Now that MoP is over, how would you rank it against other expansions?

[Bridgetjones]

MoP was the final nail in the coffin of WoW for me honestly. The game is nothing like it used to be. They've added things to the point it no longer feels like WoW to me, and that makes me sad. There's no challenge left to be had, no skill required, and the gear and spell inflation is just way too out of hand. Add in the extreme level of homogenization and this game might as well have four classes.

The game feels too fake at this point. Take me back to TBC, heck maybe even WotLK days and I'd be happy.

While I don't agree that HMs aren't challenging, I would point out that there is a lot of skill required in navigating archaic controls and clunky combat design. Doing calculus by hand takes more skill than using a calculator, but it doesn't make it more efficient. Just makes it unnecessarily complicated and obsolete.

For me: Wrath > TBC > Vanilla > MoP >>>>>>>> Cata.

Wrath was the sweet spot. Emphasis on community, great dungeons, great raids, awesome zones, memorable music, great pvp, Wintergrasp, optional dailies, epic feel. They struck a close-to-perfect balance between farming gear and rng drops. Closest balance without overly homogenizing buffs and flavor. Closest balance between casual-friendly and hardcore content. Talent trees were the most fun/interesting. Stat scaling and stat variety were the most fun.

Cata ruined everything I loved about Wrath. Too much homogenization, fake "flavor," slow content, bad content, community-ruining features, guild-ruining lockout merge, annoying leveling. EDIT: Launch raids and dungeons were flawfree. Grim Batol, cloud dungeon, Halls of Origination were remarkable.

MoP did not feel epic. Ugly gear, ridiculous leveling content (killing rodents and picking veggies? Really?), eye-rolling premise (sha, alementals, etc), and dinosaurs everywhere. Music is godawful. Trolls are everywhere as if we haven't been fighting trolls every single expansion for reasons unknown. The whole thing feels like an Asian Journey to the Center of the Earth, and not in a good way.

[MinTDH]

Story: pretty decent. Bit kidlike. People say this story has "dept". No it hasn't it has as much dept as Cinderalla.

wat.. Kiddish? Okay, something tells me you haven't done the ending of the Operation: Shieldwall questline, where the orc wants to murder children as they sleep. Not only that, when Garrosh captured Theramore Citizens he took away their children as well, god knows what happened to them. Could be dead or alive, either way though their parents are dead. And have you heard of the Mogu? Where they enslave anyone they can for their rituals? Their rituals don't tickle mind you. You should also consider doing the first quests of Jade Forest where the Alliance/Horde capture Pandaren, the Horde captured the kids for bargaining chips. So tell me this: What do you find that's so kiddish in the storyline?

And also:
MoP > WOTLK > BC > Cata

[arnoldr45]

I don't know why everyone is so against Cataclysm, I had a blast through most of the expansion.

I loved the exceptionally hard 5 man heroic dungeons, I loved the new zones, the twilight story and all of the raids. The only thing I didn't like was fighting a bunch of tentacles in the end. Other than the the last DS boss I loved it.

[Giscoicus]

Not attempting to removing anyones opinion but just adding something about when LFR released to counter the nostalgia comments- LFD was not met positively at the time either. There wasn't this massive positive rejoice over it and I know the only reason I personally accepted using it sometimes was because the heroics were so easy. Throughout most of wrath and to this day I would almost only queue with friends, in wrath more often full group queues as everyone was familiar with it back then.

Sure some people accepted it at first, but for a lot I imagine it was a rough change as people slowly succumbed to blizzards new way, and as less people made manual groups the leftovers had to do LFD. I'm not exactly sure when it became the norm, maybe about 3.3? Compared to I believe the 3.1~ implementation.

The difference is LFD didn't completely abolish the fights. Wrath heroics were a joke before and they were a joke after. Dragon soul as well was pretty easy, so the LFR didn't need
major changes mechanically. He'll by the end a madness kill in LFR was harder than normal. But in Mosts, the fights were more mechanic based than many before, especially DS. After seeing the result of making people think in Zul Gurub 4.1, Blizzard nerfed LFR to the ground so that even the mechanics present are not made aware of since they do nothing (Durumu knock-off just makes you fall down for a second). LFD didn't completely take the mechanics out of a fight. LFR did.

I can list more ridiculous ones, like how Falling Ash doesn't kill people on Dark Shamans or the 1 tanking method on Stone Guard. Or even the fact that the Dark Animus strategy is round up, AoE and run from crimson wake.

Further, even though LFD gives luck of the draw, LFR continues to stack buffs for failing, meaning there is little reason to kick those messing up since each subsequent encounter is easier.

[Gheld]

Honestly, I liked Cata. Mainly because I used to be an end-gamer (I'm a casual now though). I picked Cata because I find Tier 11 was probably the best tier of raiding ever. Tier 12 was boring and Tier 13 was just all over the place. But I find with Tier 11, all of the encounters were unique, interesting, and challenging. Having to portal and fly all over the place wasn't fun.

As far as levelling content goes, I think MoP was the champ. Cata had a lot of interesting quests, because obviously they were experimenting with a lot of stuff, and by the time MoP rolled around they knew what worked and what didn't. So there were still interesting quests, but none of the ones that didn't work in Cata.

I think WoTLK had some of the "coolest" content, no pun intended. Ulduar was cool. ToC was fun and different (although the raid content was way too short, and visually uninteresting, since there's only 2 rooms) ICC was just completely epic, and a fitting end to the expansion. The Naxx Redux at the start pissed a lot of people off, but I never got to experience the original Naxx, didnt' reach endgame until TBC (and was mostly into PVP back then anyways), so it was cool to at least see it, albeit way under-tuned. But there was other raid content on that tier as well, it just all involved dragons. (And I'd hardly call VoA a raid at that point).

But yeah, Tier 11 alone made Cata my favorite. It was the perfect raid Tier.

[anaxie]

Raiding
MoP>TBC>T11 Cata>WOTLK>CATA

Questing
WOTLK>CATA>MoP>TBC>Vanilla

This to do outside raiding
MoP>TBC>WotLK>Cata

[Dangg]

The game is probably the best right now, but personally I can't say it's my favourite expansion because of the theme and because server died.

[Sillyputty]

Why does TBC get so much love? Attunments, resist gear, endless grinds. It wasn't skill, it was time invested.

[Deleted]

questing: mop>cata>wrath>bc>vanilla.
it always improved
raiding: mop>bc=wrath>cata=vanilla
cata only so low cause of the smallness of the raids.... it was just so little
overall fun (social aspect most important for me) vanilla>mop=bc=cata>>>>>>>wrath
hated wrath, maybe cause i had no good guild/was guildhoping most of the time. vanilla was fun cause it was new

[Felarion]

TBC>WotLK>MoP>>>Cata.

Didn't play during vanilla (well i played but it was 3 or 2 days before tbc launch ). Tbc will be always my no.1 because i start back then, everything was new for me, got great guild and raid alot back then. MoP is nice in terms of mechanics and things to do outside raid but i don't like theme and pandas

[Woa]

I would say mop was close to wrath and tbc except they absolutely destroyed pvp. Full tyr shaman hits a prot warrior on timeless isle for 20 k while hes afk and no cds. Ridiculous broken wpvp. 70? Or 75% reduction to damage to players. Wtf.

[Deleted]

for me it would be

Mop > wotlk > tbc > cata > vanilla

quite easy decision for me.

[Woa]

Anyone who says mop is their fav they either do not pvp or just started play and dont know anything else.

[purefury]

wotlk>tbc>=mop>>cata

[RoKPaNda]

Classic = MoP > WotLK > BC > Cataclysm.

[Tyronight]

I enjoyed WotLK the most. But MoP wasn't too far behind.

[melodramocracy]

Anyone who says mop is their fav they either do not pvp or just started play and dont know anything else.

MOP isn't my favorite, but PvP is more enjoyable now than ever.

[Gospels]

Mop was total garbage, worst expansion ever, had the least amount of fun ever, cared less about the game than I ever have

WOTLK>TBC>CATA>VANILLA>MOP

[Deleted]

MOP isn't my favorite, but PvP is more enjoyable now than ever.

If by "enjoyable" you mean the most broken it has been in the game since pom-pyro mages between the van-tbc patch, then you'd be right.

Or maybe those few days when paladins were able to one hit anyone. That comes close.

[Fluttershy]

Wotlk > Mop >BC(if it had dual spec + better dps balance, could be better) > not playing wow at all > cataclysm.


Only complaint about panda are the retarded dailies early on, and that legendary BS catchup. Progress needed to be account-bound like pet quests.