So, what didn't work this expansion?

[Sound911]

For me it was the theme, it went from the end of the world with lava everywhere, corrupted people and animals all over the place, buldings destroyed and landscapes sundered by huge crevasses and such to this peaceful(ish) land with panda people and beer and farms which was kinda made to look evil with black and white ghost people :/

to me it wasn't very WoW and that's why i'm very very casually playing right now

[Deleted]

- the talking zoo all over pandaria , monkeys fish..you name it.

Because talking cows and dragons are better.

- the monk class, even though this is a fantasy game , its based on logic, there is only that much of bending the logic rules to try to come up with somthing new but if you bend it too much no one will accept it, how could they come up with a class that needs to be drunk in order to tank and uses only his feet and hands when up untill now tanks had to use plate (druids being the only exception but they dont tank as is, they transform into giant dire bears which is plausible) some use shields some done but dont tell me that all you need to do now to become a tank is to have a drink and fight your enemies only with your hands and feet with fancy stupid looking moves...it worked in "the drunken master" movie but not here...how would they tank ragnaros a 100% fire giant boss?? with kong fu?

You talk of ferals. How is a naked bear in anyway better protected by fire more than a user of energy and chi? Also, monks are nothing new, they have been in the Warcraft Universe since WC3.

- no plot what so ever, ali and horde were in war since 1992 , there will never be a winner or a loser , its pointless to give it to us as a patch or xpac plot..

The plot is the Horde and Ally expedition to a completely new and unknown land where they will meet new enemies, new allies and deepen their relationship.

- lei shen...how is he? a resurrected stolen corps by the trolls when you level up and then you kill him again by the time the next raid is out? pointless...

Lei Shen was the greatest tyrant of Pandaria, leader of the worst enemies of the Pandaren, the Mogu. Also, wait, did we kill Lei Shen while leveling? Nah, I don't think so. What we see, is that the trolls manage to steal his corpse, and after much work managge to bring him back to life. And don't get me started on killed and resurrected bosses. (Kael'thas I am pointing at you)

- garrosh hellscream, in cata he was depicted as the right leader , tough outside but had the right stuff at heart ( as sarufang taught him) and now out of nothing they made him the crazy guy we need to put down? disappointing....

Garrosh never had "the right stuff" in heart, he was always an arrogant racist like his father, always lusting for Alliance blood. His leadership was the result of Thrall's hopes that he would become a wiser and better person, but as we can see, Thrall was wrong.

this xpac has nothing to offer to the players who been playing this since 2004 they didnt want kong fu panda xpac, they wanted lore themed xpac with azshara , sargeras , titans and old gods..

Did Cataclysm give you anything lorewise, based on what you posted above? I saw no old gods (Only N'Zoth in the end), no Titans, no Azshara, no Sargeras. In Mists, we learn more about N'Zoth, creating a good backstory for an Ny'alotha expansion, we saw more titan technology. I agree that it had some holes as a story, but it implemented some good features and a nice touch to the war between the two factions.

[Ærion]

Dailies.

I've just returned a week ago (from a break since 5.2 started) in hopes of getting some gear for 5.4 (I wanna smash Garrosh while it's relevant). Then I remembered exactly how much bloody time is necessary for the grind for personal progression.

I'll fly circles in the same zone for hours/days farming mats while listening to audiobooks; I'll kill half a billion mobs for mats/<random_collectible> to further my rep. or whatever (again, while listening to a good book). But I'm sick and tired of artificial time-sinks in the form of dailies. I can't even finish them in a timely manner now because I can't fly in the main hub... I'll pay the fee each month, but - and here's the irony - I can't be arsed to spend hours each day playing, it's too stale after so long. I wanna finish my meta-gaming goals and move on, not spend so much time on never-ending quests.

Dailies are what I don't enjoy this expansion. The rest, the lore, the factions, the... well not the gear it's rather ugly for my taste. The game is better than it ever was since it's release, but the focus on gated content in the form of dailies kills me :<

[tru]

Besides everything?
*Pandas....
*Pokemon....
*Monks... Lamest class ever
*Legandaries for everyone...(ie they are mandatory now just like getting the better enchant or gem for an item)
*the way they approached 5m Heroics
*alt-unfriendly
*JP currency and JP gear from the start of MoP has been a joke/useless - JP gear wasnt even on par with 5m H gear
*more face rollolol LFR
*World of Colorscheme soon to be 4 shades of recycled...
*Really 4 difficulties now?
*95% of class uniqueness has been stripped
*Pandas.....
*Pokemon....
*The lore so far in MoP is my least favorite of any xpac.
*They still cant balance their PvP game.
*Another Horde Centric/Themed Ending
*Another run of pansy/pussy alliance doing nothing.
*HORRIBLE and I do mean HORRIBLE gear artwork. Worst raid sets ive ever seen of any xpac in WoW
*Cash-Shop
*Botters ( No they will never stop them because if they could that = less money from subs. I mean honestly who actually stops playing because "this guy is botting" )
*Pandas
*No real improvements of the game that people have asked for for years or things they said they would give but havent
-Player Housing/Guild Housing
-Dance Studio
-Diversity
-BC or at least older mindset of how endgame is approached.
-Hardmodes tailored to the Top 1% instead of more realistic content that we had in BC and died with Wrath.
-Player textures
-A real conclusion to Gnomer. being retaken
*Pandas
*Pokemon
*Cash-Shop to keep their pockets filled while they still don't deliver the game we deserve

All the things they said "If we really go and do that It would take dev time from this...." What have they given us that has been noteworthy this xpac?

[Auxis]

Besides everything?
*Pandas....
*Pokemon....
*Monks... Lamest class ever
*Legandaries for everyone...(ie they are mandatory now just like getting the better enchant or gem for an item)
*the way they approached 5m Heroics
*alt-unfriendly
*JP currency and JP gear from the start of MoP has been a joke/useless - JP gear wasnt even on par with 5m H gear
*more face rollolol LFR
*World of Colorscheme soon to be 4 shades of recycled...
*Really 4 difficulties now?
*95% of class uniqueness has been stripped
*Pandas.....
*Pokemon....
*The lore so far in MoP is my least favorite of any xpac.
*They still cant balance their PvP game.
*Another Horde Centric/Themed Ending
*Another run of pansy/pussy alliance doing nothing.
*HORRIBLE and I do mean HORRIBLE gear artwork. Worst raid sets ive ever seen of any xpac in WoW
*Cash-Shop
*Botters ( No they will never stop them because if they could that = less money from subs. I mean honestly who actually stops playing because "this guy is botting" )
*Pandas
*No real improvements of the game that people have asked for for years or things they said they would give but havent
-Player Housing/Guild Housing
-Dance Studio
-Diversity
-BC or at least older mindset of how endgame is approached.
-Hardmodes tailored to the Top 1% instead of more realistic content that we had in BC and died with Wrath.
-Player textures
-A real conclusion to Gnomer. being retaken
*Pandas
*Pokemon
*Cash-Shop to keep their pockets filled while they still don't deliver the game we deserve

All the things they said "If we really go and do that It would take dev time from this...." What have they given us that has been noteworthy this xpac?

Everything that you just noted, apparently.

[Ulgrim]

MoP cons:
1. Worst Alt-friendly expansion to date - Progression is so gated that getting an alt geared up is brutal.
2. Lack of 5-man dungeons - A huge part of the game for me that was totally ignored beyond the dungeons at release. Scenarios might be a good substitution, but they need to improve rewards by having each objective drop an item at least.
4. Dailies - This list isn't really in order, but if it was, this should be #1. This was a cause of a lot of the players I knew leaving the game and it ruined the game for me personally. They can claim it wasn't mandatory all they want, but it was clear anyone who DID the dailies progressed much, much faster. If you were in a raiding guild, and didn't log in every single day to get your dailies done, you got left behind. This killed MoP for me and a lot of others I know - speaking as a guild leader and a person with a lot of in-game friends, every time I heard about someone quitting, it usually involved them not liking doing dailies everyday. Some of us have jobs already, we don't need one in our game.
5. The Armor designs - This expansion just simply had the worst armor designs imo. It's completely subjective, but outside of maybe warlock S13, shaman T15, rogue T15, and a few challenge mode sets, I had no desire to collect any of these.
9. Pandas - Maybe it's just me, but I think this should have been an expansion like 8-10 years down the road when they were running out of options. It just felt way too childish to me, about up until the Thunder King patch. I thought it made a joke of the game, especially when there are so many better options still unexplored: Legion, Nerubian Kingdom, Emerald Dream, South Seas/Azshara, etc. I just don't understand the decision to make Pandaria the next chapter.

Pretty much all of this. ^

As far as scenarios go, I liked the concept but I didn't care for the execution. Blizzard admitted that they were just easier to create than dungeons, because they basically just slapped together already existing content. It's poor production value, plain and simple.

With the armor design, I'm not sure it's because the Asian theme of the expansion limited them or that they're just burnt out and it's starting to show. Once again, art is totally subjective.

Pertaining to the characters and the lore, it didn't really grab me. Developers have stated in interviews that MoP was a break from the main story. I really didn't really need a friggin break from it. The world is already so huge and there's so much left to explore, so many places to go with the characters, that the it felt really unnecessary to take it to Pandaria at all.

[Sierra85]

few things i thought didn't really work.

• Dailies and reps being gated.
• The implementation of the lesser charms / bonus roll.
• Very unfriendly towards alts.
• Leveling to 90, personally i hated the journey through the mop zones.
• PvP imbalance.

[Killilth]

MoP has been more "alt friendly" than ever. Look how easy it is to gear up.... it's almost too fast.

There is no reason to do all those dailies again unless you want to.

If anything MoP's only problem with alts is that you too quickly run out of things to do.

I don't think you run out of things to do any more quicker than a main.

I am really glad the daily grind was removed/a way around it was implemented. I am not a fan of RNG grinding old content to catch up to the latest tier though.

(I've always enjoyed dungeon grinding..maybe I'm weird)

[Funky303]

My personal experience with people quitting in MoP has two bigger reasons:

The biggest one beeing server inbalance. There is more or less just one german server with a close to 1:1 ratio, all others are 1:0,x or 0,x:1. Leveling on my server was pain in the ass, so during leveling/dailies I lost half of my raiding guild, two good friends transfered to a pve server, but stopped playing after they didn't find another similar guild as before.

With 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3, it even got worse. Blizz always added PVP zones, the ToT isle beeing a no fly zone, so at least on my server (Frostwolf EU, Horde 1:0,7 Ally) you couldn't do dailies or world bosses the first 2-3 days. Even grouped with four friends didn't help. One gets attacked by 2-3 horde, you fight them off, they come back with 10 other horde.

Second biggest reason in my experience:

the really big leap between LFR and normal. I consider myself a more or less decent player, half clicker, half keypresser. The jump from LFR to normal was quite a bit hard, one mistake, dead. I managed to get into a good guild, we cleared everything on normal, downed half the heroic bosses until the next tier came out. On my server it is virtually not possible to replace someone who left.

So when two guys from our raid group stopped playing, raids had to be called off, and then 3 other player left. Rinse repeat.

So IMHO MoP had it's flaws, but also lots of funny, new stuff. The thing that killed most of it was server imbalance.

[Deleted]

god damn stupid bloody grind is what did not work for me this exp =p

They need to push more things towards account-wide. They did it with pets, mounts some achievs.

I want account-wide - tokens, honor, all achievs, REPUTATION and probably other stuff.

If I am bored of grinding let me swap and grind rep on a different class. I have made the effort to level a character to 90 and gear it to some extent. THAT should be enough. God damn boring quest-rep grinding balls, mutter mutter =)

[Aphrel]

1. Normal scenarios.. they were slow, easy and unrewarding.. the 3 least desireable qualities in an instanced content. Hc scenarios is what normal scenarios should have been but hc scenarios were locked behind a ilvl req wich is pretty silly since its not a feature with a matchmaking tool to it.. and as for loot i can understand why we can only get the epic box once a day.. this gating system that punish players for playing much suck imo.

2. Heroic dungeons.. these dungeons whould have been perfectly tuned on lvl 85.. but on 90 they are far to easy.. easy content gets boring very fast.. challengemodes had a more refeshing difficulty and was great fun but lacked rewards imo (not everybody enjoys cosemtic rewards.. a carrot in the form of gear of raidfinder quiality whoud have been perfect to not only attract ppl to challengemodes but also provide players with an alternative progression path that doesnt involve lfr).

3. questing went to fast imo.. getting to 90 in about 15hours didnt felt like much of an adventure, id love it if worldmobs had abilities that actually could be dangerous, so you had to take them on 1 by 1 and not just pull everything in sight and cleave/aoe it down. (again harder content does leave more of an impression then something you snooze through).

[Mihalik]

1st the Asian theme. Many never liked it at all. For many others it got VERY OLD, VERY FAST! MoP lacked the feel of Outland or Northrend for me. I didn't find any of the zones memorable. Cata suffered from this problem too, lack of an engaging thematic direction or involving zones. (Oh god Uldum...all the wasted Desert potential.)

2nd the gear progression is all over the place, and makes almost no sense half the time. You have quest gear that is better then normal gear, heroic dungeon gear that once upgraded somehow manages to be better then some LFR gear, Justice points are useless, Valor is all over the place, the cap is too low, the items you can get are rubbish, it's mostly used to upgrade items. Then you have LFR where loot is frustrating or outright unrewarding. Blizzard literally had to add a feature so you would know at least some, somewhere in the group got something. Truth is rolling against yourself is boring as hell or just frustrating. Beyond that LFR gear will not get you into raid lvl gear, neither will heroics, but rather a weird Jack-of-all-trades Heroic Scenario will...where the gear drops are completely randomized and come out of a bag. Again rolling against yourself.

3rd. Dailies. The way they were implemented and tied to factions was absolute crap. In the end Blizzard returned to the tried and proved...kill in raid get rep method with the Shadopan Assault. Then you have the class balance for raiding...the horrible advantage range has over melee etc.

Many factors. I took a break from late 5.1 to up until 2 weeks ago. I came back...and everything is a cluster fuck and not enjoyable at all. Really don't know if I should stick it out untill 5.4 or just fuck it all and quit.

[Deleted]

Well this is gonna be different for everyone but for me (not in any particular order):

1) Lack of heroic 5mans. There just aren't enough of them. Scenarios aren't a good replacement, and of what 5mans there are hardly any of them are actually enjoyable. They're too easy, unrewarding as a result and because of the number you get fed up very fast. Levelling dungeons was another thing. Not enough of those either because they had cut back massively on 5mans so the only option for levelling was forced questing.

2) Daily quests. Logically these don't make any sense. "We don't want people to feel like they have to log on every day or adhere to a schedule" so here are a bunch of dailies which, if you don't do them, will cause you to lose out on possible gear upgrades. Did Blizzard really think that raiders want to go to their job/school, come home and have to do 1-2hours of chores every day in order to raid as efficiently as possible? Fixed somewhat with the lowering from 90tokens to 50 and the multiple sources, but it's still a stupid piece of linking that should not exist.

3) Scenarios. Lazy, uninspired, un-epic, boring zergfests. The lore they contain is largely un-related to the grand plot (really only a few of them contain real story elements). The random gear doesn't provide a replacement for set drops from what could be a few 5mans instead.

4) Alt-unfriendliness. Fixed a little bit with time, but still not ideal and due to the beginning of MoP being so time-consuming, many alts have been abandoned altogether. Long and very boring linear levelling, rep grinds and gated gear in 5.0, ongoing charm grinds, RNG, lack of 5mans, lack of pugs in general in mid-low pop servers due to the huge player/guild loss (more on this later) has meant people who enjoy alts have had a much harder time keeping them relevant to the content. I levelled 8 toons to 85 in Cata and 3 were geared for N/Hc raiding. In this expansion I have one alt with Normal T14 gear in all his slots. I haven't been able to get a single PuG for ToT going for lack of other people with geared alts on my server. I only have 3 alts at 90 and can't be bothered to level another one.

5) Server abandonment rates. As players leave the game, those half-guilds move off the smaller servers onto the mega ones such as Silvermoon or just out-right quit. That means no PuGs, poor economy, smaller raider recruitment pools, less PvPers etc. We've gone from having several 25man guilds and 10s of 10mans to less than 10 total 10man guilds actually killing heroic modes. The guild that has always been ranked 8-10th is now #1 and still hasn't cleared ToT heroic. Blizzard has taken YEARS to address this issue, and it still remains to be seen if Virtual Realms will even solve it properly.

[Funky303]

Well this is gonna be different for everyone but for me (not in any particular order):


5) Server abandonment rates. As players leave the game, those half-guilds move off the smaller servers onto the mega ones such as Silvermoon or just out-right quit. That means no PuGs, poor economy, smaller raider recruitment pools, less PvPers etc. We've gone from having several 25man guilds and 10s of 10mans to less than 10 total 10man guilds actually killing heroic modes. The guild that has always been ranked 8-10th is now #1 and still hasn't cleared ToT heroic. Blizzard has taken YEARS to address this issue, and it still remains to be seen if Virtual Realms will even solve it properly.

QFT.

This happend to our server too. My guild is 4/12 HC and Nr. 1 Guild on a former famous Raid server.

[Avalos]

Oh god Uldum...all the wasted Desert potential.

This so much. I'd been looking forward to seeing Uldum since the Discs of Norgannon quests in vanilla. I was so disappointed.

[Vensu24]

Lore

Dailies

Rep Grinds

Disparity in raid difficulty.

[melodramocracy]

Some of what's gone wrong really has to do more with player psychology than actual game mechanics and content (which IMO also could use a bit of a revisit)

Blizzard is in an unfortunate position, as the playerbase generally gets very accustomed to things being a certain way, and after a while, that simply becomes deemed the 'standard'. Cata heroics were a good example of this. Players were so used to Wrath heroics (for the most part), that the struggle through these new instances seemed that much more exaggerated to players. In the same fashion, MoP's leveling and grind factor took players by surprise because they simply were no longer accustomed to such things after Altaclysm.

The second constantly losing battle is the one of convenience and speed vs. player retention. Bottom line: The faster players are able to effectively complete the tasks they deem worthwhile, the faster they'll grow bored, temporarily unsub, or possibly simply move on to other games. And while many changes in this game are seen as simply removal of boring shit so players can 'get to the fun stuff', the fact is that this mindset doesn't work in an MMORPG. And it absolutely goes against the grain in a subscription based one. It sounds draconian to tell players that there should be a lot more struggle in a game to progress, but that's exactly what there SHOULD be. The trick is making that content not 'feel' tedious and boring, and one way to do that is to introduce actual risk.. something that this game has never been particularly good at (again, a topic for another discussion)

On a similar note, the third losing battle: Trying to be all things to all players. This is a sub based game, an unfortunate rarity in today's market (I can only think of a handful that still pursue this income method). Which means that, by all PC game standards, it's quite expensive to take part in. I think, by trying to make content for 'everyone', the game has brought in players who aren't necessarily interested in a long term investment such as this game. After all, if you only have time to play video games a few hours per week... then a sub fee looks even worse, and WoW winds up seeming like an effective waste of money.

That third point is the most troubling to me, and here's why: Broken down by its elements, there's little this game does that some other title, MMO or not, doesn't do better. Graphics? PvP balance? PvE encounters? Storytelling? I wouldn't call this game the best at any single one of these. What WoW (I think) strives for, is to put that package of elements together as a whole better than anyone else does... and it needs to, given the cost to play it. And by trying to appease everyone, concessions get made that keep it from being as good as it can be in other areas.

It will take the loss of a few more million subs, most likely, but the best thing Blizzard could do with this game is say "This is what we feel our core customer wants, so this is what we're focusing on 100%". If that means dropping hardcore, very difficult content? Fine. If that means dropping casual, extremely easy content? Fine. Just pick a direction, and do very well at that, because appealing to everyone simply isn't working.

[Kazi]

Pandaren have been in the franchise since Warcraft 3, they are Warcraft inspired
Pandaren have been in the franchise since Warcraft 3, they are Warcraft inspired
Pandaren have been in the franchise since Warcraft 3, they are Warcraft inspired
Pandaren have been in the franchise since Warcraft 3, they are Warcraft inspired
Pandaren have been in the franchise since Warcraft 3, they are Warcraft inspired

Pandaren have been
in the franchise
since Warcraft 3
they are Warcraft inspired

ugh....GTFO with this BS! The panda NPC, NPC! was in WC3 yes, as one of those, hey look! funny drunk panda! kinda joke NPC's. Did that really deserve an entire expansion based around it??

This whole expansion was nothing but an attempt by Blizz to increase their market share in Asian markets. If you can't see that, you're blind.

And it didn't work. Hopefully they have learned their lesson and we will move on, back to REAL WoW lore..scourge, burning legion, old gods, titans etc.

[zephid]

Which means that, by all PC game standards, it's quite expensive to take part in. I think, by trying to make content for 'everyone', the game has brought in players who aren't necessarily interested in a long term investment such as this game. After all, if you only have time to play video games a few hours per week... then a sub fee looks even worse, and WoW winds up seeming like an effective waste of money.

I've never understood why people think it's expensive to play wow. The sub cost is like $10-12, that's nothing. I, and probably everyone else, spend several times that amount on crap each month. If you compare the cost of playing wow to other hobbies you'll realize that playing wow is cheap in comparison.

If you think paying $12/month is expensive you probably have a lot bigger problems than the cost of a subscription to worry about.

[starlord]

for me:
1. heroics are pointless, and there is no challenge... at all... and "challenge mode" is only done for the gear.
2. scenarios are lame (and pointless)
3. so many dailies (which are also boring)
4. putting everything behind 8 zillion dailies
5. pvp has been just awful in terms of balance
6. pandaria itself is uninspiring for some reason.