So, what didn't work this expansion?

[klmg8]

Not relative to cataclysm or wotlk it isn't. It's far to casual unfriendly. You people seem to think seeing lei shen is some huge game changing event and if people were denied access to him they'd just continue to sub for the award winning story? I don't get it. Honest. People stuck around in WoTLK and farmed icc for a year. Finishing a raid obviously doesn't mean the end of it's use otherwise this game wouldn't work.

What keeps new players interested? The same thing that did before. Character progression which has been made VERY uncasual friendly this expansion
What keeps returning players interested? The same thing as above.

What turns both groups off? No catch up, rep grinds, shitty valor gains, Being shoved into lfr, very alt unfriendly, all the uncasual friendly crap they did in this game. It's not hard to see why casuals weren't engaged. Their is little in mists that engages them either from a difficulty stand point (normal raids are far to prohibitive) or just form a time consuming stand point. ICC and 4.3 were far more casual friendly.

Your comments are so out of touch with the current state of the game it makes me wonder if you even play it anymore.

Character progression is over in a few weeks you can get everything you want from LFR and see all the content in about a month. With no effort at all. Don't sit there and tell me that LFR is not mindless. There is no need to grind rep unless you are a perfectionist or have OCD. I am leveling an alt right now. Hit 90 > Scenarios/Quest items > Heroic Dungeons > LFR > all content > all gear minus a few ilevels.

You have to be shoved into LFR there are no pugs anymore. 10man shared lock outs and LFR killed them. Normals are the same difficultly they have always been I suppose you just want LFR to change it's name to normal and then you'll be happy. The problem is this game is to mindless. You can complete character progression and seeing all the content easily not even trying.

[Glorious Leader]

Your comments are so out of touch with the current state of the game it makes me wonder if you even play it anymore.

Character progression is over in a few weeks you can get everything you want from LFR and see all the content in about a month. With no effort at all. Don't sit there and tell me that LFR is not mindless. There is no need to grind rep unless you are a perfectionist or have OCD. I am leveling an alt right now. Hit 90 > Scenarios/Quest items > Heroic Dungeons > LFR > all content > all gear minus a few ilevels.

It's not over in a few weeks if you only play say 3-4 hours a week. That's basically one lfr run and lfr doesn't pay out for shit, at least not like dungeons used to. It being mindless or not isn't the issue. The rep grind is now associated with valor items. I think people on this forum are so far removed from what actual casual players play that they actually have no fucking concept of how much time people can invest in this game. You investing 15+ hours a week is one thing. The guy who actually plays casual gets jack shit out of this game now in the interest of giving you more to do.

[Deleted]

What did not Work in This expansion. That Alliance Ones agian Got Dip shit of lore. At blizzcon They said The Trial of the high king would lead to a " fist pumping awesome moment" And what did we get? Velen, who was supost to heal Audrion got lost or crashed on a new planet. Dwarf lore? They do not trust eachother, oh the dark iron dwarfs is good, now we are all broes" Gnomes and Worgen, nope, hardly seen really. Audrin got some, that his a " rebel" wanting to do the good thing. all lore about varian is " oh before he was a bit brute, but now he is a cool and good guy". Night elf lore? They clearly do not like to wait. And ofc The only Real thing that happen to alliance was Jaina.

Please tell me where the "fist pumping moment" in trial of the high king? Was it when moria said" fine you guys do not trust us, we will go kill the trolls" or was it when Tyrande did not want to wait any longer?

[WingsofLiberty]

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

That + 8) The death of so many servers. Honestly my server has been dead since release, only 2 guilds still raid and it's seriously awful.
Also, please don't bring the paid transfer into equation, I'm not supposed to pay for a transfer simply because blizzard won't want to merge them. Cross-realm doesn't fix the raiding problem.

9) The community was ripped to shreds, press 1 button-enter lfr-finish lfr-log off. I seriously miss having to search for groups in /trade and actually make friends.
Coming to think of it, another trend I've noticed nowadays is that NOBODY even talks in LFG, thing which didn't happen in Wotlk and to a lesser extent in Cata.

[Alopex Major]

Man, I would absolutely love a source for such a claim. Or are you just making it up to try to bolster your point as every other MoP hater seems to do?

Pandaren are the least played race on both factions, at least in the US. (I didn't look at EU stats.)

http://wow.realmpop.com/us.html

You'd think that if people found them interesting, they would play them more.

[Yriel]

For me...

1) Dailies. I actually like dailies and did the firelands dailies on 9 characters. They were fast, gave some nice gear and fluff rewards every week and a nice mount at the end. In comparison the MoP dailies took a really long time to do (at least the 5.0 and 5.2 ones) and gave next to no rewards since they only unlocked valor gear. I really hate that, dailies, at least for me, were always a nice way to gear up alts. Thats a lot more annoying and unrewarding in MoP since even at exalted you can not buy one single piece of gear if you don't grind valor in dungeons.
This and the stupid gating with the Golden Lotus dailies that were really atrocious and unfunny to do.
5.1 dailies were cool though since they were quickly done and had a motivating story part every two or three days.

2) Scenarios. I really had hope for them but as it was said several times, they should have been solo content. And if you expect me to repeat content again and again then you better give me some rewards for it. Until today i didn't get a single piece of loot from a scenario, normal and heroic. That really doesn't motivate me to do them anymore.

3) The Monk class. While a nice idea (at least as a dd) is has not a single noteworthy or cool-looking ability. It just feels lackluster to play, it doesn't stand out in any way or form. I have not had a single "I wish i were a monk now" moment.

4) Battlefield Barrens. God is this boring. I really hope they drop that concept.

5) 5er dungeons. Really disappointed that they don't do them anymore.

6) Orgrimmar Raid. After they raided Undercity do we really need to raid another Horde capital ? Can't we have a raid in an alliance capital for a change ?

7) Lack of strong Characters. After all the buildup the Empress of the Mantid was really disappointing. And Lei Shen is as generic as a baddie can be. "He's really evil and powerful, kill him for great loots!". I love the Sha though. Same with the friendly guys. Why isn't Chen featured more ? Shouldn't that be his expansion ? He had a few quests while leveling but after that he just stands around in the background.

8) Abandoning Pandaria in 5.2. I think there were a lot of stories still untold in Pandaria but first we got send to some random island, then into the barrens and to Orgrimmar. Have they lost the faith in their own setting ?

9) Optics. This is supposed to be an asian-themed expansion. Would it be to much to churn out a few asian-looking armor sets and weapons ? I'd like to have a Samurai or ninja or chinese armore but the only gear with those looks came from the questing gear. Aside from that all the sets look the same to me. If you'd show me a picture of a MoP Set armor of a class i don't play i really wouldn't be able to say what tier it is. That never happened before.

But still, in the end i really liked the Expansion, after WotLK it's the best for me and i played them all.

[Spotnick]

Let's see.. what didn't work.

You level an alt to 90, you gear him in pvp gear and do a few first grinds to get some free epics from questing (502 boots, 476 belt). Then you go kill rares to get a key for charms.. then you do LFR.. and, you're done for the week with nothing else to do because it's a weekly reset.

Plus, I'm not really interested in raiding the same instance 5 times a week with random strangers, there is absolutely no fun in that. LFR made previous content pretty much useless, so unlike in WOTLK when we were raiding Ulduar, not going to do Naxx on alts for fun, because LFR drops better loot.

Hopefully Flex fixes that, but yes, this expansion, I had zero desire to play alts once they are geared for LFR.

Before there was nothing to do when your main was valor capped from raid, now they added all this extra crap we have to do, valor, charms, food, etc, so when your playstyle was having fun with alts when you were not raiding.. you pretty much got screwed this expansion.

The daily grind didn't attract me at all, I still didn't get past honored with Shado-Pan and August Celestials, and never touched Anglers.. all people I know that did all those at the start got burned out and stopped playing. That pretty much killed my raiding guild, people didn't have time to do all that crap and instead of being competitive, we lost people.

Also, it's not specifically this expansion, but having to do the bosses in 3 difficulty levels, makes you bored of the raiding really fast. I kind of miss the good old days where you had 12 bosses with increasing progression instead of 12, then do it again but harder. I still feel the Ulduar model was better.

[Djuntas]

All I can say is reading most comments, gief back TBC model. I will keep saying it, cause its the truth.

Everyone raided something, and you feelt like you did progress at your own level. Yes I didn't see Sunwell, but I was damn happy to do 4/5 MH and up to and included Bloodboil inn BT, didn't matter if I was never gonna see Sunwell. I was happy and satisfied the hole way.

People need something to do inn wow. When everyone gets everything, you loss long term goals fast. I loved logging on to wow with a long term goal, be it a grind for gear or some rep...

[Surfd]

- Challenge Modes

I absolutely hate time trials. I would have greatly preferred an insanely hard dungeon. Think TBC heroics in mediocre gear, then double it.

This would never work, because there would be no way to do a ranking system without the time-trial aspect. Regardless of how insanely hard you make a 5 man, if it is designed so that it MUST be beatable with a 463 ilevel due to gear normalization, then the whole dungeon simply devolves into "do you know the mechanics", and "can you CC". The end. Which was exactly what TBC heroics were. There was no "skill" involved in them, it was all about having the right class comp for CCs. When anyone can clear the instance if all they do is take the time to carefully do each pull, how do you measure the Challenge?

- - - Updated - - -

What I thought was very lacking, is that there was no direct threat to the world.

In Cata, you had armies running about trying to beat eachother and Deathwing just about everywhere (With the exception of Uldum which was just some 'discovery' for the Indiana Jones crew)
In BC, you had outposts fighting demons on their borders
In Wrath, you had fucking undead and MASSIVE (See Warsong Hold) outposts fighting undead and other races loyal to Arthas all over the place.....

In MoP, we have 2 large threats: The Mogu and Mantid. And what do they do? The Mantid have an army that sits idle basically slapping you in the face if you run into them. Why aren't they fighting the Klaxxi? Their air forces get shot down every time I fly to the Dread Wastes.

The mogu, a nice big empire with an island that has fucking lightning striking down wherever Lei Shen wants, with an army in their courtyard. And just like that, Blood Elves and Kirin Tor stand on his doorstep as if he doesn't notice them. Where is the warcraft? Where is the direct confrontation? The only real Warcraft we get this expansion is in the Jade Forest in a cutscene, and in a raid which is called Siege of Orgrimmar..

Actually, the Mogu really were not much of a "big" threat in the sense you are looking for, since their great empire was crushed several thousand years before, and they only really had the POTENTIAL to become a big threat with the Re-awakening of the Thunder King. Which is why the Sunreavers / Kirin Tor assault the Throne of Thunder. The mogu are really just another "too soon" moment, in the sense that if they had been left alone for a while longer, they could have been a HUGE problem.

As to the Mantid, nearly all of their stuff is covered by the Dreadwastes / Townlong steppes lore and your interaction with the Shadow-pan. When the "heroes" arrive in townlong, You find out that the Shadow-pan defenses are practically on the edges of collapsing due to the constant Mantid Attacks. The mantid ARE a major threat, as can bee seen by the massive numbers of them being thrown at the wall, and if it wasnt for our efforts as players all of pandaria would probably be knee deep in panda corpses and mantid invaders. Thankfully the swarm was started pre-maturely and so is not really at full strength, and we have the Klaxxi, who are more interested in preserving the cycle (which incidentally, considers successfully killing off the non mantid races a BAD thing) to help us put an end to it before it becomes a problem.

I realise the game is called World of Warcraft, but that does not really mean that every single expantion has to be devoted to Alliance / Horde smashing eachother's heads in. I mean, that can only go on for so long before it becomes stupidly obvious that the only thing preventing one side from wipeing out the other is shoddy plot armor.

[Lime]

Pandaren are the least played race on both factions, at least in the US. (I didn't look at EU stats.)

http://wow.realmpop.com/us.html

You'd think that if people found them interesting, they would play them more.

...What? How does not playing a race mean someone hates MoP as a whole? I'm not a huge fan of Pandarens, yet I love MoP. Its just a race. My favorite race lore-wise is the Forsaken, yet I play a Blood Elf. Yet by your logic that means I don't like the Forsaken at all.

[PacMan]

For me, I think the dailies only giving 5 valor points per quest made them feel really Grindey. Maybe they should have rewarded 10-15 so the dailies could have been paced better. Then there's LFR. Don't get me wrong i enjoyed doing it the first time around but once I started leveling and then gearing my alts it got really boring real fast.

[Deleted]

I loved logging on to wow with a long term goal, be it a grind for gear or some rep...

Exactly, I miss logging in for those projects, even super long grinds. Also,the loot tables were far more interesting in those days too, now in mop even a lockbox only contains mop greens (wtf is up with that blizzard?). Didn't care that I didn't see all raids, I liked that fact.. reward system Blizzard, don't forget the reward system! That's what keeps us playing, not everything on a plate or some things only because we logged in an hour a day to do damn dailies. Which I don't

[Yriel]

All I can say is reading most comments, gief back TBC model. I will keep saying it, cause its the truth.

Everyone raided something, and you feelt like you did progress at your own level. Yes I didn't see Sunwell, but I was damn happy to do 4/5 MH and up to and included Bloodboil inn BT, didn't matter if I was never gonna see Sunwell. I was happy and satisfied the hole way.

Most people never got past Kharazan and while it was an awesome dungeon, raiding the same place for 2 years wasn't really fun.

[draykorinee]

Most people never got past Kharazan and while it was an awesome dungeon, raiding the same place for 2 years wasn't really fun.

I was one of those, and my god it was fun, we would raid 1-2 nights a week, occasionally try ZA or do 25 mans with another guild. I don't think a return to tbc style would be a bad thing anymore, but I don;t think its the fix needed me.

[Djuntas]

Most people never got past Kharazan and while it was an awesome dungeon, raiding the same place for 2 years wasn't really fun.

You are just lying now. Karazhan got extremly easy once badge gear inn Sunwell patch, and somewhat prio to that.

I renember pugging karazhan on alt character inn pugs I made myself or joined, quit a few times. And its not like I was picking top players - Just okay raiders, like myself, and maybe the odd 2-3 new people.

Infact once the 30% health nerf rolled inn, I pugged MH 5/5 and even killed Kiljaeden with a pure pug made by like 2-3 guilds. One guild had some good players join, but else...

Edit: Not to mention Lootreaver, Lurker the loot giver, and other very easy bosses, guilds would do as there first bosses when starting a new raid.

[Deleted]

You are just lying now. Karazhan got extremly easy once badge gear inn Sunwell patch, and somewhat prio to that.

I renember pugging karazhan on alt character inn pugs I made myself or joined, quit a few times. And its not like I was picking top players - Just okay raiders, like myself, and maybe the odd 2-3 new people.

Infact once the 30% health nerf rolled inn, I pugged MH 5/5 and even killed Kiljaeden with a pure pug made by like 2-3 guilds. One guild had some good players join, but else...

The" most people got stuck in karazhan" thing is backed up from a blue quote, iirc. Karazhan is wows most popular ever raid, because most players coudn't get past it!

[Yriel]

You are just lying now. Karazhan got extremly easy once badge gear inn Sunwell patch, and somewhat prio to that.

I renember pugging karazhan on alt character inn pugs I made myself or joined, quit a few times. And its not like I was picking top players - Just okay raiders, like myself, and maybe the odd 2-3 new people.

Infact once the 30% health nerf rolled inn, I pugged MH 5/5 and even killed Kiljaeden with a pure pug made by like 2-3 guilds. One guild had some good players join, but else...

Edit: Not to mention Lootreaver, Lurker the loot giver, and other very easy bosses, guilds would do as there first bosses when starting a new raid.

It's too bad that those old statistic sites are no longer available with data from back then. Right before WotLK was released only 25% of the people who killed a boss in Kharazan killed a boss in SSC or TK. That's only one quarter that moved on to the next raid, 75% of the players were stuck in Kara.
It may have been easy for you but not for the vast majority of players.

Even Zul Aman was too difficult for most players, there was a lot of complaining back then because many felt it had been tuned for people in T5.

[Ninotchka]

Things I didn't like:

Alt unfriendliness. My old main character is still sitting at 481 item level, my 3rd 90 is still half blue/green, and I've got an 89 and an 88 that I'm struggling to force myself to get that last bit up to 90. There are two portions to alt unfriendliness - gearing and levelling.

Gearing has been slow and painful and gated behind dailies, and crafted gear really is only available once your raid group is sharding a lot of things in the current tier and none of the mains need them, which means if you're not on heroics in the first few weeks it's going to be months after the raid is out. You can't cap valor just through the main raid. I love the valor bonus once you're capped, but it's annoying to cap most of the time (tho it's gotten easier as the expansion progressed, it's still more annoying than fun).

Questing is less linear and on rails than Cataclysm, but it's still limited to one main path. I like to quest, but aside from the split in V4W/Krasarang, you have to repeat the same set of quests on each and every character. Wrath questing was great. You could start in Borean or Fjord, hop over to the other one if you got bored, finish them both and skip Dragonblight entirely, go to Grizzly early if you felt leet, you had a choice between Sholazar or Zul, Storm Peaks or Icecrown. A lot of people never raid, never set foot in a dungeon. For them, questing is the thing. It has been far far too easy to get the Loremaster achievements for the last two expansions. Ideally, I would love to ding 90 on questing alone and still have half of the quests for each level range yet to do.

Battle.net always on. I'm our guild's main tank. I really wish there were an 'appear offline' option for battle.net because when I want to derp around on an alt, a lot of times I get guilted or socially manipulated into tanking something for someone. I know, I need to grow a backbone, but if I haven't done that in 48 years it's not likely to happen any time soon.

I've hated the linear nature of this expansion's raids. There are no optional bosses. That's the one thing I really liked about Firelands, you could choose your own path for the first 5 bosses, so if you were having issues with Rhyolith you could always hit your head on Beth'tilac. Horridon would not have caused nearly the forum controversy it did if you'd had the choice of him or Council or Iron Qon as your second boss. I know LFR wants them broken into wings of 3 in a row, but anyone willing to spend a few minutes on design can figure out ways to give a main raid multiple paths within that limitation.

It has also felt like feedback from PTR raiding fell on deaf ears, and patch QA has been poor. All of the Durumu issues were clearly laid out during PTR testing. Horridon went live with completely wrong health values for 10 man. So did Council. Vizier was really bad when it went live. etc.

Things I like:

I've enjoyed the boss mechanics and atmosphere of the raids this expansion.

I like challenge modes, though I've only really scratched the surface.

I enjoy pet battles, again I'm still just scratching the surface but they've been a fun timewaster.

I like the cooking and fishing catchup mechanisms in Tillers and Anglers.

I like the farm. It's nice to log on and get a little bonus materials for some profession or other. I'm going to be sad to let it go to weeds when the next expansion comes out.

I like the idea of optional individual rep grinds.

I like upgrading items with valor. It gives a constant use for those excess valor points once you've bought all the non-raid junk, and a quick way to boost you that tiny bit over some hurdle.

I thought that dungeon difficulty was just right. A bit hard at the beginning, pretty easy once you're geared, and if you like punishing there's always challenge mode.

I've really enjoyed the world bosses. I think they nailed those pretty well.

[espoire]

I actually loved Mists. Here's a fairly candid review though; I didn't like everything.

Levelling - Fun!

Levelling on day one of the launch was much more fun than when I did the same on Cata. I attribute this to all the hidden stuff around Pandaria: the treasures and the rare elites, which I found several of while levelling. The rare elites especially were exciting. I spent a half-dozen wipes trying to solo Eschelon as a Shadow priest in Dragon Soul gear, and it was great fun. Like a bite-sized bit of raiding content in the middle of my levelling. The non-trivial questing content at levels 88-90 was a plus as well; it made questing from a trivial chore into engaging content.

Casual Level 90 Content - Boring.

At max level, well, dailies are dailies, but there's no denying that it kept us busy. Still, the daily quests quickly (read: on day 2) became boring. The 5mans too were a disappointment. Even now I keep discovering mechanics that I never knew about because the 5mans are so undertuned that there's no need to care. Cataclysm's 5mans were much "meatier"; Mists' 5mans are like a light salad. Easy and not very satisfying. I kinda never checked out the scenarios, and there are still some (most?) that I never ran for lack of a heroic difficulty. They're tuned so absurdly easy that the only reason I would want to go to one is for the lore... but with two other players there, it's hard to stop and smell the lore. Scenarios would have been better if you could choose to go to them solo. On that note, heroic scenarios are undertuned too, although not by as much. I'm glad I'm not automatically locked out of the speed-run bonus just because I'm a healer, but when our third person can spend an entire run DC'd (leaving only a healer and a DPS) and we get the speed bonus with time to spare, then your timers are just WAY too loose.

All-in-all, under-tuning spoiled a lot of content for me.

There's also some really non-standard content in Mists that deserves a mention.

Pet Battles

Pet Battling occupied a week or so of my time. The fact that they ripped off Pokemon, and then made more interesting battles than Pokemon is pretty impressive. If it could be tweaked to do the things Pokemon does right just as well, it could really be a game unto its own.

The first problem I see is the "oddness" of the types. That is to say, Pokemon players know the type effectivenesses (water > fire > grass > water, etc.) but after casually playing pet battles, I have no clue what Magic type is good against. Also, Critter, Beast and Flying are way too common, leading to it feeling like there are only 3 types when you're battling wild pets.

Another problem is that the pet species aren't all that unique. You see the same old squirrel in 50 different zones. While that's no different than a Rattata, there are dozens of these ubiquitous "filler" pets, and even nominally different pet species often have identical stats and moves.

A core mechanic in the Pokemon games was sustaining your resources while traveling from place to place. Pet battles attempted to capture something similar by making sure that healing is fairly difficult. However, the only penalty to depleting your pets' health is a time one, and then only id Mend Pet wasn't already off cooldown. You'll also never have difficulty traveling into a new zone; your pets strength or remaining HP have nothing to do with this. You can just waltz right past (or fly over) all the pets and trainer that might be in your way. I'm not sure this can be solved in WoW.

Lastly, with only three stats, and only 8 possible move combinations for any given pet species (less at low levels) it's hard to make a pet you're training feel unique. How is my Dusk Spiderling different from yours? Answer: it's not. While in practice, people often taught their Pokemon the same sets of good moves for a given species, the fact remains that you could breed, spend your TMs, acquire a "shiny", etc and end up with one that was highly unusual. This is one case where Ghostcrawler's insistence that "false" options just lure players into gimping themselves doesn't work. No one takes Pokemon seriously, and this sense of personalization was core to the games.

Brawlers' Guild - Fun!

A place to test your DPS in a raid-like setting? Sweet. Hard (well, it was hard before H ToT gear...) content I can do without a group? Sweet. Exclusive access? Not so sweet. Waiting in line for other players to go? Cool to watch, but sucks when the wait gets too long. That bug where 6 boss fights go on at the same time? BEST. BUG. EVER. Overall, I recommend checking it out to anyone that still hasn't it's easily an afternoon of fun. Longer if you're bad.

Challenge Modes - Serious fun!

I'll admit, I checked these out pretty late. Still, it's not like I stacked socketted gear or reforged for it or anything. So really, gear scaling probably did its job in keeping it at its intended difficulty. If anything, I had it harder than the early people; I went after the Disc nerfs. Anyway, it was great fun. Foes just threatening enough to take seriously, while making a mad dash to the finish? Riotous fun. Pity 9/9 gold only took a day; I wish I had more to do. I recommend checking these out to just about everyone too. Gold is about as hard as 9/12 normal ToT, and Silver is probably attainable for anyone that can kill normal Horridon. The difficulty is just high enough not to be boring for serious raiders (although they will consume the content quickly), and not so high that casual players have no chance. Grab 4 friends and steamroll/progress them.

Harvest Moon, er, I mean, "Sunsong Ranch" (AKA Farmville) - Boring.

Frankly, this is just another daily hub, complete with the dailies. I know I enjoyed the Harvest Moon games, even the older, simpler ones. I can't tell why WoW's Harvest Moon clone fell so flat. Part of it is probably the focus on daily quests for progression, rather than actually farming, but like I said, I'm unsure. The rewards were enticing, but then, all the daily hubs were. Why do you think so many people were complaining about dailies? Good rewards gated behind boring content, leading to people playing content they don't like. Yuck.

Tier 14 - Fun!

I'm impressed at how well Blizzard balanced gear progressing this expansion. It took my semi-casual guild quite a while to finish normal mode, leaving us 6/16H when 5.2 dropped. The fact that it kept us steadily progressing for that long is a real testament to the fine balance of the raiding tier. Of special note: Elegon, Empress, Tsulong, H Will and H Sha were all particularly fun encounters. Kudos, raid design team!

People tell me HoF was overtuned. While Garalon was a tight-ish DPS check, the fact is my guild never hit a wall. Still, this is my only real complaint for the tier and it didn't even effect me personally.

Tier 15 - I cannot provide an unbiased opinion.

So, here's the deal though. Summer often sucks for guilds, and summer is really sucking right now. We raid fewer weeks than we fail to. Attendance issues suck. Roster churn sucks. Losing progress and failing to farm both suck. I hate raiding lately, but it's probably not ToT's fault. I do have one objective complaint, and that's the linearity. Raiding 4.5 hours/week is very harsh when you can't just choose not to do the bosses you don't care about this lockout (like you could in Ulduar, tier 14, etc.).

[khalltusk]

I think a major issue was reliance on dailies in 5.0 and even 5.1

Dailies had good rewards behind them and a lot of people "felt" like they had to do them to get the content. But you only had one option to get the rep rewards and that was dailies. Golden lotus then was a major gate blocking access to some of the other factions so you had to do them first. I stopped bothering with dailies until 5.1 and only did those to do the awesome quest lines locked behind the rep.

Dungeons - Lack of dungeons in MOP was a bit of a shame I was really hopping we'd get a far larger number of dungeons with MOP. No new ones added was a bit of a letdown as well.

Raids - LFR worked fine for me but I feel like flex mode should have come with 5.0 This would have promoted pugs and more casual guilds into raiding. Might well have helped server communities into getting more pugs and stuff off the ground.