What expansion was worse: WoD or SL?

[vian]

They sucked equally as hard.

The two expansions that killed any love I had for the game.

[Nachtigal]

Oh and for the record, the pain points people have with Shadowlands were decided on in WoD. It's plain as day obvious to those that played during the expansion to see exactly when Blizzard switched up their direction for the Story. The whole half an expansions worth of content cut, a .1 major patch bringing nothing but twitter integration, and the last minute switch up of Grommash all of a sudden being an ally.

[Nitrax]

WoD at least had a story that was somewhat connected to lore, so it wins for me. Even after playing through shadowlands 3 times I felt like I had no clue what was going on and why we should even bother. It felt more disconnected from the normal timeline than WoD even. Disclaimer: I am talking about in-game lore.. I havnt read any lore outside of the game itself. The last few expansions I have a feeling that you have to buy books outside of the game just to understand what is going on.

[Lolites]

Let me explain this simply.

Wod is a bread sandwich. Three slices of bread presented as a meal. It is bland, unfulfilling and by the measure of good food? It's bad.
HOWEVER. SL, Legion and BFA are servings of rotting food. They are actively bad.
So, while the bread sandwich is an exceptionally poor excuse for a meal, it is still food and won't make you sick. Warlords of draenor is not a good expansion. It being bland and abandoned is better then being actively bad

hard disagree on this analogy, if you want to go with food analogy (which is silly in itself, but ok) then WOD is empty sandwich, while BFA/SL is sandwich with something you DONT LIKE, its not bad in itself, and there definitely were people who enjoyed it, or at least parts of it, its just not to your taste, but claiming its "rotten" is just wrong...
and heres the thing - if in SL you would level up and then only raided (which was possible, had people like that in guild) you would get pretty much the same as in WOD...
so idk, thinking having more is worse, when you could ignore what you didnt like seems kinda stupid...

oh btw adding there Legion, which is usualy considered one of wows HIGH point is silly and completely kills your analogy as it shows that some of the "rotten food" as you called it was far more popular than your bread sandwich...

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WoD at least had a story that was somewhat connected to lore

yeah, connected in a way it WIPED ITS ASS with previous warcraft lore...

not saying SL had good story or any respect for lore, but wod had TERRIBLE story and complete disregard for previous lore...

[Nitrax]

yeah, connected in a way it WIPED ITS ASS with previous warcraft lore...

not saying SL had good story or any respect for lore, but wod had TERRIBLE story and complete disregard for previous lore...

It was still interesting in a Marvel What If kind of way, I did care a lot more for the characters in WoD than any in shadowlands. I wanted to side with the bad guy after doing the Bastion quests.

[The-Shan]

This requires a nuanced answer but I really dont wanna write paragraphs, so it really boils down to this:

-SL had better misc. content, WoD had a better theme/better raids imo, but it just had LESS content all around.

They both faltered for their own reasons, but they were largely different reasons.

[Urti]

Shadowlands was just boring and disjointed. It felt like it was so far removed from the established WoW elements that it was a spinoff or something instead of an actual expansion.

Warlords actually had some interesting and fun ideas, tied to the history of the game. Too bad they only finished 1/3 of it. I genuinely believe that the WoD we never got could have been one of, if not the best, expansion in WoW history. Icarus flew too close to the sun though, and what we did get was a sloppy, unfinished mess with a mad dash to close it out and move on to something else.

[BarosanuNr1]

I think WoD could have been a good expansion with some more incubation time. Its flaws have to do with quantity and execution. SL, on the other hand, felt like it was purposely designed to be as annoying as possible. I quit WoD after 5 months due to boredom, but I quit SL after 2 months due to frustration. Therefore, WoD > SL for me.

Good things I can say about WoD: Exciting theme, fun dungeons, decent class design, PvP also fun (despite the PvP zone being meh), very alt friendly.

Good things I can say about SL: Reverendreth had a cool theme, and I welcomed the new character customization options that came with the pre-patch.

[Uoyredrum]

WoD had great content but not enough of it. Shadowlands had garbage content all the way through wrapped in a terrible story. I'd play WoD for 10 years straight before playing Shadowlands again.

[Shamolo]

9.1 was an actual patch compared to what they shipped in 6.1
Therefore I'm a firm believer Shadowlands > WoD

[gd8]

I didn't play WoD but shadowlands was pretty bad and thematically felt like an entirely different knockoff game so it's the worst as far as I'm concerned

[GabrielKnight]

WoD is among my favorites expansions, right under BfA.

Garrisons were very engaging and fun, I enjoyed gathering followers and leveling them up. The questing was probably the best since Classic, even to this day. The art was top notch, loved the music and the feeling of finally playing a Warcraft game, especially after the whole Asian panda garbage. I recall the classes being very fun to play, also. The dungeons were beautifully done, among the best of the entire game.

Among its flaws I can say that I hated the ending, I wished we could've killed Grom instead. I didn't liked how they trashed professions by basically making gathering useless since we could do it in the garrison. I don't raid so it's something it didn't affected me, I just went into LFR to check them out once and enjoyed them.

Shadowlands, I have mixed feelings. Gameplay wise, I enjoyed it. Covenants were cool, the table was a fun little mini game to play every day, and there was a lot to do. I never felt the whole "borrowed power" thing being grindy, I just played a while every day and had everything I needed. I even began to do M+ and reached +15 without ever grinding. The zones were nice, especially Revendreth, and it had a few things going on that I wished were kept. The Maw was actually an awesome place, and the danger could be felt, too bad they wimped it out fast.

The worst part of the expansion was the lore, hands down. Destroying the afterlife was a mess, and by the end of the expansion I was so confused by the whole thing that I stopped caring. And I can't still get over the fact that they trashed the greatest character of the franchise, Arthas. What an absolute waste. The expansion began to feel kinda repetitive at some point, and honestly this was when the game started to feel too overwhelming. Cosmetics flew all over the place until it was impossible to catch up with them, so basically there was no real goal to aim for. In BfA, for example, the meta achievements of Nazjatar and Mechagon gave me unique looking mounts, that I love and still use to this day. In the current game those are freebies, what's the point then?

From the two, I would say Shadowlands is the worst, mostly because of the lore. Gameplay wise, it was alright. I have more fond memories of WoD tho, it felt like the last Warcraft expansion, apart from BfA.

[Johnjohn]

I didn't mind WoD at all. I loved the levelling experience and enjoyed Ashran. It really was an alt expansion for me. I did not like garrisons though.

SL and BFA are easily the worst expansions for me. Did not feel like the game was for me at all at that point.

[Azzurri]

I've never seen so many content creators leave like I did in Shadowlands.

But personally for me I liked WoD, but I did come back to WoW from Vanillia at the tail end of WOD so that's probably the reason I enjoyed WoD.

[BeerEelemental]

While WoD did have a crazy low amount of content, the content in it was still alright.
The raids and dungeons where okay to good, the zones/questing were actually very nice and many people also actually liked the garissons.

SL on the other hand, all it's content except for castle nathria was just extraordinary bad.
The zones were a disconnected bunch of garbage piles with an airport in the middle, the maw is the most depressing bullshit they ever added to this game, and then they managed to somehow made a bigger pile of garbage in korthia. The dungeons were bland, all the raids were bland except for Castle Nahtria which was alright. Torghast was a steaming pile of poop until they made it barely playable after 2 patches trying to fix it. The covenants were mainly just a pile of nonsense.

As far as i'm concerned, apart from the wait till legion, WoD was fairly entertaining with the stuff it did have, SL was just a terrible, terrible expansion that many people dreaded to even log into, and thus many many people quit during it. So, by far, Wod >>>>>> SL

[Cwimge]

This will be one of those situations where nobody agrees. I've got a grudge against legion and and very comfortable in my opinions here. BFA was at the time the "worst" expansion wow ever saw, topped by shadowlands and preceded by legion. Far as I'm concerned this was a trilogy of awful expansions

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castle nathria

Was an underwhelming raid full of tedious bullshit, visually boring and artificially inflated by the surrounding questing being appalling and a single npc with tolerable writing and VA.

CN is only good when compared to terrible content

[Soon-TM]

Was an underwhelming raid full of tedious bullshit, visually boring and artificially inflated by the surrounding questing being appalling and a single npc with tolerable writing and VA.

Yep. Revendreth questing, while not stellar by any means, was still a little better (or rather, less bad) than the combined cringe of the rest of the zones. I still /shiver thinking about what would have a Bastion- or Maldraxxus-themed raid like

[BeerEelemental]

Was an underwhelming raid full of tedious bullshit, visually boring and artificially inflated by the surrounding questing being appalling and a single npc with tolerable writing and VA.

CN is only good when compared to terrible content

Well, each their own opinion. I quit liked Castle Nathria, and so did most of the people in my raid team. As i said though, it was the only piece of SL i actually enjoyed.

[klaps_05]

You are essentially playing WoD right now, but people seem happy. Still SL takes the cake.