Which expansion was the absolute worst?

[unbound]

Sorry to say that wotlk kinda was the last good expansion, but it started the by implementing the systems that became modern wow and cata put the nails in the coffin and the "death" (huge decline of players started). The game has really never been good since the best it has achieved is "ok".

Worst expansion is all after wotlk

I agree completely. You could sense that the game was taking a wrong turn in Wrath. It wasn't until Wrath that I started to regularly run into the "Go Go Go" PUGs, and when we successfully complete Vault of Archavon despite more than half the raid being dead (PUG group after winning Wintergrasp), that was a pretty clear indicator that things were turning towards a bad path.

[Armourboy]

I agree completely. You could sense that the game was taking a wrong turn in Wrath. It wasn't until Wrath that I started to regularly run into the "Go Go Go" PUGs, and when we successfully complete Vault of Archavon despite more than half the raid being dead (PUG group after winning Wintergrasp), that was a pretty clear indicator that things were turning towards a bad path.

Lots of people point to lots of things, but I think the tuning of those original 5 man heroics may have been one of the worst mistakes they made. They were too easy from the start and with gear that wasn't going to get better. That combined with LFD seemed to just flip a switch in the playerbase they never could turn off.

Of course the playerbase really started to turn over in that expansion, and new players coming in saw that as the norm.

[Baconeggcheese]

Well, there were enough comments "Legion is worse than WoD back in the day". Just the WoW community in all of its glory.

Legion was definitely worse than wod for me.

Went from not having chore activities (dailies), still having some of the best class design the game has seen, fantastic raids and dungeons with challenge modes keeping them relevant... to infinite chore activities that I had to keep up with the entire xpac, class design going down the tubes, completely RNG massive power gaps via legendaries with bugs compounding the issue, mythic KJ being thee least fun end boss I've ever progressed on.

My guild happily raided for 6 years through all the content droughts and everything with minimal turnover, took until nighthold to burn the guild out and have most of them retire from the game.

ALL THAT SAID I don't think WoD was healthy for the average player with it not having dailies (since that was the only difference between it and previous xpacs). But blizzard always has to take things to extremes. MoP dailies were a bit of a mess, so they responded to that with WoD's complete lack of any going to one extreme, then they responded to that with Legion's endless grinds going to the other extreme.

Just need that happy middle ground in there....

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Is it really fair to judge if something suck based on what you don't get? Shouldn't you judge what you got? Or do you mean it like "WoD sucks because all features were half done due to Blizz not delivering the other half"?

Eh, I think you do a bit of both but I think its fair to say.

If you go to a restaurant and you order the buffalo chicken bites and they bring you plain chicken bites you can judge the quality of those bites and yeah the meats still there but where's the sauce? I think it'd be fair to say you weren't happy with your meal.

[Thelyron]

BfA is the only expansion that added literally nothing good, and only made things worse. At least in WoD the classes were fun to play. Everything about BfA feels horrible.

[Vrinara]

Looks like WoD is winning this lol it's sad cause every expansion since Wrath has the potential to be more then they were. Some are better then others. Imagine if Blizz didn't do what they did with WoD? I could say WoD was one of the best expansions. The Questing and raids were fun, but being stuck in a phased area playing a facebook game just gets boring. They tried with Garrison raids, but tbh, those were boring. and let's not forget the dreaded selfie cam patch. I swear 6.1 didn't really bring much to the table.

[Demithio]

Well, it seems WoD is still slightly in the lead. Its hard to tell which one was worse for me, as the they all seem to be bad these days. However, I guess I could say that I liked the theme and artwork more in WoD over Bfa. Which of course isn't saying much.

I really hope no one is thinking Shadowlands is going to 'save WoW'.

[deviantcultist]

Warlords of Draenor and/or Cataclysm. BfA has flaws but doesn't come close to those imo.

[Selah]

WoD, without a question. Half an expansion scrapped, the horrible layover between MoP and WoD, having nothing to do outside of raiding, social media integration patch (literally that's all there was), garrisons (which also screwed us out of proper player housing). BfA was riddled with problems, absolutely. However, the big difference was, there was content to engage in, the expansion wasn't aborted halfway through production, and the story was actually engaging (largely anyways).

[Zephire]

Eh, I think you do a bit of both but I think its fair to say.

If you go to a restaurant and you order the buffalo chicken bites and they bring you plain chicken bites you can judge the quality of those bites and yeah the meats still there but where's the sauce? I think it'd be fair to say you weren't happy with your meal.

Right, fair point. The meal could still be fantastic :P But as an order it was incomplete. A healthy mix is probably the way to go.

[Kheldin]

Imagine people saying things like "EVERYTHING AFTER MOP WAS SH*T!!!", and then paying for the next expansion again. If I don't like something, I don't play it. Where's the point on buying a game "I DISLIKE SINCE MOP!!!!"? How sad is that?

Actually everything after MoP went mostly downhill with some ups and downs in between. Yet people love Warcraft and that's what keep them playing or keep them coming back atleast to check out every expansion with the hope that Blizzard won't fuck that one up again with some stupid RNG grind or major lore clusterfuck.

I have little faith in SL as the covenants are looking like each will end up as a major cookie cutter faction which you have to choose if you want to play class x with spec y - otherwise your class will not perform well.

[vitabis]

Art direction, story and design are the most important to me in Wow. So the best to me are TBC, BFA and Cata.

I voted Legion, the melodramatic vibe "I've given up everything..." annoyed me the entire expansion. Illidan Stormrage seems just like a boyish retarded puber. But this is the Wow community, I'm sure a lot of people can relate to the "rebellious victim". Game mechanics were spot on, but pruning of talents was a big mistake.

Game mechanics of bfa are not great. As a healer in pugs, I'm so glad corruption is gone in a couple of weeks. But still I prefer this to Legion.

[Zogarth]

Shadowlands. It doesn't have any content at all. Nada. Seriously, i looked everywhere.

Do you feel the same about Tauren and Vulpera?

Vulpera? Hell yeah, kill them all! Tauren are cool-cows though, so those are okay. But on a note of minor seriousness, pandas are stupid and way too funny-looking and fluffy to really fit in with the other races. They just look weird man.

[Kelathos]

Top 3 expansions for me: Wrath, MoP, Legion.
Bottom 3: Cata, Warlords, BFA.

Choosing among them is too subjective to have any meaning. I'll just stick to saying those are the highs and lows of WoW over the past decade.

[MrFawlty]

Yeah, the fact that there was a huge population of MMO newbies crowding in to see what all the fuss was about had nothing to do with it.

Of course, once they saw the game was designed for a small minority of the players, they churned right back out again. The devs were in a desperate scramble to figure out how to retain them, and going hardcore didn't do it.

It was the point when Blizzard decided to make it more assessable that player churn increased. Up to that point the player base grew.

[Korru]

The hate for BFA will erode in a few months, but WoD is hands down the worst expansion for me.

[Soimu]

BFA and Legion because it's a direct follow up on the shit ending WOD had and it brought back some characters that should have not been brought back. Boring and stupid.
From a lore point of view and lore matters to me in games.

[Zephi5315]

I would have to say WoD was the worst of them all.
Players were isolated and confined to their self-sustaining Garrison and only leaving to raid or pvp. all other forms of content fell flat on their face.
The legendary quest was interesting and paid off well in the end, and also had a good story to tell, but the "war campaign" for WoD was basically set to RNG and wasn't told in chronological order if you ever got the quests to do them.
Reputations were an afterthought and were nothing more than tedious mob grinds in specific locations. When i saw the Sha'tari defender plate set, I wanted it. But guess what? I had to go out to either some village in the middle of nowhere in Shadowmoon valley or Shattrath and kill demons. And they didn't give much rep per kill so, I was out there for hours until i gotten it.
You may be able to polish a turd and make it look nice, but it's still a turd.
Blizzard cut so much content in WoD because everyone was sick of doing Siege of Orgrimmar, and demanded new content. I truly think that if we stayed in SoO for maybe 3 more months for the devs to have more development time, WoD would've been a far better expansion than the hollowed mess it became.


BfA struggled a lot over its life, but I would say it kept getting up to try again after falling.
the seasonal Mythic+ affixes were interesting, especially Bwonsamdi's affix, which i wish they'd bring back some day.
The raids were all interesting and fun. Jaina Proudmoore and Azshara are by far some of the best boss encounters i've ever done because they brought a difficult, fair, and unique set of mechanics that required coordination, communication, and a high skill ceiling in order to beat them and get all those nice epics. And while N'Zoth also brought all that as well, the ending cinematic he got just made him like he went out on a whimper.
the Azerite is my biggest problem with BfA, as I, and many others, did NOT enjoy grinding levels in island expeditions for days on end. and, while the issues Azerite did have weren't really fixed until 8.3, they at least brought some interesting power gains a lot of players like using, like "Glimmer of Light" for Holy Paladins.
The War Campaign was decent at worst. Doing it the first time, you actually got told a story throughout the experience. My favorite part was how the Alliance tricked the Horde into sending their forces to Nazmir so the real Alliance attack could invade Daza'alor from the south.


Comparing the two is a bit nuanced, but it all had to do with everyone else's experience going through both expansions at level during the times when the content was relevant. WoD gave some good raids, but that's about it. And WoW is more than just raiding.
BfA had a continuous flow of content, even if some of it was sub-par at best and was paired with a power grind players were reluctant to do.
Overall, I give Warlords of Draenor a solid 30/100 and I give Battle for Azeroth a 65/100. While both technically fail, Warlords loses out due to the lost possibilities that could have made it a better expansion and also offering nothing else other than raid content and a facebook mini game.

[ceall]

According to a poll of ~7000 votes on buffed.de (one of germany's biggest sites with dedicated wow coverage), bfa takes the cake for being the worst expansion ever, closely followed by wod. (34% of votes for bfa, 32% for wod).

Thought it'd be kinda nice to share this.

[Relapses]

According to a poll of ~7000 votes on buffed.de (one of germany's biggest sites with dedicated wow coverage), bfa takes the cake for being the worst expansion ever, closely followed by wod. (34% of votes for bfa, 32% for wod).

Thought it'd be kinda nice to share this.

This proves that German fansites are just as useless as English fansites when figuring out how people actually feel about expansions. Thanks for the information, I guess.

[Goge]

Can't be anything other than BFA for me.

* Incredibly dull, yet mandatory content for character progression in the form of islands, warfronts,...
* Legion m+ was a new feature and a success, yet they added very little innovation to it in BFA.
The things they did add in the form of seasonal affixes were a 50/50 hit or miss (infested and beguiling were terrible, reaping was fun for big dps numbers, awakened is easily the best one)
* Azerite armor in patch 8.0 and 8.1 was a complete disaster, having to REGRIND previously earned traits cause your neck level was too low.
* Overload on "borrowed power" systems with Azerite armor, benthic gear, essences and corruption, that they failed to balance at all.
425 benthic gear being better than 445 mythic gear in almost every slot was a big nono for me.
Corruption was even worse obviously.
* The complete demolotion of PvP: PvP gear doesn't exist anymore, no vendors, PvP scaling that serves no purpose.

There's probably more but these are the big ones i can think of immediately.