What would you say is the most enjoyable of the 3: BFA, SL, or WoD?

[TheramoreIsTheBomb]

These 3 expansions are the most negatively critiqued expansions I've seen in my 10 years of playing the game. Cataclysm wasn't even this badly critiqued. However, I'd want to know from the community here which is the best or "most enjoyable" of these 3: Battle for Azeroth, Shadowlands, or Warlords of Draenor.


WoD:
Pros: New character models, questing revamp, great raids and some of the best music of the expansions. Best and most viewed opening cinematic of all time.
Cons: Rushed and incomplete expansion. Barely any content outside of raiding and arenas. Garrisons and the shitpyard. Over hyped to sell a terrible product. 1 patch expansion.

BFA:
Pros: Great cinematics. Good leveling stories for both factions. Allied races. Great in game story-telling. 2nd most viewed and 2nd best opening cinematic of all time.
Cons: Too many stories all going on at once. Systems on top of 5000 other systems. Most grindy expansion of all time. Characters making weird 180's and taking odd directions [I.e: Sylvanas, Anduin, Saurfang, Jaina, Thrall]

Shadowlands:
Pros: Most casual friendly of the three. Character customization. Outstanding PvE content. Best selling expansion of all time.
Cons: Borrowed Power. Covenants & RIPChord. Confusing story and controversial story directions. Long patches due to in company drama and COVID-19. Expansion becomes 1 year old with only 1 full patch released. Devs fighting with the players. Quickest expansion to lose the most players. Zovaal is Lucifer and Thanos copy-paste.



Which is or was the most enjoyable for you out of these 3?

I'm going to say..? Shadowlands. What about you?

[Echocho]

WOD obviously. It was before Ion took over and this systems driven design mess began.

[Toybox]

WoD. Lacked content, but the content it had was good, & gameplay was much better than the other two expansions. Also required a lot less grinding, which is a huge win in my books.

SL second & BFA far behind.

[Dazmalak]

WoD for me. It was not great, but I didn't hate it nearly as much as everything that came after.

[micwini]

You can see how infested this site is with trolls by looking at the first 3 replies. They didn't play during WoD.
Even BFA was miles ahead of WoD

[luciano]

This would be a better survey if you hadn't started with your biased opinions on each pro/con list. The things you liked and disliked are not universal. Some people liked stuff you didn't. Others disliked things you did. If you're going to write a survey, you need to start off more neutral than this.

This is doubly true since the lists aren't even internally correct. For example, you say in the WoD one that there is barely any content outside of raiding and arenas. Then you list the other content you claimed didn't exist.

There was a ton of stuff to collect. There was the garrison and later, the shipyard, both of which took player investment to build and utilize. There were a bunch of cool dungeons. There was a pvp zone. There were treasures to find and collect. There were a ton of craftable items that took time to collect recipes and materials to create. There were world bosses that dropped mounts.

And c'mon, Shadowlands is casual friendly? Shadowlands is like the opposite of casual friendly. Outstanding PVE content? In what universe? One lame-ass castle raid and 4 zones that aren't even connected -- the most basic design feature from WoW Day One is connected zones you can travel to without portals. A couple of cool dungeons they turned into Diablo Rifts with their +20s mythic plus system? Meh. I'd rather take a football to the nuts than play Shadowlands.

[exochaft]

May be biased, but WoD was the one of the last times where I felt elation from defeating the mythic raids as a top 30-50 US guild... versus the current "thank goodness this is over, that was annoying!" Well, it technically started in WoD with the mythic Gorefiend death bug, but it hasn't improved with Blizz's increasing number of encounter bugs going live coupled with their love for encounter pass-fail mechanics where if one person screws up, it's a literal or figurative automatic wipe.

Despite all the issues of WoD, what it did have was generally pretty solid (could've been amazing if the cut content made it into the game). I still prefer CM's over M+ from the perspective that you could actually be done with content back then. Classes were still pretty solid, although elemental shamans may disagree... we had a token elemental shaman in our mythic raid group just for fun. In general, I prefer a relative handful of solid content that's enjoyable versus a plethora of mediocre to bad content/systems. Quality over quantity.

[Nyel]

WoD had the best iteration of classes, aka gameplay.

BfA had the most content.

Shadowlands has... I don't know. Neither the gameplay nor the content deliver, although Shadowlands classes are feeling and playing better than BfA classes.

[Djaye]

warlords

Classes were still fun, gameplay was good, raids were on point, pvp wasnt great but also wasnt a complete shit show, dungeons were plentiful and theme solid.
at the time, it lacked content imo compared to MoP. But, compared to all expansions since (besides legion ,which i feel was better mostly becuase of surumar) it was far superior and actually kept me playing the whole expanion. BFA and SL couldnt keep me longer than first major patch release.
i used to think they had two teams with slightly different philosophies when making expansions, but realized with BFA followed by SL that they have one team steering the ship directly into the great void.

next expanions will be all the same BS we got the last 4 years. the hamster wheel must keep moving....

they have shown consistantly in the past they have no intention of making the game a solid MMO experience. it continues to slowly devolve into yet another crappy eastern mmo.

they have resorted to player bribes to retain subs and have saturated the cash shop to the point its an embarrassment.

[Agrias2x]

WoD was great if you had a good raiding guild. At least there weren't so many annoying chores to do like in BFA or SL.

[Thelxi]

Easily WoD for the PvP alone.

[Echocho]

You can see how infested this site is with trolls by looking at the first 3 replies. They didn't play during WoD.
Even BFA was miles ahead of WoD

True, anyone who doesn't share my opinion is a troll so the whole site must be filled with trolls

[Nerovar]

While I didn't play Shadowlands or anything BfA after 8.1, I feel like I can pretty comfortably say that I enjoyed WoD the most. I played so much world PvP, Ashran, RBG and Arena in that expansion that I never really felt the lack of content. Garrison and all the other poorly received stuff was also easy enough to ignore if you were PvP-brained and Tanaan jungle had some of the best world PvP I've seen in the game due to the close proximity of the Horde and Alliance bases.

Biggest reason is that WoD was the last expansion with decent class design though. Classes after WoD just felt like a different game to me and never really scratched that RPG itch for me which dampened my overall enjoyment of the game to such a degree that I finally quit the game for good.

You can see how infested this site is with trolls by looking at the first 3 replies. They didn't play during WoD.
Even BFA was miles ahead of WoD

Breaking news: not everyone who disagrees with you is a troll.

[InfernalDark]

All 3 are shit.

[XDurionX]

You can see how infested this site is with trolls by looking at the first 3 replies. They didn't play during WoD.
Even BFA was miles ahead of WoD

This. People just tend to forget the bad stuff, that's why [current xpac] is always the worst of all time.

[schwarzkopf]

WOD was obviously the least enjoyable, probably BfA and SL around the same - but legion more.

- - - Updated - - -

that's why [current xpac] is always the worst of all time.

Hey - that's my line

[Yossh]

maybe BFA > WoD > SL, Shadowlands has been so incredibly bad all across the board its very hard to top this xpac. No content, No class changes, Alot of unplayable bugs, Insane amounts of grinding for player power, and on top of all this its been the worst expansion for alts by far. The thought of playing catch-up on an alt now is so daunting I don't even bother to log into them.

[Luxeley]

it's difficult to see and believe that WOD is aging better than expected. Blizzard fired and missed on pretty much every single new feature in WOD. Nearly half the proposed content got abandoned because of tech issues and delays with Garrisons. The class design with all the ridiculous pruning sucked. Garrisons proved to be a terrible attempt at player housing. 2nd patch doubled down on stupid with garrisons on the sea. Ashran proved to be a technology mess, let alone a terrible BG nowhere near what they hyped up. The 1st patch ended up being a major bust with Twitter integration.

[RemasteredClassic]

WoD was great if you had a good raiding guild. At least there weren't so many annoying chores to do like in BFA or SL.

This 100%. Wow’s worst expansion IMO is its best all time seller, SL. They have COVID 19 to thank for that (that it sold more).

[Nerovar]

it's difficult to see and believe that WOD is aging better than expected. Blizzard fired and missed on pretty much every single new feature in WOD. Nearly half the proposed content got abandoned because of tech issues and delays with Garrisons. The class design with all the ridiculous pruning sucked. Garrisons proved to be a terrible attempt at player housing. 2nd patch doubled down on stupid with garrisons on the sea. Ashran proved to be a technology mess, let alone a terrible BG nowhere near what they hyped up. The 1st patch ended up being a major bust with Twitter integration.

A lot of people are apparently willing to overlook these things because they ultimately matter less to them than the fundamental design shift that occured around Legion i.e. the Diablofication of WoW.