Originally Posted by
rda
What? We are talking about the scale of features, remember? Warmode is a single switch. That's supposed to be big? I mean, it's useful, thanks for doing it, finally, but it's a single switch, it could have been delivered in a minor patch. Are you arguing that azerite / islands / warfronts are big? They are not. The biggest thing there was the AI and while it is possible that they put tons of hours there, it's also possible that they did not do much beyond just creating a couple behavior patterns just slightly above what NPCs do, with backjumps and "sneaky Pete is here!" -- it's really hard to tell, because that's AI, visible progress is damn uneven and does not correlate with the amount of effort spent.
In both WoD and BFA there is just not a lot of work done on original features, original features are few and they are shallow. In fact, WoD would actually win here. Garrisons were damn big in terms of new features - ie, they had bodyguards as a small part, and that was an introduction of a feature, unlike in 8.2 which just reuses what was already coded with minor variations. And apart from garrisons, WoD had Ashran, quests that complete using progress bars (yeah, I know, I also am not terribly fond of the mechanic, but that was a new feature, it was sizeable and it had to be designed and coded, that's effort), per-zone events (also a new mechanic), etc. If we are counting azerite, we have to count expansion-wide ring + Draenor perks + new glyphs and effing new stats (multistrike) with wide support in enchants / gems / gear templates for WoD. WoD had more than BFA going here. It just kind of petered out after 6.0 (although 6.2 was not bad).