Has there ever been an Xpac that wasn't shat on by the community

[Kalisandra]

Wrath and TBC I never see people shit on. Wrath sure, had LFG. But otherwise people love it. TBC was well. TBC. Vanilla 2.0 basically

TBC had issues. Most of them get papered over with nostalgia. Classic TBC really opened my eyes - I knew that Paladins still basically blew outside of tanking and tank healing (I levelled one in the day). However, I had forgotten just how had they blew. In Classic I was levelling one in Outland and it was really painful. Drinking more than a Mage, running from any sort of over-pull, etc. And Classic uses a version that comes after quite a few buffs to Paladin DPS.

So yeah, TBC had problems. Class balance was non-existent. Sure, there was a spot for a lot of classes in a 25-man raid if they brought a particular buff, but if your spec was lower DPS than another that brought the same buff, you weren't getting into a serious progression raid. And outside of 25-mans, you needed the right class/spec or forget it. Don't have decent CC? You aren't doing pug heroics.

Massive long attunement chains...

Tanks had to gear extremely carefully, especially early in the expansion, because being crit-proof was vital and uncrushability was also really important if you weren't a bear (and early on their vulnerability to crushing blows was a big deal). Now, I'm all for making gearing more interesting than it is now, but that was excessive.

[Osmeric]

Early SL was pretty hype. Content droughts killed this expansion more than anything else.

For me, early SL was nails-across-a-chalkboard intolerable. It just rubbed me the wrong way in so many ways. I stopped playing after a couple of weeks with two months left on the sub.

[Kalisandra]

Let me try and put it this way, and then you can see the difference between complaints.

WOTLK: Introducing HC difficulty (but even that is "OK" compared to having 4 difficulties now)

Cata: Nothing.

MOP: Nothing.

WOD: Storyline (official downfall of lore), slow/no content release.

LEGION: DESTROYED PROFESSIONS, RNG legendary, retarded AP grindfests, destroyed pvp, destroyed gearing, 89432947327 ilvls per patch and removal of pvp/pve vendors.

BFA: DESTROYED PROFESSIONS, Essences, retarded AP grindfests, destroyed pvp, destroyed gearing, 89432947327 ilvls per patch and removal of pvp/pve vendors.

SL: DESTROYED PROFESSIONS, RNG retarded Renown grindfests, retarded conduit grindfests, retarded choreghast grindfests, destroyed pvp, destroyed gearing, 89432947327 ilvls per patch and removal of pve vendors.


You see the difference between pre-legion and post-legion wow philosophy?

You left out WoD DESTROYED GATHERING. Also NO FLIGHT for far too long, and only getting it after serious player abandonment.

[StillMcfuu]

You might have a point if not for one of the primary complaints about MoP being that it was nothing but World of Dailycraft.

WoW has always been about doing things daily, just the iteration of dailies present in MoP people didn't really love. Everything outside of those dailies was solid.

[Kalisandra]

People get very confused around Legion. Legion was massively flamed from the get go until 7.3 when the game actually became playable. A few reminders:

4. Artifact power grind to 35/51 before raids open.
5. Being able to grind and deposit artifact power in only a single artifact meaning u had 2 dead specs.
6. The above practically meant completely dead alts.

The AP grind before raids opened was no different to the usual mad rush to gear completely in time for raid opening. As for the the rest of the AP thing - this was only true if you were dead-set on having your AP maxed out. As the scaling was exponential once you were close to being maxed out putting AP into off-specs or spending time on alts didn't cost your main's main spec much. That was especially true of alts, because they got to start one the fresh easy to get AP sources, because that was the other thing about Legion - Blizzard allowed you to grind AP almost without limit, but it got very inefficient, so you were much better off spending the time doing something else.

Frankly, I prefer having that choice to the current set up where there are only a few world quests, only a few of anything, and then you have to wait. We still have an infinite grind (or rather a vast number of grinds), but everything's gated.

[Swnem]

Almost all classes got dmg ramp up mechanic by Cata. Some sooner, like Enhs with their maelstrom, they got in WotLK. It was just unfair to play with ramp up mechanics against rets, who had insta one-shots. I don't even want to list amout of OP mechanics, Rets had. It's ok to have some of them, but not all at the same time. Slow, freedom, bubble, LOH, stun, sap, -stats debuff, healing from dmg, highest armor from plate, i.e. lowest phys dmg, 2H weapon with highest insta dmg, etc.

That is starting to sound like L2P. LoH is not usable in arenas, freedom and BoP are purgeable. Back then you could not attack when you had bubble. That was later returned. The armor is offset by some of the lowest max hp in the game. I don't recall any one shots outside of Wrath, not anymore than every other class. Not unless the target is under geared but everyone does that.
Before you say Execution sentence... it's dispel-able.

[Kalisandra]

No, things like Forbearance and dmg/heal reduction under bubble, if I remember it correctly, were added in later patched. And yeah, Paladins were balanced in Cata. It was only guys, who exploited their OPness in WotLK were whining, that they were nerfed to the ground.

They were balanced after a while. Initially they were terrible. Well, Prot worked okay as a tank, and Holy functioned after a fashion, but Ret was awful. As in, 'level and do your daily chores as Prot because it's faster' awful. It wasn't until they reworked the Mastery and Holy Power generation and gave Ret some survivability buffs that it stopped absolutely sucking.

Also, Cata had that wonderful experience of really, really serious melee hate in the first raid tier. And the change to Blizzard's model of how healers should work made for some really rough dungeon runs until they buffed some healers.

In hindsight, at least these problems occurred because the devs were making some fairly ambitious changes (the same reason early Wrath had some serious balance issues), with the introduction of Mastery, and the major changes to healing and healers. These days we have these balance issues, they persist for entire tiers/seasons because the devs simply don't nerf/buff outside of simple PvP percentage adjustments, and yet most of the specs haven't changed in any great degree since Legion or even WoD (and the ones that have have generally become more bland and like every other spec).

[ArenaDk]

As someone already said, the only metric of success is subscriptions. This is a for profit business. Wrath had the highest, most consistent number of subscriptions so by far, it's the most successful expansion of all time from WoW, the vocal minority of whiners need not apply.

Cataclysm saw subscriptions spike even higher, only to have a huge steep decline, so an argument can be made for its quality as it made millions unsub. Cataclysm marked the first chink in a growing juggernaut's armor. No expansion since then reached the levels Wrath did. Legion or Mists are arguably the second and third most successful in every way possible, but by the time Legion came out, they were no longer releasing sub numbers, right? And Mists is a weird cat in that it's highly praised for quality, but if I recall, subscriptions declined too due to the theme more so than the actual quality of the content.

I must say, I was one of those shallow players. I got tired of Pandas and the overwhelming Asian them fast and wanted to get back to a Legion expansion fast.

Not really a fair way to compare expansions.

1. Woltk had no other big online games around. League of legends was still small and cs go wasnt to big yet. Both took off around cata

2. The older a game gets the harder it gets to hold subs and gain new. swap cata and woltk release and the sub count wouldnt have changed

People who read one graph and use it to say good or bad are weird for me.

Next you look at the graph of hate crimes commited in the US, see black people are overepresented in commiting them, and than you will claim all blacks are bad and asians who barely commit any are good.

thats not how graphs work, there is a enviroment behind them.

And mods before you now scream racist or anything, this is just the most easy example, if you have a better one i gladly exchange them in my comment

[Kalisandra]

You know I take back one of my prior wrath complaints no one bitched about Ruby Sanctum cause no one actually did it

I remember seeing a statement that Ruby Sanctum's loot list was intended to fill in some holes and give people who hadn't managed to get their BiS filled out in ICC some more chances at loot. Then I saw the list and realised that they meant "Those specs that like ArmPen will get the chance to stack even more of it", and that those physical specs that didn't want ArmPen could just suck it up like they had all through ICC. Did it once for completeness' sake, only ever set foot in it again in MoP and later because some guildies wanted achievements from it.

- - - Updated - - -

WoTLK was great, but they introduced some toxic item progression towards the end that just turned players off, then with cata they broke everyones favorite build by forcing you to invest so many points into 1 specialization, but I won't get into how Cata continued this trend...

Cata also killed the server pugging community. LFG had already done it a lot of damage, but in LK 10-man and 25-man were on different lockouts, so you could raid with your guild and then pug or casually raid with some non-guild friends on your main. Gearing alts was also fairly easy from Ulduar onwards (because by then the heroics had gone from 'some have some hard pulls' to 'lol'), so you could have decently geared alts to go pugging with too.

Cata changed all that. 25-man and 10-man raids were on the same lockouts, and as they shared loot tables your guild probably cared if you got yourself saved to a non-guild run. For quite some time you couldn't easily gear alts because the heroics were hard, and thus not trivially puggable, so you couldn't easily gear alts for pugging. By the time this was fixed, the damage was done, and then they introduced LFR and that finished the job.

- - - Updated - - -

Almost all classes got dmg ramp up mechanic by Cata. Some sooner, like Enhs with their maelstrom, they got in WotLK. It was just unfair to play with ramp up mechanics against rets, who had insta one-shots. I don't even want to list amout of OP mechanics, Rets had. It's ok to have some of them, but not all at the same time. Slow, freedom, bubble, LOH, stun, sap, -stats debuff, healing from dmg, highest armor from plate, i.e. lowest phys dmg, 2H weapon with highest insta dmg, etc.

In Wrath Rets did not have a slow (they had a speed-cap effect, and applying it meant not using a damage seal and judgement, so cost a lot of damage and GCDs). Their stat debuff was interesting, but not nearly in the same ballpark as a Mortal Strike effect (but it did synergise well with those). The 'sap' was on a 1 minute cooldown. They had no short CD defensives, so once bubble was nerfed (half damage, can't use with wings) they were very vulnerable to any sort of sustained damage or to a spec with shortish damage CDs. Also bubble could be penetrated by Chaos Bolt and some other effects and shattered by Warriors (as it can again now). Ret's automatic healing from hitting things was very small in PvP, and also in PvP they couldn't really use their best damage seal because of the backlash damage.

On top of all this, Ret's had no movement buffs outside of a passive +15% runspeed, no snare or root, and no kick.

Given all this, Ret had to be able to blow someone up on contact, because they'd only ever get a few seconds of contact. The contest with a Ret wasn't about tanking their damage, it was about whether they got to damage you at all. Oh, and with all those things you list, Ret's still got blown up by Warriors all the damned time.

In early Wrath the 2v2 team of choice was Holy (Paladin) + Unholy, simply because Holy's bubble made them the only healer capable of lasting more than a few seconds. So 2s was made to 'not count' and there were nerfs (some of which spilled over onto non-Holy specs). In the next season Ret was doing really well (not least because the backlash from Blood was reduced so it was useable in PvP), so Ret was nerfed - that's where the whole 'stack the DoT' thing came in, and it was entirely because people were complaining about Ret in arena and unrated BGs. Note that Ret was not completely dominating arena, but merely giving traditional specs competition, and balancing around unrated BGs is, was, and always has been foolish (and also, aside from this one time, not something Blizz really did).

Also, back then "Resilience will fix it!" became a meme, but it was actually true - most of the cases of Ret's blowing people up in 1-2GCDs were victims in next to no PvP gear, thus with no resilience who got hit with a Crit by a Ret that they'd let close with Wings up. So they did everything wrong and then ran crying to the forums. And yes, I was one of the Ret's who fuelled the fire by going into BGs and Wintergrasp and blowing up ungeared players.

- - - Updated - - -

That is starting to sound like L2P. LoH is not usable in arenas, freedom and BoP are purgeable.

And even Wings was (also stealable by Mages...). Purge/Steal protection was a big deal back then.

[Venziir]

Legion whining came at the start of the expansion, but almost exclusively with legendary items.

The hate for WoD came in strong after a couple months, when people realized there wasn't much to do. It was a raid logging heaven with good leveling zones though.

Most of MoP was pretty well received all things considered, with the only real whines I can remember being the absolute shit ton of dailies at the start of the expansion, and requiring you to win 2 BGs for the legendary quest later on. Outside of that, all the shit about the expansion came prior to it even coming out "As if an expansion based on Kung Fu Panda could ever be good".

Cataclysm was a huge amount of whining about launch heroic dungeons being way too hard (this happens when you flip the switch from TBC > WoTLK and then back again) and Dragonsoul as a whole.

WoTLK whines almost exclusively came from 'sparkle pony' at the very end of WoTLK. I believe it was the first mount you could buy from the store.

TBC whining came almost exclusively on the forums, with lots of people threatening to quit because the tuning was way too high and still required world buffs. They had to rebalance almost all of T4/T5 because of incredibly buggy bosses, stupid respawn timers on trash, and gear that had to be bumped up because pretty much every blue wasn't rewarding.

Realistically everything has been shit on to varying degrees, but a lot of it's retrospective at this point. I look back at expansions like WoTLK and Legion with contempt because there were truly terrible decisions in those times that made me hate the game, and nearly made me quit in each expansion. WoTLK difficulty at the start was awful, and the way you geared in Legion made me hate the game (AP, random legendary items and TF in general). Which is funny, because based both of these are generally seen as great expansions by a lot of the player base, but it wasn't for me.

The worst expansions for me was BFA, WoTLK and Legion (starting with the worst). Jury still out on Shadowlands, but it will likely usurp or tie BFA at this point.

WoD was, most likely, the only expansion to recieve hate before, during and after it's release. People hated the premise, the time-traveling, the orcs, the garrision, Garrosh and well everything before we even got to play it. Then people hated all the same things, plus a bundle of other things... I almost feel sorry for poor lil' WoD.

[Kalisandra]

WoD was, most likely, the only expansion to recieve hate before, during and after it's release. People hated the premise, the time-traveling, the orcs, the garrision, Garrosh and well everything before we even got to play it. Then people hated all the same things, plus a bundle of other things... I almost feel sorry for poor lil' WoD.

The levelling experience was nice... What Draenei lore and zones there were were nice... Pity so much was cut out that this was gutted and it became all Orcs all the time.

[Mardux]

People have always complained since before the game even launched. That much is true.

However, its also disingenuous to pretend all these complaints are equal. There's a massive difference between someone saying they don't like pandas and someone complaining because the game has become an unfun chorefest.

And its not disingenuous to pretend those complaints aren't subjective, just like how your complaint is subjective.

[Al Gorefiend]

''the lore''


Dafug you smoking OP.

The lore is a valid point for a lot of people. Warcraft's story is why I prefer this over final fantasy weeb stuff. Right now the direction of the story has put the same few faction leaders and characters in this Soap Opera dance of constant "muh honor" and contrived riddlespeak from lame villains. It doesn't even carry a sense of ominous foreboding to it because we've seen the story once before.

[Khaza-R]

And its not disingenuous to pretend those complaints aren't subjective, just like how your complaint is subjective.

Okay? I never disputed that.

My point is that sometimes people complain about minor things they just wish were done better. Sometimes people complain because its enough to make them stop playing the game. Although those two things are the same act they not the same in terms of impact. Obviously its all subjective since what make one player quit, might not make another one quit. But my going back to my main point, simply saying people are complaining about the game is fairly meaningless all on its own.

[Adamas102]

returning to the peak is irrelevant. having huge sub numbers is a real good sign that an expansion is successful. subs were going up in BC and thru wrath. people bitching about them is pointless as raw numbers say they are popular. numbers started to go down after....id look for a problem within that. there really is no justification in flat out shitting on an expansion when raw numbers are thru the roof. criticizing things in an expansion sure, but flat out shitting on them during its peak is not credible.

Your basing that on a very rudimentary (and incorrect) understanding of those early sub graphs.

Of course WoW was attracting a lot of new players when it was a new game. What we also know from other data is that about 90% of people who tried out the game in those first few years never stuck around very long.

By WotLK the game was already aging well past that initial surge in popularity and it’s no surprise that the influx of new players started dwindling. It doesn’t matter how great expansions after WotLK might have been, the vast majority of gamers don’t want to keep playing (and paying) for the same game year after year, and few people are interested in picking up a 5+ year old game when there are so many newer, flashier toys on the market.

If you want to look at it another way, I bet WoW’s current player retention is a lot higher than it was back in vanilla, TBC, and Wrath.

[Hitei]

WoW has always been about doing things daily, just the iteration of dailies present in MoP people didn't really love.

That's not really a response to what I said. You claimed there was a difference between MoP complaints and current complaints and I pointed out to you that no, there isn't. People were complaining about having to do things daily back then just like they are complaining about how they have to do things daily now. You've sort of shot yourself in the foot by pointing out that this design based on keeping people coming back every day has been something inherent in the game since day one.

Everything outside of those dailies was solid.

MoP was absolutely full of problems.

Its expansion feature, which people often block out of their memories, was scenarios, an absolute trashpile that makes Torghast, Islands, and even warfronts look fantastic by comparison. Half of its raids were mediocre and forgettable. 5.1's primary content was yet another daily hub and 5.3 continues to be one of the laziest patches in existence, whose only real notable feature was a BG so bad they eventually just gave up and remade it into a second version of AB because no one wanted to play it--and an associated narrative that made so little sense and was so badly written that it's laughable people complain about BfA as a """worse""" MoP.

Despite what people who don't know better often meme, its class design was easily the worst the game has ever had, with homogenization on a level no other point in the game has ever reached. With ever class having a nearly identical toolkit, gameplay design, and capability and hunters and rogues stuck with three specs that barely had any differentiation.

While the Kung Fu panda arguments are retarded, the race it added remains one of the least popular and least played races in the game, and its class has been either the least played, or second least played in the roster since its implementation.

Its PvP was largely considered a turning point for the worse after BC and Cata and utilized the weird, absolute mess that was PvP power.

Since seemingly everyone forgets, it was also the expansion that first introduced Titanforging (as warforging).

It was also probably the single most damaging expansion for the health of professions, since it switched over to the model of seasonal professions where you could simply skip the entire initial investment and craft junk items to go straight into max level. An easy skip that vastly diminished the value of professions and players reliance on each other.

While I'm never going to ignore the general quality of the art, sound and design work, the expansion also suffered immensely from being bound to a very, very specific theme and aesthetic, made even worse by overuse of the same enemy types again and again. People may complain about maw enemies but holy shit do I never want to see a mogu or mantid ever again.

People just forget all these problems and only remember it as 5.2 and the bits of 5.4 they like.
Much like they forget half of Wrath was TotGC and Naxx and instead only remember Ulduar and ICC.

[Hctaz]

Early Legion was pretty shit with Legiondaries but it got a lot better by the end. I wasn't a huge fan of it. I quit in Nighthold and it remains the only time I quit the game because I just wasn't having fun with it.

Legion burnout was the reason I stopped playing retail. The game was probably the best it had been in a while, but also the worst for anybody who took raiding seriously. I think this was the first expansion where there was a legitimate feeling that your progression never ended, and you never knew where “good enough” was.

With Classic, I pretty much have all the resources I need at this point to get me through the ending of the expansion. I can’t farm any gear outside of just doing my once a week boss kills and seeing what drops. There’s no sense of urgency, and I really miss that about pre-legion stuff.

I agree that the lack of endless content meant that casual players had nothing to do, but they should have probably invented a different set of rewards that did not impact the raiding scene.

- - - Updated - - -

WoW has always been about doing things daily, just the iteration of dailies present in MoP people didn't really love. Everything outside of those dailies was solid.

WoW definitely was not about doing things daily all the time. World of Dailycraft wasn’t a thing until Sunwell Plateau, and many people didn’t like the implementation of a recurring daily system. I didn’t bother with it in Wrath because most of it was optional content. I liked their implementation in wrath as a way to supplement your reputation farming, but that’s all the existed as: *SUPPLEMENTAL* sources of reputation farming to combat the complaints that TBC rep farming was just locked down to farming the same normal dungeon again and again.

The issue with MoP was (if I remember correctly) that so many reputations could only be farmed via daily quests and you had a billion different quests for each faction with no restriction. They went from being additional sources of reputation on top of dungeon farming and questing to being something you could ONLY obtain via questing. And that kinda started the trend we see today.

[Loveliest]

Familiarity breeds contempt. Same with everything.

Also I want to say that ppl who stop playing will never be happy playing this game again unless they come back to a group of friends that will integrate them for all available content. This is why most ppl hate expansion, they have no one to play with, pug at most and feel unhappy, blaming all the games' flaws for it.

And indeed there are flaws. For example you mentioned cata dungeons hard. Yes they were hard at the start. Half my guild quit then because they couldn't complete a daily hc. But I had friends to do them with so the dungeons were super enjoyable. This why for me none of the expansions were bad, because I enjoyed my time and annoyances are minor to my enjoyment unless they make my friends stop logging.

Tbh I feel like most ppl have a hard time figuring out if something they complain about is truly detrimental to them.

[Rockefellah]

Wotlk: Introduction of LFG and the first store mount

LFG really came at the end of it, WOTLK was one of the best-received expansions (in part by the hype on Arthas). ToC could have been done better but wasn't bad either.

Cata: Heroics too hard, Dragon soul

Heroics too hard? Heroics were perfect. One of the best balances between casuals who just wanted to see the story on normal, and for more advanced players wanting to gear and run heroic content. Dragon Soul was indeed a poorly developed end, in part by Super Thrall saving the day.

MoP: "Kung fu panda and too many dailies!!"

The panda cry babies can be ignored, vocal minorities. How can you have too many dailies? It was very nice to have a choice on which faction/daily you wanted to focus on. You didn't have to do all of them... next to Wotlk one of the best-received expansions. Content draught at the end was poorly received, with everyone waiting on WoD.

WoD: Nothing to do, worst expansion ever

. Only bad because it wasn't finished, and had a lot of cut content. Still one of the better expansions in terms of flow, balance and raid content. There was plenty to do...

Legion: World of RNGcraft. Legendary system is terrible.

. Perhaps the best expansion and received in equal measure. The legendary system was good - I am guessing you just had bad luck on the drops?

Bfa: No explanation

Here the lore/story went off. The faction war was both in-game (lore) as out game (PVP content) artificial. At the end to many systems on systems of power enhancement. The Azeroth story (not the faction war) was pretty cool.

Shadowlands: No explanation

[Johnjohn]

Its always fascinated me when people try to dismiss all criticisms with the idea that "well they always complain". Firstly, there are so many different types of people that play games like this, of course there will always be complaints. There is no way to 100% please everyone. But to use this as a metric to dismiss all criticism or not to listen to your audience is just silly.

Basically sub numbers are the only real way to determine the success of a game like this. The company can decide who to listen to, and who to cater to. I think the big issue currently is WoW is not doing as well as it could or more importantly they are under performing by most estimations, and the developers are not listening to why. Does that mean WoW will die tomorrow? Hell no, this game will be around 25 years from now if Blizzard chooses to keep it going.

I personally genuinely think the game is capable of triple the sub numbers currently if they would go back to their roots while still adding modern additions like housing and non min/max nonsense to the game. I think WoW has such a strong core of a game that it could outlive me if they wanted it to. There are so many routes they can go that is not hardcore hamster wheel grinding.