So, what didn't work this expansion?

[brunnor]

For me:

1) Nothing to do outside of raiding(actual raiding is quite good right now)

2) LFR is still horribly done

3) 5mans and scenarios... just bad.

[Treeskee]

I've enjoyed it except for lack of stuff to do after my old raids for mounts/ToT for the week, but that's mostly because my server is tiny and I refuse to spend a few hundred dollars to get all my toons on a new one.

Also I don't really see how it's so alt unfriendly (especially after the XP to 90 nerf). Only need to do certain reps on certain toons and it goes super fast after one toon has hit revered, if you don't like doing dailies then just farm warscouts/warbringers/hozen peace pipes for rep, the patterns you get aren't required especially this late in the expansion since at least one friend will have them. Loving active mitigation on my tank, nice to do something other than stand in the right spot and button mash too.

[Deleted]

Everything was perfect until 5.3. It has got to be the worst patch ever with it's boring Barrens "event" and it's terrible weekly quest being all there is after finishing the 3 or 4 lead ups. Even the rewards are boring. They would have been much better off with a series of dailies like the previous patches. At least then , you'd have a reason to log in every day.

The Barrens event is great and fixed my boredom with dailies. Perhaps they should have provided both, but I look forward to the Barrens weekly.

[Flatspriest]

One of the biggest reasons for the loss of subs for this expansion is that they did a Panda based expansion and the Chinese government does not particularly care for such things...as shown in the fact that the largest majority of sub losses have come from the Chinese region. The other big issue was that many of the different reputations were locked behind dailies until 5.3 was released and people didn't like that.

[Airwaves]

Questing for the first time was the best fun I have had in wow but it had no replay value. Xpack a before I have had 10 max levels. This expansion I was bored on my 2nd player.

Dailies are fine but should NEVER have been linked to vp gear. To add. JP was also fucking useless and still is this far into an expansion.

Raids. For the first time in almost 8 years of non stop raiding each week I was fucking bored. Bosses had so many reused mechanics from past raids that it was a fucking joke. I quit raiding by heroic hof (the week it unlocked) because fights were so predictable and easy to manage it was zero fun for me.

Pvp. After so many years I am sick of looking at old bgs. This many years into wow blizzard should have 20 plus battlegrounds by now. Not to mention I was a rogue. They hit like wet paper till 5.1 and that put me off pvp for the whole expansion.

Scenarios. They could have been SO much more then they are. What happened to the pop up event idea for them that scaled to how many players are around? Also I clearly remember they were ment to be for levelling. They are wasted being all level 90. Heroic scenarios should have been the 90 versions.

Lore has been great but with the amount of money blizzard makes now days there is NO excuses for every single faction leader to get the development that say Lor'themar got this expansion. Eg shadow of the horde. It could have played out in game as well. Scenarios leading up to the battle then have the shado-pan and zandalari battle done in a new 5man.

Dungeons. TO FUCKING FEW OF THEM! I wanted to cut my eyes out every time I got something like jade temple for the 100th time. And where the hell are the new ones. Tot and SoO should both come with 5mans as well. Tot should have had 2 and SoO should come with 3.

Patches. 5.1. Was great. The lore, the battles and the world pvp. 5.2 was tuned WAY to hard for the beer league players which has wiped out almost every casual raiding guild. There is no need for normal to be so hard. Fuck hardcore raiders (which I was for a long long time). There is a reason they added heroics. How hard normal modes are shouldn't effect them. 5.3. I did 5.3 in under 2 hours. It shouldn't have even called a patch. Should have just been a random event blizzard SHOULD add from time to time.


For the first time in wow since launch I was so bored I canceled my sub. I would be happy to play wow again if I wasn't bored shitless when I get on.

[shortnugly]

Upgrades! Blizz thinks an upgrade replaces a content patch...

[jace5869]

I think if Cata never existed and MoP was the following expansion after WotLK we might have seen a stable population, and possibly maybe even a bump. I blame the complete dullness of Cata for a lot of burn out. I understand the world needed a revamp and I enjoy the updated zones and streamlined questing, but they really should have added more to WotLK to give them proper time to develop a fully fleshed out expansion.

I've sadly had to quit in MoP because of real life issues, but I miss the game a great deal. I think the company has been doing a great job with MoP and they're just fighting the bad after taste of Cata, personally.

Can they recover? MAybe not to the extent of WotLK and TBC levels, but I think they will stabilize with a good amount of players.

[Zatetic]

I quit in early heroic progression of t14 because the raids were just terrible and I couldnt bare to be on. The daily grind, the raiding tier, the boredom was all too much. I came back and decided to go horde thinking the quest chains would be different and reinvigorate me. They werent.

The quests through 85-90 are virtually the same.
The cut in xp required meant that you hit 90 well before you finished questing (not fully unlocking areas on alts).
Gearing up is quite easy but tedious.
The dungeons are lackluster. In wotlk I loved running dungeons, they were all so exciting and fun as well as being quick. In MoP, I'm queued for 10 minutes for a quick zerg through that is almost not worth queuing for.
The story is flimsy and average.
brawlers is good but very easy to get through with gear. the difficulty should scale with gear. so for every ilvl you gain the boss gains x health and his attacks do y more damage.

I think for the next xpac they need to come up with a few changes.

-rep on alts should be significantly easier (granted, farming warbringers is a rapid way to get rep up on alts but it is very tedious and you dont do it on the character, you just send it to the character)
-the dungeons need to go back to the basics, focus less on super challenging and weird mechanics and more on environment and bosses (by the end of the first tier, we zerg them all anyway).
-pvp and pve need to be seperate entirely (what an ability does in pve should be tuned for pve and what that same ability does in pvp should be tuned for pvp). This gives us essentially two different specs to learn in the one spec. Playing pvp could be entirely different to playing pve, instead of basically the same and one wouldnt mess up the other making it either op nor up.
-the story needs to be full of solid lore. I remember leveling 70-80 and even though I'd skip a lot of the quest text I'd still understand the flow of the leveling and what was going on in the zone. In MoP, I honestly dont know what happened in each zone to warrant me being there.
-the first raid tier of the expansion (t17?) needs to focus less on number of bosses and more on immersion. I love how ToT is very ulduar-esque but its still quite linear. MSV was a really great place, but the bosses were dull and lifeless and the rooms off to the sides that you could go into held no secrets or even npcs they were just empty rooms.
-tier gear needs to vary between horde and alliance in small visual ways. Different emphasizing colours, different visual procs etc. Same overall design but slightly different.
-the horde and alliance story lines need to be vastly different and conflicting so leveling both isnt so much a chore as it is enjoyable.
-there needs to be other ways to level and enjoy zones. Hidden npc's that older xpacs had. The rare vanity items were a step in the right direction but they really should reduce the spawn rate of the rares and make each one a 100% drop instead of 440 blue useless items).
-we need to feel the impact of the final boss throughout the whole tier. there hasnt really been a connection between the final boss of the xpac and the first raid and i think it should happen. Instead of making the raids linear and the questing linear, make the entire xpac revolve around one final big bad boss and have us go through fighting to reach him spanning the different tiers. WoW is long past the point where you can chuck three unrelated raids in a tier and not join the dots properly. We need to experience the influence the final boss is having on every raid boss we fight. If its sargeras, then we need to fight our way through the front gate of the burning legion and through all his commanders and such and into his throne room or whatever. One raid tier spanning 3 actual gear tiers would be incredible. We could even have the same final boss for each tier tbh. We give him a bloody nose in the end of 1 tier and he escapes. Next tier we fight through whatever place he fled to to try again and he escapes again. Next tier we reach him and instead of escaping he is so mad that he enrages and fights us trying to wipe us out. Different abilities or even the same abilities just amped up each time.
-more stuff needs to carry over to alts. I'd really like a faction wide multiple character gold access and bank. just for simplicity.

[hulkgor]

The absolute abuse of dailies needed at start to get ready and decent to raid, it was brutal.
The total clusterEFFF that was Galleon.
Crappy 'mid' patches with Dominant Offensive (at least took a while to fully experience) and the Darkspear Revolution (should be titled a 1-day event... it's absolutely short). They sure threw some patches at us, but they were absolutely lackluster.
I also think both the 'thunderforge' and 'coin' mechanisms to be inadequate, at least in a guild environment. Some people get 5 items from coins whilst others had none from the same amount of rolls... that's just silly for a guild environment where you try to distribute gear evenly. Some people like it, i absolutely loathe it. The Thunderforge justification is also widely accepted, but i find it nonsensical. Trying to make us run stuff for longer just to get the 'better' version of an item is bad design, plain and simple.

Overall, I am not a fan of the 'theme' of the expansion to be honest, and am already looking forward to leave Pandaria and never return... bring on the Burning Legion please.

[Harmzuay]

By this point in the expansion, dailies ARE irrelevant. As soon as 5.3 hit they could've been removed and you'd have been fine. They only reason I can see to do them now is for the profession recipes.

[Vongimi]

I really think the main issue is that the main chunk of players that were real hardcore gamers when WoW was first released, that came from various other MMORPGs or even the original Warcraft games (like myself) have mostly grown up. They have far more responsibilities, families to take care of, just no time to dedicate weekly to a schedule to play a game. I personally think the game is far better than it was 5 years ago, but I could never bring myself to play as much as I did then, I simply have to much on my plate. Now the only new players it is getting are people who generally don't really play games and are quick to drop it. Not to mention the stigma that has plagued WoW players since the beginning is worse than ever these days. The game is amazing and will go down in the history books as such, but its simply running its course. Sure there are things people can point out and say "REASON X IS WHY WOW IS DYING!!!", but the reality is a few bad decisions does not kill a game, the ages do however.

[Deleted]

Dailies and legendary questline. Those two things kept me off from leveling alts.
Everytime I think about changing class for this patch of raid content, I just start thinking about the amount of dalies I'd have to do just to get the bonus rolls (my main still has 1000tokens for just getting exalted when the game launched..).
Then the legendary quest. Yep not gonna happen, you'd be gimping yourself too much for not having bloodlust on your dot's everytime metagem procs and so on...

[Durandro]

Dailies and legendary questline. Those two things kept me off from leveling alts.
Everytime I think about changing class for this patch of raid content, I just start thinking about the amount of dalies I'd have to do just to get the bonus rolls (my main still has 1000tokens for just getting exalted when the game launched..).
Then the legendary quest. Yep not gonna happen, you'd be gimping yourself too much for not having bloodlust on your dot's everytime metagem procs and so on...

I can agree with the Legendary quest for sure, its pretty unforgiving of alts - you could potentially do it, but its a huge amount of work and catchup takes forever. Heck, my main still doesn't have the Meta Gem due to rerolling a few months back!

Account-bound lesser charms would be fantastic. And account bound legendary progress, but that's maybe a little too alt-friendly.

[Dabrix32]

Monk class was a let down. Hardly ever see another one in game and they dot have the badass feel that DKs did.

[Durandro]

I really think the main issue is that the main chunk of players that were real hardcore gamers when WoW was first released, that came from various other MMORPGs or even the original Warcraft games (like myself) have mostly grown up. They have far more responsibilities, families to take care of, just no time to dedicate weekly to a schedule to play a game. I personally think the game is far better than it was 5 years ago, but I could never bring myself to play as much as I did then, I simply have to much on my plate. Now the only new players it is getting are people who generally don't really play games and are quick to drop it. Not to mention the stigma that has plagued WoW players since the beginning is worse than ever these days. The game is amazing and will go down in the history books as such, but its simply running its course. Sure there are things people can point out and say "REASON X IS WHY WOW IS DYING!!!", but the reality is a few bad decisions does not kill a game, the ages do however.

Very sensible outlook, and I mostly agree. Of course there are new influxes of players all the time, but most of us have grown up a little (though some don't act it...). WoW itself is fine, but the MMO market is changing. WoW will probably continue for another five or ten years in one regard or another, but it'll take another revolution to go back to the old playerbase figures.

[Harmzuay]

Monk class was a let down. Hardly ever see another one in game and they dot have the badass feel that DKs did.

Monks weren't a hero class. I personally love Monks. I abandoned the character that I played from Day 1 because of Monks. They're spectacular.

[Durandro]

Monk class was a let down. Hardly ever see another one in game and they dot have the badass feel that DKs did.

I played one for a while and loved it. It did have one major problem though - no-one else knew how Monks functioned, and I was constantly explaining why I couldn't Battle Rez (among other things).

- - - Updated - - -

The Barrens event is great and fixed my boredom with dailies. Perhaps they should have provided both, but I look forward to the Barrens weekly.

I think a similar faction-effort Weekly should be semi-regular, in addition to a more limited number of Dailies. Stuff that encourages a little community spirit is a good thing.

Maybe not just grinding items, though. Variety is the spice of life.

[Deleted]

That they nerfed warriors in PvP that much, that they didnt even care to balance the class out again...

[Auxis]

Monk class was a let down. Hardly ever see another one in game and they dot have the badass feel that DKs did.

While I like my monk, I agree. For a class with so much potential, the amount of melee attacks saddened me. Imagine if Windwalkers had an ability that lets us fuse together the next 2 abilities used? Like, Fusion > Crackling Lightning + Tigerpalm = Lightning Palm. Or Fusion > Tiger Palm + Blackout Kick = Black-Tiger Kick.

It wouldn't require us to have more space, rather it's like when a warlock uses Fire and Brimstone, where the new ability is bound to the last spell of the Fusion.

Can only dream though.

[draykorinee]

Dailies and the amount of raids and world bosses, I felt that until the first tier was over I didn't have enough time to see the rest of the game because I was too busy grinding on one character. The levelling and questing was better than any other expansion, the dungeons and raids were great, the theme suited me to a tea, but the early grind and my real life burnt me out of WoW. Patch 5.2 was a step in the right direction, but I won't come back because of LFR, I want that gone or shared lockout that was the final straw, but that wasn't Mops fault. A good expansion all round, but just too much grinding in the first few months and 7 years of playing.