cut for the most part Late Cata on after I moved into the country and didn't have good Internet for over a year while I figured out the best options so after the End of Cata on I just have not really enjoyed the game at all.

[Vilendor]

All MoP hater confirmed never played it. Content, game-play, classes, systems wise it was one of the best expansion. I get it, you hate pandas and the theme, but that was not the question.

[Kharli]

Cataclysm for me, it Ruined Paladins in my opinion(hey it's my main class that I play) that and it was so over-hyped with how Deathwing was this big bad..and then we had... Dragonsoul where the 5th boss was harder than the Final boss(guild killed Deathwing HC on our first night on him, after a few wipes).

The two big bad expansions after Cataclysm is Warlords and BFA.

Warlords of Draenor

Warlords as it was overhyped(I admit I was in the hype wave for it) and then abandoned once you hit max level, the levelling experience was great but before the raids were released it was nothing to do for a while, Highmaul was the worst raid out of the expansion and it did get better as it went on, until Hellfire Citadel raid(cool mechanics but eh...) as main said, Raid or don't do anything.

Battle For Azeroth

BFA was nice story-wise, and I had a few: "OMFG this is not blizzard forgetting lore! ?they are adding what they once said was non-cannon into cannon again YAY!" moments, Allied races was a very nice touch after Legion, some of them were... like WTF blizzard(I'm looking at you Megagnomes) but some of the grinds added(hello timeless isle beta version 0.3(Mechagon) and some of the content like for example island expeditions which were a really cool concept that was then just left there to gather dust, and once again Blizzard straight up telling us Person X is not a Person Y. except Person X is exactly what Person Y was.

Having Played through both Alliance and Horde storylines, Alliance got the Moral victory(is this our fist-pumping moment ion? is it? ) while the Horde once again went: Our warchief X is bad... let's betray them, just like we did with Y, let's not talk about X using the weapons Y wouldn't even use, because he actually thought that weapon was bad.

The Ending of the Expansion was kinda meh. Deus ex Machina.

[KSM899]

I'm going to go with Cataclysm personally.


Had high hopes for it when it was announced. The theme of Deathwing breaking the world, elemental forces as the bad guys... seemed very chaotic and crazy compared to the themes for WotLK.


But the expansion itself? Meh. Not to mention Heroic Dungeons in the first half the expansion were god awful to heal.

I stopped healing because of cata.

I stopped raiding entirely (other than lfr) in mists.

- - - Updated - - -

Personally, I thought WoD had the best zones, music, art and overall leveling quests. But end game was terrible, I liked garrisons at the beginning but quickly came to hate it.

I still enjoy playing bfa, as I dont care much about what people hate about it.

I would say the worst in order:
- WoD
- Cata

I liked mists, legion, wrath and BC.

[Chain Chungus]

I had forgotten about that. Oh, to have a been a fly on the wall in those meetings. How in the heck would it have worked? Intense effort on world creation and art assets, story and quest development, a new round of chaotic class redesign -- all so it could be scrapped in months? Reminds me of Weinstein/Miramax's proposal to Peter Jackson for LotR condensed into one movie.

Yea, it's pretty crazy that they thought it would work. We could have had Bladespire and Karabor capitals, Farahlon, Shattrath raid, etc. Hell, it only had two content patches and only one of them had a new raid! The other two were there when the expansion released and just opened later on. Not to mention one of those "major content patches" was about Twitter integration lol.

[Zafire]

It was MoP for me. I'm still not sure why the expansion was popular. I never raid very seriously when I play WoW, which leaves me with the leveling experience, rep grinding, heroics, PvP, and leveling alts. MoP introduced the horrible daily rep grind, and it probably had the worst questing in any expansion to date. The quests had absolutely nothing to do with a bigger picture. They all felt "filler" after Jade Forest. The PvP felt a lot like Cataclysm in almost every way, except I found it more bursty. Not many classes changed too much. Monk was a fun addition though.

Cataclysm was the expansion I was most competitive in in regards to PvP. It was also the last expansion you could get PvE gear to benefit you in PvP, so I raided a bit here. Tol Barad on a small server was a blast, and it was also the last expansion with tight knit communities on small servers.

WoD was fun for me because it was the most alt friendly expansion to date. Questing was a big deal so you could acquire followers for your garrison, and it allowed you build a gold farming army. When you had 6 alts at max level, this was probably 30 minutes of logging in every day to maximize your gold gains. WoD also had the end of expansion legion event, which helped me bolster a lot of alts in level that I never thought I'd play. You could pretty much do nothing else this expansion except level alts for garrison gold and it was largely beneficial to you. I think I got 9 months worth of tokens or something and still was swimming in gold. I also tried PvP on many different classes at max level, which is something I've never done before.

I never played BFA, and I probably wont be. Not sure if I'll be returning for Shadowlands either. We'll see!

[WaltherLeopold]

BFA is the only expandion that made me actually quit the game, even during the height of illegal vanilla servers, I still played wod, legion but with classic out and bfa being what it is, i'm not going back.

[Adamas102]

All MoP hater confirmed never played it. Content, game-play, classes, systems wise it was one of the best expansion. I get it, you hate pandas and the theme, but that was not the question.

Funny how you seem to have read so much more in the two sentence OP. Obviously it's just a matter of personally preference and yeah, I too am in the camp of placing MoP (along with BFA) right down at the bottom. Given how much context was given to the question, "worst" and "least favorite" are interchangeable.

Everyone comes at this question from different perspectives. My hardcore raiding days ended about halfway through WotLK, so from then on out it has been purely casual (heroic raids or lower depending on expansion). The way I tier my list is almost purely based on the themes and visuals of each expansion. While I don't have any problem with Pandaren (I played the RTS's, I know they have their place in Warcraft), I just wasn't a big fan of the overall visuals and theme. I just remember feeling bored flying around the map, not a single one of the zones appealed to me.

BFA is also down there as well strictly because it focused (at least for the first half) on my least favorite part of the game (the faction conflict) AND it did so very poorly.

[Aleax]

With the end of an expansion comes my biannual worst expansion poll.

Which expansion/era is the absolute worst, and why?

Not MoP for me at least. I loved MoP.

Maybie Cataclysm, I don't get the idea that the villain was a villain just because (just because he was a red/black dragon), so he was violent without reason. The End.

Yes this is a lore issue, not a gameplay issue, a few gamers think like that.

[Doffen]

All MoP hater confirmed never played it. Content, game-play, classes, systems wise it was one of the best expansion. I get it, you hate pandas and the theme, but that was not the question.

In your opinion. I could say the same with people that hate Legion or TBC, but opinions are just that. Content in MoP was at least not great to me. Had a couple of good raids, but dungeons and the whole daily system was not good. In my opinion. Class design and gameplay, I've heard people loving that and I bet it's a valid thing to say. For me though? Not at all.

And with the usual "panda hate" cliche. It never gets old. I actually like Asian themes, it was well done in Pandaria, it also had great music which is important to me.

But that's me. I've heard some people loved MoP, and I bet it was great for them in MoP.

[Tyrannica]

I think the poll should rule out WoD, because of 2 reasions.

1. Too obvious as a choice.

2. It was just half an expansion due to the 1 year schedule that never came to be, too much was cut from it, the full expansion would have been pretty good and satisfying.(still too many orcs, tho)

So in the end it would be a duel between Bfa vs Cataclysm, i love how they are thematically related too with all the old god stuff going on.

One of the advantages of catacylsm was the alt friendlyness you did not have much to grind jobs to do either, thus could instantly jump into pvp or raid end content.

From a multi alt perspective its not a bad expansions, from a strictly 1 main point of view it probably lacked content to do.

[Celarent]

Yea, it's pretty crazy that they thought it would work. We could have had Bladespire and Karabor capitals, Farahlon, Shattrath raid, etc. Hell, it only had two content patches and only one of them had a new raid! The other two were there when the expansion released and just opened later on. Not to mention one of those "major content patches" was about Twitter integration lol.

And all that. This brings it back. Oof. It was my last expansion, and the only fun I can easily recall is when guildmates and I leveled alts for a Herald of the Titans run.

[iosdeveloper]

Cataclysm introduced "make classes slow and clunky" shit, so it's the worst for me.
I left raiding, during first Cata raids cuz my FCFS Retri Paladin became a shitty rogue =(

[Venziir]

But leveling sucked ass and took forever then you had shit loads of questing and stuff to keep alts up after the fact and I despised the Artifact system and the never ending progression. I want to go back to single difficulty and activated hardmodes, I want to know where to get the best gear and do raids to get it then get BIS on a character and move on to the nest I don't want to endlessly grind some BS thing for no reason.

That's your opinion.

[THEORACLE64]

Its all just a bandwagon and 5g gives you corona. Millions of people quit because they heard its bad not because they play and find its total dogshit.
You are so detached from reality and what people didn't like about Bfa.

I'm really not. I acknowledged what people didn't like about BfA, but despite it's flaws it's still not worse than an expansion that gave us a selfie camera patch and one additional raid - an expansion that was over within 6 months.

[schwank05]

That's your opinion.

Yup, it sure is and everyone else is just stating the exact same thing in every thread on this website so what exactly is your point?

[Deferionus]

Not MoP for me at least. I loved MoP.

Maybie Cataclysm, I don't get the idea that the villain was a villain just because (just because he was a red/black dragon), so he was violent without reason. The End.

Yes this is a lore issue, not a gameplay issue, a few gamers think like that.

Deathwing was corrupted by the old gods. That was the reason. He was essentially a turned dragon aspect.

[Venziir]

Not MoP for me at least. I loved MoP.

Maybie Cataclysm, I don't get the idea that the villain was a villain just because (just because he was a red/black dragon), so he was violent without reason. The End.

Yes this is a lore issue, not a gameplay issue, a few gamers think like that.

Deathwing was a black dragon; not a red and certainly not some sort of hybrid. Besides, it was made very, very clear why he did what he did.