Which expansion was the absolute worst?

[majesta]

I would say WoD, but BFA actually got me to unsub. BFA just seemed to amplify everything I disliked about WoW and crushed everything that I did like about WoW.

[Relapses]

Pre-WotLk game design was good enough to create the single most successful game of all times in any case, like it or not. That's at least one hard fact.
What solid evidence actually support your own reasoning ? Your opinion that said game design wasn't good ? Yay, that's some hard proof right there

The proof is that this is a fucking subscription game and new player generation is just as important as retention. In your skewed world view, the only thing that matters is retaining the people who played from the beginning. This is a ridiculously stupid idea and the game would have without died off a decade ago if Blizzard sought to only appease the players who have been playing from the beginning. It's neat for shitty internet arguments where you get to conveniently correlate subscriber losses with whatever changes you personally dislike (an intellectually dishonest argument which I have debased frequently elsewhere on this forum); but back here in reality Blizzard understands how to run their billion dollar business a lot better than random internet forum posters. But sure, go ahead and keep pretending the only reason Blizzard ever changed their game was because fuck you. You'll find plenty of people entirely incapable of critical thinking who will be quick to agree with you because change is bad and Blizzard hates its players.

[Akka]

The proof is that this is a fucking subscription game and new player generation is just as important as retention. In your skewed world view, the only thing that matters is retaining the people who played from the beginning.

And what makes you think that the game wouldn't have attracted new players as time went on ? Did chess die because they didn't altered the rules during the previous 50 years ?

This is a ridiculously stupid idea and the game would have without died off a decade ago if Blizzard sought to only appease the players who have been playing from the beginning.
It's neat for shitty internet arguments where you get to conveniently correlate subscriber losses with whatever changes you personally dislike (an intellectually dishonest argument which I have debased frequently elsewhere on this forum);

And again, where is your evidence of that ? We see that sub fell after they changed their design philosophy. Of course it could be (and probably in good part is) due to market saturation/people becoming bored/whatever, but where is the evidence that it would have fared worse if they actually had kept the initial philosophy ?

Where are your evidences ? Correlation is not causation, that's obvious, but you don't even provide correlation to support your opinion, you provide NOTHING.

but back here in reality Blizzard understands how to run their billion dollar business a lot better than random internet forum posters. But sure, go ahead and keep pretending the only reason Blizzard ever changed their game was because fuck you. You'll find plenty of people entirely incapable of critical thinking who will be quick to agree with you because change is bad and Blizzard hates its players.

Speaking of shitty argument, that's just some sort of retarded circular reasoning where you claim that Blizzard knows better because they know better. Especially when they show time after time that they can and do make huge mistakes.

The day you scrutinize your own shitty reasonings to the same standard that you try to apply to arguments you dislike, you're in for a big surprise.

[Venziir]

No, because everyone hated Legion when it was current. It was only tolerable at the literal end of the xpac when AP didn’t matter and most people had the right legendaries. Still an utter dogshit expansion.

Ok litterally everyone... Sure!

[ff50dccd-a222-42f3-a786]

BFA.
Faction confrontation theme is a pure scam. Blizzard provides nothing but 1 weekly PVP quest. It is like Halaa, Auchidon, Hellfire Peninsula etc events never existed. The players' attempts to organize any activity were ruined by phasing and stuff.
Character scaling is a disaster. The Everest of engineering incompetency.
Classes are crippled and feel bland. Extremely boring to play.
Activision-Blizzard operated in some completely business-oriented artificial way and do as little as possible and safe according to trends and metrics.

[Claitraith]

Cata

i have enjoyed in some way each and every expansion aside from Cata. Normally high end gear saw you through to the end of levelling but the power increase saw folk giving up Shadowmorne for quest greens by 84. There wasn't any fluid between the zones as they are just five randomly dropped areas and the raids were lack luster to say the least. Best part about that whole expac was Firelands daily's.

[Flurryfang]

So basically you just wanted a poll where the only option was WoD. Did this expansion personally violate you? Can you show the court on the doll where WoD touched you?

It touched me..... it..... It touched me EVERYWHERE!! O.o

[kaminaris]

There is also the fact that Legion, as terrible as it was (and it was a big pile of shit for me), is still better than the atrocities that are WoD and BfA. You can only nominate one "worst" expansion.

Not really, everything that was wrong in legion was fixed in bfa.

- - - Updated - - -

The proof is that this is a fucking subscription game and new player generation is just as important as retention. In your skewed world view, the only thing that matters is retaining the people who played from the beginning. This is a ridiculously stupid idea and the game would have without died off a decade ago if Blizzard sought to only appease the players who have been playing from the beginning. It's neat for shitty internet arguments where you get to conveniently correlate subscriber losses with whatever changes you personally dislike (an intellectually dishonest argument which I have debased frequently elsewhere on this forum); but back here in reality Blizzard understands how to run their billion dollar business a lot better than random internet forum posters. But sure, go ahead and keep pretending the only reason Blizzard ever changed their game was because fuck you. You'll find plenty of people entirely incapable of critical thinking who will be quick to agree with you because change is bad and Blizzard hates its players.

Yep, this. People keep saying that old game design was good but blizzard said retention was god awful...
Which means it wasn't as good people claim.

[Akka]

Not really, everything that was wrong in legion was fixed in bfa.

Obviously not everyone agrees.

Yep, this. People keep saying that old game design was good but blizzard said retention was god awful...
Which means it wasn't as good people claim.

Yet, it doesn't seem like retention has actually improved.

[kaminaris]

Obviously not everyone agrees.

Yet, it doesn't seem like retention has actually improved.

Oh it did improved. But only blizz has statistics. Yet amount of players currently playing is not really a valid statistic without retention.

[Accendor]

Can't believe how people are already forgetting how bad WoD was.

Do we have to talk about the mid-expansion drought?

The terrible garrison system?

The complete messed up launch, that made it so that we could not really play for the first 1-2 months?

Apexis Crystals???

We do not forget it. BfA is just worse.

[Akka]

Oh it did improved. But only blizz has statistics.

So how exactly can you claim it improved if nobody but Blizz has the facts ?

[kaminaris]

So how exactly can you claim it improved if nobody but Blizz has the facts ?

You can see it from game decisions that still continues for 3 expansions.

[MrLachyG]

I kinda wish the poll was public, so we could see the 11 jackasses who voted for an expansion that isn't even out yet

[ThrashMetalFtw]

The only expansion I had to quit was Cataclysm. World Revamp did not deliver, end game content was barren, literally no plot other than "evil dragon broke the world, please fix".

I know WoD should get the vote but I stayed throughout the expansion and its content and as horribly boring and lonely it ended up being I had an alright time making gold, alts and finishing rep grinds. Not as great as MoP was but satisfactory whereas Cataclysm has nothing going for it. End game zones split up so far apart you spent more time flying to Hyjal than it did to do the dailies and when you did your 15 for the day, you had nothing else to do.

First half of Cata (BoT/BWD/Tot4W and FL) with the original Cata HCs and the revamped ZG/ZA 5mans was one of the absolute best times to be playing WoW tbh. They still haven't made any 5mans that can stand up to those orignal Cata ones, and t11 and t12 are still two of the best raid tiers of all time. And ofc, Cata classdesign was Blizz at the very top of their game, tied with MoP for best classdesign ever.


Sure, it was "raid or die", but so was EVERY expansion prior to Legion. WotLK was a pure "raid or die" expansion, and still is (I'm currently playing it on a private server). Ulduar just released, and if I want to stay on my main, I do one daily HC, the JC, cooking and fishing dailies, then sit there and wait for my guild raids. If that's not raid or die, I don't know.

I will never understand this argument about "raid or die", as if that's something bad. Once you were done with your "mandatory grinds" after the first few weeks of a new patch, raidlogging or playing an alt was the only thing left. This gameplay pattern was the same all the way up to Legion. Legion and BFA are the only 2 expansions that could possibly be described as anything else than raid or die.

- - - Updated - - -

Content it did have was still more fun than anything in BFA currently has (plus class design wasn't absolute trash garbage). Think about the comparison this way: Having the choice between half a piece of crap with good class design and decent enjoyability versus a full piece of crap with sprinkles and icing on it to make it look good but lack any substance inside is no competition whatsoever. Sure they are both crap but one is far more flawed in more ways than one then the other option.

While I do think WoD raids were amazing, so were the BFA raids. Raids in general, have been rock solid, starting from Cata and every expansion since, and the one thing that constantly stays at a high level of quality regardless of surrounding systems.

The main weakness of BFA is, and has always been its backwards classdesign. This was really really bad back in Uldir, but have been somewhat fixed by the bandaid "borrowed powers" added throughout the expansion. Classes now at the end of the expansion play almost as well as they did back in WoD. Still worse than Cata/MoP ofc, but way ahead of WotLK for example.

So, better classdesign is the ONLY thing WoD has going for it.


When you then start listing all the crap that dragged WoD down, it's pretty obvious which was the better expansion. You know, the whole thing about 2 cancelled raids, one cancelled zone, useless Garrison, useless apexis farm. WoD is simply the laziest expansion Blizz ever did. The "mid expansion raid tier" (like Firelands, Throne of Thunder and Eternal Palace) is gone. No, it wasn't replaced by anything else, it's simply not there.

[Doctor Amadeus]

Used to be WOD then Cata but this Shadowlands looks pure trash.

Basically Blizzard took everything people liked got ride of it, fixed shit that was working so that it’s broke instead of fixing what was broken and now that thing people hated let’s add that by triple.

If I didn’t know better I’d think they are trying to kill their franchise.

[Dejiko]

BFA was the worst for me, followed by WoD.

I can at least appreciate a whimsical and somewhat schizophrenic story about time travel and interdimensional
orc adventures, but a war story with no respect for the victims of warfare, no consequence for genocide and
no coherent character stories is just a poorly thought out story told even more poorly.

Normally i just tune out any story behind the quests i do because they don`t tend to be that interesting, but if it`s a central
part of an expansion, the expansion cinematic is focused around it, there are campaigns dedicated to telling a story about war,
then at least do it the curtesy of telling it well.
From a story perspective it just felt like a waste of time.

Mythic+ is nice though.

[Doffen]

Yeah man, how the fuck did people forget about how shitty WoD was!? It's not like it's the highest voted expansion or anything.

Or were you just looking for a poll that looked like this?

I would pick option 6.

[Bandiago]

There's really people who think BfA was worse than WoD?

lol

I didn't play WoD when it was originally released.

Started in vanilla, played on and off through WotlK. Picked it up again just before Legion launched. I played a character through every expansion all the way through the end of WoD. Given that I didn't have to wait for any content, I have to say that WoD was by far my favorite expo. I was actually a bit shocked when I heard how many people disliked it so strongly.

Of course, I now understand it was because there was a lack of content - my guess is that's why people disliked it, not because the content itself was bad - there just wasn't enough of it.

BFA is by far the worst. Only reason I play now is b/c I enjoy leveling up characters and playing different classes until lvl 110. Did the story mode once and have no desire whatsoever to do the god awful grinds in this again.

[Kralljin]

Sure, it was "raid or die", but so was EVERY expansion prior to Legion.

You can argue over the term "raid or die", but i think the general idea is that you cannot your progress your character without raiding.

While this is a rather general description, this philosophy started to flourish in Wotlk due to the overall streamlining of the game.
In previous expansions, certain gear sources outside of raiding took more time and awarded (on occassion) more powerful loot.

In TBC, certain reputations offered pretty powerful rewards, but since dungeons were not designed to be roflstomped in 15-30 minutes, those took more of your time (and the nonexistence of Reputation Tabards).
On top of that, the difficulty of heroics throttled your Badge gain, you couldn't just spam 5+ dungeons within a few hours and gain a lot of badges, most people farmed Mechanar once per day, got their 5(?) badges and repeated that until they could buy an item for like 50+ Badges.

That's 10 days of playing for a single item, in Wotlk you could do that much quicker because every heroic was shorter and easier to complete.

On top of that, craftable items were more powerful than raid items, meaning that even if you didn't raid, you could still go for those items.
The gold or raw material grind was nothing to scoff at, that also ate up a lot of your time.

In Wotlk, craftable items were far less powerful and due to ease of Naxx, people that didn't want to spend gold just skipped them anyway and simply waited until they got an item out of Naxx.

Overall, the gearing progression was less streamlined in Classic / TBC, which meant that sources of gear even from non raid sources were equivalent or even more powerful than those from raids.
The fact that it also simply took longer to get those items indirectly supported this because people invested far more time into the game before they reached a point of "I have to raid to improve my character".

Also, the fact that PvP was not strictly worse than PvE gear made Arena (and later on, BG's) also a potential source of gear.

While you could ignore other sources in Vanilla / TBC, it made your character worse unless you soak all of the loot in raids.

When you then start listing all the crap that dragged WoD down, it's pretty obvious which was the better expansion.

I believe that it comes down to "Personal preference", because BfA vs. WoD is pretty much a race to the bottom.

And most people that dislike BfA raise the argument more does not necessarily make it better, which is a legit argument if one enjoys the "core game modes".

I get where people are coming from when they say "there was nothing in WoD", but systems like Corruption make me say "i prefer nothing over this" and that's not even a 8.0 feature.