So, what didn't work this expansion?

[Omgarsh]

Things I haven't liked: Feeling of 0 progress/things to do after VP capping for the week on my main.
Feeling like the endgame really sucks if you can't do normal/heroic raiding, at least from a PVE perspective.
Too many factions and story events are tied up behind dailies.
Still not a good balance of things for casual players to do.
Questing has lost its fun and it isn't the actual questing style of gameplay that's at fault.*

*To expand on this, I think the quality of questing has declined rapidly in MOP after how good the 1-60 revamp was in Cataclysm (along with a few of the 80-85 zones). A huge part of why I don't want to level any alts is that the actual process of questing up to 90 just isn't enticing in the least.
I also feel this expansion has revealed several flaws in Blizzard's reward systems. For example, the 1000 VP cap feels really limiting now that there are so many tiers of LFR and such that casual players like myself can do. It also has an unintended drawback of demotivating me from doing dailies after I cap VP because I know I'm technically missing out on another reward. Of course it's also because dailies have always felt like chores with an annoying long-term reward, and MOP has exaggerated this 1000x more than previous expansions like WOTLK/Cata that worked their asses off to make dailies less annoying. They made it worse by 1) forcing you to travel all over Pandaria to do all your dailies and 2) making dailies the only way to get exalted with most factions until they added in the daily scenario/heroic champion system.

Where I think the reward system WOW uses has failed is in things like the VP cap (it should either expand like the Conquest cap does now, or do a reverse where you can grind a lot of VP but only spend X amounts per week) and how they essentially made heroic dungeons undesirable from a gearing standpoint after you can do LFR. It's like the only carrot to get me into heroics anymore is that I get +300 rep with a faction for doing one daily heroic.

IMO they should reduce the rep grinds in the next expansion and tie rewards to progress through a mixture of zone/story quests, daily quests and something else you can do in heroics or scenarios. They forgot that element of it after having it in all the leveling zones in TBC/WOTLK/Cata. I mean I haven't done Dread Wastes yet on my main cause I really don't need to do it anymore, but I've done every other zone and I only got a little Shado-Pan rep up to I think Friendly from doing Townlong Steppes. If you worked your way up through some of the rep grinds before 90, that would do a lot to motivate players to finish the job. Also if the epics didn't require VP to purchase, too.

That said, I'm hoping 5.4 fixes a lot of my complaints (it already seems to do that for some) and perhaps the next expansion won't go down the same "please the hardcore addicts" path that Cata/MOP did.

[derpkitteh]

the alt unfriendliness is bad, but something i don't see many others complain about is the reputation story gating for the 5.1 dailies. that shit sucked. took soooo long to play out that whole story, and that really pissed me off more than any other thing. cause i loved blood elf lore, but i had crappy gear and doing that shit over every day made me insanely mad. i finally just quit in 5.2.

[Viradiance]

Alliance lore.

[The Glitch]

I love my main but I get bored of playing the same class or characters all the time, so, like in wrath and cata, I like to play alts.. then remember.. jesus, I need to grind months of dailies to get anything on him/her.

Honestly, Pet Battles take up most of my time, it really has me hooked, once I've got my gear progression stuff done (LFR/Pet dailies etc) done, I spend most of my time levelling pets, doing pvp pet battles, and finishing up converting my last few pets to rares, then I do some mount farming and by that point my times up and I just don't have the time to run through the same stuff on my alts.

In Wotlk I felt I could keep on top of my alts and their gearing, albeit I did have a bit more time back then too. I guess I feel if I spend anytime on alts, thats time thats being wasted on getting the more important stuff done on my main.

I have a ton of the rep tokens that drop off the warbringers, and all exalted reps on my main, so rep grinds on my alts wouldn't be long at all, but I just feel i can't even find the time to get into levelling them, I used to enjoy levelling, but whenever I log to my alts when I do decide to, i just get this feeling of *meh*.

I don't get that *meh* feeling on my main. Tis weird!

[Deleted]

I hate everything about it. the environment is way too friendly, I don't like the lore (except for Klaxxi), leveling an alt took ages prior to the xp nerf. for me warcraft is grim and dark and funny stuff is fine once in a while, but I think pandaria is 95% fun and well I don't like that. also the endboss is a mortal orc, like wtf.. I'm glad it's over soon. look at my signature, NOW THAT'S warcraft for me

[Jokubas]

Half the reasons I listed are why I left, the other half are why I haven't returned. I find it funny that I relied on word of mouth for the latter, but a lot of people on this thread are saying the opposite of what I've heard before. Maybe I'd like this expansion more than I thought. XP

Anyway, regardless of how necessary they are, I do want to say a little more about dailies. I think dailies are a really bad idea for any kind of serious, major content. It was something I complained about during Cataclysm, but no one really seemed to take it seriously. As I said, I joined Cataclysm late. When I unlocked the Molten Front stuff, the expansion was nearing its end. The problem was, this was a major plot (not for Deathwing, but for the expansion as a whole). So here I am, preparing for the end of the expansion, and I've got this major part of the plot arbitrarily locked behind a month of forced waiting. Once Cataclysm is over? No one is going to do that, unless there's a specific reward they want (or really want to see the whole story, obviously). To most people, what is essentially the story of an entire questing zone, will never be seen because you'll level past it before you can get past the first milestone. It's not so bad as endgame content, but "endgame" doesn't last very long in a game that ups the level cap every couple of years (and the gear cap more often than that).

[Edgewood411]

I quit wow after Wrath and I still scower on here for the mere hope that one day the in game community goes back to the way it was, not world of quecraft. They turned the game into Xbox live call of duty match making with all the queues. No ones gonna pay 15 dollars a month for that, hell microsoft only charges $9.99 a month for XBL. WoW lost its longevity and its ability to make players stick around playing for a long time. I remember back even in wrath I could name almost every player in the top 3 guilds on the server and not to toot my own horn or anything of that sort because I hate that sort of thing but if you asked someone on the realm who they thought the most skilled lot of players were they'd say my fellow arena partners and myself. That acknowledgment is what turned me into the turbo nerd I was giving year(s) (yes plural, sad I know isn't it) to the game; the fact that people I didn't even know knew who I was was and that I knew other people who I didn't myself know, was just an epic feeling in of it self. The community is what made me stick around, now I log in once every six months and I don't know who the hell anyone is anymore. Its sad the community is seriously dead. The only way to fix it, is to remove all this queueing crap, merge servers (or something to seriously fix the server imbalances), and pray that the communities come back. People are sick of being Raider #50129 and Pvper #50103

EDIT* Maybe it was just all the nostalgia back than, but I played since Alpha beta of vanilla so I would have though the nostalgia would have been burnt out by the end of Wrath.

[Ebonheart]

Well the biggest turn-off for me and most has been the amount of dailies. I returned mid way in the expansion just after 5.2 went live. So I was kinda forced to do most of the dailies since I needed to pick up various profession patterns. At the same time, I had to complete the dailies in the Isle of Thunder. They were just way too many. Since this was before the changes to the August Celestials. So you had to do the Golden Lotus to get Access to the August Celestials. Since I was doing the dailies on my DK, I quickly found it easier farming the Warbringers.

However, when I proceeded to level an alt, I found it pretty hard to catch up. Even the JP gear is worse off than the Heroic Dungeon gear. And gearing is very RNG dependent. They also screwed alts over when you couldn't buy up last tiers items for JP like you could in previous tiers. So over all alts got shafted and you were still stuck with dailies as a means to catch up.

Also none of the raids were really fun. I was often burnt out from LFR, cause it didn't provide a very enjoyable experience. I was mostly there so that I could hopefully win some gear to progress into the next raid. So you basically had to do dailies on your alts as well to have access to the lesser stones of fortune to help you with a bonus roll and even then you were not guaranteed a drop. You do it enough amount of time and it burns you out. I was just too burnt out that it came to a point where I just couldn't care.

I stuck around a bit longer cause I loved playing the Auction House. Even that started to lose its charm with botters and chinese farmers which were not looked at.

Cataclysm was a pretty alt friendly expansion. Probably one of the biggest plus points. WTLK was a pretty decent expansion as well and favoured alts with Heirlooms and easy catch up gearing process since it had 2 lock outs for 10 and 25M. But MoP is just pretty fucked up.

The cool thing about WTLK was that dailies were pretty balanced. It kinda went out of control with MoP. It became all about "simply spend enough time farming dailies to get something". The Valor Cap sucked.

Even their Heroic dungeons were boring. So I'd simply skip that entire gearing up process cause of how mind numbing it was. I certainly don't remember the WTLK heroics to be as boring. They also provided an added incentive as the final boss dropped an epic weapon.

Another sticking point is the Spirit of Harmony being BoP. Not only couldn't your alts farm them through dungeons, but they had to be out in world actually killing mobs.

Also Pet Battles was pretty lame. It sure got most of the women and girls hooked onto it but it was simply horrible. PVP was probably at its most unbalanced state in the entirety of WoW.

I still think Dailies as a means of content is a crappy method and bad design.

If you are looking at a perfect and balanced expansion, then WTLK pretty much nails it. Sure it had a few flaws, but even those flaws don't really over shadow all the plus points that it offered. WTLK pretty much got it right in almost everything. The major criticism was that it was easy which wasn't a bad thing. You still needed to put that required effort to get those rewards unlike now where they are just handed to you.

[Deleted]

My list -

1) Terrible gating. Do dailies for rep to buy items you've already got better than from 5 man HCs? Poor design. Epics were ok but again, gating that could only be got past by dailies. Capping the amount of rep per day but allowing multiple ways to get it would have been better.

2) Too much to do. I've still not done all the challenge modes, even though I love that shit because it's too difficult for more casual players to organise AND get all the more mandatory stuff out of the way each week. Need to farm 50 coins, get the rep and the valor so not a liability for the raid and now I am free .... annnnnd it's tuesday ....start again. Previous expacs I've managed to get loremaster. I haven't even finished jade forest this time around, too much to do syndrome strikes again.

3) Scenarios. Ok for telling a story, terrible as a repeatable playing experience. The heroics ones are alright though as you need to be awake for them.

4) Ludicrously overtuned normal raids. T14 especially was utterly brutal, and after the near perfect difficulty spread of DS, nuked a lot of guilds and caused a lot of drama. Lets not even mention garalon. What the fuck were they thinking!

5) Use of LFR to replace actual group content. LFR isn't a proper group playing experience, you are hardly ever going to meet anyone doing it. In LFR there is no way to shine as a player and no way to interact with anyone in order to make friends. It's great for seeing the content tho, so GJ there.

6) Flight time isn't a playing experience. Having to fly around the world is an auto run engaged while watching youtube experience. They should knock it off already. Removing mass summon was just retarded. Busywork isn't engagement!

7) Going back to the caaclysm mistake of catering to the super high end of the playerbase. Blizzard, old buddy, it doesn't matter what you put in front of the top tier raiding community, they will sit through it 24/7 and down it in no time anyway. All trying to tune stuff for specifically them does is exclude everyone else.

Theres loads of positives tho

[Kaniinchen]

One of the reasons I never played MoP is because of the story focus of this expansion. I honestly never had a interest in Panderan and their story or a Chinese themed expansion. I also never saw that Garrosh was ever worthy of being an expansion end boss, and that I would need to raid an instance that I saw a million times on my horde chars already.

The only part that did spark my interest is the lore between Wrathion and Anduin, and that's only because it seems to be leading to something bigger (burning legion). But that alone wasn't enough for me.

[Ebonheart]

I'm levelling my 3rd alt now, and have not done a single daily quest on any of them. It's unnecessary.

Well then it highly depends on what you plan on doing with that alt.

Cause if you are looking to actually win some gear, you need the lesser fortunes stones which can only be got via dailies and maybe pet battles.

Either you've been really lucky with loot or probably sitting on a pot of gold which allows you to buy all the BoEs.

And to top of it when you actually want to spend those Valor Points or JP you have to be honored or exalted with those factions. So then you have to start doing dailies again.

[Zstr]

It wasn't so alt friendly as for example wrath/cata was ^^

this is kinda retarded statement,
in mop there so much things got nerfed and to do on alts and geared them up, lfr , rep grind decrease, VP 50xbuff, which wasn't in cata/wrath, so anyone tell me a single alt friendly feature in last expansions? no, coz there was none
the only thing is that u need to do dailes to get coins for BONUS roll, which noone force you to do even
so this is statement complete BS
problem in MoPe is PvP(cc chains and bots) and ppl casualness, more players gone less hardcore

[Keltas]

The dead/dying servers is a big portion of it I think.

A lot of raiding guilds are collapsing under the difficulty spikes they've been adding, and when a guild falls out, the people can either pay blizzard like $400 to move their 8+ alts or just quit, since most servers are so empty you won't even find a guild on them anymore. Even a single character being $25-55 just to get off a sinking ship is absurd.

I quit at the beginning of the xpack over this, so did most of my guild when we broke up. I came back but out of 15 people that I still can contact, only I came back. That's where the rupture is. This stupid virtual realm might help, but server merges is the best thing they could do. Leaving ANY realm dead just alienates those players and makes them quit.

Edit: Plus the legendary "catch-up" is basically non-existent. If you quit raiding for more than a month this xpack, or swapped mains EVER, you are now behind on the legendary. a lot of guilds won't take you if you don't have the legendary, they're too important to your dps/healing/tanking dps.

They need to refine this legendary thing a lot before they do it again. Less RNG, giving it to alts, and making the catch-up smoother. Plenty of people I've seen have wanted to come back, realized they were so far behind on their legendary, and just said screw it and didn't bother resubbing. They weren't going to catch up on it, nobody wants them over someone who does have the legendary, so why bother subbing?

[Wildberry]

Alliance lore.

Oh for the love of God, will you quit crying in every single thread? The Alliance had their fist pumping moment from PreBC-Late Wrath in terms of story development, deal with it, like we did.

[dragnipur]

1st CRZ was introduced
2nd Multiboxing in battlegrounds was hit
3rd daily grind

[Jokubas]

Come to think of it, I think a key flaw in Mists of Pandaria's design was Blizzard missing their own point. I remember a lot of the marketing for the expansion involved them bragging about how they finally get it: different people have different playstyles, so they will make different playstyles more viable than in the past, by doing things such as giving out valor points for dailies, or whatever. The problem was, they overcompensated and instead of making it where you could advance by doing anything, you advanced by doing everything. Instead of people who liked dailies being able to ignore heroics, people who did heroics now also had to do dailies. And, in the end, everything still culminates in raiding.

Worse, however, is that I don't think they've realized this yet, as evidenced by Flex Raids. When I first heard about Flex Raids, I thought, oh cool, they're making raiding more flexible, which should make the non-LFR raiding more accessible without actually affecting what people like about it. Then I found out, oh no, it's yet another alternate raiding system. Now, whether you like raids or not, it just seems like a huge drain of resources to me. Instead of consolidating the ever-inflating raid system, they gave themselves one more set of difficulty and gear to balance. No wonder they don't have time for new 5-mans anymore. They're focusing more and more of their time and resources on one fraction of their game.

[dope_danny]

I'd say the biggest flaw with mists is heroics. Right now they are broken.

I can join one as dps, have 300k+ more hp than a fresh 90 tank, even if i hold back he will never be able to get aggro off me and, worst of all, it doesnt matter, its not like a ToT geared dps can even die in something like temple of the jade serpent with a healer in the party.

Thats no challenge for the geared player, and said gear players unbalance it for new players. So its a lame experience for everyone involved.

Back in wrath or cata we had different "tiers' of dungeons for higher geared and lower geared players to be separated in. Instead we have 530ilvl geared players spamming 'GOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGO' macros to tanks or healers in the heroics for the first time.

We have scenarios, heroic scenarios and lfr to go into, but Its such a shame that a staple of WoW since its inception is broken and kind of redundant and without a use now.

[FuxieDK]

Problems with MoP:
1: Very alt unfriendly. Takes ages to gear up. In Cata you could easily have 2-3 alts geared for end-game content, in MoP people rarely have a single alt geared for end-game.
2: Scenarios suck bigtime... Heroic scenarios suck even more, because you can random-queue for them, and they rarely (going towards never) drop any loot in the daily-box.
3: Heroic 5mans are as easy as WotLK... Initial Cata were good, when you were in greens.. We liked those.. TBC heroics were even better (as in harder) but too many would probably whine over that difficulty)
4: Raids. THEY SUCK.. Yes, you read right. They really really suck.. Bland color palette.. Horrible graphics.. Annoying gimmick fights.. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY TOO MUCH TRASH..
5: No flying until level 90, and no flying AT ALL on Isle of Thunder/Giants/Timeless.. RETARDED.
6: Active mitigation... No thank you... I have been tanking since TBC, but this stupid change, destroyed my will to tank..

Good things about MoP:
1: Pet Battles is a passtime, where you don't need to have much time.. Even if you only have 5 minutes to spare, you can fight, but you can also spend ours on hours on it..
2: Brawl'gar Arena... Challenging solo content...

All in all, MoP is a failed expansion..

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

To call dailies a flop would be an insult to flops. Dailies were an utter disaster. Blizz made the mistake of attaching gear to them, then made the mistake of gating them, then made the mistake of making daily gear a form of attunements for raiding.

If we don't see any dailies next expansion I would not be surprised. I actually highly suspect dailies will very soon be totally replaced by "dynamic events" ala battlefield barrens, rift, and I think GW2 does them.

[Ebonheart]

this is kinda retarded statement,
in mop there so much things got nerfed and to do on alts and geared them up, lfr , rep grind decrease, VP 50xbuff, which wasn't in cata/wrath, so anyone tell me a single alt friendly feature in last expansions? no, coz there was none
the only thing is that u need to do dailes to get coins for BONUS roll, which noone force you to do even
so this is statement complete BS
problem in MoPe is PvP(cc chains and bots) and ppl casualness, more players gone less hardcore

Well kinda childish to be throwing the word "retarded" around when you contradict yourself.

You mention LFR. Each wing takes around an hour minimum and that is on those rare occasions you get a good group. Most run for a bit longer. So if you have 2-3+ alts, that is a lot of time to be sitting in a LFR queue and then to actually run the damn thing.

Previous expansions didn't really have LFR. So all the time was spent running Heroic dungeons which were faster with an organised group and even in PUGs. And you also had easy access to last tier's gear.

And regarding dailies, you actually have to be honored and exalted to spend those Valor Points and Justice Points most times. So you do have to do dailies.

So well I'll just say you are an idiot who doesn't know what you are talking about.