Anybody else honestly believe WoD was better?

[raz98]

I speak only for myself and the people that joined me, but for us? WoD was the best expansion we ever played. Not because of the expansion itself, but because of what we did with it.

We spent the entire expansion ganking, and warring with other players. We got our whole server dragged into a sort of PvP war that lasted for the whole expansion, spread to towns, rekindled old rivalries, and helped us make new friends and enemies; the server hadn't been connected like that in such a long time. It reminded us of our time in vanilla. All of the combat items lying around, craftable, and grindable. All of the best little tricks, and abilities, and rewards for WPvP. For me and my friends it was the best expansion we ever played, and were sad to see it gone.

[Arakakao]

Garrisons killed the economy and professions, specially gathering professions, so no.

[GhostShaman]

Personally I think every expac after MOP and this new design philosophy is crap. That includes Legion. Which just seems so good because WOD was crap.

[Trumpcat]

Short answer: no.

Long answer: not in any way except for class design.

[Claymore]

To me, BFA has failed on every single front. WoD was stupid, from a Lore perspective, but I at least really enjoyed the various zones and seeing Draenor in its peak. I know it's become kind of a meme know, but they truly nailed the feeling of Draenor feeling "savage".

Unfortunately, Garrison were... really bad. As was Ashran. Seriously; whoever decided to try and make Ashran the "capital" of Draenor was woefully incorrect, to the point I'd have seriously considered firing them were I in charge. Karabor would've probably been one of the favorite Capitals in the entire game if they'd fleshed it out. Bladespire Mountain... Real talk? I think after making Bladespire, Blizzard realized it was going to be a shitty capital, so they came up with Ashran last-minute to keep the Horde and Alliance "equal". So Horde got a slightly better capital than Bladespire would've been, while Alliance got a far shitter one.

Beyond those *major* fuck ups, though, I think WoD worked for the most part. I would say, some of the Raid-bosses were SEVERELY over-tuned, and I can tell you first hand that "the train boss" in Blackrock Foundry broke apart several raiding guilds, because it was simply too unforgiving for many players. Still an interesting fight, but it shouldn't have been tuned to ONLY be possible using addons (seriously; there's no fucking way an entire raid could avoid all of the trains without addons).

Of course, I haven't experienced any of BFA's raids, so I can't comment there. I quit playing before reaching a point I could Raid, because there just aren't any meaningful rewards anymore. And "better stats" aren't rewards; they're *requirements* for progressing to more difficult content. The Raid armor-sets have generally been dogshit (save for the Necromancer-looking Mythic Cloth), and to me, cool armor and weapons are a huge motivator to raid.

[Restors]

The classes were better in WoD. Both how they felt to play and how deep they were, and how different they were from one another. Now we have standardized trash that feels the same. With the GCD change it's even more annoying and tedious.

Oh, how quickly memories fades... WOD were the very expansion that caused an outbreak due to the amount of purged spells. Every class had a "debuff > filler > spender" rotation, it was one of the most homogenization expansion class mechanics wise.

And what content exactly had "miles better"?? you mean the daily apex farming? or the miserbly tanaan? Or the forever haunting Ashran?? The only good thing that every came out of WOD were the raids and how smooth the leveling system has become.

Oh btw, timegating the freaking legendary into several patches, and also forced to do the damn shipyard garrison for it.

At least Bfa world content stays relevent, the rewards for gears from WQ and emissaries scales up, same goes with mythic+. There are more choices to gear up characters than only participate in raids.

You all should be ashamed of yourself for even trying to speak up for WOD!!

[Justpassing]

I'll take the orc theme over Sylvanas theme any day of the week.

[dope_danny]

WoD was the beginning of ideas that became the core of WoW by BfA. a reliance on mechanics lifted not from rpgs but mobile games. It started with garrisons and turned into world quests and AP upkeep and so on. Its all part of the 'just log in once per day to do this and hope rng procs drop that SSR gacha drop!' while making the world around those mechanics feel redundant. For a user with a habit forming personality that can really lock them in for the duration, at the cost of everyone else being made conscious of the monotonous nature of mmo's that a good game can make you totally forget about.

[Harbour]

Absolutely. Why is that hard to believe that WoD class design, less time gating and rep grinding are enough to make it better expansion than BFA?
Leveling was also better because getting 100 level cap was less tedious than getting 120 level cap.
Starting experience of WoD was better than BFA one.
Endgame lacked of raid tier but M+ toxicity, Titanforging, WQ, Azerite Grind, Tons of Rental Powers to grind, Alt Unfriendliness of BFA was WAAAAY Worse than Camera Patch.

[Cosmic Janitor]

You could argue WoD was better if you ignore the whole picture in favor of some niche content that only you personally enjoyed a disproportionate amount (raids, PvP, the state of the spec you prefer, etc). That is something you should be aware and honest about though. As a whole, the current state is still slightly better, even if it's only because of things which were added in Legion. While I'm at that, while legion was a good one, overall every good expansion Blizzard ever released was marred by sub-par content or ideas, be it Wrath which had 2 of the best raids yet also had 2 of the worst ones or MoP with the daily chore overload and the boring jungle faction patch or legion which introduced endless grind features and the netherlight cruicible. The art is here to look at the expansion as a whole, and personally I will gladly admit that in my book, PvP has no influence what-so-ever for my rankings. Just be aware of your own bias.

[Overdispersion]

From a raiding PoV (honestly the only thign I care about) WoD was so much more fun. Better raids, better class design and a lot more alt friendly.

[msdos]

I quit WoD and never came back and did zero of the raids. Garrisons disturbed me that much. It really was a combo of things. Garrison + table + how ugly everything was + I didn't like the Horde/Ally hub, going there to buy plans, looking for the right vendor + every garrison looking identical + the SELFIE patch that came insuring there was no chance I'd come back. Not just the selfie thing though, WoW was doing a crap ton of 4th wall breaking stuff at this point that was just taking a dump on RPG immersion.
I also didn't care for Monks at all and had skipped MoP, so to me that was like 3 expansions with no new class. Even Demon Hunter makes more sense to me. Monks just seem out of no where, like there was a Monk mob in SM Cath, whoa, lets make an entire class!!! (Not saying Monks aren't cool, they just don't interest me.)

[Thokri]

I played more during orcs of orcnor, so.. But also started the decline for me on hours spent on game, not so fond of mobile games.

[Moggie]

With all BFAs shortcomings and idiocies, WoD still takes the cake for being the worse thing to hit WoW since in game voice chat during TBC...

[Nnyco]

If you liked sitting on a mission table as content and nothing else, then sure.

[KSM899]

Nothing compares to WoD.

BfA is not that good, but it's still much better than WoD.

[Tomana]

The problem with WoD is that it had little content. But the content it did have was miles better than the anti-fun shit in BfA that feels soulless and with the sole purpose of increasing /played time metrics.

We must have played a different WOD then.

The classes were better in WoD. Both how they felt to play and how deep they were, and how different they were from one another. Now we have standardized trash that feels the same. With the GCD change it's even more annoying and tedious.

I guess it's heavily dependent on your spec. I find holy to be pretty good in M+ (no idea about raids), while it was meh at best in WOD.

WoW was always grindy, but even in WoD somehow the grinds felt much less tedious and they were more rewarding. In BfA they feel pointless, unrewarding and plain awful.

Of course, you can't have grinds if you don't have any open world content! XD - fingertemple.jpg
Also, since you mention retarded grinds and WOD - the one faction where you basically had to just kill mobs to get rep (Laughing Skull?) was THE example of a retarded and unrewarding grind.

RNG wasn't as bad as it is now. RNG is straight up worse than in mobile games now. Hell, with the cancer of 8.3 and the way corrupted gear is wrapped within many layers of RNG (right tier, right effect, right slot etc...), we could say the RNG now is worse than ever.

The crafted item RNG of WOD called and it's not happy.

And the so-called "content" that BfA has is shit. Island expeditions, warfronts etc... are just shit, pure shit, it's not even subjective, they're not fun or worth doing.

Erm... Heroic Darkshore certainly IS worth doing. Is it fun? Dunno, fun is subjective, I like it quite a bit.

What I can say with a 100% certainty, however, is that WOD had ZERO open-world content worth mentioning.
My memories of WOD are those of pure boredom and running 10 garrisons for gold (which was lucrative but not really fun).
I can't say I thoroughly enjoyed BFA, but 8.3 does not even remotely compare to the retardation levels of WOD.

[Daronokk]

WoD was a million times better than BfA.

The only reason I even played BfA was Allied Races and Heritage armor. The expansion itself is boring and forgettable.

[Halfsharkalligatorhalfman]

Nope WoD is worse than a poop smoothie. But BfA is on its heels it’s more like a soup sandwich. I will never forgive blizz for the selfie cam and the shipyard passed off as major content features.

[Lawlhero]

WoD was good simply because I absolutely loved my class / spec. All I would do is do random BGs in bis pvp gear destroying fresh level 100's, zero skill, all win. Was the most fun I've had in this game.