View Poll Results: I think that...

Voters
562. This poll is closed
  • Warlords of Draenor was the most enjoyable of the 3

    300 53.38%
  • Battle for Azeroth was the most enjoyable of the 3

    135 24.02%
  • Shadowlands was/is still the most enjoyable of the 3

    127 22.60%
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  1. #141
    Quote Originally Posted by micwini View Post
    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
    I wouldn’t say trolls, but time biased. But I agree, WoD was the absolute worst expansion. They cut way too much content, and still didn’t manage to get it work properly. The whole expansion felt like it was stitched in a hurry.

    You can say what you want about BfA and SL, but these expansions were/are just slow. Both in releasing content and gathering progression. But it doesn’t feel they are missing cut content.

  2. #142
    Quote Originally Posted by MoanaLisa View Post
    Power is power. It's all math at the end of the day. It's granted to you in various ways so you can defeat opponents and it's removed from you at the start of the next expansion. Look under the hood of the game and you will be quick to realize that it's not that different at all.

    It doesn't matter if there are buttons on your bar, or a shiny temporary weapon in your hand (which I imagine you think is somehow different from the shiny weapon you get from leveling/dungeons/raids...it's not). Your class is incomplete without it at the start of an expansion because the power that you had to defeat world-ending raid bosses at the end of the previous expansion is just enough to defeat the lowly creatures you meet at the start of the next. That's power that is given to you and taken away when an expansion ends.

    Save your gratuitous insults for someone else. It's not a bad faith position to realize that in fact very little has changed since the start. It's a never-ending cycle of weakness--->strength--->back to weakness when you move onto the next thing.
    Yeah, again. Reductio ad absurdum. You're reducing these concepts like class specific abilities, entire talent trees and gear to "it's all just numbers" so you can claim it's the same thing and nothing has changed, effectively making the definition absurd/useless.

    You can't in good faith claim that the impact these expansion specific powers have on your moment to moment gameplay hasn't drastically increased in Legion and that the function of these systems didn't fundamentally change i.e. to fill in the gaps that were intentionally left behind by class design/pruning.

    Talent trees (such as the ones provided by Artifact Weapons with 20+ traits) aren't in the same ballpark as gear just because both boost your numbers and become irrelevant at the end of the expac. The former dictates the way your class plays, what utility you have etc. while the latter boosts a few stat percentages. Borrowed power takes something that was previously reserved to the realm of class design and locks it behind parasitic secondary progression systems.

    Furthermore, gear doesn't necessarily "deactivate" when you level up (Blizzard only started deactivating old set bonuses in - you've guessed it - Legion). Your gear doesn't disappear once you hit the new level cap, it simply becomes less powerful in relation to the new gear you get and even then there were periods of the game where you could use items like Thunderfury throughout most of the next expansion.
    Last edited by Nerovar; 2021-09-21 at 10:39 AM.
    The absolute state of Warcraft lore in 2021:
    Kyrians: We need to keep chucking people into the Maw because it's our job.
    Also Kyrians: Why is the Maw growing stronger despite all our efforts?

  3. #143
    Quote Originally Posted by Nerovar View Post
    Also the vast majority of the pruning absolutely did happen in Legion. I don't even see the point in contesting this. It's so blatantly false that I should probably stop replying to you. I can name you off the top of my head more than 15 abilities Frost DKs lost going into Legion. This is absolutely unprecedented and in no way even comparable to WoD/MoP pruning (which both added a roughly equal number of new spells as they removed old ones). It's an obvious caesura.
    It does depend on spec somewhat - Retribution got a lot of pruning going into WoD and didn't get much back in return. As a result it wasn't pruned quite as hard as some going into Legion because it had already been hammered. There's no question going from MoP to Legion was a huge step down in complexity for pretty much everyone, no matter exactly when it happened, though. And BfA just made it so much worse because it took so long to get that 'borrowed' power back and what you got back wasn't interesting, and nor was it customised to your class or spec much (it got better later, but the dame was done by then).
    Also care to tell me where TBC and Wrath introduced endlessly repeatable group content without lockout that gave you unlimited raid level items? Because that was M+ in Legion.
    I expect they mean being able to do heroics once a day each for tokens.
    Also world quests aren't really comparable to dailies at all besides the fact that both are repetetive by design. Dailies used to exist to progress small storylines of smaller factions with some unique rewards along the way. World quests neither have a story nor are they really interwoven with a rep faction (which have been reduced to mere vendors ever since Legion).
    The last time I remember grinding rep to get something that wasn't going to be obsolete before I got the rep was MoP with its early grindfest for rep. Prior to that it was early in Wrath. Generally since WoD grinding rep has been a waste of time when it comes to gear.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Exkrementor View Post
    WoD. It had no content but at least class design was good. Pretty much everything other than warrior. Also there was no arbitrary grind just to keep up the engagement metrics.

    Ugghhh. See what they have done to us? We think there are 2 expansions worse than WoD.
    Feels dirty, don't it?

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    Quote Originally Posted by exochaft View Post
    When I say starting as a 'fresh slate', it's literally the stripping down of classes to the bare bones to facilitate easier development processes... and I'm not really talking about gear, but more about systems and talents and abilities and fundamentals of a class/spec. I mentioned that most people didn't notice it much in Legion, but it started there with the artifact weapons and basing a large portion of player power on something disposable. Legion also moved a lot of baseline abilities to PvP-only talents. Prior to BfA launch, many classes were stripped down even further, on top of losing all the bonuses and abilities/perks that came with your artifact weapon. While some classes/specs got to keep various aspects of their weapon, many did not, leaving them with a husk of a class/spec. The long-term ramifications of such a system was that Blizz was no longer attempting to make the classes fun at all times (or even mechanically sound) at the start of the expansion, but rather they were designed to feel complete only at the middle/end of the expansion. Unlike gear or class sets, the constant temporary addition and subsequent removal of these systems were so fundamental to the classes/specs that the classes/specs themselves could be fundamentally broken until the systems progressed enough.
    Thanks to this design philosophy, levelling my Elemental Shaman in BfA was the most painful experience I've ever had in WoW. Cataclysm Retribution was bad enough that I swapped to Prot to level (and they did quite a rebuild of Ret in Cata because it was just busted), but Elemental in BfA was far worse. What's more, the design wasn't really functional even at level cap until they massive buffed some of the azerite powers - which didn't fix the brokenness of the core design, but just papered it over with big enough numbers players could ignore the issues. That's shitty design.
    In a similar vein, the addition of mounts and pets has exploded in recent times. Without going into the entire timeline (as it mirrors a lot of what's already been said), the number of pets and mounts than can get added in one patch may dwarf what used to be found in an entire expansion.
    This really started in WoD. MoP had a fair number, with all those cloud serpents, but it was nothing on all those recolours that WoD had of everything.

    To make a long story short, their addition as well as acquisition has become lazy and uninspired to the point that you can only see it as adding busywork rather than consideration for the fun and enjoyment of the player. Sad side effect is that the inflation of mounts/pets had devalued their overall worth in many people's eyes, to where even if they want to put up with the work of obtaining them... the activity loses it's enjoyment and becomes a chore.
    I used to collect mounts, and we used to show off new and rare ones in my guild (and on my server in general), but MoP and then WoD killed that dead.
    Granted this doesn't go into all the other system design shifts that have occurred over time that impact the enjoyment and participation in the game, and I've only given a cursory overview of these issues as I could talk/type about them for hours. However, it's very obvious (especially when you've actively tested and submitted thousands of bug/feedback reports from alpha/beta/PTR like I have) that there were major shifts in design philosophy and how player feedback was treated around when Ion took over as game director. Whether these shifts were due to his ideas or were passed down from above, we'll never know.
    I do miss Ghostcrawler's posts. I didn't always (or even often) agree with him, and sometimes time showed that he and his team were wrong about what fixes were needed, but there was never any doubt that he was passionate wanted to make the game great. Ion's posts and interviews smell of lawyerspeak and corporate arse-covering.

  4. #144
    Keyboard Turner Olivia Johnson's Avatar
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    It’s interesting. But it’s a matter of everyone’s taste

  5. #145
    Man, that is like picking your favorite cancer or terminal illness. What are you even supposed to say here?
    WoD had kinda nice leveling (though it was overshadowed for me by being shackled to the utterly shite horde garrison), but I rage quit 2 weeks into the expansion and I know nothing better came after it besides some raids.

    BfA had .. okay zone plots but I simply can't stand neither troll nor pirates. The heart was complete garbage and essences and corruptions just stacked alot more awful on top of it. Also let's not forget the castration of classes in BfA and the honestly retarded promise that Azerite gear will fix all of it.

    SL has god awful writing and representation of the story, but I personally like at least the 3 of the current 6 zones. The leveling put me off this time to the point that I have leveled every other character since my first exclusively with ToF, despite it being suboptimal. The raids are okay, but the dungeons have been streamlined to death for M+, a sad trend that began in full with BfA.

    I guess SL is eking out an ever so slight win here, since I at least like alot of the transmog (which works great for my DK), something that can't be said for most of WoD and BfA. I guess there is also a tiny shred of hope for this expansion that at least the last patch might be somewhat good? There is also the thing that people have just finally seen through Blizzard's bullshit with SL, which drags it down even further, despite the same thing happening in the last couple expansions. That doesn't make it an SL exclusive thing though, it just finally shows effect.
    Last edited by Cosmic Janitor; 2021-09-21 at 11:22 AM.
    You are welcome, Metzen. I hope you won't fuck up my underground expansion idea.

  6. #146
    Quote Originally Posted by Hey There Guys its Metro View Post
    Shadowlands by a mile.
    I have no major complaints right now, and the problems it does have are actually being addressed, unlike WoD.
    Hard to imagine anyone who picked WoD actually played it.

    There was actually no content in WoD, which is scary to see people act like that isn't a problem for them.
    Seems like a lot of people don't actually want to play the game regularly?

    Anyway, the worst expansion out of all of them is cataclysm.
    I assume you were listing expansions that you believe are the worst?

    Classes have never been more fun for me, at a very basic level, than they are right now in Shadowlands.
    Even if we take out the entirety of content from 50-60, I still rate Shadowlands as my favorite of those three expansions.
    I could keep myself occupied sub max level for months if not years at this rate.

    Could not say the same at ANY other time prior to Shadowlands.
    Good for you, but I'm not enjoying SL. Even less than WoD, and less than parts of Cataclysm too. I didn't much like WoD, but currently it's ahead of SL (and well ahead of BfA, which blew chunks).

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    Quote Originally Posted by Kokolums View Post
    Its quite telling that most of the people still playing WoW liked WoD. WoD drove away most everyone else tho. That's how feedback can be dangerous. You'd think WoD was popular. But its actually liked by a very small minority.
    Actually, most people posting here don't seem to like WoD. The likes are mostly 'dislike it less than the other two choices'.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Dakara View Post
    Without a doubt, WOD… and by a wide margin.

    The one thing that I’ve consistently done in every expansion, is Raid. Even when i spent a few years “solo” after a guild breakup, I still raided.
    I’ve never wanted, nor asked, for a reason to play WOW every single day. Sure, every expansion has had some form of grind, but the systems grinds are the absolute worst.

    WOD might have been a bit boring on non-raid nights, but I enjoyed it vastly more than BFA and SL (Legion managed to redeem itself) because there was no burnout, and I was happy to play other games more often without feeling that pressure to do XYZ each day/week for Power grinds.
    I occurs to me that back in WoD during the end of expac wait for Legion, when there were a few raid nights that our guild cancelled for various reasons, I used open raid (I think it was) to find groups, and raided anyway. Likewise in Legion. But in BfA when my schedule was such that I couldn't raid with my guild any more, I just didn't raid, even though there were other nights I could've raided on with a pug group or whatever. Now in SL the guild's not raiding, and even though I generally love raiding, I just don't bother either.

    So, WoW clearly just doesn't excite the way it did a few years back, let alone back in Wrath when I'd raid on multiple characters a week, and on some do both 25-man and then 10-man runs.

  7. #147
    BfA > WoD > SL
    "There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
    "The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
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  8. #148
    I am Murloc! Maljinwo's Avatar
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    BfA had Zandalari so that's a win
    This world don't give us nothing. It be our lot to suffer... and our duty to fight back.

  9. #149
    Quote Originally Posted by Seasz View Post
    LMFAO at WoD actually winning the poll...

    The line between cynicism and trolling has never been so blurred on this site.
    It's not really trolling, not for me anyway, *out of these three*, WoD is the... least bad, the raids were fathomable (No visual effects overload), and the "Systems on systems, augmenting yet other systems"-syndrome hadn't set in yet.

    Alts were relatively easy to catch up with, no grinding out three systems first, so the leap from "DING! Level cap" to "Alright, i'm (sort of) up to speed" was a lot less vast than it is now.

  10. #150
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    wod. Because its a legitimately better expansion then bfa or shadowlands. For all it's lack of content, tedium and the heavy-handed introduction of garrison facebook game nonsense whose fallout blizzard is STILL taxing the playerbase for. It's still a fundamentally functional thing, whereas bfa and shadowlands are bad. Legion as well
    Wrath baby and proud of it

  11. #151
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    Quote Originally Posted by Nohara View Post
    I wouldn’t say trolls, but time biased. But I agree, WoD was the absolute worst expansion. They cut way too much content, and still didn’t manage to get it work properly. The whole expansion felt like it was stitched in a hurry.

    You can say what you want about BfA and SL, but these expansions were/are just slow. Both in releasing content and gathering progression. But it doesn’t feel they are missing cut content.
    Warlords of Draenor wasn't bad. There just wasn't enough of it.

  12. #152
    Id give WoD the slight nod because it had a better leveling and Alt experience without all the systems bloat but it did have terrible world content. BFA's leveling was meh along with the world content but its system bloat and anti-alt feel hurt it. As for SL, for me it did none of those things right.

  13. #153
    Quote Originally Posted by Depakote View Post
    Warlords of Draenor wasn't bad. There just wasn't enough of it.
    That would constitute bad.

    If what makes SL bad is bad systems then that is still a net positive over nothing.
    The world revamp dream will never die!

  14. #154
    wod no competition,for all its faults,it had by far the best atmosphere,nostalgia,best raiding,best lvling,classes still felt good

    wod unironicaly is aging similarly to mop

    because lets face it....why was wod bad??the lack of content or the content within?and then look at bfa and sl,they both have more content,but is that content really better?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Sondrelk View Post
    That would constitute bad.

    If what makes SL bad is bad systems then that is still a net positive over nothing.
    that makes no sense,if i give you a tiny pieace of the best cake you ever tasted,was the cake BAD because it was a small portion?

  15. #155
    Brewmaster Depakote's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Sondrelk View Post
    That would constitute bad.

    If what makes SL bad is bad systems then that is still a net positive over nothing.
    No, there's absolutely nothing good about Shadowlands. Not a single thing. There were many good things in Warlords that people have already mentioned in this thread so I won't repeat them.

  16. #156
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    Obviously this is extremely subjective. I personally enjoyed the story of BFA and wanted to know what was going to happen next and those cinematics, I still go back and watch them.

    I gave up on WoD part way through... just like Blizzard did.

    Regarding SL, I find myself logging on just to do some grinds for rep, collections, achievements, etc., but mainly run old content specifically timewalking when it is up. Always try to read quest text and the like, but this storyline is just meh. I actually dread getting on alts because one time through the story was enough for me, almost too much.
    Last edited by nagano; 2021-09-21 at 02:28 PM.

  17. #157
    Quote Originally Posted by Sondrelk View Post
    That would constitute bad.

    If what makes SL bad is bad systems then that is still a net positive over nothing.
    I don't know, it's like saying that for dinner, WoD's plate with three peas on it is worse than SL's plate with a pile of literal shit on it.

    WoD didn't have much content, but we could play alts for variety, on the other hand, SL's Jenga-tower of systems makes even thinking of doing all that again on an alt a very off-putting notion...

  18. #158
    Quote Originally Posted by Depakote View Post
    No, there's absolutely nothing good about Shadowlands. Not a single thing. There were many good things in Warlords that people have already mentioned in this thread so I won't repeat them.
    There are good things in WoD, and there are good things in SL.

    Castle Nathria is a great raid. Sanctum of Domination is a great raid. Levelling is still pretty damn good, especially when you factor in the changes to levelling as a whole. The sheer amount of cosmetics that can be collected are great. There is great variety in mounts. The zones still look good.

    The only difference from WoD in that regard is that in WoD what little there was, was high quality. There is still a similar amount of good and great stuff in SL, it's just that you also have extraneous stuff in addition that is bad.

    If you go solely by what is positives then SL and WoD are about equal. If you factor in the rest then SL wins because even trash is better than nothing. At least Torghast is fun once or twice per character, so you have at least maybe a week of enjoyable content. Gathering stuff is tedious, but at least it's something to spend time doing.
    It isnt like most of the content is mandatory. If you decide to simply ignore the bad stuff in SL that you don't need to partake in then WoD is only marginally better in that raidlogging is slightly easier.


    Besides, the debate is not really going to be meaningful until SL is over and done with anyways. Whatever is the current expansion will always be judged extremely harshly, far worse than it deserves compared to previous expansions that always get off easy simply because players don't have to deal with it anyways.
    It's very easy to sit here and say that SL is terrible compared to WoD when you only remember the good stuff, it probably wouldnt be so easy if the roles were reversed and you sat in your garrison bored out of your mind thinking about all the stuff in SL that at least gave you a reason to log on outside raids.

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    Quote Originally Posted by mysticx View Post
    I don't know, it's like saying that for dinner, WoD's plate with three peas on it is worse than SL's plate with a pile of literal shit on it.

    WoD didn't have much content, but we could play alts for variety, on the other hand, SL's Jenga-tower of systems makes even thinking of doing all that again on an alt a very off-putting notion...
    Sure, if the notion of stuff like Torghast is physcially repulsive to even consider having in the game is problematic then there isnt really anything that can be done. But for those that just treat the systems like bad systems it is easy to argue how having terrible systems to spend time in when you are bored is preferable to running circles in your garrison, gathering another recolored wolf mount.

    SL has stuff to do, and it also has content that is good. It has a large chunk that isnt so great, but I find it difficult to take anyone seriously when 9.1 was filled with unique mounts, pets and transmogs. Whereas 6.1 had the Selfie cam and Twitter integration.
    The world revamp dream will never die!

  19. #159
    I'd pick SL over the other two rather easily. WoD might have had good raids and good class design (debateably since it began the Legion pruning trend) -- it just felt very very incomplete and had a very apparently lack of content. It didnt have system, but it also didnt have any content either. Having good class design with no content is like having the most pristine silverware in the world but with no food in the middle of the Sahara.

    BFA -- it just didnt click. Azerite didnt fit the void left by Artifacts until 8.2 -- but then the Essence system was not alt friendly and required you to do different things to get your best ones. Corruption was hit or miss. The story pacing just sucked the life out of the game pretty quickly.

    SL -- there seems to be attempts to fix the issues associated with BFA. There are attempts for more alt-friendliness, but Blizz did a weird thing and made some parts friendly and others not. It seems they are trying to alleviate this in 9.1.5 which is good and only serves to add continued interest (for those currently playing) and give more service to alt progression. The story is hit or miss -- but coming from the mess of BFA, its a slightly better net positive.

    I would go SL > BFA > WOD. WoD can never be first in my mind due to the fact it just feels very very incomplete and was the definition of a failed expansion. If the community rumor of 9.3 being skipped to go to 10.0 is reality -- then I would rate BFA over SL, simply due to the fact of being a completed expansion.

    However, it is hard to evaluate since the expac is not complete and I would have rated Legion low at this point in its cycle as well.

  20. #160
    It's honestly difficult for me to choose.

    The leveling experience was pretty great in all of them. But after that, they all fell off REALLY fast.

    But if I had to choose one over the others, it would be BfA simply because I played it more and did enjoy the time I spent there. But I took a LOT of time off during BfA.

    WoD just didn't have much for me to do as a non-raider and SL feels like a never ending list of chores to do, especially as someone who enjoys playing alts. I log into SL and just feel overwhelmed with tasks to do to get to where I want to be, as someone who's not in a super active guild and therefore having to rely mainly on dungeon queue and luck of finding Mythic+ groups to gear my characters. It's not fun, at all. I used to feel compelled to resub once the LFR Wing 4 opened up and could see the entire new raid, but with the amount of crap to get through to get geared enough to even queue, and the amount of time it takes, I CBA to do even that. Even with the Korthia catch up gear....that means I have to actually spend time in Korthia, which is awful, as it yet again just feels like a chore list.

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