Which expansion was the absolute worst?

[Wildmoon]

WoD by quite a large margin. The game had to structure to incentivize you to do anything and barely any content.

[trapmaster]

BFA>Vanilla>Wod

wod wasn't so bad when it showers golds mission then it was expected nerfs. Of course.

[Wildmoon]

People severely overrate WotLK problably because it is the first xpac for many people. The good things about WotLK were its zones and Ulduar. There were plenty of negatives.

[Osmeric]

People severely overrate WotLK problably because it is the first xpac for many people. The good things about WotLK were its zones and Ulduar. There were plenty of negatives.

According to Greg Street (Ghostcrawler), Ulduar was the least successful raid of WotLK.

WotLK was highly rated because raids were finally made available to the average player. And then they took that back in Cataclysm, to disastrous result.

[hulkgor]

How anyone can vote anything other than WoD (having played it, of course) is absolutely confusing to me.

WoD didn't have -any content whatsoever- besides raids. You had Ashran, one of the biggest blunders in the game, you had 1 (ONE!) Apexis Daily, and the Challenge Modes which were fun but had no replayability (in contrast to Mythic+).

BFA can have huge flaws, but in comparison? It's friggin amazing!

[Feldreams]

BFA was exhausting to play as legion, but never felt rewarded in the same level, but I put Warlords as the worst, as product whole, was the one with less content... i mean, you can only raid, and had only 3 raids... the only positive point was that there was not this grinding exhaustion, so was very very alt friendly... but is the expansion that have gave us less content overall, and they changed a lot of thing that they offered at the begining, that you ended up buying something that was not what you where buying...

[Th3Scourge]

Sooo you're complaining that you can raidlog until you've finished the things to do outside of the raid? Is it also a problem if you have to get alchemy mats?
And why the hell is it even a positive that you only log in twice wouldn't it be better if the game made you have fun every day so you get fun for the money you spend?

You give an example of farming alchy mats for raiding, but the two aren't comparable. Alchemy pots/flasks might give you a few % points here and there of power, the other (cloak, essences) almost entirely gates your ability to provide any meaningful contribution to a raid. Farming mats for raid and compulsory content are a very poor comparison. If I don't want to farm mats, I don't have to and it won't make too much of a difference. Better yet, I can just buy them and save myself the time.

How about it be a choice how you want to play the game. I don't know about you, but doing mandatory dailies to get access to visions to level up a cloak to be able to wear corruptions in order to have a character that does anything is not exactly fun, especially when you want to roll an alt, or even as a returning player.

The same applies to any player that just wants to pvp. It was great when you could just roll a new alt, get to max level, run a raid with some friends or guildies to catch up to current content and you were good to go. Now you have to grind a cloak, get all your essences (the manual way if you don't have them yet), pray for rng corruptions or wait to buy them when they are available.

The issue is that there is so much 'compulsory content' outside of what you might want to do in order just to make your character do anything at all. Think before you post

[Relapses]

WotLK was highly rated because raids were finally made available to the average player. And then they took that back in Cataclysm, to disastrous result.

The only thing disastrous about Cata was the complete destruction of 25M Heroic raiding. They single handedly destroyed an entire raiding community with gear parity between 10 and 25M and set themselves up for two entire expansions worth of encounter design hamstrung by having to create two versions of every boss.

That said, I don't think it was purely the ostracization of casual players in Cata which led to subscriber losses. I think, in large part, WotLK's culmination simply represented a stopping point for many continuously subscribed players who had played since Vanilla. This was the end of WoW's reign at the top of the video game food chain and even though it's seen bumps in popularity since the game in general seems far less dependent on large numbers of continuously subscribed players than it was towards the beginning of its life cycle. (See also: Shitty arguments that "prove" Cata killed WoW because its release coincided with sub losses.)

[Doffen]

That’s not even bringing up having to level every single artifact weapon from 1, there was never a catch up mechanic added.

Lol'd. Yeah I bet Legion sucked for those who didn't even try it. I remember a guildie of mine was noticeably much lower on the traits than the rest of us. We asked her and lo and behold, she didn't know about Artifact Knowledge Luckily, and rather good change they made it automatic later on. I bet you missed it

A personal opinion is nice and all, but telling lies or not knowing about core features is silly. And BfAs problems are BfAs problem. Its not like the devs let Legions systems go unchanged in BfA. If I were to vote worst expansion because of the expansion before I would have to say MoP. It "gave" us WoD. That kind of logic just makes people disingenuous.

[ParanoiD84]

Probably played bfa the least as it was boring as fuck, one more of those expansions and im done with wow.

[kappas]

MOP had the worst idea implemented. Mythic plus ewwww... gear should be rewarded from raids not dungeons..

[Zantera]

MOP had the worst idea implemented. Mythic plus ewwww... gear should be rewarded from raids not dungeons..

MoP didn't have mythic plus though so you must have meant Legion.

[Doffen]

The only thing disastrous about Cata was the complete destruction of 25M Heroic raiding. They single handedly destroyed an entire raiding community with gear parity between 10 and 25M and set themselves up for two entire expansions worth of encounter design hamstrung by having to create two versions of every boss.

That said, I don't think it was purely the ostracization of casual players in Cata which led to subscriber losses. I think, in large part, WotLK's culmination simply represented a stopping point for many continuously subscribed players who had played since Vanilla. This was the end of WoW's reign at the top of the video game food chain and even though it's seen bumps in popularity since the game in general seems far less dependent on large numbers of continuously subscribed players than it was towards the beginning of its life cycle. (See also: Shitty arguments that "prove" Cata killed WoW because its release coincided with sub losses.)

I did mostly only do T11 raids on heroic since I did quit(well here I am) WoW after because it was indeed the end for me. WoW had its peak for me(until Legion) because it was just boring at that time. But I do think that Cataclysm had a hard time because of the reasons you say about WotLK and players, not because the raids were hard. People could still do normals, so the argument the poster you quoted doesn't feel like a good reason to me. Raiding in Cata was easily accessible. It was just over for many players. If Firelands and DS wasn't much harder and invalidates my points of course.

But its the first time I've heard people talk about raiding being hard in Cataclysm. One major complaint in WotLK was that the raids were indeed too easy in the start, so it's hard to pinpoint if raiding is hard/easy, and how much that affect the whole player base. TBC had the largest growth of all the expansions, Vanilla even more. When raids were not so accesible, at all. I don't think raiding difficulty do affect the popularity as much as some people think. TBC is proof of that. WoW was just fresh in both of the two expansions.

It's like jumping after Wirkola, a norwegian saying. He was the best skijumper here long time ago, so good that they said anyone would have a hard time measuring their success to his. Just like Cata after WotLK. Only in this case I don't talk about quality, but popularity.

[kappas]

MoP didn't have mythic plus though so you must have meant Legion.

my bad I meant challenge mod

[Wildmoon]

It's very simplistic and likely wrong to attribute WoW's sub rise or decline to certain design decisions. It's far more about the bigger picture. It's not a coincidence that WoW's decline came with the genre's decline and the rise of F2P games.

[Zantera]

my bad I meant challenge mod

Challenge mode didn't give gear though :P

[Wilian]

This is easy. Cataclysm by far. Nothing has ever come close to touching it in it's lone stand on the mountain of shit.

[Zantera]

It's very simplistic and likely wrong to attribute WoW's sub rise or decline to certain design decisions. It's far more about the bigger picture. It's not a coincidence that WoW's decline came with the genre's decline and the rise of F2P games.

The problem when people discuss WoW's decline is they only take into consideration the idea that the game got worse - not the possibility of people losing interest or wanting to try other things. If you played WoW from Vanilla to Wotlk for example - that's a good 6-7 years in the same game, and a game that's very time consuming as well especially if you do scheduled content like 2-3 nights a week raiding. That might work great when you're in your teens or early 20s but I think as people get older and get jobs, you get less time so you are either forced to commit to the idea of pretty much only playing WoW as your game, OR drop WoW and have time for other games. No matter if WoW got better or worse, it's still the same game and I think most people only have so much fuel in their tank for how long they can stay engaged before they want to try other things.

If you put it in context of other things, imagine going to the same pizza place every week for 6 years. Then you have a chinese restaurant open nearby and an italian restaurant as well. The pizza might still be good but you'll want to try those other places too which means less pizza.

[Ogait]

For me it was Legion by far.

[CaptainV]

BFA by far, Warlords had an idea poorly executed, BFA had nothing new to say and nothing to add to the game, it destroyed faith in blizzard permanently with one of the most utterly forgettable final patches, WoD at actually had a semi-decent final patch in 6.2 even if it was rushed and crappy, it made the expansion "Somewhat" forfilling even if it ended up feeling hollow.

Garrisons still gave me something to build and make, even if they were ultimatley the worst money farm in the game. Ashran was passably bad but still dooable content even if I got bored of it after a while. Never cared nor ever have for raiding so I never felt I missed anything on that front even if the game ultimatley became focused too heavily on it by the end, much to my dissapointment.

As for BfA? BfA took what legion had, made it worse in every way possible, added Allied Races with the most rediculas time consuming rep grinds for minimal payoff, Dyper Gnomes are still a bad race and need an overhaul imho.

The Azerite trait system and benthic gear added in 8.2 was going to be the obvious precursor to corruption by 8.3 which broke the game in all kinds of bad ways, and also destroyed the end game experience making it laughably shallow.

The final boss is a meme, N'zoth a char I actually took an interest in since Cata, got *rofled* away in a single patch that was essentially 2 partially revamped zones instead of say, 4-5.

8.2 Also did Azshara a dirty by making her a minor villian in her own spotlight to shine.

Yeah BfA was bad, universally bad, the only decent content was 8.0's launch content with Warfronts being an interesting idea executed badly, which again shoulda been a pvp feature but blizz copped out for no reason.

Jaina's storyline got a semi-satisfying ending, Sylvanas one has been ruined forever, Saurfang was turned into a weak old man to glorify Sylvanas bad plot armor. Anduin is still a bad leader despite the attempts to make him more interesting, the only good things that came outta it were Flynn and Zappyboi.

8.1 was Rushed and shoulda been 8.3, they didnt need to do battle for Dazar'alor at the beginning, it shoulda been the finale of BfA with some focus on the warfronts in 8.1+2 to build up hype for the finale.


As for Cata and WoD the other 2 expansions I highly disliked, Cata ruined the MMO by trying to go back to the TBC era when WOTLK changed that forever and it was fine where it was, while WoD tried again to TBC us with more "RAIDING HURDUR" which nobody cares for these days save the minority of mythic maniacs that half-give-a-damn about the content.